The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 469, titled:
Astrology Forecast for December 2024
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on December 1, 2024
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released December 11th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrology of December 2024. So we’re recording this on Saturday, November 30th, 2024. And we’re gonna spend the first hour reviewing news stories and things that happened in the news over the past month since our last forecast. Then in the second hour or so or the second half of this episode, we’re gonna jump ahead and look at the astrology of December and do a deep dive into what the planets are looking like over the next four weeks.
So before I – as always, there’s gonna be timestamps in the description below this video if you wanna jump ahead to the forecast section. Austin, hello. Quick hi.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hello!
CB: Welcome back.
AC: Thank you.
CB: Yeah. And so before I get into the news, let me give a quick overview of some of the astrology of December that we’re gonna be talking about during the course of this episode. So here is the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the month. Then we have this lovely astrological transits graph that was designed by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co where they carry a bunch of graphics and ephemerides and different things just like this that shows some of the peaks during the course of the month, one of which – my favorite, the most positive aspect of the month – is this lovely Venus-Jupiter trine that goes exact towards the middle of the month, especially around December 19th.
We also have another graphic designed by Madeline, which is the Mercury retrograde that’s gonna be – we’re opening only a week into this retrograde at the very top of the month, and we’re gonna see Mercury continuing in its retrograde, hit the halfway point, and then eventually stationing direct on December 15th. We also have a Mars retrograde that is finally, finally getting started where it’s gonna station retrograde on December 6th, and that’s gonna be one of our most important transits this month. We’ve had several months of build up to that aspect, which is finally going exact now.
And then finally, we have the planetary alignments calendar that shows ingresses, lunations, and other things this month where we open with a New Moon in Sagittarius on the first. Then we get the Mercury cazimi halfway through the Mercury retrograde cycle on December 5th. Mars stations retrograde in Leo on December 6th. Then Neptune stations direct in Pisces on December 7th, the same day Venus moves into Aquarius and the Sun opposes Jupiter. Then we jump forward to the 15th, where we finally get Mercury stationing direct in Sagittarius. And the same exact day, we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Gemini. Then later that same week, the Sun moves into the sign of Capricorn on the 21st. Jupiter squares Saturn for the second time this year on the 24th. And then finally we get our final lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in the sign of Capricorn on December 30th.
All right. So those are some of the planetary alignments we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode, but first things first, we have to transition into talking about the news. So first, hey, welcome, Austin. It’s been a crazy month but it’s good to be back with you again.
AC: Yeah. Ditto. Quite a bit has happened.
CB: Yeah. We knew – you know, I was relistening to our year ahead forecast, and we knew, we did pretty good lining up some of the most important months of the year and talking about some of the astrology that’s striking going back listening to some of that now in retrospect now that so much of 2024 has played out at this point.
AC: Yeah. I think there are unique advantages to looking at things at different time scales and with different proximity. Like, sometimes you can actually call things easier from further out than you can close-up. And the reverse is also true. Right? You can see some things up close that you can’t see from far away. But there’s the old fog of war is not present when you’re looking, you know, a year, nine months, 10 months in advance.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I’m thinking about that a lot because now we’re starting to prepare for our 2025 year ahead forecast that we’re gonna record later in December on the 20th, and going back and reflecting on, yeah, predictions last year has been an interesting part of that.
So in terms of the news, obviously November was a huge month for news. At the top of the list is the results of the US presidential election. So Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 5th, and it was a pretty decisive victory where he won all seven swing states that were needed to win the electoral college, basically. So there were some demographic shifts in his favor with more people voting for him compared to previous elections, and Harris ended up calling him to concede and gave a concession speech on November 6th. So there’s been so much analysis and hot takes about it over the past few weeks that we’re not gonna do that here. But my goal is instead just to highlight some of the astrological correlations that I noticed, and I’ll only mention certain pieces if I have a direct astrological thing to tie it into.
So the purpose of this, as we always do each month, is to record some things that we learned from the past month, but also things we learned from just watching the astrology of the election play out, partially to record that for posterity to hand it down to future generations of astrologers to let them know some of the things that astrologers learned from this election cycle.
So some of the long term implications will have to wait for the year ahead forecast that we’re gonna be recording next month where we’ll talk about the astrology of December 2025. And Austin, you’re already deep into your research on that, right?
AC: Yeah, I spent a lot of the month trying to get ahead. I’ve got a busy December, and I knew I would, so yeah, I’ve been doing my – it started as prep for 2025, and it’s really the 2025 to 2033 prep with a focus on 2025. Your comment earlier about the yearly and just thinking about different distances, different levels of proximity to what you’re talking about, makes me want to actually write up some of the stuff I’m seeing for like, 2028, 2030, et cetera, et cetera, because usually I’m like, ah, well, let’s, you know, get a little closer. It makes me wonder now if I’m not able to see things a little bit more clearly when they’re not right in my face. But interesting to think about. Worth noting that Mercury is retrograde right now as we record this, and so I’m like, well, maybe I should do the opposite of what I was thinking!
CB: Right. Yeah, we almost had to record this right on the Mercury retrograde station, but we actually found – I found an election at the very end of the month we could do instead a few days into it. So we’ll see if this is a little bit better than it would have been.
So in terms of the election, we didn’t issue predictions for this presidential election, which has kind of been our standing policy, and we didn’t issue presidential elections in 2020, either. I didn’t personally want to put in the work necessary to do that well this year, because any time I try to do something well, I think listeners of the podcast know, you know, I put a lot of energy into it, and that becomes my thing. Like the seven hour or technically I think 14 hour, if you take both parts into account, like, 4th house episode that I just released. Sometimes in order to do things well, you have to really dig into it and do it thoroughly, and I did not wanna spend the entire year like, eating and sleeping and breathing politics in order to be able to put together what would be necessary to do those predictions well rather than just doing it, like, sloppily. And I think you were in a similar place, you said, right, Austin?
AC: Oh yeah. I mean, if I’m gonna put a hundred hours into something, I want the best possible case to be something more valuable than getting a coin flip correct.
CB: Yeah.
AC: You know, some of it’s like, the win – like, what do I get for all that work? If I win, people will be like, eh, you got a coin flip right. If you lose, if you’re wrong, then astrology is fake and you’re a charlatan and you should probably go flagellate yourself in a corner wearing a demeaning hat of some sort.
CB: Sure. Yeah. Well, and it’s like, the other part of that – it’s like, that’s a piece of it that it takes a lot of work to like… Like, if I had done it, I would have sit down and like, researched Trump’s entire biography and like, Harris’s entire biography and then Walz’s biography and Vance’s biography and everything else so you have a complete picture of what their past transits have been like and then can project that out in the future. But I just wanted to do astrology this year and focus on the houses series, so that’s what I did instead.
I also – the other reason I don’t do, haven’t been doing presidential predictions the past couple of cycles is because I think it’s also dangerous for astrologers to get involved in politics. And I actually did an episode on this earlier this year talking about that and how that’s worked out historically going back to the 17th century with William Lilly and some of his contemporaries during the English Civil War. And you can listen to that episode; it was titled “Prophecy and Power” with the historians Patrick Curry and Nicholas Campion. So that’s actually more the reason why. I actually used to write a blog called The Political Astrology Blog with Patrick Watson that we started in 2008. But we ended up actually closing it down in 2013 after successfully predicting the 2012 presidential election, because I could see that politics was going to get more divisive over the course of the next decade. So instead, I decided to get out of politics because I didn’t wanna be involved in that, and instead I started this podcast around that time in 2012.
So nonetheless, we’ve been tracking obviously some things related to this election since we’ve been doing the news segments each month, so we’ve been noticing things that were in the news. And I think it’s interesting now to note some of the things that we kind of learned in retrospect as we do each month and sort of reflect on what astrologers could take from this election in terms of things we learned astrologically where there’s always a lot of things like that, I think, right?
AC: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, yeah. Yeah. You can watch an election unfold. Like, you know, there’s a lot to look at without necessarily, yeah, without overinvesting in the coin flip. And there’s a lot to learn, there’s a lot that’s been observed. There’s a lot. I think there’s a lot about this election that tells us a little bit more about this next sort of era that we cross into in 2025, which we’ve been talking about for a while. I think there’s a lot of, yeah, there are a lot of little gems to mine.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Or flowers to pluck. However you wanna put it. Things of value worth focusing on.
CB: Right. And four years ago, Leisa and I did a post-election analysis after the 2020 election to just talk about some of the things that we learned from it privately. I decided to fold most of that into this forecast episode, although I may still do a bonus episode going into technical stuff in more detail just as a little video for patrons at some point.
So at the top of the list, one of the primary things for me was being fascinated by how the zodiacal releasing played out because this was tied in with some long term predictions that I made going back a decade ago. So one of the things I’ve said pretty clearly in the past few forecast episodes is that the zodiacal releasing in this election wasn’t decisive because both primary candidates were in peak periods, and it was showing that both of them had reached high points in their career during this time. So I had said on one of the previous forecasts that I didn’t think then that you could use zodiacal releasing to make a decisive prediction for either one since they were both essentially like, equivalent or canceling each other out. So I did release an old clip of Leisa predicting that Kamala Harris would become more eminent in the 2020s that she had made back in like, 2018 or something like that. But this was not an election prediction, and I wouldn’t have released it if it was. But instead, it was just meant to take credit since she indeed did become even more eminent in 2024 as she became the nominee for a major political party basically and reached the newest high point in her career.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. Like, she’s much more eminent now than she was six months ago. Right? Like, that’s a huge jump in what that technique is tracking.
CB: Right. And then that clip specifically cuts off before talking about the 2024 election. So for me though, in terms of the zodiacal releasing, it’s interesting to finally see Trump’s 25-year peak period beginning now, because this is something I’d been waiting to see how that would work out for over a decade now. And it was very tied into 2016. When I was involved in presidential predictions back then, I didn’t think that he would get into the presidency then because we could see that his peak period wouldn’t begin until 2025. And so we assumed that if he got in in 2016, that he would do two four-year terms and he would be leaving office in like, 2024, 2025 if he won in 2016. So we didn’t anticipate a scenario where it’s like, he wins in 2016, he loses in 2020, and then he makes this stunning comeback in 2024 essentially.
AC: And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the first time that’s happened with presidents of the United States? Or is there a previous instance?
CB: There was like, one other president – like, Garfield or somebody like that – that made a comeback —
AC: Okay.
CB: — but it’s otherwise extremely rare and not anything we’ve seen any time in like, modern times.
AC: Okay, Garfield.
CB: So that was interesting because I ended up being wrong in 2016 then due to that about my presidential prediction back then. But now eight years later, I finally know why. And Nick Dagan Best and I discussed this two years ago in an episode on the Uranus return of the United States where he was in a similar position in terms of seeing that Trump would hit a major career peak in 2024, 2025, but then having a hard time squaring that back in 2016 with whether he would get in at that time.
So now we know why he begins his biggest career peak in 2025, and it was interesting because Patrick Watson and I actually had debates about this after the 2016 election where we were trying to figure out what went wrong and why he had won, and what the technical reason for that was. And different solutions were proposed, but – and we had debates about it, but – I told Patrick, I was like, we just have to wait. Because we need to see how things play out, and we need to see what happens in 2025. So I’ve been waiting for eight years now to see if this is indeed what would happen, and it’s been pretty surreal to see it all play out like this. So just imagine everybody as an astrologer waiting eight years to find out if something that you predicted would actually come true, or something that you were anticipating as a potential scenario would actually play out and that’s kind of what my experience partially of November has been like.
Have you had any long term predictions like – I mean, you were just talking about doing some long term predictions, but eight’s a big one. I mean, I guess we all have personal ones like that, essentially.
AC: Yeah. I really tend to focus on sort of the macro environment and what the world looks like. I really don’t follow individual biographies to the same degree when I’m thinking about the future.
CB: Yeah. And that one was unique just because we were so focused on the presidential election and trying to predict it.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So in other astrological things that I learned about this, there were a lot of omens and repetitions. So there were eclipse repetitions, I think, first and foremost where the Great American Eclipse that occurred earlier this year seemed like a repetition of the one that happened back in 2017, which was just months into Trump’s first presidency. And I had always associated that eclipse with him back in 2017, because it happened in Leo right on his Ascendant degree. And it was like, I sort of saw it at the time as an omen of his ascendancy, essentially, because it was right on his Ascendant and it happened a few months into his presidency. But then we had an interesting repetition of that, of course, where there was another eclipse where the path crossed America and millions of Americans witnessed it earlier this year. And we only got, you know, two eclipses like that that occur any time in our recent time frame, and they both happened to be in those two – or around those two – election years around the time of Trump’s wins now in retrospect.
AC: Well, and it’s important to note that he’s an eclipse nativity. We have Rahu or the North Node on the Sun in his chart, and then the Moon is on the South Node, and he’s born the day of an eclipse. I think, I believe it had just ended visibility, but he’s very tied – like, his chart is very eclipse-y. And so that’s a nice tie-in.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So he responds strongly to eclipses, which is one of the things that we’ve discovered over the past year with some of the intense eclipse research that began in late 2023 is that people born on eclipses tend to have very important turning points in their life happen under eclipses as well. And that continues to be true for him.
Other omens – there was this visible comet that we talked about last month in October just before election day. And I thought this was striking, because some of the comet research I did a year ago for the year ahead forecast in 2024 and talked about back then, one of the things I learned last year was that the ancient Chinese astronomers and astrologers called comets “broom stars.” And sometimes they were taken as an omen of sweeping away whatever the current government is at that time. And there’s other deeper implications of that, but I think that continues to intrigue me in terms of comets and some of that ancient wisdom surrounding that. There were some statistics this year that came out after the election that it was like, that this was the first election or first year since like, the early 1900s or something like that since they had been tracking this where every incumbent government lost in the elections compared to like, any other year in recent times. And I think there’s something striking about that, and it might be relevant in terms of those two comets that we saw take place that were visible this year.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting. That makes, if we’re using that as a frame, the one in April could potentially be interpreted, with, you know, in hindsight as the removal of Biden or the withdrawal of Biden as a candidate.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good point. Yeah, because it would have been shortly after that that the first debate took place, and that was what led to his downfall basically. All right, so moving on. There’s been other repetitions as well, though, with both nativities of candidates as well as Venus placements and the Venus cycle.
So one of the things I thought was so striking as soon as Harris became the primary candidate and that I realized right away is that Harris and Hillary Clinton were both born with Gemini rising and Mercury in Scorpio. And I thought this was an incredibly striking repetition that the same two candidates that went up against Trump in 2016 and 2024 were both women with Gemini rising and Mercury in Scorpio.
And of course, since it happened eight years apart, that’s one exact Venus cycle, so that Venus was roughly in the same degree on election day in 2024 that it was eight years earlier in 2016 when Hillary lost to Trump and then there was this weird repetition of that with Harris losing to Trump eight years later with Venus in the same position. And then of course, Venus will also be in roughly the same degree and the same zodiac sign on inauguration day coming up here in January as it was eight years earlier was Trump was first inaugurated.
So sometimes in astrology, we see these repetitions come up, and there’s this question of like, are events gonna repeat, or will something like, break the cycle? But here so much of the repetitions in this instance this year seemed to be really repetitions of astronomical phenomenon really closely coinciding with repetitions of what the actual events or outcome were in these cycles at the same time.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So that’s pretty —
AC: It is, it’s really interesting. A few points. One, like, just pause for a second and think about how unlikely it is that the two people Trump ever runs for president against both have the same rising ruled by the same planet in the same degree. Like, that’s roughly one in 144, which is, you know, significantly less than one percent chance. That’s really interesting. Makes you wanna think of the synastry. Like, what is his – like, what is the relationship that he has with Gemini ruled by Scorpio? And then second, on the Venus, you know, it’s interesting because that Venus in Leo, which we talked about extensively before, during, and after it happened last year – you know, for him, that went over his, that like, was right near his Ascendant. And seems to have taken him from underdog status to a surprising victory in both cases. And just as you’re talking about it, as we’re talking about it now, it’s bringing me back to the kind of figures that we saw during the Venus retrograde in Leo. And so one of the big ones, or one of the big events that sort of contained and channeled that energy was the Barbie movie. As I was in addition to that when I was doing research, I also saw a bunch of Hulk Hogan and Arnold Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding stuff as well as – I think that we can also see that retrograde as inaugurating like, Taylor Swift’s complete dominance of the human world. And you know, the way I was abbreviating those, like, oh, it’s these like, big blonde American winning machines. And you know, it’s that kind of energy. And that I didn’t think about that with Trump, but that looks a lot better a match in retrospect now.
CB: Yeah. And I wanna talk about that more a little bit because I also think there’s a connection between that Venus retrograde in Leo from last year and the Mars retrograde in Leo that’s happening now. But I’ll circle it back around to that —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — and to the points that you just made, which are good. So there was also repetitions that we talked about a lot over the late summer with 1968, and repetitions with eclipses plus the Venus cycle. So we talked about a lot of this around the time of the DNC, because we could see that there were all these like, bizarre repetitions with 1968, and that was tied in with the fact that there was a solar eclipse in Aries in both years, and also Venus was in an exact repetition based on those eight-year cycles so that Venus was transiting the same degrees in the same signs roughly that summer. So we had in both years, it’s like, Biden stepping down – the president stepping down and not seeking reelection just like we had Johnson stepping aside and not seeking reelection in 1968. We had a tense Democratic convention taking place over the summer in both years. We had assassination attempts on candidates’ lives in both years. We had a Kennedy running in both years, and et cetera. There’s probably more correlations —
AC: Let me just add one thing to the assassination attempts. MLK was killed on April 4th of 1968 right around a solar eclipse in Aries.
CB: Right.
AC: And we’ve been, you know, we’ve been seeing assassinations both within the United States but just an instrument of, I don’t know what you’d call it, conflict on the rise all over the world in a lot of existing conflicts during this North Node in Aries period. And it’s a little shocking to see. You know, one of the most famous and tragic assassinations had exactly that same signature.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s like, the Sun is in its exaltation in Aries, and sometimes —
AC: Yes.
CB: — it’s the singular figure who has this exalted status, because it wasn’t just MLK but also not long after MLK was the assassination of Robert Kennedy. And interestingly, it’s like, that assassination as we noted in previous episodes partially had to do with his stance on I think it was like, sending arms to Israel and there was a Palestinian man who ended up killing RFK partially as a result of that supposedly, although there was lots of weird mysteries surrounding it like there are a lot of those assassinations in the 1960s.
So the final repetition, though, that I was waiting to see once we had established that all of those repetitions were happening is that the disarray, essentially, in the Democratic party that occurred in 1968 eventually resulted in a sweeping victory for Richard Nixon, which brought him into the presidency by the end of that year. And then that’s basically what happened here where there was a sweeping victory later in the year for Trump that brought him into power, basically. So yeah, a lot of interesting repetitions with that just based on the coincidence of the Venus and the eclipse cycles.
So in other news, we had anticipated delays, and the anticipated delays ended up being the House, which was undecided for quite a while, where while the election itself was called quickly by like, that night or the next day November 6th, the control of the House was actually up in the air for a week or so. And this ended up coinciding with the application of Mercury to square the planet Saturn. And what was fascinating about that is that it was eventually resolved around November 14th just after the Mercury-Saturn square completed. So this was important because some of the elections were extremely close, and it took a while to count the votes. But it mattered in terms of whether Republicans would end up controlling all branches of government, and in the end, they ended up taking the House as well, so that they secured the presidency, the House, the Senate, and have a majority on the Supreme Court. So that was interesting that that coincided with that in terms of just some of the Mercury-Saturn delays.
You actually had made an interesting statement that with after the election that there would be this weird period of like, what did you say? But it ended up being like, strikingly true of just like, things were oddly calm for like, a week or so after the —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — election where everybody was kind of like, waiting to see what happened or something, and there did end up being like, this eerie sort of like, silence. Not just from the Harris campaign, but also from the Trump campaign in like, the week after election day before things like, started really moving.
AC: Yeah. I think I – yeah. I don’t remember what I said, but that was the gist of it. And that I as well as you are interested in seeing what happens when Mercury comes back to those degrees, which is yet to happen.
CB: Yeah. That and the Mars station, and we’ll come back to that in a minute.
AC: Yeah, we’re gonna talk about the Mars station kind of all day.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Like, once we get to the past, that’s about, I don’t know, 60 percent of the future we’re gonna discuss.
CB: Yeah, for sure. In other news, all astrologers – the Pluto-Sun conjunction in the inauguration chart, every astrologer that looked at this election noted this extremely close applying Sun-Pluto conjunction on inauguration now that Pluto has gone into Aquarius because the Sun on inauguration day, it’s always on January 20th, so the Sun is always at like, one degree of Aquarius, the first degree of Aquarius, or so. But now Pluto is there so that there’s this close alignment of those two planets, which is one of the most striking features of the 2025 inauguration. And I think this is important and striking and makes a little bit more sense now, because the Sun is traditionally the king or like, the leader of a country, whereas Pluto is about power and the consolidation of power. And I think what this is is that it’s about the centralization of power in the executive branch with the president, and the moves that may happen to consolidate unilateral power under the office.
So it’s also probably about one party being in control now of all branches of government, which is, as I said, the presidency, the House, the Senate, and essentially the Supreme Court. So our entire government for the past like, you know, 200 years has been based on the idea of checks and balances between the different branches. But now because of the sweeping nature of the victory, there’s almost like, unchecked power in the hands of an individual as well as a group. And now we sort of wait to see like, what they’re gonna do with that, where I tried to look in the past where like, other majorities like that happened, and like, the Democrats had something close to that in the 1960s and they used it to pass the Civil Rights Act and to really like, push that through Congress. So now Trump and the Republicans will have that power to achieve whatever their goals are and whatever that ends up being, basically.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that we are heading into the Uranus in Gemini years, and that the Uranus in Gemini years consistently show a peak of executive authority for the president. If we go back, it was FDR, and then Lincoln, and then Washington. And so it makes sense that we’re heading into a period where the executive branch is very strong and is potentially able to command or align other branches in accord with it.
It’s also worth noting that that Uranus in Gemini period runs ‘til 2033, and we just get a taste of it next year. It extends well beyond the next presidential term.
CB: Right, yeah. And yeah, the extension of that period, and then you know, you had talked about in previous episodes about how there had always been this like, central figure in the Uranus in Gemini periods which had been like, FDR, or Lincoln, or George Washington in the first one, and whether there would be the arising of this central figure again during that time. And Nick Dagan Best, I was talking to him about this, and he pointed out that the difference this time is that in all previous of those three previous periods, Jupiter has come through Gemini and conjoined Uranus at some point there, coinciding with this like, great man or centralized figure basically who’s in charge of everything and leads the country through a conflict of some sort. But what’s weird about this cycle, Nick pointed out to me, is that Jupiter – because it hit Gemini early this year, it won’t conjoin Uranus during this cycle. So this will be our first time experiencing as a country a Uranus return in Gemini, which has traditionally involved a conflict, but having it without Jupiter transit through Gemini at some point during that seven year period that Jupiter transits through that sign – or that Uranus transits through that sign.
AC: Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting point. Likewise, it’ll be interesting to see whether the like, Jupiter’s sextile from Leo to Uranus and trine from Libra end up getting the job done, and if they do, what that looks like and if it’s meaningfully different. It’s worth noting that 2028 has a Jupiter-Uranus trine.
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: Which is basically the most love that Uranus is gonna get from Jupiter during that period.
CB: Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff interesting in 2028 and 2032, as I’ve started to look forward. But we’ll save that for another time.
Other things – the Mars retrograde in Leo ended up being decisive for Trump. So what’s interesting, we go back and listen to our year ahead forecast, I discovered this 79-year cycle where Mars always repeats almost to the degree where it stationed retrograde every 79 years. So that means when it stations retrograde in Leo this December, if you go back 79 years before that, you’ll find that Mars stationed very close to the same degree in Leo. And this cycle – I discovered this like, right before the year ahead election last year, the year ahead forecast last year, and you can see me be kind of startled by it in that recording because I had just discovered this, where I found that that 79-year cycle goes all the way back in American history and it goes all the way back to the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 and 1788 when there was a similar Mars retrograde period that was happening in Leo. And what was happening then is they were having debates as they were trying to ratify the Constitution about the federal government and how much they should even create a centralized federal government versus how much the power should be in the hands of the states. And so somehow, there’s a resonance with that original debate about the Constitution and the creation of the Constitution and the tensions within it compared to something that’s happening, that’s being unlocked now. And then of course weirdly, if you go back just 79 years from now, you go to 1945 and 1946, where you end up with Trump, and Trump was born with Mars in Leo just after it came off of that Mars in Leo retrograde period.
So this Mars retrograde then acts as like, a recurrence transit for him, activating something that was built into his birth chart since the beginning, coinciding with this Mars retrograde period.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
CB: Yeah. So that discovery began me on a whole process of researching Babylonian goal year periods, which actually resulted in some other successful predictions in May. So it remains to be seen still whether any challenging first house themes arise for Trump when Mars stations in his first house next month. But I think right now the main lesson is just that the retrograde signified his win because he was born just after the same retrograde cycle in 1946.
AC: Yeah. That would have been… In retrospect, we can see that signifying the win, but it’s like, it signifies Mars, right? Like, it’s like, the full, it’s a complete Mars cycle. And Mars so often brings difficulty. I would have had a hard time saying that the full maturation of that Mars cycle would mean that he wins. It would mean that we would see Mars’s significations, which in this case was a win. But that would have – I think that’s more difficult in retrospect.
CB: Yeah, it comes down to a fundamental issue —
AC: Not in – it’s easier in retrospect. It’s much harder in foresight.
CB: Yeah. It comes down to a fundamental issue we have as astrologers making predictions based on the recurrence of malefic transits, because we so often see the negative side of that subjectively where something subjectively negative happens to the native. But then in other instances, it’s like, we do see that there are some people in the same way that some people respond to Venus retrogrades and really important turning points happen in their life under those, there’s other people that respond to Mars retrogrades. And we’ll talk about one of them, actually, in just a moment.
So more broadly, this Mars retrograde in Leo seems to be connected with like, men in a broader sense, and it almost seems like, as you were saying earlier, Austin, like, the counterpart or inversion to what happened last summer when we had the Venus retrograde in Leo, and it seemed like the summer of women and where women and women’s themes were being talked about more, where for example, the day Venus stationed retrograde in that sign that the Barbie movie was released when it stationed retrograde in Leo. And then you had these massive concerts that year by both Taylor Swift but also Beyonce as well as other themes that were coming up at that time. So now that Mars is slowing down and stationing retrograde in Leo, a lot of the post-election analysis is like, talking about men and the way that Trump was partially carried to victory by men where exit polls were showing that something like 55 percent of men voted for Trump versus 53 percent of women voted for Harris. And there was also a major role in terms of male influencers who took on a major role in terms of this election cycle, especially in like, the rise of the male podcasters and things like that and the way that that influenced this election. The most like, important and striking one of which was Joe Rogan, who actually – as we’ve talked about in previous episodes – started his podcast 15 years ago under a Mars retrograde in Leo in 2009. So it’s the same exact Mars retrograde cycle 15 years ago is when he started his podcast. And then his success has influenced all similar podcasts today and has spawned like, so many other imitations or other people using that format for different things. So he ended up, of course, having playing a notable role in this election where he ended up interviewing both Trump and Vance towards the end of the election. And then he ended up actually endorsing Trump at the very end.
There was also some drama over whether Harris would go on Rogan’s podcast, and there was this weird week or two where it’s like, she might do it, she might not do it, where they were trying to like, negotiate something. But ultimately, she didn’t end up doing it. But regardless, it seemed like Rogan in particular became a central figure in this election as well as in part of the broader sort of like, almost like rightward shift in the country. Although he’s obviously just like, one piece of a larger phenomenon, but this Mars retrograde was clearly significant to both him personally as well as like, his role and impact on the country in general.
AC: Yeah. Well, and it’s really interesting that this year is the, like, the 15th year of the podcast. It kind of feels like it’s just, Rogan’s been around forever. When I saw that in your notes, I was like, really? Was it only 2009? You know, which is two universes ago. But like, that timing increment, like that 15 years being martial and looking at his chart. You know, he has an angular Mars in Scorpio. Right? Like, that is a martial chart. Like, the… You know, people move, people not only like, act in a way that is consonant with the nature of the planets that are dominant in their chart, especially if there’s a super strong one. But they also move like, at the pace and along with the time scales of the planets that they’re really tied to. And that angular Mars in Scorpio just, you know, ties him to Mars’s time frame. And if you’re looking at one, like, one complete cycle of Mars, right, like, could the podcast – could Rogan’s podcast, how should we say, have matured any further to like, you know, from like, whatever sort of stinky sweatpants basement shit to like, being the talk of the town like, in the days leading up to a presidential election where, you know, interviewing one candidate and maybe interviewing another. Yeah, it’s just so obviously like, the maturation of a Mars thing for someone who’s got a really strong Mars. And of course, he has Sun, Jupiter, and Mercury in Leo that are square to or angular to that Mars.
CB: Right. So it’s like, so he’s a good example of that then in terms of malefics needing to account for that in the same way that we’ve done such extensive Venus retrograde studies and we can see how those repetitions coincide with turning points for people that are keyed into that cycle. There’s other people like Rogan that are very closely keyed into Mars retrograde cycles. For him, because he has a night chart, and because he has Mars in Scorpio and he has a Leo stellium, we can understand why that’s so key for him as well as tends to be more subjectively positive for him personally in terms of starting his podcast or now becoming almost like a kingmaker during this presidential election. Like, just, you know, a random guy that just started a podcast having such a oversized influence on presidential election —
AC: Having any influence —
CB: Right.
AC: — is extraordinary. And just as another Mars note, right, another part of Rogan’s rise is that he started doing the commentary for the UFC when it was like, nothing. You know, when it was two guys fighting in a cage in a bar. And that his profile also rose as UFC became a sport rivaling and in some cases exceeding a lot of the established sports. Right? And that’s like, with – you know, that’s a movement that’s riding along with Mars.
CB: Right. So it’s like, we can see in his case how those periods have worked out and how it’s worked out in a subjectively positive way. But we need to then reflect on that when it comes to Trump, for example, where sometimes malefics when they’re prominent in a chart – sometimes when Mars is prominent in a chart, it just means the person will sometimes respond to and have some of the most important turning points in their life happen when that natal Mars placement is activated. And there may —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — be some challenging stuff that comes along with that subjectively. But it will also coincide with some of the most pivotal turning points in the person’s life. And I think that’s part —
AC: Yeah —
CB: — of what we saw here.
AC: Like getting nearly missed by a bullet in Trump’s case.
CB: Right.
AC: With Trump’s Mars is more ambivalent in terms of its beneficence towards the native, whereas Rogan has like, a great Mars in a night chart.
CB: Sure. Yeah. So all right, so moving on, because we’ll come back to Mars in the forecast. It’s like, the gravitational pull of this Mars retrograde is already dragging us into talking about it.
AC: For sure.
CB: So I wanted to talk about Jupiter in Gemini, because I talked about this on the last forecast episode, but it came even more strikingly clear by the end of the election, which is that with Jupiter in Gemini this year, this really did become the podcast election where long-form discussions became key. And I think that’s such an amazing delineation of Jupiter in Gemini as long-form discussions. And —
AC: That’s a really polite way to put it.
CB: That’s a polite way to put it. Well, you should be very polite, because you know, guess who started their podcast under Jupiter in Gemini 12 years ago – this guy. So —
AC: Oh!
CB: — if you need —
AC: And people have politely referred to you as long-form.
CB: Yeah, very politely.
AC: And me as well.
CB: Right. So if you needed any better demonstration of that, you have me. But then of course, in a year in which Jupiter is in Gemini, I was very taken by the fact that these podcasts and the long-form discussions involved in them actually potentially became really key to the presidential race as one major factor in terms of its outcome. And in a way that they were not up until this point. That this was actually a turning point or a sort of watershed moment. So part of that is that as everybody knows that’s like, listening to this or has been listening to this podcast for a long time, you really get to know people better by listening to extended discussions involving them. And one of the issues is that Harris seemed to avoid or seemed to not be comfortable for the most part doing some of these long-form podcasts, whereas Trump fully embraced it. And I think this ended up being a major contributing factor in the election. So especially at first, she seemed to be avoiding doing some of this, and I think part of what happened, if I can give an astrological spin to it, is I think that with Mercury in Scorpio as the chart ruler that she was attempting to do more controlled settings and just like, stay on message and to avoid mistakes as much as possible. And you can actually see a similar thing that Clinton did eight years ago before this, also with Mercury in Scorpio, where she also kind of avoided doing some of those more what existed as the long-form format at that time, which is she had an offer to go on Howard Stern in the 2016 election, but she didn’t do it. And in a later interview, she said that she regretted that actually. So that was one of the few longer interviews that Harris made sure that she did do this year, I’m sure trying to like, correct that mistake that was identified from eight years ago.
But nonetheless, I think the Harris campaign – I’m assuming – viewed long-form discussions as more dangerous because it’s like, harder to stay on message and there’s more opportunities for error. And then even the bigger ones that she did do later in the cycle, like when she went on Call Her Daddy, they kept it short to like, an hour long discussion, which is a little short for some of those formats where some of the episodes can go to like, two hours or even three hours. So it gave people less opportunity to get to know her, and ultimately she also didn’t do Rogan even though that could have happened. And I do think that that was a major mistake. It could have been challenging for her to go onto that platform and like, have whatever debates would have happened with him, but it would have been a huge audience that she could have spoken to, but instead she didn’t or it didn’t work out for whatever reason.
So obviously, this is not the only factor in what happened with the outcome of the election, but I still think it’s important in a year with Jupiter in Gemini. And by contrast, it’s like, Trump on the other hand embraced podcasts from very early on, and it was clear that that was a major part of his strategy starting in the late summer where he went on not just shows like Joe Rogan, but also on like, comedy podcasts like Theo Von and others like that. So one of the transits for him is that Jupiter was transiting his 11th house in Gemini and conjoining his Sun, so he ended up getting supported by this wide range of like, allies in the male especially podcasting sphere that had built up over the past decade. And I thought it also interesting, because at one point in some of those interviews – because I tried to listen to both the ones Harris and Trump were doing to see if they would drop like, biographical facts that were useful for astrology, and Trump like, I think shouted out his son Barron at one point. And Barron may have been giving him tips for like, as a younger person, like, what podcast to go on. And I thought this was an interesting manifestation of Trump having Jupiter as the ruler of his 5th house of children in his 3rd house of communication, and that was, of course, also getting activated this year.
AC: Yeah, that’s a nice insight.
CB: Yeah. So just to give you context, though, and some numbers, there was this amazing video that was like, a post-election analysis on the YouTube channel by Colin and Samir that was titled, “How YouTube Podcasts Predicted the 2024 Election.” And this is from a channel that usually just interviews YouTube creators and like, has like, the pulse on what’s going on with YouTube. And they did this post-election analysis where they said that Trump went on 14 podcasts that got 124 million views on YouTube, whereas by contrast, they said that Harris only went on five podcasts that only got four million views on YouTube. So those are just like, staggering numbers in terms of the number of people that Trump was able to reach with that, versus Harris not being able to reach such a huge audience. And I think a crucial difference is that Harris was focusing more on like, traditional media, and was spending a lot of money that had been raised on like, you know, advertisements and stuff like that. Whereas Trump, basically, those are like free advertisements just by going on and doing a podcast for a couple of hours and you reach millions of people. So I think this will be remembered as the podcast election to some extent, and it’ll be seen as a watershed moment that both sides will use and account for next time in 2028 where they won’t make the same mistakes. And I think astrologers should remember that it happened under Jupiter in Gemini.
AC: Yeah. Hundred percent. And I would also add to that that this is – Jupiter doesn’t conjoin Uranus in Gemini this time around, but it does precede it, right? Uranus actually moves into Gemini right after Jupiter leaves Gemini. And so we have this baton passing rather than a conjunction this time. And there’s been a lot of talk since the election about the, how should we say, the viability and power of I guess what people are calling legacy media, or “mainstream media.” But, you know, news from like, whatever news corp – CNN and MSNBC, Fox, blah blah blah. But like, that news that is produced in that way, versus the power of podcasting platforms and more, how should we say, more amateur, more bottom-up versus top-down stuff. And if we’re thinking about the – a number of people are thinking about the future of legacy media, like, top-down versus bottom-up stuff, Uranus is about to move into that space. And so, you know, I think that this election will be cited when we start seeing significant movements there.
You know, we don’t – when we look at the history of Uranus in Gemini, we tend to focus on, I don’t know, kind of significant things like, I don’t know, World War Two, Civil War. But you know, what we haven’t done that might be worth doing before next time is looking at the information environment in the country. Right? Because it’s Gemini, right? Like, it’s pretty important. If we were not sort of stunned by these historical landmarks that occur during that period, we might look at the – you know, what did the information environment look like, and did that actually change significantly, and did that play an important role? My guess is yes.
CB: Yeah, totally. That’s a really great point. Let’s do that for the year ahead forecast.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right, moving on because I wanna nail a few of these other things. I know this is going long —
AC: Still got a few things to talk about.
CB: I’m sorry! But yeah, I wanted to – you know, well, I wanted to wait, you know, because last four years ago, I did a separate episode, but I wanted to wait and see how some things played out, and I’m glad I did because a few of the next few points were things that happened after the election, and if I had done a whole separate episode a few days after I would have missed. So one of them really quickly is inflation was a major motivating factor, according to a lot of the polls in the election and why people voted the way that they did. And I thought this was interesting because remember, inflation originally happened a few years ago during the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction, and there were some amazing graphs that we shared back then towards the end of that about how some of the inflation peaks perfectly coincided with the alignment of Jupiter and Neptune in Pisces. So I thought this was interesting because, of course, this year as we’ve talked about in the past year and the year ahead forecast, we’ve come to the square between Jupiter and Neptune once Jupiter went into Gemini. And so this is the opening or the waxing square between those two planets, so of course, this square ends up referring back to what happened or what started at the conjunction. And I think that’s really striking then that that ended up what happened a few years ago impacted this election so closely. So it’s a good lesson about how the relationship between a conjunction and a waxing square works in some instances and connects two points in time.
AC: Yeah, and then Saturn being in the mix, right, makes it a more damning thing. People are wanting to, you know, with Saturn it’s like, “Who do we hold responsible for this thing?” Right? Whose fault is it? Let’s look at the damage.
CB: For sure. All right. Next point – this is the one that I discovered afterwards that I just, this is one of the most stunning correlations I saw. Biden and Trump met at the White House on November 13th, and there’s like, a video of them sitting there in front of the fire talking after – before – their meeting; I don’t know which it was. But this was incredibly striking because this occurred on November 13th, which was two days before Saturn stationed direct in Pisces. And why that is striking is because their first debate back in June happened two days before Saturn stationed in Pisces. So it was a extremely close and stunning correlation where that first debate that was so devastating for Biden and led him to drop out of the race and then led to Harris taking over and everything else, happened as that Saturn was stationing, and then you know, months later at the next Saturn station, we get like, the outcome or the result essentially of that first station happening at the second one exactly two days before.
So that was both connecting those two events, but of course had deeper meanings because Saturn is transiting Biden’s 4th house, which is like, his home and living situation. And he was essentially meeting with the person who would be moving into his home. And then the reason why he was moving into his home connected back to an event that occurred at the first station when Biden lost that debate and had such a difficult performance due to his age. So this is a really good demonstration that astrologers should take note of of how stations work, and sometimes that’s really hard to articulate because they happen over such long spans of time that you have to track. But in this instance, we have a really striking demonstration of that.
AC: Yeah. That’s a gem.
CB: Yeah. Lastly, transits. Trump had Jupiter conjoining his Sun on election day, whereas Harris had Mars squaring her Mercury, which is the ruler of the Ascendant and the lord of the year. And I think those two transits proved to be the most decisive in terms of transit analysis for election day itself. You know, Uranus in Gemini is also a factor for Trump, and this is one of Nick Dagan Best’s major factors going back two years ago that he predicted for Trump. I guess we’ve already talked about this, though, in terms of the question about a leader during this cycle, and we’ll see how that plays out.
Other transits – Saturn stationed in Harris’s 10th house the week after the election. And for months, I had been wondering if that Saturn transit in her 10th house, since she has a night chart and that transit would normally be interpreted as very difficult – like a major setback – in terms of one’s career, if that Saturn transit would counteract the 10th house eclipse that occurred in September, which normally would indicate an elevation for somebody, and normally is for presidential elections tends to push things in a person’s favor if it’s happening in a person’s angular houses. So that eclipse happened in September around the time of the debate, so we had thought that the debate was like, a good sign that the Saturn transit wouldn’t be as bad for her. But in the end, it wasn’t, and it turned out the answer was yes, the Saturn transit can counteract the eclipse or even cancel it out in some sense entirely.
So it just ended up being that the debate was her greatest moment of importance in terms of what she had to do during this election cycle and her greatest moment of elevation, as well as just the fact that she had been elevated at all, whereas Biden’s political career with the eclipse happening in his 4th house essentially came to an end during that same timeframe. But then she was essentially elevated and then suffered a very public defeat. So in some ways, it was like, a very classic Saturn in the 10th house transit where sometimes we’re kind of raised up at some points in our life so that we can fall. And that’s not always the most, you know, positive scenario, but sometimes that is a scenario that happens to people.
AC: Yeah, like Mike Tyson.
CB: Like Mike Tyson, who was also on the Saturn station exactly. Like, another major parallel with that.
AC: Yeah. I don’t know if you wanna get to that right now, but that’s perfect Saturn station material and also equally Mars just about retrograde material.
CB: Let’s save it, because I’m gonna —
AC: Okay.
CB: — finish this section and then I wanna take a break.
All right, so one of the things that happened is now the Mercury retrograde has started to take place, what happened is right when Mercury stationed at the end of the month, the Harris campaign leadership went on one of the main liberal podcasts, Pod Save America, on November 26th, the day after Mercury stationed retrograde, and they were recounting and reflecting and reviewing on what happened, which are all Mercury retrograde keywords, although it didn’t seem like it was super well received, and they were often criticized it seemed like in terms of accountability for that.
In terms of the presidential election and it going forward, it remains to be seen still what some of the other transits are about that are coming up, like, you know, is Mars stationing in Trump’s first house just a general omen of his ascension, or are there any other things that come along with that that are problematic? Is the Mars-Pluto opposition in early January just a general omen of the new Congress coming into power, or what’s the deal with that? How does the third opposition between Mars and Pluto tie into things around April? We’re gonna have to wait and see for a lot of this, and we’ll revisit some of these questions in the year ahead forecast next month, which we’re gonna be recording with patrons on December 20th. So that is where we’re at with the presidential election.
All right, I wanna transition to talking about some other news stories that happened in November really quickly besides the presidential election. So around the Mars-Pluto opposition, I noticed there was like, a couple of just like, terrible Mars-Pluto stories that were little blips in the news but they nonetheless fit the symbolism of that alignment.
So one of them was like, on November 1st, there was this squirrel that had like, thousands of followers on TikTok and social media; it was like, a rescue squirrel this guy had raised. And somebody like, called the authorities saying that he was raising a wild animal, and then the authorities like, busted in, took his squirrel, and then over the next few days they were fighting about it and having like, a legal battle, and then the authorities decided to just like, kill the squirrel basically out of nowhere before that had been wrapped up. And it was just like, a really bizarrely… He described it, the owner, as like, an over-the-top or overreaction or like, going way too far, and yeah, it was pretty brutal.
So there was like, that, and then there was this other news story in late October where there was this woman who tried to poison her boyfriend because she was mad that he had broken up with her or something like that, and she poisoned his soup. But then he ended up sharing the soup with four of his friends, and then all five of them ended up dying, including two of them who were brothers. So it was another like, just like, weirdly brutal story that was like, right on the Mars-Pluto opposition and manifested some of that energy.
AC: Yeah, I saw a lot of that. And my mind was drawn towards like, the monstrous, cruel, grotesque, and inhumane. Like, that was the vibe.
CB: For sure. In other very sad news, the astrologer Michael Lutin passed away on November 11th. And Michael had written this – he did many things; one of them is that he was like, the resident astrologer for the magazine Vanity Fair for many years. And as part of that, he wrote this famous article about Pluto in Capricorn and how it would transform the country for Vanity Fair back in 2006. It was titled, “Vanity Fair Special Alert: Horoscope USA.” And it got a lot of coverage back in 2008 when the financial collapse happened, I remember, because he had talked about some things related to that and how that would tie in with Pluto in Capricorn. But then it was striking seeing it passed around again when he died just days after the election.
And also interestingly, Nick Dagan Best had learned about recurrence transits from Michael originally as one of his students, and this was striking to me because the Venus-Saturn recurrence on inauguration day was one of Nick’s arguments for Trump winning. And so it was very striking that Michael passed away right after the election and Nick had learned that technique from him that made him more confident about the outcome and just a sort of full circle thing there. But you knew Michael, right?
AC: Yeah. I wouldn’t have been able to make it to UAC in 2012 where I met so many astrologers and, you know, began a number of now like, 12-year long relationships. One of them – like, I met Kelly Surtees for the first time at UAC 2012, and I absolutely wouldn’t have been able to get there without Michael’s help.
CB: Nice. Yeah. Michael hosted a library for the – astrology library – for NCGR in New York, and he also hosted workshops with the NCGR, and I went out there and I stayed with him like, a few times in order to give lectures and workshops, including a zodiacal releasing workshop in 2015 where I got to connect with people like Sam Reynolds and Chani Nicholas, and yeah, I’ll always remember some of those times like, going out to New York, and my exposure to that city was really as a result of Michael and getting to hang out with him and talk astrology and talk some of the like, institutional history of like, what is was like working for Vanity Fair and doing astrology for so many prominent people as a result of that. So yeah, it was a sad loss for our community.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Other news – there was a huge group of stories that all clustered around Saturn, which stationed direct in Pisces on November 15th. So at the top of the list, the funniest one and also very striking – I’m not even joking about this, but – suddenly in the news that week, I had started noticing that Red Lobster, the famous seafood restaurant in the United States, was attempting to revive itself with a new CEO and menu, and they did a media blitz that week and they launched a new menu on November 11th, just days before Saturn’s stationing. And then their CEO did a media blitz with like, tons of interviews that week, and one of the things he said is that he would never bring back all you can eat “endless” shrimp due to the significant financial losses that it caused the company in the past. And he said, “I know how to do math,” when he was discussing this decision. I thought that was such a hilarious Saturn in Pisces like, manifestation.
AC: Yeah. Saturn like, bringing limits and finity. And so, yeah, like, the downfall blamed on the not limiting the shrimp. Right? Saturn says that everything has its limits, especially shrimp – and shrimp, of course, being from the ocean, Piscean symbolism.
CB: Right. And I didn’t go back and check this, but I know we talked about like, the downfall or like, the bankruptcy of Red Lobster under one of the previous Saturn in Pisces transits. So it’d be interesting to go back and look at that at some point.
In other news, Coca Cola created its annual holiday Christmas season ad entirely using AI this time. And this ad went viral on November 15th, which was the very day of the Saturn station in Pisces as well as the Full Moon in Taurus conjunct Uranus. So I thought that was an interesting manifestation of that.
There was also a virtual reality thing where I kind of wondered whether the virtual reality thing like, died out after, you know, some of the stuff earlier this year and some of the things I had said about in the year ahead forecast, but then I looked up news, and that week Apple collaborated with the music artist The Weeknd to release his new music video in virtual reality. And they’re calling it a “immersive music experience” where you can put on this headset and then literally like, go into the music video and have this sense of being there and being present in it. So they launched this on November 14th, which was literally the day before Saturn stationed. So it was another striking blurring the boundaries between what’s real and what’s not real under that Saturn transit copresent with Neptune in late Pisces.
A big event or like, spectacle that occurred around that time the very day of the Saturn station on November 15th, there was the Mike Tyson boxing fight against Jake Paul. And it ended up being this huge spectacle because it was live streamed on Netflix, which many people already have subscriptions for, so a lot of people watched it. And I thought this was really striking that it occurred on the Saturn station because there was this weird parallel with like, the Bidne debate that occurred under the first station in June where Biden’s age became very apparent as well as like, his inability to do some stuff that he had previously been able to do much more effectively in terms of debates and stuff. And there was a similar thing with Tyson where it became really clear pretty early on in the match that like, he was not doing well, that his age was significantly hampering him fighting this guy who was like, 30 years younger than him. And I think a lot of people had these realizations of like, the hard limitations of age and time as a result of that fight.
AC: Yeah. So what was funny is I was teaching elections about maybe a week before that fight, and I was teaching Dorotheus’s principle that in every election, the rising matters, the Moon matters, and then the planet that is the natural ruler of the kind of activity that you’re doing matters. And I said, for example, if you have a shitty Mars in a chart and you are trying to promote a fight, that’s always going to be a problem even if you de-emphasize it. Like, because that’s the planetary sphere in which you’re operating. And someone said, oh that’s funny; the Tyson-Paul fight is, you know, in a week. And I was like, oh. Well, that makes sense. Like, that’s going to be a grotesque spectacle/money grab. And it was even worse than that.
And so it was interesting because it really gave us sort of the worst of Saturn. Like, seeing not only getting older, almost 60 – in his second Saturn return – but also recently almost died of illness Mike Tyson, right? Like, destroying everyone’s hopes that they could still be good at anything, you know, once they’d passed middle age. It was, it made me just kind of wanna lie back and abandon any efforts that I’m making to preserve myself in hopes that I will be functional in another 15 years. I was like, oh, just let the lords of decay ravage me. So it was like, profoundly Saturnian and demotivating.
It was interesting to see the Mars, right, because it was Mars in Leo and we talked last month about how Mars in Leo is great at spectacle. And it was great at spectacle in the sense that a nearly unprecedented number of people tuned into this fight. So all the previous Jake Paul fights and almost all fights, big fights, are pay-per-view. But this was just through Netflix, and so a staggering – I believe it was something like 60 millions households or something, not people, households – tuned into this fight. And yet, the reaction to it was, “I never wanna see anything like that again.” Right? So we have like, the Mars in Leo doing the good job promoting, but even then – which is almost two weeks ago – Mars was barely moving. It was gonna move another degree and a half over like, three and a half weeks. Like, this isn’t going anywhere except backwards. And so you have the – I thought it was a really profound lesson in not just the position of a planet, but like with Saturn, the motion is like, there’s not going to be another Jake Paul Netflix thing like that. That event has been, shall we say, condemned and reacted to with disgust, you know, IRL as well as all over the internet. It was like, an anti-spectacle.
CB: Yeah. And I mean, I was noticing there was like, a lot of millennials who are going through their Pluto square right now, and a lot of them like, grew up watching Mike Tyson just be like, the best fighter in the world and being undefeated during the height of his career in like, the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. But then – and many of them went into watching this thinking like, of course, like, Mike Tyson’s gonna crush this like, YouTuber. But then realizing something about the limitations of age and time and that being a really heavy feeling. And it was just so striking to me that we go two incidences of a similar experience that people had seeing the limitations of age and time and the impact and how that can sometimes, you know, stop a person from being able to do things that they used to be able to do, that both of those incidences this year happened right on those Saturn stations. There’s something incredible about that.
AC: Yeah. Well, as they say in fight sports, the only undefeated champion is father time.
CB: I like that. All right. So other news right on the Saturn station, around November 16th, there was this video of a popular TikTok food reviewer who was like, he went to a new city and he was eating sushi on camera, and he ate a piece of sushi and he didn’t see it, but the camera picked up that there was like, a worm or like, a parasite on it, and then he ate it. And it wasn’t until later that a bunch of viewers like, pointed out to him that he was eating this sushi that was tainted that he realized what had happened. And I thought that was incredible as, again, just happening on the Saturn station and we had talked about all these themes of like, tainted water or other things like that. And there it was like, tainted seafood basically, which then sort of like, psychologically a lot of people were freaked out about that and just realizing that that’s a potential issue sometimes when you’re eating raw fish.
AC: Yeah. The ocean is dangerous, right? It will bankrupt your seafood restaurant. It will poison you. Right? Saturn in Pisces.
CB: Exactly. Last Saturn in Pisces news overlap with Saturn in Pisces, Saturn stationing and Pluto going into Aquarius, but there were these news stories of undersea cables being cut in the seas around Europe. On November 19th, there was a story of a second submarine telecom cable that had been cut in the Baltic Sea, and it was a cable between Sweden and Lithuania. And the previous day, news had broke that a cable between Finland and Germany had been cut. So this is kind of like Saturn in Pisces like, ocean stuff with cables being cut, but also potentially because it occurred the day of or the day after the Pluto ingress into Aquarius, a sort of preview of the future and some of the like, Pluto in Aquarius ways that conflicts and wars will happen in terms of information and telecommunications cables being attacked or being cut in order to, you know, cut off the flow of information.
All right. So next we move into there was a string of stories that occurred on the historic Pluto ingress into Aquarius, which occurred on November 19th. The biggest one was that immediately after the presidential election, the price of Bitcoin began to skyrocket. And this was really wild to watch, because it also coincided with the end of Pluto in Capricorn and the beginning of Pluto moving into Aquarius where within days of Pluto moving into Aquarius, the price of Bitcoin nearly hit a hundred thousand dollars per Bitcoin for the first time ever. And this was really striking because the beginning of Pluto in Capricorn in 2008 and 2009 began with this anonymous person publishing a paper that proposed the very idea of a digital currency and the argument that it could have value partially due to scarcity if there was a limited number of those coins that would ever be created. So we go from that at the beginning of Pluto in Capricorn to it’s accomplished and it’s done by the end of Pluto in Capricorn. We saw that digital currency hitting a price of a hundred thousand dollars per coin, which is just incredible when you step back and look at that from a broad standpoint. So and it wasn’t just that, but more importantly perhaps, there were also crypto companies that poured money into the US presidential election and created like, lobbying or like, superpacts basically, and it ended up impacting the outcome of the election, especially some of the like, Senate races where they ended up supporting pro-crypto candidates. And not only both presidential candidates ended up endorsing cryptocurrency, especially Trump, but – and that was one of the factors that gave him an edge – but also for example, in Ohio, a cryptopact spent 40 million dollars in order to get victory for one candidate who was pro-crypto, and they ended up being successful.
So we’ve gone from this place in the span of a Pluto transit where this new industry surrounding digital currency has emerged and is now beginning to wield huge amounts of power and influence in elections. And I tie that in with Pluto in Capricorn, which was then accelerated by Uranus transiting through Taurus over the past several years.
AC: Yeah, it’s pretty striking.
CB: Yeah. Other Pluto in Aquarius news – on November 18th and 19th right as Pluto ingressed into Aquarius, all of a sudden Kim Kardashian started showing off her new Tesla robots, and it was clear there was some sort of partnership where she was being paid to promote that. And there were these bizarre videos of her assistant walking around a mall with a string of robots walking behind her carrying like, packages and like, groceries or whatever. And it was striking to me that that was happening on the Pluto ingress into Aquarius and I think as a preview of a scene that we’re gonna start seeing as much more prominent over the course of that transit in the next decade or so.
AC: Indeed.
CB: Another important one – Australia banned social media for children under 16. This happened on November 29th; that’s also probably a Pluto in Aquarius thing in terms of attempts to control social media or, now that it’s been around for more than a decade, like, you know, starting to understand the impact of that on people and then people debating, you know, the extent to which that should be controlled or regulated or not.
AC: Yeah. It folds in very neatly under the Pluto in Aquarius theme of technological terror, right? Like, the, you know, the form of the destroyer taking on – or excuse me, the destroyer taking on the Aquarian form. Right? The robot form, the oh, it’s the, you know, it’s the technology that is the site of fear or anxiety, terror, et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Yeah. Well, and also —
AC: Like, the conclusion of the first Ghostbusters. Pluto takes on a – the destroyer takes on a different form every time Pluto changes sign.
CB: Right, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in our time is a Tesla robot.
AC: Yeah, for sure.
CB: Nice. Good times. Or not good, not great times. But we’ll see.
All right, last transit that happened in November that was big was Mercury retrograde started on November 25th; we’re still early in that. One of the things that happens – Kaitlin Coppock pointed out to me, which was great to point out, that Drake announced a lawsuit where he was like, suing Kendrick Lamar’s music publisher that he was with for the rap battle that happened earlier this year. He initiated this lawsuit on the 26th, which is the day after Mercury stationed. And then it seemed like it was roundly sort of criticized or mocked, so we’ll have to see how that goes with Mercury retrograde as he initiated that action.
AC: And we also know that Kendrick has a very prominent Mars in Cancer, and that we have a lot of Mars in Cancer to do next year.
CB: Right. Yeah. That was a great point that Kaitlin made. So in other news, when Mercury stationed, as I said earlier, the Harris campaign leaders did that podcast the day after the Mercury station, and then it was sort of roundly criticized. And then finally on November 26th, there was an announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, but this was right on the Mercury station, so – and already in the past few days, it’s been in question whether that will hold after there’s been like, airstrikes just a couple of days later. So they say it’s tentatively holding, but it seems very fragile, and it’s… We’ll see how it goes since it started on a Mercury retrograde.
AC: Yeah. Makes you wish they had a better election for a ceasefire.
CB: Right. Exactly. Yeah. So that is the news section. So all right, before we jump into the forecast, I wanted to mention that we just released our 2025 Year Ahead Electional Astrology Report, which we put out every year where we – it’s basically an astrological forecast that identifies the most fortunate dates next year using the principles of electional astrology. So in the report, Leisa Schaim and I start by giving an overview of the astrology of 2025, and then we go through each month and identify the most favorable date for taking actions. And we provide you with an auspicious electional chart or astrological chart that you can adapt to your location. So these fortunate dates can be used for taking actions like major things like starting a business, getting married, or launching a creative project, and it can help to improve the chances of success in those endeavors.
So the report comes with a three hour video workshop that we recorded a couple of weeks ago where Leisa and I talk about the astrological weather and then go through the best dates in 2025. There’s also an audio version as well as a PDF write-up for quick reference, plus PDF copies of all 22 charts that we discussed in the report for the 22 best dates and times that we found this year.
So this year we found some really great charts, and we also discussed the general astrological weather for the year more than we usually do. So the report doubles as a nice little preview of the astrological forecast for 2025. So we’re running an initial launch sale where you can purchase the report for 20% off if you get it now. So you can find more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report.
And people have been asking me about the posters this year, and we just released a few days ago our annual astrology calendar posters that show the astrology of the year at a glance. So this includes planetary ingresses, lunations, retrogrades, and aspects, and it’s the same calendar graphics that we use in the monthly forecast epds, but it’s a poster that shows all 12 months of the year at a glance.
So this year we’re experimenting with incorporating showing more inner planet aspects each month, which is kind of interesting and fun to do so that you can highlight not just the major ingresses and stuff but also know when major inner planet aspects are gonna take place as well. So you can order the posters now at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Merch.
And then finally I also wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is our friends over at the Honeycomb Collective which creates astrological almanacs and calendars that are personalized to your natal chart. So most astrology planners only show mundane transits that apply to everybody, but each of the Honeycomb almanacs is uniquely programmed to display transits to your actual birth chart. So it’s uniquely programmed to you and printed specifically for you.
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All right. So thanks to Honeycomb for sponsoring this episode and this big forecast that we do. Definitely check out their website because, yeah, it’s really nice having a personalized almanac like that each year.
All right. So let’s transition into talking about the astrology of December. So my synopsis of December is that the month opens kind of rough with we’re just a week into the Mercury retrograde, and then Mars stations retrograde in Leo towards the end of the first week of December. So it starts kind of rough, and then December ends pretty tense when the Mars-Pluto opposition comes into very close alignment by late December and then goes exact again at the very beginning of January. So it’s tough on both ends of December, but then the middle of the month is actually kind of nice and features a very auspicious looking Venus-Jupiter trine between the signs of Gemini and Aquarius that is very positive and will open up a nice little window of some good things that’ll happen this month in between the sort of bookends at the beginning and end of the month. Is that your feeling, or what’s your synopsis of December?
AC: Yeah. I would go similarly. The second week, like, 6th to the 12th, I would say is my least favorite. And it’s not fantastic at the end of the month, but it’s better than the beginning. Yeah, I would agree that there’s a sweet spot sort of, you know, halfway through. As we get Mercury stationing direct, we’ll get into the Mars-Pluto opposition and Venus getting tortured by the Mars-Pluto opposition, which is my least favorite thing. But yeah. Like, all of the bad things center on the Mars retrograde opposite Pluto and then other planets getting sucked into that rather negative dyad.
CB: Yeah, for sure, which as we can see, the next Mars-Pluto opposition goes exact on January 3rd. So it’s like, by the end of December, we are just fully back in that again.
AC: Oh, we’re gonna be back in that by the second week. Like, they’re not very far apart, and once Mars stations retrograde, they will be mutually applying, right? Mars will be backing up to Pluto and Pluto will be racing forward into that opposition.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s true. But there’s at least counterbalancing aspects that are positive in the middle of December that I think will be good for some people with the Venus-Jupiter trine that’s applying roughly from like, the 12th ‘til the 19th when it goes exact. And that provides a nice reprieve, whereas by the time you get to the end of the month, that’s sort of absent and we’ve just got full on intense Mars-Pluto opposition action going on.
AC: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a reprieve because it doesn’t stop Mars and Pluto. But it means something else that’s nice is happening while something not nice is happening. Right? The nice doesn’t fix the not-nice, but it’s nice to have a mixed bag rather than just a bag full of turds.
CB: Yes. That is an eloquent way of putting —
AC: Yeah. Well, you know.
CB: — it, my friend. So here’s the Mercury retrograde periods that Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co designed with her brilliant illustrative capabilities just to give you dates on the Mercury retrograde, which started on November 25th and then stations direct and sort of ends on the 15th of December. But I wanted to actually open up and let’s pull up charts and let’s start with that New Moon that occurs on the 1st of December. It’s like, either late on the 30th or early on the 1st of December depending on your timezone. But this lunation that we open the month with kind of bakes in initially some of those aspects that we have at the beginning of the month. And to me, this is kind of a somber lunation, because the Sun and Moon conjoin at nine degrees of Sagittarius, and then the next aspect that the Moon will make is that it’s applying to a square with Saturn at 12 degrees of Pisces. So one of the things I’ve learned, at least, over the past several years is just whatever the next aspect is that the Moon makes after a lunation often tends to really imprint strongly the energy and vibe of that planet with whatever that lunation is supposed to be about.
So we open up with that square with Saturn, which is somber, and also we’re only a week into Mercury having stationed retrograde, and we can see it retrograde there in Sagittarius at 20 degrees. So that’s still very potent as well at the same time.
AC: Yeah, there’s also a pretty ferocious component to this. We have the Sun and Moon both in a trine with almost just about to station Mars, and they’re also conjoined right on top of the fixed star Antares, which is a very bright red star which forms the heart of the Scorpion. And its name Antares is often translated as “the rival of Mars” and can act almost like a very strong replacement Mars in a chart. It’s very, it brings fierce, and on a positive level it can bring the enduring will to struggle and to contend, but it does not guarantee that that tolerance for conflict will be used wisely. Right? It’s an ability to wage war for a long time, right, which is easily misplaced. It’s basically it’s almost as if the Sun were conjunct Mars, the star’s martial quality is such. And then being in a trine with Mars on the eve of Mars’s big station, there’s a lot – and of course with the Sun, Moon, and Mars all being in fire signs, there’s a lot of smolder going on. But Chris, as you said, there is the Sun and Moon are both checked by that sort of frigid undersea leviathan that is Saturn. Right? So there’s all this fiery energy and what would like to go forward but is actually about to go backward that has like, again, this sort of glacial Saturn in Pisces in front of it. There’s a lot of tension. There’s a lot of tension there. Little story of ice and fire.
CB: Song of ice and fire, that’s a good one. Yeah, stuck between the fieryness of Mars, which is heating up, but the coldness, the somberness, the slowness of like, Saturn hitting that lunation for some reason of two otherwise like, fiery, you know, the Sun and Moon in Sagittarius trying to form an otherwise kind of optimistic or adventurous conjunction in that sign. But running into —
AC: Or at least purposeful. You know, Sag likes a serious mission as well as a silly mission. There’s that like, there’s a quest, and even if it seems silly like in a video game, part of the fun of a quest is that you take it seriously. Right? Like, Sag likes that serious mission fun as well as the like, optimistic fun.
CB: Yeah. One of the things I did in the year ahead forecast as I was reading back about – I was reading like, Tarnas’s description of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and he was writing in what, like, 2005 or ‘06 or something like that, and so he talked about the Saturn-Neptune opposition that happened after the 2004 election in the sense of like, disillusionment and sort of despair that people on the left fell into after that election, and I thought that was an interesting parallel now with that Saturn-Neptune being so close and how we had Saturn station right after the election in the middle of November and now the other side of that is having Neptune station at the beginning of December at the same time as this Mars station is ramping up and as Mercury hits its halfway point through the retrograde cycle and hits the cazimi at the same time functionally. So that idea of like, disillusionment and of… He describes it as like, this general sense of dis-ease as something that comes along with Saturn-Neptune as well.
AC: Oh, yeah. An easy example of that is the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Right? Like, everybody was just like, everybody just sort of gave up on the dream of building a new society. Everybody was ready to give up. You know, it didn’t – there was no shattering blow. It just sort of everybody gave up at the same time and suddenly the whole structure wasn’t there.
CB: Well, that’s interesting you mention that, because then that’s also part of what seems like it’s happening as well, which is with Saturn you get structures, but with Neptune you get the dissolution of structures and like, the taking apart of things, and there’s a lot of things potentially that are gonna start being like, taken apart basically. It seems like —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — there’s a lot of…
AC: Yeah, like things that are held up by belief. Like, it works if we all believe in it – what is that, the end of Peter Pan? But like, it works if we all believe, and then like, everybody stops believing at once and the thing falls apart.
CB: Yeah. For sure that, but also things like actual physical things like, should we have like, a national department of education, or should that be taken apart, for example? And different people’s reactions to that potentially being some of what we’re seeing here in terms of both a literal dissolution of things as well as a metaphorical one.
AC: Yeah. Like, institutional dissolution.
CB: Right. Exactly. So that’s getting us into the Mars retrograde.
AC: Let’s just talk about the Mars retrograde.
CB: Let’s just do it. The elephant in the room. The —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — spiky elephant in the room. Let me just put the December calendar up one more time because it just shows how if we’re talking about that station, like I said, there’s just a few things that happen all around the same time which is like, Mercury hits its halfway point in the cycle and has the retrograde cazimi, Mars stations on the 6th, and Neptune stations the next day, and then Venus goes into Aquarius where it runs into like, Pluto and Mars.
So one thing I wanted to emphasize that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately with the Mars retrograde is how this a repetition of a Mars retrograde period that happened 15 years ago when Mars went retrograde towards the middle of Leo in December of 2009, and then it stationed direct in Leo in March of 2010. So for some people, because that’s a 15-year repetition of that planetary period of Mars, there’s gonna be some events that happen in some people’s lives that are gonna hearken back to events that occurred during that period 15 years ago. And sometimes if you’d like a preview of what’s gonna happen now, you might just look back to that period and think about what house that transit coincided with in your chart and what topics may have come up in your life at that time. Because one of the things about retrogrades is that Mars retrogrades can actually be reminiscent of Mercury retrogrades or even Venus retrogrades in that whenever a planet turns retrograde it has this backward looking component where it turns its gaze and instead of moving forward in the signs of the zodiac and like, moving towards the future, it turns around and starts moving backwards, but it also starts looking backwards. And sometimes that looking backwards theme can cause things from the past to come back into the present in your life for some reason, and I think that’s gonna be a significant theme here in terms of people’s personal experiences of this retrograde in some instances.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And so just a little bit, backing a little, what do they all have in common? What are they like? What is this phase? Like, on a simple, physical level, which has implications, Mars retrogrades are Mars’s closest pass to the earth. Mars is much closer during the retrograde phase than any other phase. Mars is also much brighter. Mars is also visible in the night sky for the most amount of time. At the heart of the Mars retrograde, Mars will rise as the Full Moon rises, meaning that the second that the Sun sets, Mars rises. And Mars will be at maximum closeness and brightness. Right? So we have this like, red king of midnight sort of energy. And so we have – we don’t, it’s not that when Mars is retrograde we have less Mars. It’s actually maximum amount of Mars, but it’s not moving things forward. Right? And that’s the source of a lot of frustration and confusion during Mars retrograde periods. Because Mars is so constant a companion and martial topics are a close companion, and yet it is very difficult to make discernible forward progress on those martial topics. And though every planet has some – to some degree – does not enjoy a retrograde, you know, it’s frustrating to not be able to move forward in every sphere – Mars is at that meaning, at that core significations level, the most interested in getting things done and moving forward. Mars is like, pragmatic and accomplishment-oriented. And so there’s, like, so that planet – the like, let’s get it done, let’s move forward, let’s either win or lose the contest, et cetera, et cetera – that planet being retrograde and refusing to make forward progress has its own unique species of frustrations that it breeds.
CB: Right. Of like, slowing things down, of hampering things, of causing things that should have been quick to take longer, especially if you’re trying to get something started. You know, we do sometimes see people create a new and important foundation in their life under a Mars retrograde period because sometimes a retrograde just signifies an important turning point in a person’s life with respect to that planet and the house that it’s stationing in. But sometimes things that maybe if you’re starting something new that you think are gonna move quickly can actually end up taking much longer and move much more slowly or take much more effort in order to come to full manifestation at that time. But sometimes we —
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: Sometimes we do see people as we were talking about earlier, like Rogan for example starting his podcast under the Mars retrograde in Leo 15 years ago. And then so you see sometimes people starting a foundation that’s subtle at first but then builds up into something more significant later on, and then sometimes at the subsequent 15-year period like we’re seeing now, we see the returning back to and reviewing the foundation that you started 15 years ago in that part of your life, but also leveling up and taking it to the next level, which is obviously something that he’s doing now in that instance. And sometimes, though, there can be a process of going back and reviewing it. There can be challenges that come up in that process where you’re forced to contend with sometimes decisions or actions or circumstances from the past, but sometimes in pushing through that it can be somewhat constructive, albeit frustrating and taking extra time.
AC: Yeah. It’s definitely, I mean, like, there are always exceptions to everything, but trying to get something up and off the ground and moving is the opposite of what Mars retrograde is. Because Mars is not only going backwards, it’s very slow. Right? It’s much slower than normal, and it’s not going to get out of this set of degrees until May. And so but like, with Mercury retrograde or Venus retrograde, often the way forward is back. Very often it’s returning to a problem or a challenge that actually didn’t get solved, right, and that you can’t really move forward until that issue is worked through, which may take longer and be more aggravating than you had hoped.
CB: Yeah. It’s like you have to untie the Gordian knot in order to move forward from this period.
AC: Yeah. Although I would recommend not defaulting to Alexander’s answer to the Gordian knot, which was to just cut it in half.
CB: Just cut it.
AC: Occasionally that’s the right move, but a lot of times those knots involve people and relationships. And part of Mars being so close and so bright – like, literally Mars is up all night at max volume during the retrogrades. And so figuring out what to do with the like, how should we say, the supersized portion of Mars being served every day – like, figuring out how to not damage things that don’t need to be damaged. Right? Because Mars energy is great, but it’s a malefic, and just like the knives in my kitchen, they are not evil, but I have to be more careful with what I do with them than I do with the spoons.
CB: I mean, there is – yeah, that is a downside of the like, bull in a china shop type scenario where you just like, you’re just destroying everything in a certain part of your life in a way that’s reckless or careless and not good and not constructive. But then sometimes when you have a Mars retrograde, sometimes there are things that do need to be cut from your life. There are sometimes things that need to be burned down so that you can build a new foundation, and sometimes that can be a manifestation – a necessary, albeit sometimes difficult or even painful one – in order to move forward. So that is definitely a scenario in terms of you wanna do it carefully and conscientiously, but sometimes, you know, we do need to cut things or situations or even people out of our lives in some instances, and that can happen under a Mars period where the notions of severing and separation are more prominent.
AC: Yeah. And a lot of times I see that around the direct station. But like, with other retrograde planets, what you very often see with Mars retrograde with people is that there’s a huge ambivalence and a back-and-forth throughout the retrograde portion, where it’s like, do I just cut them out? Let’s go to the Gordian knot. Is this something that I can actually like, unfuck? Or is it something that I just need to cut in half? And usually that takes a while. It takes a while to figure that out. And it takes a while because usually we are of two minds around anything, any knot that ties us to something that’s actually important to us is not something that we would just sever willy-nilly because there’s a cost to that. And so again with retrogrades, like with Mercury, like with Venus, there’s this like, “I don’t know,” like, hem and haw, and kind of both sides of the scales getting an additional item or thought placed on them every day for a while. And —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — like with Mercury and Venus retrogrades, I find letting that process occur, like if there is some sort of “Do I do this or do I do that,” both of which have consequences, like, letting Mars make the case for both of those things before prematurely deciding. Because the only thing worse than like, cutting the knot, as painful as that might be, is cutting the knot prematurely and then being like, actually, I don’t wanna cut the knot. Let me tie that back together. Or committing wholly to not cutting the knot, and then being like, actually I was wrong; I’m totally gonna burn that down. Like, giving yourself the time to make the closest thing you can to a wise decision, letting Mars set the time frame is very often worth it.
CB: That’s a really great point. Yeah, I agree. I do think there will be a tendency, especially with Pluto being in the mix and this not just being a Mars retrograde in Leo, but —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — it being Mars retrograde opposite Pluto and that Pluto tends to go to extremes, as we’ve seen with Mars-Pluto aspects over the past year or two. And there will be this tendency to want to just like, burn it all down or for people trying to burn things down and going to extremes in that where you’re not just burning things down, but you’re then demolishing the very foundation and sort of pounding it to dust. But then yeah, there could be situations later in the retrograde where you’re like, maybe I shouldn’t have burned it down or —
AC: Maybe I shouldn’t have salted the earth!
CB: Yeah, exactly, so nothing could grow again where there might be this question of once those structures are burned down, do we realize that they were actually holding up other things that we didn’t realize in terms of not thinking through the long term implications of removing or cutting certain things out of our life?
AC: Yeah, hundred percent, and especially just your point about Pluto. Pluto just like, puts more pressure on it. You know, it makes things – you know, instead of just like, oh, do I do this or do I do that? It’s like being pushed really strongly in both directions, and yeah, like, not to merely sever the Gordian knot but to like, douse it in gasoline and yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good read on Pluto’s input. It just, it makes it easier to go way extreme. Or I’m never giving up this knot. This knot – I’m keeping this knot. Nobody touches it. It’s fine the way it is. Like, Pluto can also be like, maniacally defensive. Right? It’s like the horror story motif of like – or it’s like, I was gonna say Weekend at Bernie’s. But the like, no, we’re, you know – it’s Pet Sematary. Right? It’s the not letting go of something even though it’s way obvious that the cost, that it’s already gone, and that the cost of not letting go gets higher with every scene. But that like, yeah, like that kind of obsessive action on one side and then the salting the earth on the other. So no victory over Carthage and salting the earth, and no Pet Sematary holding on at all costs.
CB: Yeah. And so the focal point for us this month is gonna be the Leo sector of our chart and whatever house that is, but this retrograde’s unique compared to the one 15 years ago because it’s gonna station retrograde in Leo but then it’s gonna return back to Cancer. And one of the things that I learned and really saw happening vividly in the last Venus retrograde, previous Venus retrograde cycles is that when a planet crosses two signs, it can sometimes connect the topics of those two houses in your chart if it crosses over a sign boundary. So there may be something about a major topic that is opened up or like, a fire that is started this month in December in the Leo sector of your chart, but then once Mars retrogrades back into Cancer next month, we find that part of the resolution is returning back to another topic that ties things together in that area of your life in some way that matches the Cancer area of your chart.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. Like just as an example, like, so I’m a Cancer rising. So in Leo, something with let’s say with the second, you see diet, among other things. Like the stuff that you put in your body. And then that coming back to the first and affecting health. Or could be money, right, second house thing – like, how you’re dealing with possessions, money, how you spend, how you save, et cetera, et cetera, and then that coming back to the first to like, change the way you think of yourself or the way that you conceive of yourself.
CB: Yeah. Or if it was like, between your 11th and your 10th, there could be a connection between friends and your career that the Mars retrograde brings into focus or ties together in some way.
AC: Yeah. Or 10th and 9th, right, like, for Scorpio rising. Like, this is what’s going on in my career – Mars and my career – I’m really frustrated or excited or whatever. But then it comes back to Cancer, and it’s like, oh, it’s really about like, my direction in life and what’s meaningful. Like, 9th house, like spiritual philosophical topics. And once I get that sorted, then I can go back into the 10th and the shape of my career makes more sense now.
CB: Yeah. And you know, as we talked about earlier, Venus and Venus retrogrades have often been associated with like, women or femmes traditionally, whereas Mars is traditionally associated with men or sort of masculine or whatever you wanna call that energy. And I know in some previous Mars retrogrades, you’ve coined a phrase – I think it was about Mars retrograde – talking about like, the duderang effect and just —
AC: Hundred percent!
CB: — just like Venus retrogrades can bring in relationships with like, femmes or women from the past or just relationships in general, sometimes people have like, a Mars retrograde and there can be masculine type figures that come back into your life from the past.
AC: Yeah. The duderang was a phenomenon that I was observing. Maybe that was 2012 retrograde? But people were just like, oh god, my ex-husband like, won’t fuckin’ leave me alone. Like, I haven’t heard from that guy in a month. It was just like, 30 versions of that, and I was like, oh, it’s the duderang. And in my mind, I was calling it like, I was like, oh, it’s Captain Boomerang, and then I thought about if that was a real superhero who’s a villain. But yeah, the Captain Boomerang effect, like, masculine people that you had previous relationships with that got cut off for some reason kind of boomeranging back into the life for a period of time, especially if this Mars retrograde is in like, a relational sector or aspect like, the ruler of the 7th. It’s a very common thing. And the advice is always like, don’t catch the boomerang.
CB: Well —
AC: There are probably exceptions; no one has – I have had many duderang anecdotes and sequences described to me. No one has ever said, “I caught the duderang and I’m so glad I did.” I’ve head a lot of, “I caught the duderang and boy, I wish I hadn’t.”
CB: I mean —
AC: There are always exceptions; I’m just reporting what has occurred and what people have told me.
CB: All right. Well, yeah. I mean, I could see it going not well as a retrograde a lot of times, but I could also see it going okay sometimes. Especially because it’s not always just like, men, but sometimes it’s people that have Mars prominent in their chart for some reason.
AC: Yeah, it’s that Mars figure.
CB: Right. Yeah. You know, we were talking about like, the Venus retrograde and how the Venus retrograde was like, the Barbie movie last summer. But I think about like, this Mars retrograde in Leo as the inversion of that. It’s kind of like in the Barbie movie when the Kens take over and then it turns the Barbie Dream House into the like, Mojo Dojo Casa House. Basically like that, that that’s kind of like the energy of this Mars retrograde in Leo is like, the counterpart to the Venus retrograde.
AC: The Leo part. Yeah. It’s worth noting that the majority of this retrograde is actually in Cancer. We’ve got the first six degrees in Leo, but then we have 13 degrees of Cancer that we’re gonna cross. And even though like, this as a cycle will connect both, probably like in interesting and surprising ways, we have two very, very different signs. Right? Like, the lunar and the solar. And so like, the Leo portion, which is what we’re going to live through in December, is very loud. Like, loud, brash, flashy. Like, it’s the Jake Paul of Marses. But this same cycle has like, very different Mars energy for actually more than it has this Leo stuff. And so yeah, it’s gonna be a real study in contrasting things that are annoying.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Contrasting bad flavors.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s interesting that, you know, 15 years ago this particular one was like, fully in Leo but this one’s in Cancer, so it’s tying together those two different areas. And I was doing some work on the longer term planetary periods in the past that this is a repetition of, and historically the 79 year repetition was like, late 1945 through early 1946; that was a retrograde Mars that started in Leo and went back into Cancer. So that’s like, the closest parallel is that, if people wanna look to historical parallels, and that’s the one that Trump, you know, was born just after once Mars had stationed direct in Leo.
Then there was another close repetition that was 47 years ago, and this is from December of 1977 to March of 1978 when again it stationed in Leo and went back to Cancer. So for some older people, you know, you might look back to that period and see what topics were activated in your life or what topics were activated in history.
One of the things that’s interesting about this cycle is that Mars will go retrograde in Leo and it’ll station direction in Cancer, but in two years from now, we’ll actually get another Mars retrograde that will go retrograde in Leo where in January of 2027 it’ll start retrograde in Virgo and then by early 2027, by April of ‘27 it’ll station direct at 20 degrees of Leo. So this is actually a weird cycle that we’ll have to pay close attention to, each of us, in terms of what Mars retrograde in the Leo sector of our chart coincides with because it’s gonna be a preview of another transit we’re gonna have two years from now when Mars again goes retrograde in that sign.
AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. I would also add that the Mars retrogrades being delineating of the portion of the sky and a portion of our lives, that Mars spends an absolutely inordinate amount of time in – remember that Mars is usually clicking through a sign about every month and a half. Whereas Mars during this retrograde, for example, or during most retrogrades spends, you know, about eight months in a 30-degree wedge. Like, you know, it’s – we’re not talking about twice as slow or three times as slow. It’s more like five or six times as slow in terms of how much time does Mars spend in an area. And so that area gets a shitload of attention, right? And so what I often see is that as a natural consequence of that, there’s a lot of really rethinking like, the power dynamics and the challenges in that area that often sets a tone for the next couple years. Because it’s like, okay, well how do I rise, how do I address the challenges that are present in these areas? Right? Because Mars always, you know, revleas challenges, reveals tasks, et cetera, et cetera. And so it’s like this new battlefield or new conflict and new struggle. Struggle’s a better word. And you know, a lot of times we don’t have all of the tools and training to excel and to meet those challenges just ready for this. And so there’s often a sort of like, getting the lay of the land and like, what do I need to become competent at? Where do I need to place my bravery? Like, where do I need to be brave? Where do I need to be strong? What do I need to train for? What skills do I need for this part of life?
CB: Yeah, and to go through that training like, during that time.
AC: Yeah. And sometimes I think about it on a very sometimes literal level. And for people who are, I don’t know, like, workout people this might be useful. But you know, during the Cancer portion – because I like, modify my routine all the time because I have Saturn in Virgo in the 3rd, so coming up with schedules is a strange delight for me – but I’m like, ooh, I’ve really neglected grip and finger training. And so I just ended up doing this huge deep dive on like, all these different ways of training grip and finger, and it ended up being like, connecting with a lot of themes, and I was like, oh. Did I literally just study how to pinch better during the Mars shadow in Cancer? You know, because – anyway, that’s a very literal example. But in order to get good at an area of life that’s become challenging with important rewards and important negative consequences, often we have to retrain or we have to train ourselves to be good at that thing or to have the strength that’s required in that area of life. If anybody wants my pinching things hard routine, you know, email me at MarsIsGonnaBeInCancerForever.com.
CB: Dot com slash org, dot org.
AC: Dot CA.
CB: Theya in the chat mentions getting a shoulder injury under the last Mars retrograde in Gemini, and I actually had that as well, and I remember it was like, this initial injury that turned into a long thing for a few months that I didn’t work out towards the end of it, but that even now two years later even though I’ve got it under control, I still have to like, do stretches so it doesn’t reactivate it. And it reminds me that sometimes during Mars retrograde periods, while sometimes it can be like, a singular event – like I saw one person that had Gemini rising with that last Mars retrograde that the day Mars stationed, they got in a car accident and they wrecked their car. So there was like, something that was permanently taken away, and they had to get a new one or were without a car for the majority of that retrograde subsequent to it. There’s other instances where sometimes Mars retrogrades, it can cause like, metaphorically like a wound or an injury in one part of you that eventually heals but that you’re still left with a scar from that period. So sometimes like, things can get ruffled in your life in that specific area, and eventually you can like, work through it or overcome it in some sense, but sometimes, you know, we all carry the scars of whatever past battles that we’ve had, and that makes us who we are later in the present or in the future. And sometimes that can be good and necessary because we learn things from our past battles, but nonetheless we rarely like, emerge without scars from some of our greatest conflicts or challenges that we have to overcome.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. So I wanna talk about Venus, because Venus is in rough shape and starts being in rough shape right around the time that Mars stations retrograde. We see that Venus ingresses into the sign of Aquarius on December 6th, so it’s like, literally at the same time. And when Venus goes into Aquarius, it’s gonna immediately conjoin Pluto, which is still in the first degree of Aquarius having recently ingressed, and then Venus from that point forward from December 6th, once it completes the conjunction with Pluto then it begins applying to an opposition with Mars, which doesn’t go exact until around the 11th or 12th.
So Venus is effectively then kind of enclosed between the really challenging rays of both Pluto and Mars, and that’s gonna add an additional component especially in terms of relationships and relational dynamics that I think is gonna be very intense during that week and kind of difficult to resolve because it’s gonna surface a lot of like, tensions that might have been buried deep up until that point.
AC: Oh yeah. I’ve been not looking forward to that for a while. As someone who has their Venus at two Aquarius, not looking forward to the return this year.
Yeah, it’s not that long in the, not just the grand scheme of things, even in the monthly scheme of things. But Venus is just, yeah, just getting tortured for like, a week. And so like, negative feelings will likely arise, and you may – it will be very easy to see the worst facets of relational dynamics.
CB: Right. Because it’s like, Pluto has this obsessive quality to it when it’s combined with Venus there under that transit as well as this like, controlling quality, whereas the Venus-Mars opposition has some of those tensions between like, action and restraint or even relational dynamics or even like, physical dynamics and sometimes tensions that can come up within that context.
AC: Yeah. And you know, Venus is often responsible for providing some chill, right? The like, yeah, all this is going on, but there are things to enjoy. Like, life isn’t just a meaningless hellscape. Like, and Venus’s chill is temporarily off the table. Venus is not able to provide that salve, balm, or chill for about a week.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But it’s only a week. And Venus’s —
CB: I know.
AC: — aspects afterwards are much better.
CB: Yes, and that’s what I wanna transition into now to give people some hope and optimism, because once Venus clears that opposition with Mars by about December 12th, it starts separating from the opposition with Mars. And then what happens is it immediately forms a sextile with that retrograde Mercury, which is getting ready to station direct, which is positive and helpful in terms of heading towards a resolution with some of the Mercury retrograde issues that Mercury kicked up starting at the end of November. But then once it completes that sextuile with Mercury, from that point forward Venus, which then is at like, six and seven degrees of Aquarius, starts applying to this lovely trine with Jupiter, which at that point is at 15 degrees of Gemini. And we just see after that point the Venus-Jupiter trine getting closer and closer and closer, all the way up until when it eventually culminates here around December 19th when Venus hits 14 degrees of Aquarius, trines Jupiter at 14 degrees of Gemini, and by that time, Mercury has stationed direct and is moving forward and is starting to come out of that period of chaos and delays in communications and revising or going back and revisiting things from the past and everything else. So I like this little span of time right here in the middle of the month when at least we get some, you know, positive aspects happening.
AC: Yeah, it’s the creamy center.
CB: Right. Of the not-good-tasting sandwich, which is the —
AC: Yeah. Oh, I’ve just been binging Great British Bake Off, so it was a dessert in my mind. The judges were not a fan of what was presented, the December showstopper. The habanero and feces pastry. Like, the crust on the outside – Paul Hollywood was not a fan. But the center’s good! Well baked.
CB: Yeah. Venus — I don’t know what to say there. I’m gonna… I wanna highlight, actually, at this point the monthly election because our month ahead – now with that, that’s a nice segue. That’s a nice transition point into highlighting the monthly election, yeah?
AC: Yeah.
CB: Your, the…
AC: No habanero or feces in the monthly election.
CB: Right, the S sandwich. So our monthly election for this month, our most fortunate date, is December 14th, 2024, starting at 11:20 AM with Pisces rising. So let me adjust our chart here to get Pisces rising for those watching the video version. Basically, you wanna set your chart for that, but change it to your location and set it for about 11:20 AM, and then adjust the Ascendant until you have around the early degrees of Pisces rising. Like, let’s say the Ascendant around three degrees of Pisces rising. You should end up with a chart like this. So this is our most fortunate electional chart for the month for starting new ventures and undertakings and just taking actions in general. It has Pisces rising with the ruler of the Ascendant being Jupiter, which is in Gemini in the 4th whole sign house, in a mutual reception with Mercury, which is slowing down and is one day from stationing direct. So Mercury is basically already in the process of doing that U-turn and moving forward again, and this is one of the first dates that you can start really using auspicious electional charts again since we’ll start coming out of the Mercury retrograde shortly after this point.
So this date has a very auspicious looking Moon-Jupiter conjunction around 15 degrees of Gemini that we take advantage of, and we also start getting Venus, which finally as we said is separating from Mars, and now is applying to that trine with Jupiter. We do have some mitigations where Mercury is in the 10th house sextiling Venus, so even though Venus is in the 12th house, it’s helping to mitigate Venus’s 12th house position.
This election’s very much focused on the 4th house with the ruler of the Ascendant there, so it can be good for basic 4th house topics having to do with like, the home, the living situation, one’s family or things like that. But the 4th house is also a good place for things having to do with privacy, things having to do with doing work behind the scenes. There was one listener, I think it was a patron – I can’t remember their name right now – who after I released the first part of the 4th house episode pointed out that we had highlighted a number of famous directors that had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 4th house. And the point that they made is that these are people that are in charge of things, but they’re doing so from behind the camera. It’s like they’re not the person that is, you know, on film in their actual movies, and yet they’re still the one in charge on the movie set. And I thought that was an incredible observation and a great insight into how 4th house placements can still be powerful since it’s an angular house, but it’s also something that’s not typically like, as visible as it could be otherwise as like, let’s say a 10th house planet. But despite that, because it has a mutual reception with Mercury, the ruler of the 4th in the 10th house, there are still some great 10th house things going on here. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be completely invisible or not focused on 10th house matters.
So this is our electional chart. What do you think, Austin?
AC: Yeah. I like the point you made about the ruler of the first being in the 4th and seeing that in directors, right, who are, you know, the 4th house being the actual physical location a lot of the time. It’s like, this whole scene is because that’s what they wanted. The set is there, the people are arranged that way because it is the, you know, at the command of the director. And that, you know, by having control of the foundations of something that then, you know, like, everything is resting on that. And that the 4th is an angular house for a reason. So I really like that Moon-Jupiter down there. And then yeah, like, the Sun’s up there in the 10th and Mercury’s got some good stuff. But that’s nice. There’s like, I wanna use that for either work on establishing something or work on that foundational level. Like, what is supporting other things? Which could literally be something in the house. Maybe my office will take its final form on December the 14th. Because that —
CB: Right.
AC: — that eclipse in my 4th tore up my office, and it’s been somewhat rearranged. But I have just like, large pieces of furniture sort of strewn next to, I don’t know, waist-high stacks of books. It’s not done yet.
CB: Yeah. Well, and there was a loss for the community, because we had the loss of your peacock like, background in the monthly forecasts, but we gained an otherwise pretty impressive new background for your video.
AC: Yeah. It’s me sending coded messages to the faithful. What does the disappearance of the peacock mean?
CB: Exactly. There will be books written about that. All right. So that was our best electional chart for the month, but we actually, Leisa Schaim and I found I think a dozen other electional charts for later in December, including some that take even better advantage of the Venus-Jupiter trine that happens days later. So you can get access to those other electional charts if you need other good dates for December through The Electional Astrology Podcast, which you can find out more information about at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Elections. And of course, if you need longer term elections, then we have our Year Ahead Electional Report, which is 20% off right now at launch. So you can get that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com as well.
AC: Nice. Yeah, there are a lot like, little moments to make use of that Venus-Jupiter trine.
CB: Exactly. All right, so let’s jump ahead. Mercury goes direct on our second lunation of the month, which is that Full Moon in Gemini on the 15th. The Full Moon is not without issues, though, even though Mercury is stationing direct, because the Full Moon, its closest aspect is that it’s squaring Neptune in Pisces. So there’s like, this like, nebulousness to that Full Moon even though otherwise we would be thinking that communications are starting to move forward again with Mercury stationing direct.
AC: Yeah. And the contrast is really clear between like, the Sagittarius Sun and the Gemini Moon, which are so action oriented. Like, those signs are so moving around, saying stuff, doing stuff. And with the tight square to Neptune, you’re just left wondering like, so there’s all that sound and fury, but what does it signify? Like, so what does that mean? Does that mean anything? Like, is this real or what kind of real is it? You know, Neptune has these sort of troubling and deep ontological questions which riddle our time. It’s like, okay, so all that happened; what does it mean? Is it going anywhere?
CB: Right. Yeah. What does it mean, and sometimes we look into the meaning of things and we find like, deeper meanings and purpose from things, and other times we find things that just confuse us or blur the picture even more. And as we move forward after this Mercury retrograde, I think that’s gonna be one of the questions that we have this month on that lunation, which is like, is communication improving or are there still things that are casting a shadow over things that are making things unclear?
AC: Yeah. Things are being said! Yeah, what does it mean? Where does this mean things are actually going? There’s a lot of that in December. You know, because we began with the Mercury retrograde where it’s like, oh, it’s obviously retrograde, but even as you said after the direct station, there are still questions about that. And we’ve got Mars very retrograde. So like, where’s Mars going? Right? And we get the first chapter of that in December, but Mars has lots of other things to do in January and February and beyond. There’s a question of like, “Where are we headed? Where is this thing headed?” that don’t get resolved this month, although we get, you know, we get some, we get more clarity than we did with Mercury’s direct station. Because at least it’s a piece, but it’s not the whole thing.
CB: Right. For sure. One of the positive things I like after Mercury stations direct and once it starts moving forward again after the 14th and the 15th is Mercury being in Sagittarius, it starts applying to Jupiter. And what’s interesting is if you look at the chart once Mercury stations direct, it looks like it’s applying to square Saturn first at 13 degrees of Pisces. But because Jupiter is retrograde at 14 Gemini and Saturn is direct, what ends up happening is that Mercury applies and perfects that opposition to Jupiter first before it completes the square with Saturn. And that’s an interesting like, change up that happens around December 26th when the Mercury-Jupiter opposition with reception goes exact, which especially because that’s a mutual reception I consider to be more positive, because it’s like —
AC: Certainly.
CB: — it’s an opposition that has some resolution. And then immediately the day after that on December 27th, Mercury squares Saturn. So in some ways, Mercury this month once it moves direct, it activities the Jupiter-Saturn square between Gemini and Pisces, which this is the second exact hit of in December in terms of the tension between those two planets. And we’ll see one more of those squares next year.
AC: Yes. Yeah, all of those things. Yeah, I like the mutual reception between Mercury and Jupiter quite a bit. Especially with them being in aspect, they can help each other. You know, they’re staying in each other’s houses; they’re staying up all night on the phone gossiping, trying to instruct each other as to how to Sagittarius and how to Gemini properly. It’s good for Mercury-Jupiter things, and I think it helps think about as you were saying the Saturn-Jupiter square, which is a slower thing. Right? We got the first one several months ago; this is the second. The third will not take place until Saturn and Jupiter have both entered new signs. But this is the, you know, this is the first quarter in the Saturn-Jupiter cycle, which is almost exactly 20 years. Right? Like, this is the waxing half Moon, but at the scale of 20 years. We began this at the very end of 2020, and yeah. This is where things are, and the action is still rising.
CB: Right. So somehow this refers back to partially the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that happened in 2020, and the new foundation that that laid in terms of a realignment of so many different things, of like, economic things, of governments, of public health and so many different things since that conjunction occurred in December of 2020. Somehow this waxing square refers back to that, and the next evolution of some seeds that were planted at that time. And I think we should see some picture into that here, especially when Mercury perfects and helps to accentuate both of those. Yeah. I had been curious about and thinking with the first square that it would relate partially to the economy because it’s like, we have the tendency of Jupiter which is to grow versus the tendency of Saturn to contract, and that these two planets are coming into some sort of tension with each other so that it would be a tension between those forces of growth and contraction. And I’m curious if that’s part of what we’ll see in terms of that square. And then like, with most of these retrogrades that have three exact hits, sometimes it’s not until the third and final exact hit that you see the final outcome of what that transit was all about, and that will not hit until June. But here at the second one, I would expect us to really start to see and understand what that square is all about.
AC: Yeah. And it’s kind of nice that it occurs at the very end of the year when people are naturally inclined to think about time on a bigger picture level.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And more of this stuff, because by late December, it’s like, the government will be getting ready to change over the following month and more of the things will be in place. So I think presumably then some of that stuff will start being factored into the economy more, and we’ll get a picture of how things are gonna go.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Or at least what the market is anticipating —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — things are gonna —
AC: Right, like, we’ve got those pieces. Again, we’ve got like, the Mars piece is still unresolved and going somewhere.
CB: Right.
AC: But yeah, that helps bring clarity to that slower moving Jupiter-Saturn picture.
CB: Yeah. So that brings us then – I’m glad that you mention it, because we can clearly see looking at this chart that by the end of December, the Mars-Pluto opposition is so close. Mars gets back to by December 31st two degrees of Leo into one degree of Leo, and it’s very closely opposing Pluto at one degree of Aquarius. And that’s when we get our third and final lunation of the month, which is this Sun-Moon conjunction that occurs at nine degrees of Capricorn. And that lunation is going to really bake in that Mars-Pluto opposition to the following lunar month that will take place over the next three to four weeks, basically.
AC: Yep. And so the Sun and Moon themselves are not in very dramatic condition. Like, they’re not really getting shown upon by the benefics, nor are they getting devastated by the malefics. Like, there’s a sextile to Saturn; it’s in a Saturn-ruled sign. It in and of itself is not very dramatic. But the tightening vice of the Mars and Pluto is right there.
CB: Yeah. It’s interesting that the lunation is in Capricorn and applies to the sextile with Saturn after it completes, so somehow it’s emphasizing that Saturn there in Pisces. But it’s like, the most dramatic aspect that’s happening is just that Mars-Pluto opposition there and that tendency on the one hand as we’ve seen to do Mars-type things, which can have this severing or separating component, but to take them to their utmost extreme or sometimes to take things too far – that tendency will be there again at this time in late December and early January especially when that aspect is completing. And the other thing – I went back and I was listening to our year ahead forecast recently over the past month just to see how we did and check in. And you actually said some really brilliant things about the Mars-Pluto opposition in the year ahead forecast where you were talking about power being influenced from behind the scenes and associating that with the Mars-Pluto opposition. And I thought that was such a brilliant point to make in retrospect, because of especially just the influence of the billionaire class on this election cycle seemed more pronounced than at any other time in history. Like, one of the most stunning things right before the election was when Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, stopped The Washington Post editorial board for issuing an endorsement for Harris. And that happened, I think, like, a week or something before the election as that Mars-Pluto opposition was going exact. So it’s like, you see that. You saw over the summer, you had what’s-his-name from Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg – reached out to Trump after the assassination attempt and said some positive things about him, despite their years of having this more combative relationship over Facebook and accusations of censorship of Trump’s previous campaigns like in 2020. And then, of course, you also had Elon Musk and the oversized role that he played in the lead-up to the election day in really becoming, you know, Trump’s primary – one of his biggest supporters with the biggest person and the most richest person in the world at least publicly. And there was something about that that was really striking that I think you did a good job of calling in the year ahead forecast.
AC: Well, thank you. I wish I had remembered that when we were talking about this last month —
CB: Right.
AC: — and the month before.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But you know, you pointing that out just makes it almost like a Homer Simpson “d’oh” moment of like, how did I miss that when I didn’t miss it earlier. It’s, you know, like, if we’re looking at who are Pluto’s people? How about the plutocrats? Right? Like, maybe like, the foremost members of the Plutocracy maybe have something to do with Pluto. And yeah, like, it was a pretty dramatic sort of shift of political allegiances among the Plutocracy. Like, in retrospect, it’s like, oh, there it is, and you describing that, you know, just all at once. And that, like, it’s not just the – it wasn’t just one Mars-Pluto, right? We saw it leading up to the first one, but that is like, just a shift that like, the Mars – like, that active – Mars being the planet which actively attempts to influence and shape going retrograde opposite Pluto and that indicating a shift of the, yeah, the Plutocracy’s interests. And that happening so visibly seems hard to remove from the Mars in Leo side of things. Right? Because those weren’t just like, those things weren’t behind the scenes. Right? Like —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — those are all huge stories.
CB: Well, it’s like, some of it – like, the outward effect of some of it was in front of us, but I feel like there were conversations that happened —
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: — behind the scenes that led to some of those sudden shifts. Like with —
AC: Hundred percent.
CB: — you know, Bezos. It’s like, who knows what was said or what he anticipated if he decided to make that decision so late in the process when up until that point, like, he could have said months earlier to his newspaper basically like, “You’re not allowed to endorse,” but he did it at the very last minute for whatever reason. So yeah, who knows what happened behind the scenes. But it was interesting; that was a good call on your part in terms of sometimes things in astrology that we see happen publicly and like, visibly, but other times there’s a lot of stuff that we see that relates to things going on behind the scenes. And more than at any other time recently, after researching the 4th house episode where that’s a major component because the 4th house is hidden and it’s literally under the earth where you can’t see the planets and getting a sense how important sometimes things are that happen behind the scenes. Like with those directors, for example, I mentioned who were —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — you know, running the show, but they’re not the ones on camera so you wouldn’t know that if you just look at the movie itself until you just read the credits at the end. There’s something similar about Pluto when it comes to that here, and it’s interesting to explore that component further.
AC: Yeah. And I hope we remember – I think we will – to bring that lens to our second and then third Mars-Pluto opposition.
CB: Yeah. Although there’s so much stuff going on in March and April. Like, the astrology I’m starting to research that for the year ahead forecast, and that Neptune ingress that happens within like, 24 hours of the eclipse in Aries – that whole time period just looks so crazy.
AC: Yes it does. And we will spend probably too much time in the yearly talking about it.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Because it’s so very dense.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like, we need to come up with – because it’s like, we’re laughing about it, but it’s gonna be crazy. But it’s just like, as astrologers, intellectually it’s the same thing we’ve talked about for years where you have like, what we’ve been calling “astrologer good,” which is like when bad stuff or difficult stuff is going on in your life, but like, you’re so impressed by the transits sometimes that you’re —
AC: It’s perfect – of course it manifested that way.
CB: Right, exactly.
AC: Like, you couldn’t make this up.
CB: It’s like, you just like, wrecked your car. It’s like that story of that astrologer from the 1800s who Uranus had just been discovered, and he’s trying to figure out what it means, and he thinks he’s figured it out. And he has this transit coming up on this day that’s gonna go exact, so he just sits around all day waiting to see what happens, and then at that moment like, something happens accidentally and his house catches on fire. And he’s so excited that he runs outside and he starts writing it down, what Uranus means, while his house like, burns to the ground. It’s like, that’s astrologer good as we’ve been saying. But we kind of need a bigger version of astrologer good when you’re kind of like, watching just like, historic events happening and you’re seeing sometimes the destruction or crumbling of structures that have always been around. And it’s in some instances gonna be really rough, but sometimes you’re intellectually so impressed by the astrology that you almost like, dissociate. And we’ve been thinking about – you had said like, “May you live in interesting times,” which is supposed to be that like, you know, ancient Chinese curse, that maybe that’s like, the hashtag for that when you’re dealing with like, the historical version of that.
AC: Hashtag interesting times. Yeah, I mean… Yeah. Having paid more attention now to history both as it’s unfolding and as it has unfolded, history – at least half of the time – is like, a horror genre interest. Like, if you like uplifting stories and happy endings, like, history’s not for you. And you know, that’s even during the good times. But yeah. My guess is that that is not an ancient Chinese curse; that sounds —
CB: It’s not. It’s actually not. Somebody pointed that out in a YouTube comment recently; I didn’t know that, that it’s thought to be like, in America like, an ancient Chinese curse, but that there’s not really a trace of that existing in China and that it may have been invented by like, an American guy or something like that in the past century. So that’s actually like, interesting.
AC: Yeah. It has that flavor. But it like, that’s the idea, right? That it is to be in interesting times is by no means a blessing. But yeah, hashtag interesting times? I agree that the astrologer good is better on a personal level when it’s something that’s not devastating. Right? Like, oh, Mars conjoined my Ascendant, and I totally stubbed my toe. Right? Or you know, that —
CB: Right.
AC: — little things, or maybe more intense than that, but like —
CB: Like, cut yourself or something, but it’s like, a little cut or burn.
AC: Yeah. Right. Like, when I entered my 6th house profection and I slammed my thumb in the door and the thumbnail turned black and fell off. Right? Like, some sort of easily borne but commiseration-inducing suffering. Yeah, I agree that we need a different term for scaling that up.
CB: Yeah, we’ll have to workshop that. But it’s like, you know, there are the most extreme versions of that that we all experience as astrologers sometimes where in the most extreme version, if you have like, the loss of a loved one or you have some sort of traumatic event, and I do think as astrologers we sometimes find solace in looking at the astrology and seeing that the astrology correlated with these important movements in our life and that that’s part of our process of astrologers sometimes, even when we’re going through difficult times, is not just intellectualizing it, but understanding how even difficult events are integrated into the larger narrative of our lives and our life story and in some instances our fate or our destiny. So that’s part of our process, and yeah. Sometimes we get excited about seeing the astrological correlations just as an intellectual exercise unto itself, but yeah, that’s sort of separate from almost like, your personal feelings and experience of things sometimes.
AC: Hundred percent.
CB: Yeah. All right, buddy. Thank you for doing this episode with me. Thank you for doing such a long recap of the presidential election portion of this with me; I appreciated it. I could have done that as a separate thing, but I wanted to do it with you because you and I have been on this journey for like, so long now of checking in on the monthly forecast episodes and seeing mundane astrology play out over the past decade that yeah, I wanted to have that conversation with you and I’m glad we did it and that we combined it with looking at the astrology of December.
AC: Yeah, me too. Yeah, it is coming up on a decade. I think we’re six months away from a decade.
CB: Yeah, that’s crazy. Yeah. That’s wild. I think it was like, a Venus retrograde in Leo or something like that. Was that?
AC: I wanna say it was before it went retrograde; it was the – I remember it was a Jupiter-Venus in Leo election that you had, because it was right when you started the Patreon, and it was June. I was visiting Denver because it was speaking at a tarot conference —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — about my book that had just come out. You know, 36 Faces.
CB: Oh my god. Yeah. Well, that’ll be fun. I’m looking forward to that. And then yeah, I started the podcast under – it wasn’t just Jupiter in Gemini, but also I think there was like, a Venus retrograde in Gemini, so it was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini, and that’s why I have a lot of words on this podcast.
What do you have coming up? What are you doing? What are you working on in December?
AC: Oh, I got a couple things. One, I’m doing at the very end of the month, I’m actually doing the last Year One intake for my astrological education program, so that’s gonna open up on the 28th. It will probably close down a few hours later on the 28th; they fill up really quickly. If you’d like to be involved in that, sign up for the mailing list; it just goes out to the mailing list. I don’t put it out publicly. And there should be enough time if you’ve already got a background, if you sign up for Year One, you should probably be able to qualify for Year Two by the time it starts in April if you already have a background.
Let’s see, what else is going on? I think I’m gonna write an article for the first time in a while. You know, I used to do that. I’ve literally written thousands of articles. But I think I’m —
CB: That’s old-fashioned. Like, you’re actually gonna type with like, your hands?
AC: Yeah, I think I’m gonna actually write up some of the macro stuff that I’ve been doing astrologically. Some of the like, 2025 through 2033 stuff, because it’s already… There’s too much. It would be an hour and a half long digression in any podcast, and it’s nice to have as much time as I want to find the right words. So I’m actually probably going to put out an article.
CB: Nice.
AC: He says, while Mercury is retrograde. Look for it around the direct station! And then there is a series produced through Sphere and Sundry that not only did I elect, but I actually did all of the ritual work and the construction for that’s coming out I believe first week of December, and it makes use of one of the spicier Mars in Capricorn elections that happened at the beginning of 2024. If you remember Mars in Capricorn once upon a time was trine Jupiter in Taurus. And so I actually made a lot of Mars in Capricorn stuff. And this is inspired by the hoodoo classic, the Fiery Wall of Protection. So it’s sort of an astro-magic Mars in Cap take on that. So look out for Fiery Wall the first week of December from Sphere and Sundry.
And then finally, you know, the website as always has a lot of recorded lectures and classes available if you wanna stuff your stocking with those. And you can also find a list of my three-year program graduates to book with if you would like a reading.
CB: Brilliant. And what are your websites again?
AC: Oh, it’s AustinCoppock.com and SphereAndSundry.com.
CB: Brilliant. All right. I’ll put a link to those in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website.
As for myself, so just a reminder that 2025 Electional Astrology Report with the lucky dates for next year is 20% off right now, so get it while it’s on that launch sale at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report.
We’re gonna be recording the 2025 year ahead forecast on December 20th live with a group of patrons, so that’s gonna be my focus next month is getting prepared for that. I’m pretty excited about it. Austin and I have both begun our research. As prep for that, I’m planning to record year ahead horoscopes in early December if all goes well, and I’ll release those for early access to patrons as soon as I can, and then they’ll be released to the general public not too long after that. So I’m looking forward to doing those just because it’s really good prep for the year ahead forecast to like, personalize it based on everybody’s rising sign for the year ahead.
And other than that, I’m also getting prepared and starting to research with my team the 5th house episode, and we’ve already recorded a live chart reading session with patrons where I interviewed several patrons about their 5th house placements, and we just had some incredibly stunning stories that really got me excited for the 5th house episode doing that. So that episode’s already available for early access through Patreon. And yeah, we’ll see what happens and how research goes before I eventually put together and record the full episode on the 5th house here before too long. Otherwise I think that’s it.
AC: That’s gonna be amazing. Look forward to it.
CB: For sure. All right, buddy. Thanks a lot for joining me for this. Thanks to our audience of patrons that joined us in the live chat for this episode; I appreciate all of you for your comments and for your support. Thank you to Austin for joining me for this forecast. And yeah, we’ll be back again next month when we do our year ahead forecast for the entirety of 2025. So otherwise, thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next time.
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If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then check out my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology. It’s perfect for beginner and intermediate students because I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, including monthly webinars and Q&A sessions, and at the end of the course, if you complete the final test, you’ll receive a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me. You can find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.