The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 472, titled:
2025 Year Ahead Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on December 23, 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 February 11th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 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 astrological forecast for the entire year of 2025. Hey Austin – how’s it going?
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Pretty good. How are you, Chris?
CB: I am really good. I’m really happy to be here with you today where we’re back again 12 months later since we did our last year ahead forecast, and this is always the biggest episode of the year where we look at the biggest astrological alignments in the coming months. So what we’re gonna do here is in the first part of this, I’m gonna give a quick overview of some of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about in this episode. Then we’re gonna jump into talking about the major outer planet shifts that are happening this year for the first hour or so, because there are some major outer planet shifts where all of the outer planets are changing zodiacal signs this year. Then after that, we’re gonna go into a chronological breakdown by dividing the year into two parts, and we’re gonna go through the major aspects of 2025 chronologically in the first half of the year, and then in the next part we’ll go into the second half of the year, and then eventually wrap everything up in the conclusion. So that’s our outline; that’s our ambitious outline for today. You feel like we can do it, that we’re there?
AC: I feel like I have to do it, Chris.
CB: We must do it. We were talking about being on like, a ski slope, and you just have to… That is 2025. Like, the momentum is taking us and we are on our way.
AC: Yeah, I feel like Johnny Mnemonic. Like, my brain has been filled with way too much data, and if I don’t get it out, I will have a cerebral hemorrhage. This is the only way to get it out.
CB: I’ve never related more to one of your memes. That is a good way. All right, so I wanna first start by showing some images and some diagrams for those watching the video version of this episode. So this is the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets start at the beginning of the year and how far through the signs of the zodiac they get by the end of the year. And one of the things that it shows is how many outer planet ingresses there are of planets changing signs this year. Another image I have is the planetary aspects calendar, which is a poster actually that Madeline DeCotes designed from Honeycomb.co, and we’ve been collaborating on this over the past few weeks to give you a snapshot of all of the major planetary aspects that will take place over the course of the next 12 months. And I’ll be referring back to this at different points just because it’s really useful for showing like, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that comes within a degree this summer, or for some of the different Mars aspects that take place in the fall and so on and so forth, and just looking at things from the perspective of either a three-degree orb or a one-degree orb when things go exact.
In terms of what we’re gonna be talking about, I saw a post recently on reddit which was like, you know, why is 2025 – why have astrologers been saying that 2025 is such a big year? And the reason for that is that there’s outer planet shifts of all of the outer planets. And that is not something that happens. So here’s the major astrological alignments this year, roughly sort of chronologically, that we’re gonna be talking about to give you an idea. But right at the top of the year, Mars is still retrograde in the sign of Cancer, and it stays in the sign of its retrograde and its shadow period all the way through like, June. It’s still in Cancer and Leo before it completely finishes that retrograde. Then in the early part of the year, there’s also a Venus retrograde in Aries and Pisces that overlaps a little bit with the Mars retrograde and shadow periods. We have the final eclipse in the Aries eclipse series, which is taking place in March, which completes that series which has been going on since late 2023. Then 24 hours – just like, a day after the Aries eclipse – the planet Neptune enters Aries for the first time and begins more than a decade long transit through that sign. Then a month or two after that in May, Saturn goes into the sign of Aries, where it’s gonna begin a three-year long transit through that sign. Then this summer, we get the closest alignment of a conjunction of Saturn and Neptune as they’ve gotten so far as they’ve been building up to this conjunction over the past few years. They finally come within one degree of a conjunction with each other in July. Around the same time in June, Jupiter ingresses into Cancer, where it’s gonna spend a year. And then in July also, the planet Uranus makes its first entry into the sign of Gemini where it’s gonna transit for about seven years, and this is a hugely monumental transit, especially for the United States that has Uranus in Gemini in its birth chart. And then finally later in the fall, later in the year, there’s a Virgo-Pisces eclipse series that fully gets going when we get our first full exact set of Virgo-Pisces eclipses taking place in September. So it’s gonna be a very, very big year, and yeah. We have a lot to talk about. So let’s start with the outer planet transits and just like, emphasizing that maybe for people that are new. Some of these outer planet – like, you know, Neptune takes something like 14 years to go through a sign. Uranus takes seven years to go through a sign. Pluto takes a decade at least. And to have all three of those planets changing signs this year essentially – because Pluto only just recently went into Aquarius for its final time, so it kind of counts – that’s pretty monumental. And I think 2025 is the year that everything changes, basically.
AC: Yeah. It’s a monumental pivot in direction, because not only do we have – right – when an outer planet, or any planet, moves into a sign, that means it begins operating in a different way affecting different things. And so you get themes for as long as the planet is in that sign. And with Uranus, we’re looking at seven years. So our last arc, which is ending in 2025, is Uranus in Taurus, which has been there since 2018. You think about how if you think about 2011 to 2018 and 2018 to 2025, they are very clear, identifiable differences. And then we also have Neptune changing, which is about twice as slow, right? So it’s Neptune in Pisces, which first ingressed in 2011, and so 2011 to 2025 – you think about cultural trends, we think about more than cultural but cultural trends. We’ve got a whole 14-year period. That’s about to switch. Right? It’s 2011, 12 again. And then with Pluto, it’s even longer. Pluto is – unlike Uranus and Neptune – variable in the length that it spends in each sign. Minimum is about 13, 14 years, and then maximum is about 30. Right now, we’re moving from Pluto in Capricorn to Pluto in Aquarius, or we’ve just done that. That was 2008 to 2024, so 16 years. Again, think about all that’s changed. And what we have just entered will last for basically another 19 years. Right? So these are all shifts with significant medium and long-term consequences. Right? Before all this is done, we’ll all be 20 years older. Right? I will be in my mid-60s, you know, et cetera, et cetera. My child, my infant, will be a walking, talking man creature that I will have a hard time recognizing, at least from how he is right now. Like, this takes us pretty far in the future. And even the shortest one, right? Seven years. Seven years – everything changes in seven years. Right? Your 11-year-old graduates high school in, you know, in seven years.
CB: Think of where, you know, seven years ago was what, like, 2017, 2018 from now, and just how much all of our lives have changed in the intervening years and how much even all of our lives changed in that one year in like, 2020, and how much that shook up things. But now we’re going into a period where there’s lots of changes of different outer planets and different things. With each of those outer planets, they’re all moving into a new sector of each of our charts and shifting into a new whole sign house. So on the one hand, there’s a new area of our life that’s gonna start becoming much more active with a different astrological energy and indicating changes in that area of our life. But then at the same time, those outer planets are also finishing up very long transits where they’ve been in certain sectors of our charts for many years and certain whole sign houses, so it’s also closing down this year and making the transition from one chapter to another.
AC: Yeah. And because all these cycles are so long, those planets’ presence in that part of your life, wherever Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have been visiting, has just become normal and is taken for granted. It’s very hard to not just fall into the assumption that that’s just how life is, and in a couple years, or maybe even this year, you’ll have the context of not that. You’ll be like, oh, that’s not how life is; that’s how that period of time was. And that period had a beginning and an ending. But for Pluto, right, 16 years ago, if you were 36 years old, it moved in when you were 20. Right? Like, you haven’t had, you’ve barely had any time as a cognizant adult that wasn’t Pluto in Capricorn. Right? So it’s very – you know, we don’t have the context for these things until we get older, and things change sign. And so there’s a lot to say about these changes individually and collectively, but yeah, they’re important. And you’ll notice them inside and outside.
CB: Well, and if that wasn’t enough with all of the outer planet changes, with every single outer planet changing signs or getting settled into new signs this year, also all of the inner planets go retrograde this year, which is also something that doesn’t happen every year where we have overlapping Mars retrograde and Venus retrograde transits in addition to, of course, the three Mercury retrogrades that happen each year. So even the inner planets are showing some really major turning points happen as well in terms of their individual retrograde cycles.
AC: Yeah. And Jupiter changes signs, but Jupiter changes signs once per year. The nodes – the head and the tail of the dragon, the eclipse indicators – change signs at the very beginning of the year. That’s a one-and-a-half year cycle. And Saturn changes signs, which is a two-and-a-half year cycle. So pretty much everything?
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s get into our first one, then, which is I wanna talk a little bit about Pluto in Aquarius, because even though we’ve been talking about this transit for at least a couple of years now on the forecast episodes and the year ahead forecasts because Pluto first went into Aquarius in early 2023 – so that means we’ve been dealing with it for almost two years now – this is gonna be the first full year of just Pluto in Aquarius, of Pluto staying in that sign. And because we just saw the final ingress in November, I was really struck by some stories in the news because it seemed like there were some omens or some previews of things to come. And in the same way that in retrospect Pluto’s initial entry into Capricorn started with the financial crash and also the invention of like, Bitcoin which then grew and developed over the course of that entire transit until it culminated and Bitcoin ended up hitting a hundred thousand just after Pluto departed from Capricorn, I’ve been paying attention to what are the little themes that are happening right now or have been happening in the past couple of years that are giving us a preview, basic, an omen or an idea of what this entire transit’s gonna be about. So obviously, artificial intelligence has been one of those things that’s emerged in the past couple of years shortly after that around the time that first ingress took place, and now it’s, you know, reached this interesting sort of like, culmination this year when Jupiter went into Gemini. And one of the things I noticed is in the past month, Google as well as the other big AI companies have rolled out this feature of live chat, instantaneous chat, with their artificial intelligences where you can just hold conversations with it, and it’s instantaneous. It’s like, conversing with another person, and you can just like, ask them any question you want and it will give you any answer that you want in a conversational flowing format that almost doesn’t sound like you’re talking to an artificial intelligence. And that was one of the things that I noticed is that was what Jupiter in Gemini was partially this year, but also that I think we’ve passed the Turing test in some instances where – I’ve come across instances where I couldn’t tell that something was artificial intelligence. Like, I was listening to a podcast the other day that was recommended to me on YouTube, and I listened to it for like, 10 minutes. And then at one point, I realized that one of the people was like, interjecting like, a millisecond too fast so that it sounded unnatural. But it took me 10 minutes to realize I was listening to a podcast that was completely artificially generated, both in the voices as well as in the content of what they were saying. And I realized at that point that like, some element of the Turing test of not being able to tell if something was human or a machine, that we’d finally crossed that over the past few years without fully realizing it.
AC: Yeah. We were talking the other day about this. And I brought up the well known event where people were shown a movie, many of them for the first time, in the early part of the 20th century. And the movie involved a train coming towards the camera, and many people in the theatre panicked because they didn’t – they hadn’t yet grown the discernment to distinguish between an image of a train and an image indicating an actual train. And it seems that not only inevitably will be, but it is entirely necessary in order to – it is entirely necessary that we kind of grow better eyes and ears to be able to see the nuances that indicate that this is AI-generated, this is scripted, or this is in many cases, like, hybrid. Like, somebody wrote some of this, and then they’re having the AI fill in the book report here. And that there’s – you know, Pluto also brings the dynamics of evolution to play. And by “evolution,” I don’t mean a sort of gentle, spiritual unfolding, but the type of evolution seen in nature with lifeforms where there is a necessity to adapt in order to survive. In order to not become obsolete or irrelevant or ineffective in an environment. And this is – these technologies in their nascent form are already challenging our current capacities, and so does the evolutionary arms race begin between our eyes and ears.
CB: One of the news stories I noticed that day that Pluto ingressed is that somebody – I think Elon Musk must have paid one of the biggest social media people in the world to show off his humanoid robots from Tesla – the Tesla robots – and there was these viral videos that went viral of somebody like, walking around a mall with like, a string of robots walking behind them carrying their packages. And that was the first moment that I had this real feeling of seeing the future and realizing that’s the preview. That’s the like, Bitcoin white paper coming out at the beginning of Pluto in Capricorn compared to where we are now, which is that by the end of Pluto in Aquarius, humanoid robots walking around in society will be ubiquitous and something that we take for granted and doesn’t seem strange or fantastical, but will be just something that’s there as a present thing in our society in addition to that obviously being combined with some level of artificial intelligence.
AC: Yeah. At least in some places, right? As William Gibson famously said some time ago and remains true, like, the future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed. Right? And that, I imagine that will continue to hold true.
CB: Yeah. Well, one of the —
AC: In some – it’s like, oh have you been to Chicago lately? Like, oh, there are robots everywhere. Or it’s like, oh, no I’ve been down south. Like, for the last six months in Atlanta, you know, you barely ever see a robot. Right? Like, you know, these things will – it’s not going to be everywhere all at once, right? It’s gonna be distributed like everything else.
CB: I mean, I think you’re gonna be surprised by the end of Pluto in Aquarius, and I think – I will predict right now that there’s gonna be more societal penetration of robots being everywhere than we can even imagine right now. And it’s, you know, in the same way that smartphones started off as being something that was a very expensive luxury that only few had in 2009, 2010, but within not that long, like, the entire internet’s been transformed so that everybody uses a smartphone at this point. And the vast majority of internet traffic is actually through smart phones and not on like, laptops or desktops.
AC: Okay.
CB: So —
AC: I’ll take that bet. We’ll check in —
CB: Take the bet?
AC: — in 20 years. Yeah.
CB: Okay! This is good. I like our bets. So one of the things about that is with every major technological revolution, there’s always a lot of, to put it lightly, job turnover, but to put it another way, unemployment as a result of suddenly a lot of jobs becoming, you know, obsolete. And that’s an issue both in terms of artificial intelligence in general as well as with robots and other things that are like, adjacent to AI or connected with it. And that’s something I was talking to you about because I started getting into looking at the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, and I was really struck by – I was researching the 1800s and how that shift of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions into the earth signs really closely coincided with the industrial revolution —
AC: Absolutely.
CB: — and what a major shift that was in society that shifted different things in terms of labor and things like that. And that we’re on the cusp of a new era like that right now, since as we know, in 2020 the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions just recently shifted to a new triplicity for the next 200 years.
AC: Yeah. And so we’d be looking – what we’re looking at already is, and what we’ve been affected by already are you could say digital revolutions rather than industrial, although they certainly affect industry. And what’s interesting about the shift into the air triplicity is that the actual conjunction in 2020, the apparent conjunction, was the one that officially unambiguously moved us into it. But thanks to Ben Dykes’ research, we know that a number of astrologers who used this technique in the past also use what’s called the mean conjunction, which is more regular. And that according to the mean conjunction, we moved into this air period in 2000, and so that it was – the mean conjunction was Saturn-Jupiter in Gemini, it was in Taurus visibly. But you can see that like, the so-called digital revolution and the way that it’s changed jobs very much began then. Right? Like, you know, the number of people in digitized economies who did gig work, the possibility of us doing this – like, all of that was getting going by the end of the first decade of the 2000s. And then not to go too – I won’t go much further than this because our time is so precious today – there was a preview conjunction before the cycle actually shifted in 1980, ‘81. And so we saw some previews of the digital world to come, and some of those previews were dreams and some of them were nightmares. It’s worth noting that a lot of our most compelling near futurescapes, many of them at least partially dystopian – all cyberpunk, Blade Runner, all that – most of those works were either created or released right around that preview conjunction of the time that we’re actually in right now.
CB: That’s interesting. Yeah. Well, and there’s gonna be unexpected things that will arise as a result of new technologies that will change society. That was one of the things I was interested to learn more about was like, how the invention of like, the cotton gin around 1800 give or take ended up changing and impacting and leading to an increase in slavery at that time in America in like, early 1800s, and the different impacts that that had societelly as a result of like, a technological change that maybe you couldn’t have anticipated at first how that would impact society in such a negative way. There’s probably gonna be things like that in our time that are gonna impact society in positive or negative ways, but —
AC: Yeah, I think —
CB: — unexpectedly.
AC: I think that’s a really good example, because there is a hope/underlying assumption in I would say western culture and particularly in American culture that technological innovation is inherently liberatory and leads to people having more freedom and more choice over their lives, whereas that is demonstrably not always the case.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Because we associate technology with progress, and progress sometimes with good things – like, social progress or things like that – but sometimes technology can do not good things. Interestingly, that’s one of the things that we’re dealing with right now that’s starting to come up as a theme as Pluto just went into Aquarius is social media. And we had like, you know, Australia is apparently passing a potential ban on social media for people younger than 16, so there’s attempts to control social media. And then in January, very close to the time of the Sun-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius, is currently set to be this ban on TikTok unless the company is sold or they work out some sort of deal, which very well may happen, but just the fact that there’s the threat of banning one of the biggest social media companies in America is very striking in terms of I think a theme that’s gonna become ever-present in the next couple decades, which is attempts to control social media by different groups or different governments and organizations and their occasional successes or failures at doing that.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the… An awareness of the downside as well as fear itself, which may or may not designate a thing that’s worth fearing, is such an important part of Pluto’s movement through signs. You know, Pluto’s position tells us a lot about what the face of terror or horror is for, you know, at least a decade. And so when Pluto changes signs, the like, sight of collective horror and the face it wears changes. And I parallel this to the climax of Ghostbusters where Zuul is – no, Gozer is part of the, has come into the material world and asks the Ghostbusters to choose the form of the destructor, right? And so Ray thinks of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And so every time Pluto changes signs, it’s a different face for an old terror. Past examples very quickly – during Pluto in Sagittarius, like, the image of terror was the terrorist, right? Sagittarius is armed; it’s mobile. Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, therefore religious. These people with these beliefs are coming from far away; they’ve got, you know, they’re armed and they’re gonna do a thing. Pluto in Scorpio before that showed – which is like, ‘83, ‘84 to ‘97 – was America’s obsession with serial killers. This is when, you know, everybody knew – we had won famous serial killers, and it was always like, sex, occult serial killers, which we don’t have now. But it was like, Richard Ramirez – people were like, ooh, why did they do – you know, like, it was very Scorpionic. And so on and so on. I would say with Pluto in Capricorn which we’re about to leave, the sight of horror became the mechanisms of civilization themselves, the enclosing structure that we can see all throughout history and in the present. Right? Rather than a figure in those structures, it was the structure itself which was the monster or the Satan.
CB: Right. Yeah. Well, I was listening to the former CEO of Google recently talking about AI, and he was saying that regulation of AI won’t happen until there’s some huge disaster or scandal. And so it’s just a matter of time until something catastrophic happens, because we don’t know the danger yet or what to regulate against. Everyone is racing to build artificial general intelligence right now, but no one’s really like, slowing down to ask like, whether we should be doing that or other things like that because it’s become this arms race – not just America, but also around the world with China, which is also very close to the US in terms of their artificial intelligences they’re developing. And one of the things that Google announced recently is that they’re calling this the beginning of the agentic age, which is talking about autonomous AI agents being the next big thing, which are AI agents that are able to perform tasks with little human intervention where the AI can learn and make decisions and adapt to real-world conditions. And so that’s gonna be one of the things in terms of the era that we’re moving into, and one of the interesting things with Pluto in Aquarius and the Sun-Pluto conjunction is that the Biden administration was trying a little bit to regulate some of what was happening with AI, and they passed some of the first regulatory laws I think like, a year or so ago in 2023, almost treating it like the Manhattan Project or something like that or classifying some forms of it. But with the Trump administration, if they go on the other path of like, deregulating things more, then it’s going to make it so that some of the AI developments are gonna go much faster and much quicker without regulation and things sort of like, stifling innovation. But then as a result of that, it’ll be much more uncontrolled, so it’ll be interesting to see how that sets things up as we move further into Pluto in Aquarius.
AC: Yeah. And I would add that in thinking about all these developments that the successes in these projects are equally important as the failures. The failures are just as important; the difference between expectation and result is very – like, the idea that we know exactly where things are going based on the present moment, we know what the aims are, but this is by definition unknown territory. And so, you know, there is a proper horror to the complete perfect success of AI. Right? Like, that is a nightmare scenario. But then don’t forget the scenarios where it just doesn’t work, or it just can’t do this one thing, and then the gap between those two becomes a problem in implementation in a way that I think was captured best in Robocop Two where they’re trying to do a successor to Robocop and there’s this hilarious montage of the robots that don’t quite work. Right? And end up randomly shooting board members. You know, one of the things that you know is coming and is already there in some places is customer service for corporations being replaced by AI chat bots, which it’s like, you know, you take the least helpful, lowest paid customer service person, and then you know, minus 50, and then you have the AI chat bot. And regardless of how amazing or not amazing AI ends up being, we will all spend scores of hours trying to get the AI chat bot to recognize that this thing is under warranty and to please send somebody to repair the dishwasher. Like, there’s gonna be that kind of mundane stuff all over the place, right? Regardless of the, you know, the actual humanoid robots, like, we’re gonna be interacting with replacements for the human, and that speaks to, you know, what you were saying about the way it changes the job market. And those replacements might be better; they might be much worse, but they’re still gonna be there, and we’re still gonna spend a lot of time with them.
CB: Right, for sure. Yeah. So other things – you know, last thing about this section just because it’s setting a new era is of course in January we’re gonna have – on January 20th will be the inauguration of Trump, and that’s gonna happen on this Sun-Pluto conjunction in the inauguration chart. And as I was talking about in the last episode we did for the December forecast, I think that really speaks to the concentration of power in the executive branch under the president and perhaps that reaching new levels. And I’ve been researching early American history, because I was going back and researching the different times Uranus was in Gemini to see what happened during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and World War II. And one of the things I noticed is that even though the country was founded with the Declaration of Independence when Pluto was in late Capricorn, most of our actual structure of government – like the Constitution – wasn’t put together until Pluto had moved into Aquarius. So really the Pluto return of most of our structures of government is happening right now with Pluto in early Aquarius, and with that we’ll probably see many of those structures tested, some of them potentially destroyed, and some of them potentially rebuilt in a different manner. But seeing those, the stress tests of some things that were founded in the country so long ago is gonna be I think a major part of the early part of this Pluto transit.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And so you pointed this out to me a couple weeks ago, and I realized much to my delight that it was actually possible to find a precedent for an inauguration with the Sun conjunction Pluto because the inauguration up until – god, I think ‘37? Or maybe it was post-FDR. But the inauguration for the first quite a while in the United States took place on March 4th. And so that’s the middle of Pisces, and so we had Pluto in the middle of Pisces in let’s say in the inauguration for 1809 and 1813. There was a very tight Sun-Pluto conjunction in 1809, and it’s still within three degrees in 1813. These were both inaugurations for James Madison. And what I found very striking about that was that James Madison was the president when the White House was burnt to the ground – when the capitol building, the palace of the regent, right, like, the seat – the physical seat – of power was annihilated. Right? And if we’re looking at Pluto potentially damaging the Sun and the Sun represents the king, the queen, the sovereign, the president – like, the one who is at the center of a system. And so seeing that that seat of power was burnt down was very symbolic. And —
CB: That was the War of 1812?
AC: Yeah, it was during the War of 1812. The actual burning of the White House was in 1814 during the second term, but the war was declared by the United States in 1811. And —
CB: So after – during his first time after that Sun-Pluto conjunction on inauguration?
AC: Yeah. And the Sun’s still conjunct Pluto in the next inauguration, just not quite as tightly. But the one sort that brought up – there are two quick additional things. One, Chris and I started talking about is it really – if you serve consecutive terms, is it really about the first inauguration? Because that’s when you go from not president to president. Whereas the second one is just like, “Don’t worry, buddy; you’re still president.” Right? It’s not really a change in status.
And then two, there’s a famous anecdote about the burning of the White House. And that is that Dolly Madison – who I’m told I’m distantly related to, by the way? My grandma said that; I never checked it – famously like, rushed back in to the burning White House to save a portrait of George Washington. And so symbolically it’s really interesting that we have the seat of power destroyed but the sort of image of the presidency, that there’s some like, essence or root that survived that. But yeah, with Pluto on the Sun burning down the throne.
CB: Wow. That’s incredible. Interesting fact I found was that the year that the Constitution was ratified, which basically gave us our form of government, it was a year in which Mars went retrograde in Cancer early in the year, and then later in the year, Jupiter ingressed into Cancer after Mars went direct and left, and also Saturn was in Pisces and Pluto was in Aquarius. So we have very similar placements that are somehow harkening back to that and the creating of the Constitution. And the only other points about Pluto in Aquarius before we move on is just one, there’s been a lot of discussion about oligarchy right now, which is like, a small group of people having control over the country, and whether we’re like, getting to that point in terms of some billionaires. The influence of billionaires and some of the richest people in the world and their ability to influence politics directly has now reached I feel like unprecedented levels where in the past, usually that power was wielded indirectly or like, subtly or something like that. But now it’s become much more like, open and just sort of like, brazen in terms of how some of that is going. But then at the same time, right after Pluto went into Aquarius, we saw that news story about the shooting or the assassination of that CEO of that healthcare company. And there was a lot of like, a lot of CEOs started taking down their pictures from websites and got scared, and a lot of the discussion was sort of like, reminiscent of some of the stuff that was happening the last time Pluto was in Aquarius during the French Revolution. And it’ll be interesting to see what that’s about on the other end of things as well.
AC: Yeah. And that connects to a larger point about Pluto in Aquarius, which is that Aquarius is Saturn’s sign, and it is opposite Leo. It is opposite the domicile of the sovereign, the monarch, the king, the queen, right? The one at the center of the system. And so we have Pluto opposing that solar center, right, and so anybody who’s in charge of a big thing is in a solar position whether they’re a president, a monarch, a CEO, et cetera, et cetera. Or – and I would add – a celebrity. Another piece of this is that our oldest generation that is for the most part living and in high positions are the Pluto in Leos. Pluto was in Leo from 1939 until 1959, roughly – a.k.a., the boomers. And so Pluto’s movement through Aquarius is Pluto opposing the natal position, and there are many things to say about this, but one in particular is that with Pluto in Leo, you know, like, you have the leader, the star. And it is that generation that very much gave us our current idea – like, the existence of the celebrity is inextricable from what happened as that generation grew up. And already we can see that celebrity is a different thing than it used to be and is changing. And so we have that – like, I’m wondering, I’m watching with Pluto in Aquarius what happens to the concept of celebrity as well as a number of other concepts and social structures which are just taken for granted because they’ve been here since the ‘60s and ‘70s, which is when the Pluto in Leos were growing up and as a huge and influential generation ended up creating shapes which we still live inside?
CB: Yeah, that’s really good. All right, so that’s Pluto in Aquarius, and we had to start there because part of the reason is all those themes that we’ve seen start to emerge over the past two years as Pluto’s been dipping its toe in Aquarius and then backing out and then now finally went in, all of that’s gonna get accelerated and supercharged this year, especially in the second half of the year starting in July when the planet Uranus moves into Gemini, because that’s it’s own cycle in and of itself, but then it’s also very quickly going to start forming a trine with Pluto, which is really going to accentuate and exacerbate and accelerate many of the Pluto in Aquarius themes that have already started to emerge in the past two years. So Uranus in Gemini – Uranus is on an 84-year cycle. It’s gonna be in Gemini from 2025 and it’s not gonna leave Gemini until May of 2033, so that’s the time frame for this transit – a full seven years roughly. The pace of things is gonna move more quickly.
As I’ve talked about and we’ve talked about many times over the past few years, honestly over the past decade because astrologers have been anticipating this transit of Uranus coming back into Gemini because that’s where it was when the country was founded. And every time Uranus comes back into Gemini, the United States has gotten into a major conflict and had a major war. So this started with the Revolutionary War is very well encapsulated by Uranus in Gemini back in the 1700s. Then 84 years later, it came back and then the United States had the Civil War, which is also very well encapsulated by Uranus in Gemini for seven years. And then eventually 84 years later, Uranus came back, and then we had – that was literally, I think it was like, the year that the United States entered into World War II, right?
AC: Yep. And it’s worth noting that Uranus in Gemini did not time World War II, which had been going on three years previous in Europe and five years previous in Asia. It timed the United States’ entry into World War II.
CB: Right. So that’s really striking. So that sets up three precedents, but then there’s a question. I did a whole episode on the Uranus return of the United States with Nick Dagan Best that you can listen to for more, but one of the questions we had when we did that two years ago was then does that set it up, based on those precedents, for an external war or an internal war or both? We don’t really know the answer to that yet, but that’s something we’re gonna be paying attention to here very soon since we can see the tensions building in very similar wars from some of those different times of like, World War II from 84 years ago or even the Civil War and a lot of the internal strife that’s been developing where we can see the potential for it to go either way or both.
AC: Yeah, and even like, even though the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II are all very different things, all of them end up transforming America both internally as well as radically changing America’s place in the world and role in the world. And on a hopeful note, all three of those instances saw life in America look much better on the other side. It was a better – the country was in much better shape on the other side of Uranus in Gemini than it was right before it entered.
CB: Yes, but —
AC: You know, I —
CB: — a lot of people had to die in the process to get there.
AC: They did. And yeah, I’m trying to give the silver lining that’s not —
CB: Right.
AC: — fake. I think the non-silver lining of three wars is pretty clear. The like, the blood dripping off the cloud or the blood raining from the cloud is I think pretty easy to see, but yeah. It is a blood cloud, but it has a silver lining.
CB: I do appreciate your rosy optimism always, Austin —
AC: It’s what I’m here for!
CB: Yeah, that is your role here. So one of the things when I was going back and studying this recently that was really striking to me and came up over and over again was that in past Uranus in Gemini transits, there’s always been a president who takes on additional powers, especially at the time of the war, that verge on going too far or overstepping what the law allows or what that role should have. And there become questions of whether they’re becoming an autocrat. So this happened with Lincoln during the Civil War. Like, Lincoln took a lot of liberties and suspended a lot of rights in the country at the time in order to win the Civil War, and there was questions about the legality of some of that, but he just kind of did it anyways and everything worked out. And then, you know, in FDR’s term, he ended up having like, you know, multiple presidential terms, so that he —
AC: He won four elections!
CB: Right. Four elections and then he died at the end, but then immediately after that, Congress passed a law to limit presidential terms to just two terms. And that really in and of itself just harkened back to the fact that it was just kind of like, an unspoken agreement up to that point that presidents would only have two terms because Washington, our first president, who interestingly was a military general, he had two terms and then he gave it up and like, walked away and set that precedent for presidents to only have two terms. But it was kind of an unspoken thing until FDR broke that, and then once that line was broken, Congress ended up passing the law to make it official. So there may be similar dynamics that come up during this time.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting – as I know you’ve mentioned before – that Washington walked right up to the line of kingship and then declined. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: And so we have that right up the line of kingship and then death, actually, in the case of both Lincoln and FDR. But like, that line which is usually quite clear has gotten scuffed all three times in the past.
CB: I saw this quote recently that said when King George – when the king of England at the time heard that George Washiington would resign his commission at the end of the war, he said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” Just the idea that somebody would like, give up all of that power voluntarily and just like, step back from it from the perspective of another king who had all the power was just like, you know, stunning as a different thing that obviously a new mode of leadership or something was coming into play that was emerging at that time.
AC: Yes. And it was, and the history of that way of thinking – of what if we did this without kings, what if we tried to value individual liberty as highly as order? You know, what is historically called liberalism – not necessarily what people are arguing about on the internet in 2024, but the whole idea of like, what if we tried something democracy, and what if we didn’t have kings? Right? Like, this whole line of thought actually you get many of the most important works in the development of this model of governance during Uranus in Gemini. What was exciting and shocking, interesting to me, as I was looking at the time periods that Uranus was in Gemini before the Revolutionary War because I wanted some other precedent besides just America and war – and if we look back to the 1690 to 1698, what we have is we have John Locke publishing every single major work. And John Locke’s influence on the construction of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is such that he could probably sue them for copyright violation these days. There’s so much of Locke, so much of the model for America was written down and published exactly 84 years before that.
And then while the American Revolution is happening, Immanuel Kant publishes A Critique of Pure Reason, and Immanuel Kant is in many ways considered the most important western philosopher for a hundred years in either direction, maybe 200 in either direction, and whose work also constitutes some of the basic, fundamental thinking for what would be historically known as liberal democratic governments.
And then what I didn’t think of as democratic or liberal in nature at first, but I realized this morning actually falls into line with this is that if we go back even further to 1606, to 1613, which was the previous Uranus in Gemini – we have the publication of not a progressive philosopher, but the King James Bible, which to our eyes today is a conservative thing. But that was the publication, that was the democratization of possession and reading of the bible in a way that was completely unprecedented. This is not that long after, you know, we’re one Uranus cycle into Protestantism being a thing, and the democratizing of the word is a big part of the, like, the Protestant-Catholic rift, and giving individuals the ability to do the interpretation themselves, right, and the mass publication of the King James Bible was a huge part of that. And of course, the publication of works that would be influential a hundred, 200, at least 84 years into the future makes a lot of sense with Uranus in a Mercury-ruled sign, right? Like, just on a super simple level.
CB: Yeah, that’s brilliant. That’s a great find.
AC: Thank you.
CB: One of the things that cracked me up reading about the Revolutionary War is Uranus was actually discovered like, right in the middle of the American Revolution in 1781, and the discoverer tried to name it after the King of England at the time, King George, so it was almost called Geroge, basically. Like, we almost started calling the planet Uranus “George,” which would have been honestly like, hilarious now if we were talking about George transits to your natal chart and like, the George return of the United States and stuff like that. But apparently, it didn’t catch on outside of Britain, basically, and everybody else rejected it, and then a German astronomer started calling it Uranus and that catched on and took off.
AC: It’s funny, you talking about George Washington makes me realize that the Revolutionary War was a tale of two Georges in some ways —
CB: Two Georges, ooh!
AC: — and that like, maybe if George Washington had decided to become king, they would have stuck with George for the planet, and we would have been —
CB: Right.
AC: — in a worse timeline.
CB: Yeah, the George timeline.
AC: The George timeline!
CB: I mean, it is a return; we’ll have to see if – we have to review that and revisit that naming. All right, so your point about it being Mercury-ruled in Gemini I think is really important. I think Uranus trine Pluto’s gonna supercharge everything. But with Uranus in Gemini, we’re gonna see then major advancements with AI, major advancements with communications, major changes in terms of travel is a major Gemini thing. The entire AI revolution has been around what’s called large language models, which is about our ability to understand and generate human language with AI. So to the extent that that’s true and that Mercury is about language and speech, I think this is also gonna supercharge some of the AI stuff and that being the tool and perhaps pathway to artificial general intelligence is unlocking the power of language, which is really interesting because it makes me think of the Greek word logos, which means “speech,” and that of course is at the core of our term for astrology, which is in Greek it was astrologos, which is “star speech.” So there’s something like, core there about the important role of language as a core animating force in the universe.
AC: Yeah, right? Back like, to the King James and Locke and Kant and all that – like, America wouldn’t have its shape if somebody hadn’t written things down. Right? Like, you know, the Declaration of Independence is also a document that was published during Uranus in Gemini, and it’s not just words. Right? It’s words that end up shaping reality for millions of people for a long time. Right? Like, we’re forced to consider a magical or religious concept of speech – “in the beginning, there was the Word” – because certain speech does have that level of power.
CB: Yeah. Well, and even in the bible, it’s like, “in the beginning was the Word,” and the Greek word used there is logos. Like, in the beginning was logos.
So more practically speaking with Uranus going into Gemini, I think there’s just gonna be massive changes and advancements in terms of transportation, which is a major Gemini theme. Autonomous vehicles I think are gonna be one of the main transformations that we’re gonna see in the next seven year period where some of these companies like Waymo and other autonomous car companies are starting to rapidly expand, and Waymo is owned by Google, and they’re gonna be in ten cities next year and they’re also going international this year with their first cars in Japan, I believe. So I think that’s gonna be one of the major transformations that’s gonna be bizarre for us that grew up in an earlier era to adapt to is taxis and a lot of cars becoming autonomously driven just through AI and stuff basically and people riding around in those.
AC: Yeah. That and I would add to that it’s gonna be drone everything. Right? Because drones are, you know, like, we don’t need breakthroughs to have drone everything. We have – like, drones are already almost at everything, but they’re not fully utilized. And part of the history of Uranus in Gemini is new inventions, but a lot of it is taking things that were possible or that people kind of knew how to do but then developing or engineering them so that they’re everywhere and change the face and the dynamics of the sphere that they’re part of. Like, for example, in the Civil War, which was fought entirely while Uranus was in Gemini, telegraphs existed before, but they hadn’t changed war yet. It was the first war where telegraphs were used extensively. You also had – it was the first war where hot air balloon reconnaissance was a thing, which sounds hilarious, but you know, imagine the difference in battlefield visibility. It was the first war where transportation via rail line for supplies was used. Like, it wasn’t the second that the train was invented, but it was the time that it changed the face of war. Right? So yeah, telegraph, codes in telegraph, you have the rifling of muskets, which existed for a little bit before but wasn’t implemented on a mass scale. Yeah, you have these things which are kind of there, but they haven’t changed the world yet. And as I said last year – or, god, two years ago now – during Mars’s retrograde through Gemini, there’s a little bit of a preview of Uranus in Gemini just as Jupiter’s time in Gemini has been a preview. Mars’s extended stay in Gemini saw drones adapted to a real war for the very first time in the Russo-Ukrainian war. And what they found out was that drones were useful for like, 30 things, and there will never be like, a real war in future that doesn’t have drones playing 30 different roles, and Uranus isn’t even in Gemini yet.
CB: Yeah. That’s really gonna accelerate when Uranus goes into Gemini, and I think that’s part of Pluto in Aquarius is drone warfare and how destructive that’s gonna be in addition to when it gets linked up with AI and the questions of human intervention versus that being automated. And then of course, it’s just a matter of time before there’s some kind of attack or some sort of catastrophe that happens with drones, like assassination or terrorist attack or something like that, which would then be very Pluto in Aquarius in terms of it being this like, technology that flies around that’s not really super regulated as much as it could be at this point. And we even saw some of that, actually, in the past few weeks that was the other thing that emerged right after Pluto went into Aquarius was all of a sudden all these news stories about drones and talk about like, aliens and stuff like that. And even though a lot of that I feel like was kind of Mercury retrograde stuff that got cleared up a lot by the end of that retrograde, just the fact that aliens were kind of in the news shortly after Pluto went into Aquarius reinforced something I said about a year ago about Pluto in Aquarius, which is Aquarius sometimes being about other forms of life. And I think that’s gonna be part of this transit over the next 20 years is humans grappling with like, other forms of life potentially in the universe or other forms of sentience. And that could be like, extraterrestrial life, but it could be something as simple as like, we just launched in October that mission to Europa, which is gonna get there in 2030 and then they’re gonna start looking for signs of organic life potentially on another planet in our solar system. And even if only microbes were found, that would just radically change our understanding of the universe in a very significant way.
AC: Yeah, or confirm very strong suspicions that we’re not alone.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that this is what a trine is. Right? Like, very simple level Pluto in Aquarius – AI stuff. Uranus in Gemini – all of these like, mobile applications, like drones and flying hover cars all the shit, right? And so it’s like, oh, should we put AI in the drone? Yes, there’s a perfect trine; it’s the easiest thing in the world. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: That’s what a trine is.
CB: Yeah. And that’s one of those evolutionary things that like, what you were saying, which is that – or what I was saying also, which is just sometimes there’s not regulation on something until there’s been some sort of catastrophe with it that then forces it. But otherwise, it’s kind of like a free-for-all up until that point. So that’s the downside or the dark side of thing. Positive side – as a I talked about like, on last year’s forecast, I do think those EVTOLs, the electric takeoff and landing vehicles, which are like, air taxis that has started becoming more significant and some of the main companies in America, their stock price on those shot up in the past few weeks, which I’ve been tracking very closely. So I do think that’s gonna be a major emerging thing is these electric drone air taxis, basically, that you get into in order to fly around the city and short distances as a major Uranus in Gemini thing that we’re gonna see revolutionize short distance travel here over the course of the next seven years.
AC: Yeah, and the transportation of goods across short distances, too.
CB: That’s a good one. On top of that also, electric vehicles finally becoming dominant is probably gonna happen as Uranus is going through Gemini. That’s gonna come with other things. Like, in order for that to happen, there’s gonna need like, infrastructure in order to support that in terms of charging stations and the question of whether, you know, like, our country for example gets it together and starts doing that or what.
There’s also other travel – ways that short distance travel could be changed. There’s like, the boring company, for example, that’s like, digging holes underneath cities in terms of creating underground roads, as well as the commercialization of space travel is starting to happen very significantly. So all of this we’re just gonna see accelerate massively during the course of this.
There’s also gonna be new communications technologies that are gonna emerge, including probably a new social media model or platform eventually. I think we’re due for one, and I don’t know what the form is that that takes. But we’ve gone through a few. You know, you and I, Austin, have seen a few different era. You and I met on MySpace like, back in the mid-2000s.
AC: I published my first astrology column on Friendster.
CB: Oh wow. Okay. So that’s even earlier. Yeah. So it’s like, we’ve seen different social media companies rise and fall like MySpace and then there was like, this era of like, a year when everybody switched to Facebook suddenly. And then we’ve seen people go through like, Instagram and Twitter and its rise and decline. And I’m really curious what the next major – because it may not just be like, a company, but there may be something about a new platform or something that offers something radically different in terms of ways to communicate. And if somebody offers that, then it could capture the spirit of this decade with Uranus going through, you know, a Mercury-ruled sign.
AC: Yeah. A new model of platform.
CB: Right.
AC: Just two things to add to that – one, that so this is the Uranus and Pluto – or excuse me, Pluto in Aquarius, Uranus in Gemini, the trine between the two. These are both air signs, and so they resonate with the themes of the 200 year age that we entered for keepsies in 2020. Right? This is the age of air. And what you see when you look at these 200 year slices of time that have an elemental theme is that that element figuratively but also literally becomes more important. And so, you know, already we’re going to need more legislation about airspace, right, and airspace will become meaningful in a way that real estate has been for a long time. It’s gonna need to be legislated, and probably owned with rights in a way that’s never been necessary before.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The last thing I wanted to mention for this section is the atomic age began in 1945 when the US developed the nuclear bomb and detonated them, and that began both the nuclear arms race of the era of atomic weapons, but also the era of nuclear power as well, which went through different stages and different, sort of like, waxed and waned in popularity over the years. But something’s happening right now where all of the big tech companies are putting a bunch of money into nuclear power suddenly because they are all realizing that they’re gonna need massive amounts of power to run these massive data centers that are necessary for artificial intelligence.
So what’s happening is a bunch of these companies are returning to nuclear power, and we may see during the course of this Uranus transit, which is itself a return back to when the nuclear or the atomic era began, both a return to nuclear power and the popularity of that, but also, you know, potentially more problematically returning back to that period of a turning point for nuclear weapons as well, and since the last and the only one that was used during war was used during the last period of Uranus in Gemini.
AC: Yeah. I think the planets plan to make nukes scary again.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll see how that goes. So that brings us to our next major transit, though, which is that the planet Neptune is going to ingress into the sign of Aries this year, and this is a major ingress because Neptune is on a 165 year cycle.
Did you have something?
AC: Yeah. I really need to take a pee break. I put something —
CB: Okay.
AC: — in a direct message to you; I need —
CB: Sorry, I didn’t see it.
AC: — a one-minute pee break before we switch to Neptune. I don’t need a real break; I just need to run real quick.
CB: I think that’s symbolically significant with Neptune, but we’ll take a little break.
I wanted to let people know that I just released my 2025 electional astrology report where I go through each of the next 12 months of next year and I highlight the single most lucky or fortunate date for starting new ventures and undertakings using the principles of electional astrology. So this is a report that Leisa Schaim and I have been putting together for several years now, and it’s really great because what we do is we go through each of the next 12 months of the year and we try to figure out what the most difficult astrological alignments are and what the most positive ones are, and then we literally tell people what the luckiest dates are that they should focus on if they wanna schedule something major in their life. So people have used our previous years’ reports to do things like plan the date for a marriage, to schedule when to launch a new business, to plan a date for taking a major trip, or other things like that. Anything in which you wanna launch something under better astrological weather rather than more difficult astrological weather. And that’s something that Austin and I really focus on a lot each month using our approach to electional astrology. But in this report, we actually go through and tell you the best dates ahead of time for doing different types of actions.
So when you purchase the report, what you get is a three-hour video where we present the best electional charts for 2025. And there’s both a video version as well as an audio version of the report that you can listen to. And it also comes with a 25-page PDF write up where we summarize the main dates and times and charts for easy and quick reference. We also have a printable PDF with all 22 charts that we picked out this year, because even though our focus is to pick out the single best day in each of the next 12 months, we also gave more variant charts this year where you can have an alternative date in some months or sometimes there’s two charts on the same day at two different times that are really auspicious or look really fortunate. You also get a 90-minute video tutorial on aligning your birth chart with our electional charts as part of the report, as well as a 20-minute video on how to adapt our electional charts to your location in whatever city you’re in in the world. And then finally, you also get a 15% discount on my online electional astrology course.
So this year, we actually decided to lower the price of the report because we know a lot of people are still struggling with inflation and just the cost and the price of things and companies jacking up prices. So we actually dropped the report by 10 dollars this year – the price of the report by 10 dollars. And we’re also running a 20% off sale where you can get the report for 20% less than the normal price, but only until January 7th. So right now you can get the report at the discounted price of just 44.95, and you can find it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report.
So I think that’s a pretty good deal. Like, 44 dollars for basically get an entire year ahead of electional charts, especially when an electional consultation with an astrologer would cost like, a hundred or 200 dollars, I think, right?
AC: Yeah, whereas you’re like, between three and four dollars per election.
CB: Right.
AC: I mean, I think, you know, if I could hire you and Leisa to do all of my astrology homework for me for the year for that price, I most certainly would.
CB: You definitely would? Okay, yeah. And unfortunately you cannot hire me personally individually, because I don’t do that anymore. However, I did pour all of my electional skills into this report, so if you’d like to take advantage of that, then you can get more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report.
All right, let’s transition now into talking about the next outer planet shift, which is Neptune is moving into the sign of Aries. And this is a much more significant ingress because Neptune is on a much longer cycle of 165 years approximately. So it’s gonna move into Aries this year, and it’s not gonna leave that sign until the year 2039. So this is the beginning of a long term transit, and the last time that Neptune was in Aries was 1861 through 1875. And astrologers always famously talk about this transit because it really weirdly coincided perfectly with the very beginning of the US Civil War. Basically, the US Civil War is usually dated to the day that Fort Sumter fell on April 13th, 1961, and that very day was the first day that Neptune ingressed into the sign of Aries. And then what happens is like, the South attacks like, Fort Sumter; it falls, and then immediately within days, Lincoln starts calling up thousands of troops, and the war begins really rapidly after that point.
AC: Yeah, it’s very dramatic. And so yeah, we have – you know, so Neptune changes signs once every 14 years, and with Neptune, what I see is that there’s sort of a dream, an ideal, that encloses a period of time, just as Neptune’s orbit encloses all the other planets proper. And like when you’re in a dream, you rarely realize you’re in a dream. Sometimes you do. Right? And those are unique and powerful moments. But there’s just like, a dream logic guiding things. And when we look back at history, Neptune gives us this sort of dream logic that guides things for about a decade and a half. And so, you know, to understand this, it’s important to think about what is the Neptune in Pisces dream logic that has been guiding things since 2011, 2012? I’ve been thinking about this a lot in order to one, understand where we are, but also understand what the shift is. And one of the things that I’ve noticed about Neptune in Pisces that we can contrast with Neptune in Aries is – or just Neptune in general – is there’s often without even meaning to, whatever sign Neptune is in gets idealized, because Neptune is very big into idealization. Not so big into nitty-gritty and concrete. And with Neptune in Pisces, there’s been a valorization of Piscean qualities. Of being understanding, compassionate, you know, of not dismissing anything out of hand, but being willing to accept or think about anything, and to accept and include everyone. And so you saw during the previous Neptune in Pisces in the United States in the 1850s, you had the abolitionist movement, which had existed for literally hundreds of years at that point, become like, get big. Right? Where, you know, it became in a sense pop culture. We were like, “Hey! You know what? That’s actually right!” And certainly the last, what, 12 years have had some real parallels to that. You also saw in the late 1840s and ‘50s the beginning of the spiritualist movement where it suddenly became very common for people to be doing seances on a saturday night. And similarly over the last 12, 13 years, astrology is, you know, five, 10 times as popular. Everybody’s a wizard or a witch now. Like, the difference in location and pop culture or in mainstream culture is just wild. And so I was sort of as an exercise I was thinking about contrasting the sort of ideals of Neptune in Pisces and like, the sort of like, the valorized figures. Right? So in Neptune in Pisces, we kind of have like, the compassionate mystic, right? Because we have like – or wizard or witch or like, we have this figure who understands more than the normal person and who accepts and feels for and feels with people. Whereas with Neptune in Aries, it’s a Mars-ruled sign; it’s fire. I think that you have a contrast in Neptune in Pisces versus Neptune in Aries that’s maybe best epitomized by the valorization of the saintly for Pisces, versus the heroic for Neptune in Aries. And one of the things that I found when I was looking through the history is that what I realized about Neptune is that while Neptune is in a sign, suddenly everybody becomes a thing that they weren’t before. And we can, as astrologers – Chris and I – we’ve experienced suddenly everybody’s an astrologer. Right? Whether they’ve studied or not, like, on the internet – like, suddenly everybody’s an astrologer. Suddenly everybody’s a witch or a wizard. Suddenly, everybody has really, you know, spent the greatest part of their life fighting for the equality of human souls embodied in the world. Somehow overnight, Neptune makes everybody a thing. And what triggered this for me – which makes sense, because Neptune has no boundaries, right, so it’s everybody’s a thing – is when I was looking at the history of Neptune in Aries, what I found were moments, the first moments were mass conscription happened in different countries. In the United States during the Civil War was the first time we did mass conscription. And I was like, “Oh, everybody’s a soldier.” It’s Neptune in Aries – guess what? You’re a soldier now. Weren’t a soldier yesterday? Too bad. You’re a soldier now. And in the previous instance, England did the same thing. There was a unprecedented conscription act. And so it just got me thinking about, oh, Neptune sort of makes everybody an instant whatever the quality of the sign is.
“Guess what – you’re a soldier now! You’re a warrior.”
“But I’m not!”
“Too bad.”
CB: Totally. I love that. What did you say, the romanticization of heroism? Was that what you said?
AC: Yeah, I think like, yeah, like Pisces – the saintly, and then Aries – the heroic.
CB: The heroic. Okay.
AC: Right. And then both of those, it’s Neptune so both of those end up contradicting and betraying themselves when they’re put into practice, sadly. It’s Neptune.
CB: That’s perfect because that’s what – when I was studying the Civil War recently and the Neptune ingress, one of the things I was noting that came through strongly was that early on, they had this really romanticized view surrounding the war that it would be like, this “grand adventure.” So there was —
AC: Right.
CB: — a real naivete about war, and many people had a romanticized view of warfare that was influenced by popular literature and patriotic fervor. So both sides as a result went into it very overconfident, where they both underestimated each other’s strength and resolve and thought it would be like, this quick and easy thing. And then due to political rhetoric, leaders on both sides used this really optimistic language to rally support for the war effort, and also to downplay the potential for a protracted struggle and conflict. Some people even saw the prospect of war as entertaining, and during early battles would like, go out and set up and like, have like, a picnic on a hill in order to like, watch the little battle that was gonna take place. But then what happened is that the reality of the Civil War started to set in and proved to be way different from the initial expectations. And a lot of that early optimism and naivety was replaced with the grim realities of actual warfare, which really highlighted the tragic consequences of like, miscalculation and underestimation. And interestingly, one of the things that allowed for that is that photography was a relatively new technology during the Civil War, and that war became the first major conflict, especially in the United States, to be extensively documented through photographs. And this is fascinating because Neptune, of course, it was discovered in 1846 in Pisces, and photo studios were becoming really popular at that time where people would come in and they would have to sit still for like, a long time to get their photo. And because they had to sit still, that’s why a lot of early photographs people aren’t smiling because they couldn’t like, hold that for like, you know, five or 10 minutes. But during the Civil War, some of those people that had these photo studios realized that they could be documenting this or taking pictures, so they found a way to take all this gear and equipment that was a huge hassle, and they would take it out to some of these battlefields. And they started photographing what happened after the battle and just all of these hundreds and thousands of bodies that were laid out everywhere and just how gruesome it was. And then these photographs ended up being printed in newspapers for the first time, which brought the horrible realities of wars to the general public in a much more intense way than it had been up to that point.
AC: And bodies were destroyed in previously unseen ways because of the technological advances that happened at the same time, with the overlap of Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Pisces, during the Civil War. Right? Not only was there rifling of barrels, but there was new ammunition that was used on a wide scale for the first time, which accounted for the maybe hundreds of thousands of amputations. Right? They blew limbs or rendered them useless forever. And to speak to that war enthusiasm, even though it is during the Civil War that we have that first conscription act, that was not necessary for the first part. Enlistment rates were through the roof when it was first declared, just like you said. Like, Neptune gives this energizing, motivating, like half-blurry but very shiny version of that sign. Right? So it’s like, oh, like, war and contest and struggle – oh, you mean the forge of heroes? Of course I’ll be – you know, of course I’ll enlist to become part of like, this heroic thing that will turn me into or get me closer to this ideal figure. Between us, and you know, the few people watching, I am so glad that Lucian is not going to be very old by the time that Neptune is out of Aries that he will not be of age for military service, because he’s an Aries and he’s got Mars stuff, and daddy likes Mars stuff, and so I was like, “Oh god, he’s not gonna be able,” you know, he’s not gonna, like, he can be deluded about that when he’s like, 13, but like, you know, I don’t want my son being a meatshield in some historically negligible war. But yeah, like, that’s gonna be going around. It’s not just, you know, it’s not just ready for war, it’s a valorization. And there is a legit – I would say, like, with Neptune there’s always the spiritual part is real. It’s just when it gets too confused with the material. Like, heroically struggling with and overcoming is a beautiful thing. Just like the, you know, the oceanic understanding and acceptance that Neptune in Pisces gives – those are both beautiful things. It’s just that in practice, people tend to fuck it up.
CB: Right. Yeah. And there were some higher, like, Neptunian ideals that were going on in the backdrop of the war. Like, on the one hand, there is the Union is like, fighting against the dissolution of the country, which is a very Neptune thing – that dissolution or disintegration of something. But then also during the course of the war it also became about fighting for the higher ideals in terms of ending slavery and that becoming, you know, the main thing that the Civil War is remembered for primarily in American history aside from not breaking the country in half, but also ending like, the scourge of slavery which had been this huge terrible mark, but also point of contention since the very founding the country 84 years earlier at the previous Uranus in Gemini period.
AC: Yeah. It was a fork in the road for the vision of what the country would become, and there was no going halfway down one path or the other.
CB: Right. And it’s like, so you have all these like, really lofty ideals during that Uranus in Gemini period on paper when the Constitution and the other things are put together. But obviously, it didn’t like, live up to that. There was a lot of ideals that in reality it was still sold short on, and has taken some subsequent things like that first Uranus return to start to move more towards. But then, you know, there’s still been a lot of progress that’s been made since that time. And so this may, again, be another one of those sort of like, turning points in terms of some of that.
AC: Yeah. It’s certainly a check in. Yeah, and there are probably going to be similar forks in the road, and that’s – you know, I know we’re talking about Neptune in Aries, but just one more thing about Gemini – like, there’s often a stark duality in Gemini where you ultimately have to choose. Right? You can’t have two Georges. Only one George can prevail, or no Georges. You either have Georges, or you don’t. But you know, not to – just to definitely not sugarcoat, Neptune in Aries is very pro-war. Because we had on the other side of the globe, we had in China we had one devastating —
CB: Wait, wait.
AC: — civil war —
CB: Don’t – let me – before you transition, let me —
AC: Okay.
CB: — end the Civil War thing, and then let us get into that.
AC: Sure, yeah. Okay.
CB: So really quickly, I just wanted to note a fact that I didn’t know until recently was that most of the photos in the Civil War were actually taken in 3D. And there was an expectation that they would be viewed in 3D through these little like, viewfinders. And I think that’s so fascinating, in addition to that, that that happened, because that’s probably foreshadowing something about how all of our videos and memories are about to start being taken in 3D and probably meant to be experienced then in virtual reality, and there will be a similar experience not just in a war context in terms of people documenting upcoming wars in additional dimensions or with additional detail, but that just in general, people will start setting new standards at this time for how such documentation and recording of history will have to take place in these new mediums. And that is the last point is that the world’s first color photograph was taken on May 17th, 1861, when Neptune was at one degree of Aries. So there’s something like that in terms of the beginning of a new epoch for capturing and blending the division between what’s real and what’s not and our ability to record that. And that’s something that our friend Alan White always used to say in his like, intro to Hellenistic astrology lecture where he had a little segment on the outer planets. I think he says that in the video on YouTube on my channel that, you know, the Civil War – when those pictures of the battlefields of photographs starting being printed in newspapers, people were a little bit blown away because, you know, they would look at it, and they would say, “I’m looking right at this battlefield.” Like, I can actually see the real thing. But in reality, what they were seeing was ink that had been, you know, smeared on a piece of paper in order to convey that reality even though what they were looking at was just ink on paper. But it was able to give you that sense of presence and of being there. And there’s something about that sense of presence and a new, heightened level of realism that we’re moving into at this time that this shift of Neptune will mark as well.
AC: The technology of simulation.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. All right. So that’s the transition point. So it’s not just the United States, but it turns out that there was a civil war taking place in China at the same time.
AC: Two civil wars, actually.
CB: Two? Okay. But one of them, the Taiping Rebellion, reached its bloody conclusion and the bloodiest part of it towards the end in the last like, four years, and this happened while Neptune was in Aries. And in this war, there was an estimated like, 20 to 30 million deaths, which made it one of the deadliest wars in history back at that time. And what I thought was fascinating by it is that it was started by this guy in China who claimed that he was the brother of Jesus, basically, and he became this like, religious figure that created this huge civil war that cost like, millions and millions of lives.
AC: Yeah, and of course the Taiping revolt – Taiping, ironically, translatable as “perfect peace.” Right? This is the perfect peace group which started the bloodiest civil war in history.
CB: Nice.
AC: And 20 to 30 million is the low end of the death estimates. But of course, that starts with Neptune in Pisces with the guy who says, “I’m actually, I’m family with God and Jesus, and they told me that society should be shaped like this.” And there are some very interesting sort of early precedents for what would later sort of become standard for communist revolutions; he wanted to abolish personal property. He wanted to abolish division in gendered labor. There are a lot of things that look like kind of like, half like a communist revolution, but mixed with a very particularly insane version of Christianity. So of course that starts during Neptune in Pisces. But as you just said, it reaches its bloody finale while Neptune is in Aries. And overlapping with that —
CB: So that’s important of just like, a Neptunian like figures that lead the masses into a costly war based on false or misconstrued premises, or based on deception or other things like that would fit the symbolism of like, Neptune in Aries.
AC: Yeah. And yeah, absolutely. And so overlapping with that, and kind of beginning just as Neptune enters Aries is the less well known Dungan Revolt, which was a series of regional civil wars that nonetheless – that ran for about 15 years, almost exactly while Neptune was in Aries – that had a death toll of another estimated eight to 12 million. Right? And so yeah, also an internal conflict, also, you know, catastrophically deadly.
CB: Something you mentioned internal conflict there, and I think that’s important because a point that when I was telling Leisa about all this, Leisa Schaim, a point that she made to me was that Mars-Neptune conjunctions in modern astrology – and I think especially stemming from cosmobiology – are sometimes associated with autoimmune diseases where the body like, freaks out and starts thinking that it’s the enemy and attacking itself. And a civil war is basically the same thing when a country as like, an entity kind of starts freaking out and starts attacking itself and hurting itself internally. And there may be some similarity there when we’re talking about Neptune in Aries in a Mars-ruled sign.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s a nice insight. Right? Because it’s literally Neptune confusion about who the enemy is or what to attack.
CB: Right.
AC: And so I did some significant investigation into the Neptune in Aries period before the Civil War. And so there we’re looking at 1697 to 1712, and we have kind of war everywhere – in particular, in Europe, there are three big wars that are all running for the majority of the time that Neptune’s in Aries. The biggest one is the War of Spanish Succession. In North America, you have Queen Anne’s War. And then off in the Northeast, you have the Great Northern War. And I don’t wanna go into all of that, but the War for Spanish Succession is really interesting because it’s the inversion of the US Civil War. Whereas the US Civil War was fought to prevent dissolution into two, the War of Spanish Succession was fought to prevent two from becoming one. Very short, abbreviated version of the story is Louis XIV of France is kind of running everything and wants to run more. He figures out a way so that his grandson is also the inheritor of the throne of Spain, which is still quite powerful at this time. Excuse me. Spanish monarch dies, and so Louis says, “Okay, great – now my grandson who loves me very much runs Spain.” And the rest of Europe basically said, “Fuck you. That ruins everything. You can’t have the two most powerful countries.” And they fought a war for 12 years about it. And so it was the prevention of union, rather than the prevention of dissolution, which I thought was very interesting. And then we have during that time – and Chris, let me know whether you’d like for me to save this for the next section – but what we have during that period is we actually have a precedent for Saturn conjunct Neptune in Aries, which is what we’re gonna have for the next three years. Basically 1702 to 1704, not only do we have Neptune in Aries like we’re gonna have very soon, but we have the copresent and conjunction of the two, and boy do I have some anecdotes from that time.
CB: Yeah, let’s finish up this section and then we’ll jump into that once we’ve introduced Saturn’s shift.
So you bringing up this has made me – the one I was researching, the one previous Neptune in Aries historical – I was looking for past recurrences like you did, and I went really far back, and I found one that was not just Neptune in Aries but it had a few other things that we have this year and I was really struck by it, which was the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE occurred in a year when Neptune was in Aries, Pluto was in Aquarius, and the eclipses were shifting from Aries and Libra earlier in the year to Virgo and Pisces later in the year, which is just like what’s happening essentially this year. And you know, that also started with a revolt of like, some Jewish groups against the Roman Empire, and then the Roman emperors basically crushed the revolt and then destroyed the temple and it led to the Jewish diaspora, basically, over subsequent centuries. And one of the things that was interesting about that is that worship used to be more centralized in Jerusalem at that time, but as a result of that catastrophic destruction of the temple, it gets spread out so that it becomes in some ways, you might say like, more personalized in terms of religious observance and things like that as well as the other ways that that changed the Jewish religion at that time permanently as a result of this like, catastrophic destruction of something. So there’s something there as well that’s worth looking into and exploring more, especially from somebody that has more background in sort of the impact that that had on Jewish theology and history and things like that.
AC: Yeah. I mean, is that the Maccabean Revolt?
CB: No, this is the Second Temple Revolt. I don’t think that’s —
AC: Okay.
CB: — the same. If somebody in the comments knows and wants to…
AC: But that’s really interesting. And then quickly – because again our time is precious – Neptune in Aries has historically is very correlated with advances in engineering. Right? Not like, blue sky science breakthroughs, but engineering. We had during the one two times ago, we had the steam engine debut. And then during the last one, we had Alfred Nobel invent dynamite and patent it in 1867. We had the first underground railway open in London, 1863 – Neptune in Aries. First transcontinental railroad in the USA complete in 1869 – Neptune in Aries. The Suez Canal, which is a tremendous feat of engineering, opened in 1869 – Neptune in Aries. First mechanically powered submarine in the world, also Neptune in Aries. And James Clark Maxwell publishes his equations that quantify the relationship between electricity and magnetism, showing that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, which is very Neptune in Aries. Right? Like, the energy and power in light, which is everywhere but which is utterly insubstantial, right? That Neptune insubstantiality. There are probably dozens more, but it’s that like, the inventions or engineering feats that demonstrate a mastery of like, energy and power are part of Neptune in Aries. And then we also have a lot of sports history, which makes sense, right? Because that valorization of the heroic, when it doesn’t get pointed at literal battlefields, sits quickly comfortably in the sporting arena. And so the last time Neptune was in Aries, we had the first college football game played, the sport of skiing was invented. The Football Association was formed in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which that’s, you know, football – to Americans, soccer, right? Which paved the way for it becoming the world’s most dominant spectator sport. And then finally the first professional baseball team in the United States, 1969. That’s the Red Stockings, so you even have like, Aries red theming. And again, probably more, but.
CB: I love that because one of my news items for this year as I was researching it was that the first esports Olympics is supposed to take place this year in 2025 and is supposed to be held in Saudi Arabia. And I don’t think a date has been announced yet, but if that happens, that’ll be a funny recurrence, which is like, the beginning of electronic sports and like, gaming essentially as an Olympic sport, an Olympic competition.
AC: Yeah. It’s right in line. And that’s in some ways even more in line with the Neptune part —
CB: Right.
AC: — because Neptune doesn’t need things to be physical.
CB: Yeah. It can be digital, it can be fighting, battling in a different world, you know, or something like that.
AC: Yeah. As long as there’s like, the image and dynamic of contest, the experience of contest.
CB: Yeah. No, I mean, in some of those e-sports gaming, like, those guys really do train like, constantly, and it requires a very high level of skill, kind of like chess for example. And when they’ve done tests on people, they can see that they burn like, a huge amount of like, calories and energy just with the amount of like, focus and brain power it takes to do all that.
AC: And like traditional athletes, they also burn out young.
CB: Right. That it’s a sport for like, younger people that can maintain that level, but you can only maintain it for a certain amount of time.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on. If that wasn’t enough in terms of all those outer planets changing signs, we also have Saturn moving into Aries this year when it dips into Aries for the first time in May. And then it’s gonna not leave Aries fully until April of 2028. So that’s the beginning of a three year long transit of Saturn through that sign. It’s kind of a tricky sign, because Aries is traditionally said to be the sign of Saturn’s fall or depression where it has challenges like, functioning the way that Saturn likes to function or functioning in a way that’s natural or easily expressed for Saturn, I think, is one way of putting it.
AC: Yeah. You know, I sat down and tried to write out the contrast and like, the reasons and the arenas where Saturn and the territory of Aries are at odds. Because this is something you see with all the falls or depressions is that the planet’s nature and motives and its job are so at odds with the nature of the sign. And so just on a very simple level, we have like, so Saturn is slow. Aries is explosively fast! Right? If you try to accomplish things that require slow explosively fast, you fail. If you try to do the fast things slow, you fail. Right? We also have a strong association in Aries with youth, right, and with that like, exuberance of energy. And Saturn is literally experience and old age, right? And so, you know, you get things – you get literal instances such as when the last emperor of China takes the throne in 1908, and he is two years old. Right? It’s like, oh, with that level of – like, you want somebody experienced, wise, patient, with non-reactive with good Saturnian judgement in that role, and you get a two-year-old who just made a poo poo. So that like, young versus old association. And then just in general like, patience versus spontaneity – neither of which is a negative quality, but when you are spontaneous in a realm that requires patience, you fail. And when you’re patient in a realm that requires like, quick reflexes and spontaneous reaction, you fail. And so that’s the situation with Saturn in Aries is you have to reconcile those two where one naturally hamstrings the other.
CB: Yeah. I mean, having a less than one-year-old now, what would your estimation be of putting him in charge of a country in a little bit? Would that be —
AC: Yeah, much less like, the most populous country on the globe. Yeah, I think he’s got a lot of energy, you know? I know —
CB: Okay, that’s good.
AC: — that’s important for a leader; he’s got a lot —
CB: Drive.
AC: — of energy!
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, drive, energy.
CB: He crawls around a lot.
AC: Oh, he’s fast. He zooms! I don’t know that he’s as —
CB: Not quite walking.
AC: Yeah, not quite. I don’t know that he’s as careful with his words as he would need to be. He’s very verbal, but you know, I don’t think he thinks about what he says a lot before he says it, and I think, you know, a thoughtful, measured tone is important if you were to be the emperor. But yeah, and then his ability to weigh his needs against the needs of others is a real problem. I don’t know that he’s gonna be able to do that very well as the emperor of, you know, several hundred million people.
CB: All right. Well, give him time. Let’s see —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — how he is in a few months after one or two more solar returns.
AC: Yeah, let’s get to that first anniversary.
CB: Age him up. So yeah, so the cautious and well-planned Saturn in a risk-taking and impulsive sign of Aries is tricky, at least at first, and that’s the difference between, you know, in… Yeah, the exaltation of Saturn in Libra versus its fall in Aries. I did find a great quote recently from a Saturn in Aries who has it ruling the Ascendant, which is Francis Ford Coppola. And in the movie he just released a few months ago, Megalopolis, he had this one quote that he kept repeating, and I thought it was so Saturn in Aries. He said, “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.” And I think that’s an amazing Aries and Saturn in Aries quote. Now of course, it’s a little tricky because, you know, that movie was like, bold and risk-taking, but it didn’t really do well. He did do some things that were like, innovative, but it also didn’t do well at the box office. He is saying, he’s trying to claim somewhat defensively that all of his movies are poorly received at first by critics but that they do well in the long run, so we’ll see if it’s better reviewed in the future. But I just thought that was such a striking quote that’s relevant for us this year when Aries is so prominent, not just in terms of mundane astrology and all the planets going through Aries, but also the Aries sector of each of our charts being activated, whatever house that is in our chart, that when we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free is a really interesting motto for that.
AC: That’s interesting. I would say that that’s a statement and that I don’t know if that should be a motto. But that’s definitely something people will think. Right? You know, and if we talk about taking leaps, that’s interesting in the context of discussing a planet’s fall.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Speaking of falls, and falls from grace, if we look back to the last time that Saturn was in Aries, we’re looking at the late ‘90s, right? And we’re looking at Bill Clinton’s second term in office, which was largely hamstrung by the controversy about his sexual misbehavior. Right? He spent a lot of that turn denying that he had sex “with that woman,” right? And this brings another – one, we see literally a fall in estimation as many people thought better of him than some of his actions revealed. But you know, so you have sometimes fallen planets literally show someone falling from grace. Also, it shows another very central theme in Saturn in Aries. So Aries is not only this energetic and impulsive place of Mars; it is the place where the Sun is at its greatest exaltation. And so what we have is a rough time for leaders or people who are in that place where the Sun is supposed to exalt. I would say yet another thing indicating difficulties for leaders, right? We’ve got a couple of them now. But so we have bad leaders, we have bad times even for good leaders, and then we also very often have a climate of serious anti-authoritarianism of a not acceptance of Saturnian structures, very often because those in charge – those in authority – are illegitimate, are seen as illegitimate in some ways, whether it’s because they’re a two-year-old emperor or because of misbehavior being exposed. But that combination of anti-authoritarian sentiment with problematic authority figures is something we see every time with Saturn in Aries.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I was looking through people that have Saturn in Aries, because one of the things is I kind of already see some of the people that it’s their first Saturn return, you can already see that Saturn return like, coming in really hot for the people in their mid- to late 20s right now that have Saturn in Aries. But I was looking back at my list of other people that have Saturn in Aries. One of them that I found that was interesting was George Washington, and I thought this was really interesting because he was, you know, a military general, and I think it’s really striking that so many of our presidents have been politicians, but our very first president was literally a military general that had led the country through the Revolutionary War, and that’s why he was, you know, given that position or held in such high esteem. But it also made it so that that initial role was one of Commander in Chief, and we still refer to that as the civilian head of the army. But his experience was actually very limited when he was made the head of the army in 1775, so it was interesting how he was still sort of thrust into that role due to a variety of role and still came out successful, but there was some stumbling at first. And I think that’s a common thing with planets that are in their fall or detriment is that there’s this initial awkwardness or stumbling or like, fumbling around, because they’re not inherently great at executing that topic or working in that environment. But in the long term, it can be something that the person can overcome through striving and through much determination and grit.
AC: Weah. Fallen planets have to work harder. Although that, I think, is a bit of a trap for Saturn in Aries. What I’ve seen with people who have the natal position is that they think – like, they think when something doesn’t work out, that they just didn’t try hard enough, which is a very Aries thing. Right? Just like, just more power. Like, if I just try harder. But often it’s actually a Saturnian thing. Actually, you need to be more patient. You have all the power in the world. Right? The energy is not lacking. There’s actually a little bit of timing and a little bit of patience would have changed the trajectory of that.
CB: Yeah. So there —
AC: Yeah, go ahead. I had another point, but I lost it.
CB: I’ve got some other people that are like, sort of like, intrepid explorers or people that are the first to boldly go where other people haven’t gone before. Albert Einstein is one of the most famous like, scientific examples of that who had a prominent Saturn in Aries and Aries stellium in the 10th house. But you also get people like Tony Hawk, the famous skateboarder and like, pioneer of setting up skateboarding, including setting up skateboarding as eventually like, a major – I think it’s actually like, an Olympic event at this point. You have other people, like I said, Francis Ford Coppola is a innovative filmmaker. You have Hunter S. Thompson, who was sort of like a adventurous journalist. You have George Carlin, who was like, a adventurous and somewhat fearless comedian. You also sometimes have the dark side of that where you have like, Joseph McCarthy had Saturn in Aries, and that whole era of McCarthyism, of like, basically like, doing witchunts in the 19 – what, like, ‘40s and ‘50s trying to root out —
AC: Early ‘50s.
CB: Early ‘50s.
AC: It was during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Libra.
CB: Right. And people, they were trying to like, root out communists, supposedly, in the government, but they were just accusing everybody and going way too far. You have, let’s see, Lee Harvey Oswald is another one. Margaret Atwood is a Saturn in Aries. Sometimes you have like, comedians – like, Will Ferrell I think is a good example of that and his kind of like, somewhat kinetic form of comedy. You also have Joe Rogan has Saturn in Aries, so he’s coming up on his Saturn return. Lilly Wachowski and what they did with like, The Matrix – what the Wachowski siblings did with The Matrix and their pushing filmmaking and trying new techniques. Like the thing they did with the 360 degree camera that nobody had ever done before. Let’s see, Bill Burr as kind of a gritty comic is a funny one. Zendaya. Chuck Norris is one in terms of martial arts. And then finally, Malala Yousafzai is also a Saturn in Aries, and her, you know, the intrepidness and fearlessness and courage that it takes in her case to, you know, try to teach young children and especially girls when in a area where they’re not allowed to receive normal education.
AC: So I would add the Great Gama to the Saturn in Aries natives. One thing that you see with a lot of Saturn in Aries stories in that there is a – and this is something you see with a lot of planets in fall – is that the person is starting from a disadvantaged, outsider, like, fallen position and has to fight for respect or fight to prove that what they have to say or their work or whatever their mission is is useful. Again, and you see a lot of people peaking early. Not everybody, but you do see a lot of the like, you know, they never do something more remarkable than what they did when they were 26. But I think the Great Gama is a really interesting example. For those who don’t know, you can google him; the Great Gama was an Indian wrestler from the period of time that Great Britain had India colonized. And so the Great Gama’s mission was in part to basically he traveled around the world and beat every wrestler in every country, and this was a period of time that was particularly difficult, obviously, for India being colonized. And so he took the stereotype of and the European belief in the inferiority of Indian people, especially physically, and proved it wrong. Right? He spent most of his life literally – and not proving them wrong by argument, but by literally traveling and wrestling into submission the argument that he and his people were weak and lesser. Right? And that’s like, not only is he Saturn in Aries, but he has a bunch of stuff – he has a stellium in Aquarius all ruled by that Saturn in Aries. And he’s, you know, it’s an Aries – he’s a figure who did so through physical contest. But yeah, the Great Gama was a, he was a unit. He was built different. There’s a lot of sort of archeology of “What was his training like?” that you can find on YouTube.
CB: I just remembered – I almost forgot one of my best ones for Saturn in Aries was the daredevil Evel Knievel had Aquarius rising and Saturn in the 3rd house of short distance travel. Speaking of when we leap into the unknown we prove that we are free, how much more of that can you get than literally like, riding a motorcycle down a ramp and then jumping over like, 20 buses as your regular thing?
AC: Yeah, and we were talking about this the other day. Like, there’s a lot of risk-taking during Saturn in Aries; there’s a lot of pretending that Saturn things don’t exist, or what if we just pretended that gravity wasn’t real? What if we pretended —
CB: Right.
AC: — what if we just pretended that consequences weren’t a thing?
CB: Yeah. Maybe our bones won’t break if we jump over that canyon!
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. There’s also Lucy Lawless – Xena: Warrior Princess – and that’s part of her like, entire Aries stellium, but it’s still a —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — interesting Saturn in Aries example. But then there’s also other ones you were speaking about like, rebelling against authority, and you have people like Timothy McVeigh, for example, is an example of a Saturn in Aries who did the Oklahoma City bombing. And then you also have people like Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was falsely imprisoned. I think he had it in the 9th house, and he was falsely imprisoned for years before eventually being exonerated and set free.
AC: Interesting.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So a few things that I wanted to mention – quick things about Saturn in Aries before we move on – is that it seems, the last four have been not particularly great for China. The last one in the late ‘90s was the easiest of those, but it was still jarring. It was the basically the capitalist pivot for China, the like, you know, we’re not gonna not do one-party system, but we’re gonna do a market economic system, which is a pretty jarring change of direction. The previous one in ‘67 to ‘69 oversaw the bloodiest and most chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution. The one previous to that in ‘37 to ‘39 was the disastrous invasion of China by Japan – disastrous for China. And then the previous one was when Prince Chun took the throne at two years old, which was between 1908 and 1910. And so this one – like, Saturn in Aries just seems to be not the best time for China. Very different —
CB: All right.
AC: — events, right, in each case, but you know, none of them particularly wonderful.
CB: Yeah. Well, that takes us into our next section, which is I wanted to talk about Saturn conjunct Neptune. And this is an aspect that’s coming into very close alignment this year. This is one of our most important signature aspects of the year, especially in the middle of the year, when Saturn and Neptune get within less than a degree of conjoining each other but don’t come into a full conjunction until early 2026. And this is an aspect that we’ve been talking about for a few years now because we predicted that we would start getting a sense of it and we’d start experiencing it as soon as those two planets went into the same sign once Saturn entered into Pisces in March of 2023, and that really has been the case. We’ve seen this intense buildup of that relationship between Saturn, which represents what’s real and like, cold, hard reality, and Neptune, which represents what’s not real or what’s illusory, and the tension between those two things becoming more and more intense since early 2023. This year, it’s going to reach a high point and a sort of fever pitch, especially in July when they get within a degree of each other and they both station that month.
So one of the things about that is that artificial AI-generated video has reached a turning point in the past few months where it can’t be distinguished from real. And some of this stuff I was seeing released by Google recently of a new AI generation model was so high quality that I realized what’s gonna happen during this conjunction in mid-2025 through early 2026 is that’s gonna be the turning point where the AI-generated video reaches a point where we can no longer really tell that it was AI-generated. And I think it’ll become commonplace at that point so it’s just something that we’ll take for granted from that point forward. But we’ll look back and we’ll realize it was accomplished at this conjunction this year and next year, and that we could see the buildup over the past two years where it’s just grown by leaps and bounds ever since Saturn went into Pisces and joined Neptune there.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And that brings up another general theme with Saturn-Neptune, which is ontological trouble. Just like, difficulty in knowing what’s real. And you know, because of technology, because of the changing world situation, because of the state of various philosophical paradigms, like, it’s just always a period where one, weird shit happens, and things that people didn’t expect. And it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not. You know, the… We have, and one thing that I’ve been focusing on recently that I’ve really been seeing is this quality of collapse with Saturn and Neptune, which is different, and I’m contrasting collapse versus like, losing after a long battle. Like, oh, the fortress is taken after a six-month siege versus the attackers come, approach the walls, and then the walls – suddenly the entire structure pancakes. The most dramatic and large-scale version of this sort of pancaking Saturn-Neptune thing was the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the last time Saturn conjoined Neptune, right? Which was not what anybody was expecting. Right? The two sides of the world had been preparing for an Armageddon battle and were armed for it for decades and decades, and it was just like, “No, we’re not doing that anymore.” Right? It was one, very confusing. What is going on? And two, just like, a collapse. And I’ve been thinking about this quality of collapse quite a bit in terms of the collapse of belief, right, and belief in a story. Saturn-Neptune shows us periods of time where everybody’s just kind of done investing in a particular story that they think describes the world or themselves. And as Chris said, we’ve been kind of leading up to this Saturn-Neptune conjunction via a shared copresence in Pisces for more than a year and a half now; we’re not there yet, but it’s coming. And so I was just thinking, I was like, you know, like, what does it mean when like, people’s belief in stories collapses? And it struck me that if you look at the storytelling organs in America – the nonfiction stories being the legacy media of news stations and newspapers – if you look at the storytelling apparatus of Hollywood and you look at what is now a very significant storytelling and story immersion medium, which is video games, there have been just epic failures and losses of money in all of those. And I was like, oh, that’s what it looks like when you have a story crisis. When you have a Saturn-Neptune story crisis, of course you’re going to see that in the storytelling business. And of course that never lasts, but it puts us in a sort of like, Road Warrior wasteland of meaning where it’s not – just because the old stories have collapsed, it doesn’t mean that new aren’t coming. But you have like, you know, for those of you who have seen Furiosa, you have the situation where you have comparing warlords and competing narratives. Like, you know, contesting to see who will get the belief, because it’s really who people will follow that determines who will rule the wasteland.
CB: Yeah, I like that. One of the things I’ll say is that Neptune, especially when we have a transit of it, one of the things that’s good to remember is sometimes Neptune has to build up an illusion first before it can remove it. And especially during the early phase of this transit with Neptune moving into a new sign, I think they’ll be the establishment of a lot of new illusions or beliefs that sound really good on paper, and that a lot of people buy into, but then may later turn out to be not as grounded or well-founded as we might think initially or we might feel. Sort of like thinking back to the Civil War and how everybody goes into that war sort of like, idealizing it and underestimating it or think it’s gonna be this little thing, and then just throughout the course of it, the brutality and the carnage and the reality of it eventually becomes clear and then everyone becomes disillusioned by it, essentially. And that’s a very common process with Neptune transits. So yeah, so the main themes for Saturn-Neptune are gonna be blurring the line between what is real versus what is not, like you said. Also the boundaries between things becoming blurred or unclear. The dissolution of established structures. And then also something you and I were talking about was the loss of faith in authority, I think, as being a potential theme as well. Because one of the things I was noticing is like, any time I go on social media, it seems like every major news story that comes out these days, people like, immediately jump into just putting forward these like, wild speculations about what the true story is underlying everything or like, questioning the narrative and saying that it doesn’t make sense and then providing this alternative thing that’s sometimes really wild and out there. And you pointed out, you said to me when I was mentioning that, that you felt like part of that was that there’s been a loss in faith and authority, and that’s what’s underlying everything. I thought that was a really interesting point.
AC: Yeah. Right. And especially – excuse me – people who have the authority, like, literally author to tell you what happened. Right? Like, if you don’t believe the official story, the more people don’t believe an explanation given. The greater the space that is left over, the vacuum of explanation which will inevitably be filled. Right? By, I don’t know, people on fuckin’ YouTube saying it was Saturn in Aries, that that’s why that happened. But by, you know, theory and explanation of all character and quality.
CB: Yeah. So I think there’s gonna be more polarization between on the one hand, a lot of people having a loss of faith or a move towards skepticism and skeptical thinking versus on the other hand people on the other side having this surge in religious thinking. So both simultaneous and seemingly contradictory rise in both religion as well as skepticism. And both sides actually becoming more militant with Saturn and Neptune in Aries. Like, Aries is a very militant sort of sign; it likes to fight. It likes to be combative. And I think of like, Neptune going in there is fighting for one’s beliefs, and sometimes people are fighting because they have like, a religious conviction about something. Other times, people are fighting because they have even a skeptical conviction of something. Like, you know, we’ve kind of fallen out of this as Saturn’s been in Pisces over the past decade, but the skeptical community used to be like, very militant and like, aggressive about going after people in order to promote what they thought was the true reality of things. And we could see a return to something like that as well.
AC: Yeah. Anything that – yeah, like, religion is sort of the best single example, but any worldview or sort of ideological system that, you know, people believe in subject to this Neptune-Saturn… More eager to invest, you know, to join forces, to join one of the warlords, one of the teams in an environment where there is a poverty of belief, where there is a scarcity of things to believe in, which is part of why the Mad Max imagery and metaphor of the wasteland I found particularly appealing. Because if you don’t join a team, right, then you’re not gonna get water. And all the teams are not just recruiting; they are enlisting, which is our Neptune in Aries thing. Right? Like, we have the – they’re trying to conscript. Right? It’s not, you know, why don’t you come hang out with us. It’s like, why don’t you fight for us? Right? And so that energy is very, it’s both Saturn in Aries and it’s Saturn and Neptune.
CB: Yeah. That makes me think of the last point I had about that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries is just the idea of like, fake news that sparks outrage or conflict or war, and the idea of potentially being led into something under false premises or something like that seems fitting with the symbolism.
AC: It certainly does.
CB: Yeah. And then the last point we were gonna mention here about Saturn-Neptune that we’ve talked about in previous episodes is just there’s a very close tie-in with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in Russian history. And I know that’s something that both you and Nick Dagan Best have talked about a lot, because Saturn-Neptune conjunctions have coincided with so many important turning points in Russian history, and the last one, you know, happened in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when there was the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn that saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And that’s our most recent reference point, but it actually goes much further back in Russian history, right?
AC: Yeah. It goes back to the early 1880s, and then it breaks off. Super quick – the one in the early ‘50s is the death of Stalin and subsequent de-Stalinization. Because what you get for the last four in a row is you get a leadership change, and then you get a real pivot in the direction of Russian internal and external policy right after the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So dissolution of the Soviet Union. Death of Stalin and de-Stalinization. Previous one in the late teens is literally the Russian Revolution, right? Regime change, change in direction. And then the one previous to that, which begins the string, is the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second. Alexander the Second was a huge liberator and liberalizer. He was responsible for granting the serf class in Russia rights like they hadn’t had in a long time, and there was a reactionary assassintion attempt against him. They basically threw a bag of dynamite under his carriage and blew him up. And then when the next tsar took the throne, Russia went in a much more, in a very conservative direction and sort of doing pogroms willy-nilly was a radical pivot. And so I went and checked the previous two, right? There were two others that happened in the 19th century. And neither one of them ends up with regime change; neither one ends up with even changing leaders within the dynasty. And so there are important moments in Russian history that are Saturn-Neptune conjunction based, but they don’t give us the radical shift that we’ve gotten since about 1880. Since about 1880, it’s four in a row, is big shift, leader change, regime change. And so that’s as long as that pattern goes. But to give an example of how it’s still important, during the last Saturn-Neptune Aries conjunction in 1703, about a month after the conjunction by degree, the city of Saint Petersburg is founded with an almost perfect Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Not only is Saint Petersburg a major Russian city, it was the capital until the revolution in 1918. And so like, the capital of Russia was founded under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And I thought that was just extraordinary.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible, that history. And then of course, you know, what I’ve noticed is that Vladimir Putin was born on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction back in the 1950s. And so what happens is when a person is born under a certain alignment, it tends to mean that some of the most important turning points in their life will then happen the subsequent times that that same alignment repeats in the future. So then this should be a really important turning point for him in 2025 and 2026. There’s also some stuff in Russian history about this specific Venus retrograde in Aries that’s about to take place in the spring that we’ll also talk about that’s very relevant, but we’ll save that ‘til later.
And the last thing to mention here is that it wasn’t just Vladimir Putin is not the only world leader who was born on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, but the head of China right now – Xi Jinping – was also born on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So that implies that that’s also an important turning point for him, this conjunction that’s coming up, as well. So yeah, that’s just wild. You know, world leaders being tied in with major alignments happening this year.
AC: Yeah, it’s huge. And then the last thing that I have on Saturn and Neptune conjunct in Aries – in 1703, which really brings together a lot of the tings we were saying about the valorization of heroism and sacrifice, is the very famous incident of the 47 ronin occurred as Saturn and Neptune are closing in on perfect conjunction in Aries. 47 ronin was an incident where basically one lord is horribly insulted and treated badly by another, and he draws – this is some Saturn in Aries shit, or some Neptune in Aries shit – draws a blade on him, but in the emperor’s palace it’s forbidden. And then this lord is executed. All of his loyal retainers, his samurai, 47 of them wait – this is Saturn – wait carefully for almost two years, and then launch a surprise assault on the castle of the person that baited their lord into his destruction. They behead him; they walk through the streets. They place his head upon the grave of their lord, and then all turn themselves in because they’ve done their duty. They aren’t starting a revolution. And it becomes a thing of national interest because people are so moved by the dedication and heroism of these samurai to their lord that they don’t want them to be executed, but they’ve just gone and executed someone. And so the compromise that is come to is that they will be allowed to honorably commit seppuku. And so with Saturn and Neptune less far – like, I think a quarter of a degree apart, the 47 ronin – or actually it’s 46 of them at this point – all commit ritual suicide simultaneously on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And this is a story that’s been retold in plays, in novels, in films, in Japanese history. There’s an awesome movie that came out not very long ago. But it’s like, the like, story of heroic martial self-sacrifice for what was seen as a very universally revered cultural ideal. And it was actually just —
CB: Heroic —
AC: Yeah.
CB: Heroic self-sacrifice. Like, that’s a really good core keyword.
AC: Yeah. And the fact that like, it stuck as a story. Like, not only is it a pretty fucking dramatic thing – you imagine 46 samurai simultaneously committing seppuku to the, you know, as much in front of the nation as you could be at that point. It also made me think about the recent execution of the CEO by Luigi Mangione and the public reaction to that, which really feels like a sign of things to come. The like, oh you broke the law – like, it’s literally murder breaking the law, but people were like, oh, but that was so righteous because there’s been a lot of support for that action. Because, you know, the ronin were basically – they were acting as vigilantes. But like, but enacting that heroic martial self-sacrificial ideal. So I feel like that really stitches a lot of things together, a lot of the themes.
CB: Yeah. I like that you mentioned the head – that they cut the head off, because I think that’s very relevant for the Aries symbolism. Because of course, in astrology, Aries is the head. Like, literally the body – it’s the top of your body and it’s the top of in the beginning of everything, but it’s also the part that leads everything else. And I think we’ve seen over the past year as we’ve been having these eclipses in Aries, we’ve had instances where the head of the country has either died or become eclipsed in different ways. Like, Biden stepping down, for example, or the head of the president of Iran was died under mysterious circumstances. And there’s something about Aries and the notion of leadership, both as a quality but also the symbolic significance of somebody who acts as the head of something, and that being a real focal point here as we get all of this energy of surrounding Aries coming up this year in terms of leaders, which tangibly can mean world leaders, but can also mean the leader or the head of other things as well.
AC: Hundred percent.
CB: Perfect. All right, with that, on that note, let’s take a little break.
I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Honeycomb Collective personal astrological almanacs and calendars, which are personalized to your actual natal chart. So most astrological calendars only show the mundane astrological transits that apply to everybody, but each Honeycomb calendar is uniquely programmed to include your personal natal transits to your actual birth chart. So your calendar can also be customized to any timezone in the world so that it’s not just like, set to Eastern time or something like that, that way you’ll always know what time the planets are aligned relative to your actual location where you’re living on earth in that year.
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And yeah, I just got my own calendar from Honeycomb just the other day and put it up on my wall so that it’s easy to just look and see what the exact transits are to my natal chart any day of the year, and it’s kind of nice as a complement to other astrology calendars like the ones we sell on our website which just show the general astrological weather, because it’s always important to see how the general astrological weather is actually impacting you personally through your birth chart.
AC: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s a good practical reference tool, and more than that, it’s really fantastic educational resource. Because there’s learning, like, the rules and meanings of all the things in astrology. But the process of watching it happen and unfold, watching, you know, Mars conjoin your natal Sun, watching Venus go over your Moon, whatever the transit is – watching these things happen and knowing what’s happening while they’re occurring is absolutely irreplaceable as part of one’s astrological education. You learn so much from that ambient awareness that the calendars are a perfect tool for cultivating.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Because astrology is, it’s that balance between looking at the general alignments and the weather for everybody, but also your personal astrological weather and how it’s actually hitting your chart and finding the balance between those two things.
So yeah, so thanks to the Honeycomb Collective for sponsoring this episode, and definitely check out and get a copy of one of their calendars, either PDF or printed version, at Honeycomb.co.
All right, we’re now gonna transition into doing a chronological breakdown of the year starting with the first half of 2025 and moving roughly still looking at sort of big picture and maybe medium picture things instead of getting too, too granular. But we’re gonna start going through a little bit more chronologically in this section through the first half of the year in order. And then in the next part, we’re gonna go through the second half of the year. So this is a good time to show first off the planetary aspects of the year again, just to give you an idea of where we start off with and what some of the aspects are towards the beginning of the year. But the main aspect that I wanna open with talking about is one that’s kind of a carryover from last year, from the end of 2024, which is the Mars retrograde which we’re right in the middle of still as the year opens, where on January 1st, Mars is retrograde in Leo because it stationed retrograde at six degrees of Leo on December 6th. And it’s gonna retrograde back into Cancer before eventually stationing direct on February 23rd at 17 degrees of Cancer.
So we start the year with this Mars retrograde period, but if you count the signs that Mars is transiting through – because one of the ways of looking at retrogrades is that they’re like extended Mars transits through one or two signs in your chart – Mars isn’t gonna be done transiting these two signs of Cancer and Leo in our charts until June. So it’s not until June 17th that Mars finally departs from Leo and moves into Virgo and ends this entire sequence. And it’s not until mid-April, April 17th, when Mars departs from Cancer and moves into Leo. So one of the ways of conceptualizing this is we’ve got a long Mars transit through those two signs of the zodiac that goes through the entire first half of the year.
AC: Yeah, the Mars retrograde cycle is absolutely the most impactful thing happening as 2025 gets going. We actually don’t get to the official midpoint of the Mars retrograde until January 15th, which is the exact opposition of the Sun and Mars, and that’s gonna be at about 26 Cancer for Mars and 26 Capricorn for the Sun. And that Sun-Mars opposition, which is the heart of any Mars retrograde, tracks to the point where Mars is nearest to the earth and also when it’s brightest in the sky and also when it rises like the Full Moon exactly as the Sun sets. And so unlike the more common retrogrades of Mercury or Venus, where the planet disappears for a time, Mars is actually hyper visible during its retrograde. It’s literally close, hot, and bright. And this tracks with a lot of the meaning. During the retrograde, Mars doesn’t invert becoming Mars; in many ways, Mars becomes more martial and more unrestrained or out of control.
CB: Which we saw. Like, can I just say, like —
AC: Go for it.
CB: — what the hell? The astrology and the news stories when Mars was stationing in early December was wild. Like, everybody who watched the podcast was blown away by the amount of stuff that happened. Like, first there was in Korea there was the attempt to implement martial law that was reversed within 24 hours. There was the Assad regime fell suddenly in Syria on December 8th, which was right around the Mars station. There was also the health insurance CEO that was assassinated in New York just before the Mars station. There was a major election thing happening in Romania. The French government collapsed in early December through a no confidence vote. It was a wild like, news week in that early part of December that really was focused on that Mars station in Leo.
AC: Yeah. Mars retrogrades are wild. And you know, again, the Mars retrograde’s all about the Sun and Mars coming into opposition, being on opposite sides of the earth. And so a lot of the meaning of the Mars retrograde can be extracted from that. If, you know, the Sun on a personal level is your conscious identity and how you like to do things and how, you know, how you think of yourself and who you try to be, Mars opposite that is feelings of anger, of wanting to act, you know, of being triggered by situations and tempting one to act in a way that’s out of alignment with how you’re trying to be. It shows on the – like, to take a couple of those examples, it often shows military against whatever the civilian government is or tension between the two. Right? Like, an attempt to do martial law where the military gets to be in charge. And yeah, you just have that, like, if the Sun has this sort of temperate conscious action sort of set of meanings, and Mars retrograde is like, much more reactive and chaotic, and so there’s a huge tension there. Sometimes that can be educational where it’s like, oh, actually, I need to not restrain myself in this situation. Usually I’m too controlled here. And so it may be useful or good in some ways. But then more commonly, the Mars acts up and you see people acting, losing their temper or doing aggressive actions in such a way that is out of alignment with how you think of them. And then you also just see like, more out of control shit when you look out into the world of Mars in action. When you look at military situations, when you look at the Mars retrograde part, it’s almost never things going according to plan. There’s a lot of everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face while Mars is retrograde.
CB: Totally. That’s a great saying. So what’s unique about this is – and I meant to say that we’re recording this on Friday, December 20th, ‘24. We started at like, a quarter after 11 AM in Denver, just for the record for news purposes. But when we open the year, Mars is in the early degrees of Leo opposing Pluto. So we’re in the midst of this Mars-Pluto opposition that’s kind of nasty and tense that we open the year with that’s very problematic. But then immediately within days of opening the year, Mars retrogrades back into Cancer, so it’s returning back to a sign and it’s taking us back to something that happened last fall when Mars was transiting through Cancer back between September 4th and November 3rd, and some actions or events or circumstances in our lives as well as in world events that took place at that time that now we’re returning back to and revisiting for some reason.
So I was trying to think back to some of the stuff that was happening then, and one of the things that we noted in some of the forecasts back then as it was happening was Mars in Cancer brought up a lot of like, ideas of like, nativism, of protectionism, but also even some things involving like, racism over the course of the fall. And I know there was some stuff that was promised during the presidential campaign about things Trump planned to do in terms of things like deportations or other stuff like that that I wonder if doesn’t get revisited and then potentially enacted during some of this period, which is like, the first four months of the year with Mars in Cancer, and some of the conflicts and things that might arise as a result of that.
AC: Yeah. With Mars in Cancer in general has this sort of hyper protective, potentially over-reactive quality. I told you about what I was thinking about when Mars in Cancer went over my Ascendant; I became paranoid about security for my house. And I was like, oh my god, the animals and the murderers and all the bad people – you know, like, I had to catch my train of thought because it was right on my Ascendant, and that like, oh my god, you know, I need to protect my family. That’s the Mars in Cancer, and there’s, you know, in essence there’s nothing wrong with that. There are several things right with that. But it’s a line of reaction and thought that very easily goes too far and can get you bad results.
CB: Right. Yeah. The way I was trying to summarize it was that Mars in Cancer can be sometimes when we get overly defensive about protecting what is familiar. And sometimes that can be about where you’re from and sometimes fighting for it. One of the funny manifestations of this that happened over the fall when Mars first went into Cancer is Kendrick Lamar, who has Mars in Cancer in the 10th house, it was announced that he would be headlining and doing the halftime show at the Super Bowl, which is a huge deal. But then there was a controversy on social media because there was another rapper who was from the city that the Super Bowl’s gonna be in – Lil Wayne – in New Orleans, and people were saying he should have gotten it and that Kendrick shouldn’t because he’s from Los Angeles. And so there was like, this fight and this dispute and controversy over whether he should be able to do that, to put on that performance based on where he’s from or where he’s not from, and tensions literally over people’s places of origin.
AC: Yeah, hey, that’s my hometown. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: That’s a perfect example.
CB: Yeah. So that’s something that might come up. I did notice one of the things I had talked about previously is this Mars retrograde cycle goes back in our history in like, 79 year increments. And 79 years ago was the year Trump was born in the same year as this same Mars retrograde cycle in Cancer and Leo. And then 79 years before that was right after the Civil War when they passed the 14th Amendment, and 79 years before that was when the states were trying to ratify the Constitution and like, fighting over it and fighting over – one of the things they were fighting over is whether to really create like, a federal government versus having states in control of things and the tension between those two things is very much tied in with this Mars retrograde. But one thing I didn’t know is that the 14th Amendment that was passed after the Civil War, one of the things that it did is it included the birthright amendment that made it so that people who were born in the US are natural citizens. And I thought that was really interesting because this is something that’s been like, in the news recently because Trump is claiming that he wants to repeal that or make it so that that’s not a thing anymore. And that sounds like, very far-fetched and I don’t know that he’s gonna be able to accomplish that, but I was just very interested in the fact that it’s come up or it’s even been floated as an idea during this time.
AC: Right, because its cycle is recurring.
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: Yeah, that’s… Yeah, and that’s… Yeah. Again, the Mars in Cancer – yeah, like, it’s the desire to protect, right, what’s inside the boundaries and what’s familiar and often familial, like, going awry is such a Mars in Cancer theme.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And you know, this is also – this is the sign of Mars’s fall. That’s actually one of the things that’s interesting is that Mars starts off the year in its fall, like, stationing in the sign of its fall, opposite to the sign of its exaltation. And similarly Saturn will go into the sign of its fall this year as well, so both of the malefics are in signs this year in which they do not function as well, especially initially. And for Mars, it’s like, Mars’s impulsiveness is exacerbated by the changeability of the Moon being in Cancer, the sign that’s ruled by the Moon, and that’s often where some of those issues arise for Mars in that sign.
AC: Yeah. And with planets in their fall, it’s not that they’re weak necessarily. It’s that the environment of being in fall means that they’re very easily confused about how to act in order to achieve the goal. Right? So Mars in Cancer wants safety for the family. It’s like, well, if everybody in the family has a loaded gun at every point of the day, then we’re all safe, right? And now the family is less safe.
CB: Right. If the two-year-old has a gun.
AC: Yeah! Like, the best way for me to protect Lucian is to get him the most potent firearms and the sharpest blades legally allowable. No.
CB: Well, you know what they say. They say like, the only thing that can stop a bad baby with a gun is a good baby with a gun.
AC: Don’t tell him that once Neptune enters Aries. His chart is too primed to believe it. But this is just the function of falls. Like, poor Venus in Virgo is like, “How do we make things beautiful? We make them perfect!” Perfection is a trap. Right? So nothing’s good enough. Right, so nothing’s safe enough with Mars in – or you know, the trap with Mars in Cancer is nothing’s safe enough. Right? And the trap with Saturn in Aries, which I’ve seen with a lot of the people born with it, is nothing’s ever under control enough; I’m never disciplined enough. I just need to go even harder. There’s always a like, there’s a trap in each of the falls that you can learn to recognize and not fall down into. Like, it’s literally like, a tiger trap. It’s like a piece of floor that falls away and then you’re stuck in a pit. And so they can be navigated, but you need to recognize that they’re there both natally and, you know, temporarily.
CB: Yeah. And I think, you know, Mars in Cancer – the other reason why it gets in trouble is just because when it’s in Capricorn, its exaltation, it’s restrained by Saturn, but also it has the long term planning of Saturn to reduce Mars’s impetuous impulses and to help it think more long term and strategically. But in Cancer, we’re more inclined to react emotionally or react impulsively to our first initial response, even if that’s not like, the most strategic or like, long term thinking that we could do. And that’s where sometimes we get into trouble when it comes to Mars in Cancer and Mars especially when it’s stationing around in Cancer in February. So you know, Mars retrogrades so it can be – as I talked about in the year ahead horoscopes where I went through and I did horoscopes for each rising sign, and everybody can go listen to those to have these transits personalized for you based on the houses they’re transiting in your chart. So for some people, it is experienced as like, a point of irritation, of frustration, of challenges coming up in that area of your life. But for other people, Mars retrogrades is like an extended expenditure of energy in that area of your life. But it can be one where you’re expending energy to good effect and good and productive things can come of it. And I’ve noticed with retrogrades, sometimes they are backwards looking and they harken to the past or they bring people from your past back into your life. So Austin, you famously had the phrase we used in the last forecast episode, which is the duderang and like, you know, men from your past or other people from your past coming back into your life. And I think that’s sometimes a theme with these retrogrades just as they are for Venus retrogrades. But also sometimes retrogrades lay a new foundation for the future, which you then will revisit at future points as well.
AC: Yeah. Well, and when a martial figure comes back into your life, do you then accept them back in and now they’re present again? Do you reject them again but this time finally and with closure? Right? The way that you deal with the past that’s returned sets the precedent that will be revisited next time. And I just want to give a brief hallelujah to what you were saying about the long, slow, extended expenditure of effort that Mars retrograde sometimes describe. Because Mars is so slow. So like, it takes so long to get through that set of degrees that sometimes we find ourselves in a like, grinding campaign where effort needs to be poured in and poured in to get something done. I find myself in one of those during this Mars retrograde, so I’m in a Mars-ruled year. It’s going back and forth over my Ascendant. And boy, is there a lot to do and has there been a lot to do.
CB: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. I also find – and I emphasized this in some of the horoscopes, but sometimes because it’s crossing two signs, it may connect those two houses in your life so that there’s overlap between those topics at this time. So that’s something to think about. This is gonna be really intense, especially for the first four months of the year when Mars is just hanging out in Cancer for the entirety of that time. There’s gonna be certain peaks during the course of that, like in mid-February when it actually stations as the next most important turning point. But even —
AC: Oh, I would add one to that – one in January when Mars is exactly opposite Sun and there’s a Full Moon basically on Mars a day and a half later. January 13th to 15th is very peak Mars, and you will see it with the Full Moon.
CB: Yeah. And that’s, of course, at the beginning of the month we get the second Mars-Pluto opposition, which is also potentially problematic although it was interesting that we ended up seeing that as being people exercising power and power plays behind the scenes. Like, especially with some of the billionaires and some of the stuff that was going on there. I saw this social media thing of like, Jeff Bezos visiting Trump the other day in Florida, like, Mar-a-Lago, and I thought that was so interesting just because, you know, right before the election, he – Bezos, who owns the Washington Post – famously forced the editorial team to not issue an endorsement at the last minute during that Mars-Pluto opposition. And it seemed very interesting in terms of whatever sort of power plays were going on behind the scenes at the time as well as whatever fears or threats or other things that were like, swirling in terms of like, if you don’t do this – or if you do do this – like, what will the outcome be?
AC: Yeah. The first portion of this Mars cycle seemed to, or very neatly enclosed the shifting political allegiances of the plutocracy.
CB: Right. The plutocracy, and now the oligarchy as another fun word that we’re all using and getting used to in our new era of whatever we’re entering into here. And of course on January 20th, we have the Sun-Pluto conjunction and inauguration day, which we just talked about as well, which is also the beginning of a new era for the executive branch and for the government and everything else over the next four years. It’s the birth chart for the next four years of Trump’s presidency and the focal point is very much that Sun-Pluto conjunction.
All right, so one thing I did wanna mention here is I did wanna give an electional chart for January, because usually I do this each month where I give you one auspicious electional chart for the month ahead, and even though this is a year ahead forecast episode, I’d still like to highlight the best chart for January for those that are looking for it. And this is the chart that Leisa and I found that we highlighted as our best chart for January, and it takes place on January 10th, 2025, starting around 9:30 AM with early Pisces rising.
So if you cast a chart for your location with roughly that time, just adjust it until the Ascendant is at somewhere in early Pisces, and you should get a chart that roughly looks like this. So this is our most fortunate date of the month, and with this chart, it has Pisces rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is located in Gemini in the 4th whole sign house in a day chart. And what’s nice about it is there’s a very auspicious conjunction between the Moon and Jupiter that’s forming in Gemini that day where the Moon is actually separating from a square with Venus, which is exalted in Pisces in the first, and then it’s applying to a conjunction with Jupiter in Gemini. So Venus is also exalted in the first house on the Ascendant. This chart does have a little bit of space; it’s as far away as we can get from the Mars-Pluto opposition which went exact the previous week so that there’s a little bit of distance, certainly by sign, between Mars and Pluto. But it’s also before the Sun-Mars opposition gets super super close as well. So we squeezed in our best chart of the month here.
So excellent chart; very 4th house focused, which on the one hand could be things about like, the home and the living situation or the family. But it can also be about laying a solid foundation for something also at the same time or doing things in which you are sort of acting and you’re in control of things, but you’re sort of like, behind the scenes rather than being out front. So last month, we used the analogy of like, the director of a film, for example, being very 4th house-focused in that they’re not the person like, on the screen, and yet it’s still their vision that’s still being sort of brought to fruition. So that is our best electional chart for January, and we have several other electional charts that we’re about to release in our electional astrology podcast for the month, which you can get access to through our page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. I think Leisa and I are gonna record that this week, and it’ll be out soon sometime in the next several days. So you can get access to that there. And then, of course, if you’re looking for more long-term elections, you can check out our year ahead electional astrology report for 2025, which we just released and are doing that 20 percent off sale on all the way until January 7th. So you can get that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report.
All right, so back to January. Mars retrograde really dominating the first four months of the year, especially January and February. Now we need to transition into talking about —
AC: Yeah. Really especially January and February because we don’t have anything else that outshines them during that first portion. So my nickname for January and February is the not-so-calm before the storm. The storm being March and April.
CB: Yeah. We were trying to come up with a name, but I think “the storm” is a good one for what happens in March and April. I think every astrologer I’ve talked to or any astrologer that’s done a forecast or anything, everybody’s eyes keep coming to March and April as just being the craziest part of the year where there’s so much happening in Aries especially as a sign that it looks like that’s when some of the most pivotal events are gonna take place in 2025 is gonna be in the March and April time frame.
AC: Yeah. And there’s just as much happening in Pisces. And it’s all right around the border between the two, and literally back and forth across the border. Yeah, somebody in the comments says, “March madness.” I had in my notes, “March madness,” but like, “this time it’s real.” Because it’s not only cyclonic and active and high winds and confusing, but there’s something carnival-esque about it. Like, it’s not just shit; it’s a shit show. And so my mind kept going to the Gathering of the Juggalos, very dark carnival imagery. But we decided to not use that as a title. But like, there is that energy. Like, there’s confusion. There’s like, strong emotions. It’s very, it’s bright and bold colors. Right? This is not like, a quiet, grim shift. Like, this is going to be very loud, very colorful, and very confusing.
CB: Yeah. So let me give an overview of what happens here. So first, Venus goes retrograde in the sign of Aries on March 1st, and then it retrogrades back into Pisces before stationing direct on April 12th. In the same time frame, the final solar eclipse takes place in Aries on March 29th, and that is the final eclipse and the culmination of a series of eclipses in Aries and Libra that have been taking place going back to October of 2023, and a sequence of major beginnings and major endings that have been happening in both the Aries sector of our charts but also in terms of world events that have been so notable over the past year or so since that time culminates with this eclipse on March 29th. And then bizarrely, Neptune enters Aries the very next day on March 30th. So it’s like, there’s an eclipse in that sign, then all of a sudden, this outer planet that hasn’t been there in more than a century just walks into Aries the very next day and activates that sign. And then if that wasn’t enough, Mercury’s also retrograde; it starts a retrograde on March 15th in Aries, and then it retrogrades back to Pisces where it stations direct on April 7th. And then if that wasn’t enough, all of this dust is kicked up during this time in March and April, and then a month later, Saturn also moves into Aries on May 24th. So there’s just so much crazy astrology happening. It’s happening in the Aries especially sector, but also Pisces. But this is gonna be the pivotal turning point this year that a lot of other things are gonna flow from.
AC: Or react to, or try to figure out how to deal with whatever happens March, April. But yeah —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — Venus retrograde —
CB: It’s like a —
AC: — Mercury retrograde, Neptune ingress, and yeah. And eclipses. All not only at the same time, but in the same really quite small part of the zodiac. Everything going back and forth between the beginning of Aries and the end of Pisces.
CB: It’s like a cascade event. It’s like, one thing happens, and it sets off this cascade of a bunch of other events for the rest of the year. I think that’s what we’re looking at here, and it’s certainly gonna be at least one major geopolitical event is gonna take place, but there may be multiple in like, different areas happening at the same time in the same way that we saw that Mars retrograde station coincide with like, events in a few different countries that were all Mars-related in early December.
AC: Yeah. I think it’ll be a web or network of things. It’ll be at least two or three big things that all intersect strangely. And one thing about the nature of this with all of the retrogradation involved is that the way – like, it’s going to look like it’s going one way this week, and then the next week, it looks like it’s going a different way, and the next week, like, it’s not going to be clear. It’s not like, well, a nuclear weapon was dropped and so that’s a thing that happened; let’s react to it. It’s gonna be, “Oh my god, it looks like it’s going this direction – oh, it’s going the other direction.” There’s going to be whiplashing around that with all the big events that take place during this time. But the result, whatever the resulting mess is – and it will probably be quite a mess – rather than leaving one ordered piece, it will leave a series of, a set of chaotic situations, and that will set the tone for a lot of the rest of the year, as Chris said. We’ve got some other big stuff later in the year, but without a doubt, top one – it’s going to have to fight for top one or two biggest moments in 2025.
CB: For sure. Yeah. And it really centers on eclipse season, where we have the Aries eclipse at the very end of the month, but that’s actually two weeks after the first eclipse, which is a Virgo eclipse that takes place on March 14th. And the Venus retrograde is already started at the beginning of the month, and the day after the Virgo eclipse, on March 15th, the Mercury retrograde starts. So eclipse season is gonna begin about a week before the first eclipse, so that means maybe around March 7th or so. And then eclipse season, as we’ve seen over the past few years, always extends at least a week after the second eclipse. So that means that the eclipse energy is gonna take us from March 29th all the way into like, at least April 5th or so if not later is a time frame that we’re looking at. And one of the things that we should focus on now as the first thing to focus on in that craziness is the Venus retrograde that takes place during that time.
So here is a diagram that Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co who does the Honeycomb calendars and almanacs designed for me is this beautiful Venus retrograde graphic, because one of the things when you – again, we were talking about Mars and how there’s the Mars retrograde period itself, which is always the most intense part of a retrograde, especially to the two stationary degrees. In this instance, it’s like, Venus stationing retrograde at 10 Aries on March 1st and then eventually stationing direct on April 12th at 24 degrees of Pisces. So that’s the most intense part, but in our personal lives, Venus retrogrades are also experienced as an extended Venus transit through two signs of the zodiac in this instance. And when you expand it to that full period and realize that this is just a super long Venus transit through two zodiac signs, you realize that Venus actually goes into Pisces for the first time on January 2nd at the very beginning of the year, enters its pre-retrograde shadow period at 24 degrees of Pisces on January 28th, goes into Aries for the first time on February 4th, then it goes retrograde on March 1st, retrogrades back into Pisces on March 27th, stations direct in late Pisces conjunct Saturn on April 12th, then going direct, reenters Aries on April 30th, exits its post-retrograde shadow period at 10 Aries on May 16th, and then finally does not leave Aries and departs into Taurus on January 5th. So that means we’re experiencing this super long Venus transit in the Aries and Pisces sector of our chart for the entire first half of the year practically speaking, which is interesting because then it kind of overlaps with the Mars retrograde period and there’s also kind of a hand off, because just as Mars is stationing direct in mid-February in Cancer, Venus then goes retrograde a couple weeks later on March 1st in Aries, so there’s this —
AC: It’s actually less than a week. It’s the direct station for Mars is the 23rd, and then Venus gives us like, five or six days and stations retrograde on March 1st. So we have —
CB: Oh wow.
AC: — we have basically no time off.
CB: Yeah. There’s something about that. There’s like, an interchange between those two energies. And one of the things I was thinking of is that we were talking a little bit about how the Mars in Leo energy, the Mars retrograde in Leo energy was giving this like, masculine sort of resurgence type energy in that time, which was so different compared to the Venus retrograde in Leo that occurred last summer in the summer of 2023 when like, the Barbie movie came out and you had those huge concerts by like, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. But then we have this Venus retrograde energy that comes in at the tail of the Mars retrograde, and that kind of gives me this like, battle of the sexes sort of like, tension energy to me for some reason. And it also reminds me of how eight years ago, Venus was retrograde in Aries and Pisces when Trump was first inaugurated. And at that time, there was actually a lot of like, women’s rights protests that started happening around that time which eventually like, later in the year segued into the Me Too movement, which started in October of that year. So there’s some overlap there in similarity here with Venus and it’s almost like it’s reacting or it’s being touched off by the Mars retrograde that preceded it.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And also, it’s Venus stationing retrograde in a Mars-ruled sign. Right? So the expression of anger and forceful expression in general of Venusian concerns is always going to be a part of that cycle, but especially this year, right, where not only do we have what is – excuse me – not only do we have Mars always ruling Aries and therefore being part of the Venus retrograde in Aries, but we also have the hand off, as you said, between the two retrograde cycles. And then, you know, that Mars in Cancer, just barely stationed, will be the planet ruling everything in Aries – the Venus retrograde, Mars retrograde, Neptune’s ingress, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s, yeah, they’re unpleasantly woven together.
CB: Yeah. Venus in Aries is not like, a quiet Venus. Like, that is a loud, that is a forthright, that is a bold Venus that’s like —
AC: Direct.
CB: — acting direct, yeah, that’s a really good term. So it’s like, we’ll still get some of the normal Venus retrograde stuff, especially in our individual lives, where you have like, relationships that come back from the past or you have a reviewing of past events, especially ones that occurred eight years ago or sometimes 16 years ago or sometimes – what is it – 32 years ago?
AC: Yeah.
CB: So you have that cycle, of course, of retrogrades are backwards looking and they bring things back from the past so that sometimes it can be about like, reviewing and revising even relationships in the present and thinking about what sort of foundation you wanna lay for the future. So it can act as an important turning point both for past relationships as well as present ones.
AC: Yeah. Venus retrogrades always try to pull a person into a deep review of what and who they want, whether they still want them, what – you know, like, all quests of desire. Where it’s like, oh, I worked so hard to be in this relationship; is this where I wanna be? Or, you know, I’ve been thinking I don’t wanna do this; actually, I’m gonna change my mind about it. It’s like, this deep review of what do I really want and who do I really wanna be here with? Like, what is – there’s a searching for on an emotional level an unambiguous yes. Right? Where sometimes we just get in the habit of being around who we’re being with. But a Venus retrograde pulls people to find the unambiguous part underneath just pattern. The like, oh, I’m not just doing this because I’ve been doing this, but it’s because I’m passionate about it. And so there’s often an uncomfortable rediscovery of passion or what a person really wants and also really doesn’t want on a personal level.
CB: For sure. Yeah. So sometimes during the process of that being an important turning point for relationships, there can be… Like, retrogrades do things unconventionally, things that are different that stand out or go against the grain. I think that’s even more so for Venus retrograde in Aries. There can also be delays and postponements that come up as a result of the slowness of Venus. Sometimes there can be scandals during Venus retrogrades, especially a Venus retrograde in Aries. One of the keywords my friend Nick Dagan Best used for this is “provocative art and culture” as a major theme for this specific retrograde in Aries as a theme that comes up as well.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And the Pisces side of that, right, is a very natural sign for Venus, and so we’re, you know, this retrograde where we’re gonna see Venus spending so much time on both sides of this is like, the exalted side of Venus or the place in which Venus is exalted where all the Venusian things are very easy and natural, and then the Aries side where they express in an unconventionally direct and forceful manner, and going back and forth between those and trying to reconcile them as a lot of March and April is gonna ask us to both choose between and try to reconcile the Piscean and the Aries-ish. I’m not gonna say “Aryan.” What do we use? Aries-ian? But yes, that which is like the ram, not the defunct racial theories. But yeah, between that like, adaptability and compassion versus forthrightness and decisive action. Right? It’s gonna seem like being chill is the right move one day, and then it’s gonna seem like, “Fuck it, I need to just say what I think,” and then the next day – like, there’s gonna be a lot of back and forth between those two signs and the very meaningfully different mode of action and thought that each represents. It’s Venus, it’s Mercury, it’s Neptune, it’s Saturn, et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Yeah. And you know, sometimes there is the sort of dark night of the soul thing. So one of the things that I explored during the last Venus retrograde, Demetra and I did an episode on the myth of Inanna and the descent of Inanna into the underworld and that being a story that’s been handed down in connection with Venus retrograde for thousands of years now, and how when Venus was last retrograde in Leo, that story just like, organically bubbled up back into consciousness in the Barbie movie where she literally like, takes a similar story where she has this descent. She comes back from being gone and she finds that her partner has like, taken her throne, and then she has to like, get things back and set things back in order before eventually emerging renewed and victorious. There’s some element of that here when Venus starts out in the sign of her detriment, in a sign that she’s not usually comfortable with at the beginning of the retrograde, but then retrogrades back into Pisces and moves into the sign of her exaltation, which is like, the throne of Venus and it’s the highest expression or an elevated expression of Venus as being one of royalty, although it’s not a Venus that is completely comfortable because Venus stations retrograde conjunct Saturn, which is in late Pisces at that point. And that’s some of the energy that would be interesting to attempt to describe, which is some sort of metaphor of a woman who was exalted in status or at the highest point in society, like a queen or a celebrity or somebody that’s noble and rich and powerful socially but still has the burden of responsibility or of age, or of something Saturnian that’s kind of either putting a blemish on things or holding things back from being their most glamorous, let’s say.
AC: Yeah. It’s – there’s – Venus’s direct station gives us a very dramatic picture, because it’s Venus stationing direct in the place of exaltation, also very close to the degree of the single degree of exaltation, but with Saturn and Neptune and Rahu or the dragon’s head there. So even at this place of sort of maximum poise and empowerment, there are tremendous obstacles. And that is the point from which Venus will move forward.
CB: Yeah. So here’s Venus stationing direct around the middle of April in that conjunction with Saturn. So Venus stations direct at 24 Pisces and we see Saturn is there at 25 degrees of Pisces. So that is an interesting signature. That’s actually also reminiscent, because that’s one of the signatures in Trump’s inauguration chart is that Venus and Saturn are conjunct in Pisces on this one. So interestingly, that’s like, referring back to that for some reason, which is a replication of his natal Venus-Saturn conjunction, although it’s in Cancer.
So this is all taking place while Mercury’s like, retrograde at the same time. So Mercury is bringing up like, miscommunications and delays and snafus – like, technical snafus – and different things like that at the same time with its retrograde starting in Aries and going back and stationing direct in Pisces around the same time. It’s also notable that both of those inner planets, they don’t just have to contend with the conjunction with Saturn, but they’re also like, passing over Neptune at the same time, which is making its way through late Pisces and then ingressing into Aries. So it’s like, we have on the one hand a Venus-Neptune conjunction, which is like, the idealization of love or like, falling into a deep, crazy sort of romantic love with somebody, but then sometimes that not being fully grounded in reality, and sometimes the reality setting in later and being somewhat disappointing. And then we also have like, a Mercury retrograde conjunct Neptune where Mercury is sometimes about not just miscommunication, but sometimes not having a clear picture. Sometimes issues of like, deceit or lies or miscommunications becoming more prevalent during that time as well.
AC: Yeah. And you know, because it’s a retrograde, both Mercury and Venus get three conjunctions with Neptune. And those include Neptune in both Pisces and Aries, right, so that re-encountering the – like, for Venus, like the vision, that romantic dream, right? And maybe reevaluating that dream. Maybe becoming disillusioned with it. We have multiple passes across Neptune.
CB: I didn’t realize until this until just now, but look at this – Mercury is retrograde at zero degrees of Aries on March 29th. That’s the day of the solar eclipse in Aries, and both Mercury and Neptune exchange signs at that time, where on March 30th, Mercury has retrograded back to 29 Pisces and Neptune has ingressed into Aries. So part of that crazy solar eclipse that we were talking about and putting so much emphasis on as being the culmination of more than a year, year-and-a-half’s worth of eclipses in Aries culminates with a Mercury retrograde conjunct Neptune at zero degrees of Aries at the same time. So there’s some element of miscommunication, of deceit, of not seeing clearly or not communicating clearly that’s in the air and that’s exacerbating things at the same time.
AC: Yeah, and Venus is within a degree of Neptune. There’s a lot of – Neptune’s new enchanting vision in Aries gets going immediately.
CB: Wow. Incredible. So it sets off this cascade event like I was saying, and let’s see – yeah, so repetition of 2017, that Venus retrograde. Other repetitions are early 2009, early 2001, early 1993, early 1985. This one has only been going back into Pisces since 2009, though, which is actually one of the interesting about it is it’s a little bit of new cycle that we’re not fully experienced in yet. We’ve only done two of these before.
I did look back, though, at previous events because Nick Dagan Best pointed out to me that this is tied in with a 32-year cycle where Venus goes retrograde in this set of signs, in Aries, but also Mars goes retrograde in Cancer at the same time. And 32 years ago, this happened in early 1993, and it coincided pretty closely with the Waco siege. So as one repetition of things, I thought that was a striking one. Another repetition where it maybe tied in with with this Venus retrograde was the Bay of Pigs.
Let’s see. This retrograde is also tied in with a lot of stuff in Russian history, both in Russian and American history. Nick has done extensive work on this. One of the ones that I thought was most striking as Nick pointed out to me that this Venus retrograde, the same one happened in 1985 that coincided with the death of the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, and then that’s what led to Gorbachev being appointed, which is pretty striking because that then eventually led to the break up, the dissolution of the Soviet Union just years later in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. So we also had a Venus retrograde like this occurred in the same sign in Aries around the time that Stalin died in March of 1953. And then, of course, eight years before that was the death of Hitler, which was around the time of a Venus retrograde in Aries in April of 1945, which then means that the European side of World War II ended around the time of that Venus retrograde in Aries as well.
AC: One quick note about that is that that was actually parallel in the sense that there was both a Mercury and a Venus retrograde in the last days for Hitler if you watch the movie Untergang or Downfall about like, the last couple weeks and the madness in the bunker, and just think Venus and Mercury are both retrograde in Aries while you watch it. It makes perfect sense. Steiner’s not coming? No. Right? It’s coming – it’s realizing that it’s not going to happen.
CB: Yeah. After being like, completely convinced that it was and then having your entire society just like, crumbling around you.
AC: Literally.
CB: So yeah, there’s a lot more there in Russian history. I was looking at Venus in Aries people, and Leisa helped me research this just to get a sense for like, Venus in Aries energy. One of the most striking was Lady Gaga. There’s also a bunch of people in the news; one of them that has Venus in Aries is Tulsi Gabbard. Rachel Maddow. Tucker Carlson, who actually had it recently stationing direct in Aries, so this one may be important for him. Kimberly Guilfoyle – Guilfoyle – I forget how to pronounce her name. Sandra Day O’Connor, who was one of the first woman Supreme Court justices. So that idea of like, firsts sometimes. Feminist authors Betty Friedan and Judith Butler. George Takei, who was one of the – he was a really prominent figure in the gay rights movement in the mid-2000s because he came out as gay at a time where it wasn’t as socially acceptable. We’ve also got Elizabeth Taylor, who had very – is famous for having many relationships. She had it conjunct Uranus. Jack Nicholson, who we talked about in the 3rd house episode recently with his Venus retrograde ruling the 3rd house of siblings as well as the 4th house, the IC, which represents parents and he learned later when he was an adult from a reporter that the woman he grew up as his sister was actually his mother, and that his mother and grandmother had kept it from him for their entire life.
AC: Yeah, and famously, charismatic and also I think married six times. Like, very bombastic and prone to directional change in the Venusian sphere.
CB: Right. Others are Timothy McVeigh, the famous Oklahoma City bombing guy. George Carlin, where Venus has just stationed direct in Aries, who was a sort of pioneer in terms of comedy. Mario Andretti, the famous racecar driver. Kathleen Kennedy, who’s been so prominent in Hollywood as a producer and studio head over the past several decades who’s been running some of the different studios for quite a while now. America Ferrera, who was one of the lead roles in the Barbie movie last year. Maika Monroe, who’s famous especially in like, scary movies over the course of the past decade. She’s sometimes referred to as like, a scream queen, which I thought was great because she has Mars on the Ascendant in Leo but also Venus retrograde in Aries, and she was in like, the movie Longlegs last summer. Did you see that?
AC: No, I didn’t.
CB: It was pretty good. And then finally, Cory Booker, who Leisa found has it retrograde in the 3rd house and apparently he’s a cousin of RuPaul, so that’s kind of funny connection with the Venus retrograde in Aries in the 3rd house. And then finally, Heather Heyer, who was born with Venus after recently stationing direct in Aries, then died in 2017 during the Charlottesville riots, basically, and during the Charlottesville stuff that took place where there were these protests against some like, racist marches that were happening at that time, and she ended up being run over by this truck at this time. It turns out she was born with Venus retrograde almost coming off of retrograde in Aries, and then she died later in the same year that it went retrograde. So just to give you an idea of some different energies and different things, I think it starts giving you a little bit of an idea of what Venus in Aries is like in general.
Yeah. So the Venus retrograde is connected with and takes us into as we already talked about the Aries eclipse, which takes place on March 29th, 2025. This is the final eclipse in this series. I think this eclipse is gonna be really important for geopolitical events because every other eclipse that’s occurred in Aries over the past year and a half, all of it started in October of 2023 with the first set of eclipses in Libra and then eventually Aries. And each installment has then, every six month, been a further escalation between Israel and other countries, with Palestine, with Iran, with Lebanon, and so on and so forth. So we would expect it then to coincide with another major turning point in terms of that sequence of events in that whole saga.
AC: And being the last one, we would expect it to be something decisive that either finishes an arc or takes things into their final phase.
CB: Yeah. And it seems like it keeps escalating each time, though, so I’m concerned that it’s gonna represent a significant escalation. Eclipses can sometimes represent major endings of things, but they can also represent a new beginning of something. And the fact that it occurs and then we all of a sudden get a bunch of other planets moving into Aries just makes me think that it’s some sort of event that sets off another series of events.
AC: Yeah. It’s gonna make things messier. And one of the things that I hypothesized before the eclipse that has ended up being confirmed several times by events as well as by historical research is for whatever reasons, the North Node in Aries and then subsequent eclipses – solar eclipses in Aries – are correlated extremely strongly with assassinations, or the sudden removal of heads of state. The death of Iran’s head of state as well as several other high-ranking officials happened very shortly after the solar eclipse in Aries in 2024. And then I was led through research, I stumbled upon the fact that Martin Luther King, Junior, was also assassinated right after a solar eclipse in Aries on the North Node. And we’ve seen just during this period of time while the North Node is in Aries, an unusual number of assassinations in a number of different theatres.
CB: Yeah. And not just – there’s definitely assassinations, but also sometimes the eclipsing of a world leader like when Biden stepped down last year —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — and how that was a repetition of 1968 when Lyndon Johnson stepped down. That idea of Aries also represents, as we were saying earlier, like, the head of the body physically, but also can represent the head and like, leadership of countries, perhaps also of like, companies, like major companies and other things —
AC: Absolutely.
CB: — like that. Yeah.
AC: Any like, leader of an organization or a military or, you know, Aries is the place where the Sun is supposed to be maximally exalted. Right? Where we have like, the height of leadership. And so this is yet another thing – how many have we mentioned now – that has leadership in its sights. You know, we talked about Saturn and Neptune in Aries doing that; Pluto does that. Like, this is… Watching the status of leaders. Like, one, who gets to be a leader? Because we get some of our factors give us bad leaders. Some of them don’t necessarily give us bad leaders, but in battle or kill existing leaders. There’s so much that, you know… I think you did a nice job, Chris, by just pointing out that Aries is the head. There are so many different guns and hammers and pepper spray cans pointed at the head this year and next year as well.
CB: Yeah, for sure —
AC: And the question of leadership will probably be more and more on everyone’s mind. When I was talking to my dad two days ago a little bit about what’s happening, what he sees, he was like, “Well, you know, it’s worth noting that the incumbent leaders of many, many different nations are all on their way out.” Like, Biden’s on his way out. Trudeau is on his way out. Macron’s on his way out. In Germany, the leader’s on their way out. And he named like, several others, but like, we’ve got all this new leadership with one facing strong headwinds, and in many cases, the leaders who will follow are quite unproven. And you know, it’s like, again, all of this stuff is pointing towards the issue of leadership from a variety of directions, and it’s already quite visible.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So while eclipse seasons centers on March because the Aries eclipse occurs at the very end of March, it’s gonna bleed into early April. Major beginnings and major endings, escalation of some things but wrapping up others. And then also there’s the first Virgo eclipse two weeks earlier like I said in the middle of March, and this is the first time that we’ve seen an eclipse occur in this sign in many years. And it’s like, the second foot in the door of the sequence of eclipses that just began last year in September when we had the first eclipse in Pisces. So we’re gonna get the first initial like, preview of that, especially whatever house that’s falling in in your chart, and then we’re gonna revisit that again six months later in September when we get an eclipse fully in Pisces and fully in Virgo.
AC: Yeah. It’s wild. Yeah. It’ll have its own distinct quality, but it will be somewhat difficult to pick out, because it’s in the midst of five other things happening. But we will see it quite clearly, like you just said, once we get to September where we just get eclipses in Virgo and Pisces. And as you were saying, a lot of the biggest singular moments occur in March, but there’s so much momentum that as we get into April, it’s all the same stuff. The Mercury and Venus need to make another conjunction to Saturn, another conjunction to Neptune, they need to get back into Aries, right? Like, it’s the third leg across exactly the same terrain and that critical boundary between Aries and Pisces is still extremely lit up. And then as a funny coincidence, it is at this point that we actually start wrapping up the Mars cycle. Mars finally, finally leaves Cancer on April 17th, and then shortly thereafter makes its third and final opposition to Pluto, the first of which occurred on November 3rd, the second of which occurred on January 1st, and then this is finally the third one at the end of April. And then shortly thereafter, leaves the – crosses the degree of Leo which it stationed retrograde in. So we have both the Mars and Venus cycles sort of wrapping up as we get towards the end of April, but it takes that long.
CB: Yeah. That is such a long transit for Mars or for Venus, which normally just zoom through each of their respective signs in a matter of a month or like, a few weeks.
AC: Yeah, it’s six weeks for Mars. Like, yeah, four weeks, sometimes a little faster, for Venus. Not a big deal.
CB: Yeah. So and then like I said earlier, the eclipse on March 29th then immediately sets off Neptune, which moves into Aries the next day on March 30th and it’s gonna stay in Aries for the whole middle part of this year all the way until I think like, October. And then in May —
AC: October 21st.
CB: October 21st. And then in May, Saturn ingresses into Aries on May 24th, 2025. So Saturn joins the party where it very quickly meets up with Neptune, and then we get Saturn and Neptune forming this close conjunction and coming within a degree by the time of July, so that energy becomes extremely intense that we talked about earlier of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the blurring between what’s real and what’s not, especially because both planets also station retrograde. They make their very first station in Aries in July, and that’s always important; we’ve seen a lot of times over the past few years how much the first station that an outer planet makes once it enters into a new sign really speaks loudly to what that transit is gonna be all about.
AC: Yeah. They’re extraordinarily close; they’re within a couple degrees, and they get to within less than a degree for several months this year. From May 24th until September 1st, we have Neptune and Saturn right on top of each other in Aries.
CB: Guess when Neptune makes its first station? July 4th, 2025. So right on the birthday of the United States, we get Neptune making its very first station in the sign of Aries since the time frame of like, the mid-1800s and the Civil War era on our solar return that year. And then if that wasn’t enough, then Uranus goes into Gemini three days later on July 7th, and then Saturn makes its first station in Aries on July 13th, 2025. So July also becomes a big month in the year.
AC: Absolutely. There’s a lot of fun over the summer.
CB: What the —
AC: Just worth mentioning, you know, like, March is really this circus firestorm, and it takes – it’s still going for a lot of April, and even May, like, the image I get for May is the campground, the like, trashed campground after the circus has left town. And everyone is stumbling around, confused, wounded, shellshocked by the strange acts that they’ve been forced to bear witness to. And it’s really not until the end of May and then June that we get significantly like, meaningfully different astrological weather with a different tone and quality.
CB: Okay. Yeah. One of our questions for this summer is gonna be, Saturn and Neptune get so close – they get within a degree but they do not go exact. And we don’t get the first exact – we only end up getting one exact conjunction between Saturn and Neptune, and it’s gonna happen early 2026.
AC: February 13th!
CB: So it’s like, we’re gonna have this question where, you know, will it be functionally as if they have perfected the aspect this summer in July and we see the perfect melding of those two planets and whatever the primary mundane events that that’s gonna coincide with? Does it really happen already next summer? Or is this the last closest buildup pass before but it’s still building to something next year? All of the Aries stuff that’s happening this year implies to me that we may experience it as a perfection where it’s just super intense Saturn-Neptune themes that we remember this summer for very strongly. But it will be really interesting to watch that and see how it goes.
AC: Yeah. I think it’ll get stronger in 2026. But it will not seem like it could get stronger in mid-2025. We’ll be like, this can’t be – the volume’s all the way up, right? Nope.
CB: Right. Yeah. You’re probably right. All right, and I think that’s it for this. So I think that we can pause here and take a little bit of a break before we transition into the second half of the year. Or do you have any final statements or things to make about the first half of the year?
AC: Well, we’re breaking before June. So we’re doing —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — June in the second half? Our —
CB: Basically.
AC: — first section of the year. Not in particular, just that the center, you know, the center of the show is absolutely March-April, and that we have a very uneasy, not-so-calm before the storm build to that. And then second half of April and May is really like, aftermath of that, and that really a new thing – a period of time that feels meaningfully different when both Venus and Mars cycles have wrapped up is gonna start in June, where we actually have some pleasant surprises.
CB: Yeah. Lots of pleasant surprises. Here is the whole March-April time frame for those watching the video version and just how this looks on our aspects graph for this year with all of that inner planet activity as well as Neptune changing signs. But then what lays in store for us is the big buildup to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction over the summer and Uranus ingressing into Gemini and so on and so forth, which we will talk about here in just a moment.
Alright, let’s take a little break.
All right, before we move into the next section, I wanted to ask you what you have coming up this year, Austin, and what you’re working on.
AC: Okay. Quite a bit. First, with Sphere and Sundry, which I am the resident astrologist for as well as chief advisor and something cocreator, we’ve got a ton of good projects planned for 2025. Even amidst the historically troubling configurations, there are a lot of beautiful moments, and we plan on catching them all. It’s worth noting that we’ve been catching them all, catching all these like, beautiful electional moments for planets and stars since 2018 and have a good number of those still on stock. So you know, go and check out Sphere and Sundry. You know, do you miss the Venus in Pisces when it was copresent Jupiter? We’ve still got that. Right? So a lot of good stuff in the past, lot of good stuff in the future from Sphere and Sundry.
CB: Nice. Yeah, there’s so many good elections; I was looking through my box of the old vials and like, oils and the different sigils and stuff that they have and just realizing how many amazing elections you guys have captured over the years that are still sort of encapsulated there.
AC: Thank you. I think it’s 52 now? I think there —
CB: Wow.
AC: — are 52 series?
CB: That’s crazy.
AC: Yeah, it’s wild. But yeah. So a lot of that catalogue is still available; some of it’s definitely sold out in that we have to get it done during the election. It is inherently limited in stock. We’ve started making more stuff all at once, but it’s not infinite.
CB: And you —
AC: So —
CB: — were showing me the other day all this fancy new —
AC: Yeah!
CB: — labeling for the bottles, right?
AC: Yeah, Kait agonized over different ways that she might upgrade the labeling and ended up with just an exquisite answer where the names of the series are actually like, cut into the glass, and then some of them tinted slightly with gold or silver. And they just look exquisite.
CB: Yeah, it’s very —
AC: I’m not even —
CB: — fancy. Very nice upgrade.
AC: I don’t even like nice things, and I think they’re cool.
CB: Nice. So that is at SphereAndSundry.com?
AC: Yes, sir.
CB: Okay. Anything else you got going on?
AC: Yeah, and then just me personally, the website’s always there. You can purchase for download a pile of lectures I’ve given and classes that I’ve given as well. You can also find the chosen ones – the few who’ve actually made it all the way through my three-year program and presented graduation project, their information is there if you wanna book with them. They’re all excellent; I strongly recommend them. And then I will be continuing to teach the three-year program next year. There is an enrollment for Year One that begins on – well, begins and ends – on December 28th this year. If you’d like to join the program, get on the mailing list. The invites only go out to the mailing list, and the seats generally get filled within an hour – sometimes two. But sign up for the mailing list; I send out something maybe once every four months. I promise not to deluge you.
And then do I even mention 36 Faces, Chris?
CB: I don’t know, bro. I would just say the concept of a book exists, and it is in the works, and it will be born when the moment is right.
AC: It’ll probably be born on my Jupiter return.
CB: Oh, that would make sense.
AC: So yeah. I might put out the second edition of a book that I wrote 10 years ago. No promises. And then finally, things that I am definitely doing is I’ll be doing a series of articles and workshops on the big outer planets that we’ve been discussing – the Neptune, the Uranus, the Saturn, and more importantly, I have a piece that’s almost done about the Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius all forming this lovely wedge which we will be living with basically like, on and off with a few tiny interruptions from 2025 until 2033; it’s a huge configuration because it’s not only each of the planets doing something themselves, but they are all tightly aspected and reinforcing each other. So I have most of that written; that’ll come out at some point over the next couple weeks on the website. So yeah. All the things!
CB: Incredible. Awesome. Well, and your website is AustinCoppock.com?
AC: Yes sir.
CB: All right. I’ll put a link to that in the description.
As for myself, like I said earlier, I’ve got my 2025 electional report, which is on a 20 percent off sale but only until January 7th. So you can get it right now for 44.95, and then there’s gonna be a 10 dollar price jump on January 7th, so I’d recommend getting it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report to get all of those best and luckiest and most fortunate days for 2025.
Elsewhere, I’m gonna keep working on the podcast as I always do each month, and a lot of people have been joining my Patreon where you get early access to new episodes – like, this episode is gonna be released, I think, three or four days before it’s released to the public. All of my horoscopes I think were released about a week before the public had access to them. And we also have a group of patrons that are attending this recording live and joining us in the live chat as we’re doing it all day, which has been kind of fun. Sometimes you see like, behind the scenes stuff or little discussions that don’t make it into the recording. As a patron, that’s like, one of the bonuses. And then finally, I’m also gonna keep doing the houses series, and as I go through each house, I keep doing a live chart reading session where I get together a group of patrons and we do a webinar where I sit down and interview people about their birth chart and about different house placements in their chart. And that’s turned into a whole really enjoyable series of actually talking to the patrons and going over their chart and learning by having that dialogue with each of them about what each of the houses means. So I’m gonna keep doing that. The 5th house I just did that webinar, and the next one will be the 6th house. But then we still have a bunch of other houses to go over the rest of 2025.
AC: A glorious series.
CB: The glorious series. It will be – the work will be completed. It continues on. And the last thing is that I have my Hellenistic astrology course – oh yeah, I did wanna mention my Hellenistic astrology book is available on Amazon again. Amazon had taken it off like, two or three years ago and stopped carrying it due to a technical glitch. I finally got the book back on Amazon, so you can order it through Amazon Prime with two-day delivery, and it is flying off the shelves. So you can get a copy of that on Amazon, and it goes really well with my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I teach my approach to reading birth charts. And you can find that at TheAstrologySchool.com. And I’ve been doing monthly chart readings with students there as well, and we just did one last month where we did a Mars retrograde chart reading webinar where I talked to and interviewed some students in my course about past instances of Mars retrograde in their birth chart by transit and what happened at that time. And we ended up doing this just incredible workshop on Mars retrogrades where we really got to the core of how Mars retrogrades impact people in terms of their personal life, how it can sometimes connect events in 15 year periods, how it activates the house placement that Mars is transiting through – it was really brilliant. I almost wanted to release that as an episode of the podcast, but because it was for the Hellenistic course, it’s just an exclusive recording now for students of that course. But if you’d like to get access to that or attend future chart reading webinars that I’m gonna do each month on the first weekend of each month, you can find out more information about that at The Astrology Podcast or TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right. I think that’s all I’m doing. Shall we transition into talking about the second half of the year?
AC: We shall.
CB: All right. Let’s jump right into it. So first things first is Jupiter is moving into Cancer, the sign of its exaltation, in June of 2025. And it’s gonna stay there all the way until June of 2026. And this is actually some of the most favorable news from my perspective; this is one of the most positive things that’s happening this year is that in the entire second half of 2025, the greater benefic, Jupiter, is moving into the sign of its exaltation. And I think this is really gonna help to counterbalance some of the other crazy transits happening this year, but more importantly, one of the things I noticed when doing the horoscopes is what happens is that Mars spends the first four months of the year kicking up dust in Cancer and in the Cancer sector of our chart and whatever house that is. But then later in the year in June, Jupiter moves through Cancer and then just starts cleaning things up, like remodeling, settling things, and just smoothing things over that had been kicked up earlier in the year, and I think this is gonna be a really – I think this is gonna be experienced as a very positive transit and as a nice counterbalance to some of the Mars energy in Cancer from the beginning of the year.
AC: Absolutely. And as a Cancer rising with Jupiter in the first, I am very much looking forward to it. So as you mentioned, so Jupiter is in its exaltation in Cancer, and exaltations bring out the best in planets, but I would say equally importantly, they help the planet avoid its worst or its bad habits. Each of the exaltations filters out a bad tendency that you would see even when the planet was in excellent position. And so for Jupiter, Jupiter in Cancer – Jupiter’s a little bit more efficient. It’s a little bit less wasteful. It’s not quite as universalizing and over-the-top as it is in its other strong positions, which are Pisces and Sagittarius. And I think that that’s exemplified financially by the one billionaire who has Jupiter in Cancer, or the one famous billionaire, which is Warren Buffet, who’s always advocated a very careful, thoughtful, well-researched strategy to wealth accumulation – only investing in companies that you believe in and understand. Right? Like, the very opposite of wild speculation. And then insofar as Jupiter speaks to wisdom and knowledge, when we look for famous wise and knowledgeable people who have Jupiter in Cancer, we see people that are nonetheless extremely approachable. We have Benjamin Franklin, right, being a Jupiter in Cancer, and most likely an angular Jupiter in Cancer, though there’s some confusion about the time of day. Where, you know, Ben Franklin was not only, like, a world-renowned smart guy in several different fields; he was also funny and approachable and wrote things that the normal people appreciated, enjoyed, and understood. And very much in the same vein, we have Mark Twain who’s also a Jupiter in Cancer. You know, Mark Twain, he said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” And it’s funny because those are like, sort of characteristically like, American – I don’t know what you would call them – intellectuals? Literary figures? And of course, the Declaration of Independence occurred while Jupiter was in Cancer. And so there’s this kind of like, you know, folksy-ness that you see with Jupiter in Cancer with all of those figures, whether it’s Benjamin Franklin or Warren Buffet. There’s like, in addition to whatever elevation in status, there’s still an ability and a willingness to connect to those who aren’t, you know, playing on the same field, in a way that I think connects really nicely with the healthcare examples that you have, Chris.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s abundance, but it’s not – like, it’s not just for the rich, right?
CB: Yeah. Jupiter in Cancer likes to take care of people, because you know, Jupiter is the greater benefic. It likes to do good things. And Cancer is ruled by the Moon, which represents the body and one’s physical vitality. And when you put those two things together, you have sometimes things like healthcare has become a recurring theme when Jupiter goes through Cancer in the United States. And part of the reason for that, as you said, is that Jupiter was in Cancer not just during the Declaration of Independence, but interestingly 12 years later, Jupiter returned to Cancer when the Constitution was being ratified. So we had this early instance of Jupiter in Cancer being crucial, and then when you look through the history or the recent history, I was remembering the one from 12 years ago because in 2013 through 2014, Jupiter went through Cancer in June of 2013 through the summer of 2014, and what happened is that the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was implemented during that time. And what happened is that all of a sudden, millions of people got health insurance that didn’t have health insurance before, including myself, and millions of people who had preexisting conditions suddenly could not be denied healthcare at that time. So it was actually a very important turning point for healthcare, whatever you think about it or whatever criticisms you have for it at this point, there were some provisions in it like the fact that the health insurance companies couldn’t deny people healthcare coverage for preexisting conditions was actually a very important turning point. So what’s interesting is that went into effect when Jupiter went into Cancer. And if you look at the timeline, it lines up very, very well. But interestingly, what we realized back then when that was being rolled out is 12 years before that in 1990, basically, when Jupiter was going through Cancer, that was also when the Americans with Disabilities Act came into effect in July of 1990, which was when Jupiter was in Cancer and Venus was in Cancer at the same time. So there was like, this similar theme.
So I don’t know how that’s gonna play out this year because I’m a little skeptical about whether we have more than the idea of like, a healthcare, you know, reform. But I guess we can be hopeful that hopefully if some parts of the previous act are revisited or even torn down, hopefully something else is put in its place. And this does actually make me slightly hopeful that I hope something like that is put into place as a result of seeing this transit.
AC: Yeah. That’s great history. And I will defend Jupiter in Cancer in 2013, ‘14. So as to the imperfections and compromises in the Affordable Care Act, Jupiter in Cancer was having to deal with an opposition to Pluto in Capricorn, a square to Saturn in Libra, Uranus in Aries the entire time that it was in Cancer. So it was Jupiter in Cancer, but with resistance everywhere.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s crazy. It’s also crazy, like, this Jupiter return – so when Jupiter goes into Cancer, it will be a Jupiter return of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the country in the Sibley chart at five degrees of Cancer. But it’s more than that. It’s not just a 12-year repetition, but Jupiter has a longer 83-year cycle that is tied in with Babylonian goal year periods where Jupiter recurs to the same exact degree on the same day every 83 years. And if you take that back, we’re actually three 83-year Jupiter cycles – it takes you all the way back to the founding of the country at the Declaration of Independence. So somehow, this particular Jupiter return is activating the United States birth chart in a way that’s far more potent and far more pivotal than other solar returns, essentially, that the United States has had any time in the past while.
AC: Yeah, and that – you know, that’s so interesting, because it’s only a degree – excuse me, a degree – it’s only one year different than the Uranus cycle. And so all of these things that we keep talking about with the Uranus cycle – Civil War, World War II, Revolutionary War – are also these moments of hyper Jupiter return where the country reexamines what it wants to be. What it —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — aspires to.
CB: I actually did a episode with Patrick Watson a few months ago on Babylonian goal year periods where we presented some of our initial research, and he made the point that this 83-year period of Jupiter that the Babylonians are so focused on is probably the best piece of evidence that the Babylonians were picking up on the existence of the outer planets like Uranus without knowing about it. Because they could see that things like this 83-year repetition were really important, and that was true both because of Jupiter, the visible planet they could see, but there was this other invisible planet, Uranus, that they couldn’t see that was also making 83 a pivotal repetition.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So Patrick and I will be doing probably a podcast on that early next year, and Patrick’s gonna give a talk at the Northwest Astrology Conference which is happening in May of this year in Seattle – NORWAC – which you can find out more information at NORWAC.net – and I think he’s gonna give a talk on Babylonian goal year periods that should be excellent. So him and I are gonna do some collaborations this year on that. Are you going to NORWAC this year?
AC: I’m not sure. I’m not speaking this year. I’m very busy and I have a lot of responsibilities. You know, I have my half of taking care of the baby; who knows what else is happening. I would like to also be able to go to NORWAC.
CB: You are pulled by the social element. Maybe if you have a book and a baby, you might be drawn to attend at that point by May.
AC: Indeed. The ruler of the 5th is very activated.
CB: For sure. All right. So my final thing I wanted to circle back to something you said, because I’ve really been getting into exaltations over the past year that we’ve been doing more example charts and just seeing how much an exalted planet represents a person doing the highest version of something of whatever it is that they do and sometimes becoming the most eminent in their chosen field as a result of that. So some examples of that are like, Harrison Ford with his exalted Jupiter in the 10th house, and at one point in like, the 1990s and ‘80s he was the biggest actor in Hollywood. Or Roger Ebert, who has also a 10th house exalted Jupiter, and he became like, the most notable and famous movie critic of his times. Or you have like, Frida Kahlo, who has an exalted Jupiter conjunct her Sun and Neptune in the 12th, and she became one of the most famous artists in contemporary times, in recent times. You have people like Jimmy Wales, who has it exalted in the 3rd house, and he’s not just an encyclopedist, but he founded like, the biggest encyclopedia of all time, which is Wikipedia. Jennifer Lawrence, Kurt Cobain – all these people that reach very high levels of eminence within their chosen career field because they strive for excellence in what they do. That’s really what exalted planets are about, and I think that’s part of what we’re gonna see with Jupiter in Cancer starting in the second half of the year, and I’m excited for – that’s why I think it’s one of the best aspects of the year.
AC: That’s really nice. Well, that list bodes well for me.
CB: Right. For you and your Jupiter in Cancer.
AC: Yeah. Me and my Jupiter in Cancer in the first. And so one thing I would just add about the action of Jupiter in Cancer and what a lot of the natives have in common is that there’s like, a get rich slow quality. There’s not the same wild enthusiasm you see with Jupiter in Sag and Pisces; there’s often like, a very long-running cultivation. It’s Cancer, and so a lot of vegetative or child rearing metaphors make a lot of sense, whereas it’s not about like, the one dramatic action; it’s the slowly but consistently cultivating the talent, the knowledge base, the project over years that gives such excellent success.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So other things… I just saw this the other day, just random, but apparently there’s a new Superman movie that’s coming out in July on July 11th, and that’s gonna weirdly follow the Jupiter ingress into Cancer; I thought that was a funny manifestation of like, Jupiter in its exaltation and thinking of like, a colorful superman who has these superhuman abilities – like, human, but he’s like, the best way of being a human if you could fly.
AC: Well, he’s technically an alien.
CB: That’s true; he is an alien. Dammit. Well, he’s humanoid, let’s say.
AC: So it’s actually a Pluto in Aquarius thing. It’s something that looks human but isn’t. And —
CB: Right.
AC: — has the power to destroy us all.
CB: But doesn’t, because he uses his power for good. All right. So the other thing about this is two things – one, Jupiter going into Cancer means it’s departing from Gemini; that also means Jupiter’s actually spending the first half of the year in Gemini, so it’s wrapping up that transit. And I think that’s gonna be crucial, because some of the things that we talked about last year like longform podcasts, like, AI that you can talk with and different things like that, I think we’re going to see the further expansion of in the first half of the year. So we’ll be paying attention to those themes and checking in on them regularly. And then lastly, also, when Jupiter departs from Gemini and moves into Cancer, it makes the third and final square with Saturn around that time. So we get a Jupiter-Saturn square.
AC: Yeah, it’s like one week into Jupiter in Cancer, Jupiter hits the Saturn-Neptune conjunction by square. Right? That Saturn-Neptune conjunction’s there in early Aries, and so we’ve got this powerful force and then Jupiter has to intersect with that.
CB: Right. And so it’s squaring not just Saturn, but also Neptune in early Aries. So that makes me a little nervous, because on the one hand, I was anticipating like, last summer some financial instability with that, and we do the second Saturn-Jupiter square that’s happening right now, and there was a bit of a dip in the stock market in the past few days. And especially with the geopolitical stuff that we’re expecting in the March-April time frame, I’m very concerned about that like, destabilizing the economy. And then that third Jupiter-Saturn square will follow not that long afterwards in like, you know, June and July.
AC: Mid-June?
CB: Yeah. So there’s that. And then you’ve noted the, over the summer when that was happening the first time, the potential for like, in the news breakup of tech companies was coming up, and that seems to be a potential for some ongoing stuff with Google, and there’s questions —
AC: And a lot of really big judgments against tech companies. Like, some breakup stuff and some like, “You can continue, but you owe us a gajillion dollars.” It was very clearly like, Saturn limiting Jupiter in Gemini. And so there are three Jupiter-Saturn squares, and this last one which occurs in July of 2025 is in a different set of signs than the first two. And so I don’t know to what degree the past Jupiter-Saturn squares having tech company implications was just because it was in Gemini. I would tend to think that that was about the sign that Jupiter was in and that the square took place. I think this one will look different.
CB: Yeah. And I think you could be right, because especially with the new government coming in, I don’t know how much sometimes now like, personal relationships with people who are at the center of power isn’t gonna dictate sometimes like, companies that flourish and prosper versus those that don’t. And that could be an element with Jupiter moving into the sign of its exaltation and then kind of escaping into that as it then moves away from the Saturn square.
AC: Yeah. And the good news about that is that Jupiter makes that square to Saturn pretty immediately and then never makes another one.
CB: Right.
AC: And they spend a lot of the year in – a lot of the year that Jupiter’s in Cancer – in either a trinal arrangement or an extremely loose square, but it never perfects again. So we get the like, the impediment to Jupiter in Cancer’s goodness out of the way right away.
CB: Yeah. And something that it’s referring back to from the conjunction in 2020 is brought to completion at that time, and it refers back to.
AC: Yeah, like, the check on growth, whatever that Saturn check on like, growth, expansion is.
CB: Right. All right. So that takes us forward to the next major and probably I wanna say biggest shift of the year, which is Uranus —
AC: As big as anything.
CB: It’s Uranus moving into Gemini on July 7th, so just after the 4th of July, after Neptune stations retrograde on Independence Day, then Uranus goes into Gemini on July 7th, and we see eventually the first station of Uranus in that sign will occur on September 6th, and I’ll be watching that closely because some sort of very loud Uranus type events are gonna take place starting at the ingress and then especially at that first station that are gonna really tell us what Uranus in Gemini is gonna be all about for the next seven years.
AC: Yeah, and it’s such a – not only is Uranus’s movement into Gemini historically important in and of itself, but it puts all three slow-moving outer planets into their new positions. Right? We’ve got our Neptune in Aries, we’ve got our Uranus in Gemini, and we’ve got our Pluto in Aquarius, which are not only individually significant, but are all making super tight supportive aspects to each other. So all of the things about Uranus in Gemini will support all the things about Pluto in Aquarius, and both will support Neptune in Aries. And so even though we only get that super team-up for a few months this summer, we get it from July 7th until October 21st. So more than a few months. So about three and a half months. But that trio, that wedge, that flying wedge, will then recur in 2026 – or excuse me, 2026 – and then it’s just gonna be there until 2033. And so that’s what we’re gonna be living with. And so that changes, that’ll change so much so quickly, because even one outer planet changing signs is a big deal, but all three and then all three working together and supporting each other is, it promises just a wild bevy of changes. And in looking at this, I was trying to name it, because I know we’re gonna talk about it 500 times over the next 10 years.
CB: Right.
AC: And so let me hit you with the title and give you the explanation, see what you think. So the first thing that came to mind was just “the flying wedge,” because it’s a wedge, and it’s gonna fuckin’ – it’s air signs and fire. And then I googled “flying wedge.” I was like, “Does that have any particular meanings?” And so the first meaning that came up is a football play that was banned. It was the most successful football play for like, 80 years until it was banned. And the football players just form a human wedge in front of the guy with the ball, and then they just plow forward, and anybody who tries to bump into that gets run over. And the Wikipedia says that it was banned not because of the injuries but because of the fatalities that resulted from it. And that’s that like, if we imagine that as the force for change that it is, nothing’s getting in its way. And then there were two other meanings. One is it’s a traditional military formation. Nothing gets in the way. It’s got other names; it’s got names in different cultures – in some, “the boar’s snout” – but it’s like, it’s exactly the shape and it’s exactly those angles that you put people in to make change nearly impossible to stop. And then finally, I found that the flying wedge was also used as a term in sort of corporate or organizational management speak, and a flying wedge is when one person is hired in, you know, in a big organization and then they immediately bring in another person or one or two people in high positions who then bring in more people, and it completely like, clearcuts the management and replaces it very quickly. And I think all of these like, make perfect sense. Daunting, yes. But this is such a powerful configuration. And I’m so glad we only get three months and change of it this year because I want to see what it does and then have some time to think about it. Chris, you and I were talking about this, and it’s like, this isn’t a preview because it’s actually showtime. This is the pilot episode. Right? It’ll be a little bit different. Like, pilots are a little bit different. But like, this is the pilot episode. And —
CB: I like that.
AC: Thank you. And then it’s worth nothing that I would say the moment that activates this most over the summer – we’re trying not to get too granular here – but Mars’s entrance into Libra will be its – go, okay.
CB: Let me back up because I —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — just wanna… So what you’re describing, what you were just talking about for a while, is just that Uranus, once it goes into Gemini, is sextiling Saturn and Neptune and trining Pluto so that all of these – that’s the other backdrop of this year that we’re gonna get into later in the year, that we’ll get into when we do our monthly forecasts with more granularity. But just that it’s striking that we have a bunch of outer planet configurations, including this year, including like, Uranus trine Pluto, Saturn sextile Uranus, Uranus sextile Neptune, you know, Jupiter square Saturn and Neptune, et cetera, that are all going on that is part of the picture here. And this is the initial degree-based experience or like, pilot episode of that that’s then gonna come back and last for quite a while.
AC: Yeah, and if you draw the lines between then, you get a wedge.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so it’s worth noting that all three of these shifts are from water/earth signs to fire/air signs, so they’re going from more chill and passive elements to very active. Right? And so this is, you know, like, it’s a lot. And we get our first taste. And so —
CB: Yeah. That’s crucial. And that was something that you wanted to emphasis last month, but we decided to save for this —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — month, which is it’s shifting from all of those planets being in what traditionally used to be known as like, the more feminine signs to all of the outer planets suddenly being in what’s traditionally the like, masculine signs, or what’s the terminology you use for that for like, yin and yang?
AC: Yeah, from yin to yang. From adaptive or reactive to proactive and bossy. Like, the planets in fire and air push things; water adapts. You know, air – excuse me – water adapts and earth similarly adapts. And so they’re all moving into much more active positions, all in concert and all supporting one another. And so it’s a really significant feature of the year that is also descriptive of 2026, ‘27, ‘28, ‘29, ‘30, ‘31, ‘32, and then they go out a little bit and then back again in ‘33 and then we’re done. And so it’s such an important thing to get to know, whether you like it, whether you dislike it. You know, if it sucks – if the wedge is pointed at you, like, all the more reason to pay attention so you can figure out how to deal with it, how to get around it, how to get missed by the flying wedge. But it’s such an important thing to understand. And so —
CB: Yeah. And just to and to pay attention to what this initial pilot episode does. What shifts start taking place in especially the whole sign house that those planets move into in your chart, because that’s gonna be a preview of much longer term changes and trends that are gonna last for quite a while for many years. And I like your saying a pilot episode, because what happens with pilot episodes – or what used to happen – is like, a TV channel would fund like, just a test episode where they would pay to have the pilot put together, and the pilot episode is somewhat like, kind of cheap or it’s a little bit like, janky compared to the later episodes because they’re just testing it out and it doesn’t have full funding yet; they just wanna see if this is a good idea. And they’ll do it, and then they show it to test audiences, and then usually there’s a break in between recording the pilot episode versus when if they get the go-ahead they do a greenlight, then they go and shoot the rest of the actual season, you know, sometimes later. And we get a similar thing here because there’s a gap where all of these outer planets move into these signs in the middle part of 2025, but then at the end of the year, they retrograde back into their previous sign for a final run through those signs before eventually going back in like, 2026.
AC: Yeah. Right? Like, they’re gonna recast the female lead. Or, you know, it’s like, eh, I don’t know if the kid, this actor – we’re gonna keep the character, but we’re gonna get somebody else, right? Every —
CB: Right.
AC: Because Saturn retrogrades back into Pisces on September 1st. Neptune retrogrades back into Pisces on October 21st. And then I believe it’s November 7th that Uranus retrogrades back into Taurus. Right? And so Pluto’s still in Aquarius, but the team’s gone. What happened to the team? Right? We were doing something!
CB: Right.
AC: Like, the —
CB: It’s like the Avengers.
AC: — crazy lineup is over.
CB: It’s like the Avengers or like, all of the superheroes like, aligning.
AC: Yeah, and then it’s just like, a one-character movie. It’s like, it’s just, I don’t know who Pluto in… Is Pluto in Aquarius Ironman? Right? Technological…
CB: Yeah, that’s pretty good.
AC: Yeah. But evil Ironman?
CB: Right.
AC: AI – A Ironman? Oh!
CB: Yeah. The dark side of Tony Stark who’s like, yeah.
AC: Tony Dark.
CB: Tony Dark. That’s good.
AC: We have been podcasting a long time today.
CB: I know. So here’s that for those watching the video version of just some of those regresses back into the signs. All right. So you wanted to talk a little bit about some – I didn’t focus a lot on like, Mars aspects after the Mars retrograde in the first half of the year, but there was some Mars stuff that you wanted to point out over the summer, right?
AC: Yeah, I just, you know, yeah. There are a couple moments; the one that I’ll talk about is the Mars’s entrance into Libra, which is usually not necessarily that big a deal. But when Mars enters Libra, and we’re looking at basically the 6th through 10th of August, Mars in the course of less than a week opposes Saturn, opposes Neptune, trines Pluto, and trines Uranus. So it makes perfect aspects to all the members of the wedge.
CB: Nice.
AC: And it does so in very short order. I’m glad we’re starting with Mars in Libra and not starting with Mars in Aries at —
CB: Right!
AC: — at the spearpoint of the thing.
CB: Totally. Yeah, that would be a lot. We will deal with that next year in 2026, I believe.
AC: Oh, yes sir.
CB: But yeah, this is the closest we get to that, which is the opposition of Mars to those Aries planets this year and then we start to get into a square at the end of the year when it moves into Capricorn, but yeah.
AC: Yeah. And so just, you know, eyes open for that. It’s not that long a preview, but you will be graded on what you did and didn’t learn.
CB: I forgot to mention for the video viewers that Madeline DeCotes and I actually made a poster out of this this year, so you can actually order this as a wall poster if you wanna track your planetary aspects or the mundane planetary aspects this year at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Merch. It’s kind of an experiment to see if people would be interested in a poster like this, so check it out and let me know.
AC: Pretty cool.
CB: Yeah, it is pretty cool. I like – this is helpful just to visualize the way that not just individual aspects when they happen, but how they overlap. Like, just seeing that some of those Mars aspects, for example, are overlapping with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s still very potent around that time, or the fact that Uranus is like, sextile Neptune at the exact same time, and Uranus is like, stationing – making its first station – in Gemini on September 6th. Or that actually brings me to the next thing I really wanna talk about, which is one of my last hugely different things that happens this year, which is the eclipse season in September when they fully go into Pisces and Virgo. And that’s gonna overlap with some of the things you were just talking about.
AC: Well, and what’s interesting is we get Saturn back into Pisces less than a week before the lunar eclipse in Pisces.
CB: Yes. Okay. So we’re doing it; let’s talk about that.
AC: Let’s do it.
CB: That eclipse season seems really important. So in September, we’re going to have two eclipses. So there’s a Pisces eclipse on September 7th, and then there’s a Virgo eclipse on September 21st, and this is the first full set of eclipses in that pair of signs. So there was already a bit of a Pisces preview that occurred last September when there was an eclipse in Pisces that was conjunct Saturn, and we saw that accentuating and exacerbating some of the experiences people were having with the Saturn transit through Pisces at the time. There was a lot of flooding, for example, that occurred at that time. But then we’re also gonna get the Virgo end of things and activating that sector of our chart within two weeks of that, and our first preview of that was six months earlier in March when the very first Virgo eclipse took place. So in some ways, this will be a continuation of those two starting points that occurred in the two previous eclipse seasons, but there’s something fresh about this one that’s just like, fully putting the emphasis on those two signs.
AC: Yeah. And we’ll be doing Virgo-Pisces for a while after this. And so —
CB: Two years.
AC: Yeah, two years. This one takes a long time to get done with.
CB: Until like, early 2027 is the last Virgo-Pisces eclipse.
AC: Yeah. So, you know, Virgo/Pisces planets, watch your ass. The – you know, we have, and so what we have with Virgo-Pisces, you know, the way that the nodes tie the signs together is big picture and granular detail. Right? And the back and forth between the two, right? You know, in Pisces, what do we believe? And then Virgo – what is our technological, technical capacity to act in accordance with that? You know, it’s very – Virgo and Pisces are very the big and the small. Right? And —
CB: Yes.
AC: — so troubling and going deeping into that axis will be part of it on a personal level. And of course, whatever pair of houses that is for a person.
CB: Definitely. Those are good keywords – the big and the small is such a core tension between Virgo, which is like, the small things, like, even microscopic things or sweating the details, versus Pisces, which is the big things, the huge things, like the big questions of the universe.
AC: Yeah, the big sweeping things, right? And you see that. I think a really good example… Ooh, I don’t know if that’s… Nevermind, that’s not an example of somebody who has the node. Okay, I think a good example of someone who has important planets on both sides – I don’t think the nodes are there, but it’s still a good example – is Richard Tarnas, who wrote Cosmos and Psyche, which deals with these massive sweeping themes but is just chock full of granular detail like, chronicling the different periods of history and like, the events like grains of sand which together build these discernible and large shapes.
CB: Yeah, for sure, because that sometimes can be an issue between those two things is sometimes we can overly focus on details and we can lose the big picture, or other times we can overly focus on the big picture but really struggle with details, like dates and stuff like that, but for some reason, he’s able to hold those two things together in unison. And holding those two sides of our life together in unison is gonna be part of the theme of that, because it’s always the theme of eclipses, which is that two seemingly opposite ends of our life that seem like they should be separate and completely different are somehow pulled together during this time period based on whatever houses those eclipses are falling in in your chart.
AC: Yeah, for sure. It’s very much like, well, I’m busy doing my life’s work, but I still have to take out the trash. Right? Like, you don’t have to – one doesn’t invalidate the other. Like, you can’t take out the trash so much that your life’s work is accomplished, and you can’t just do really important things so much that the trash gets taken out. Like, they always are in conversation with each other.
CB: Right. Or you can’t like, meditate or do artwork or, you know, explore the universe with your mind all day without stopping to break to like, feed your body and like —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — take care of your body and have personal nutrition and health and other things like that.
AC: Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Right? Yeah, you’ve gotta have both sides. And one cannot replace the other, and so it’s a matter of what you’re prioritizing, which on a personal level eclipses really focus on. They’re usually a reprioritization of the things that you have on that axis.
CB: Right. So I always say major beginnings and major endings, and one of the things that you mentioned is that Saturn retrogrades back into Pisces just as eclipse season is starting one week before that first eclipse takes place in Pisces. And this is really notable because remember Saturn has spent the past several months since May in Aries in a completely new area of our chart and of our life, basically. But all of a sudden in September, Saturn comes back into Pisces where it had been transiting for two years at this point and where we’ve been experiencing some restructuring and some surmountable difficulties and other things in the Pisces sector of our chart, and all of a sudden, Saturn comes back for one final pass because there’s something that’s not done yet there. And there’s something that has to be revisited and finished.
AC: Yeah. There’s a review of what’s been built. And there may be a last set of changes or upgrades that quite obviously become necessary.
CB: Yeah. And but for some reason, what’s new here is that it’s not just the Pisces sector of our chart, but it’s also the Virgo sector in the opposite house as well as getting tied in. So it’s like, for example, if the Pisces sector is like, your 4th house and your home and living situation and you’ve been used to dealing with major changes in that area from Saturn transiting there over the past few years, that comes back up again, but now you also have to deal with your 10th house where the Virgo eclipse is taking place. All of a sudden, career matters are somehow intimately tied in with home matters even though those are normally separate parts of your life.
AC: Yeah. Yeah. The eclipses complicate the issue. Right? It’s not just doing Saturn, finishing the Saturn work; it’s balancing it with making sure it’s not fucking up the other opposing area. And so Saturn, again, moves back into Pisces on September 1st and will be there until the eve of Valentine’s Day 2026. It is on February 13th that Saturn will reenter Aries for keeps. So for another two and a half years-ish.
CB: Yeah. So that is crucial because that’s the theme of the later part of the year for me, the last quarter of the year is all of the outer planets, after giving us this preview or this pilot episode of what the next many years is gonna be like, they return back into their previous signs. So Saturn goes back into Pisces on September 1st. Neptune also returns back to Pisces on October 22nd. Then Uranus returns to Taurus for another pass on November 7th. So there’s a lot of by the end of the year, even though obviously things have changed, a new chapter of all of our lives has begun, there’s some sort of final check-in with many of those outer planets and the houses that they represent in our charts that we have to revisit at this time in order to bring something to full circle and to completion.
AC: Yeah. And so, you know, and also that is not only the finishing things up; it is also our sort of break time between the pilot episode of the flying wedge and friends until it resumes. And once it resumes, it’ll be fully back on April 25th of 2026, and then it’s just gonna be part of the sky until 2032, brief break, some more in 2033, and then done. So you know, it is also time to think about that.
CB: Totally. Yeah. So here’s the final station of Saturn in Pisces on November 27th, and that is the last station it will have in Pisces in this run, so it’s gonna be a critical turning point. It’s followed by Neptune stationing on December 10th, another Pisces critical turning point. Meanwhile, Jupiter is stationing for its first time on November 11th in Cancer, so that’s gonna be extremely loud, Jupiter speaking to the Cancer section of our chart. Anything else?
AC: Yeah. As you said and as we talked about, the year ends in a weird echo of how it begins.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s sort of back here, but a lot has happened, and we’re not going to stay here. But you know, it looks like, oh, Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, Uranus in Taurus. It looks like 2023 and 2024 at the end of 2025. But big things have already gotten started, and they’re going to resume again shortly. And so it’s a strange place to end the year.
CB: Yeah. The year ends with some of these planets back in their 2024 signs so that there’s clearly unfinished business, especially with the Pisces and Taurus sectors of our charts and whatever houses those coincide with. But a new era has already begun, and there’s no going back once you’ve started to go forward, even if there’s this final revisiting.
AC: Yeah, this year is very much a Venn diagram overlap. There’s like, 2018 to 2025, and there’s 2025 to 2033. And this is the only year where they really meaningfully intersect, and it’s kind of both. It’s the end of, you know, the end of a seven year period and the beginning of another. But also bigger Venn diagrams – it’s also the 14 year Venn diagram overlap with Neptune, and an almost 20 year Venn diagram overlap with Pluto. So if you draw that out, you’d see 2025 is the single point of intersection between all of these circles, which is why we’ve been so excited, terrified, interested in it.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, the overlap, but also like, the landbridge. It’s like, between, you know, Europe and Asia there’s that point where you have that landbridge in between the two continents, and it’s a little ambiguous about like, are you in Europe; are you in Asia or the Middle East? And you’re sort of in both, but you know that you’ve made that transition from one major area of the world to another at a certain point.
AC: Yeah, and like all bridges, you’re kind of not on either side, and it’s a space that has its own particular quality. And it’s a space you never stay in. Right? You don’t set up your life on the bridge.
CB: Right.
AC: Right? You’re moving from one side to the other. It’s always a transitory space.
CB: And that’s what’s so important about the fact that there’s so much cardinal energy this year. It’s just like, cardinal energy is that energy of the new seasons, and when seasons change, you have this really distinct quality where stuff clearly is moving in a completely different direction. It’s not super stable yet, but it’s obvious that a turn has taken place and that you’re in a completely new part of the year or a new quarter of the year, and eventually things will stabilize. But in that initial transitional phase, things start moving very rapidly in a new direction.
AC: Yeah. To use a seasonal analogy, it’s like the last couple weeks of a season where it’s like, oh, it’s the end of summer; fall’s about to begin. And it’s like, you have some days that are just summer weather, and then you have some fall days, and then it goes back to summer, but it’s before the season is decided. But yeah, it’s Year One of the great rearrangement. Everything will look different afterwards.
CB: Yeah. 2025, the year that things change.
All right, my friend, I think we’ve reached the end of this overview of 2025. This was a lot, but this was really good. I mean, we’ve been talking about and anticipating this year for years now. Literally, we’ve been talking about how wild 2025 would be, and I can’t believe we’re actually there at this point.
AC: It’s definitely wild. I’ve been thinking about it enough that of course it’s here; it’s been here in my thoughts for so long. I’m just sort of – I have an, “Well, finally I get to see what happens and I can stop just using historical precedents and, you know, symbolic thinking.” You know, I have everything except the actual data now, or like, the actual what happens. And I can’t wait to see what happens despite the fact that a lot of it will be fucking crazy, and some of it will be awful. But like, bring it on. Like, it was gonna happen. So let’s just, you know, let’s do this.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, we’ve all been talking about and Nick and I did a episode on Uranus in Gemini like, 10 years ago, and what that was like in US history and then talked about then what we were anticipating 10 years in the future that that would be like and what it would coincide with just based on the prior precedent of those three wars. And that was one of my like, initial reactions in November after the election was just like, oh, okay, we’re doing that version of this, and that’s where this is headed. And that’s kind of what I’ve been feeling like is that the pieces are now in place, and we can kind of see where things are headed finally.
AC: Yeah. We’ll see part of it. I think this whole era’s gonna be very chaotic. I think that it’s gonna be very hard to draw straight lines from what’s happening now to what happens next, and what happens next to the next thing. It’s going to be consistent as like, the plow of chaos tears up what is solid. But —
CB: I think we can see the, when the events happen in March and April, I think we’ll very quickly see what the cascade event is and how that’s gonna cascade —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — into the rest of the Aries transits as well as the Uranus ingress.
AC: A hundred percent. Yeah. For 2025, I was just thinking about the arc as a whole.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right, well I’m glad – all that being said, as we were preparing for this, one of the things I said was just like, I’m so happy that you and I have had so much experience at this point doing these monthly and these year ahead forecasts at this point to do this that it builds up to such a consequential year in world history, and having just completely a hugely consequential and eventful year in world history, I’m very happy that you and I were able to do this together, and you know, having gotten our 10,000 hours or whatever in of practice of trying to do forecasts like this to build up to this point. It’s been a great time preparing for this and also doing this forecast with you, so thanks for doing this with me today.
AC: Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, it’s been… It’s a real blessing to get to do this project and to watching things as they happen, talk about them before they happen, like, check for hits and misses, and also just get to see the blanks filled in. You know? Sometimes astrology’s like mad libs where you know the sentence structure, but you’re not sure what that noun or verb is gonna be. And yeah, you know, you’ve built a magnificent platform and an audience that’s actually interested in, you know, getting into the nitty-gritty and getting nerdy and historical about it. And so I’m very grateful to be part of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And watching and documenting history as it’s taking place. Like, I have a real sense that that’s what we’re doing here, and obviously that’s what we’ve been doing. And this year, we’ll see even more how that is as well and be there to document it each month as we come back and do the monthly forecast episodes and then get into more details about the inner planet transits and other things during the course of this coming year.
AC: Yeah. Hundred percent. Yeah, I think we got about a thousand of those 10,000 hours today!
CB: Right! Yeah. Something like that. It was a run, but that’s okay. We wanted to do a comprehensive job; I think we have accomplished that. And yes, as Erin says in the comments, like I said earlier, with Saturn-Neptune, we’re gonna learn this year that time isn’t real and it’s just all a figment of our imagination and what you make of it. That’s how you feel right now at the end of this five hours, I assume?
AC: Well, as I said early, time may not be real, but exhaustion is.
CB: That’s fair. You do have a mortal body that is a small time experience. All right, my friend – good job. Thanks for joining me today. What’s your website again?
AC: AustinCoppock.com and you can find a lot of the work that I’ve been involved in at SphereAndSundry.com.
CB: Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks everyone for joining me and for watching this episode. And I guess that’s it, so good luck in 2025, and we’ll see you again next time!
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