The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 475, titled:
Venus Retrograde in Aries in History
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on January 25, 2025
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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 13th, 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 Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be talking about Venus retrograde in Aries through history. Hey, Nick – thanks for joining me.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me back.
CB: I’ve finally caught up with you recently since I’ve been doing my own Venus retrograde research and going through the past century that Venus has been doing these retrogrades through the sign of Aries. And what we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna go through the past century and every eight year repetition of Venus retrograde in Aries from the past century, starting way back in 1905. Although we’re gonna work our way backwards in reverse chronological order starting with 2025, and then just work our way back and then people are gonna be able to see – on the one hand, I wanna demonstrate the repetitions that when Venus repeats that retrograde, sometimes it connects events in eight-year increments or 16-year increments or other intervals of eight where you’ll see a connection or a similarity in events through time. Other times, you’ll just see similar themes coming up, and one of the goals here is to learn what Venus retrogrades are about and what they coincide with by just seeing some of the major events that coincided with this particular retrograde in history.
So this isn’t gonna be a full Venus retrograde episode because I’ve already done a bunch of those, especially in 2023 during the last Venus retrograde in Leo, where you can see a full episode titled “Venus Retrograde in Astrology Explained” in episode 405. Another major one titled “Inanna, Venus Retrograde, and Barbie” that I did with Demetra George, and then there was another one – episode 410 – on sharing Venus retrograde stories. So this will expand and build on this one by focusing on a new particular Venus retrograde cycle, which is the one in Aries.
All right, so let’s set some context for this current retrograde, just because it’ll help to give us a format and like, a blueprint for the rest of them going forward. So first things first, this particular retrograde there’s a few different pieces to it in terms of the timing. So —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — in terms of the retrograde itself, Venus is gonna slow down and station retrograde at 10 degrees of Aries on March 1st, and then it’s gonna retrograde back into Pisces where it will eventually station direct almost 40 days later, around 40 days later, on April 12th where it’s gonna then slow down and station direct at 24 degrees of Pisces. So that’s the core of it is the retrograde period itself when Venus moves backwards in the order of signs and degrees for a period of time. But it can also be – there’s also a few other pieces to that. So for example, the broader Venus retrograde period, one part of a Venus retrograde is not just Venus moving backwards, but it’s also Venus moving through in this instance two signs where it’s just staying in those two signs for the entire first six months of the year. And to me, the broader Venus retrograde range includes the entire period in which it’s in those two signs as being relevant because it’s activating a certain part of our chart and a certain house in everybody’s chart for an extended period of time.
So for example, Venus moved in Pisces already on January 2nd, and then it won’t depart from Aries for the final time until June 5th when it moves into Taurus. So that sets up a pretty long span of time of just about six months that it’s gonna sit in those two signs, which gives you sort of an expanded period.
NDB: Yep!
CB: So there’s also two other periods – there’s the pre-retrograde shadow period which starts on January 28th, which is when Venus passes 24 degrees of Pisces, which is the degree it will later retrograde back to. And then there’s the post-retrograde shadow period, which is when Venus will pass the degree that it first stationed retrograde at, at 10 degrees of Aries on May 16th. So that’s another important set of ranges in terms of dates. And then there’s one more sets of dates, which is the greatest elongation, and that’s the one that you really like to focus on, right?
NDB: Well, it’s something that I like to include in the overall study. I mean, what you’ve set up there in that first diagram is absolutely a worthwhile sort of boundary if you will or frame to study that cycle in. But the greatest elongations at either side of the Venus retrogrades, I think, mark these very interesting points when Venus is at its greatest distance from the Sun. You have one that precedes the Venus retrograde; it’ll be about I believe about 50 days before the retrograde station. Venus will be at its greatest distance from the Sun in one direction, and then we go through the whole Venus retrograde cycle, Venus emerges as a morning star, and about 50 or 51 days, I think, following the direct station, we then have the next greatest elongation – the greatest distance, the maximum elongation indeed, between Sun and Venus. So that’s – part of what’s happening the Venus retrograde over this very relatively short – you know, it’s about five percent of the total Venus cycle is this one Venus retrograde in Aries. And over the course of that retrograde, Venus is going through this tremendous transformation in speed and in visibility. It goes from being very bright to literally disappearing behind the Sun. It goes from disappearing in the setting sky in the west and then reappearing a little while later in the morning sky. So yeah, all these different things, the change in speed, the change in visibility, the change in brightness – all these things modify Venus over the course of a very short part of its overall cycle. And it’s really interesting to watch, and it tends to accelerate a lot of these sort of Venus-related subjects in astrology.
CB: Right. And so here’s a diagram for those watching the video version that Demetra and I designed back in 2023, and this shows how the maximum elongation is about at like, 46, 47, 48 degrees is as far away as Venus can get from the Sun, and that’s when it hits its maximum elongation when it gets that far from the Sun. And what’s interesting – and you can see this right now – is that Venus becomes super bright in the night sky and super visible when it’s at its maximum elongation. And this is important because otherwise, when Venus gets too close to the Sun, you can’t actually see it. So this is part of the way to conceptualize a little bit this period is that Venus hitting the maximum elongation is at its most bright at that point. And I didn’t actually plan this, but I just realized today that Venus is at its maximum elongation according to the website Astro-Seek, and they have a great page where you can calculate maximum elongations of Venus; it’s titled “Venus Cycle Calendar,” and it has a thing for the greatest elongation. And it says, today, June 10th, 2025 is the —
NDB: January 12th.
CB: Sorry, January 10th, thank you – 2025 is the greatest elongation. Right. We started this 12 minutes ago, so today is Friday, January 10th, 2025. We started just before 12:20 PM with Gemini rising here today, and we’re doing this episode and this is the best electional chart of the month that Leisa Schaim and I had picked out in our year ahead elections. But you and me, Nick, we ended up scheduling this partially due to like, practical purposes because you’re like, moving tomorrow. But it just happens to be that we’re doing this big episode on the day of Venus’s greatest elongation.
NDB: Yep, it’s perfect timing. There are no accidents.
CB: It’s brilliant. All right. Well, okay, I think that’s good. So we’ve now established that we have these different ranges, and here’s another slide just for 2025 that shows the ranges. And the retrograde is the most intense phase from like, March 1st through April 12th. But there’s also when it enters its shadow degrees from January 28th to May 16th. There’s the period in which it’ll be going through those two signs, which is January 2nd to June 5th. And then finally, there’s the greatest elongation dates, which are January 10th to June 4th. So all of those are kind of like, overlapping in greater periods of intensity, and the nucleus of it is the retrograde itself for 40 days and 40 nights in the middle. But you do have these things around it that are still relevant and connected to whatever the Venus retrograde story is.
NDB: Yeah, certainly. If you’re following Venus over the course of a given retrograde transit, you’ll see it’s not merely like, a sort of zigzag motion. It makes these different loops depending on what part of the zodiac it’s in. It makes these different varieties of loops. So it’s a really sort of dramatic and changeable part of the cycle, just visibly. It’s not sort of staying in a straight line and merely doing this; it really is doing this little dance in the sky, if you will, if you’re following it over the course of not just those 40 days and 40 nights or those – certainly, that’s the really dramatic part of the loop, but that whole time preceding and following it, Venus is still going veering way off course as it’s about to do this loop. So yeah, it’s perfectly legitimate to look at it relative to these different, you know, goalposts that you can set, and it’s interesting no matter what, indeed.
CB: Right. And so Venus will station retrograde in Aries every eight years. So for example, going back, the last one before this was in March and April of 2017. And then the one before that was in March and April of 2009. The one before that was in March and April of 2001. And what’s interesting is that it goes retrograde right now in five different spots in the zodiac, and this ends up forming like, a five-pointed star in the different signs, basically, over an eight-year period, right?
NDB: Yeah. And really, as it goes backward through the signs, it takes about 120 years and eventually it shifts back into the preceding zodiac sign. So that’s another sort of interesting logic to doing our chronology backward today with this episode is at the same time, we’re gonna be showing you Venus moving forward the zodiac because we’re going backward in time. So it’s a funny sort of reversal in that way. We’re still moving forward in a different sense of the word.
CB: Right. So this is – what we’re gonna focus on today is just one part of this five-pointed star of Venus, which is the Venus retrogrades that currently start in Aries and retrograde back into Pisces. But in 2003, we experienced the one that now starts in Leo and then retrogrades and stays entirely in —
NDB: 2023.
CB: — Leo. 2023. Wow, I’m off today. You’re gonna have to keep an eye on me today. Gonna drink some more coffee.
NDB: I’m sharp; don’t worry. When it comes to this topic, you won’t slip much by me.
CB: Yeah. This is the one, like, not to slip up on. Yeah. So but there’s another one that retrogrades in Gemini, there’s another retrograde that retrogrades in Capricorn, and there’s another one in Scorpio. So these all, because these repeat every eight years, these could all be individual studies in and of itself, and that’s a lot of what I did in 2023 is we really focused on the Venus retrograde in Leo history, and we found a lot of cool stuff about how like, the Barbie movie came out the day that Venus stationed retrograde in Leo that summer, and this actually tied all the way back to 1959, which was like, the first summer after Barbie had come out and became really popular was also a Venus retrograde in Leo period, so it connected those two points in history in this really striking way.
So what we’re gonna do here today is just focus on the retrograde in Aries and take that back in history and see what we can find. And actually, we found a lot of really cool stuff, so this is gonna be really good. Here is a list, finally, for those watching the video version of all of the Venus retrograde in Aries dates. So going back more than a century, the first one was 1905 – so this is the first time that Venus – it started retrograde in Taurus, but then it retrograded back and stationed direct in Aries for the very first time in that year in 1905. Then eight years later, there was another retrograde that stationed direct in Aries in 1913. Then the next one was 1921. Then 1928. 1937 —
NDB: 1929.
CB: Damn! All right. 1929.
NDB: Should I take over?
CB: For reading the – yeah. I mean, you do have —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — more, better Virgo placements than I do. Let me just focus. Hold on. So 1937. 1945. 1953. 1961. 1969. 1977. 1985. 1993. 2001. 2009. 2017. 2025. So those are the years we’re gonna be going through, and we’re gonna see a lot of interesting connections and repetitions between those different periods where Venus is always going retrograde in the first part of the year, basically. Like, the first quarter and second quarter of the year, essentially from like, January until about June-ish, although there’s gonna be some shift in the dates that we’ll go through during that time.
NDB: Yeah. With every sequential return, the return always occurs about two to three zodiacal degrees and two to three calendar days earlier than the previous return. So it is gradually moving backward through the sign with every successive station. And this is why every 120 years, the Venus retrograde will move through one full sign and move into the preceding sign – hence the fact that Venus was retrograde in Aries in the 20th century. It’s interesting that in the 19th century, that same part of the cycle it was Venus retrograde in Taurus. And that might even tell us something about the difference between Victorian people and 20th century people is that Victorian people lived through an age when Venus was going retrograde through Taurus, a sign that it rules, whereas 20th century people were going through an era when Venus goes retrograde through Aries, a Martian sign. These are some of the interesting ways that you can use the Venus cycle to think about history, think about different periods, different cultures, different eras, because it really demarcates them in very interesting ways.
CB: Yeah. And I’ve noticed that it also unlocks – like, for people that have placements in those signs natally that it’s retrograding in, sometimes it activates their chart or unlocks it. So you know, that first retrograde that went back into Aries in 1905, that just happened that went back into Albert Einstein’s 10th house, which is Aries, where he had important Aries placements, and that ended up being his miracle year when he came up with the theory of special relativity. Or of relativity.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. And any time – if I have a client who has an early, you know, say the first decan of Aries as an Ascendant, or the Moon is there or something of that nature, you know right away – okay, well, this is the chart of someone who every eight years will have that Venus retrograde transit pass over that point, whatever the point may be. And so it’s already informing you of some pattern that you can look at this person’s chart and think about how it’s appeared there regularly over the course of their entire life. And working with the person, you can often sort of, you know, resurrect a sort of a thread that has been consistent over the course of their life, all of which ties to these eight-year intervals. So it’s really, really useful for anyone doing astrology with any chart, because it just gives you some idea of what the person’s been through.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So all right. So let’s talk about 2025. Yeah, let’s focus on 2025 to set the present context, and then we’ll jump back in history. Here is the title card for 2025 with those dates again really quickly.
So already we’re starting to see some repetitions here. Even though Venus has only just like, gone into Pisces in the past week or so, we’re already starting to see things develop and see what some of the repetitions are. So the biggest one, of course, right now that’s about to take place later in January is that Donald Trump is about the be inaugurated president for a second time after a surprise comeback, one of the most striking comebacks in history, and actually surprising comebacks is actually one of the themes that we’ll see come up over and over again with some of these Venus retrogrades. Judy Garland giving her surprise comeback concert in, what, like, 1953. There was —
NDB: No, 1961.
CB: 1961.
NDB: Yeah, but her chart – her whole life has all these Venus retrograde in Aries moments in them, so yeah, we’ll probably get to her a few times over the course of the episode.
CB: Right. But I’m just mentioning the instance where she gave this legendary concert, which seemed to be like, one of the greatest comebacks in history. Similarly, in 2017, that was the one eight years ago – I’m just confirming this – that was the Super Bowl one, right?
NDB: Oh, I missed the Super Bowl one if you added that. It was a comeback – the largest comeback in Super Bowl —
CB: Okay yeah.
NDB: — history.
CB: Sorry, it was —
NDB: The Patriots overcoming a 20-3 deficit to emerge victorious.
CB: Yeah, that was the one in 2017. So it’s like, they were super, super down basically. Like, they were gonna lose the game. They had the hugest deficit where the other team was up like, the highest number of points in Super Bowl history, yet they still made a comeback and came back in I think overtime and like, won the game.
So one of the keywords I learned from doing this research is sometimes a surprise comeback. And so Trump is our first example of that, actually, because he, you know, lost the presidency in the 2020 election, and then somehow came back. And now interestingly, he’s our first repetition that’s really obvious because if you go back eight years earlier, he was inaugurated the first time in early 2017, and at that time, Venus was slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde in Aries and Pisces just like it’s about to do today. So part of the repetition astrologically with Trump getting back into office now is this very Venus retrograde that he got into office in the first time.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, he’s got a history with this particular Venus retrograde. He married his first wife, Ivana, in March 1977 or April of 1977, rather, during this same Venus retrograde in Aries. So yeah, there have been other sort of important commitments, shall we say, that he’s made during this Venus retrograde.
CB: Right. And all of his oldest children are from that marriage.
NDB: Correct.
CB: Okay. So another repetition with this one, of course, was that one of the obvious ones is that he defeated a woman who became the nominee of the party, which is still actually a very new thing. Like, Hillary Clinton was the first time that a woman had become the nominee of a major political party. She’d gone up against Trump and lost that election, and then this time with Harris it was the first time that a Black woman who had been nominated for a major political party. She went up against Trump and lost to Trump. So there was some sort of repetition there again in terms of some of those dynamics in an eight-year period. Interestingly, also, Harris – we’ve had to see Harris over the past week since Venus went into Pisces because she’s the vice president; she’s the sitting vice president. The sitting vice president always has to certify the victory – the votes, basically – in Congress at the opening of the new congressional session at the beginning of January. So Harris has had to be there to basically like, officiate her opponent’s victory. And what’s interesting about this is this actually happened two other times in Venus retrograde years in Aries. Like, 2001, when Al Gore had to certify as the sitting vice president that George Bush had won the election, even though ironically it was like, a disputed election that had gotten decided by the Supreme Court. And even going back to 1961 when Nixon lost against Kennedy, he as sitting vice president had to certify the vote in Congress after that.
NDB: Yeah. And in all cases, these were very close elections that had some sort of dubious, you know, circumstances surrounding their ultimate conclusion. So there’s also that in common as well. In 2001 and 1961, rather.
CB: 1961, there were like, accusations that the Kennedys had like, stuffed votes or things like that.
NDB: Correct. And in Chicago and Texas, yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay. So anyway, so that’s obviously one of our most prominent repetitions. Moving forward, this year the Academy Awards are gonna take place, and when we’re researching this, one of the things you pointed out is that the Academy Awards are very tied in with this specific Venus retrograde in Aries that goes all the way back in its history and like, important turning points and firsts keep happening in the Academy Awards under this specific Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah, that’s correct, going all the way back to the very first ceremony, which was in May of 1929 during the Venus retrograde very close to the station. So that, you know, yeah, and there are other instances in its history which I think we’ll touch on as we go backward in time. I think we’ll keep touching on these different moments in Oscar history that are very tied to the Venus retrograde, ongoing.
CB: Yeah. It was like, the first time they broadcast it over the radio was this Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: The first time they televised it was this Venus retrograde in Aries. Like, it always comes up as a super important one.
NDB: Even the first return in 1937 was actually the first time where the categories were really set – like, it’s gonna be five movies, and it’s this category. It had been a lot sort of looser prior to that. So even just with the very first return it became very formalized.
CB: Got it. Okay. So and in terms of one of the things that I noticed is sometimes – like, we talked about Venus retrograde last time. I thought it was really interesting in our “Venus Retrograde in Astrology Explained” episode back in 2023, two of the figures that we focused on who are women that had Venus retrograde was Demi Moore and Jodie Foster, who were born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And what’s interesting is they were born a week apart with Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and both of them have Jupiter ruling the Ascendant, which Demi Moore having Pisces rising and Jodie Foster having Sagittarius rising. And just last week, both of them on the same night won a Golden Globe award, with Demi Moore winning one for the movie The Substance and Jodie Foster winning one for a television show, like, a season of – what was the name of the show? I’m spacing it at the moment.
NDB: You’re spacing! This was your category; I don’t know the show! I’m a big Jodie Foster fan, but I haven’t been watching the show, so I don’t know what it is.
CB: Oh, okay. It’s annoying that I’m spacing it out, because Austin just like, encouraged me to watch it like, a year ago, and I watched and I really liked it – True Detective, with like —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — the first season was with like, Matthew McConaughey and another guy.
NDB: Okay. Oh, that guy! Yeah, I know him.
CB: Yeah. Woody Harrelson. So anyway. Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe. They won it on the same night. Interestingly, Venus was exactly at three degrees of Pisces on the night that they both won this Golden Globe, and that’s exactly where they both have Jupiter at three degrees of Pisces. So this is really striking that sometimes people born with Venus retrograde having important events happen in their life during Venus retrogrades. And in this instance, it’s building up already once Venus moved into Pisces to the Venus retrograde, because it’s the start of a long transit of Venus through that sign. And I think this is gonna actually bode well for Demi Moore during the Oscars coming up, because Venus is gonna station retrograde on March 1st and then the Oscars are gonna happen right away on like, March 2nd. And Pisces is her rising sign, so Venus is gonna retrograde back into Pisces. And it’s also striking – in the year ahead forecast, I was talking about how Venus is gonna retrograde back and station conjunct Saturn. And I was trying to describe that as like, a woman who’s like, raised up into a high point of prominence despite issues having to do with like, health or time or other restrictions and things like that. And it’s really interesting because it’s like, very much what the subject of The Substance is like, about. And it has to do with issues of like, appearance and like, age and body and different things like that.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, Venus is very much about these sort of standards that we hold each other to, that we hold ourselves to, et cetera. I do wanna say something since we’re talking about the Oscars happening on the station, though. I do wanna point something out. Can you put the first diagram that you put up at the beginning of the episode, the one that traces just the Venus cycle itself in 2025?
CB: Yes —
NDB: The very first one. Yeah.
CB: So and I meant to say that this was designed by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co, this lovely Venus retrograde diagram she designed for me for the forecasts.
NDB: Yeah. Because it is – it’s fantastic. And but there’s something that isn’t in this diagram, not that necessarily needs to be, but I just wanna remind you and everyone about an important feature happening in 2025 with regard to these stations that isn’t something that happens with every recurring Venus retrograde station. Last October, whether it was October 1st or 2nd, the last solar eclipse we had was at 10 degrees of Libra. And the last lunar eclipse we had in mid-September of 2024 was at 25 Pisces. And then just a few weeks following these – well, actually, a few weeks following the retrograde station, but prior to the direct station, the next pair of eclipses occur at nine or 10 Aries and I think 23 or 24 Virgo, somewhere there. In other words, these eclipse pairings of late ‘24 and early ‘25 happen to sync up perfectly with Venus’s retrograde and direct stations. And then to compound this, less than two weeks after Venus goes retrograde at 10 Aries, Mercury is gonna go retrograde at nine Aries. And it goes retrograde all the way back to 27 Pisces. So it is – there are all these dynamics to 2025’s Venus retrograde – in particular the eclipse thing – that is really unique, and typically – you know, planetary stations that coincide with eclipse degrees this closely tend to have really magnified sort of outcomes, if you will. You know, really more sort of, really calling attention to themselves. So you know, I would agree that Demi Moore looks well positioned to win, but there are so many also so many chaotic elements occurring that very week that really anything could happen. You know. So yeah —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — good luck to her!
CB: Well —
NDB: It will be, yeah, it’s gonna be a pretty big week altogether.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I would just say, regardless of what happens or whether she wins, like, Best Actress or whatever awards The Substance ends up winning at the Academy Awards, this is a period of much greater prominence for her in her life when she’s being nominated at the very least for a bunch of awards. She’s doing tons of press. She’s getting lots of great press. And Venus is going retrograde through her rising sign, so I think that’s an example of how sometimes these retrogrades can actually be positive for people and lead to periods of greater eminence and visibility.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. And she’s had some other movies that came out during this retrograde that are also kind of interesting. Like in April of 1993, the movie Indecent Proposal came out.
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: Which, if you remember, is a movie where I think it’s Robert Redford and Woody Harrelson is her husband, and Robert Redford is a millionaire who wants to pay a certain sum of money for a night with her, and so on and so forth. So yeah – was that the movie? Do I have the plot right, or is it a different one?
CB: Yeah, that’s the plot —
NDB: That’s the one.
CB: I was just watching an interview with her talk about it, like, yesterday. That and that even some of like, the scenes were more risque or something like that. Like, she seemed to be alluding to like, the sex scenes being more risque or that the implication was because of the whole context of the movie and different things like that. Yeah, so that’s actually really interesting if that was one. I mean, because that’s one of the things we talked about is Venus retrogrades sometimes being – there can be scandals surrounding it. There can be risque behavior like, seems —
NDB: Provocative, yeah.
CB: Provocative, yeah.
NDB: “Provocative” is another word I would use. Yeah. Someone’s being sort of outraged, you know, one way or the other. Someone’s being offended. Because it really – Venus really is about the sort of the social code, what we all agree is done or not done. Who’s being polite; who’s being rude. But whenever Venus goes retrograde, these lines are getting tested or shifting in some way. They’ll shift in one direction or the other, you know. They are present at a lot of – you’re gonna see, we’re gonna be touching on Venus retrogrades that coincide with suffragette rallies and things of that nature. But you know, Venus was also retrograde in Scorpio with Uranus in 1978 when the Iranian Revolution happened and women had to go from wearing western clothing to, you know, scarves and hijabs and things. So it’s that whole sort of range that we have in society where these lines are always sort of pushing in one direction or the other. Someone is not happy with the status quo, and they want things to be different. And then other people are very, very attached to holding on to the status quo, whatever that may be. So it’s that whole sort of dance that we go through, and that’s what you see is exactly what’s up for grabs when Venus goes retrograde.
CB: For sure. Yeah. And I noticed this also comes up – like, risque topics come up with like, the films and the culture at the time, but also sometimes in the Academy Awards. Like, I was looking at like, the 1961 Venus retrograde in Aries, and the movie that won Best Picture that year was titled The Apartment. And the Amazon description for the movie just says, “An office worker lends his flat to coworkers for extramarital affairs.” And that was – have you seen that one?
NDB: Oh yeah, yeah. It’s a classic movie. And that the same – the 1961 Academy Awards were also the year that Elizabeth Taylor won Best Actress for a movie called Butterfield Eight in which she basically plays a call girl. And to make matters worse, she had been snubbed; she had not won the previous two years, even though she had been in much better movies – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and I think Giant. But because she was involved in marital scandals – you know, her husband was killed in a plane crash, and then she wound up marrying her late husband’s best friend, Eddie Fisher, who had been married to Debbie Reynolds, and so she caused this huge scandal because she broke up a marriage and she was sort of canceled in that sense of the era. But then she made this movie, Butterfield Eight; she was nominated, but just before the ceremony, she got very sick, and she had pneumonia. And I think she was possibly even legally dead or very close to it, but they had to do an emergency tracheotomy just to save her life. And she really was on the edge. And this was in the newspapers, like, as a big, big story. And so she wound up winning the Oscar. And she was kind of bitter about it, because she didn’t like Butterfield Eight. And she felt she had, you know, really deserved the award for other movies. And she was kind of embarrassed about the fact that the role was a call girl, et cetera, et cetera. So there were all – I mean, that’s just like, this one casual example of exactly what seems to happen during the Academy Awards years once every eight years when that Venus retrograde in Aries is in play.
CB: Yeah. And that was the ‘61 one as well?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Well, that’s really interesting, because the reason I was gonna segue is because another movie that’s like, a frontrunner this year is Anora, which is considered to be a frontrunner for Best Picture and Best Actress, and it’s a movie about like, this really strong-willed, like, feisty sex worker, basically, and like, the dynamic between her and her client. And they say that it actually has a strong chance of winning in several categories. I actually I watched it; it’s actually a really good movie. And the lead actress, Mikey Madison, has placements in early Aries. So it’s interesting that she’s getting all those positive like, press and stuff right now for her performance in that movie, and that it’s even up for, you know, consideration for an Oscar.
NDB: Yeah. That’s Venus retrograde for you!
CB: That is Venus retrograde. So the other Venus retrograde thing that’s happening right now that just happened in the past few days is there’s also been these destructive fires in Los Angeles that have just burned down scores and scores of homes. And one of the things in the news is that there’s many celebrities and like, movie stars that had their homes or had homes there in Los Angeles that were burned down and just completely wiped out. So this will no doubt play some sort of role, I think, in the Academy Awards this year in terms of getting mentioned.
NDB: Oh, I certainly imagine so. I mean, it’s so close to home. I just saw a headline that Mel Gibson’s house literally burned down while he was doing a Joe Rogan interview. You know, just —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — like, sort of that, you know, I mean, that’s just one example of the kind of stories that are coming out. But yeah, I mean, who knows if they’re even gonna be held in Los Angeles this year? You know, what if that’s not a possibility?
CB: Yeah. We’ll have to look and pay attention.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: I saw there was an astrologer on TikTok – Sarah – who posted a chart for Los Angeles incorporation in 1850, and it had Mars just coming off of a retrograde in Cancer as well. And she pointed out also an Aries stellium, and I thought that was really interesting. I haven’t researched the history of Los Angeles very much, but I’m sure there’s some history there. So that’s no doubt gonna be part of this Venus retrograde story.
Reminds me of how there was that fire in Hawaii during the Venus retrograde in Leo. And sometimes like, disasters and things are some things that come up during the course of Venus retrogrades for weird reasons.
NDB: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, for better or for worse, when we have these natural disasters, you know, very often people come together and pitch in and help each other, which in itself is a very – and I think that’s where the Venus retrograde really falls into the thing. It’s not that it signifies the disaster; it signifies the relations between people during times of crisis, because that’s where Venus – that’s Venus’s dominion. You know how these things go. You know, when you have the – no matter – people might be, you know, furious with each other on one day, but you hit a period like that where everyone’s really gotta pull together and cooperate, and yeah, you have a shift. That’s exactly what Venus retrograde can do as well.
CB: That makes sense, because I actually I noted that and I wrote that down on a larger nation level that in some instances I was seeing like, nations, you know, doing diplomatic cooperation and like, signing treaties and things like that under Venus retrogrades as part of, you know, establishing diplomatic relations and things like that.
NDB: Indeed.
CB: All right. So other news stories. Justin Trudeau just stepped down, and you had pointed out how this connected back to a period in 1977 under another Venus retrograde in Aries that was important for him.
NDB: Yeah, it’s a notorious story in Canadian history; the Canadians listening will know this one well. Also, Rolling Stones fans will know this story well. It’s where these two factions meet. In March of 1977, the Rolling Stones were flying into Toronto to record a live album. And Keith Richards’ wife was busted at the airport with an amount of heroin, and she was detained. And because of this, they were on high alert. Apparently, they may have already been sort of, you know, expecting this kind of thing. And when the Rolling Stones got to their hotel, the Canadian mounted police rushed in and went into Keith Richards’ room and found heroin there. And one thing led to another, and that was a big scandal, and then amidst all this, Justin’s father – Pierre Trudeau – was the prime minister of Canada at the time. And his wife, Margaret, they had just split up. They had a big age difference in their marriage; they had three kids together; they’d been married for about six years. I think it was the 6th anniversary of their wedding. And they split up, and she left, and she was sort of newly free, I suppose. And she wound up at the hotel with the Rolling Stones, hanging out with Ron Wood, the guitarist in the Rolling Stones. And you know, I can’t claim to know what did or did not happen there, but they certainly had adjacent rooms and they were very close, and some kind of intimacy occurred between the two of them. So this is the First Lady of Canada; it’s a huge sort of political scandal. Everyone’s talking about it. And in the middle of it all, Keith Richards is in a big, you know, legal case that could see him thrown into jail. The story of how he gets out of that is also very interesting but beyond the scope of this story. So yeah, the fact that Justin – I mean, Justin would have been, let’s see, five years old when this was happening. So old enough to, you know, tell something’s wrong, obviously. And so it’s interesting that, yeah, that this nadir in his political career is also a recurrence of this Venus retrograde pattern.
CB: Yeah. I mean, that would have been like, a defining event of his childhood in that it was when his parents split up. So it probably would have been experienced as subjectively negative for him. I noticed that he has the Moon in Aries, so it’s interesting that this event of like, his mom kind of like, running off was his Venus retrograde story in Aries early in his life. And then now, many years later, there’s this other Venus retrograde that takes place, and he’s stepping down, basically, as prime minister after being prime minister for so long. And it was interesting, also, because like, part of the precipitating event I think was his finance minister resigning or something, like, a few weeks ago —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — wasn’t it?
NDB: Yeah. Chrystia Freeland, who is I think 12 days older than me or something. She’s another ‘68 Leo. Yeah. And my money would be on her being his replacement. There’s an interesting thing – just to not get too caught up in the weeds, but – he resigned as prime minister, but he did not announce an election, which is what a PM would usually do in this instance. So what they’re gonna wind up doing is having just a leadership conference and choosing the next prime minister amongst the sitting MPs in the Liberal party. And the reason they’re doing this is the Conservative party, the Canadian Conservative party, is under investigation for Russian interference, and the report is supposed to come out I think at the end of February, hint hint. So and when that comes out, that can be a whole sort of other chapter in this ongoing, you know, political mayhem happening up there. So —
CB: Got it.
NDB: — yeah. Yeah. Stay tuned on that.
CB: Yeah. So this is just the beginning of this Venus retrograde. Most of this stuff hasn’t happened yet, but we’re just starting to get into some of the early versions of some of these stories, because the Venus retrograde – instead of being like, a singular thing, it’s usually like, a sequence of events that plays out over a few month period. The only other ones that are notable that I can see forming in this one is Lady Gaga first blew up and came on the scene in early 2009, and she did her first major tour then during the Venus retrograde in early 2009. And her single “Poker Face” was like, really huge, as well as another one, “Let’s Dance,” was really huge in early 2009 when Venus was retrograde in Aries and Pisces. And she actually has Aries and Pisces placements very prominently in her chart. So I just looked her up, and apparently like, just this past week, she just put out a video because she has a new single out with Bruno Mars that hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. And she also has a new album that’s coming out in February. So she’s gonna be one to pay attention to as a repetition of this period versus – what is it – two Venus retrograde cycles ago 16 years ago.
Finally —
NDB: Right.
CB: You also noticed that Timothee Chalamet is starring in this Bob Dylan biopic movie, and he’s out promoting it a lot recently. And the first Bob Dylan performance ever was under one of these Venus retrogrades.
NDB: The first one in New York City. The first time he performed in New York City was April of 1961. He had just hitchhiked to New York from Minnesota. Part of that hitchhike journey was alongside famous astrologer Michael Erlewine, apparently, who would also later have a band with Iggy Pop. And yes, in April of 1961, he performed I think at Gerde’s Folk City for the first time. So this Venus retrograde, the movie coming out precisely about this very – it wouldn’t surprise me if this very gig we’re talking about is in the Timothee Chalamet movie. Yeah, there’s a Venus return of when Bob’s musical career actually started.
CB: That’s funny. Michael Erlewine is like, the Forrest Gump of the astrological community. He’s just like, showing up in weird places with like, Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop and later the traditional revival and different things like that.
NDB: Yeah. No, he’s got his fingers in some very interesting pies. Always fun to talk to, and someone who kind of, you know, I’m somewhat in awe of, you know? There are so many great stories. All right.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that brings us —
NDB: I have one – wait, no, I have one other thing I just wanna point out. This is kind of an improvisation, but it’s really interesting. I had a client the other day from Germany ask me – apparently in Germany, they’ve just called a snap election. And this client was somewhat anxious about how the election could go. Now, I haven’t been following the most recent candidates; I have, you know, Olaf Scholz’s chart, but I haven’t even looked at it very carefully. But this person gave me the names of the main candidates, and I looked up their birthdays; I didn’t have a time of birth. But apparently the far right candidate is a woman named Alice Weidel. And she’s from one of these very far right parties that’s running in this election. And she first got leadership of this party of April of 2017, and it turns out even though she’s the leader of this very far right German party, she is a lesbian, and she lives with a Sri Lankan woman in Switzerland. So – which is, to put it mildly, you know, out of the ordinary for a far right political leader. So on that basis alone, even without having any birth times, this really does look like an election to look out for. I would imagine this woman, Alice Weidel, does wind up being the winner of this election just based on, you know, I mean, that’s a Venus retrograde candidate right there, you know? So yeah, that’s just a thought I’m having about that particular election as well.
CB: Okay. Sure. Yeah, we’ll see what happens. We do know that some major geopolitical stuff’s gonna happen in March and April. Austin and I talked about it in the year ahead forecast, so people can go and listen to that for more. You know, the Neptune ingress into Aries the last time that happened was the beginning of the US Civil War in the 1800s. The Uranus return of the US is also happening, which you and I have talked about, Nick. And we have the final Aries eclipse in March. And all of those have coincided with things with Israel and Iran especially over the past year. So that’s likely to be the focal point, so that’s one thing that we’ll pay attention to, because I noticed this Venus retrograde does show up a few times in the history of Israel. So —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: That’s the context. We need to now investigate the history. We need to look to the past in order to be able to predict the future. So let’s look back. Let’s jump back eight years all the way back to the year 2017.
So 2017 was the last time that Venus went retrograde in Aries on March 4th, 2017, and it retrograded back into Pisces on April 15th of 2017. By sign, Venus first went into Pisces on January 3rd, and then it departed from Aries for the final time on June 6th. So that gives you kind of like, a broad range again, which is pretty similar to the one in 2015. So let’s talk about some of the stuff that happened back then.
One of the funny ones was the Academy Awards when the wrong award was announced and La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture at the end of the night instead of the one that actually won, which was the movie Moonlight. And it created this huge fiasco and scandal, because then they had to recall it, and they had to say, “No, that’s not right.” And they had to call the correct, you know, movie crew up onto the stage, and it was this huge blunder and was very much the talk of the town for a while.
NDB: Yeah. So cringe, as the kids say. So cringe.
CB: Yeah. So in terms of like, major events in Academy Award history, that’s like, another example of that, of just like, a major thing that is one of the most – certainly in my lifetime – like, one of the most striking events I remember about the Academy Awards that you would still continue to remember afterwards, even once it’s over.
NDB: Yeah. You know, for a show that has had streakers and protests and all kinds of things, that one really does just sort of land and never leave your memory. Quite the blunder.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Also in early 2017, as we talked about, Trump was inaugurated, and he had his first hundred days under this Venus retrograde. Interestingly, there were these women’s protests after Trump was inaugurated on January 21st, 2017, which was the 2017 Women’s March. And this protest was massive. It was the largest single day protest in US history at that time with an estimated three to four million participants nationwide. And what was interesting is that this was the largest protest in US history at the time until three years later when Venus went retrograde in Gemini, and then the George Floyd protests happened. So interesting connection in terms of Venus retrogrades there.
NDB: Yeah. Well, there was another Venus retrograde feature to it, of course. The women in this march, many of them were wearing a very particular hat that was a reference to a remark that Donald Trump was heard to say during the election with reference to a woman’s anatomy. And so this hat, I think, you know, is this sort of demonstrable sort of symbol of what this march was about, or what had triggered the size of it, if you will, is interesting. I mean, it’s, you know, there’s also a Venus retrograde element to that. I mean, it is Venus retrograde in Aries, after all, and it’s a hat!
CB: Yeah, it was like, the pussy hat like, cat hat became a symbol of the march and like, almost a powerful piece of visual art that was both like, playful and defiant, which is a good Venus retrograde keyword. But there was then like, this sea of pink hats that created this striking image that was widely shared and became instantly recognizable. Which is interesting, because it’s kind of reminiscent of I remember how when Venus went retrograde in 2023 and the Barbie movie came out, like, pink became like, the color of the summer basically, and everybody was dressing up in like, pink to go see the Barbie movie and stuff.
NDB: I sure did!
CB: Yeah, I saw it shortly after it came out. Well, because it was – it literally described the Inanna story, the descent of Inanna into the underworld – I think still quite accidentally. Like, that archetype just happened to bubble up into the story on the part of the writers with the director being born when Venus was like, stationing retrograde, I think, right? Greta Gerwig?
NDB: Yeah, yeah, she was indeed. And yeah, it could have all been an accident. But I mean, it also – that myth of Inanna is very closely tied to the cycle of Venus. And you never know! Maybe Greta Gerwig just, you know, really went into the weeds with the theme of the movie and knew exactly what she was doing in that way.
CB: Yeah. It always – it could go either way. We’ve just never had confirmation.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So this women’s march after Trump’s election kind of became a watershed moment in some of the – not just some of the resistance to Trump that was emerging at that time, but also later that year, the Me Too movement starts in like, October. And that ended up, you know, becoming this entire thing as well as part of 2017 and the energy of that year. And so some of those things may start repeating again later in this year when Venus will again pass through the same degrees on the same days and have the same relationship to the Sun that it did back then. So it’ll be interesting to pay attention to.
NDB: Yeah. You can see it sequentially going from Trump’s remark in October 2016 to the march in January of 2017 to ultimately what emerged around I believe October of 2017. You know, the whole Harvey Weinstein thing that erupted then. So yeah, I mean, that was a sequence of things, and the march I think is a sort of fulcrum in the middle of it all where everything sort of becomes possible.
CB: Right. For sure. So the other interesting thing at the beginning, of course, with Trump is that January 6th, 2017, US intelligence agencies released a report concluding that Russia had interfered with the 2016 election in favor of Trump. And then a bunch of stuff plays out over the next few months, and then finally by towards the end of the retrograde time frame, on May 17th was when Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation or the investigation into Russia interference. So there was some theme that was coming all during this time in early 2017 of like, the relationship between the US and Russia, Russia interfering in like, US politics and elections and things like that, the relationship between Trump and Russia and other things. And this will come up sometime in the past, especially in terms of Russian history, as we get —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — further back into these periods that this retrograde is always very important for Russia.
NDB: Yeah. Consistently.
CB: All right. So February 5th, the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl with that historic comeback against the Atlanta Falcons. April 26th, 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale was released or started – that series premiered, and that was about this like, dystopian future where women are like, controlled and, yeah, and it’s pretty dark. But it became a very popular and like, trendy thing that year, which was an interesting backdrop with all the Venus retrograde stuff.
One last one – the disastrous Fyre Festival happened —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: — April of 2017, and this was this thing where these promoters like, were promoting this festival on like, an island, and they got a bunch of celebrities to promote it and endorse it, and a bunch of people signed up and bought tickets. But then when they got there, the organizers had mismanaged it and had spent most of the money, so it ended up being like, really bad, and it was just an absolute disaster and like, a huge fiasco and scandal.
NDB: Yeah. People having to pay outrageous amounts for water and like, baking in shoddy tents or something. I don’t remember all the details. But yeah, it was a real mess, and there’s a documentary, I think, that covers a lot of the details of it.
CB: Yeah. It was like, widely documented on social media and in subsequent documentaries, because like, people had phones and they were documenting it in real time, just this absolute disaster of a festival. So yeah, that was a huge scandal that was kind of an interesting one back then.
There may have been other things, but I think those are the main things that I wanted to mention that seemed the most obvious in 2017 and that stood out to me.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right, cool. So let’s jump back then even further back in time to a year many of our younger listeners may not remember, but all the way back in history – the year 2009 was the retrograde Venus in Aries and Pisces that occurred before 2017.
So this one is interesting because this retrograde started March 6th in Aries, and it retrograded back and stationed direct at the very end of Pisces on April 17th, 2009. And this was actually the first one where Venus retrograded back into the end of Pisces. So prior to this time, when we go back like, eight years before this to 2001, we’ll see that the retrogrades were entirely in the sign of Aries for most of the 20th century, especially the second half of the 20th century. But this is the first time that there’s a shift and they’ve started falling back into Pisces. So this is notable and important as a shift, but I just wanted to note that even though we’re focusing primarily on the retrograde in Aries much of the time prior to this.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So what happened here is that Barack Obama was inaugurated during this Venus retrograde. So it was the first time that a Black man was elected president of the United States in history, so it’s a huge moment in terms of the civil rights movement, in terms of the history of like, racism in the United States. And we’ll see some ways that this Venus retrograde was connected to things going very far back in terms of that. One of the most striking one was the Freedom Riders started under the Venus retrograde back in – that was 1961, right?
NDB: That was 1961, yeah. And also the burning of the Tulsa what they called “Black Wall Street.” There was a massive riot where a mob of something like, 15 to 20,000 white people burned down a 30-foot square block area in Tulsa that was a sort of prosperous Black neighborhood, you know, basically on a trumped up rumor. So yeah, occasionally some of these, you know, past landmarks in the struggle did coincide with this particular Venus retrograde transit. I think with regard to Obama, it would also be interesting to put the chart of his inauguration up against the chart of Trump’s upcoming inauguration, because there’s also a really interesting feature that I think defines their respective presidencies with regard to where Venus is in those inauguration charts.
CB: Okay. What are we looking at?
NDB: 2009 and 2025. So you see when Obama was inaugurated, that Venus – you know, prior to the Venus retrograde station, right, you can see it there at 17 Pisces. It was with Uranus in the 11th house of the inauguration chart. Whereas Trump’s inauguration coming up is that same Venus, but now it’s with Saturn. You know, in both cases, virtually a conjunction; I would call them a conjunction, certainly. And to my mind, there is – I mean, Trump is a sort of Saturnian response to Obama’s Uranian themed presidency, right? I mean, it was the audacity of hope. It was very Uranian. It was very Venus and Uranus in Pisces in the 11th house. You know, whatever one thinks of the Obama presidency, on that day on January 20th, 2009, that was sort of the spirit of the day. Whereas Trump’s inauguration is, yeah, it’s Venus-Saturn. It’s a counterpoint; it’s a response.
CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah, and there’s other stuff that go along with that. So I think from now on, though, with charts, because we have so much to cover, let’s just say things.
NDB: Sure.
CB: Just describe it.
NDB: Okay.
CB: All right. So Obama’s inaugurated. One of the things that he does, like, right at the start is he signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 that relaxes the statute of limitations for equal pay lawsuits. This was signed on January 29th, 2009. So this primarily impacted women due to the persistent gender pay gap. So this is interesting and this is important because we’re gonna see over and over again this retrograde being tied in with women’s rights and issues related to that, including legislation.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So additionally, the Obama administration, one of the things it did in its first hundred days is that it announced support for the UN declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity on March 18th, 2009. So it was like, officially endorsing a declaration calling for an end to discrimination and other human rights abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And this is a major Venus retrograde sort of thing, because it’s not just women, but also sexual orientation, gender rights, and sometimes transgressing gender norms and different things like that, and the social things surrounding all of these topics are like, major themes of Venus retrograde.
NDB: Exactly. In a nutshell. Again, everyone having different ideas of what the standard is. What are the rules? What is done and not done? Some people want it to change; some people want it to be as it is. This is the ongoing Venus retrograde dance.
CB: Right. So this is also important because it would be a precursor to Obama’s eventual reversal on gay marriage in 2012 where his first public endorsement of same-sex marriage occurred in an interview on March 9th, 2012, which was five days before Venus stationed retrograde in Gemini. And then of course —
NDB: May. Not March. May.
CB: Sorry, May 9th, 2012.
NDB: 2012 is in May. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Yeah. May 9th, 2012. And then of course we all remember – all the astrologers remember – when the Supreme Court essentially legalized gay marriage in the summer of 2015, which is during the Venus retrograde in Leo that occurred that year.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: So major theme that keeps coming up over and over again. Let’s see. Other major things that were happening in 2009 – I did write down that January 3rd Israel intensifies its ground defensive in the Gaza strip as part of the Gaza war, so that was going on around that time in the buildup to this Venus retrograde was one of the news things that I noticed.
With politics, this Venus retrograde though also brought up the opposition as a result of Obama’s victory. So it’s like, Obama is, you know, swept into power after eight years of a conservative majority with George Bush, and then all of a sudden, Obama is swept into power, and the Democrats are swept into a majority in the government. But then this Venus retrograde is when the opposition, the conservative opposition and like, backslash started to form. Because on April 15th, the Tea Party protests take place across the United States, which marked this rise of this new type of conservatism that eventually essentially culminated in Trump and in where we are today. But the protests initially were fueled by opposition to government spending and taxes, supposedly, primarily.
NDB: Yeah. Obama had passed the stimulus bill on February 17th, and so, yeah, a lot of it was sort of backlash to that. Different ideas on how he should have handled the government response to the financial crash that was happening just prior to his election. So yeah, you’re absolutely right; it was during that Venus retrograde transit that all this sort of opposition to how he was handling this thing was surfacing.
CB: Yeah. And that was part of what he was doing, obviously, in that first hundred days. For example, in February, he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was a stimulus package to address the economic crisis. So – oh yeah, May 20th also during the broader Venus retrograde period, the US Senate confirmed Sonia Sotomayor, who was the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. So that was like, a major important milestone and sort of like, turning point in terms of the US and race and different things like that.
NDB: Yeah. And there was also on the international front, we did promise that Russia would keep surfacing. On March 6th of 2017, Hillary Clinton who was now the Secretary of State met up with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov —
CB: 2016?
NDB: Yes, March 6th, 2009 – my apologies. In Geneva, Hillary Clinton met up with Sergey Lavrov, and she presented him with what was supposed to be a reset button that he would press, and this was gonna reset relations between the United States and Russia. But it turned out that the word didn’t say “reset.” It was something sort of more sinister instead, and they got the translation wrong, and the whole sort of gesture was a fiasco as opposed to some lovely bit of diplomacy. So yeah, that’s another Venus retrograde sort of factor is diplomacy going awry or otherwise.
CB: Yeah. And what a connection there. Like, Hillary Clinton, you know, doing this symbolic gesture of like, the reset button between the US and Russia during the 2009 retrograde, and then eight years later literally there’s all these investigations starting about whether the Russians helped to push the scales in order to make sure that she didn’t win the US presidential election. Like, that’s a stunning eight year connection there in general.
NDB: Absolutely. Absolutely.
CB: All right. So other stuff going on – June 3rd, the Iranian presidential election takes place, and Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, although there was allegations of fraud, which sparked widespread protests.
NDB: Yeah. I have June 13th. That was when he was declared the winner. Maybe the election itself was on the 3rd. But yeah, that’s right; it was a really contentious part. Something else that was happening here – someone else who’s gonna resurface is – this Venus retrograde in 2009, these were also the last few months of Michael Jackson’s life. On March 5th, 2009, when Venus was already retrograde, he announced he was gonna be performing these shows in London, and the tickets went on sale on March 11th and March 13th. But then, you know, he died. He died June 25th, 2009, coming out of that. And it winds up being interesting, because yeah, there are gonna be other periods as we go backward through this Venus retrograde in Aries where he’s gonna pop up again. Like, this was also sort of an important part, an important recurring rhythm in his life, in his chart.
CB: Interesting. Okay. The only other thing I have is June 3rd, the very first Bitcoin is mined, which is literally like, the day right as Venus entered Pisces and began the buildup to the Venus retrograde in Aries and Pisces. And then January 12th, the very first Bitcoin transaction takes place. So this retrograde had the foundation of Bitcoin, which would be interesting to pay attention to now during this period 16 years later in 2025.
Interestingly, simultaneously, on March 18th, Bernie Madoff pled guilty to running a massive Ponzi scheme which was the largest financial fraud in US history. And I think that’s kind of funny, interesting parallelism just because Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are sometimes accused as being Ponzi schemes or Ponzi scheme-esque in terms of some of the encouragements of people to sign up for things like that, even though for the most part, it’s clearly become a legitimate currency on its own. But it’s just interesting having those two things coincide in time.
NDB: Yeah. Well, I mean, also, I mean, cryptocurrency certainly is Venus retrograde-esque in the sense that it is sort of breaking out of the system, if you will. You know, subverting the system. There is something about it that is doing that. So I think right there it absolutely applies.
CB: That makes sense.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Well, that is all I got for 2009. Shall we travel even further back in time?
NDB: Let’s go back in time.
CB: All right. We’re gonna go all the way back to the year 2001, at the very beginning of the new century. This one is interesting because this is the last retrograde that was entirely in Aries. So as a result of that, the full sign-based period actually gets shortened a little bit where the retrograde itself was March 8th through April 19th in Aries, but by sign, it was only in Aries from February 2nd until June 6th. So it does get extended, though – that does get extended with the dates of greatest elongation. So the dates of greatest elongation according to Astro-Seek in 2001 were January 17th at 14 Pisces and June 8th at one degree of Taurus. So that still overlaps like, pretty well with the other dates, like, relatively closely.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: All right. So 2001 – so of course, this one is interesting because at the beginning of 2001, George W. Bush is inaugurated on January 20th. And Gore, as I said earlier, as the sitting vice president, has to attend his inauguration after losing in what some argued was like, a stolen election because of issues with like, votes in Florida, with what happened with the courts, even the Supreme Court and other things like that. And like Harris in 2025, Gore’s role was to oversee and announce the winner in Congress on January 5th, 2001, which is right after it went into that sign.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that one’s striking. Other events – what’s your favorite one of 2001?
NDB: Well, one good one was there was also the Grammys. On February 21st, 2001, you know, Eminem was really big at this time, and there was – he was very controversial because of the sort of perceived homophobia on his part or an expression of it, you know, in his music that seemed to reveal homophobic attitudes. And as a sort of counter to these criticisms of him, he appeared with Elton John and did a duet of the song “Stan.” It was a really sort of moving and sort of, you know, it brought this whole sort of controversy to a cooling point, I suppose, with this gesture, this appearance on the Grammys. So that was a pretty good one.
CB: Yeah, that is good. That was a really memorable moment with Elton John.
NDB: Yeah. There were other ones. Oh yeah, Bridget Jones’s Diary was the big movie at this time, and I think it’s also quite Venus retrograde, you know, in the theme – the sort of being in the middle of choosing men and all that. The plot of the movie, I suppose, was just a reflection of that particular transit. And yeah. What else was there?
CB: One of the ones I wrote down was April 12th, Dennis Tito becomes the first space tourist paying 20 million dollars to visit the International Space Station. And this is really important, because this is the start of a theme that we’re gonna see go back a century, which is firsts – of people doing —
NDB: Right.
CB: — being the first to something. And it seems to be partially due to the Aries especially, which is like, the first sign of the zodiac; it’s associated with the head. It’s associated with like, you know, charging out courageously into things. And we’re gonna see a lot of firsts under this Venus retrograde, and this is one of the ones earliest in my list.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Let’s see. Other things that happened – there was like, a – March 11th, the NASCAR race at Atlanta Motor Speedway is marred by a fatal crash, killing driver Dale Earnhardt, Senior. That’s another theme I see come up a lot with these Venus retrograde in Aries is like, things that go fast, racing, and other things like that. But sometimes these courageous or fast or other types of things, there can be things that go awry, and there can be tragedies that happen.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: April 8th – Tiger Woods wins the Masters Tournament and completes the “Tiger Slam” by holding all four major golf championships at the same time, which is a major feat.
Oscar buzz – Gladiator wins Best Picture, and Russell Crowe takes home Best Actor. This one I just thought was funny, because Gladiator Two just came out recently, but it’s not gonna get I don’t think any Oscars, although Denzel was nominated for a supporting actor Golden Globe recently. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. It is interesting that that same movie has, you know, sort of come back again. I think I saw a funny meme regarding that.
CB: Right. The only other things I noticed when I was looking into things is that the first episode of Fear Factor was released June 11th, 2001, which was just after Venus left Aries. But that means that they were probably filming this first season during that Venus retrograde in the spring of 2001, and this would be one of the things that would like, kind of launch Joe Rogan to stardom, which he —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — would eventually parlay further into his like, podcasting empire later on.
NDB: Yeah. As he would describe it, you know, the money he made from Fear Factor made it possible for him to just sort of spend, invest the time developing something like the podcast, so I think that’s how it really worked out for him best.
CB: Yeah. Another one I noticed is that in early 2001, the 9/11 hijackers entered the country in the early part of the year and did additional flight training and reconnaissance. And this is the period when intelligence agencies missed opportunities to work together to piece together clues about the attack that would have foiled the plot. And this was one of the major like, conclusions that the 9/11 investigations realized later is that through a lack of cooperation, like, the FBI and the CIA and the other agencies that could have pieced it together didn’t because they were like, doing things independently and deliberately sometimes not sharing intelligence with each other. And that was one of the major reforms that happened after 2001.
NDB: Yeah. There was also the Destiny’s Child song “Survivor” came out in March of 2001. And it also reminds me – this was around the time, I think the movie came out a little before. They also did the theme music to the Charlie’s Angels movie, which is funny because when we get to 1977, Charlie’s Angels will come up again. But Venus retrograde – you know, this was sort of, this was right during that period in early 2001. Destiny’s Child were already well known, but “Survivor” really sort of was the moment, I think, where they hit this level of superstardom that they hadn’t achieved until that very moment. I certainly I remember – I was in Europe at the time, and this was certainly when I was becoming aware of them. And you know, their music was everywhere. They’d had a few hits before this, but this is when they just became megastars, I think.
CB: Yeah. And Beyonce said that she wrote it in response to frustration of criticisms and said,
“It was all about what survival means for women, and how hard it is to be the one when there are people out there who are trying to bring you down.”
And some of the lyrics were, “I’m a survivor. I’m not gonna give up. I’m not gonna stop. I’m going to work harder. I’m a survivor. I’m gonna make it. I will survive.”
I think it’s a very Venus retrograde in Aries song that became popular, and that’s one of the things I kept seeing over and over again, and I’ll try to pay attention to is sometimes there will be like, a song or music during a specific period that captures something about like, the essence of the energy during that period.
NDB: Yeah. It’s just perfectly that exactly. When they released their first album in 1998, it had been during a Venus retrograde going from Aquarius to Capricorn, so they were already sort of in that cycle. Their second album, The Writing’s On The Wall, came out in July of 1999, so that was the Venus retrograde in Leo. So Survivor’s like, their third album; the album itself comes out in May. The single was in March. But right from the first to the second to the third album, these releases all consistently came out during Venus retrogrades, although Survivor was the album where they had a new lineup change where they went from a four-piece, half the group left, and they brought in a third member – Michelle Williams – and that was the sort of the all-star lineup of Destiny’s Child that we know now. So yeah, that’s what I’m getting at – that whole sort of path that was just consistently Venus retrograde where you can trace all their album releases to that 18-month cycle.
CB: I forgot that was actually one of my 2017 ones that I didn’t mention was that in February of 2017, Beyonce announced that she was pregnant, and this was like, a huge like, media announcement and sensation —
NDB: Right.
CB: — and an important turning point in terms of her life. So I think that she’s very tied in with this particular Venus retrograde cycle, so we’ll have to keep an eye out on what happens over the next few months.
NDB: It makes sense. She has a Libra stellium, so when you think about it, the Venus retrograde in Aries will always be opposite all that Libra.
CB: Right. Yeah, that does make sense. All right. I think that’s good for – oh yeah, the only other thing was February 6th, 2001, Ariel Sharon wins in a landslide victory in the Israeli elections and becomes Prime Minister, and that this marked a significant shift to the right in Israeli politics. So again, you know, some stuff coming up with Israel at this time. And that’s something that we’ll pay attention to as we go further back into the history.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s go further back in our time machine back to the year 1993. So 1993, the retrograde was March 11th through April 12th. By sign, it was February 2nd ‘til June 6th. It was entirely in Aries. And this one also coincided with Mars retrograde in Cancer at the same time, which is very similar to what’s happening now in early 2025, which is Venus retrograde in Aries and Mars retrograde in Cancer. And this is a recurrence that you’ve noticed and studied that happens at a specific interval, right?
NDB: Yeah. That’s the fascinating thing about Venus, especially the way we’re following it in this episode, because while the Venus return is every eight years, there are different parts of that cycle, different multiples of eight where the cycle of Venus will line up with the cycle of another planet or another point. 24, if we had thought about it when we were looking at 2001, not only was Venus retrograde in Aries, but Jupiter was in Gemini or going from Taurus to Gemini. No, it was in Gemini. And so that, you know, 24 is a joint Venus and Jupiter synodic cycle. But 32 is the – like we have between 1993 and 2025 – is a joint Venus and Mars synodic cycle where the cycles of both those planets will line up to 32 years previously in a solar return chart. Anyone’s 32nd birthday solar return chart will have Venus and Mars in very close to the natal position.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s really important to know. That’s really cool seeing overlapping ones. We’ll have to pay especially close attention to the news stories that come up in 1993 since that’s gonna be an even closer repetition to now.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: I guess the only difference is just that the Venus retrograde back then was entirely in Aries, whereas now it’s in Aries and partially in Pisces.
NDB: Sure. And the Mars retrogrades will happen in somewhat different parts of Cancer. But you’re having a cyclical return. So even if there aren’t perfect zodiacal alignments, if you understand these bodies cyclically with relationship to each other and certainly with relationship to the Sun, then it does all even out, and you can see how it is a return even if the actual zodiac position is a little off.
CB: Got it. Okay. All right. So in terms of events in 1993, Bill Clinton is inaugurated for the first time at the beginning of the year in January. And interestingly, there was some major stuff around this time in terms of politics for women where a number of women were elected to Congress in the 1992 elections, and they came into office in January basically when the new Congress was sworn in. And then in January at the time, the press was calling this “the year of women.” So for example, January 3rd, 1993, the first time in American history, California became the first state in the nation to be represented in the Senate by two women. Since each state has two senators, this was the first time a state had been represented in both instances by women. So that, again, that’s a first, and again another like, you know, social progress for women thing happening during the Venus retrograde in this specific cycle in Aries.
The headline writers described this as “the year of women.” And never before had four women been elected to the Senate in a single election year. There was actually five, if you count one of the successful reelections. And then within months, another woman senator would join them in June of 1993 after a special election in Texas. Additionally, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois was elected as the first Black woman to be elected to the Senate, which was another first that happened in this year. Additionally, during the Venus retrograde on March 11th, Janet Reno was confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General, and this was the first woman who became the Attorney General of the United States.
NDB: Yeah. And the new Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was born during this Venus retrograde and also became Secretary of State at this time. And I neglected to mention when George W. Bush became president eight years later, his Secretary of State, Colin Powell – also born during this retrograde. So we had a series of Secretaries of State born during this retrograde and who were getting their jobs at that time. Sorry, he was Secretary of Defense – Powell – not State.
CB: Right. And didn’t he come in under Clinton?
NDB: No, Powell came in with Bush.
CB: Did he? I thought he was a carryover. Maybe I’m wrong.
NDB: No. He was a Republican.
CB: Okay. So let’s see – Janet Reno. So the Secretary of State, though, did she come in at the beginning of Clinton’s term? Because that might have been one I overlooked.
NDB: Madeleine Albright? I believe so.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: She was born – yeah, she’s born May 15th, 1937, and yes. Oh no, sorry – she only became Secretary of State in ‘97. My bad. She was named US Ambassador to the United Nations on January 27th, ‘93. So she was with Clinton —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — all along, but she only became Secretary of State in ‘97; I forgot that part.
CB: Got it. Got it. And —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — you know —
NDB: But she is another woman added to an important position during that retrograde as well, so.
CB: Right, and that would be a stepping stone to then becoming Secretary of State.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: Essentially like, four years later. So that also reminds me, actually, something I hadn’t thought of, but just the role that Hillary Clinton played from like, day one in the Clinton administration because she was given basically the job to work on healthcare reform and really started pushing that very early in Clinton’s presidency. But then started receiving like, a huge amount of flack from it from Republicans. And the kind of like, political team that those two were, basically, and the role that she played because that’s not completely unprecedented, but it makes me think of like, Eleanor Roosevelt who’s somebody that will show up when we get all the way there to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and what a like, power political couple they were when they came in. You see sort of like, echoes of that here with Clinton, with the two Clintons.
NDB: Yeah. You also get a bit of it with Lou Henry Hoover, Herbert Hoover’s wife, who sort of gets overshadowed – I guess because her husband’s presidency wasn’t very popular. But she was quite progressive and had a good hand, not unlike Eleanor Roosevelt who succeeded her. The funny thing about the Hoovers was they had spent part of their younger lives together in China, and so they actually could speak I think Mandarin or Cantonese, but I believe it was Mandarin. And sometimes even in the White House if they didn’t want people to understand them, they would speak Mandarin to each other. Anyway, we’ll get to Lou Henry Hoover eventually, but she’s another interesting one.
CB: Yeah. And I’m looking forward to getting to the Roosevelts, because I didn’t —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — because they were married under this Venus retrograde, and then he died under this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So there’s some important and interesting stuff there. Speaking of the year of the woman, this – so this was something that was in the news in like, January because of all of the women that were coming into politics. But as a result of that, the Academy Awards which often has like, a theme to it, they decided to kind of like, follow that theme, and so the official theme was supposed to be “Oscar Celebrates Women in the Movies.” And they did a bunch of things to go along with that, right?
NDB: Yeah. It was a total theme, but it kind of backfired. You know, women felt – the response was underwhelming, let’s say, that it was sort of they felt that it had been cheapened, this sort of declaration, this theme that was supposed to carry on from the fact that the US government did suddenly have more women, you know, representatives in the governments than had ever existed before. And so yeah, the Oscars were sort of, you know, an anticlimax if you will, because they were trying to run with that, and it didn’t really work out.
CB: Right. So it was like, as part of that, they gathered 67 female Oscar winners from every category for a photo that was shown at the start of the broadcast. And actress and singer Liza Minnelli performed a song called “Ladies’ Day” that was written specifically for the broadcast, as well as a award-winning documentarian, Lynne Littman, assembled a montage highlighting women in film. But then it wasn’t well received, and it was specifically criticized by feminist leaders like Betty Friedan afterwards who said,
“It had no basis in reality. On behalf of women directors, cinematographer and producers, I resent the travesty of calling that a tribute.”
So it was interesting that there was this, it became, you know, not sensational but sort of like a scandal in some ways.
NDB: Yeah. And interesting, Betty Friedan – born I believe February 4th, 1921, in this same Venus cycle as she was now speaking up in, so yeah.
CB: Incredible.
NDB: Material keeps writing itself.
CB: It does not stop. Yeah. All right so —
NDB: The other thing – speaking – there was one other thing. You mentioned Janet Reno, and I went and diverted you to Madeline Albright. As soon as Janet Reno did become Attorney General, there was the Waco crisis, and this was very, you know, symbolic of the Venus retrograde with the Mars retrograde that was happening in ‘93 like it is now. What’s his name – David Koresh, the leader of this Waco faction, was born – he was a Leo born in 1959. You know, he had the Venus retrograde in his own chart. And yeah, you know, he was living like a sort of, I don’t know, like a king amongst these religious followers. And the government at first was just trying to, you know, get to the property because there were children who they needed to sort of have checked in on by services, and there were reportedly a lot of weapons there, which turned out to be true. But one thing led to another; there was a strong resistance, and it became this siege. And it went from like, February to April over the course of virtually the whole Venus retrograde. And it ended tragically with this, basically the whole compound catching fire, and all these men, women, and children dying in this terrible fire. So it was a real fiasco. And it does remind us that the Venus retrograde in Aries combined with the Mars retrograde in Cancer that we had in ‘93, that really this Waco incident was the sort of the signature of that combination. You would see this – we’re gonna see this again in 1961 with the Bay of Pigs – you know, very similar kind of situation early in the presidency and some terrible calamity that results in, you know, a defeat or a tragedy of some kind.
CB: Yeah. That makes me nervous about ‘93 being the closest repetition that had Venus retrograde and Mars retrograde in Cancer, just because Waco was so prominent in the 1993 one. That definitely makes me nervous. Interestingly, I found – just like, happened to stumble across this, but – in the 1953 Venus retrograde in Aries, in Waco there was this huge tornado outbreak where an F5 tornado hit the downtown section of Waco, Texas, and killed 114 people.
NDB: Wow.
CB: So there was this weird repetition with this city having this major disaster that connected these two Venus retrograde in Aries periods from 1953 to 1993.
NDB: Okay. Well, 40 years is a joined Venus and Mercury synodic return. So it would also be interesting to look at those planets relative to each other in those two years. Alongside Waco in late February of 1993, there was also the very first attack on the World Trade Center, which sort of anticipated 9/11’s, you know, arrival eight and a half years later. So also there, you know, there was foreshadowing in that transit, we’d say.
CB: Yeah, that —
NDB: That’s also connected to that Venus retrograde and that Mars.
CB: That absolutely makes me nervous. That was on March 12th, the first World Trade Center bombing in New York City. And that’s why I was focused on how the 9/11 highjackers eight years later were basically finalizing preparations for —
NDB: Right.
CB: — the 9/11 attack during the Venus retrograde of 2001, because the first bombing that was the first attempt to do the same thing happened literally one Venus retrograde cycle earlier. And it was a failure, but then it set up the foundation of what would be attempted then eight years later.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: Yeah. So those are some of the things in 2001. Do you have other – oh yeah, I have one other —
NDB: 1993 – I believe we’re doing ‘93, right?
CB: Yeah, sorry – 1993.
NDB: There was also the storm of the century in Cuba. It was called the storm of the century – March 12th, 1993, a powerful prefrontal squall line hit western and central Cuba, and yeah, I mean, you know. Cuba gets a lot of storms, so if they were calling it the storm of the century, it was probably pretty crazy, and it just – I just mentioned the Bay of Pigs a minute ago; I forgot that both of these things occur Venus retrograde in Aries, Mars coming out of retrograde in Cancer.
CB: Got it. Okay. An interesting one in pop culture that I caught was that in January of 1993, David Letterman announced that he was gonna leave NBC. And then during the retrograde, this whole bidding war ensued, which eventually CBS won. So his last show on NBC ended up being June 25th, 1993. So the retrograde was like, him wrapping up his time there and getting ready to move to CBS where he would stay for the rest of his television career, basically.
Interestingly, in connection with that, then they needed to find a replacement for Letterman on NBC, and on April 25th, 1993, Lorne Michaels chose Conan O’Brien to replace Letterman. And Conan was just this obscure writer for The Simpsons at the time. And what’s funny about this is I saw this, I found this headline from The New York Times yesterday that was like, very unenthusiastic; it just said “NBC has picked an unknown writer to replace Letterman.” And that, you know, Conan has the Sun and Jupiter in Aries, so this was his Venus retrograde story. Suddenly he gets lifted up out of obscurity to suddenly become like, a household name virtually overnight. And initially, everybody was just like, “Who? Who is this guy?” And it was kind of a little bit of an awkward transition.
NDB: It was even worse than that. It was like, “Who the hell does he think he is?” It was more like that.
CB: Right.
NDB: But he warmed our hearts. He warmed our hearts.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: But he had a rough – yeah, no one believed in him. But it was impressive. He totally won everyone over.
CB: Yeah. So he ends up, he was undergoing like, a series of auditions and like, screen tests and stuff during the Venus retrograde, and then eventually he gets announced. But I thought this was a nice parallel with like, Lady Gaga where during the Venus retrograde in 2009 that goes over her Aries stuff, she gets lifted up and suddenly just becomes this huge, worldwide singing sensation. And similarly with Conan during this retrograde, he gets lifted up and becomes a household name virtually overnight. And he got really lucky. I mean, he got really lucky that he was chosen for that role by Lorne Michaels who saw something in him. And sometimes I think that’s a good keyword for Venus retrograde when it’s hitting personal stuff in your chart is it’s lifting you up, it’s bringing you into greater prominence and brilliance, and sometimes you’re getting really lucky, basically, as well.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s actually, it’s funny too because I’ve heard Conan talk about this period in his life. And you know, he was a comedy writer; he had written for The Simpsons, he’d written for Saturday Night Live. He was a proven comedy talent behind the scenes. But in terms of choosing him for to be an on-camera talent, which he didn’t have that much experience at, Lorne Michaels said the reason he chose Conan is that he’s very likeable. You know, like, he just knew like, yeah, no, you’re a good, decent guy – that’s why you’re gonna be good. Sure, you know how to write comedy, but lots of people are funny. But he also chose Conan because Conan’s like, a good, decent guy, which I think is also interesting with regard to, you know, the concerns of Venus. This was at the tail end of the, you know, this was already the April part of the Venus retrograde where it’s emerging as a morning star. So there is this sort of like, young, youthful, pure sort of figure, you know, who’s gonna regenerate the show and get the ratings back up and win us over gradually.
Yeah, in terms of pop culture, there were some very curious times, even sort of behind the scenes in terms of like, origin stories. On March 4th, 1993, the very first auditions for the group that would become the Spice Girls was held, and three of them – Victoria Adams, Mel Brown, and Mel Chisholm – auditioned on that day and won the audition, and then the other two – I guess that would be Ginger and Baby Spice – you know, auditioned shortly thereafter and completed the group. So that was happening. And it was also during this period in 1993 I know that a very young Britney Spears was finally successfully auditioning for the Mickey Mouse Club, this TV program that would launch her career. Of course, she was only whatever – nine, 10 years old or what have you. I guess she was 11 – my bad. But this is where she’ll meet Justin Timberlake for the first time and Christina Aguilera for the first time; they’re all gonna be on that show as kids, so. Yeah, even just in terms of the upcoming talent getting their big breaks, you know, down the road – that Venus retrograde was also a big one.
CB: That’s brilliant. I just went and – I forgot to look up Conan, how the rest of his story played out with this. I forgot that his last show of that series, of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, happened on February 20th, 2009.
NDB: 2009! Yeah. It was —
CB: Which was —
NDB: — I was gonna mention that, too, yeah – also the Venus retrograde, yeah.
CB: The 2009 – so he got the job, basically, when Venus went retrograde there in 1993, and then he ended that job of that specific show in early 2009 in a subsequent Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. And I mean, he’s got a podcast now, and he’s still hilarious. If anything, I find him funnier today than I even did back in the ‘90s, and I did eventually – even though I was amongst his cynical doubters at the very beginning – I became quite a fan; I always have been. But his podcast is just, you know, as good as anything.
I also, I just —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — going back to the —
CB: I was a huge Conan fan as a young Millennial in the late ‘90s, and you know, I think one of the greatest like, Millennial wounds is what – seeing what Jay Leno did to Conan in the whole debacle with The Tonight Show that happened later on. But then like, it’s been so amazing seeing his rise and comeback over the past five or six years, because I feel like he ended up – all that ended up happening, and it was really terrible in his life that that happened, but then it set him up to be in such a good position now where he’s actually way more relevant like, right now, than I feel like he would be if he was just hosting late night shows or something and maybe would have retired by now. But instead, he’s in the main format that everyone’s paying much more attention —
NDB: Exactly!
CB: — to, which is podcasts.
NDB: Yeah, it’s a total blessing in disguise. I mean, you know, it was certainly upsetting for him at the time. He did wind up getting this other show on I forget the network, but he had a very good talk show after that that he did for a while until, yeah, like, it’s a format that isn’t really, that doesn’t have the same sort of spark in it that it used to, and the podcasts are the big things, and he transitioned to that, and he’s doing great. It’s a really good, really funny podcast. So you know, more power to him.
I wanted to just to go back for a second when I was talking about the Spice Girls and Britney Spears. The Backstreet Boys were also doing their auditions at this time as well; I noticed in my notes I forgot to mention. So there’s a lot of that happening, a lot of these sort of up-and-comers are coming together right at this time.
CB: That’s really interesting, because that’s a theme I saw was in the Venus retrograde in Aries, especially, there’s a lot of like, putting the final touches on preparing something. It’s like, preparing —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — something or retooling something and getting it ready for primetime and getting it ready to like, fully debut, because that was one of the things I noticed in early ‘93, what would become the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the very first fight happened in November of 1993. And I’m having trouble like, nailing down the chronology, but I think in early 1993 then, during this Venus retrograde in Aries, they were like, putting this together and they were finalizing and they were putting together some of the rules for like, these fights. They were getting like, sponsors and all sorts of things like that. So somebody should research that more to see exactly what was happening. But I think they were laying the groundwork for things for the Ultimate Fighting Championship in early 1993.
NDB: Yeah. We’re gonna see this quite a bit. I mean, you know, later on in 1969, we’re gonna see that the Jackson Five were signing their record contract, and we’re gonna see the Carpenters are signing their record contract. Again, it’s all these sort of like, up-and-coming stars who are finally getting that big break that will be a big deal as they get to show what they can do.
CB: Yeah. We’ll see it in the next one, also, with like, Nintendo finalizing its designs in ‘85 before launching.
Okay. Other ones really quickly for this one – March 27th, Jiang Zemin is elected President of the People’s Republic of China. So this was a major shift. And also very important, April 4th – the first public version of the Mosaic web browser is released, which made the internet more accessible to the general public. So this is a huge important event in terms of the history of the internet, the very first web browser, and it’s happening, you know, very close to the Venus retrograde in 1993.
NDB: I have one other thing I must mention, because the Canadian Constitution mandates it and I could be penalized if I don’t. Two weeks, no maple syrup. You know, high, high penalty. March 25th, 1993 – Kim Campbell announced her candidacy to be the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. Brian Mulroney, who had been the Prime Minister, had just stepped down. They were having a leadership conference not unlike the Liberals are about to have. And she put her candidacy forth, and she won – and so for a temporary time in 1993, starting with her announcing this candidacy and winning it, she became Canada’s only woman prime minister. She would wind up losing the election, I think in October it was, in part because there was a scandal involved – she was running against Jean Chretien, who had a sort of a facial tic due to Bell’s palsy, and someone on her campaign put out an ad that made fun of it. And so there was this huge backlash, like, “How dare you,” you know, “humiliate this man for a physical thing that he can’t control,” and he gave a great speech where he sort of managed to spin that, and he won the election.
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: But yeah, you know, this is when she does become, you know, the candidate for prime – and she does become Prime Minister over the course of that Venus retrograde in ‘93, only to lose it at the end of the year.
CB: Interesting. Nice. That’s a good one.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Last two things I found that are kind of throwaway ones, but in pop culture, the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray was released February 12th and became like, this comedy classic of him repeating the same day over and over again and like, falling in love with this woman, which was a notable movie during that Venus retrograde. And then also during this Venus retrograde, March 8th, 1993, the television show on MTV Beavis and Butthead premieres, which was like, a very like, risque, you know, show. I don’t know how else to describe it. Especially in like, 1993.
NDB: You said “risque.”
CB: All right.
NDB: Sorry.
CB: Very 1993 of you.
NDB: Yeah, you can just imagine. Yeah. Great show.
CB: What is another term for “risque?” Like, I’ve been searching for one; I need a better one. Do you got anything?
NDB: Well, I mean, not so much – risque – it was very lowbrow. Like, it’s these two —
CB: Right.
NDB: — snotty kids who are dumb as anything who comment on music videos is how it started, and it was very hilarious. And then, you know, there’s a movie that’s —
CB: Like —
NDB: — just great —
CB: — obscene?
NDB: Yeah, obscene, but obscene the way, you know, nine-year-olds are obscene. Like, not – you know, not… I mean, in 2025, maybe we have a different notion. Yeah, I guess it was seen as certainly degenerate, you know, which is sort of the kind of accusation that some will cast at others during a Venus retrograde.
CB: I’m looking up synonyms. Bawdy, indecent, ribald —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — rude, racy —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Words like this, these are all actually kind of Venus retrograde terms —
NDB: They’re great —
CB: — in some contexts.
NDB: — Venus retrograde terms, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. Another movie that came out around that time was Falling Down, which has a sort of, you know, Michael what’s-his-name?
CB: Douglas.
NDB: The Michael Douglas, yeah yeah – it’s sort of a notorious movie about sort of raging at society, not being able to handle the way society is changing, you know? That’s his character who only realizes at the very end that he’s the bad guy. So that’s another sort of element to Venus retrograde, the idea that the world changes and some people just don’t want it to, or you know, can’t change with it.
CB: Yeah. And protest, also, is just like, a huge one.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. That’s good for 1993. Let’s take a little break.
All right, let’s transition into talking about 1985 and the Venus retrograde that occurred in Aries in the early part of that year. So the dates are about the same – retrograde, March 13th through April 24th. By sign, it was February 2nd through June 6th of 1985. Reagan – Ronald Reagan – had just been inaugurated into his second term after a sweeping victory in the 1984 presidential election that occurred in November, and then he’s inaugurated in January.
NDB: Yeah. This was an inauguration where since the 20th fell on the Sunday, he was actually inaugurated January 21st, 1985.
CB: Okay, got it. This would have been —
NDB: And I believe it was a very cold day as well. As I recall.
CB: This was probably the one then that Quigley, the astrologer Joan Quigley, adjusted a little bit where she tried to move it by like, a few minutes to make the chart a little bit better.
NDB: Yeah. My inauguration says 11:49 AM is the one I have —
CB: Interesting.
NDB: — from I believe, you know, the White House website, so yeah.
CB: Yeah. That was the thing with him. Using the astrologers.
All right. So Reagan, second term, sweeping victory. Sweeps into victory. Like, the map for that one is crazy; it’s just like, all red in that electoral college map for that election.
NDB: Yeah, except for Minnesota, as I recall.
CB: Okay, Minnesota was the one hold out.
NDB: I believe so, yeah.
CB: Got it. So that is Reagan. One of the biggest geopolitical events that happened, though, shortly after his inauguration in the world is that on March 10th, the leader of the Soviet Union died in March 10th of 1985, right?
NDB: Yeah. Konstantin Chernenko died – he’d only been leader for about a year. His predecessor had also not lasted very long. There was this whole succession of events in the ‘80s starting with even before the death of Brezhnev, the guy who was expected to succeed Brezhnev died in February of ‘82. I forget his name offhand. Then there was Brezhnev died in November of ‘82. He was replaced by a guy who only lived until I think the spring of ‘84. And then Chernenko was in charge for about a year. And then out of the blue, because they’d run out of so many of the old guard, they bring in someone who’s, you know, of the next generation in their context, and that was Gorbachev.
CB: Got it. So this ends up being a pivotal turning point in the history of the Soviet Union, because Gorbachev starts instituting reforms, basically, right?
NDB: Yeah. He’s not trying to end the Soviet Union; he really thinks he’s, you know, getting it into working shape. He’s eventually gonna be deemed something of an idealist, but certainly he puts into place all these reforms that are supposed to improve the way the Soviet Union handles communism. And the fact that he’s coming in during this Venus retrograde is really interesting, because it really sets a pattern for the duration of his political career, because it’s gonna be in October of 1986 when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio that he meets up with Reagan in Reykjavik and they really start to plan the new peace. And then the Venus retrograde following that in June of 1988 sees Ronald Reagan actually in Moscow signing an anti-nuclear treaty. And then finally, certainly in August of 1991, there was an attempted coup against Gorbachev. One last attempt of the old Soviet guard to sort of stop his dismantling, ultimately, of the Soviet Union. I was in East Berlin the day that happened, actually, and it was a very interesting place to be!
So yeah, when Gorbachev is coming to power in March of 1985, the sort of the landmarks of how that’s gonna unfold and lead to the fall of the Soviet Union is really marked in very interesting places by the periods where Venus is retrograde.
CB: Okay. So this was – Gorbachev coming to power is kind of like, the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union in some ways and would certainly like, lead to that over the course of the next decade?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, there are other forces at work. But his is the most sort of deliberate and done on the part of the Soviet Union as opposed to just sort of external circumstances contributing to everything unfolding the way it does.
CB: Okay. Got it. All right. So that’s very important. And that happened – it’s important also because it happened so close to the Venus retrograde, because you know, he died on March 10th, 1985, and Venus stationed retrograde on March 13th. So it’s really very closely tied in with that specific retrograde, and we’ll see many other instances of this retrograde showing up at important turning points in Russian history, including in 1953, right?
NDB: Yeah. 32 years earlier, so another one of these Venus-Mars joint synodic returns. I believe it’s March 2nd, 1953 – I could be off by a day or two – is when Stalin dies just after Eisenhower was inaugurated president in January. And that also leads to a real sort of tumultuous period in the Soviet Union that is very reform-minded, even if it doesn’t sort of lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union the way 1985 does. So there are some parallels just between 1953 and 1985 certainly because of that joint synodic Venus-Mars return, and the fact that the leader of the Soviet Union is dying, and as a result there’s gonna be some reform movement that follows.
CB: Okay. All right. So we’ll come back to that later. One of the other things, one of the major things I saw that came up in the 1985 Venus retrograde that made me laugh is that April 23rd, 1985, was when the New Coke formula is released by the Coca-Cola Company, where they did this really controversial change where Coke was losing market share to Pepsi during the course of the early 1980s. And Pepsi was sweeter, so the Coca-Cola CEOs decided to reformulate Coke to make it sweeter, which is honestly a hilarious Venus thing, because Venus has always traditionally been associated with things that are sweet, and they actually tried to, you know, reformulate something – which is very retrograde to go back and revise something – and make it sweeter. But it completely like, backfired, and the public did not like it. And within months, they had to start walking it back until eventually they brought the original Coke formula back that summer.
NDB: Yeah. I remember it well. It was a total flop. And then what happened was really funny. Then they did figure their thing out. And some people even thought this was the plan all along; they introduced the new Coke. It flopped. And they brought back the old Coke, but now they called it “Coca-Cola Classic,” and that did boost sales. Because now everyone was happy to have, you know, Coca-Cola Classic out. So that’s how that went down in the end.
CB: Right. That’s funny that it’s called “classic,” because “classic,” you know, harkens back to the past to like, something —
NDB: Right.
CB: — you know, in history, and it’s like, retrograde. And then, you know, nowadays, everybody talks about and there’s this conspiracy that about whether or not – because they also switched out using like, cane sugar for corn syrup —
NDB: Right.
CB: — when they brought Coca-Cola Classic back. So sometimes it’s like, speculated of like, well, maybe that was just a marketing ploy to make this shift that would subtly change the taste of the original formula and to make that transition, and they did it to mask that. And usually that’s said to be not probably true, but it’s still like, speculated upon around that time. Interestingly, also in early 1985, Coke launched in select US cities they launched Cherry Coke for the first time. Another interesting Venus retrograde like, cherry red harkens to like, the pink stuff from like, Barbie and other things like that, but —
NDB: Right.
CB: — Cherry Coke gets launched during this Venus retrograde in 1985.
NDB: Yeah. You know, you used to – a Cherry Coke was something that you would really get at your old fashioned soda fountain. In Montreal, there was this classic old place called Ben’s Delicatessen where you could get that sort of old school soda fountain kind of drink. And so they would make a Coke, but they would put cherry syrup in it, and it was a popular drink for a long time. But yeah, suddenly they figured they would just put that stuff in a can, and that’s what they did.
CB: Nice. Yeah, well, I think the —
NDB: There was a lot of experimentation with those drinks. From this point onward, actually, you saw this, I think, more broadly suddenly these sodas were coming out with different flavors, different – it just kept going and going and snowballing. And you can almost think of the New Coke moment being the moment when that all really starts to accelerate.
CB: That’s actually really funny now. That makes me wanna look at some of the later interactions under this Venus retrograde like, now they have those machines where you can mix Coke with like, 10 different, you know, flavors —
NDB: Right.
CB: — and whether like, the roll out of those was under this Venus retrograde would be funny.
NDB: Yeah, it’d be really worth following.
CB: I think this one – the New Coke that was a good example, because it’s like, somebody trying to do a redesign or a reworking or to revise something during a Venus retrograde. And sometimes that doesn’t work out and it’s rejected by the public and they wanna stick with the past. And you have to like, go back on something kind of like a Mercury retrograde. But sometimes the revising or sometimes like, the makeover, like getting a makeover sometimes can happen if you have like, a Venus retrograde in your first house. Sometimes it sticks and it actually works, and it’s changed from that point forward. So it’s one of the duality of that in Venus retrograde.
NDB: Indeed. And it’s even funnier – you know, Coca-Cola was first sold in Atlanta on May 8th, 1886. And Venus was at two degrees of Aries, and it was just 58 days after a retrograde period which had been in Aquarius. So it’s even interesting if you go back almost a hundred years – I think it’s 99 years – before the New Coke is the first Coke. And the first Coke did have Venus in Aries, and it wasn’t too far away; it was a very bright morning star. It was 58 days after the direct station, so there’s even some history there with Coca-Cola.
CB: Interesting. Interesting. Well, yeah, and it’s just like, you know, sometimes it’s referred to derisively today as like, “sugar water,” and like, fundamentally if you break it down that is kind of what it is. So it’s interesting just as Venus has —
NDB: Absolutely.
CB: — always been associated with sweet things and with sugar.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Another really funny one I found in this retrograde in 1985 was on March 31st, 1985, the first WrestleMania professional wrestling event is held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. And I thought that was really funny, like, Venus in Aries thing to have the first big wrestling WrestleMania, you know, event.
NDB: Right. I mean, it’s theatre, right? It’s just, you know, yeah. Fun little theatre with a lot of like —
CB: Theater?
NDB: Chris, I – sit down, I have —
CB: No, it’s totally —
NDB: — something to tell you!
CB: It’s totally real, Nick! These are professional —
NDB: Oh Chris, I don’t know how to break it to —
CB: — athletes that are operating at the highest levels of, you know, their —
NDB: And who have very, very earnest and serious grievances with each other that just —
CB: Right.
NDB: — happen to sort of unravel perfectly in front of everyone on the stage, entirely unscripted, all legitimate, and very real. Yeah. No, of course, Chris.
CB: Well, this was the time – at this event – that Hulk Hogan and Mr. T teamed up at this WrestleMania to defeat their two opponents in the main event. So yeah. It also had celebrity guests, including former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who served as a referee.
NDB: Oh yeah. He pops up a lot in Venus retrograde stories. Less so that the Aries one, although there are some important ones that coincide. But he’s a very Venus retrograde guy, born during one as well.
CB: Okay. Well, I thought that was interesting just because then, you know, eight years later in early 1993, they’re putting together the UFC, which has now become the sort of bigger thing in our time.
Other things that were happening in 1985 – in early 1985, I’m having trouble nailing down the dates on this, but I think if I’m correct that in January, Nintendo debuted the NES console at a electronics trade expo that happened. And if I understand correctly what happened, they debuted it in January but then a lot of the press was like, super skeptical and derisive of it because of the video game crash of 1983 where the video game market became oversaturated and it just completely tanked. So Nintendo was like, coming up with this new home console, and a lot of people were skeptical it would take off because it was in kind of like, in a dark period for home consoles. And if I understand the dates – because I was having trouble confirming and researching this – but I think they rolled it out in January at this first expo with one design, but then by June towards the end of the Venus retrograde on June 5th, there was another trade expo, and they had rolled out a redesign of it where they made it instead of loading the game from the top where you load the game from the side. And this ended up being the final design and form of it once it was released later that year in October of 1985. So I thought this was interesting, because it wasn’t like, you know, launched under this Venus retrograde. But it was brought into the public for the first time and also they were doing the final redesign and retooling of it basically before launching it.
NDB: Right. You know, I remember loving playing Atari Pock-Man – Pock-Man? Did I just say “Pock-Man?” Goes to show —
CB: That’s the —
NDB: How I —
CB: — that’s the like, Montreal pronunciation.
NDB: Right? No, no. No, we called it Pac-Man. I just sort of misspoke. Yeah, those were the good old days. Nintendo was when I was starting to outgrow all that. Something else that came up at the end of January 1985 – the NASDAQ 100 stock market index launched. The first trade was on January 31st, 1985, Wall Street. So that’s, you know, talk about the… Yeah, the stock market sort of catching up with technology, I suppose, is one facet of that. There were a number of very interesting things happening culturally and technologically. USA For Africa recorded “We Are The World” January 28th, 1985, and it was released in March. This was a song written by – or cowritten by – Michael Jackson with Quincy Jones, and Stevie Wonder was there. Did he cowrite it? I forget. There were a number of writers. But Michael Jackson had a big hand in it. All these celebrities – American celebrities – got together to record this song that was meant to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Pop stars in England had done that around Christmas. But this was now the American turn. Since the Grammy Awards were that night, all these music celebrities happened to be in the same place at the same time, which made it easier to organize the recording session. So yeah, and this led to the Live Aid concert later in the summer in July. But the whole USA For Africa, you know, recording and release was tied into the Venus retrograde period.
CB: Nice. That’s a really good one.
NDB: Yeah. And the big single during this time on January 30th, 1985 – Madonna released “Material Girl.” She had already had a big hit with “Like A Virgin,” and that was like – she’d had some other hits that were minor. “Like A Virgin,” like, is the big, like, you know, number one that made her a star, but then “Material Girl” is the follow up. So is she just gonna be like, this, you know, one-hit wonder, or is she gonna keep having chart-topping hits? And “Material Girl,” of course, is – I mean, it’s obviously there’s an element of satire, although, you know, very well done. She’s mimicking an old Marilyn Monroe film in the video. And it’s, yeah, it’s all in pink – you know, again, that sort of that theme, a very similar color to the hats 32 years later – and yeah, just the perfect number one single for that Venus retrograde in 1985.
CB: Yeah, that’s funny; that’s a funny parallel because like, later I remember when Lady Gaga first exploded in like, 2009, she was sometimes compared to Madonna. And so it’s interesting both of them having —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that to some extent with that Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. Whitney Houston’s very first LP was released February 14th, 1985, so you’re also seeing, you know, eventually she would have a daughter born during this Venus retrograde in ‘93. And then she would have some legal troubles I think in 2009 or one of the other Venus retrogrades in Aries also pops up in her life, so that’s another, you know, huge legendary singer whose life privately and publicly was very tied to this Venus retrograde cycle as well.
CB: One other “first” that I noticed that’s kind of a bizarre but interesting one is that the world’s first internet domain name was registered on March 16th, 1985, and this is for the company – it was symbolics.com, and this was two days after Venus went retrograde. And I thought this was crazy, because that’s super early.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: You know, one of the things – did I mention that eight years after this in 1993 was the first internet browser during that Venus retrograde?
NDB: You didn’t mention that; I was just thinking about that, too – I was gonna look for it. But yeah, no, it absolutely was, as I recall.
CB: Okay.
NDB: So that’s an interesting return. Well done.
CB: Yeah, that was a major one in 1993 I meant to mention was the first internet browser and then it’s like, weirdly connected to the first internet domain in ‘85. And this is bizarrely early, because this is like, before browsers or anything. But prior to this time, it’s like, on the internet, the sort of internalized internets, they just had numbers, and then domain names give names or letters that are assigned to those numbers so you can find internet addresses more easily as well as like, remember them more easily by having words instead of just numbers.
NDB: Right. And I am just remembering in real time – duh. You’re gonna love this. It all follows through. The internet bubble pop was —
CB: Oh.
NDB: — March —
CB: 2001.
NDB: — or April of 2001. Yeah.
CB: Right. That’s good.
NDB: I remember that very well, because I was getting paid to write – this was my very first astrology job was writing —
CB: Oh, right.
NDB: — astrology articles for Star IQ. I started in November of 2000, and wrote right up until April 2001 when their funding ran out because of the stock market – not the stock market – the internet bubble bursting. So yeah. With that in mind, that just follows through with those other two – the browser and the first domain. That’s crazy.
CB: Yeah. That’s really good. I like that. So there’s a whole thread there. I think there’s actually one in ‘60 then that’ll tie in with that, but I didn’t make that connection, but we’ll talk about that soon.
NDB: Yeah. ‘69 maybe, I think.
CB: Yeah, ‘69.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: There were a couple of important ones in South Africa, right?
NDB: Yeah. Well, I mean, the Venus retrograde in Aries often pops up in South Africa. In 1985, which one did you have in mind with 1985?
CB: So February 6th, Nelson Mandela rejects South African —
NDB: Right.
CB: — president’s offer for a conditional release from prison, and Mandela insists on unconditional release and an end to apartheid. And then also unrelated but a couple of months later on April 15th, South Africa ends its ban on interracial marriages.
NDB: Right. Well, it does follow through in this particular government, I mean, the apartheid regime had started in 1948 technically. But the republic – when South Africa left the British Commonwealth in ‘60, ‘61, the new South African republic that was divorced from the Commonwealth was launched I think in April of 1961? Definitely during the Venus retrograde in Aries of 1961. And then eight years after this period in ‘85, in 1993, which is after Mandela was released but before the new regime, you know, became a thing, there was a very important South African political leader named Chris Hani who was assassinated during that Venus retrograde. This was a very tumultuous, violent time. So yeah, there are other periods in South African history that do connect with this particular Venus retrograde. Jacob Zuma who was a very controversial president of South Africa was elected during the Venus retrograde of 2009, and yeah, you know, his regime was found to be corrupt. But it’s a very sort of polarizing matter in the country. So it is, you know, probably things relating to South Africa also surface around this time as well.
CB: Okay. Well, it’s interesting I guess as a focal point looking at other – because I’m focused on the US a lot in some of this history and chronology with like, civil rights and different firsts and things, but it’s interesting, you know, here for example with South Africa ending its ban on interracial marriages at that point as being a major Venus retrograde thing.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, it was as radical to them as say, you know, making gay marriage in the United States was – no less so, you know? And relative to the social norms prior to that. So yeah, it was a huge deal. This is what was unfolding over the course of the ‘80s is once Mozambique and Zimbabwe were sort of out of the picture as buffers to the South African apartheid regime, they sort of knew that the writing was on the wall. And so it was a very gradual process of loosening apartheid until, of course, it was finally ended. So yeah, what happened in ‘85 with that is virtually the midpoint of that loosening, that very gradual loosening of it.
CB: I like that you said that gradual loosening, because that was a note that I wrote later after finishing most of the notes is I realized a recurring theme – I have a recurring theme section – but one of the things I wrote was “incremental progress in social movements during each retrograde in these eight year repetitions.” And this is very visible, especially in the 20th century, in the women’s suffrage and rights movement over the past century. But even here we see little like, incremental things.
NDB: Yeah. Another thing that occurs to me – we mentioned in 1993, there was the storm of the century in Cuba. And I mentioned also in 1961 we’re gonna get to the Bay of Pigs invasion between the US and Cuba. Well, on – excuse me – on May 20th, 1985, the US government launched Radio Marti, which was a propaganda radio station that they would broadcast to Cuba, you know, advancing the American propaganda position against communist Cuba. So again, this Venus retrograde comes up in the ongoing, you know, war of words let’s say between the US and Cuba.
CB: Yeah. That’s good.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Well, I think that brings us to the end of 1985, unless you’ve got any other major ones before we move on.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, the Go-Gos broke up, and Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg cemetery, which was a cemetery that had some old Nazi officers buried there, so it was kind of a scandal. There were a bunch of things. People like Sam Altman was born during this retrograde. So you know, there’s also, you know, these are people that you can watch in the news as it were. But yeah, we can keep going. There’s so much. There is a lot more, but we can keep going.
CB: Yeah. We’ve got another century to get through, half century, three quarters. So let’s keep it moving.
All right, my friend. Let’s go back. We’re now going back before I was born to the year 1977. So I’m gonna have to lean on you more for cultural things from prior to this point.
NDB: I’ll be happy to oblige. Yes, I was —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — eight years old, and I do remember it well. Some very happy memories. And yeah, we’ve got a lot of cool stuff to cover here!
CB: Yeah, you were a very hip, like, eight-year-old. So you were very much with the times —
NDB: Oh, was I ever! Was I ever. Yeah. I was rocking a drum kit in a music school and, you know, I already had long hair and I was very sort of snotty and defiant and acted like I knew everything, so yeah. Just like any eight-year-old.
CB: Nice. Nice.
NDB: So where does —
CB: All right, so —
NDB: Where to start? ‘77 is a great one.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: ‘77 is, you know —
CB: Let me introduce it with the periods like I do for the beginning of these, so retrograde – March 15th through April 27th of 1977. But by sign, it started February 2nd through June 6th of 1977. And then the dates of greatest elongation are probably not too far outside of that. This one’s important because the nodes were in Aries, and so this one coincided with an Aries eclipse which is important because that’s similar to the one that’s coming up this year.
NDB: Right.
CB: That December, also, Mars stationed retrograde in Leo just like it did recently in 2024. So there’s some parallels and echoes with this one. Interestingly, like, one of those parallels and echoes, I forgot to mention in the 2025 section, but it ties back to this 1977 one, which is January 20th of 1977 is when Carter was inaugurated president – Jimmy Carter was inaugurated president of the United States. And of course, Jimmy Carter just died at the end of December of 2024 a few weeks ago. And his funeral has just been taking place over the course of the past week or two, culminating I think yesterday with his national funeral on January 9th, 2025. And it was announced that January 9th was a national day of mourning in honor of Carter, and that flags will be at half-staff or supposed to be at half-staff for the next 30 days following his death, which is gonna then encompass and include inauguration day.
So this one is incredibly striking to me because that means Jimmy Carter came into office and was inaugurated under the Venus retrograde in Aries of 1977, and then he passed away and the nation was mourning him during the Venus retrograde repetition of early 2025.
NDB: Yeah. This particular Venus retrograde is actually the most common of any period in the Venus cycle to coincide with the death of US presidents. Dwight Eisenhower died at the Venus retrograde in Aries in 1969. Franklin Roosevelt died at the end of the Second World War when Venus was retrograde in Aries. And then, of course, in the 19th century, that same Venus retrograde in Aries had been in Taurus; Garfield was shot during that Venus retrograde, although he died a little while after. Lincoln was shot and died during that retrograde. And even the very first president to die in office – William Henry Harrison – died when Venus was going retrograde in Taurus. And actually, at the same degree. Harrison died when Venus was at 25 Taurus. Lincoln was shot and died when Venus was at 25 Taurus. And Garfield was shot when Venus was at 25 Taurus. And there’s also even, what’s it, James Polk died – he’s the president to die, to spend the shortest amount of time after leaving office and then dying, you know, quickly after leaving office, whatever the best way to phrase that is. He died, I think, two or three months after leaving office, and it was also Venus coming out of that retrograde. So a lot of presidents have died during this particular little period, little interval in the Venus retrograde cycle.
CB: Wow. That’s really striking.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s important. That’s crucial. And let’s see – one of the things that came along with that that I thought was really interesting is that within his first hundred days, one of the things that Carter did is that on March 17th, 1977, the US Senate voted to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which eventually transferred control of the Panama Canal from the US to Panama. And I think this is really interesting and hilarious because this is coming up in the news again recently because now Trump is like, threatening to take over the Panama Canal or something again. Although I’m not clear if that’s just, if he’s just saying that because Carter is in the news right now and he heard that that was one of the things that Carter did or like, why that’s even coming up or if that’s in any way going to have a precedent beyond like, an actual tangible thing that happens beyond just being something that he says. But it’s just striking that that’s something in the news right now, and it ties back into the same Venus retrograde from early 1977.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much going on. 1977 is one of my favorite of these Venus retrogrades. It’s so Venus retrogradey. Where to start?
Outside of – well, actually, there are some interesting ways in which politics and entertainment merge. We already discussed the fact that Justin Trudeau’s father and mother were breaking up and that his mother ran off with the Rolling Stones just as another member of the Rolling Stones was being arrested for drug possession, so there was all that going on in Canada.
But over in England, Queen Elizabeth was having her Silver Jubilee, the 25th anniversary of her coronation. And there were all these celebrations in England, but this was happening just as punk rock was becoming a thing in England. And – excuse me – it was in February of 1977 that the Sex Pistols, who were already a popular punk band who had been sort of sensationalized in December of ‘76 on British television when they made a guest appearance at like, six in the evening and swore on television and, you know, caused this big scandal. So what happens is they replace their bass player with Sid Vicious at the end of February, and they sign a new record contract. They’d already been kicked off a bunch of record contracts for their behavior because they were quite, yeah, you know, rude punk rockers. And they sign their new record contract right at Buckingham Palace as a sort of, you know, middle finger – although the British do two fingers and not a middle finger, but the same deal – you know, to the monarchy. And then they released this song “God Save the Queen” in the middle of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. And the cover art for the single is a picture of the Queen with a clothing pin through her nose, you know, like, punking up the Queen. And because the band’s called the Sex Pistols, and this is 1977, the song goes to the top of the charts. And you know, and BBC has this show Top of the Pops where whatever artist has the top single of the week gets to appear on the show. But now the Sex Pistols have this song, and it’s number one on the charts, and the BBC doesn’t even wanna say the name of the band, you know, on air. So it’s very Venus retrograde the way they sort of burst onto the scene. They’re very rude, you know, again, when we were talking about Beavis and Butthead, you know, the same thing. Very sort of snotty, rude, disrespectful. Certainly, you know, turning everything over as it were. And this really is that era – this Venus retrograde in Aries is when punk becomes this big sort of, you know, national cultural happening as opposed to just something some kids are doing in some basement club somewhere.
CB: Yeah. And this was shocking, like, in 1977. Like, it has to be expressed at how provocative and – they got a lot of major flack. Like, I saw something about even like, one of their producers was like, attacked and like, harmed or something at that time, right?
NDB: Their singer, John Lydon, or he was called Johnny Rotten at the time. He doesn’t go by that name anymore, but yeah, Johnny Rotten just tells you everything. Yeah, he was assaulted and badly injured just by, you know, some rough guys who didn’t like the Sex Pistols and what they had to say, and maybe, you know, the disrespect they showed for the Queen.
CB: I saw something about like, razor blades. Like, a producer being cut up or bloodied by like, razor blades or something like that.
NDB: Well, their manager was also a very notorious guy – Malcolm McLaren – was something of a character himself. And really, this whole thing – I mean, it’s interesting; we’re gonna get more and more into sort of performance art. And really, as far as Malcolm McLaren was concerned, that’s what the Sex Pistols were. It was never supposed to be this like, successful commercial pop operation. It was kind of a, you know, countercultural art project of sorts. So for it to become this huge thing, McLaren, unlike – most managers of a successful band are gonna try to ride with the success, and for him, he just, it sort of rode with the sensationalism and made it sort of inevitable that the group would self-destruct, which they did.
CB: Okay. So yeah. Wikipedia just says, it “was regarded by many of the general public as an assault on the Queen and the monarchy.” And “during the media furor over the single, Lydon and producers Bill Price and Chris Thomas were subject to a razor attack outside a pub in Highbury, London.”
NDB: Okay.
CB: So I thought that was just striking in terms of just how intense some of the pushback and the scandal was. But also that this was focusing on the Queen and the monarchy and some of the tensions in the country between the different camps that support or don’t support the idea of the monarchy. But also in terms of Queen Elizabeth, this is tied in very much with her story. She’s celebrating her jubilee, but this Venus retrograde actually ties back in earlier with her story a few different times, including —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: — her coronation was Venus retrograde in Aries, right?
NDB: Yeah. It was coming out of that. And when she had her coronation, her grandmother had just died during that Venus retrograde, and the grandmother’s husband, the former King George the 5th, was born during that Venus retrograde. So there’s, yeah, that cycle just pops up over and over again. In 1969 when that Venus retrograde was happening is when the BBC made this television special about the royal family that was really, you know, sort of cutting edge. It’s 16 years after the coronation had been televised, and that itself was something revelatory for the British public. That was a Venus retrograde in ‘53 that coincided with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is something that comes up over and over. And this is exactly when with the Queen’s coronation in England and with Eisenhower’s election in ‘52, which was the first election that was televised, suddenly people in both those countries went out and bought a lot of TV sets. So that was an element of how the culture was shifting with the Venus retrograde, but also that new insight of Saturn-Neptune. I mean, until 1953, no average English citizen got to see a coronation, a royal coronation; that was for lords and, you know, all those people. And suddenly the whole country gets to see what it’s like inside; that’s pure Saturn-Neptune.
CB: Yeah. And —
NDB: So it is also interesting that all those things are, you know, coming up again. Emerging again.
CB: And then two Venus cycles before her coronation under the Venus retrograde in Aries was when her father had his coronation, I believe —
NDB: That’s right.
CB: — during Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: That’s right. He had his coronation famously because his brother had abdicated. And his brother married the woman he abdicated for also during that Venus retrograde, so it just goes – yeah, it keeps going.
CB: It’s amazing. Yes. All right, we’ll get to all of that. Back to the Queen. The main thing, though, I noticed that she was doing during the actual retrograde itself is that she was doing a tour of Australia and New Zealand in the March time frame when Venus was actually retrograde. And she ended up like, February 28th, she opened the New Zealand parliament in person, and March 8th, the Australian parliament is opened by Elizabeth in her capacity as the Queen of Australia. So I thought it was interesting that you have this like, tour of the Queen across Australia and that area at the time.
NDB: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s the jubilee, so the thing to do, of course, is to do a tour of the empire. And speaking of doing a tour of the empire, sometimes the empire does a tour of you, or something to that sort. We were talking about Justin’s father – Pierre Trudeau. Pierre Trudeau, whose wife just left him for a Rolling Stone, nonetheless had some life in him as well, and there was an instant in May of ‘77 just coming out of the Venus retrograde during some kind of public function, Pierre Trudeau was photographed doing a pirouette behind the back of the Queen. And this photograph wound up on the front page of many newspapers around the world. You know, okay, the Sex Pistols might have been the more, the ruder of the sort of the disrespect that was being shown to the Queen at this time. But this was, you know, a head of state and a world leader behaving kind of punk rock in his own way, you know, doing this pirouette behind the back of the Queen and having that picture go everywhere on the newspapers. So yeah —
CB: So that was actually like, that was a huge scandal?
NDB: Yeah. It was a big deal. It was, you know, I mean, I don’t think it lasted for months and months, but it was on the front page of papers and yeah, it was embarrassing and people were talking about it. Very Venus retrograde.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So you know, that brings up a recurring theme, which is just – with Venus retrograde and Venus – is royalty, celebrity, women who are in prominence positions or femmes who are in prominent positions, scandals, things like that.
NDB: Yeah. And you could even see it happening sort of even just on regular television. There was a show that launched in 1977 – excuse me again – there was a show that launched in 1977 on March 15, 1977, there was a new TV show that aired I think on ABC called Three’s Company. It was an American version of a British TV show called Man About the House, and it was a show about – I mean, it seems so innocent today. But it was a show about a man who’s roommates – who becomes roommates with two women. And you know, the shenanigans that get up to when you have sort of a, you know, when you’re merging the sexes in a non-relationship setting living under one roof. And the whole premise of the show is that the man has to pretend to the landlord that he’s gay in order to justify him living with the two women. So there’s this whole comic premise of, you know, men and women living together out of wedlock, a straight man pretending to be gay, et cetera, et cetera. And this was for the mores of the time, yeah, you know, sort of the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been on television up until 1977, this idea of men and women living together out of wedlock.
During the same month of March of ‘77, I mentioned Charlie’s Angels earlier. And it’s funny, this sort of also anticipates what’s gonna happen to Three’s Company down the road. In March of 1977, Farrah Fawcett-Majors leaves Charlie’s Angels. Charlie’s Angels was this huge TV show, these three glamorous, gorgeous women who are, you know, solving crimes and mysteries and karate-chopping the bad guys on flying helicopters and stuff. You know, it was a very, very popular show. And Farrah Fawcett-Majors left the show, and it was, you know, I think she was trying to advance her career, but it more or less sort of sank her. And then interestingly, Farrah Fawcett would die on June 25th, 2009, the exact same day as Michael Jackson would, so there’s even a connection between the two of them and this Venus retrograde period and the one that happens in 2009. So yeah, there were these kinds of things happening. And just in the world —
CB: The biggest —
NDB: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
CB: The biggest entertainment one that I associate this Venus retrograde with is the release of Star Wars. So the first —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — Star Wars movie came out on May 25th, 1977, and I think this is the one that most people would still be familiar with. And it’s interesting to know that this came out shortly after Venus stationed direct. And what was interesting is that we were talking about this last night, and we figured out that they were finalizing the film during the actual retrograde, and you told me that James Earl Jones recorded his Darth Vader dialogue in March of 1977, and that John Williams recorded his famous music score between March 5th —
NDB: That’s right.
CB: — and 16th of ’77.
NDB: That’s right. Yeah. James Earl Jones recorded – I mean, he, it’s so funny. I mean, it’s such an iconic performance. He spent, I don’t know, barely a day’s work on March 1st, 1977 – excuse me – recording all his dialogue for Darth Vader. As people know, it was another actor in the Darth Vader suit, but James Earl Jones provided the voice, so yeah – you know, final little touches like that – the things that really make the movie such a tight production. You know, like the Darth Vader voice or John Williams’s score being recorded that month – these are all very Venus retrograde sort of, you know, touch ups to what was becoming a really perfect movie.
CB: That’s also funny because he famously, he has Capricorn rising with a Capricorn stellium, so that means Aries is his 4th house. So that means the Venus retrograde was in his 4th house, and he’s, you know, the man behind the voice. But you know —
NDB: Right.
CB: — he doesn’t appear in the film himself and he’s not the actor in the suit.
NDB: That’s a very, very good point. Very astute. It’s also interesting like, for Star Wars to come out during this Venus retrograde, it also has this ongoing relationship to George Lucas and his life. His first marriage was during the Venus retrograde of 1969. And ironically, his second wife was also born during the Venus retrograde in Aries of 1969, although obviously he married her much, much later. And Kathleen Kennedy, the woman who he sort of handed his empire – no pun intended, or pun intended – over to, she was born during the Venus retrograde in Aries in 1953 during that period. So just, yeah, certainly the women around him either by the birth chart or by, you know, the wedding dates, they all sort of fall into this Venus retrograde in Aries as well.
CB: Nice. That’s brilliant. I have written down that on May 1st, 1977, the first public screening of Star Wars was held at the North Point Theatre in San Francisco. And this was just four days after Venus stationed direct in Aries, so just to give you some idea of that. And one of the things that’s funny about this being Venus in Aries is this theme I keep seeing come up in other areas is like, things that go fast, and like, racing and —
NDB: Right.
CB: — speed and cars and stuff like that, and flight especially keeps coming up over this century. And it’s —
NDB: Right.
CB: — funny because that was such a huge element of Star Wars, and it’s part of his, you know, element – having Mars in the 3rd house – is just like, he liked to race cars. And then in Star Wars, like, the fast spaceship battles was like, a major part of it.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, you know, Star Wars obviously, you know, is the really big treat is all the spaceship fights at the end, you know, between the TIE fighters and the empire ships – a lot of that edited by George Lucas’s wife, who of course he married during the Venus retrograde. So it’s, you know, she’s also a sort of a partner in that speed, if you will. In —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — creating it. That —
CB: Her editing. Who won? Was it John Williams that won an Academy Award for the score, or – she won for editing, right? The first one?
NDB: Yeah. She shared it. The film was edited by three editors.
CB: Okay.
NDB: I believe she’s the one who did like, the fight scenes if I remember correctly. And so the editing Academy Award was shared by her and her collaborators. And I think John Williams won. You know, I’m not always the best at retaining that information, but if he didn’t won, he should have. But I’m pretty sure he did. You can double check that if you want.
CB: John Williams won an Oscar for his score for the 1977 film Star Wars. Because that’s one of the funny things is that George Lucas never won an Oscar for Star Wars despite it —
NDB: Right.
CB: — being such a huge blockbuster. But John Williams won for the score, which he recorded during the Venus retrograde, and then the editing potentially could have still been being done during that Venus retrograde very late in the process in the early part of ‘77, which was the other thing that was also awarded.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Anyway. So that was a huge cultural touchstone, turning point, for movies, cinema, for special effects and all sort of things.
NDB: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, there are still other things. February 28th, 1977 is when Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the filming of Apocalypse Now that wound up sort of shutting down the filming of the movie and made things very difficult for Francis Ford Coppola, who has an Aries Sun and this, you know, this transit was turning his life upside down, although in the end, everything worked out.
There was another important one. Oh yeah —
CB: One of the most interesting ones that you wrote, you turned me onto was Studio 54 opening.
NDB: Right! Yeah, yeah – Studio 54 opened on April 26th, 1977. Classic Venus retrograde place. I mean, my god. You had to line up to get in, and you either had to be really famous or either very good looking or at least very sort of special looking at the very least. So it was a very exclusive place. There were all these, you know, famous stories, like a newlywed couple going and the bride gets in and the groom doesn’t, and she just, she goes in, you know, and it’s total decadence behind there and all kinds of sex and drugs and disco —
CB: Right.
NDB: — going on behind the doors. So yeah, very —
CB: I thought that was interesting that there’s a paradox there where on the one hand, it was very exclusive and people would be turned away at the door based on things like how they look, which is a very – or not being famous enough, which is a very Venus thing. And yet paradoxically, it was also a very like, free and inclusive space when it came to sexuality, sexual orientation, and race.
NDB: Yeah. It was a sort of a spark, a very short-lived thing. The club owners I think were found for tax evasion or something like that; they spent some time in jail. And then Steve Rubell, one of the cofounders of Studio 54, wound up opening a new club when he got out of jail in the spring of 1985 during the next Venus retrograde. So you know, you can see it even ongoing in his life even after Studio 54. So that indeed is a good one.
CB: So —
NDB: I think —
CB: For those not familiar with it, though, it was just like, this huge nightclub in New York when disco became huge. But it became this focal point for celebrities because tons of celebrities would go there and become regulars there. But they would get their pictures taken, and it would show up in the newspapers like, the next day, and it became part of a growing trend towards celebrity culture and eventually like, paparazzi type culture in terms of people that were getting photographed going to the club. So one of the founders I found a quote where he said,
“There was a paradigm shift away from reading about crime and sports heroes. People became fascinated with celebrities. It was the beginning of the age of celebrity. We were there at the right time, and we rode it all for what it’s worth.”
So I thought that was really interesting, just like, the celebrity focus of it as well as the documentation in the newspapers and things like that.
NDB: Yeah. It was a very, very notorious place. And interestingly, like, you know, the movie Saturday Night Fever wouldn’t come out until Christmas of ‘77, but it was filmed of course in March of ‘77. So even the art that’s gonna sort of help accelerate the disco culture that’s just being sparked with Studio 54, it’s really, it’s a big part of this mix in the Venus retrograde of 1977.
CB: And since it opened in April 26, 1977, I saw in a documentary it said it was built in just six weeks. So that means the construction must have began around —
NDB: Right.
CB: — the retrograde station, which I thought was really —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — fascinating.
NDB: Yeah. Fantastic.
CB: Nice.
NDB: Yeah. And you know, there’s also like, you know, earlier we were talking about artists like Spice Girls or Backstreet Boys who are just getting their momentum towards stardom. And you also see some of that in 1977. It’s during this whole Venus retrograde period that the band The Police is really getting started and starting to, you know, play gigs and record. And it’s interesting because eight years later is when they’re gonna break up and Sting’s gonna have a son born during that Venus retrograde, the singer in the Police. So you see those kinds of things happening. Yeah. There’s so much. I could talk about Iggy Pop or the Clash or a bunch of other things, but it just never stops.
CB: Yeah. One of the ones you mentioned earlier is April 7th, 1977, Donald Trump married Ivana.
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: And this was right after the Sun-Venus conjunction. So I thought that that retrograde – I thought it was interesting that that retrograde was so significant to him in terms of his personal life, and then, you know, is recurring now in 2025 for another very important moment in his life where he becomes president again.
NDB: Yeah. And speaking of presidents, in March of 1977 is when Richard Nixon recorded his famous interviews with David Frost, which were sort of notorious and were the, you know, to some degree the air was cleared or at least he was, you know, his verdict on his fall from Watergate was recorded and broadcast. So that was an important point, especially considering it was just eight years earlier that he had been inaugurated president, and we’ll be getting to that in 1969. So there’s an interesting sort of parallel between him, his inauguration in ‘69 during one Venus retrograde in Aries and then the interview with Frost at the next one.
CB: Well, and he said that – that was the one where he said like, where when a president does it, it’s not illegal. So it’s like, if you’re —
NDB: Correct.
CB: — doing something illegal. That’s ironic right now because that’s coming up in the news right now. That’s like, something that’s actually —
NDB: Right! Good point, yeah.
CB: — being discussed right now. Funny thing I also just looked up – you know Frost/Nixon – they made a biopic —
NDB: A movie.
CB: — a movie about that in late 2008. Guess when it got a bunch of awards and nominations? In early 2009 at the Academy Awards in early 2009, which was Venus retrograde in Aries. So it was a recurrence of that.
NDB: Yeah. I remember that. I remember thinking that at the time, because I was already aware of all this at that point. But yeah. It just wraps it all up in a nice little bow.
CB: Nice little bow. And that’s something we’re catching a bunch of these, but there’s gonna be a bunch that people listening – especially people that are more familiar with certain aspects of history or pop culture or other things – are gonna catch. So if people listening to this, if you hear one, or if you hear us talking about something and you know that we missed one, let us know in the comments, especially in the YouTube comments. Post a comment and let us know if you noticed a repetition in a specific Venus retrograde that we missed. Don’t like, yell at us, you know, or criticize us, because we’re doing the best we can in covering so much history and making the connections that we have seen. But I’m sure there’s tons we’re missing, so I’d love to hear from people so we can add to this body of research as a community.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it really keeps going. David Lynch’s famous movie Eraserhead premiered March 19th, 1977. This is again this is the launching the career of a very important and successful director, but it’s also an art project that’s really off the beaten path and really strange, and it has a lot to do with some Venus retrograde subjects as well. And then they’re even – you know, there are other things. There’s sort of very scandalous things that I don’t necessarily wanna get too into, but just for people who know the references – Roman Polanski is gonna become a very important figure in the news around this time. And you know, you can imagine why. And Brooke Shields is filming a movie called Pretty Baby in March of 1977, which is also incredibly scandalous and something that would never happen today. So it really gets, it goes really into the weeds, this Venus retrograde. Some of the most extreme elements of ‘70s decadence, I suppose, is one way to put it, or certainly ‘70s liberalism and permissiveness is really sort of reaching this major peak in the spring of ‘77.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I noticed there was a disaster that sometimes comes up. The deadliest accident in aviation history happened on March 27th, 1977 – the Tenerife airport disaster —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — where there was 583 fatalities, which is pretty crazy. And at first, when I was going through the Venus retrogrades and seeing disasters occasionally, I wasn’t writing all of them down because I was having trouble determining which ones to include and which ones stood out. But if there was one that was like, a first, then I would note it. And as I went further and further back progressively from the present to previous times, I kept seeing major disasters; then I started writing them down more, the big ones, because I started realizing that it wasn’t, that it was a thing. That there were sometimes major disasters that happened under Venus retrogrades.
NDB: I mean, it is something you see often enough that, you know, like that storm of the century we saw in ‘93. It certainly does come up. Again, I think it has a lot to do more with the way people respond in these instances; I think that’s a big part of the Venus.
CB: Maybe part of it is that it’s like, a heartbreaking tragedy, and that’s also part of the Venus angle as well.
NDB: Sure.
CB: All right. Other stuff… There’s another disaster, actually. February 18th, there was a farm fire that started on the Chinese New Year when a firecracker ignited wreaths, and it killed 694 people, mostly children, and it remains the deadliest fire in the history of China. So I thought that was a striking one. Also on May 17th, the Likud Party wins the national elections in Israel. And according to Wikipedia, it says,
“For the first time in Israeli political history, the right wing, led by Likud, won a plurality of seats, ending almost 30 years of rule by left-wing Alignment and its predecessor. This dramatic shift in Israeli politics caused by the outcome it led it to become known as ‘the revolution.’”
So this election saw the beginning of a period lasting almost two decades where the left- and right-wing blocks held roughly equivalent numbers of seats in the parliament. So that seemed important; it was another important turning point in Israeli political history under this Venus retrograde that happened back in 1977.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed. And funny enough, that same day – February 18th, 1977 – there was this wild event happening in Nigeria. There was this great Nigerian musician named Fela Kuti who had a group of musicians and dancers that was so large it was like, its own little village. He was an incredible artist at the time. But his home was a sort of compound that he declared to be its own republic – the Kalakuta Republic – but he ran afoul of the Nigerian government, and there was attempt by the Nigerian military to storm his compound. And they came in, and they roughed people up, and I think Kuti’s mother wound up jumping out of a window or something and died because of this raid. It was very intense. But he’s this very important international musician, and there’s this tremendous standoff between him and the political authorities in his country. So yeah, again, you know, talk about the extremes that were happening at this time. Anywhere in the world, they really were coming to this really wild boiling point.
CB: Got it. Yeah. Other firsts – May 29th, the Indianapolis 500 – A. J. Foyt becomes the first driver to win the race four times. So there’s another like, first, and also a going fast like, race thing. There were other firsts. Well, actually, one of them was a disaster; April 4th, the super outbreak – the second largest tornado outbreak in recorded history hits the central United States, causing significant damage and loss of life. June 5th, the Apple II computer goes on sale, which marks a significant step in the personal computer revolution, and this occurred on the very last day of Venus in Aries. So it’s just like, the very tail end of the Venus retrograde, but it was important because the Apple II helped to popularize home computing, and it influenced the development of later software and helped to make —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — like, personal computers mainstream.
NDB: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that. I wanted to – I was gonna mention that. And it’s interesting, too, because it’s of course it’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And Wozniak would wind up leaving the Apple company during the Venus retrograde of 1985. So there’s also – there’s, you know, he’s sort of, at which point he’s really disillusioned and sort of brokenhearted by Jobs. So there is an interesting sort of bookend between them introducing the Apple II in ‘77 and him leaving the company in ‘85.
CB: Nice. That’s a good one. That’s a good repetition of eight years. And with this, it was also – it was one of the first successful mass produced microcomputers. That’s one of the reasons it was important is it was a first, but also it was priced low enough that it was within reach of many middle-class families, so it helped to make computing more accessible.
NDB: Yeah. It was very sort of everyman at the time, which is kind of interesting when you think about the company now. But certainly at the time, yeah, it had that kind of Model T appeal, you know, the kind of computer anyone can have. So there was an element to that.
I wanted to just come back when we talked about Donald Trump’s wedding to his first wife, Ivana Winklmayr, April 7th, 1977. I just wanted to point out that Laura Loomer was born during this retrograde in 1993 – just saying! Just saying. You know, worth knowing. You know, who knows where that goes. But anyway. I wanted to make sure I got that in there.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s a good one of just important people showing up in his life again who, you know, become close to him.
Another one that I noticed that was a major one – March 20th of 1977, Indira Gandhi loses the Indian election in a surprising upset. And she had served as the Prime Minister since 1966, but was suddenly voted out of office, which was really important as a turning point.
NDB: Yeah. Her life has all kinds of Venus retrograde stuff all over it. But yeah, indeed, this was a very – you know, I was talking about Kim Campbell in 1993; this is another sort of, this isn’t the easiest time for a woman to be a political leader. Mind you, I mean, she had – her regime went really dark in 1975, a period that’s called “the emergency” there. Some pretty upsetting things were going on. And —
CB: Where they were like, suspending civil liberties?
NDB: Yeah. They were doing that. They were – what’s the term – they were not spaying. They —
CB: Suppressing?
NDB: No, they were forcing or encouraging men to be —
CB: Sterilized?
NDB: Sterilized! Thank you. I was trying to think of the word. Yeah. There was a mass sterilization project to try and decrease the population. Of course, it was targeted at the poorest people and what have you. So there were things like that. There were attempts to clean up slums, but of course not in any kind of compassionate, organized way, but in a just very cruel and sudden way. So yeah, just a lot of things happened very quickly that turned enough people off that for a period of time, she was voted out of office. But she would make a comeback.
CB: So this period that we’re talking about – the Venus retrograde – was the sudden removal of that, because the day after she loses the election, a day later on March 21st, she has to withdraw the state of emergency which had been in effect for about two years at that point. So that’s really, really striking.
NDB: A little less than two years. It had actually started not long before the Venus retrograde in the summer of 1975 in Virgo to Leo, so yeah.
CB: Nice. All right. That’s my final one for 1977.
NDB: There are no final ones! But let’s move on.
CB: Yeah! You can keep going?
NDB: Like, I’m still, I’m seeing other things I could say, but I’m just like, okay, yeah. But —
CB: We have —
NDB: — ‘77 is a great one. It really is.
CB: All right. Let’s go back to 1969 and the Venus retrograde that occurred in the early part of that year.
So the retrograde started March 18th, and it lasted until April 29th of 1969. But by sign, it started February 2nd and lasted until June 5th when Venus finally departed from Aries. So at the very beginning of this one is politically – starting with the presidents – Richard Nixon was inaugurated for the first time on January 20th, 1969. So this is interesting because he had become the vice president under the 1953 Venus retrograde in Aries when Eisenhower became president, so this was an interesting repetition for him in terms of his Venus retrograde story.
NDB: Yeah. And as we already covered, eight years from now, he’s gonna be explaining himself on the David Frost interview. So yeah, it keeps happening. But it’s all the more poignant because, yeah, he was vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, and as I mentioned earlier, Dwight Eisenhower died during this Venus retrograde. He died on March 28th, 1969, 16 years after his own inauguration, and of course he had been the general, the US military leader on the European theater in 1945 during the Venus retrograde that saw the end of the European part of the Second World War. So yeah. You know, three things that Eisenhower’s peak as a military leader, his ascension to the presidency, and then his leaving the planet – all these things fall into that same Venus retrograde cycle. And Eisenhower himself was born during a Venus retrograde cycle – the one that used to go from Sagittarius to Scorpio.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s another good example of like, a president dying under this Venus retrograde, like what just happened with Carter. And we have Eisenhower dying during this Venus retrograde in Aries in 1969.
Going back to Nixon, you know, Nixon is inaugurated president in 1969, and this is a repetition of Venus because eight years earlier, of course, in 1961, he loses to Kennedy, and he’s having to as vice president certify the vote to the guy that he lost to or that he feels like stole the election even. So this was an interesting comeback for Nixon politically where it seemed like he was kind of like, finished or he could have been like, over after 1961. But somehow eight years later, Nixon makes this striking comeback and is inaugurated under this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah, it gets even Venus retrogradier than that when you consider, yes, he had to hand over, you know, the victory to Kennedy in 1961 as that Venus retrograde was happening, but then he ran for governor of California in 1962 during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And when he lost that, that’s when he gave the famous speech, “You’re not gonna have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore,” which makes his eventual comeback all the more ironic because he literally declared himself, you know, out of the political world forever.
CB: Right. So even he thought he was done.
NDB: Oh, in 1962, well, at least he – you know, if he didn’t, I don’t know why he would say it to a whole press corps in public with cameras rolling. So yeah, one presumes that he did! But eventually he changed his mind. So there’s that, but there’s also this other undercurrent. When Eisenhower became president in 1953, one of the first things that happened was since Eisenhower appointed the Dulles brothers, he had John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State and then Allen Dulles was running the CIA. This is when the CIA starts to become the institution that we, that has the greatest reputation, let’s say. MK Ultra is introduced; it’s a program whereby they’re gonna try and test LSD as a weapon, a psychological weapon. And this is created during the Venus retrograde of 1953. In 1961 when Kennedy takes over, I mentioned the Bay of Pigs – the Bay of Pigs invasion was supposed to be an operation that was conducted under a President Nixon who, it was hoped, would win the election against Kennedy. So Kennedy winds up getting this, you know, CIA-led operation to find Castro’s Cuba, and he doesn’t know much about it. But Nixon knew all about it! It was something that was supposed to happen with him in charge and that had been developed with Eisenhower in charge. So when Nixon finally becomes… ‘69 that Cambodia is bombed secretly, which will emerge later on. But it’s always like, I mean, that’s one pattern with this Venus retrograde in Aries because it always follows a presidential inauguration. It happens with every second presidential inauguration. It just so happens that whatever sort of peak shenanigan, if you will, is happening, that sort of like, when it comes to the US government, this Venus retrograde in Aries is some outrageous shenanigan that happens right at the beginning of the administration in the first 100 days. And in some way, you can tag it to virtually every one who does get inaugurated during this one.
CB: Right. And this one’s also interesting and important because it ties back to last year, because last year we were noting all of these repetitions that were happening between the 2024 US presidential election and the 1968 presidential election. And a lot of that was because there was a repetition of both Venus and like, the Venus phase – like the fact that we had a Sun-Venus cazimi or conjunction in Gemini in June – and then Venus was just like, tracking and repeating exactly where it was all of 2024 back to where it was in 1968. But there was also the nodes were in the same place and the eclipses were also repeating in Aries, just like they had in 1968. So we had all these parallels. And what were the parallels again? It was like, the president who’s the president at the time instead of running for re-election, he steps down.
NDB: Yes.
CB: We had a Kennedy running for president where it was Robert Kennedy was running for president in 1968, and then his son was running in 2024. There —
NDB: We had students shutting down Columbia University in protest of a military operation. There’s that. We had a Democratic Convention in Chicago. We had an attempted assassination, or – obviously in ‘68 they were successful. And I think there were still others even though that’s already quite impressive as it is.
CB: Right. So that’s where – oh yeah! Well, the other one was that it’s like, there’s the protests that the Democrats are protesting and it creates a somewhat chaotic like, Democratic Convention due to anti-war protests. And then in 1968, what happened is that those protests ended up helping to swing it so that the conservative candidate, who was Nixon, won the election then and then gets inaugurated and comes into office. And one of the things that was interesting about that is that the Chicago protests and convention was so chaotic in 1968 that there were a bunch of repercussions from that afterwards. And so one of those is that in March of 1969, the Chicago Eight were indicted. And this was during the Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: Yeah. That’s correct. I mean, this was this big show trial, and it was Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin – these were guys who were known as yippies. They were sort of – again, we’re coming into that sort of theater, experimental theater. They were political, you know, activists, but they often did it in very theatrical ways. Abbie Hoffman did things like attempt to levitate the White House using, you know, psychic powers, or I think he went into the stock exchange with Jerry Rubin and they threw out dollar bills or something? Something to that extent. They would pull these stunts to sort of to protest Vietnam, to protest the draft, so on and so forth, these sort of theatrical stunts. And they were involved with other organizers that none of – actually, to say they were involved isn’t even accurate. Different people who had a hand in creating the environment through which the riots in Chicago came to be, the political activists who wanted to protest the Democratic Convention because they didn’t like the fact that the party wasn’t pushing a distinctly anti-war candidate like they wanted, so Chicago became this big, violent ordeal with the police, you know, really hurting a lot of protesters, a lot of young people. And so the Chicago Eight ultimately – Hoffman, Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was sort of thrown into this group, these other organizers who didn’t have really anything to do with Hoffman and Rubin, who weren’t as theatrical – they were more sort of serious political people – they also made up other people in the Eight. There were one or two people who were just sort of loosely political who – or, you know, controversial – who were sort of thrown in so that there would be some people who could be let go and some people who could be convicted. And you know, the real hard targets were people like Hoffman and Rubin and Seale, certainly.
So it was a terrible trial. At one point, Bobby Seale was bound and gagged really unfairly just because he was protesting the fact that his lawyer wasn’t present. All kinds of things happened. The trial itself became a big sort of piece of theater and it was very serious and went on forever. So yeah, and again, we’re already, we’re gonna touch on other things of this nature. There’s a lot of things happening in the spring of ‘69 that are sort of political theater or very provocative theater. Very provocative public events across —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — the political spectrum, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that one was a major one that they were charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Convention; it became a big media firestorm in the spring.
One of my favorite Venus retrograde ones in the 1969 retrograde is the Bed-In For Peace in Amsterdam with John Lennon and Yoko One in March of 1969 where John Lennon and Yoko Ono got married under this Venus retrograde in Aries, and then the couple spent a week in their honeymoon suite at the Amsterdam Hilton hotel, and they invited the press to observe their protest. And it was this weird mixture between a piece of performance art, which was very much Yoko’s thing, and peace activism. And the couple invited the press to join them in their hotel room for every day from March 25th to 31st, 1969, and they were trying to like, find ways to promote the anti-war movement.
NDB: Yeah. Great political theater. And of course, I mean, first of all, the wedding itself – part of the reason John and Yoko got married on March 20th, 1969 was because Paul McCartney and Linda… I’ve blanked on her name. What am I thinking? Linda, his wife —
CB: Eastman? Was it Eastman?
NDB: Eastman! Thank you! Yeah, yeah, I blanked on her maiden name even though I’m a huge Beatles fan. So Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman, I think, March 12th or 13th or something. So the Venus – two Beatles are getting married during this Venus retrograde. Of course, they’re the two songwriters. And it’s not a big stretch to think that, you know, John marries Yoko because Paul just married Linda and he wants to – the Beatles are really like that with each other. There’s a sort of competition between them. And then —
CB: In Yoko’s chart, she has Aries rising and Libra – oh, so, no – she has Libra rising and Aries is her 7th house, so the Venus went retrograde there. And in the likely time for Lennon, he has Aries rising and Libra is his 7th house.
NDB: Yeah. There are two versions of his chart; it’s, you know. I’ve got an opinion, but nonetheless, there are two versions. The other version is Libra rising. So either way, it’s an angular transit for him. So he, you know, given the ambiguity, it’s still in the middle of everything certainly.
CB: Okay.
NDB: So yeah, that – I mean, that happens. And the interesting thing about the bed-in, of course, like, it’s perfectly innocent. They’re sitting – you know, they’re lying in bed in their pajamas. There’s nothing sort of sordid about it. But when they first announce it to the press, you know, the press really think they’re gonna go to the bedroom and see like, a honeymoon if you catch my drift. That’s kind of part of the appeal, the way that they get the press into their hotel room in the first place is the press think that they’re really gonna get, you know, something really steamy.
CB: Right.
NDB: But they’re there to really protest the war.
CB: Yeah. And so apparently, their protest inspired other bed-ins around the world. And then they did another one in Montreal in late May and early June where – which included the recording of the song “Give Peace a Chance,” which became an anthem of the anti-war movement. And “Give Peace a Chance” was recorded on the 1st of June 1969 just before Venus left Aries. And the core lyric is just, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”
NDB: Yeah. As a born and raised Montrealer, this is just a huge thing, you know, for me. I’m really the kind of person who introduces the word “pride” into, you know, these kinds of contexts, but you know, to have this song of any song written and recorded by a Beatle in my hometown is just something that we just love where I’m from. And I’ve even snuck into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel when I was a teenager with my friends just to look at the hotel room where they had stayed all those years ago on the 17th floor. It’s a notorious piece of theater. It’s an incredible song in the sense that, you know, my favorite Beatles song is “I Am the Walrus,” which is really complex and has all these different elements to it. “Give Peace a Chance” is a one-chord song and a chant. It’s so bare bones, and yet it’s so powerful. It’s so incredible. And the way it resonated – the song, you know, took on a life of its own in the protest movement. Pete Seager sang it at the biggest anti-Vietnam War march by October of ‘69. So you know, sure, it’s a song by a Beatle, but it’s gotta sort of a power and a status and a magic to it that, you know, exceeds even their work, their oeuvre. So yeah, what —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — I mean, as a Montrealer, I can’t gush enough about it. But it certainly is, even as a piece of art, it’s something very so stripped back and naked and essential and basic and beautiful.
CB: Yeah. I feel like if we had to do like, a top 10 list, then this would be probably somewhere in my top 10 of just most striking Venus retrograde examples just because of the way that it comes out of, you know, their marriage, like the marriage between John and Yoko and the complexities surrounding that, and then her background with performance art and then them doing this, you know, peace stuff with the bed-ins, and that trying to be like, another expression of like, the sit-in protests. And then finally, the song itself, “Give Peace a Chance” as like, an expression of Venus retrograde in Aries. There’s so many —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — different layers to that. This is definitely one of my top ones.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the thing about this 1969 Venus retrograde in Aries is this is the one that is copresent with Saturn in Aries. And so you do get a very different kind of mix in that sense, that you know… Yeah, it’s more sort of serious but also sort of stripped back and there is – I mean, it’s funny, I’m saying “stripped back,” but that is something that actually happens a lot here, whether it’s, you know, a married couple inviting the press into their bedroom or other things that we’re gonna be talking about here.
CB: Right. And this comes up more —
NDB: — stripping back. Sorry. Go ahead.
CB: It will be more stripping.
NDB: Yes.
CB: So this comes up in another one – I forget which one – it might be the 1953 one. But there was a theme that came up in one of the other retrogrades that we’ll go into more of like, also with sometimes protests like these of being like, radical chic or protest chic. And this isn’t the best example of that, but there’s some others that we’ll see in the future where we’ll circle back to this one as well in terms of like, celebrities becoming involved in protests and things like that.
NDB: Right. Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on. This is also connected to the repetition from 1968, but March 3rd in a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. And on April 17th, he’s found guilty of the assassination. So I thought that was curious just because the retrograde in Aries then referred back to the assassination that had occurred, and to the eclipse that occurred, in Aries from the previous year. So that’s something I’m gonna be paying attention to this year just in terms of this Venus retrograde in Aries that’s coming up perhaps referring back to some of the events that happened after the eclipse in Aries in 2024.
NDB: Yeah. And tied to all this, speaking of sort of celebrities and future celebrities, during this Venus retrograde, some students at Morehouse University in Atlanta, which was Martin Luther King’s alma mater, they take one of the sort of school personnel hostage in a protest over some matters relating to, you know, race relations and the recent assassination of King the previous year. And one of the students in this action where they take this hostage is none other than Samuel L. Jackson, the actor, as a young student in this part of this militant action where they take a hostage in a protest. So that’s interesting as well. But there’s a lot of this kind of thing going on. And a lot of the sort of the FBI, you know, sort of co-intel pro action against the Black Panthers is really surfacing now as they’re planting all these different people within the organization to undermine it. And they at one point conduct this mass arrest of people they called the Panther 21, just a very large group of young people who were involved in the Black Panther Party, one of whom is the future mother of the rapper Tupac Shakur, and I believe she’s – I don’t think he’s born in prison, but I think she was at one point pregnant in prison with him —
CB: Yeah. Well, she’s literally pregnant while she’s defending herself and representing herself —
NDB: Right.
CB: — on trial. She’s arguing in court like, while she’s pregnant with him during this time.
NDB: Yeah. So I mean, that’s just hugely powerful. So yeah, her ordeal began with this arrest on April 2nd, 1969 with the Panther 21.
CB: Yeah. One of the things – oh yeah, this is where the protest chic came up – that the composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia hosted parties raising money for the Panthers. And it was one of these parties in support of Panther 21 that Tom Wolfe wrote about in his essay “Radical Chic: That Part at Lenny’s,” in which he coined the term “radical chic,” which was said to be like, a fashionable practice of upper class people associating with politically radical people and causes. And it’s – Wikipedia has this whole write up where it says,
“Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in ‘radical chic’ remain more frivolous political agitators ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their social standing.”
And the concept has been described as “an exercise in double-tracking one’s public image: On the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to radical cause, but on the other, demonstrating that this allegiance because it is fashionable way to seem in name conscious society” or something like that. So obviously, there’s gonna be like, some criticism and critique of that, but it was an interesting dialogue and criticism sometimes of people supporting radical causes but not necessarily like, getting down and dirty themselves in terms of doing some of the things that were involved in that.
NDB: Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, some of these people really were getting down and dirty. One thing that comes to mind is Shirley Douglas, an actress, she was the wife of Donald Sutherland; she’s the mother of Kiefer Sutherland. And she’s the daughter of a very beloved Canadian politician named Tommy Douglas, the guy who literally introduced the medicare system that they have there. She was arrested in October of 1969 specifically for I think transferring weapons to the Black Panthers or holding them for them or something to do with weapons and the Black Panthers. So you know, this is white actress from Canada and fairly not necessarily in Leonard Bernstein’s social class, but certainly doing things that put herself in jeopardy. And you know, this is also when the Weathermen are starting to emerge and get more militant. This is what I mean about this Venus retrograde and Saturn – I mean, this is like, everyone gets very, very sort of serious and hard about something that up until that point had been more, you know, hippie-like and hip and playful, even if it was protest. Everything gets very, very serious.
CB: Sure. I guess I was just saying that sometimes Venus retrograde periods can characterize something that becomes trendy during a period of time.
NDB: Oh yeah. Sure.
CB: But then the tricky part is that also sometimes during Venus retrogrades regularly, you’ll see protests come up. So sometimes part of what becomes trendy is protesting something. But there’s gonna be a spectrum of people that are like, more or less actually dedicated to that cause versus only supporting it in certain ways or limited ways or perhaps being more of a passing thing because it’s more of a fad or a trend or something like that. There’s gonna be like, a full spectrum.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. No, that’s well put.
CB: You mentioned Saturn, and that was a important aside I meant to make earlier on, which is that there’s probably a lot of greater specificity and ways in which each of these Venus retrograde periods can be further defined and unique based on the planets that are either in the sign that Venus is going retrograde in or are aspecting it by transit during the course of the retrograde. For the most part, we’re not getting into that, but it’s something that obviously we’re aware of; we’re just not going to – you could dive much deeper maybe going into some of the specifics of what happened during each retrograde if you were looking at some of those aspects to Venus during the course of it.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: As well as like, overlapping alignments, which you’ve mentioned in passing a few times. Like the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that coincided with one, or other various alignments that are happening at the same time; we’re just isolating one alignment and trying to get as clear about it to see if we can see the patterns and the repetitions in it as we can.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, both these things are true at once. Because you are getting this regular Venus rhythm, if you will, there is something consistent and related between each eight year return. At the same time indeed, every one contains its own variant – something that’s unique to that particular period that isn’t present in all the other returns. Like, for instance, Saturn being also in Aries in 1969.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right. So let’s hit some other ones. I got a bunch for this one. March —
NDB: Oh, so do I.
CB: March 17th, Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel. Again, I thought this was very important political turning point in Israel we keep seeing with this Venus retrograde, and I’m mentioning that just because I’m anticipating this upcoming one being important as well.
There were a number of other firsts that occurred under this Venus retrograde. One of them, for example, was April 4th, Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart, which I thought was striking. April 22nd, English sailor Robin Knox-Johnson becomes the first person to sail around the world solo without stopping. More depressing first – May 15th, an American teenager known as Robert R. Dies in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States, of a baffling medical condition and later on in 1984, it will be identified as the earliest confirmed case of HIV AIDS in North America. So that’s a very striking and important Venus retrograde one.
NDB: Yeah. Big time.
CB: Let’s see, other things. May 16th – the Venera program – the Soviet space probe Venera Five lands on Venus. And this is really important because it gathered data and helped engineers to design future Venus missions, ultimately leading to the first successful landing on Venus with Venera Seven in 1970 shortly after Venus stationed direct in Scorpio.
NDB: Yeah. They also send probes – if they’re sending any probe or what have you to Venus, it’s always during the retrograde because that’s when it’s closest to earth. I’ve got a whole book about, you know, every single thing they’ve sent there, and it’s always during the retrogrades. It’s funny that way. It makes sense! I mean, you know, it doesn’t have to travel as far.
CB: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I think that’s part of the astronomical significance of why the Venus retrogrades are so important and why Venus becomes so prominent during these periods. It’s because Venus is actually closer to the earth during this time when it’s retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. So that’s why it appears to be going backward is because it is so close and why it just appears to stay in the same area for so long.
CB: Right. So this is at what’s called the inferior conjunction, which is the retrograde conjunction with the Sun. Venus is on the earth’s side of the Sun, and yeah. It’s the closest to us.
NDB: Yeah. That’s why I like the term “interior” as opposed to “inferior,” because it’s even more sort of specific and descriptive of that basic fact. It’s inside. It’s in between us and the Sun.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: May 18th, the Apollo program. Apollo 10 is launched, and it’s the full rehearsal, basically, for the Moon landing. So I think that’s actually really important. They stopped 15 kilometers short of actually reaching the lunar surface, but this was basically like, a dress rehearsal for Apollo 11 later that year when they actually landed on the Moon. And this was another instance I saw of like, you know, almost like, prototyping or putting the final touches on —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — on preparing something before the full like, showtime that happens later in the year.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. And speaking of which, there’s another important start that happens that same week. On May 11th, 1969, in London, there’s a meeting at the BBC. An executive there has brought together six different comic writers and performers who are interested in possibly starting a new show. And they get the go-ahead to make a series of episodes under this new show, and they try to figure out a name, and ultimately they decide on the name Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And the first episode will air at the, you know, in the summer, but this is the meeting where they sort of they figure out this is, you know, this is gonna be a show, and we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna have, you know, this animator – Terry Gilliam – makes these cartoons, and it’s gonna – there are gonna be no punchlines. So it is really sort of experimental even though it’s gonna be hugely popular. It’s a whole other way of writing comedy. The whole idea of writing comedy but not having punchlines, just having every skit kind of collapse and segue into a new one. And yeah, very sort of, it sort of defines humor today, but at the time, it’s wildly revolutionary. It was so radical at the time. I remember being seven, eight years old and seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time and then catching up with the TV show. I mean, it really did seem like it was out of this world.
So that’s also, that’s another sort of, you know, both a sort of an experimental art project, but also this really important cultural force that’s no less popular in North America as it is in its native UK. And yeah, they’re starting right at this time.
CB: Yeah. And I mean, comedy and laughing is such a Venus thing.
NDB: Yeah, Venus-Saturn thing, too! I mean, Saturn is, of course, tragedy plus timing, right? Very Saturnian words. Saturn is very often present in humor as well, and I do absolutely think it’s the combination of the Venus retrograde and the Saturn that makes Monty Python so funny.
CB: Definitely. All right. Another one that happened – on Valentine’s Day in 1969, this is one of the funniest Venus retrograde ones. The pope issued a whole declaration in which they deleted many names from the Roman calendar of different saints, including Saint Valentine who, you know, Valentine’s Day is named after. So like, part of the headline of this day is essentially like, “Pope Removes Saint Valentine’s Day from the Church Calendar” on Valentine’s Day itself during a Venus retrograde. And I cannot think of a more Venus retrograde thing than the pope saying like, Venus – saying Valentine’s Day is canceled from this point forward within the church even though on a popular level outside of the church, Valentine’s Day obviously continued to be, you know, just as popular.
NDB: Yeah. It’s pretty wild. Very Venus retrograde.
CB: For sure.
NDB: Yeah —
CB: Very Venus retrograde with Saturn also in Aries at the same time.
NDB: Exactly. No, yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. It’s funny – you know, coincidentally, it was that same day, February 14th, 1969, that Vito Genovese died. He was a major, you know, Cosa Nostra guy. And yeah, you know, sort of the flip side to the Vatican, I suppose, is yeah, Vito Genovese.
Alongside – we were talking about my hometown of Montreal, and “Give Peace a Chance,” it’s interesting; it occurs to me there were two pretty big sort of revolutionary protest events that happened in Montreal in February of 1969. On February 11th, 1969, there was what was called the computer riot at Sir George University where these computer students, or these students – I don’t know that they were computer students – but they sort of barricaded themselves in the computer lab area of this university and did a bunch of damage to the equipment there and what have you. And then it was just two days later at the Montreal stock exchange that an FLQ bomb went off and injured 27 people. The FLQ is the Front de liberation du Quebec; it was the separatist sort of – think, I mean, it’s the Quebec version of the IRA that you had in Ireland. Sort of a separatist movement. And so yeah, these were actions that were, you know, sort of at the center of Montreal politics at the time. At the following Venus retrograde in 1970 in Scorpio, there would be a very famous kidnapping by the FLQ of a Quebec politician who was later murdered, and that was sort of the culmination of things. But these events, these bombs, and you know, student riots and what have you were quite common in Montreal in the ‘60s. It was a very sort of explosive time politically then. And this period, again, in the Venus retrograde in Aries in 1969 puts, you know, is also sort of a wild peak with regard to that.
CB: Nice. That’s a good one. Short one – Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse Five, which was his novel about his experiences being a prisoner of war in Dresden in February of 1945 when the firebombing happened. And February of 1945 was also a Venus retrograde in Aries, so it’s like —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — somebody publishing a novel about something that happened more than two decades earlier under like, multiple Venus retrogrades ago.
NDB: Yeah. And that book is really the literary version of “Give Peace a Chance” in a way. It’s interesting. He talks about in the introduction to that book that – because indeed, Kurt Vonnegut had been a soldier who was prisoner of war in Dresden and was therefore locked up just outside Dresden when it was firebombed and basically incinerated. So he was so close to what happened and got to see the aftermath. And so he had an old army buddy that he went to visit sometime I think in the early ‘60s, and he talked about that he wanted to write a book about the firebombing of Dresden. And his buddy’s wife got very upset. She said, “You’re gonna write a book that just encourages young boys to go to war, because it’s always glamorized.” And he swore to her, he’s like, “That’s not the book I wanna write. I don’t wanna write anything that glamorizes war. This is a children’s crusade,” which is the subtitle of the book. Fiercely anti-war novel. But it’s a brilliant also just piece of literature, fantastic piece of writing. And yeah, there’s a Venus retrograde theme on both ends of it. It’s published and comes to life during a Venus retrograde, but it refers to a very specific event in his life, and even though it’s a work of fiction he is a character in the book in a small way. Well, he often does that with himself as a narrator. And it’s about what he experienced during that same Venus retrograde 24 years earlier.
CB: Brilliant.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Let’s see. Elsewhere, April 28th, Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, steps down as president after suffering a defeat in a referendum the day before. And this is interesting because eights years earlier during the previous Venus retrograde in Aries, he had survived a failed coup attempt. So he ends up falling, and this is kind of interesting because it’s kind of similar with like, Justin Trudeau right now having to step down as, you know, prime minister of Canada.
NDB: Yeah. Charles de Gaulle has Venus retrograde all over his life, all over the place. You know, obviously we won’t go into every single one, but indeed he resigns from office during this Venus retrograde, and the previous one in Aries was the one when there was an attempted coup because it was in the middle of the whole, you know, civil war with Algeria, who were fighting for independence. And de Gaulle had really been chosen as a political leader because it was expected that he would help France hold onto Algeria, whereas in the end, he ultimately was realistic enough – he was a very sort of sober guy, I suppose – realized it was impossible for France to hold onto Algeria. And so he engineered its independence, and there was a backlash because of that. And so there was this military coup in 1961 that was attempted against him; it was quite serious and nearly succeeded. Conducted by these four high-ranking military leaders who wanted to hold onto Algeria at all costs. So yeah, there is a resonance between that. And de Gaulle was born during a Venus retrograde – the same one as Eisenhower. Actually, he and Eisenhower were born fairly close together. Eisenhower’s a Libra Sun, and de Gaulle was born when the Sun was at the last degree of Scorpio – so they’re born, whatever, a month or five weeks or whatever apart. And so they’re both born with that Venus retrograde that went from Sagittarius to Scorpio. And de Gaulle would die just shy of the age of 80 during that same Venus retrograde in Scorpio. So he would be born and died in the same Venus retrograde, you know, interval – the one in Scorpio. So that’s also interesting. That all sort of follows through.
And years earlier in 1921, he married his wife during the Venus retrograde that went from Taurus to Aries in those days. So even, you know, going back there in his personal life, that Venus retrograde is really important.
CB: So th at’s like, parallel with like, Trump, for example, who married his first wife under Venus retrograde in Aries and then later becomes —
NDB: FDR. FDR married —
CB: Oh yeah.
NDB: — Eleanor during the Venus retrograde in Aries, yeah. You know.
CB: Right.
NDB: You know, we were speaking about Hitler last time. Of course, just before he took his life, he married Eva Braun during the Venus retrograde in Aries —
CB: That was —
NDB: — so a lot of those —
CB: — the most romantic one. Right.
NDB: Oh yeah. Yeah. What a charmer, that one. So yeah. Like, so many of those World War Two people are totally Venus retrograde, you know? Churchill was also born during a Venus retrograde, but he’s literally the only one of these leaders who didn’t die during one as well. He did die during a Mars retrograde, but all these other guys – de Gaulle…
CB: The President Eisenhower —
NDB: FDR. Yeah. Eisenhower, FDR, et cetera. Stalin, of course. You know.
CB: Right.
NDB: Mussolini. Yeah, they all died during Venus retrogrades, yeah. So it is something wild there. That’s always intrigued me, yeah.
CB: Good times. Yeah, it’s something – there’s something about – well, one of the things I’m noticing with Carter right now is there’s this huge outpouring of remembrance of the good things, of public support. Like, there’s an element of that sometimes when people die of memorialization and visibility and things like that, you know, sometimes when a person passes away. And just their prominence as their story like, comes to an end at that point.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So there was two airplane things which keeps being a recurrence in the 20th century. But one of them was February 9th – the Boeing 747 jumbo jet makes its first commercial flight revolutionizing air travel. It was the first wide-body aircraft ever made, and it began like, the jumbo jet era. So this did a bunch of things. One of the things it did is it drastically increased the number of people who could travel by air at once because it could carry over 350 passengers. But that also meant that it would lower costs, because more passengers meant lower costs per person, making air travel more affordable and accessible to the middle class, which democratized flying.
It also opened up new possibilities for long-haul routes and nonstop flights across continents and oceans. It made air travel more spacious and comfortable, including, interestingly, increased amenities where airlines introduced new inflight entertainment, better meals, and even lounges on the upper deck that made flying more enjoyable. And the last thing about that is that the Boeing 747 earned the name “the queen of the skies” for its graceful design and dominance of long-haul air travel, so I thought that was a good Venus retrograde – “the queen of the skies.”
NDB: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Similarly, March 2nd, the Concorde, the supersonic jet, made its first test flight. And this was a major technological advancement and a symbol of progress as well as just one of the keywords of Venus retrograde in Aries seems to be “zoom.” Things that go fast. So that was interesting one.
One of your favorites is like, a scandal that happened in this Venus retrograde with Jim Morrison.
NDB: Oh! Yeah, but wait, I just wanna continue on flights, and then we’ll get to him. Another thing related to flights in this Venus retrograde in Aries is hijackings. 1985, 1969, and 1961 all have very notorious airplane hijackings that occur during that Venus retrograde in Aries. So yeah, it’s interesting. The one in ‘85 was really notorious. But in 1969, there were some pretty serious ones. And one of the first ones that kind of became a phenomenon in the ‘60s, particularly flights to Cuba, and yeah – May 1st, 1961, there’s a knife-wielding Cuban who hijacks a airliner and forces it to Havana. And that almost becomes like, you know, they didn’t have memes in the 1960s, but hijacking a plane and taking it to Havana became a sort of, you know, 1960s idea of a meme. It was, you know, like a punchline I suppose as you’d say. You know, something that kept happening. And it sort of starts around that time as well. So that’s another thing pertaining to flights that I find interesting.
CB: I mean, ironically, that was also what was happening in early 2001 was they were putting the final preparations and they were all taking —
NDB: Yes.
CB: — flying classes in order to plan that what ended up being the largest like, terrorist attack involving planes in history.
NDB: Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, it comes up a lot. You see it in, like I said, ‘69, ‘61, ‘85, and certainly 2001, absolutely. So yeah.
CB: All right.
NDB: Now —
CB: So —
NDB: Yes, Jim Morrison.
CB: Let’s do a brief version of this one.
NDB: Well, I mean, this does become a really big ordeal because it sparks all this other stuff. It’s part of what sparks the sort of the right-wing pushback against decadent, you know, hippie culture if you will. So what happens is it starts in Los Angeles; there’s this group called the Living Theater, and again, it’s experimental art. It’s this theater group that, you know, breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience. The actors in the Living Theater will get naked, and they’ll yell at audience members and say really terrible things to them and be very confrontational. So it’s really this very provocative form of experimental theater. And Jim Morrison, the singer in The Doors, goes to at least one of these Living Theater performances – I think he goes to several – and he’s really inspired. Now, Jim Morrison himself is a really amazing performer, at least he has been. But he’s also wrestling with alcoholism. And on March 1st, 1969, the same week that he’s just attended – I think even the night before, just a few nights before he’d been to a Living Theater performance – The Doors are playing a concert in Miami. And Jim Morrison gets very drunk and he starts berating the audience. Like, if you know the context of the Living Theater, you get that, like, he’s drunk and he’s trying to do a Living Theater thing, but he’s also just like, a drunken maniac, you know, berating an audience that paid money to see his band. And the recording – you can hear it on YouTube; it was bootlegged. It’s not very good sound quality, but you can hear everything he says to them, and you know, a lot of it is not stuff I would wanna repeat here. And then it all culminates with him basically threatening to expose himself, and he may have exposed himself. He also – what many sort of the closest witnesses say is that he didn’t actually expose himself; what he did do was stick two fingers through his fly and sort of, you know, intimate that he was exposing himself. Whatever the reality of it was, it led to this huge outcry. He was charged and arrested later. I think he surrendered to the FBI, technically, but he was charged and indicted. And even at his death, I think there was an appeal. He, you know, there was still the possibility he would have gone to prison for this. But then furthermore, the whole thing sort of sparked these rallies that were for – rallies for decency. And this marked the ascendancy of this woman, Anita Bryant, who actually I think just died this week. Anita Bryant was this sort of, you know, middle of the road performer, singer, and what have you who was sort of took her homophobia and made it her brand. She was this sort of anti-gay campaigner. But it all came out like, she became popular in part because she participated in these Miami rallies for decency that came up because Jim Morrison had allegedly exposed himself to young people in Miami. So yeah, it became this very big brouhaha, and very Venus retrograde with Saturn, you know? Not just the outrageousness of the act, but also the pushback and how that snowballed in its own way. And again, we’re seeing this experimental art that just keeps coming up when we’re talking about it, you know, whether it’s the bed-in or the Living Theater. All these things that are very, yeah, you know, not conventional art. You know, really trying to change the rules of art. It’s very Venus retrograde.
CB: Right. Provocative, but also like, a scandal. Like, a public scandal involving a celebrity.
NDB: Yeah, very much.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good one. Speaking of provocative art, there was a exhibition that occurred at this time that was like, a major turning point in terms of art history. Sorry, I’m trying to find my notes on it; I somehow lost track of – there it is! March 22nd, very close to the retrograde, the landmark art exhibition When Attitudes Become Form opens at in Bern, Switzerland, and the show is considered a groundbreaking landmark for Postminimalist and Arte Povera work, which according to The New York Times was, “arguably the most famous exhibition of new art of the postwar era,” and it happened during this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. Starting in March 22nd at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland. Yeah. A sort of a notorious, you know, event happening… Yeah. Sort of established some new ideas.
CB: Right. So it was like, a radical departure from traditional art exhibitions. It embraced new artistic practices and challenged the role of the curator. And one of the things that’s funny, though, is it caused some controversy at the time, because some critics found the show to be messy and incoherent. But then it still ended up becoming wildly influential. And I think that’s something that comes up as a recurring this as well sometimes with Venus retrograde and art is there’s like, avant-garde or provocative art, but sometimes there’s pushback that it’s like, “This is too crazy; this is,” you know, “not art,” or debates about that or things like that. But then eventually sometimes it becomes so – it imprints, like, the public consciousness so much that it sets a new standard for things.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, all these things we’ve been talking about – you know, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and their bed-in, or you know, all these other things. When I was mentioning Eraserhead coming out in 1977. This kind of art is meant to alienate someone. If everyone likes it, then it really hasn’t succeeded. You know, someone’s gotta be angry or upset about it, otherwise it hasn’t done its job. You know, to some degree, I think that’s deliberate.
CB: One of the things —
NDB: That’s the thing about —
CB: Go ahead.
NDB: I was just gonna say, that’s the thing about Venus retrograde. In art, it’s absolutely it’s the virtue of breaking the rules, you know? At some point, that has to be done in order for the art to grow.
CB: Right. That’s a good point. One of the things on Wikipedia has a great quote where it says,
“The exhibition redefined the role of the curator in relation to artists – as a partnership.” And I thought that was a great Venus retrograde keyword. “The exhibition included 127 works by 69 artists – three of whom were women – from Western Europe and the United States. The artists constructed their works on site within the gallery spaces. The exhibition enabled the curator to redefine his role as an independent curator working outside of the constraints of an institution,” which is a very Aries thing. And it ended up changing how exhibitions were conceived and presented, influencing generations of curators and artists from that point forward.
And I don’t know a lot about art history, but the fact that there were like, three women who exhibited their art in this was probably important as a turning point to some extent as well.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that. I’m just looking through my notes. Are there any other major ones you wanna mention before we wrap up 1969 and move to like, all the other decades?
NDB: I was just gonna – I mean, just quickly. I mentioned that in 1977, Jimi Hendrix was – sorry. In 1977, Keith Richards was busted in Toronto for heroin possession. In May of 1969, Jimi Hendrix was busted in Toronto for heroin possession. And they were both Sagittarius Suns as well, so I guess there’s that. Mars was retrograde in Sagittarius in ‘69, just after the Venus retrograde in Aries. But anyway, yeah. There’s yet anther rock musician being busted for heroin in Toronto. But that’s what you get for going to Toronto —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — instead of Montreal.
CB: Right. Instead of Montreal.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: There was one other first I noticed. Scott Momaday became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature on May 5th, 1969, for his novel House Made of Dawn, which is considered a landmark work in contemporary Native American literature. This is recognized pretty widely as a significant moment for Native American authors. So I thought that was an important first that occurred during this Venus retrograde.
And also there were two major political events that happened. One of them, February 4th in Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. So that ends up becoming important, because he ends up rising and becoming a long-standing world leader.
And then also on January 22nd, there’s an attempted assassination of the leader of the Soviet Union, but it ends up failing.
NDB: Yeah. Leonid Brezhnev. And we’re gonna see a lot of – I mean, we’ve already seen Chernenko died when he’s leader of Russian in 1985, and there’s gonna be a bunch more. We hinted at Stalin in ‘53, for instance. Yeah, there was an attempt on Brezhnev in 1969 just before Venus went retrograde. And he survived. He would be in power and die in November of 1982, actually during an exterior or superior conjunction of Sun-Venus in Scorpio. But Brezhnev had natal Venus retrograde. He had natal Venus retrograde I think in Sagittarius or Scorpio, one of those. So as do a lot of Soviet leaders – more of them do than don’t, actually. Gorbachev is one of the few who doesn’t. Chernenko did as well, so. They’re all over the place.
But there’s another important political event that happens during this time. May 22nd, 1969, the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties is adopted. So again, you know, these sort of diplomatic, which is another very sort of Venus word, this is Venus just after the retrograde. So it’s stationed direct, it’s a morning star. It’s, you know, still close to Saturn. And yeah, this is an important convention in terms of how, you know, people are treated. Another, you know, United Nations treaty that started in 1949, but this is a sort of a revision, and sort of centralizes how, you know, treaties are expected to function in diplomacy.
CB: Nice. That’s a really good one, especially because the United Nations would be formed in 1945 under previous retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. Those first meetings, yeah, in the spring of ‘45 just as FDR died, even though it was kind of his brain child, yeah.
CB: All right. I think that’s good for 1969. Why don’t we take a little break?
All right, we’re back from break, and now we’re gonna transition to talking about 1961 and the Venus retrograde in Aries that occurred during that time. So 1961 is important because this is the first retrograde that was entirely in Aries. Prior to this point, the Venus retrogrades were still starting in Taurus and then retrograding back to Aries. But this is the first one where it starts the retrograde in Aries, and it ends the retrograde in Aries. And the dates involved were it stationed retrograde March 20th of 1961 and then it stationed direct on May 2nd. By sign, it was retrograde – or it moved into Aires the first time on February 2nd, and then departed from Aries the final time on June 5th of 1961.
So this is 1961. Very first thing at the very top of the list, the beginning of the year, is that President John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president. As we said before, he beat Nixon, and Nixon as vice president had to certify the results of the election in Congress, which is a repetition of what just happened with Harris in 2025 and Gore in 2001. Let’s see. You’ve talked about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which is one of the first big things which was planned to happen under Nixon because the previous administration assumed Nixon would win. But then – and they got this whole plan ready, basically, to invade and take over Cuba. But then this happened during the Venus retrograde. Starting April 17th, they invaded Cuba, but the invasion failed by April 19th and it was a huge fiasco and looked really bad on the Kennedy administration which had just gotten started.
NDB: Yeah,e xy. It was this huge blemish that made him look incompetent and that he wasn’t really in charge right off the bat. So yeah. It got things off to a bad start.
CB: Which was probably already an issue because I think he was the youngest president elected at the time, right?
NDB: Yeah, maybe second to Theodore Roosevelt. But very young. Very young and certainly the youngest in a very long time, so.
CB: And he was also like, the first like, Roman Catholic, I think, elected president?
NDB: That is correct, yeah. And that was something that was really new, you know. That almost sank him right there. It was an issue with the campaign. It had never been done before. It had been tried before and it failed; it’s not unlike women trying to run for president today. You know, like, a few attempts had to be made before – or at least one other attempt was made —
CB: Yeah, I thought that was —
NDB: — before it succeeded. Yeah.
CB: It was notable in terms of firsts. Okay. So the Bay of Pigs fails. March 1st before the Bay of Pigs but also in the retrograde, Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps. And I thought this was really interesting. And initially, the Peace Corps sent trained American volunteers to developing countries to assist with education, healthcare, and community development.
NDB: Yeah. There were, of course, also the Freedom Riders —
CB: Did you have anything else to say about the Peace Corps?
NDB: Oh! No, I mean – oh, I’m sorry. I missed that. Yeah. Well, they were founded on the idea that they were working side-by-side with people in developing countries, so Americans could foster understanding and goodwill, promoting peace and friendship on a global scale.
CB: Yeah. I thought that keyword of like “promoting peace and friendship” as being like, one of the key terms around this time.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And it was connected also with his famous inaugural address, which happened in this year where he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” which kind of encapsulated this call to action that he was calling for people to do.
NDB: Right. Yeah, no, it was – and it was, you know, because of the whole sort of Cold War thing, you know, there was also a PR element to it all, though I do think Kennedy really believed in the Peace Corps’s mission. I think he had his brother-in-law was sort of put in charge of it, and yeah, you know, it was an important sort of cultural thing in the ‘60s as well for young people. You know, considering that in a few years time, the men would be – they would start drafting the men to go off to fight in Vietnam. You know, you contrast that with this, and it’s quite the… Yeah. You know, it’s kind of how the ‘60s turned out. It started off very idealistic and peacefully, and ended with cynicism and everyone – and the loss of innocence, I suppose, you know?
CB: Right. Yeah. I thought that from like, an international standpoint it was interesting because it was focused on winning hearts and minds, and it was seen as a form of soft power and a way to win the hearts and minds of people in developing countries and build positive relationships with them. And supposedly, it was motivated because Kennedy recognized that military force alone could not solve the world’s problems, so this was like, presenting a different approach that was focused on development and cooperation. So I thought those were very Venusian themes to come up during this Venus retrograde when Venus is closest to the earth.
NDB: Absolutely.
CB: So in not as Venusian themes, the Freedom Rider protest was also like, a major thing that got started during this Venus retrograde that was very significant.
NDB: Yeah. It was a movement of anti-segregation activists to integrate all the different Greyhound stations in the south. So they were riding, you know, Greyhound buses, and they wanted to defy of course the seating segregation laws, and they wanted to challenge just the segregation laws inside every Greyhound station. But this turned ugly. Counter-protestors came out and would attack these Freedom Riders – John Lewis, you know, the future politician, was one of the young activists doing this. So they were beaten up and attacked, and a bus was set on fire, and yeah, it got really, really ugly and nasty. But it was this very bold and brave and idealistic attempt to desegregate these federal, you know, transit facilities, you know, for, yeah, to desegregate them. So it was —
CB: Yeah, but —
NDB: — a tough thing.
CB: — I thought it was really important moment in the Civil Rights movement; it was really striking how close it was to the station, because Venus stationed direct on May 2nd, and then bam – like, right away, May 4th, the —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — Freedom Riders begin the first interstate bus rides where they’re starting in like, New York in the East Coast, and they’re taking buses all the way across the South into New Orleans and doing this really bold, provocative move. Because after the Supreme Court and everything had the process of desegregation had started, it still wasn’t complete when it came to interstate bus routes, which should have been also like, not an issue, but in reality were. So the protestors like, pushed the issue by doing these rides. And even some people like, it seemed like even Martin Luther King warned them that they were gonna run into problems doing this. But nonetheless, they were really, like, bold and like, courageous and fearless to do this. And in some instances, to almost like, die in the process or to get beat up or firebombed or other things. And this ended up being provocative and pushing the issue so much that like, Kennedy wasn’t super stoked about it at first, but it eventually forced him and his brother Robert, who was the —
NDB: Attorney General.
CB: — Attorney General to actually, you know, change things and to actually make this, to institute reforms in order to make it so that this wasn’t a problem anymore.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So I think that’s a really important lesson in terms of sometimes like, bold and provocative protests, which sort of like, force change, basically. But sometimes there’s like, violence and heavy pushback in the process.
NDB: Yeah. And you can also think of this in a counterpoint to eight years later when Saturn’s gonna be in Aries alongside the Venus retrograde in Aries. This one in 1961, it’s Saturn in Capricorn squaring the Venus in Aries, and yeah, you know, this is – I mean, this is how the ‘60s start with this sort of more… This is a more integrated movement, first of all. The Freedom Riders are, you know, the idea is to, yeah, you know, have people together, so there are whites riding alongside the Black Freedom Riders to, you know, show solidarity. By the end of the ‘60s, you know, it’s a much more sort of splintered movement; there are alliances like the Weathermen, but you know, largely that splintered. And you know, the idealism holds, but obviously it becomes more sort of jaded and cynical as the decade progresses and especially after the murder of Dr. King.
CB: Right. But this ended up sort of setting a foundation for other —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: — protests and other civil rights actions during the course of the decade.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. Which was something that wasn’t common in the ‘50s, so this was, you know, now it almost seems like a cliche that the ‘60s had so many protests. But when you think about the ‘50s and how conformist it all was, you know, there were some battles over the HUAC, the Communist hunters and what have you, but largely, society was a lot more sort of, yeah, accepting of the status quo. And then you get to the ‘60s, and people really start pushing back. And the Venus retrograde certainly are the periods where those, you know, those things become more sort of pronounced and emphasized and potentially extreme.
CB: Right. That’s crazy that the ‘60s kind of are bookended by these two Venus retrogrades in Aries, then, that like, you start the ‘60s with in 1961, and then you end the ‘60s with in 1969. And that actually just made me realize that we completely overlooked like, a huge one in 1969 that I’d done work on before, which is the Stonewall Riots in —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: — June of 1969 happened under that Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: Yeah. Well, we were gonna come here in 1961, we were gonna start talking about Judy Garland anyway. So we can tie this all together. And she’s gonna keep coming up all the way back to 1929 when she makes her first ever film appearance, which was filmed in June of 1929 during the retrograde. This retrograde is huge in her life. Two of her weddings happened during —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — this retrograde. And yeah, it just goes on and on.
CB: Okay. Then we’ll introduce her formally —
NDB: Yes, let’s do that.
CB: — so hold on. But do you happen to know, do you happen to have a reference on when the greatest elongation was in ‘69 on the other end?
NDB: Oh. I mean, if I… I have to open something to do it.
CB: 68… I’m just gonna pull up Astro-Seek then really quickly. Greatest elongation was June 17th – okay, so it was like, a little pushing it on the other side. Because Stonewall was like, at the end of June of 1969, right? It was like —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — June 28th.
NDB: It is a little bit outside it, yeah.
CB: Okay. So it’s like, right after the Venus retrograde was the Stonewall Riots. And that’s especially like, Uranus going into Libra is one of the main things I always associate with that. Let’s talk about Judy —
NDB: It is – yeah, it is also the Mars retrograde in Sagittarius. Judy Garland was born with the Sun in Gemini directly opposite Mars retrograde in Sagittarius. And she died just as Mars had been retrograde in Sagittarius, because she died at the age of 47, and that is a synodic Mars return. But there was a Venus retrograde in Aries in the last months of her life, and during that wedding, she had her last marriage. Was it her fourth or her fifth? But it her last – it was to a guy named Mickey Deans who was much younger than her. You know, it didn’t wind up too well, and yeah, she died by June. But —
CB: Okay. Well, to —
NDB: — as I mentioned earlier, yeah.
CB: — introduce why we’re talking about Judy Garland at all —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — first, then. So we’re talking about 1961, April 23rd, the singer and actress Judy Garland performs this legendary comeback concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City. And Aries is actually her 10th house; she had Cancer rising. And this is just said to be this legendary concert where she had struggled with issues for years and she had fallen out of the limelight after being very prominent early in her life. But then she staged this amazing comeback performance that was recorded and then just became legendary during this Venus retrograde in 1961.
NDB: Yeah. It was a huge deal and a big seller and a big comeback. And indeed, you know, it was recorded during that Venus retrograde.
CB: So earlier what was she in again? What was her main movie at the beginning?
NDB: Well, the big movie is The Wizard of Oz that everyone —
CB: Okay, right. Yeah.
NDB: And that was actually, it was filmed during a Venus retrograde, but that was the one that went from Sagittarius to Scorpio in 1938. That being said, the Venus retrograde in Aries was not only – I mean, yes, it is her comeback in 1961, but eight years earlier in 1953, April 3rd, 1953, she had her first non-movie recording session just where she recorded a couple of singles that did quite well. And that was her first session outside of the movies in seven-and-a-half years. So that was a comeback; she was coming back to like, the record market outside of just being a film star in 1953. So the comeback in ‘61 is very notorious, and it really was like, dramatic. But overall, this Venus retrograde in Aries does tend to be a period where she renews herself in some way.
Back in —
CB: Right. Which I think is really important, because it’s like, she’s only 38 years old at this point, but —
NDB: Right.
CB: — because she had been a child star, and she had struggled with issues with like, addiction, with career setbacks and with other health issues, this was her like, coming back and delivering this powerhouse performance that showcased her vocal range and showcased like, emotional depth and stage presence. And then it ended up – they ended up recording it. And it was released as Judy at Carnegie Hall as a double album, which ended up being a massive critical and commercial success, and it won four Grammy awards including Album of the Year, and remains one of the best-selling live albums of all time. So this was a huge deal, and it was recorded, it happened, under this Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. And you know, also this year she filmed her role in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg, which came out at the end of 1961. And she was actually nominated for a Best Actress Supporting role in ‘62 for that film. So even like, the comeback at Carnegie Hall also sort of reintroduced her film career, albeit briefly, but quite notably. Judgement at Nuremberg is a really big movie of the era. And she’s alongside Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift – you know, they’re all in this movie. So it’s a pretty big deal.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. So it’s a comeback.
CB: So this, and this becomes like, a career highlight of like, her entire career. But then during this Venus retrograde, but then eight years later, she dies in 1969. And that Venus retrograde in the early part of 1969 ends up being like, her final months of her life, and she ends up getting married during that time.
NDB: Yeah. She gets married for the fifth time, like I said, to a young guy and it doesn’t work out very well. This guy, Mickey Deans. And yeah, I mean, she’s really far gone by this point, and just so fragile that it doesn’t take much else to take her away. But you know, if you go back – like, in 1937 during that same Venus retrograde, this was when she started doing movies for MGM and starts doing her first recording sessions for them. And then eight years before that is when she is first in the cinema as a really small kid when she’s just turning seven years old. So this Venus retrograde in Aries from the beginning of her career, at least her film career, to the very end of her life, that Venus retrograde in Aries is always timing something very important. She marries Vincente Minnelli in 1945 and Mickey Deans in 1969. So sure, she was married five times, but two of those are during the Venus retrograde in Aries.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah. So it’s really, really, really prominent. And then you combine that with the Mars retrograde in Sagittarius, and then it really gets interesting.
CB: Right. I think that in terms of this and in terms of – so this was April 23rd, 1961. And just in terms of her chart, because she had Cancer rising… She has Cancer rising, so this Venus retrograde in Aries was in her 10th whole sign house. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this was such an important one for her in terms of her career and making this comeback, but it also being this career highlight for her because it was this Venus retrograde in her 10th house of career. So there’s just something very striking about that I wanted to point out just in terms of that.
NDB: Yeah. No, absolutely. I was just gonna mention, too – two people who were born during that Venus retrograde in Aries period who had an important impact on her life, one of them was the film director Victor Fleming, who’s one of the main directors of The Wizard of Oz, and then Harold Arlen, who wrote the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I mean, the song that really is her signature tune from The Wizard of Oz. He was born during that retrograde. So you can even just see the synastry in terms of, you know, some of the people who were involved in her life who had an impact.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So to bring things full circle, so as we said, eight years later, she passes away in June of 1969, which is… That’s the one that’s fully in Aries, right?
NDB: Yeah. Well, the 1961 is the first one that’s fully in Aries, yeah.
CB: Fully in Aries, okay. Yeah. So this is just coming off of the Venus retrograde. She ends up passing away in June of ‘69, and then one of the reasons we were like, tying this into Stonewall is because you were saying that there may have been a connection there, right?
NDB: Well, that certainly is part of the lore. Judy Garland was always very important in the gay community, and so when she died in 1969, the men at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village were mourning her loss. They were mourning her death, and they were sort of, you know, bonding over that —
CB: The people at the bar?
NDB: Yeah. And the police came in, as they often did. There was a lot of police harassment at this community in these days. But it was because it was this sort of, you know, sacred vibe, if you will – because they were mourning the loss of Judy Garland, that sparked part of the outrage. I mean, certainly, I’m sure it was like, a kettle boiling. They’d been harassed so often that, you know, someone was bound to snap. But one way or the other, her passing was sort of a catalyst. It’s the thing that’s on all their minds when the police are walking in the door and disrupting them. And so everything that follows does in some way seem to have to do with her passing, yeah.
CB: Right. I mean, I was trying to look that up, and I was seeing some skepticism about whether that was for sure the case, even though it’s been thought that it was the case for a while and that it was circumstantially suggestive and may have been some role. But then also they’d been getting harassed for like, years and persecuted for years, so that was probably also like a major overriding factor.
NDB: Sure. Look, you know, I wasn’t there, so I can’t attest to it. But it’s true that sometimes apocryphal stories are nonetheless true, if you know what I mean.
CB: Right.
NDB: If they’re not true in fact, they’re utterly accurate in spirit, so. Yeah. One way or the other, there certainly is a connection. It certainly did happen the night she died, anyway. And I do believe that people at the bar knew that it had happened when, you know, trouble broke out, so.
CB: I’m trying to think of like, an equivalent today, but it’s like, if… Yeah. I don’t know. If like, Lady Gaga or something had just died days earlier and then the police are hassling you, you know, that would certainly be somewhere in the back of your consciousness in terms of like, grieving and the stages and things for that.
NDB: Yeah. You know, I like Lady Gaga fine; I don’t know if I personally would be that devastated. But no, sure, hypothetically that kind of thing. But I think —
CB: What is your if – John —
NDB: Oh.
CB: If one of the Beatles just died, let me make that analogy.
NDB: Well, you know, they’re very old. I don’t know. If someone – yeah, but certainly, I could, you know, I would be mourning a Beatle or, you know, someone from Fuzagi or there’s a lot of, you know, rock musicians I could be mourning.
CB: Yeah. If Robert Downey, Jr., Iron Man himself, just passed away. I don’t know. I’m just gonna run through —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s redirect. Let’s go back to 1961. Let’s —
NDB: Yeah. Another —
CB: What are some other major ones?
NDB: Yeah. You know, going back to the idea of young stars who are like, getting their big break during these retrogrades, who are going to be huge stars – there’s a nightclub singer, a really young girl named Barbra Streisand who gets her break during this Venus retrograde in 1961. She’s sort of a last-minute addition to this show that’s a precursor of The Tonight Show, The Jack Paar Show. And so she gets to sing on television, and it’s part of what gets her a record contract. And she’s gonna go on to become Barbra Streisand! Speaking of which, actually, something else we left out from 1969 are the Oscars, because in 1961, she gets that first TV break. In 1969 at the Oscars, she – it’s kind of like a real anomaly. She and Katharine Hepburn are tied for the Best Actress Oscar – something that really – there was a tie very early in the Oscars for a Best Actor category, but it’s not something that really could happen, you know, so easily, and certainly not under this more regimented regime. But this is what happens. Again, very Venus retrograde with Saturn in 1969 —
CB: In ‘69, and that’s – so that’s – yeah, that’s like, a huge, that’s a fiasco.
NDB: Right. But it’s like, think about it. It’s Barbra Steisand and Katharine Hepburn. Katharine Hepburn is considerably older than Barbra Streisand. Right? Like, there’s a generation thing there along with the Venus retrograde. And yeah, you know, again, it’s another one of these sort of somewhat embarrassing events. And actually, funny enough, eight years after that in 1977, Streisand wins the Best Song Academy Award for her song for – ironically, you mentioned Lady Gaga – A Star is Born. Long before Lady Gaga was in a version of A Star is Born, Barbra Streisand was in a version of Star is Born, and before Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland made a version of A Star is Born —
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: — in the ‘50s. So – that’s a whole other thing! When you were talking about Lady Gaga earelire, I was trying to remember if that movie came out in 2017; it came out in 2018. I don’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lady Gaga’s A Star is Born was filmed during the retrograde in 2017, right? A year before the movie came out? Anyway. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. It actually says, “Filming began April 17th, 2017.”
NDB: There you go! I didn’t know that; I just like, it’s a wild guess, like —
CB: Right.
NDB: — that’s the thing! You can start to – yeah, you know, eventually you just know. It’s like what I said about the German woman running for president in March. It’s like, oh yeah, of course that’s gonna be a win. Like, eventually, this stuff writes itself and it becomes very obvious.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: You can start to infer past events that have happened, but then you can also start to infer future events that are gonna happen as well.
NDB: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It becomes a really handy tool that you can use. And always some kind of like, shorthand that is very useful in so many different facets of using astrology. In mundane, in client readings, anything like that. It’s always —
CB: You know, and —
NDB: — always, always useful.
CB: One of your most famous, actually, inferences of it that was impressive is you can also use it for rectification. And I think this – was it Venus retrograde was one of the reasons why you thought Hillary had Gemini rising?
NDB: No, that was Mars.
CB: That was Mars. Okay.
NDB: That was Mars retrograde, because the Mars retrograde in Cancer is a regular – like, think about it. In 1961, what we were just talking about this. Or rather in 1960 before the inauguration of ‘61, when Mars is already retrograde in Cancer when Kennedy defeats Nixon in the election, young Hillary Clinton who I think is 13 at this point, she lives in Chicago and she sees firsthand that the election has been, you know, cheated. She witnesses this. And she is a Republican at the time; she wanted Nixon to win in 1960, and she sees that Kennedy has sort of stolen it. And it kind of takes her innocence. And then, of course, 32 years later, it’s her husband running and she’s becoming First Lady. And there’s this, you know, sort of mirror image to when she was 13 and going through the whole Nixon-Kennedy thing. So I just, I noticed over the course of her life I think there was something – oh yes, in ‘75, she married Bill Clinton in October of ‘75 when Mars was retrograde in Cancer. So it was just a matter of like, finding these Mars retrogrades in Cancer that repeatedly had these really important – coincided with important turning points in her life. The Nixon election, the, you know, marrying Bill, and then Bill becoming president. And that was the basis for my saying that she was Cancer rising, and it turned out I was correct and you guys were not.
CB: Yeah. We failed.
NDB: We failed.
CB: A legendary failure of rectification. I thought the chart was more prominent, the morning one, but the correct chart ended up being the other one.
So same principle, though, with the Venus retrogrades, where it’s like, if you didn’t know Judy Garland’s birth time, you might note this Venus retrograde and if you had like, Cancer – if like, a relative had remembered she was born around a certain time and Cancer rising was one of the possible times, and you’d note this like, huge comeback when Venus was retrograde in Aries, then it’s like, it would push you in the direction of rectifying to Cancer rising. Or like a similar thing when we get to Einstein in 1905 and his Venus retrograde in the 10th house in Aries, because he has Cancer rising, and publishing the theory of relativity in that year.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. This is – I do use this for rectification. It’s very handy. This is exactly the kind of thing where it really comes in useful. Particularly when you pair it with the Mars synodic cycle, because Venus and Mars are useful for almost exactly the opposite reason. Venus is useful because it does send this sort of, it sets this eight-year regular pattern; it’s very symmetrical and even. And then Mars, because the orbit of Mars is so sort of warped – it’s elliptical – and therefore the cycle is really sort of asymmetrical, and there are some signs – like Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces – where Mars retrogrades or conjunctions to the Sun are so infrequent that you can really zero in on these little periods when they do happen and find really relevant stuff. So yeah, it’s a really useful pair of synodic cycles that can help in a big, big way with rectification. I don’t – I can’t —
CB: For sure.
NDB: — imagine trying to do rectification without them.
CB: Definitely. For sure. All right. So back to 1961. January 3rd, one of the things I thought was interesting is Dwight D. Eisenhower, before he left office, announced that the United States had severed diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba, and then of course the Bay of Pigs fiasco happens just a few months later, which further just makes things terrible between the US and Cuba. I thought this was interesting because in 2015, on July 20th, Cuba and the United States ended 54 years of hostility and reestablished full diplomatic relations, and this was four days before Venus stationed retrograde in Virgo. So there’s like, a Venus retrograde connection there.
NDB: Yeah. The Cuba Revolution was, of course, at New Year’s Day of 1959. But it wasn’t until you got to that summer of ‘59 that things between the US and Cuba really started to go south. In the first few months of the revolution, it wasn’t clear that it was necessarily a Communist revolution. And Castro even went to the US and, you know, I think spoke to Nixon at that time who was still VP. And things were friendly. But then in the Venus retrograde in Leo in the summer of ‘59, that’s when things started to go, you know, get hostile between the two parties.
Another thing – but going back to January of ‘61, though, as the Eisenhower presidency is ending and Kennedy’s coming into power, one of the last things is done is the CIA cooperate in the assassination of Patrick Lumumba – Patrice Lumumba, rather. Patrice Lumumba was the political leader of the Congo, which had just gotten independence from Belgium. We’re talking about the singularly most exploited country in the, you know, on the African continent on a continent full of exploited countries. And Lumumba was murdered within hours of Kennedy taking power, and Kennedy was really intent on helping Lumumba. And by the time he, you know, got into his office, he learned that Lumumba had been killed. And there’s a famous photograph of Kennedy on the phone being told that Lumumba was murdered —
CB: Wow.
NDB: — and the way it crushed him. So that, I mean, again, these were CIA shenanigans. Again, Eisenhower was inaugurated in ‘53 when Saturn and Neptune were conjunct his Sun, and the CIA – since he appointed the Dulles brothers into their position, Allen Dulles is the head of the CIA – this is when they really start to become, you know, the dirty tricks people so to speak. And yeah, that’s what happens with Lumumba and MKUltra and all the other things that are happening. And you know, very likely it has something to do with Kennedy’s eventual murder as well.
CB: Okay. All right. So let’s see. Moving onto other major ones. We already mentioned the Academy Awards this year, but this was the one where the movie The Apartment wins the most —
NDB: That’s right.
CB: — awards, including Best Picture. And the Wikipedia says that the description is,
“The film follows an insurance clerk who, in hopes of climbing the corporate ladder, allows his superiors to use his Upper West Side apartment to conduct their extramarital affairs. He becomes attracted to an elevator operator in his office building, unaware that she is having an affair with the head of personnel.”
Yeah. So I thought it was like, you know, a provocative like, Venus retrograde movie to win under that Venus retrograde during the Academy Awards that year.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. And of course, I already talked about Elizbaeth Taylor winning the Oscar for Butterfield Eight where she played a call girl, et cetera, et cetera. We covered that.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: So that was —
CB: Well, and then this year and we’ll see what ends up winning Best Picture this year during this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Moving on. On March 11th, big news – Barbie got a boyfriend when the Ken doll is introduced into the United States for the first time just eight days before Venus stations retrograde in Aries. And I thought that was hilarious and also kind of connects it in with other famous Venus retrogrades for Barbie, including the release of the Barbie movie the day that Venus stationed retrograde in 2023, as well as the 1959 Venus retrograde in Leo which was the summer that Barbie became popular.
NDB: The perfect sequel! You know, like a lot of these retrograde cycles, one leads to the other.
CB: Yeah. But it’s just funny introducing during the Venus retrograde the Ken doll and the idea that Barbie has like, a boyfriend or like, a partner.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And then of course that’s interesting because that like, Ken would play a major role in the Barbie movie itself. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, he’s —
CB: Lots of things.
NDB: — the villain. Yeah, he’s the —
CB: Right?
NDB: — Venus retrograde villain!
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s see, other things. February 12th, the Soviet Union launches Venera One towards Venus, and this is the first spacecraft to perform an interplanetary flight in basically like, flying by Venus. And I thought that was interesting as a first as well as just in some of those later repetitions like, eight years later when they’re launching the subsequent probes.
NDB: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: So first man-made object to fly by another planet is a good first. Another first was March 8th – Max Conrad circumnavigates the earth in a light plane in just eight days and 18 hours and 49 minutes, which sets a new solo record. And what was so striking is that this is a solo flight that he accomplished on his own. So that’s good. It was all about speed also.
Let’s see. What else?
NDB: Well, there’s Yuri Gagarin. The, you know, talk about these —
CB: Oh yeah, that was huge.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yuri Gagarin is the first man in space; he’s a Russian cosmonaut. He was born actually with Venus retrograde himself. So on April 12th, 1961, yeah, he launches into space and he spends I think 108 minutes in space. And he’s on the Vostok One, and he is the first human being to orbit the earth. He himself, he was born in 1934, I think with Venus retrograde in Aquarius, which is really common one in Russian history as well. Like, Lenin was born during that one. Khrushchev was born during that one. It pops up a lot, especially with Russians who are very sort of revered. I forget the name of the Russian military guy who basically saved planet earth in 1983; he was born in that retrograde as well. I forget the man’s name, even though he saved all of us.
So yeah, Gagarin obviously he’s a huge hero for this. This is – and this really ruffles the feathers, of course, of the Americans. It’s a few weeks after this, it might be I think at the end of May of 1961, but certainly instigated by Gagarin is when Kennedy announces that the US will go to the Moon, which of course they’ll do one Venus retrograde cycle later. And they’re gonna do these things not because they’re easy but “because they’re hard.” And yeah, so, you know, even that eventual achievement on behalf of the US is in some ways a riposte to Gagarin’s, you know, flight and his orbit. He would die by 1968, kind of heartbroken, cynical about the space program. Friends of his had died, and then I think he had a plane crash himself when he was testing a plane. So yeah. It —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — didn’t work out well for him, but this was a very triumphant moment no doubt.
CB: Yeah. So that means during this Venus retrograde in Aries, the very first person launched into space happened. And then as a follow up that Kennedy announces that they’re gonna put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, which they barely pull off in 1969 shortly after the next – not too long after the next retrograde in Aries.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: Cool. That’s a good one.
NDB: All right. I have another one. You remember in 1969 was when Monty Python’s Flying Circus was formed. Well, eight years earlier in England, one of the inspirations for Monty Python was a group of British comedy experimental – somewhat experimental, excuse me – group. They were called “Beyond the Fringe,” and they had their theatre debut May 10th, 1961, at the Fortune Theatre in London. Dudley Moore – you might have heard of him – he was one of the group. Peter Cook who was quite well known as a comic talent in those days – really, really funny. Jonathan Miller, and there’s the fourth guy… Alan Bennett. They all became sort of household names in comedy in their own right. Dudley Moore became a bonafide movie star, and Peter Cook was certainly a pretty big name. But this was like, a precursor to Monty Python in the sense that this was certainly like, very new and hip and a new kind of like – this is anticipating swinging London. The Beatles are still a little ways away from making their impact on England. But as a precursor, this is the beginning of England sort of shedding that wartime dreariness and being cool, hip, funny, and you know, creating culture that really leaves the past behind, I suppose is the way to put it.
CB: Nice. Isn’t this the one where the Beatles themselves come back from Germany?
NDB: Yeah. Yeah. The Beatles went to Germany from August to November of 1960. It started okay; I mean, they certainly they played, they got to be really, really good in a short period of time. It was during that trip that they first met Ringo Starr for the first time; he wasn’t in their band yet. But it ended kind of in a rough way. George Harrison was too young; he wasn’t 18 yet, and so he was busted for being underage and forced to send, you know, forced to go back home. And then Paul McCartney and Pete Best – the drummer at the time – they were, you know, young guys looking for something to do, and apparently they had a – in the back room of a nightclub that they were just leaving where they had been playing, but they left to play at a different club, and so the manager of the club was mad at them. And as they were packing up their stuff and going, they took a condom. They stuck it to the wall, and they set it on fire, which caused like, a little burn mark in the wall. And so they got arrested and sent back to Liverpool. And then, you know, John Lennon eventually went back and everything seemed to be sort of, you know, crushed and over. But then they got back together over the course of late 1960, early ‘61, and suddenly, they’re this really great, tight band. And I think it’s February 9th of ‘61, they make their debut as the Beatles at the Cavern Club. Some of them had played there earlier, I think when they were the Quarrymen, you know, in ‘59. But this really is – this is the Beatles more or less as we know them, except Pete Best is still the drummer. But they’re now the four-piece. They had —
CB: Right. So this is —
NDB: — been a five-piece – yeah.
CB: This is the first time they used that name, the Beatles, at this specific bar?
NDB: Yeah. They had, I think they became the Beatles just as they were going to Hamburg, you know, back in August. But also they’re a five piece; Stu Sutcliffe is their bass player. But because he meets this girl, Astrid Kirchherr – the woman who changes their hairstyle, creates the famous Beatles hairstyle – he stays back with her and they’re gonna get engaged to be married, although he’s unfortunately gonna die by April of ‘62. But this is also you can think of not only are the Beatles playing in Liverpool under that name as this newly reformed band, but this is also Paul McCartney has now moved over to bass, and they’re the four-piece Beatles that we start to recognize as the Beatles that we think of when we say “the Beatles,” as opposed to like, the five-piece outfit that had been playing in Hamburg the previous autumn.
CB: Right. So this is the final retooling thing before basically hitting it big, because they start playing at the Cavern during this Venus retrograde. They build up a fanbase there over the course of the next several months. And then that’s where they get discovered by their manager, Brian Epstein.
NDB: Yeah. Brian Epstein finds them in November of 1961, but pretty – I think exactly the day that Uranus makes the first ingress into Virgo. And the Beatles are very much all about the Uranus in Virgo era, so it’s really interesting because Uranus makes two ingresses usually into the sign. The first ingress of Uranus into Virgo was in November of ‘61 when Brian Epstein discovers them in the basement club, the Cavern. And then the next Venus retrograde ingress into Virgo is in August of ‘62 just as Ringo Starr is replacing Pete Best and they’re about to record their first single and really become the Beatles. So yeah, the astrology in all of that is very interesting, but I think the Venus retrograde thing in this case – yes, it is about their sort of their new image in Liverpool, where they had been thought of as a sort of a fifth-rate band and, you know, they weren’t taken very seriously. But because they got —
CB: Oh yeah —
NDB: — so good —
CB: Because they’re returning home. That’s what it is.
NDB: Exactly. They’re returning home, but – yeah, they’re returning home, but people even think like, that they’re from Germany they’re so good. You know, like, who are these guys? So yeah, they really sort of take Liverpool by storm because of how much they’ve improved. And also I think it just has to do with that sort of that four-piece lineup of the Beatles being what it is. It’s more consolidated. It’s that much closer, apart from Pete Best having been replaced yet, it’s sort of it’s that band that we recognize. And of course, we were talking about like, eight years later in 1969, they’re gonna be at each other’s throats, and they’re kind of breaking up. Paul and John get married. They’re —
CB: Oh right.
NDB: — working on Abbey Road, their last album, and they pretty much had it with each other. So it’s an interesting sort of beginning and ending in some ways.
CB: Yeah. That really bookmarks these two Venus retrogrades do bookmark the beginning and the end. And then in the interim, they blew up and became the biggest band of the 1960s.
NDB: Of ever! I mean, you know, they still are the metric against which bands are measured usually, you know. At least for my generation. But I mean, yeah. I mean, you know, it’s a name that really lasts. I mean, my god, you know, they’re funding Disney… There’s a new movie on Disney every year now thanks to…
CB: Right. Yeah. All right. So that’s good for the Beatles. One thing we forgot to mention is that after the first human was launched into space, shortly after that like a month later, the Americans launched their first person into space in May of 1961, and this was also during the Venus retrograde period that we’re looking at.
NDB: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, and the funny thing is as I understand it – oh no, no, sorry – that’s about the… Never mind. I’m thinking of something else in the space – there was something earlier when ‘57, the Russians just launched this satellite, right? What was it called? The famous satellite in October of ‘57? The reason they did it was because they ignored some like, testing protocols that the Americans were observing with theirs, so it was almost like the Russian recklessness allowed them to beat the Americans to the punch I suppose. But yeah, here again, it’s true. Like, the Americans were about to launch someone into space. But you know, the Russians beat them to it with Gagarin, probably by cutting some safety corners.
CB: So this was done on May 5th, and it was Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So a lot of firsts. Oh yeah, there was a major one with Adolf Eichmann and his trial took place during the Venus retrograde starting on April 11th. And this is the trial of a Nazi, very prominent Nazi leader. Begins in Jerusalem. And this is, you know, two Venus retrogrades after the end of World War Two, which ended with Venus retrograde in Aries in 1945. And Adolf Eichmann was a high-ranking Nazi that was involved in the organization of the Holocaust and the concentration camps, and he was initially captured by the Allies in 1945, but he was able to escape, and then he was able to flew, basically, to Argentina where he lived for a number of years. But then the Israeli secret service tracked him down and captured him and brought him back to Jerusalem for trial.
So during the course of this Venus retrograde, there was this very prominent trial of this like, Nazi war criminal, and part of what that involved was a lot of people who had been in the Holocaust coming back and having to share stories and to recollect what happened and to have all of this televised by people around the world.
NDB: Yeah. And remember I mentioned that Judy Garland was in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg, which is being filmed while that Eichmann trial is going on, and I think that, you know, it’s sort of sparked in some fashion because that trial is happening. So yeah, it’s this big movie with Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich and Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, all these stars – Montgomery Clift – and yeah, you know, that’s happening on the tail of the Eichmann trial is this cinematic recreation of the Nuremberg trials which had occurred after the war in 1945 to ‘46. And actually ended with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio of ‘46.
CB: Yeah. So the Eichmann trial was like, a major thing that was happening during this time. There was this whole thing about remembrance and education, and it created this really invaluable historical record of different Holocaust survivors documenting the atrocities in detail and preserving the testimonies of some survivors. And this is even more striking as a Venus retrograde, not just because the war ended in 1945 during that Venus retrograde, and not just because Eichmann himself escaped after the war ended, but also because one of the things we’ll come to in 1945 that I find incredibly striking is that all of the concentration camps were liberated in the first half of 1945 during the course of the Venus retrograde period. And the last camps were actually liberated right as Venus was like, stationing direct, which is very striking to witness.
NDB: Yeah. That blew my mind, too. Yeah. That’s exactly it. I mean, think about it. Talk about scandal, right? Talk about provocative. And that’s the thing. You know, that was Eisenhower who said, “Make sure you film all this, otherwise people aren’t gonna believe it.” You know? Which was very prescient. So yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s an important element. Sometimes Venus retrogrades can be looking back to the past; it can be remembering the past, revisiting the past. Revisiting people from your past. Having people from your past come back into the present. Sometimes that can be a good thing; sometimes that can be a difficult thing or it can be hard memories. It can be people you don’t necessarily want to come back from the past. But that’s part of like, a little bit of what we’re seeing here is some of those themes during this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. That reminds me of one last story front this period. On May 19th, 1961, Miles Davis is performing at Carnegie Hall with this full orchestra. And Max Roach, who’s a drummer – a great drummer – who used to play with Miles in Charlie Parker’s band, Max Roach was actually really upset about the murder of Patrice Lumumba. Roach was now on the FBI watch list because he was such a, you know, a pro-Lumumba sort of activist and agitator. And he actually disrupted Miles’s concert – there is a live album recording of this concert – and Max disrupted Miles’s concert to make a political statement about, you know, Lumumba and the FBI – or the CIA, rather – and et cetera, et cetera, and what’s happening in Congo. And, you know, he’s sort of, he’s thrown out. You can hear the disruption on the live album to some extent. But talk about people coming in out of the past. Miles and Max had made the first recordings with Charlie Parker. These absolute pioneering recordings in jazz. And they were making them when? In early 1945 during the Venus retrograde. These are records that – these are the first records they ever appear on that make them huge. They’re making them when they’re kids playing with this master, Charlie Parker, on his first solo recordings. “Billie’s Bounce,” “Now’s the Time,” these just – it’s impossible to overstate how influential and revolutionary those records are.
CB: Nice.
NDB: The new bebop movement that emerges out of jazz. So yeah, you know, that 16-year gap between Miles and Max being these essentially these kids, these young students of jazz at the foot of Charlie Parker, being in his band, getting to be on these classic recordings. And then 16 years later, where Miles is the best paid jazz musician in the United States, and he’s leading this huge orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and in comes Max, you know, trying to turn things over for a political statement. So it’s a very interesting moment there as well in so many ways.
CB: In music, I was looking at what the most popular music was at the time, and in February, “Pony Time” by Chubby Checker hits number one, which continued the dance craze phenomenon where it introduces not just the song but also like, a dance that goes with it that looks like a horse riding motion where you kick your legs and clap. And it was this simple – it’s described as, “a simple, energetic, and fun” which made it perfect for the dance crazes at the time, which included other things like, what, like, the Mashed Potato and like, other dances like that.
NDB: Right. Yeah. And of course he would become most famous for the Twist.
CB: Right. Which is before this, I think.
NDB: Right.
CB: Yeah. So okay. Last things in this section. One, May 28th, Peter Benenson’s article “The Forgotten Prisoners” is published in several internationally read newspapers, and this is later considered to be the founding of the human rights organization Amnesty International. I thought that was very striking.
NDB: Yeah, that’s really good.
CB: Yeah. Amnesty International. And then elsewhere, there is a May 15th – Heinrich Matthaei alone performs the Poly-U-Experiment, and is the first person to recognize and understand the genetic code, which ends up being like, the birthdate of modern genetics. And this is like, a whole thing that we don’t have to go into, but I noticed this is tied in with some earlier Venus retrogrades of other unraveling of DNA and the genetic code that happened during earlier retrogrades.
NDB: Okay! Interesting.
CB: Last political thing is that Kennedy and Khrushchev met June 4th, and this was the first meeting between the two in Vienna.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: They discussed nuclear tests and disarmament in Germany. They didn’t produce any major breakthroughs or treaties and in fact, the meeting may have increased tensions because Khrushchev perceived Kennedy as weak after the Bay of Pigs. And this ended up contributing to Khrushchev’s decision to build the Berlin Wall just two months later, but it did create a foundation for future dialogue between the two and between the countries.
NDB: Yeah. And as always, you know, Jacqueline Kennedy is part of the charm offensive, if you will. She does very well with de Gaulle just before this. You know, because France is also kind of cold. De Gaulle is notoriously cold towards any country that is English-speaking. And she charms him, of course, because she actually speaks French, and she’s also she really charms Khrushchev on this meeting. So you know, Kennedy really has this formidable ace in the hole, if you will, with Jacqueline Kennedy as a First Lady who, yeah, you know, has just this magic touch when it comes to diplomacy. And Kennedy jokes, you know, when they go to Paris to meet de Gaulle just before meeting Khrushchev, he says, “Some of you might know me as the man who has accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris” or something to that extent, you know. So like, he’s like, the guest star on his own tour, which is kind of funny. But it works, you know? She can do things that he can’t in that sense.
CB: That’s really interesting, because I remember – like, part of that is as soon as she moved into the White House, she began redecorating, and —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — became more interested in hosting like, arts and cultural events at the White House, including concerts and ballet performances. So maybe that’s a recurring theme sometimes when there are sometimes like, First Ladies that are more involved in things in the administration than others. Like, it makes me think of like, 1993 where you have Hillary Clinton, who’s the opposite in that she’s like, not —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — doing homemaker things, which she’s famously not into, but instead she’s like, actually trying to push policy like healthcare reform and things like that. But each perhaps First Lady puts their own like, different stamp on the White House sometimes during these times.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re absolutely right when it comes to redecorating the White House, which – that work is finished in February of ‘62 during the exterior conjunction. She gives this big televised tour. And some of that redecoration involves doing things like finding some old desk that James Monroe had owned, you know, and used, and bringing it back to the White House. So so much of it is like, reconnecting with old artifacts that had been part of the White House and had drifted away and sort of reintroducing them into that milieu. So yeah, very much when you’re talking about Venus retrograde and taking things out of the past and bringing them back, you know, that’s a perfect example.
I also wanna mention, of course, Jacqueline Kennedy was born in July of 1929. She’s a bit far away from the Venus retrograde, but you know, she was about to turn 32 when all this was happening, heading towards that birthday where you do get Venus and Mars merging together. So yeah, very interesting.
CB: Nice. All right. That’s good. All right. I think that’s good for 1961.
All right, let’s transition to talking about 1953 at this point and the Venus retrograde in Aries that occurred in the early part of that year. So Venus went retrograde on March 23rd, in Taurus, and this is actually the last one that starts in Taurus, and then it retrogrades back into Aries where it stations direct on May 4th, 1953. By sign, though, because this one’s in both Taurus and Aries, it extends it a bit so that it first goes into Aries on February 1st, and it last departs from Taurus all the way on July 7th. So that does extend our dates a little bit on the other side.
So early in the year, first things first in terms of presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower is inaugurated the 34th president of the United States in January. And of course, as we’ve already seen, he would die 16 years later – two Venus cycles later – under the same retrograde in 1969. Nixon had been his vice president and then became president in 1969, so Nixon became Vice President in 1953 under this retrograde. And then finally, the retrograde connects back to one eight years earlier, because he had been the US military leader in Europe in 1945 at the end of World War Two.
NDB: Yeah. And of course, the other thing about 1953 is it’s also a year where you get the Venus retrograde in Aries alongside a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which in this instance is opposite the Venus retrograde, which is kind of interesting.
Eisenhower had the Sun in Libra, so the Saturn-Neptune conjunction was on Eisenhower’s Sun. One of the first things he did in between being elected and being inaugurated was he changed his church. I forget what church he changed to. He had been raised a Mennonite, but he changed to some more sort of conventional American church; I’m not really good at denominations. But he made a conversion, which is a really – and he did it for political purposes to sort of, as a counter to Communism, which of course was atheistic. So there is something about that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that I think signifies the head of state making a religious conversion as a sort of political maneuver, if you will, which is very interesting. And like I mentioned earlier, Eisenhower is the one who appoints the Dulles brothers on his government – John Foster Dulles is his Secretary of State; Allen Dulles is the head of the CIA. So MKUltra, Operation MKUltra, the LSD experimental strategy I mentioned earlier, that comes into being. And of course, these are the guys who are going to, you know, topple the government in Iran, in Guatemala, all the things that you hear about the CIA doing that cause so many problems down the road – that’s the Dulles brothers. That’s on Eisenhower and the administration that’s being introduced at this time.
CB: Right. Yeah. So I liked your point about the conversion, because that’s kind of what Venus does is Venus starts the retrograde on one side of the Sun and appearing during one part of the day, but then it goes retrograde and it conjoins the Sun and switches to the other side and then emerges renewed on the other side of the Sun. So there may be something symbolic about that of like, changing sides that sometimes happens.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed.
CB: So we’ll see an example of that in a little bit. You mentioned the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that happened around this time at the same time, and that brings us to one of the most major geopolitical events, which is that Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, and he was the head of the Soviet Union. And this was a major turning point in terms of Russian history.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. And there is a sort of a side note that’s kind of bittersweet but comical as well. The great composer, Sergei Prokofiev, had been really sort of – he had moved back voluntarily to the Soviet Union, and you know, out of sort of patriotism, and had really experienced a lot of artistic restriction and oppression under Stalin. And you know, his life would have been so much better if he could have outlived Stalin, but it turned out he wound up dying on the same day as Stalin. So there is, you know, it’s Venus stationing – Venus going retrograde opposite Saturn-Neptune. You know, think of Peter and the Wolf. This is the guy who did, you know, that. He’s a really important Russian composer. So yeah, there’s something ironic about Stalin dying on the same day as Prokofiev and, you know, it could have been his nemesis, but it wasn’t to be.
But indeed, Stalin dies, and there’s a grab for power. Khrushchev ultimately outwits his rival for power and takes control. East Berlin erupts into riots, which is interesting if you consider that Berlin eight years earlier exactly was when it fell in the war. And yeah, it’s a major sort of geopolitical shifting around. And it also starts to change the dynamic, the relationship, with China between the Soviet Union and China, because Mao respected Stalin but he doesn’t like where the post-Stalin regime is going. And that eventually becomes a split that creates a war between the two countries in March of ‘69 during the Venus retrograde in Aries – a battle over an island that they both claim ownership over, and that’s the thing that Nixon will eventually exploit when he is president. So there are, there’s a sequence of things that emerge with these Venus retrogrades that are all sort of interconnected and influence geopolitics for decades to come.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s really striking because then Nixon, you know, that Venus retrograde in ‘69 bringing Nixon into power and then Nixon is the one that leads the US into reestablishing a relationship with China.
NDB: Yeah. Which is a total strategic thing to exploit the rift between the Soviet Union and China, which got worse in March of ‘69 when they started fighting each other over this Zhenbao Island. But really, it begins with the death of Stalin because that’s when Mao starts to look askance at the Soviet Union.
CB: Okay. So Khrushchev not long after this – this is what leads him to come into power after Stalin dies, right?
NDB: Yeah. There is a bit of a power struggle; he’s up against this real psychopath, though. What’s the guy’s name? Another Georgian guy. Just an awful, awful person. I’m drawing a blank on the name; I can look him up. But yeah, ultimately, Khrushchev triumphs. There is almost a coup against Khrushchev a couple of years later after he, you know, starts revealing the truth about Stalin. But he manages to overcome that one in ‘57. Eventually, he falls to a coup in 1964, but that’s because of how the Cuban Missile Crisis goes and he’s, you know, they start to see him as an uncontrollable element, let’s put it that way.
CB: Okay. Yeah.
NDB: The rest of the party.
CB: Also during this time period, on February 11th, the Soviet Union breaks diplomatic relations with Israel after a bomb explosion at the Soviet embassy. So I thought this was interesting, the relationship between Russia and Israel coming up during this retrograde in 1953.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: In February, one of the things Eisenhower does is he refuses a clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and as a result of that, that couple who was charged with spying for the Soviet Union ended up being executed by the Americans, basically, June 19th of 1953 under this retrograde. But there was a huge amount of protests, especially abroad, and attempts to get Eisenhower to grant them clemency, including even the Pope attempting to intervene. But these attempts were rejected. And these two became the first American civilians to be executed for espionage charges – or these specific espionage charges – and to be executed during peacetime.
NDB: Yeah. It’s really rough. I mean, they’re a married couple, and they’re kind of set up by the woman’s, the wife’s brother. It does seem like Julius was probably guilty of something, but Ethel Rosenberg’s execution is very hard to justify under any circumstances. They leave kids behind. You know, so, they’re executing a married couple whose kids are suddenly orphaned. And they’re raised by – I forget the songwriter’s name, but it’s the man who wrote the lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s song. He winds up raising the Rosenbergs’ kids.
Yeah, it’s —
CB: Right. So part of the story was that they were passing, or said to be passing, nuclear secrets off to the Soviet Union. And what’s interesting is that this connects back to eight years earlier because in 1945, Julius was discharged after the US Army learned that he had previously been a member of the Communist party. So there’s this really interesting connection in terms of him working for the Army and passing off secrets during that time from the US government and Army, but then eight years later under the same retrograde basically being executed as a result of that.
NDB: Yeah. That’s very striking. There are some very notable weddings and engagements that happen during this retrograde in ‘53. On June 18th, 1953, Martin Luther King, Jr., marries Coretta Scott, who will be known as Coretta Scott King. And then five days later, John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier announce their engagement on June 24th, 1953. So that’s pretty interesting.
The Korean War armistice was announced —
CB: That reminds me —
NDB: Oh.
CB: That reminds me of Barack Obama proposed to Michelle Obama during a Venus retrograde I think in – I wanna say in Virgo in like, 1991? Is that correct? Does that sound correct?
NDB: 1991? Is that when you predict it – proposed?
CB: I just know he proposed to her like, the day that Venus stationed retrograde, and she was a little like, reluctant at first, but then eventually like, they ended up obviously like, getting married and having a successful marriage.
NDB: Okay. In ‘91? In the summer of ‘91, there was the Venus retrograde there. Yeah, I don’t have that one in my file yet. He married her —
CB: Yeah, it was when —
NDB: — in October of – he married her October 18th, ‘92, so yeah. They could have been, you know, engaged about 26 months earlier, or 14 months earlier, rather. That makes sense.
CB: Yeah. That was part of the story is that they had like, a prolonged engagement because she was like, a little unsure about it, and he ended up – she ended up like, coming around or he ended up like, talking her around.
NDB: Okay. Well done, Barack! Is there anything he can’t do with that charm?
CB: Right. April 13th, you have one for Frida Kahlo in Mexico City?
NDB: Yeah. This is the only solo exhibition that she ever had in her native Mexico, and it’s basically her last exhibition. She’s so infirm at this point because of her injuries and her health that she’s brought to the exhibition in a bed. They carry her in on a bed like a monarch.a nd so she gets to attend her own party even though she can’t really get out of bed. She does wind up dying just a year later. Ironically, one of the last things she does a year later is protest the US interference in Guatemala. So yeah, this is just, this is a very important art exhibition. Frida Kahlo, I’m sure, needs no introduction. Certainly, you know, someone with their own vision. I wouldn’t exactly call – well, maybe she’s experimental, but more importantly, she’s visionary and singular. And this exhibition is, yeah, the only solo exhibition she has in her native Mexico.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. I’m just writing the thing – and that was famously, I don’t know famously, but in the biopic with Salma Hayek, they recreated this like, towards the end of the movie as kind of like —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — the culmination of the movie.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. And it was like that in life, too. I mean, sometimes those movies manufacture, you know, a climax, but for her I think it really was such a thing.
CB: Right. Of like, the culmination of her life and life’s work in some way and her art.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Here is the chart because there’s actually a very interesting chart for that day, because there was a New Moon that happened that day at 23 degrees of Aries, and Venus was just coming off of the conjunction with that, and it was at 22 degrees of Aries. So there was a rare and interesting triple conjunction of the Moon, Venus, and the Sun that day.
NDB: Yeah. With Frida, the charts are always really, really interesting without fail! It seems like everything that happens in her life is always during some like, super dramatic transit. And of course, her own chart is off the charts.
CB: Right. All right. What’s your next most important one? Or I have a really good one.
NDB: Okay, go ahead. You give me what you have.
CB: All right. February 13th, there was a trans person named Christine Jorgensen who returned to New York after successfully having gender reassignment surgery in Denmark, which had been a process that they’d been there for quite a while doing. But then they finally came back home to the United States after successfully doing this, and somehow some of their letters to their parents had leaked out so the press became like, aware, and she was met by a bunch of press, basically – a bunch of reporters – as soon as she got back, and then became like, this overnight celebrity as being one of the first people in the United States to have gender-affirming surgery, basically. And this ended up interestingly it was like, for the most part, received a lot of positive press by this. And I thought it was an interesting example in Venus retrograde, because when Demetra and I did the episode on Inanna back in 2003 and talking about those Venus retrogrades, we found some ancient Babylonian hymns to Inanna, to Venus, basically, and to the Venus retrograde. And it actually like, mentions at one point Venus and associated Venus with like, men becoming women and women becoming men. And there’s actually like, a line about that in the hymns to Venus from like, 2000 BCE. So it was interesting seeing that theme of gender transitions or blurring the lines between genders or moving from one side to the other as we were talking about earlier. But here in the 1953 is like, a really early like, first example of that in the United States.
NDB: Yeah. That really rings with the Venus retrograde opposite the Saturn-Neptune as well when you think about it. I mean, the whole experience, not just the transition, but the public element of this. The fact that it becomes this big public affair, which is very Saturn-Neptune. Like, sort of everyone sort of seeing something or having some insight or something being revealed that is really sort of, you know, new information to put it mildly. Seeing things in a whole new way or seeing something that’s a brand new insight.
CB: So get this. Remember Judy Garland? Cancer rising? Albert Einstein, Cancer rising, Aries 10th house? Christine Jorgensen, we have a birth time! Also Cancer rising, Aries 10th house, and Venus in Aries in the 10th house. So this Venus retrograde went over her 10th house Venus when she basically comes back, returns to the US, and then becomes famous as a result of this. And then does run into some issues with being able to work and like, not being able to find work. But then ends up being able to work in like, entertainment industry and becoming successful or having some success during the course of that.
NDB: Oh, it’s also interesting having seen her birthday. She’s born the same week as Miles Davis, Marilyn Monroe, and Allen Ginsberg.
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: You know, already one of my favorite time twin weeks to look, so I’m definitely gonna look at more detail in her chronology, and yeah, compare her with those other people. That’s a fantastic example; thank you for sharing.
CB: Yeah. So the only other parts of that was I found a quote saying,
“Soon after her arrival, she launched a successful nightclub act and appeared on television, radio, and theatrical productions. The first five-part authorized account of her story was written by herself in a February 1953 issue of American Weekly titled ‘The Story of My Life.’”
So “the overwhelming amount of coverage opened new discussions surrounding gender, sex, and transexuals” at the time was one of the other quotes that I found. And then another quote said the publicity following her transition and gender reassignment surgery became “a model for other trans people for decades” basically.
So I think it’s really important point, because we do often see things related to like, gender – we’ve already talked about sexual orientation, but also gender as a basic concept, as well as like, challenges to gender. Like, Venus retrograde often challenges gender roles, challenges gender norms, but even gender like, perception and self-perception can sometimes be a thing that comes up in Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. And in Saturn-Neptune as well. So it’s an amazing combination of them both. Yeah. Okay. Well, I also have some other things relating to the arts and also another marriage that I left out that I’ll go through quick.
One of them is there was this big jazz concert in Toronto. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Max Roach in Toronto; it’s called the Quintet of the Year at Massey Hall. It was recorded and turned into a record that was a huge seller and is considered a massive jazz classic. So that was a really important concert, and you know, groundbreaking in jazz. And like I said, it’s one Venus cycle after those first Charlie Parker recordings, and one Venus cycle before Max Roach, who plays drums on this night, is gonna interrupt Miles Davis’s concert. That’s May 15th, ‘53 – three days earlier, May 12th, 1953, in Cannes, Brigitte Bardot arrives at the Cannes Film Festival and totally stuns the press and the people there. They describe her – “the goddess of love had not been seen emerging from the sea since Botticelli painted Venus floating on a mother of pearl shell” – but this was the spectacle that 2,000 American Marines witnessed on May 12th, 1953 at 11:30 AM from the aircraft carrier enterprise anchored in the Bay of Cannes in France. So there’s this, you know, French movie starlet who is just coming out with her first movie, and you know, taking the culture by storm.
CB: Wow. Nice. Good one.
NDB: Yeah. Very Venus. Very, very Venus. And lastly, you know, it’s funny – we were talking about the Kennedys. I mentioned that John F. Kennedy’s proposing to Jacqueline in June of ‘53, but a month earlier, May 23rd, 1953, Sargent Shriver marries Eunice Kennedy, and Sargent Shriver is the guy who eight years later is gonna be the head of the Peace Corps that his brother-in-law’s gonna start. So there’s something in that as well.
CB: Nice. That’s a good eight-year repetition.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Here’s some quick ones. Jame Wilson and Francis Crick of Britain’s University of Cambridge announce their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule where they basically announce the double helix structure of DNA was announced on this date. And I thought this was great, because it connects with that one eight years later that also had to do with figuring out the structure of DNA and everything else.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: One that makes me nervous about this one happened on March 17th, and this is the first nuclear test of Operation Upshot-Knothole is conducted in Nevada. And what makes me nervous about this one is that one of the things they were testing was tactical nuclear weapons for the first time, or one of the first sort of times during this time in 1953 after eight years earlier having first developed the atomic bomb. That makes me a little nervous about repetitions for reasons we talked about in the year ahead forecast.
Elsewhere, the first Academy Awards to be broadcast on television was on March 19th, 1953. So this was another first. The Academy had been long resistant to television up to this point and then they finally did it. This was also the first ceremony to be held in Hollywood and New York simultaneously, and it connects it back to the very first Academy Awards ceremony, which occurred in May of 1929 during a Venus retrograde in Aries and Taurus.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: This Venus retrograde had one of the most important events of the 20th century, which is on March 26th, Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine. And this was just massive, massive news because polio had been this huge devastating disease in the 20th century. And his announcement was met with like, huge jubilation and a sense of triumph over a disease that had caused so much suffering. And there was a media frenzy about it with news just spreading like wildfire through newspapers and radio all over. And basically hailing Salk as a hero and his vaccine as a medical miracle.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So church bells rang. Schools closed early. People took to the streets in celebration. It’s like they got rid of the plague, basically. Like, imagine like, the plague in like, the Middle Ages or like, the 15th century and imagine somebody just like, came out and said, “We’ve just defeated the plague.” That’s basically what happened. And what’s interesting about it is it connects back to earlier retrogrades, because in 1921, that was when Roosevelt got polio basically.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Right?
NDB: It was either polio or Guillain-Barre syndrome. There are other opinions. But certainly it was thought to be polio throughout his life. So even if it wasn’t —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — it was regarded as it was.
CB: Right, which is the point that’s important, because then he would go on to really champion efforts to fight polio during the course of his life and career. And as a result of that and founding organizations that put money into polio research, it eventually —
NDB: March of Dimes, yeah.
CB: Right. The March of Dimes. It eventually culminates in 1953 with eventually actually finding a cure for polio.
NDB: Yeah. He had the, you know, the place he died in Georgia, this hot springs place was a center that he had founded to help people who were, you know, paralyzed and needed that kind of water therapy. So yeah, it was something he was really driven to champion.
CB: Right. Yeah. He had the ruler of the Ascendant in the 6th house, and I think that was one of the defining things about his life aside from all of the other important things that he did was just like, his focus on that and helping to find a cure for polio and that it would eventually culminate a few Venus cycles later with this, which then just like, eradicated polio by the end of the century, essentially.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. April 16th, interesting one – Eisenhower gave this speech which is referred to as his “Chance for Peace” speech to the National Association of Editors, and Stalin had just died a few weeks earlier, and there was this sense of uncertainty about the future of Soviet-America relations. And even though Eisenhower was like, this military general, he made this like, impassioned call for peace, which was unexpected to people. And unfortunately, while it didn’t have a lot of impact in terms of the Cold War still heating up and everything else, it was a striking speech that he gave at this time during this Venus retrograde in terms of its, I don’t know, what he attempted, what he wanted to accomplish by it. And it has echoes of some of the later Venus retrogrades like with John Lennon and “Give Peace A Chance” and things like that.
NDB: Sure. And it is worth mentioning, the Korean War – the armistice was signed June 8th, 1953, not long after. So this had been a really tough war, and you know, I mean, in some sense of the world, it’s not really over. It was an armistice that was signed; it just sort of suspended things where they were. But the war had been going on for just about three years at that point, and yeah. You know. So after the speech, we do get that, at least.
CB: Yeah, that was huge. And basically, the entire Venus retrograde of the spring of 1953 was the Korean War winding down. Although both sides kept doing stuff, because they kept wanting to like, leverage their position in subsequent negotiations, but it was partially because they knew negotiations were about to start happening, they started doing prisoner swaps during the Venus retrograde and then eventually it culminates in that armistice in July of ‘53. So this is a striking repetition because it means during this Venus retrograde in 1953, we see the end of the Korean War, which was basically a huge proxy war between the United States and China that took place on the Korean peninsula between the two sides of Korea – or what became the two sides. But this is exactly eight years after the last Venus retrograde in Aries coincided with the end of World War Two. So we have a repetition of the end of two major wars during this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. And it really extends even more than that. In the west, we tend to think of the First World War ending in 1919, but for Russia, it really ended in March of 1921 at the Venus retrograde. Because that’s when they finally tied things up with Poland, who they’d been at war with, and Ukraine where they were sort of at war and sort of allies, with Turkey, opening up a trade agreement with England, really just sort of putting everything behind them at last and becoming a country. And even, you know, you go back a hundred years, and the US Civil War also ended during that Venus retrograde. So yeah, there is something about this retrograde that – I mean, sometimes terrible military things are done during it, but it is a period when wars do end.
CB: Yeah. That’s one of my… I don’t know. I’m hoping there’s like, a better case scenario where, I don’t know how it’s gonna go because there’s so much other tricky stuff where I’m expecting like, a major geopolitical explosion in the March-April time frame in certain parts of the world. But whether there won’t be any settlements or hopefully like, cessation of war, I’m really curious how that’s gonna go within Europe, for example, with some of that stuff, and if some of that isn’t forced based on some of the changes that occurred recently.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: That would be expected. I guess it bears mentioning; there was something else that happened during this period. May 29th, 1953, Edmund Hillary reached the summit of Mount Everest. He did it alongside his sherpa guide, but in true Venus retrograde fashion, even though two men are making the climb and one of them is a lot more qualified than the other, it’s the other guy who sort of gets the glory. So yeah, you know, on the one hand, it’s an achievement – one that makes the front page of everything that’s in print at the time – but at the other hand, there’s just the, you know, same good ol’, you know, racist class divide when it comes to acknowledging achievement.
CB: Yeah. That was like, the – one of the guys that did the plane, the fastest around the world, during one of the later Venus retrogrades, there was somebody that accompanied him just in order to be a witness to him doing it, but you know, didn’t achieve these —
NDB: Didn’t get the credit, right.
CB: Yeah, exactly. All right.
NDB: Interesting.
CB: One of the – oh yeah, which speaking of – May 18th at Rogers Dry Lake, California, Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to exceed Mach one, and she actually had Mercury in Aries. So I thought that was a funny first. Again, speed, flying. A woman becoming the first, et cetera.
One of the biggest events of this retrograde happened on June 2nd. And this is when Elizabeth the second is crowned Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms at Westminster Abbey. And Venus was right at 28 degrees of Aries, so this is later in terms of the retrograde, but it falls within the retrograde period. And what’s interesting is that this coronation was the first to be televised in full, and that meant that it was just like, witnessed by millions and millions of people around the world, and it became this huge spectacle who saw like, the pomp and circumstance of everything involved with the coronation.
NDB: Yeah. And of course, it was her coronation and Eisenhower’s election which just preceded this that really instigated thousands of families, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of families to go out and buy TV sets, which up until this point were more like luxury items. But because these were such big events, the television right at this period becomes this household item. Which again, I think is very Saturn-Neptune – the fact that all these people are seeing this ceremony that until that point was really restricted to them. And of course, all the other things that television is gonna introduce into the home – all these new sort of ways of seeing the world that are unprecedented. Yeah. Very much —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — in sync with that.
CB: Yeah. So it’s estimated the worldwide television audience for the coronation was 277 million people, which is a ton of people. She of course would become the longest reigning monarch in British history and potentially the second-longest reigning monarch ever. And a documentary film about the coronation titled A Queen is Crowned narrated by Laurence Olivier was one of the most popular films in British cinemas that year. It seems to have come out like, right afterwards, although I’m having trouble figuring out the date because the dates are often listed as like, right after the coronation, but I’m not clear if it was really produced that quickly – like, literally within days of the actual event – or what. But it ended up being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and it was the first winner of the Golden Globe award for Best Documentary Film. So I thought that was really interesting.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it could have been made quickly. You know, they made these newsreels in those days, which were almost just like, news reports. To have Laurence Olivier narrate, you know, a special news event like that, you know, it wouldn’t have been too hard to do.
CB: Yeah. Well, and they did – they wanted to have different areas of the world see it as quickly as possible for even just the filming of the coronation, so they like, got the film and like, threw it on airplanes and like, sped it over —
NDB: Right.
CB: — to like, Canada really fast the same day so that the Candians could watch it at the same – within the same day of it happening.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: This was the first nonstop flights between the United Kingdom and the Canadian mainland, interestingly. So that was a major one. Just imagine everybody for the first time seeing the coronation of a queen during a Venus retrograde is a pretty striking image.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Do you have any others for 1953?
NDB: Oh, what have I left out?
CB: I mentioned the Waco one in 1953; there were these crazy tornadoes that hit Waco and killed 114 people —
NDB: Oh yes.
CB: — which is a weird repetition that happened then 50 years later in 1993.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Or 40 years. Yeah. Okay. I think that might be it for 1953. Those are all of the major ones that I really wanted to make sure that we mentioned.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Let’s go back then eight years earlier to 1945, which is the big one. So this retrograde happened March 25th through May 6th of 1945, and by sign it happened February 2nd through July 7th of 1945.
So at the very beginning of the year, Roosevelt is inaugurated. And he’s sworn in for a fourth term as president of the United States, and he’s the only president ever to exceed two terms. So that’s another like, first. And of course, Congress after that term would change the law and make it so that a president can only serve two consecutive terms.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Aries is his 8th house, and Roosevelt ended up dying in office during this Venus retrograde in Aries. So I thought that was kind of striking that the Venus retrograde happens in his 8th house and he ends up passing away.
Truman becomes president then in April under this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Truman has natal Venus retrograde.
CB: What sign?
NDB: Cancer?
CB: Okay.
NDB: I think? Maybe – yeah. He’s a Taurus Sun; I think it’s in Cancer. Yeah.
CB: Okay. So of course the main thing that was happening during the course of this Venus retrograde is that the Allies are closing in from both sides in Europe on Germany, and the war is coming to an end and does come to an end in Germany, the end of World War Two, where the Russians are invading Germany from the east and the other Allies are invading from the west. And eventually Hitler finds himself in a bunker. He ends up marrying his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, on April 29th in a closed ceremony, and then they commit suicide the next day on April 30th. And then the Germans surrender like, a week later on May 7th. And this like, literally right at Venus is stationing direct, which is stations direct on May 6th. So I cannot express how incredibly striking that is that —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — World War Two ends basically the day within 24 hours of Venus stationing direct.
NDB: Yeah. When Alfred Jodl signs the surrender, it’s super, super close indeed. So yeah, it’s quite striking.
CB: Yeah. So that’s incredible. In April, the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress are hung by their heels in the public square in Milan. So the fascists are overthrown in Italy at the same time. I looked at the dates, and it’s actually really striking because during this Venus retrograde as I said before, all the concentration camps are liberated basically January through May. So Auschwitz was the first one on January 27th. Then Buchenwald on April 11th. Bergen-Belsen on April 15th. Dachau on April 29th, which was the first camp ever created. And I forgot to mention that Auschwitz was the largest. Ravensbruck on April 30th, and that’s the largest camp for women, so that’s right during the Venus retrograde. Mauthausen on May 5th, and Theresienstadt on May 8th, and that was the last one I saw listed. So it’s like, literally as Venus is stationing retrograde, all of these people are being freed as Venus is stationing direct.
Unfortunately, one of the weird things that happens that’s only being documented more recently is that some of the camps, there were gay men who were imprisoned in the camps, and some of them once they got out – because homosexuality was still outlawed – they were then imprisoned afterwards. So that there was some stuff like that that happened, or some of the survivors didn’t get reparations and things like that. So there were some tricky things as well in terms of not everyone being like, fully liberated.
NDB: Oh, I just – to go back for a second, I went and looked it up. When Alfred Jodl signed the Act of German Surrender on May 7th, 1945, at 2:41 AM, Venus was four hours and 37 minutes from the station. That’s how —
CB: Wow.
NDB: — close it was. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So you know, that’s gonna be then the best probably example of Venus stationing direct in history and a war coming to an end and like, peace —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — happening.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. The Civil War’s pretty close, too, but —
CB: Oh right. The station direct and then, yeah, and then eight years later the Korean War as well.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: So there was also stuff, of course, going on with the Pacific War was starting to wind down, because it’s like, the Battle of Iwo Jima’s happening during this time. Okinawa happens in like, June. It ends, at least. On February 3rd, the Soviet Union agrees to enter the war against Japan once hostilities against Germany are concluded. The Yalta conference happens in February, and this ends up being —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — pretty significant, right?
NDB: Yeah, I was about to bring that up. I felt like we were risking burying the lede. Yalta’s very important, you know, for what it gets right and what it gets wrong. But it is sort of like, the new world order is being set there. Churchill realized that the British empire is, you know, a faded entity at this point, although ironically, he does campaign for France to be included as a permanent member of the Security Council, because he wants more buffer against the Soviet Union. So it’s kind of funny that England winds up championing France in that way. But yeah, Yalta is the new sort of world order that exists, and still sort of exists in some ways.
CB: Right, because they finalize plans for creating the United Nations during the Yalta conference.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So that’s super important. They also agreed on a division of Germany during the Yalta conference. There was issues over eastern Europe and the division of that, which ended up coming under Soviet control. And it also ended up in some ways then creating the origins of the Cold War and the seeds for the Cold War sort of get sown at the Yalta conference.
NDB: Yeah. Definitely. But it doesn’t help that, of course, like, FDR is about to die in April, so the – Yalta’s in February. FDR dies in April. And then in June, they have the Potsdam conference, which is the follow up, by which point Truman is replacing FDR, and it’s right in the middle of that conference that England – or the UK – holds an election, and Churchill is voted out of office, and so his replacement, Clement Attlee, suddenly comes in. And Stalin, of course, who’s an authoritarian, is like, “Okay,” you know, “I was with FDR and Churchill a few minutes ago. Like, what’s going on here?” Like, okay, FDR dying – that’s one thing. But you know, like, England just replacing their leader at a time like this? What kind of country is this? You know. Interesting sort of culture shift that…
CB: There’s probably —
NDB: Doesn’t make —
CB: He was probably emboldened to then have these French —
NDB: Yeah!
CB: — new guys coming in who don’t have the experience of like, you know, Roosevelt or Churchill.
NDB: Well, certainly. For instance, it’s at Potsdam that Truman informed Stalin that, you know, hey, we just tested this great new weapon that we’re gonna use against Japan, and Stalin’s like, “Oh yeah, thanks for telling me.” But meanwhile, Stalin already knows; Stalin knew before Truman knew because he’s got spies everywhere, you know? So —
CB: Right. Which connects it with the Venus retrograde eights years later that we were just talking about.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: With the two spies that are executed eight years later.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. You know? And you know, other spies. At Potsdam, you know, there’s a young guy in the state department – Alger Hiss – who’s later gonna be charged with espionage for the Soviet Union as well, so it keeps going.
CB: Right. So the war ends in Europe, and then April 25th during this Venus retrograde period, the founding negotiations for United Nations begin in San Francisco. And then it’s eventually, it culminates in the United Nations charter being signed on June 26th where representatives from 50 nations sign the charter, which establishes the United Nations. And this is Venus in Taurus trining very closely Jupiter in Virgo, and it was also the day of a lunar eclipse.
NDB: Yeah. Heavy.
CB: Yeah. So that’s another great Venus retrograde thing after Venus has stationed direct and the creation of the United Nations in order to stop something like World War Two from happening again.
Okay. Other major ones. Do you have other major news? I mean, one of the things that happened, I realized, is during this Venus retrograde, the United States during the spring finished refining enough uranium in order to create the first atomic weapons which they then test for the first time in July very shortly after the Venus retrograde period ends.
NDB: Yeah. So again, we see something being prepared for, you know, that’ll be unleashed a little later.
CB: Right. And being like, finalized and perfected, including the first what they called like, “the gadget,” which was the first test atomic bomb that they would test at the Trinity test site.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: I thought it was weird – they called in Trinity, and I looked this up. They ended up setting off three atomic bombs that year, and they called the first one “Trinity” and the Trinity test site, but apparently that was for some other reason and just happens to be a coincidence that there ended up being three bombs.
NDB: Yeah. I thought – was that not explained in the movie, the reason it was called Trinity? I’m searching the back of my memory.
CB: Yeah, I mean, it was for, I don’t know, like, scriptural reasons or something like that.
NDB: Right. Like, the father, the son, the holy ghost – that kind of trinity?
CB: Yeah, I’m actually – I think some people are gonna hassle me in the comments, because it’s actually something else. I just read this earlier today. It had some other obscure meaning. But anyway. Other major news things – February 8th was a really interesting first. The Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945 was passed, and it’s passed by the territorial Senate. And this was the first anti-discrimination law in the United States in the 20th century, and it was signed into law by the governor on February 16th, 1945. So I thought that was really interesting during a Venus retrograde that the first anti-discrimination law in the United States was passed and how that, you know, would show up with some of the later civil rights struggles during subsequent retrogrades.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Do you have any other major ones you wanna mention?
NDB: Oh god.
CB: Okay. Well, I got one – the 17th Academy Awards ceremony is held on March 15th, and it’s broadcast via radio for the very first time.
NDB: Okay.
CB: So that’s a good first. That’s another first for, again, the Academy Awards just keeps having like, important stuff happen on this Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I was gonna say one thing was George Bush married Barbara Pierce January 6th, 1945. So we have seen a couple of other, you know, future presidential weddings happen around this period, so I just thought I’d throw that in there.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That’s another good one. March 22nd, the Arab League is formed with the adoption of a charter in Cairo on March 22nd. That’s a really important one, because that would continue to be a really important thing even to this day.
May 3rd, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and 120 members of his team surrendered to US forces, later going on to help start the US space program. I thought this was striking because I noticed later that he died in June of 1977.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So there’s a Venus retrograde connection there for him.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: June 1st, the British took over Lebanon and Syria. I thought this was striking, since Lebanon and Syria are major places right now in the news and during this Venus retrograde, it was somehow important in terms of the British connection and like, British colonialism.
NDB: Right. Prokofiev, the guy who dies the same day as Stalin in 1953, he premiered his composition War and Peace June 7th, 1945, in Moscow in the Great Hall. So yeah, this is a big, you know, it’s based on the Tolstoy book; it’s a big old, you know, symphony piece. Obviously in June of ‘45 it’s about what has just transpired, and yeah, it’s Prokofiev who’s gonna die, like I said, exactly eight years later at the next retrograde.
CB: Wow. Nice. In pop culture, I noticed that the song “Sentimental Journey” by Les Brown and Doris Day was the record reached the Billboard chart on March 29th, 1945, and it lasted for 23 weeks on the chart, peaking at number one. And the song’s release ends up coinciding then with the Second World War winding up in Europe, and it became the official homecoming theme for many veterans who were coming home after the war or who were looking forward to coming home. And some of the lyrics I thought were very Venus retrograde. They sing,
“Gonna take a sentimental journey. Gonna set my heart at ease. Gonna make a sentimental journey to renew old memories. Never thought my heart could be so yearny. Why did I decide to roam? Gonna take that sentimental journey, sentimental journey home.”
I thought that was a very Venus retrogradey; you just think about all those people that are like, away in Europe or traveling all over the world and then the war ends, and they, you know, go home.
NDB: Yeah. And especially, you know, this retrograde is characterized in part by the fact that like the one coming up, it’s Venus retrograde with Mercury retrograde, which is all the more sort of connected to the past.
CB: Right. Yeah. Do you have any other major ones that we’re gonna ourselves if we forget to mention?
NDB: Only something that I’ve mentioned earlier, which is the fact that Charlie Parker at this time with a very young Miles Davis and Max Roach in tow is making really groundbreaking jazz recordings. Actually, Dizzy Gillespie as well. Sometimes with each other, but each on their own as well.
This is a new sort of approach to jazz that’s emerging after the war, in part because of political conditions. First of all, during the war, they needed the shellac that was used to make records; they needed that for war purposes. So there weren’t really records being made. There was also a musician strike, so there weren’t even sort of like, you know, radio concerts or things of that nature happening. To make money to raise money for the government to fight the war, all the nightclubs had a tax on their dance floors. So what happened was nightclub owners started asking the musicians to play the kind of music that patrons would sit down and listen to, like, would sit down with a drink at a table and listen to, as opposed to dancing, which is what jazz was doing in the ‘30s. And since there were no records being made or radio shows to appeal to, there was no need to sort of be middle of the road or commercial or conventional. Really, these musicians were branching out and exploring the artform at a really sort of a level of dexterity and skill at a very complex and very spontaneous and very, you know, unconventional approach to music that was not immediately commercial but became really revolutionary. And so a lot of this – this is in part an artform that emerges because of the times, because of the restrictions played in the industry. And all these things combined, you get, you know, the likes of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, who are rewriting the rules of music for the second half of the 20th century.
CB: Nice. That’s really good. All right. The last things to wrap up just happened in like, June at the very end of the war and very late in the Venus retrograde period.
June 11th, the Franck Committee actually recommended against a surprise nuclear bombing of Japan. And ultimately, Truman ended up kind of ignoring some of the advisors, and he still went ahead and bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. And one of the things I noticed is on July 8th, which was literally the day after Venus departed from Taurus and completed the period, Truman was informed that Japan would talk peace if it could retain the reign of the emperor. But he ended up rejecting that and then proceeding with the bombing.
And the last thing is June 24th, a victory parade is held in Red Square in Moscow at the end of the war towards the very, very end of the Venus retrograde period. So that becomes the final one of 1945.
NDB: Right.
CB: Cool. All right. Let’s take a little break.
All right, let’s transition to talking about 1937 and the Venus retrograde that occurred during the early part of that year. Same dates and time frame again as normal. January 20th, the second inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes place. He’s sworn in for a second time as president. And this is actually the first time that the United States presidential inauguration occurs on this date, because it used to be in March, right?
NDB: Yeah. That’s right. It was always in March, usually about March 4th or so, and it was moved to January 20th by COngress because it was no longer seen – excuse me – as being necessary for it to be so late after the actual election. It was something that made sense earlier in history when it took a lot longer for information to be exchanged and for, you know, ballots to be tallied. But yeah, to speed the whole process up, they moved it to January 20th.
CB: Okay. Cool. So to summarize, 1937 is a year of rising global tensions, and a lot of precursors, basically, to World War Two, especially with the Spanish Civil War and major events taking place there in 1937, especially where the Nazis got involved and started committing war crimes in Guernica. And then also, the Japanese and the Chinese went to war during this retrograde in 1937 as well, which ended up being a precursor to a lot of the war in the Pacific in World War Two.
NDB: Yeah. The Japanese had been clashing with China since 1931, but the proper war begins indeed in this period in ‘37.
CB: Got it. So during this Venus retrograde on April 27th in the Spanish Civil War, the bombing of Guernica is carried out in Spain where the Nazis came in and just bombed this town and killed hundreds and hundreds of people, and it ended up being this major event basically.
NDB: Yeah. And it was immortalized in a painting by Picasso. And it’s the beginning of the German sort of aerial bombing. It’s not something they had done with the Anschluss in Austria or what have you. This – or, you know, this really was this sort of new and very brutal type of warfare. Sort of what we would call today I suppose “carpet bombing.” So yeah, it’s quite new and it’s quite horrific. Guernica is this very small place in the Basque region of Spain, which typically was quite rebellious to the powers that be in Madrid. So yeah. Hitler’s lending a helping hand.
CB: And that’s really striking because the parallel eight years later in 1945 ended up being the firebombing of Germany, you know, as a little connection there.
NDB: Exactly. Well, there’s even an irony just, you know, two weeks after the Guernica bombing. The Hindenburg crashes in the United States – a German airship, you know, a zeppelin, crashes. The famous image, you know – “Oh, the humanity!” That event happens on May 6th, 1937, in New Jersey in Lakehurst.
So yeah, you know, there’s almost an immediate riposte from nature to the Guernica bombing with the crash of the Hindenburg.
CB: Yeah. And that became a whole media sensation with the images and news reels and everything being spread everywhere of the Hindenburg crash.
NDB: Yeah. It’s a huge, you know, front cover of Led Zeppelin’s first album, you know? It’s an iconic image.
CB: Yeah. So iconic images sometimes come out of Venus retrograde. And you mentioned Picasso. There was such a huge international outcry after the Guernica bombing of like, outrage and condemnation with many seeing it as a war crime, and Picasso later in this Venus retrograde starts painting – and publicly – this famous painting that was a powerful like, anti-war statement that became a symbol of the horrors of that conflict. And he completes that towards the tail end of this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. It’s a very famous painting.
CB: It’s one of if not his most famous painting, right?
NDB: Yeah. It’s certainly – you know, if it’s not the most, it’s tied for first place. You know, maybe with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or something. But it’s very, it’s a very important painting. Legend has it, of course, I mean, Picasso’s a Spainard but he lives in Paris. So during the war a few years later when the Germans invade France, there’s a story that the Germans walk into his studio and they point to the “Guernica” painting and they say, “Did you do this?” And he goes, “No. You did this!” It may not have actually happened that way, but it’s a great little story and sometimes, like I said, apocryphal stories do have a lot of truth to them.
CB: Right.
NDB: So yeah, that happens. There is also, you know, we were just talking about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation not long ago. On May 12th, 1937, her father – King George the 6th – is crowned in Westminster Abbey. This, of course, wasn’t televised, but yeah. 16 years before she’s gonna be queen, he becomes king, rather reluctantly, because of course he’s replacing his brother who abdicated a few months earlier who wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, an American woman. And indeed —
CB: Right. That whole thing is like, the most —
NDB: — former King Edward the 8th —
CB: That whole thing is the most Venus retrograde story ever, because he’s king, but he wants to marry like, a commoner basically. And he’s told he can’t do that, so he says, “Well, then I don’t wanna be king anymore,” and he abdicates the throne, gives it to his brother. His brother becomes king during the Venus retrograde, and then the former king then marries his then wife on June 3rd during the Venus retrograde, during the last day of Venus in Aries and the first day of Venus moving into Taurus.
NDB: Yeah. So it’s really, really something the way that all plays out. And this is what – like, Queen Elizabeth would never have been queen if her uncle hadn’t have abdicated and her father hadn’t taken the throne. So it also really like, changes her destiny in a way. Because it’s not how things were meant to play out.
CB: Yeah. Actually, that actually just made me… Yeah. Well, the retrograde would have been in her, what, like, 4th house in Aries, basically, right?
NDB: Mhmm.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So her father first – her first experience of that Venus retrograde then is Venus retrograde in Aries and her father becoming king. And then 16 years later, that repeats, and she takes over from her father and becomes queen.
NDB: Right.
CB: That’s pretty brilliant.
NDB: Yep!
CB: All right. Other major things for this retrograde.
NDB: Well, you know, before Lady Gaga, before Barbra Streisand, and before Judy Garland, on April 20th, 1937, the first version of A Star is Born starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March and Adolphe Menjou is released. So A Star is Born is just following us from decade to decade. And either is being released during this retrograde, is winning Academy Awards during this retrograde, or is being filmed during this retrograde or something is happening during this retrograde that has to do with A Star is Born. Venus, of course, is – I mean, it’s not a star in the modern sense of the word, but the Venus synodic cycle is the depiction of the five-pointed star. The five-pointed star, that image, is a reference to the Venus synodic cycle – the brightest star in the sky. So I love this A Star is Born; we’re talking about Venus retrograde – I mean, give me a break! This is like, the morning star, right? This is like —
CB: Right.
NDB: — a star is born!
CB: Well, and Venus is literally being reborn during every retrograde when it descends into the underworld and like, sort of figuratively dies under the beams of the Sun, and then Venus reemerges eventually towards the end of the retrograde.
NDB: Exactly. Exactly. Now, Judy Garland is still almost 20 years away from making her version of A Star is Born, but during this Venus retrograde in 1937 is when she’s beginning her career. She’s done some films without music in ‘36, but in ‘37, she’s doing like, you know, singing films. And the first one is filmed in March and April of 1937. So she’s embarking on that career. Remember, you know, in ‘61, she’s gonna be making that huge comeback concert. In 1953, she also had a sort of comeback recording career. Of course, in 1969,s he’s gonna have her last wedding before she dies. In 1945, she was also married during the Venus retrograde. So so many of these things really line up in her life. And eight years before this, in 1929, she’s – as a little seven-year-old – she’s gonna film her first movie and music performance ever. So it just like, yeah. She’s one of these people where the Venus retrograde in Aries is just always, always, always doing something.
CB: Yeah. That’s really striking. The Academy Awards this year happened on March 4th, 1937; it was the 9th Academy Awards, and it was notable for the introduction of the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories. It was also the first year that the number of nominees for acting and directing categories was limited to five. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that’s a definite year of firsts.
NDB: Yeah. They’re really, I mentioned this earlier – they’re really sort of stratifying and codifying the Academy Awards. They’re finding like, the structure that they’re gonna use and basically stick to largely for the rest of its existence.
CB: Right. This is a funny one – February 16th, Wallace Carothers receives a patent for nylon in the United States. That’s a little Venus retrograde-y.
NDB: Yeah, for sure. For sure.
CB: July – go ahead.
NDB: I was gonna say, February 3rd, 1937 is when Jean Renoir begins filming his movie Le Grande Illusion, which is a film – it’s an anti-war movie. When Hitler invades France three years later, the first thing he wants to do is seize every copy of Le Grande Illusion and burn it. So yeah. It’s this great French film made by Jean Renoir, who’s the son of Pierre Renoir, the painter. And he goes on to have an incredible film career himself, but this film is super important. Not just as a work of art, but as a political statement. You might say it’s the cinema version of “Guernica” in some ways. I mean, at least in a political context.
CB: Nice. That’s a good one.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: There’s two airplane-related ones, of course, again for some reason with this Venus retrograde in Aries. So one of them is April 12th, Frank Whittle ground-tests the world’s first jet engine designed to power an aircraft in Rugby, England. And then a really sad one is July 2nd towards the very end of this one, this retrograde, Amelia Earhart disappears after taking off from New Guinea during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — she was trying to make a first, but then unfortunately like, passed away.
NDB: Yeah. And you know, again, there’s an element of Venus retrograde there; it is 1937. Women aren’t, you know, “supposed to be” flying airplanes even though they’ve been doing it since at least 1910. But you know, the times being what they are, any time a woman is doing anything outside the kitchen it becomes some, you know, really noteworthy, potentially scandalous affair.
CB: Right.
NDB: Let alone flying around the world.
CB: One other first for scientific research happened on May 21st when a Russian manned ice station becomes the first scientific research settlement to operate in the Arctic Ocean on drift ice.
A weird one is that the Golden Gate Bridge opened May 27th of 1937, and San Franciscans threw a party, like a fiesta, they said, for the new bridge. Schools, offices, and stores were either closed or reduced to skeleton staff, et cetera. And this is interesting because I found a repetition where eight years earlier was the previous bridge was opened in San Francisco that connected like, the Bay area, I guess. I forget what the other name was, but we’ll see it when we come to 1929 that the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge was actually a Venus retrograde repetition.
NDB: Okay. June 16th, 1937 – so 38 days after the direct station but still very much Venus at 10 Taurus conjunct Uranus – this is an amazing one. There was this theater play called Cradle Will Rock. This was, of course, in the middle of the ‘30s, and the Depression is happening. And you have the WPA, which is a government sponsored theater program, government sponsored plays. And this is part of how Orson Welles becomes, you know, really well known is he’s directing all these theatrical works in New York in the ‘30s relating, you know, that are funded by this government funding. But in 1937, there’s this work – Cradle Will Rock – a musical play that has political undertones. And they’re preparing to show it, but because it’s kind of controversial and left-leaning to put it mildly – it’s written by this guy Marc Blitzstein – and it’s directed by Orson Welles, who’s still three years away from doing Citizen Kane and he’s still a year and a half away from scaring everyone with the War of the Worlds thing, which will be the next Venus retrograde in Scorpio. But he’s putting on this play, Cradle Will Rock, but because the work is so controversial politically and sort of, you know, provocative – there’s your Venus retrograde word again – the government sort of comes down on the play nad tells him they can’t put it on. And they padlock the theater. So the actors, the performers, and the audience can’t get into the theater to, you know, to present this work. So they send people out throughout New York City to find a theater where they can hold, you know, this play and present it. And they find one a few blocks away, and everyone walks there. The cast, the director, you know, all the background people, and the audience, and they all walk to this other theater; they go in there, and some of the actors are like, they’re threatened – if they go on stage to perform in this play, they’ll lose the funding that they’re personally getting that’s feeding their families. So what happens is onstage, there’s just the composer – Marc Blitzstein – playing his piano. And the cast is actually sitting amongst the audience in the stands. And it’s a musical play, so Marc Blitzstein starts playing the piano, and when the first actor has to sing their line, they just stand up in the audience and sing their line. And then the next actor, when it’s their turn to sing, they stand up and sing their line. So the performance is, in the end, being performed from the audience, you know? And it is already a political play about the travails of the Depression. So it really strikes home. You know, it’s another example of Orson Welles’s genius, which he just is demonstrating over and over through this period. And it’s very Venus retrograde. It’s this play that’s not supposed to be performed that the actors are literally themselves forbidden from performing in officially. The theater it was supposed to appear in is closed to them, padlocked, and yet they managed to pull it off and they make it this incredible show that’s all the more poignant because the actors are singing their parts sitting right next to whoever is there to watch the performance. So yeah, it’s an astonishing kind of work of theater. Talk about, you know, being experimental! It’s completely improvised in that sense, even though it was a rehearsed play with a whole, you know, plot and songs and all this. The execution is improvised, and in such an impressive way that actually makes it greater than it would have been had it just been this ordinary, you know, performance on a stage.
CB: Brilliant. That’s a great one. Let’s see. At the very tail end, it’s like, the last day as Venus is switching out of the Venus retrograde sign and going from Taurus to Gemini, but it might have just barely fallen into the last day. July 7th, 1937, the Peel Commission proposes a partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. So that was an interesting setup there in terms of the Venus retrograde in Aries which we’ve seen come up like, a few different times over the course of the rest of the 20th century.
For some reason, on March 18th, the worst school disaster in American history in terms of lives lost takes place when the New London School in New London, Texas, suffers a catastrophic natural gas explosion that kills in excess of 295 students and teachers.
And then the last thing – actually, there’s two last things that lead into World War Two. One, the pope in March issues a statement in the German language condemning the Nazis, basically, and criticizing the Nazis for their view on race and other matters and saying that they’re incompatible with Catholicism. And then also, Neville Chamberlain becomes prime minister of the UK on May 28th, and this of course sets up things in terms of most of the governments had already been trying to appease Hitler and trying to avoid, you know, having another major world war after the horrors of World War One. But this is like, one of the final things putting it in place that almost makes it inevitable at this point because then Hitler continues to be appeased all the way up until he starts invading Poland in 1939.
NDB: Yeah. It’s something else, because Chamberlain – you know, that whole appeasement thing will happen in September of 1938 as the next Venus retrograde is preparing to happen in Scorpio in October. But the other thing about Chamberlain, I mean, of course he goes down in history for the appeasement thing. He comes from a family political dynasty. His brother and his father had been very important British politicians as well. But if you live in England and you’re not super rich, then chances are you might actually owe a great debt to Neville Chamberlain because he was a big pioneer there for government housing. There are many, many people in the UK who, you know, manage to live in much better homes than they otherwise wouldn’t have had had it not been for Chamberlain. So it is also kind of tragic that while he actually did have a great achievement in his premiership, that it’s greatly overshadowed by, you know, what went wrong, and so it goes.
CB: Yeah. So the next Venus retrograde, that was when the famous appeasement thing happened where he made a deal with Hitler and then said that through this deal, we’re gonna have peace in our time or something like that?
NDB: Exactly. Exactly. And it’s a really interesting like – Chamberlain himself was born when the Sun was close to Venus in an exterior conjunction, but everyone else involved in that, from the Czech premier, from the French prime minister to Mussolini to Hitler – all those guys are born during Venus retrogrades, so. Sorry – Mussolini is also exterior conjunction. But all those other guys are Venus retrograde as well. So there’s all kinds of Venus stuff happening when it comes to that appeasement matter as well.
CB: Got it. All right. I think that’s good for 1937.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s move onto 1929 and talk about the Venus retrograde which occurred March 30th through May 11th, 1929, and by sign February 2nd through July 8th of 1929.
The beginning of this saw the inauguration of Herbert Hoover on March 4th, and he was inaugurated as the 31st president who took office during a period of economic prosperity. But then by the end of the year, the economic collapse would happen and so he ended up – his presidency was overshadowed by the Great Depression, basically.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: In this year at the very beginning of 1929, the very first Academy Awards ceremony took place on May 16th, 1929. So we have come all the way back. We’ve followed all of these crazy important firsts and turning points of the Academy Awards every eight years with this Venus retrograde in Aries until we go all the way back to the very beginning in 1929 and we find the very first Awards ceremony taking place here.
NDB: Yeah. It’s amazing. And you know, it really does signify everything that the Oscars gonna, you know, develop into over the course of the next decade and decades. But it all starts with what is a fairly reasonably ordinary by Hollywood standards dinner party with – you know, I’m not sure like, actual awards are given out there and then. I think they just sort of announce winners and that’s that. It’s nowhere near what it’s gonna become. But they’re gonna gradually sort of shape that as they go forward. And yeah, by eight years later in 1937, they really have the format down.
CB: Yeah. Apparently, it’s just like, it’s presented in a 15 minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. And apparently, the Best Picture, the movie that won Best Picture was Wings, which interestingly was a romantic action war picture where the two characters portray World War One combat pilots in a romantic rivalry over a woman. Which is like, a funny —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — Venus retrograde thing for 1929.
NDB: Yeah, and it was, you know, made by Howard Hughes, you know, of course, who was a pilot himself and wanted to break into the movie business. So yeah, he spent a lot of time and money making this movie. I think it did – like, he starting making it when silent movies were still a thing, and then sound’s coming out, and he sort of corrects it for that and all that. Which was something that was being done right around this time as well. That’s it. Sound movies are really just becoming a thing in the last year, so that’s… The Oscars are being introduced as the industry is also going through these other changes.
CB: Yeah. That was the really pivotal thing about 1929; it was the transition to sound in film, going from silent films to talkies. And while silent films were still being released, suddenly sound films were rapidly gaining in popularity. And one of the ones that came out during this Venus retrograde in early 1929 was titled The Broadway Melody, which was the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. And this ended up being the top grossing picture of 1929. So I thought that was really interesting Venus retrograde instance.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. And then going back to sort of the experimental art element of things, in March of 1929, these two Spanish artists, one of whom is Salvador Dali, the other is Luis Brunel, they make a movie called Un Chien Andalou – An Andalusian Dog, which is a real sort of experimental art film. It’s got some pretty like, hard imagery on it. There’s an image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor blade. But it’s a surreal piece of film. It’s an absolute classic in the genre. I’m sorry – they starting filming it April 2nd, ‘29, but it was during the Venus retrograde and then it came out by May, I believe. It’s still a very famous and influential experimental surrealist film.
CB: Okay. In other news, let’s see – the Young Plan is signed on June 7th, 1929, which is a post-World War One agreement that reduced significantly the amount of reparations that Germany was required to pay to the Allied powers, which aimed to stabilize the German economy and lessen international tensions by setting a more management payment schedule, which was nice of them since that set up, you know, eight years later, Hitler’s bombing Spain and then eight years later Hitler’s destroyed Europe and dies in a bunker at the end of World War Two.
NDB: Good job!
CB: So we can see how some of these things are interconnected in these eight year periods.
NDB: Absolutely. Absolutely. In India, you know, there is a movement certainly, Gandhi and his allies are agitating for India to be independent. And there’s a countermovement by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who’s the head of the Muslim League, and he’s the man who will eventually found Pakistan as, you know, when India is partitioned. So although he also wants independence, he is a sort of adversary to Gandhi and determined to have a sort of a Muslim nation apart from the Hindu majority of India.
So he at this time – March 28th, 1929 – proposed 14 points that, you know, at this point I think he’s not necessarily trying to find a homeland for the Muslims, what will eventually be Pakistan, but he’s trying to find a way for Muslims to have a place in this new independent India. And that’s what these 14 points that he drafts at this time are. So it’s a, you know, one chapter in the stage of India eventually getting its independence 15 years later – more like, yeah, 17 years later.
CB: Nice.
NDB: With partition. And he’s a major sort of instigator for that, yeah.
CB: That’s really good. April 14th, the first edition of the Monaco Grand Prix is held, which again Venus retrograde in Aries and just things that go fast keeps being this recurring theme.
March 2nd – the longest bridge in the world opens at this time, which guess what, is the San Francisco Bay toll bridge which opens in 1929 during this Venus retrograde. And then eight years later, the Golden Gate bridge opens in San Francisco in the 1937 retrograde. So there’s this weird bridge thing in San Francisco with the Venus retrogrades.
NDB: It is wild. On June 12th, 1929, I hinted at this earlier. Lou Henry Hoover, who was the wife – even though her name is Lou, she’s the wife of President Herbert Hoover. She’s the First Lady. And she wants to have a White House, you know, party; it’s her first year as First Lady. And she has a party, and she invites people who aren’t white. And it’s the first time that has happened since, you know, Theodore Roosevelt accidentally invited Booker T. Washington to dinner when he was visiting him at the White House in 1901. So it’s quite a major thing that happens. I think what happens is that she invites all the wives of congressmen to a dinner party, and there is a Black congressman, so she invites her wife. And you know, it’s as simple as that – like, you know, “I’m having the wives over; you’re invited!” You know? But it’s obviously a big deal for the time. And it does anticipate Eleanor Roosevelt’s, you know, who succeeds Lou Henry Hoover in this sort of this progressive mission of a First Lady.
CB: Right. And just those small incremental steps that are taken progressively during the different Venus retrogrades in terms of society.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. The first public demonstration of a color TV happens on June 27th during this Venus retrograde, which is a striking technological one. And then, you know, foreshadows like, later things like when we were talking about Queen Elizabeth and the televised way of her —
NDB: Coronation.
CB: — coronation being the first televised coronation seen by millions and millions of people.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Was there anything else? Judy Garland – if you wanna mention that.
NDB: Yeah, the Gumm sisters make their film and musical debut in a short film called The Big Revue. So Judy Garland is still known as Frances Gumm. She’s just turned seven years old the previous day, and she and her two older sisters perform in this movie called The Big Revue; that’s about – the whole movie’s 18 minutes long and they have about a two, three minute song in it. They look very cute.
CB: So that Venus retrograde in Aries just really does go all the way back to the very beginning of her story.
NDB: Exactly. I mean, this is, you know, this is the first one of her life. She wasn’t alive eight years earlier in 1921; she’s born in 1922. Right out of the gate, every single Venus retrograde in Aries is a really important turning point in her life.
CB: Right. So this is the first Venus retrograde in Aries in her 10th house. And then she would have that massive comeback in 1953 and her biggest performance, and then eventually she would pass away shortly after the 1969 one.
NDB: Yeah. She had – you’re referring to the concert in ‘61; she did have a recording —
CB: ‘61.
NDB: — session comeback in ‘53. A big concert comeback in ‘61. She dies in ‘69 shortly afterwards. She starts her MGM film career in, you know, 1937 – the musical part of it, anyway. So it’s just – and you know, two of her marriages are during those retrogrades. So that’s altogether astonishing.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s really good. One last political one – March 4th, the National Revolutionary Party is established in Mexico. And under a succession of different names, it will eventually hold power in the country continuously for the next 71 years.
All right. I think that’s good for 1929, yeah?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s transition into 1921. The retrograde was April 1st through May 14th. By sign, it was February 2nd through July 8th. Warren G. Harding is inaugurated in March. He would not live to finish his term because he died of a heart attack pretty early on, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Or not early on, but like, two years into it.
NDB: Well, halfway through. Yeah. August 2nd, 1923, I think was the date?
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah. And he’s replaced by Calvin Coolidge, who goes on to win the ‘24 election. So yeah —
CB: This one’s really —
NDB: Go ahead.
CB: Harding. Go ahead. You had something about Harding?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, Harding by the time he dies, it emerges that he’s got a very corrupt cabinet. And you know, his death leaves this whole sort of scandal and things are basically a mess with the presidency and sort of cast adrift.
CB: Sure. What I realized about this one today that I was researching is that women were given the right to vote the previous year in August of 1920, but that means that the first election that women were allowed to vote in was at the end of 1920 in November of 1920, which means all of the people that women had voted for for the first time came into office in early 1921 during this Venus retrograde period. And I thought that was really incredible, thinking about this Venus retrograde in Aries as the first time that all these different Congress or other people are coming into office that women had for the first time been able to have a say in voting for for the first time in the history of the country.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s an incredible one. As part of that, one of the things that was passed during this Venus retrograde was the Sheppard-Towner Act, which is a federal law providing funding for maternal and infant healthcare clinics. And this was a significant victory for women’s health advocates, although it faced opposition and they actually repealed it so that it fell out of effect and was ended effectively exactly eight years later in 1929.
NDB: Oh, that’s interesting. In England at the same time, March 17th, 1921, Marie Stopes opened England’s very first birth control clinic. It was a clinic for married women, of course – let’s not go bonkers – but it was still it was the first mother’s clinic birth control clinic in England. And she opened that March 17th, 1921.
CB: Yeah. That’s huge. That’s a huge one. Let’s see. One of the things about this is – about the Sheppard-Towner Act – was that it was the first venture of the federal government into social security legislation and the first major legislation that came to exist after the full enfranchisement of women. And I almost wonder if it’s not like, a precursor to an echo of the 2009 retrograde which is when Obama puts everything towards passing healthcare reform in the early part of his first term. So I thought that was really something.
NDB: Very.
CB: We’ve already talked about how Roosevelt was stricken with probably polio; it could have been something else, but effectively it’s – he believes it’s polio, and that ends up changing his life in terms of that and eventually leads to putting money into polio research. But he’s away on a trip with family when he’s like, stricken with it at this time in 1921 during this Venus retrograde.
NDB: Well, it’s after the Venus retrograde. His legs paralyze August 11th. But he had just been the candidate for vice president in that previous election in 1920. And they had lost. And so the Venus retrograde is sort of him, you know, cast adrift politically and not sure what he’s gonna do. Of course, he is gonna make a big comeback. But having his legs paralyzed that summer is just sort of compounds this overall aimlessness that he feels after having lost the election that year.
CB: Okay. Right, because that —
NDB: Yeah, what does happen is there’s a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Virgo on his Ascendant when his legs paralyze, and you know. So that’s the transit of the actual, of that event. But the Venus retrograde that precedes it really is sort of it’s not an easy time for him, and then just losing the use of his legs really does get hard. And keep in mind, eight years later at the beginning of 1929 is when he’s inaugurated governor of New York. And it’s with that that he really has to learn how to walk and disguise his, you know, infirmary. His, you know, the fact that his legs don’t work. And he comes up with all these different tricks; he wears leg braces that are very painful, and he’ll walk with his – arm in arm with one of his, you know, sons who’s a grown man by this point. So he looks on camera like he can walk, and to some degree, he can. He can fake it if he’s got someone to lean on. Or he has his car sort of customized so, you know, he’s often filmed just like, sitting in his car looking like he’s just someone sitting in his car, even if he’s in the middle of a baseball field or wherever he’s doing a public engagement.
So he comes up with all these tricks to hide it. And that starts at the next Venus retrograde when he becomes governor of New York where he really has to master it in order to have the political career that he wants to have.
CB: Right. Yeah. Russia had major geopolitical stuff happen under this one, right?
NDB: Yeah. As I was saying, like, for the Russians, the war we call the First World War, they call it “the Great War.” They call Second World War the Great Patriotic War, but the first war is the Great War. That doesn’t end for them in 1919 because they’re in the middle of a civil war. They’re fighting the, you know, the Bolsheviks are fighting the Whites, but they’re also fighting Poland. They are sometimes fighting Ukraine, who are sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. There’s trouble with the Turks. There’s trouble with Iran. And then in March of 1921, everything sort of wraps up neatly in a bow more or less. The last sort of uprising, these sailors on Kronstadt Island, which is just off Saint Petersburg, they have an uprising, and the Bolsheviks crush them pretty harshly on the ice on March 7th, 1921. Trotsky’s a major sort of leader in that victory.
At the same time, the Soviet Union – they’re signing a treaty with Turkey, they’re signing a trade agreement with England, and they’re wrapping up the war with Poland and Ukraine with the Peace of Riga. So all these things are wrapping up pretty quickly, virtually almost like, all in the same week, certainly in the same month. So that’s a lot of activity right there. They had also recently invaded Georgia, you know, in a short war that they’re gonna win there as well. So yeah. Just so much is changing. But it’s really ending. With this, they’re gonna move on to actually name themselves the Soviet Union the following year. Like, with all these wars out of the way, they can now start to think about actually building this country that they wanted to build.
CB: Right. There keeps being this theme of like, things ending with Russia during this time frame, so —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that’s one of the things I’m looking at when it comes to this year.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: So one of the major US ones that happens is the Tulsa race riots destroy 35 square blocks of what was called “Black Wall Street.” And this was like, a major event in terms of the 20th century, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s devastating. You know, on this one day, there was just, there was some kind very silly incident involving a young Black man who needed to use a bathroom, and you know, a woman who misinterpreted his intentions. This is a public bathroom I’m talking about. One thing led to another, and you had I think 15 to 20,000 white people burning down a 35 square block area in a relatively prosperous and successful Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called I think it was Greenfield. Greenfield or Greenwood. And yeah, it’s one of the – I mean, in a century where there were many, you know, horrible interactions between whites and blacks, certainly just a year and a half earlier during the previous Venus retrograde in Virgo in the summer of 1919, that was called Red Summer where there were these kinds of, you know, race riots. And in these days, race riots meant it was a bunch of white people, you know, going bananas on Black victims. Later that terminology would come to imply the reverse, I guess. But that’s what happens is, yeah, this neighborhood is just destroyed. It’s just incinerated by fire.
CB: Right. And then I just think that’s so striking compared to however many years later when we get the other side of that – 88 years later, you get the inauguration of the first Black president under the Venus retrograde in 2009. And then you have all these obviously like, interim dates of like, progress before it gets to that point, which is like, the blood and sacrifice, for example, of like, the Freedom Riders in 1961 under that Venus retrograde. So it’s like there’s just this whole like, spectrum of this incremental progress in these Venus retrogrades in these eight-year increments that you see a culmination of from like, point A to point B.
NDB: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s the last major one I wanted to mention about 1929.
NDB: Well, I just have two quick ones. There’s two famous scientists who come to the United States for the very first time. Albert Einstein arrives in New York April 2nd, 1921 – interestingly, as part of a campaign to establish a homeland for Jews in Palestine. So you know, you’ve been talking about other events relating to that, and of course we’re gonna go 16 years prior to this is when Einstein’s gonna write, you know, his famous papers. But this is Einstein coming to the US for his first visit; of course, eventually, he’s gonna move to the US a decade later to escape the Germans and he’s gonna become an American citizen. But at this point, he’s just arriving for the first time for this diplomatic visit.
And then the following month, I think on March 11th or March 12th in 1921, Marie Curie arrives from France. And she’s given all these like, they have this one big ceremony for her at Carnegie Hall where you have women scholars from all over the country coming to hear her speak, and she has an audience with Warren G. Harding, the president at the White House who I believe gives her some kind of award or commendation or something official. It’s an official visit. So it’s a really big, you know, acknowledgement of this scientist who’s accomplished a lot. Of course, she’s a woman, which has been an issue for her and continues to be an issue for her despite her celebrity. And apparently, she does – I don’t know when she comes back to the US, but I know it’s in 1929. It might also again be during that Venus retrograde. But this particular one in 1921 is a really big like, sort of publicity affair, you know? It’s very, very public, and like, an honor kind of thing.
CB: Nice. All right. I think that’s good for 1921.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Let’s jump back to 1913 where we —
NDB: Oh, I remember it well.
CB: Yeah, like yesterday. So the retrograde started on April 3rd and went until May 16th, 1913. By sign, it was February 2nd through July 8th of 1913, because this one’s in Taurus going back to Aries, so it gets extended two signs.
Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated on March 4th; this is the 28th president of the United States. His presidency would be dominated by World War One and his efforts to establish peace.
The big one about this one I thought was incredible was on March 3rd, the very first large scale suffrage parade takes place in Washington, D.C., on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. So this event demonstrated the growing strength of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. So this is just like, incredibly striking to me, this protest and this parade that takes place under this Venus retrograde, because eight years later, you know, under the next time the same Venus retrograde happens is when women have just been – gotten the right to vote, and their very first politicians are being ushered into office that women had voted for for the first time in the United States.
And then more broadly, you can also see the echoes of this of having women do this protest like, the day before – or this parade – the day before Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated. And then many years later, in 2017, you have Trump coming into office and then this – the largest —
NDB: Right.
CB: — protest ever with the Women’s Protest on the very next day under the Venus retrograde in Aries. There’s something incredibly striking about the echoes of those two things a century apart.
NDB: Yeah. Although I can’t imagine the women in 1913 wearing those hats they wore in 2017, but yeah, absolutely. The spirit is there. And meanwhile, over in England, things were also happening with the suffragettes. On April 3rd, 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst, who was the suffragette leader in England, she was sentenced to three years in prison, but she went on a hunger strike and was soon released. But then in a more sort of grisly sense, on June 4th, 1913, there was another suffragette named Emily Davison Wilder, and she attempted a protest that really backfired in a nasty way. King George the 5th, who himself was born during the Venus retrograde in Taurus of 1865, he had a horse that he was running in the derby – you know, so like, a horse race event, very official. And she ran out onto the field where the horse race was. And it seems she was trying to put a banner on a horse, on the king’s horse, you know, some kind of propaganda pro-suffragette message on the horse, and something went terribly wrong. She missed and she was trampled by a horse and killed right in front of the king’s eyes.
So yeah, this was a sort of a more grim sacrifice to make in the cause of suffragism, but yeah. You know, in a parallel with what was happening over at Madison Square Garden across the pond, and Emmiline Pankhurst’s ongoing problems with the legal authorities in England, this was a very, very pivotal time for the suffragettes. Ultimately, they really won their vote in the war by, you know, contributing as nurses and in other facets. So it was, you know, ultimately the war that enabled, that helped change the minds that were so against having women vote up until that point.
CB: Yeah. Apparently, there was violence in the US one as well. Because the women —
NDB: Oh sure.
CB: — in Washington also faced major opposition and violence from some onlookers. But the positive part was the parade generated a huge amount of media coverage, and it heightened public awareness of the suffrage movement that kept it in the newspapers for weeks. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind that sometimes these Venus retrograde events can be an event that keeps something in the news for like, weeks after that point so that it’s like, sort of in the public consciousness for an extended period of time, which is very much fitting the symbolism of Venus just like, slowing down and sitting in a sign for a long period.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. Now another thing that we see in 1913, there’s a few really good examples of that experimental art thing that we see cropping up time and time again. Starting with on May 29th, 1913, Stravinsky has a concert of this new work called Le Sacre du printemps or The Rites of Spring. And it’s a really avant-garde piece of music and dance. Najinsky is dancing like some kind of pagan, you know, it’s very sort of raw and to the sentiment – you know, the taste of the time, it seems really vulgar to them, I suppose. Very Venus retrograde in that sense. And the crowd riots. They’re so outraged by this work that the crowd riots, and the evening ends with Stravinsky and Najinsky sort of sobbing in a corner if you will, traumatized by the fact that the response to their work has been so brutal. The work goes on to be hailed as a classic. The Rites of Spring, you know, to my mind, it doesn’t sound that far out, but it’s very, very rhythmic, and you can see how it was a new sort of musical element within a European context, certainly. So it was really an outrage and literally caused a riot in the theater in Paris that night, so you know, Venus retrograde indeed.
CB: Nice.
NDB: And then about a week later, June 7th, 1913, across the pond at Madison Square Garden, there was the pageant of the Patterson strike or Paterson strike. There had been this big silk workers strike in New York, and John Reed, who was a leading sort of leftwing writer, the guy who would later write about the Russian Revolution in a few years, they put on this play at Madison Square Garden that was again a very sort of, it was a political play. And it had a tremendous audience. Apparently it was, the play received overwhelming critical acclaim. To this day, it is considered one of the most important moments in modern art. Few performances could ever match what happened on stage that night. So it’s another one of these really sort of like, special extraordinary artistic theatrical events, not unlike what had just – in a whole other context – The Rites of Spring the previous week.
CB: That’s incredible. That’s a really good one. All right. What else is – there was the Armory Show was also happening —
NDB: Right.
CB: — which is an international exhibition of modern art. Opened in New York City on February 17th, 1913, and this was the first major exhibition of modern art in the United States.
NDB: That’s remarkable. That’s not nothing! That’s pretty amazing.
CB: So this is like, introducing Americans to European avant-garde art, including cubism and fauvism. Nice.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So challenging ideas about artistic progress, became a catalyst for American artists who then became more independent and created their own artistic language. So that was a huge Venus retrograde moment in art.
NDB: Big time. Something else that happened – on May 17th, 1913, just one day after Venus went direct, Jack Johnson was an African-American boxer. He had won the world championship, but really, you know, he had to fight that match outside the US in order to qualify, and there were a lot of people who were against having a Black man hold this world title. There was this ongoing campaign to find a white, you know, adversary for Jack Johnson. So the long and short of it is the US government came up with this new law that actually still exists; it’s called the Mann Act. The premise is that it’s a law that’s created to stop human trafficking. It makes it illegal for a man to bring a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” But it’s really ultimately a coded law that’s meant to arrest Black men for being in relationships with white women. Much later on, Chuck Berry will also go to jail under a Mann Act charge under similar circumstances.
So this is just a law that’s created as a method of harassing someone like Jack Johnson, who in a sense is possibly the very first African American celebrity. He’s a very visible, you know, figure. He’s this champion boxer who keeps defeating white opponents, and he drives around Chicago in a very nice car. And people resent this. So it becomes this legal ensnarement that serves to, you know, really undermine him.
CB: Got it. Another really pivotal figure in the Civil Rights like, history also died in 1913, right?
NDB: Yeah, Harriet Tubman died in 1913. That’s really, you know, something having done everything that she did during the Civil War and even before. But she lived to be quite old, and died on March 10th, 1913.
CB: So she was one of the most famous people involved in the Underground Railroad helping people out of the south. She was also an abolitionist, a suffragist, an activist, and served in the Civil War as a leader, nurse, cook, scout, and spy. I was looking at – it said she was born March of 1822. And it looks like in the second half of that month, Venus was actually in Aries. So that’s interesting that she may have had Venus in Aries.
NDB: Right. Yeah, it is possible.
CB: Yeah. All right. Any other major ones about 1913 – did we cover Russia at all? Like…
NDB: Well, yeah, we didn’t say in 1913. There are a few things. Excuse me. One of the main things like, on the Romanov side – the Romanov dynasty is celebrating the 300th anniversary of its creation. So Tsar Nicholas the 2nd and the Dowager Empress, his wife, they do this major sort of tour of Russia, of all the cities, and to see all the citizens. So there’s a series of parades that goes on for weeks. And the audiences are very warm, and you know, the Tsar and the Tsarina feel like they’re really putting the feather in the cap of their dynasty. Of course, as it turns out, they’re almost exactly four years away from the Revolution overthrowing their regime, and they’re just over five years away from being murdered in a basement with their children by Bolsheviks. So yeah, it’s kind of this last hurrah, I suppose. And at the same time, you know, just as this celebration happens, King George the 1st of Greece is assassinated, which really hits close to home because he’s the uncle of the tsar. He is the brother of the tsar’s mother. He’s also the brother of the mother of King George the 5th of England, you know, the current reigning king. So he’s family to everyone else, all these other, you know, as the royals are. And it’s, you know, so it’s a very hard felt loss for them. And Greece in the meantime in 1913 has been fighting as part of the Balkan Wars. There were two Balkan Wars that are almost one after the other. The first one was against the Ottoman Empire, and then the second one was when Bulgaria turned against the countries that had been its allies in fighting the Ottomans, which it lost. And these are precursor wars to what we call the First World War. It’s in part because Serbia does so well during these wars that they feel emboldened and ready to take on the Austrians, hence the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand the following year.
CB: Right. And so World War One begins the following year in 1914.
NDB: Yeah, it does. But the Balkan Wars are sort of to the first World War what the Spanish Civil War is the Second World War. In some ways, you can see them as being connected, related, part of the same bigger war. You know, there are different ways to sort of, you know, look at it. But these are wars that anticipate the First World War, if you will.
CB: Got it. Okay. I think that’s good for 1913, yeah?
NDB: Yeah! It is —
CB: All right.
NDB: — but we can always keep going! We didn’t say anything about the Mexican Revolution, but let’s keep going.
CB: Well, I did mention Mexico one or two cycles ago, so if you have a very quick like, one or two sentence —
NDB: Oh!
CB: — version of what happens in 1913, what was it?
NDB: Yeah, sure. Yeah, well, I mean, the Mexican Revolution is underway. It started in 1910.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: But in 1913 during the Venus retrograde, there is this period when what’s called the Plan de Guadalupe is announced, and it’s one of these periods where there’s supposed to be a reform, but it results in violence. I mean, it’s a cycle of events we would have to really get in the weeds of the Mexican Revolution, but it is one of the important turning points in that revolution.
CB: Okay. Got it. All right. I think that’s good for 1913. That brings us to our final period, which is 1905, because this is the very first year that Venus in its retrograde cycle retrogrades back from Taurus into Aries. So this is the very first time that Venus would go retrograde in Aries, or at least end its retrograde in Aries, wherein if you go earlier than this, the retrogrades are entirely in Taurus.
NDB: Right.
CB: So the retrograde started April 6th in Taurus, and it ended May 18th in Aries, 1905. By sign, the period extended from February 3rd until July 8th, 1905. Right at the beginning of it in March, we have the second inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt as president of the United States. The big thing —
NDB: It’s really, it’s his first inauguration. Because remember, he replaced McKinley who was assassinated. So he’s never actually been inaugurated before.
CB: Okay. Right.
NDB: He just stepped in as Vice President. So sorry, just a correction.
CB: Good one. The focal point of this one is the Russian Revolution of 1905, right?
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much happening here. We’ve already, you know, we’ve seen over the course of this entire podcast how Russia is always popping up during this Venus retrograde, particular part of the Venus retrograde cycle. This will keep going well into the 19th century and even the 18th century. You go all the way back, and Catherine the Great was born during this retrograde, and a number of tsars and other important Russian royals have lost their lives in bombs and stabbings and what have you. But in 1905, the Russian Revolution begins proper. They’re already, they’ve been at war with Japan for over a year. Now, this is of course, this is the turn of the century. No european power has ever lost to a non-european power in, you know, in memory. But indeed, Russia has its ass handed to it by the Japanese in this war in 1905, and because things are going so poorly, Russia is breaking into a revolution because the disgrace of losing so badly is difficult for them to tolerate.
And meanwhile at the same time, of course, Russian people are starving and having a very rough time. Things start off badly January 22nd with the Bloody Sunday riot in Saint Petersburg with some peaceful pleading for, you know, food for the poor results in Russian soldiers firing into a crowd and killing people. So this already radicalizes the population. Then on February 17th, 1905, the Grand Duke Sergei, who is the Governor of Moscow, is blown up in a bomb attack. Now he is both – he’s the uncle of the tsar, but he’s also the brother-in-law of the tsar because their sisters – their wives are sisters. And the Grand Duke Sergei is also the son of Grand Duke Alexander the 2nd who was himself killed in a bomb attack during the Venus retrograde that was in Taurus in 1881 and was also a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So there is a lot of this kind of thing.
So Tsar Nicholas is seeing his uncle/brother-in-law be killed in a bomb attack in 1905, he had been a witness to his own grandfather, Alexander the 2nd, have his legs blown off by a bomb in 1881. So this is sort of a recurring theme that keeps coming up. And Alexander the 2nd, his grandfather, Tsar Paul the 1st, had been killed in his bedroom in a military coup, so, during this same Venus retrograde cycle. So there is a lot with this Venus retrograde cycle that sees the end of Russian leaders, leading as we saw later with Stalin and Chernenko. So yeah, that’s just part of it, the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei in Moscow.
Following that, at the same time, the Bolsheviks are really establishing themselves apart from the Mensheviks. There’s been a split in the Communist party and the Russian Social Democratic Labor party. And Lenin, as of May 8th, 1905, in London – he’s in London – he establishes his Bolshevik party as a distinct and very militant separate entity from the larger party who he doesn’t want to, you know, associate with because they have different plans than he does, is the easiest way to put it. So that party’s already, the party that will eventually take over in 12 years later is really sort of founding itself in the middle of all this on May 8th, 1905.
On May 27th, 1905, Russia loses this humiliating, terrible naval battle – the Battle of Tsushima. The Tsushima Straits are the straits of water in between japan and korea in the Pacific Ocean, and the Russian fleet had sailed all the way from Saint Petersburg, around Europe, and I’m not sure if they went through the Suez Canal or all the way around Africa, but it took them months to get to Asia. It took them months to just arrive in Japan to fight the Japanese navy, only to like, instantly be just completely sunk by the Japanese navy. It’s a total rout. And because no European powers ever lost to a non-European power, there’s that extra “disgrace” with this loss. And ironically, the newly inaugurated president Theodore Roosevelt is gonna negotiate a treaty between these two parties, and he’s gonna win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. So there’s that to look forward to as well.
And then finally, one last Russian event happens during this Venus retrograde that’s also really, really important and celebrated. I mentioned earlier in 1921 there was the Kronstadt navy rebellion. Well, on June 27th, 1905, there’s the Black Sea Mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin. This is an event that will later be immortalized in a famous film, German – not German, Russian film by Sergei Eisenstein, a Soviet era filmmaker. So this is a major navy rebellion that happens in Odessa in Ukraine where, yeah, you know, sailors are protesting treatment and various matters, not to mention losing to the Japanese.
So this is the Russian Revolution of 1905. It does change things a little bit for a short period of time, but things basically go back to normal within about two years – normal meaning as they were before the revolution. But once the First World War really goes poorly for Russia, by 1917, of course, the whole thing sort of erupts again, and this time with a lot more sort of finality, and yeah, you know, from that point on the Romanovs’ days are numbered.
CB: Right. It seems like this was the initial – it’s like when you’re trying to push over like, a refrigerator or something like, big and heavy, you have to like, rock it a couple of times before you can like, fully push it over, and it seemed like this was the first rock where social unrest really breaks out and you have under this retrograde mass political and social unrest, including worker strikes, peasant revolts, military mutinies. And it’s all being directed at the king or the tsar at the time – the nobility and the ruling class who then as a reaction are forced to institute reforms, including creating in the state Duma and creating a multiparty system as a way of placating the public. And it puts a bandaid on it, but it only sort of forstalls what will eventually happen, which is the overthrow of the king and the nobility, and eventually what leads to the creation of the Soviet Union for the rest of most of the 20th century.
NDB: Exactly. So yeah, with that in mind, it’s so much of the foundation of what unfolds in 1917 is really done here in 1905. Just it’s one Jupiter cycle earlier is the way to look at it, you know. But yeah, this Venus retrograde – a lot happens in a short period of time that really undermines everything that, you know, Russia has come to believe in itself up until that point.
CB: Yeah. Social unrest and like, protests is like, a major thing. One of the interesting little tidbits that I found during this time is the All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality was founded in 1905 during this Venus retrograde, and it was this liberal feminist organization that fought for the women’s right to vote and hold political office. And it was formed by 30 women about a month after Bloody Sunday, which occurred on January 22nd, 1905. So the first meeting for women in Moscow occurred on April 10th, which is pretty close to the Venus retrograde. And there was about a thousand attendees that laid the groundwork for the first congress of the union May 7th through the 10th. The union demanded equal political – particularly voting – rights for women, and it succeeded in raising awareness and political consciousness of many women in the Russian empire.
NDB: Yeah. You know, the early Soviet Union was quite, you know, good on gender equality. Eventually, it broke into the usual old white man’s club. Well, I guess Russians are always white, but yeah, the old men’s club. But at the beginning, say, in the 1920s, there was a lot of sexual freedom, and women did hold positions of power. It was quite advanced relative to the rest of the world, but as Stalin’s regime really sort of, you know, calcified, then that became less and less the case.
CB: Right. Well, this probably women’s group then it was founded in 1905 probably would have been part of the reason for that, for those first, you know, initial successive Venus retrogrades until Stalin comes to power and some of that repression sets in.
NDB: Yeah. You know, I mean, during the actual like, Bolshevik Civil War in the late, you know, after 1917 but before 1921, there are women soldiers who are doing serious damage. Like, they’re out there shooting! You know, with the men. And doing well at it, too – there’s a women’s death brigade and what have you. So yeah, you know, women also, as one does on the battlefield, sort of earns the status that you have after the war is over. So it does help, you know, if women are fighting in the battle, then women have more grounds to make claims once the fighting is over in terms of having a say in how things go.
CB: Right. So that was major in terms of Russia in 1905 and sets up not our earliest precedent, but certainly in terms of this Venus retrograde in Aries, precedent for our current times.
Elsewhere on February 13th, US President Theodore Roosevelt publicly addressed America’s racial problems in a rare acknowledgment of racial injustice at the time, which I thought was really striking, again, as like, setting up some of the later things that we would see during successive Venus retrogrades in Aries eventually culminating like, a century later with Obama’s inauguration under the 2009 Venus retrograde.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: March 17th, Franklin Roosevelt marries Eleanor Roosevelt, which is pretty significant as an event in history that you wouldn’t see the full impact of until later but would be very significant later on.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, Roosevelt – they get married in March of 1905. The new president is, of course, Eleanor’s uncle, and he gives her away because her father is dead. So he gives her away at the wedding. Eight years later in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson is elected, Wilson appoints FDR to be his Assistant Secretary of the Navy, which is FDR’s first job in the US government, and it’s the job that has him moving to Wahsington, D.C. For the first time.
CB: Oh yeah, I forgot we skipped that one in 1913.
NDB: Right. But I mean, it’s fine, because it does – you know, we go to 1905, we see his wedding. 1913, and he gets his first government job. 1921, we say, you know, as we said, he’s licking his wounds after having lost the 1920 election. 1929, he’s inaugurated as Governor of New York, and he’s learning how to walk again. 1937 sees him right in the middle of that second inauguration after a very – his biggest election victory, but right away into the hands of the court packing scandal, which is sort of the nadir of his whole, you know, 12-year presidency. And although it does resolve itself largely because the judges he’s up against wind up retiring one after the other over the course of 1938 and ‘39 and sort of, you know, take care of the problem themselves by going away. And then of course in 1945, he dies just as he’s winning the Second World War. So yeah, FDR is another one, you know, like say, Judy Garland or other people that we’ve looked at where that Venus retrograde, that recurring eight year repetition, is always a big deal in different ways and different themes but in a way that you can really set your watch to.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s really important and also important that here we see his union with Eleanor Roosevelt. And even though they seem like they drifted away in terms of their personal or romantic relationship possibly in later years, they were still very involved in each other’s lives and played crucial roles in terms of politics as this like, power couple in Washington, D.C. And then even after he died, she would go on to be involved in the creation of the United Nations and becoming I think, like, one of the first delegates to the United Nations, right?
NDB: Yeah. That’s correct. I say the one thing you said that probably isn’t correct is they weren’t close personally anymore, but they made an amazing team. Because she was sort of his legs and his eyes, so she would go into the country and she’d see this problem, that problem, this thing’s being done, that thing’s being done. And so she could report to him in a very sort of firsthand way about things that he should know. And so they made a really great team, but they really had their own lives, though, you know? At this point, it was if anything like, sort of a professional partnership. There was a lot of respect between the two of them, and you know, love in the sort of the non-romantic sense. But the romantic part of the marriage, you know, really ended in the nineteen teens around 1918, 1919 when she discovered he was having an affair with her secretary. And what happened was he went to Versailles for the Versailles Peace Conference after the war, and his mistress was writing him letters, and when he came home, he was sick and so Elanor was unpacking his luggage and she found these letters. That was really the end of the marriage as a sort of romantic union, but after some healing, they still had a formidable marriage as a sort of, yeah, power couple is definitely one way to put it. They were an amazing team, very cooperative, very respectful of each other, and really good at playing off each other’s strengths.
CB: Yeah. Well, they were married as Venus was slowing down to station retrograde in Taurus, and there was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Taurus at the time.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So that’s pretty incredible. All right. What else? Einstein we’ve talked about before, but 1905 is Einstein’s most important year. It’s commonly referred to in biographies as his “miracle year” where he publishes this string of papers that are all published in the early part of 1905 during the Venus retrograde largely when Venus retrogrades back into his 10th house, which is Aries. And he revolutionizes scientific understanding of several different areas having to do with space, time, mass, and energy, which sets up a lot of things interestingly, because one of the things he sets up is relativity and special relativity, and he develops the equations this year. Like, e = mc2, which interestingly later will lead to some of the things that eventually lead to like, the atomic bomb which is then developed finally in 1945.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Quite a journey. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s crucial in terms of Einstein and in terms of his role in history and this being a super crucial year for him. What else? Is there anything else? Those are actually the main things that I had for —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — for this.
NDB: That’s what I have. I don’t see anything much else for 1905.
CB: Okay.
NDB: You know, there were no Academy Awards yet, so!
CB: Right! All right, my friend. Somehow that is our last entry because that’s the very last – that’s the first Venus retrograde in Aries. So we have gone retrograde ourselves. You know, we could have done this different ways. We kind of chose to do it backwards at the last minute because I thought it would be easier for people to start with something familiar, which is like, the present, and then to work our way backwards in history. And I think it’s been a pretty wild journey where we’ve seen the repetition of these concepts and the development of it over time in this very interesting like, backwards motion through history.
NDB: Yeah, I’m glad we did it this way. I think it was an interesting idea, and I think it worked. And you’re right. Like, on the one hand, it allowed us to gradually move backward into periods that most people are less familiar with, but also I still like the idea that because we were doing Venus retrograde, we were actually moving forward in zodiacal order this whole time. So there is an element of forward motion even though we were chronologically going backwards.
CB: Right. So let me put up the slide just very quickly just to show you the retrograde dates for Venus retrograde in Aries again, just to give us the full scope of what we just did and what we’ve been through. These are all the Venus retrogrades in Aries that have occurred over the past century starting in 1905 all the way down to 2025. And in order to wrap things up, I wrote down as I was putting together some of this just some themes to summarize some of the main themes that we’ve encountered during the course of this journey.
So women, women’s rights, women’s themes. Venus in Aries especially like, strong-willed women. Fighting for women’s rights and other things like that I think has been a very clear theme during the course of these Venus retrogrades.
NDB: Yeah, for sure. Scandalous, experimental art.
CB: Scandalous things in like, especially like, pop culture, in celebrity culture. Just like scandal in general is definitely like, a theme.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Firsts. There have been tons of firsts. Like, especially for like, women and things related to gender or race or sexual orientation or other things like that.
NDB: And technology.
CB: Yeah. But then also, you know, by extension, even outside of that, lots of things for technology. Firsts I think is especially tied in with like, just Aries being the first sign.
There’s also been a lot of things related to speed, which has been funny to me, and like, flying, which is funny just because that was one of the main keywords that we came up with during the Aries episode was “speed.”
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Final preparations and retooling and redesign and optimization of something before a final rollout seems to be a major one with this retrograde.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Raw energy. Radical chic is a major one. Protests is just a huge one, as well as civil unrest during Venus retrogrades in general.
NDB: Mhmm.
CB: Firsts… There’s a recurring theme of like, politicians and public figures having their rise or their fall that seems to be connected with the Venus retrogrades. And we’ve seen some of that with like, more recently like, Justin Trudeau. We saw Charles de Gaulle. Sometimes I think it has to do with public opinion shifting either in favor of somebody or against somebody, and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing coinciding with the Venus retrogrades.
NDB: Yeah. It’s a changing consensus, you know? People changing their minds en masse.
CB: Right. And like, switching from one side to the other, and it’s like, sometimes you don’t know somebody and then all of a sudden you have a really favorable opinion of somebody, and they’ve become famous. And other times, you have somebody that you know that you think is favorable, but then the opinion switches and it switches to unfavorable just like Venus is switching sides relative to the Sun.
NDB: That’s absolutely right, yeah.
CB: All right. Other things – speed, solo things. Leaders seems to be a major one with this; I think this is partially because Aries is the sign of the exaltation of the Sun. The first to do something. Legendary comebacks has been a major, major one.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Protests. Courageous acts of civil disobedience like the Freedom Riders. Transgressing gender norms. Sometimes there’s places that have repetitions, like Waco – 1953 versus 1993. San Francisco – like, the two bridges.
NDB: Sure.
CB: “Sentimental Journey,” that song from 1945 I think is a good like, Venus retrograde song that’s gonna be relevant for a lot of people during Venus retrogrades. Establishing diplomatic relations. Forging international alliances. Creating diplomatic partnerships, et cetera. Venus —
NDB: Sagittarian rock guitarists being arrested for heroin possession in Toronto.
CB: That’s a universal experience, I think.
NDB: Right, yeah.
CB: Venus making little incremental progress in social movements each time. This is really visible in the women’s suffrage movement, especially in like, the early part of the 20th century, but really in the entire century, just the progress of women has been really striking in general. But it’s also true of civil rights as well as gay rights and other things like that.
NDB: Yeah. That turn of the century looks like no picnic in these areas. There was a lot of work to do.
CB: Right. Royalty and celebrity seem to be core themes with Venus retrograde and especially this particular retrograde. And then finally, the last one that I wrote down is pushing the limits, and pushing the limits of what is thought possible seems to be a really broad but important keyword for this particular Venus retrograde in Aries.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s always challenging that. That’s been very consistent as we’ve looked at all these.
CB: Yeah, because it’s like, when you’re pushing the limits, you’re doing something provocative. You’re doing something that is uncomfortable to some people, even if you think that’s right or you think that’s interesting or what have you. And sometimes that’s resulting in pushback. But then sometimes there’s that back and forth, but then eventually what was started during that time becomes normalized and becomes accepted eventually.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So is there anything else? Do you have any final thoughts? I know it’s always hard once we get to this point after very long day to think of like, concluding thoughts, but do you have any final things that you wanna wrap up this long presentation of this particular Venus retrograde cycle in Aries with?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, like we said at the beginning, I’ve been studying this one for a very, very, very long time. So you know, one would expect I would have some earth-shattering insight into some kind of undercurrent, but I think, you know, everything emerged over the course of the conversation. You can really see ultimately it’s a very sort of social phenomenon. It has to do with how we relate to each other, with what individual standards are, how we feel about the present, what our aspirations for the future are, and how we expect society to accommodate us, how we’re prepared to accommodate others – all these things sort of come into play. And I think it always demonstrates just how differently we all see the world in our own ways and how we, you know, we have competing priorities that somehow fight it out in this weird little marketplace. And the Venus retrograde cycle is that arena where that fight happens, I think.
CB: Right. I like the duality of how the Venus retrograde sometimes refers back to something that happened in the past and it can connect you to something that happened eight years ago or something that happened 16 years ago or whatever different multiples of eight for Venus and bring things back from the past. But then it can also set a new foundation for the future, and that’s often a lot of what we’re seeing with a lot of these firsts is it would be a first for something where there was something new or something provocative. But it would create a foundation, then, which would be built on in eight year increments going forward from there. So the duality of the backwards-looking motion of Venus that is, you know, looking backwards versus the forward-looking motion of Venus at the same time is an interesting one to hold. I’m really interested and excited now that we’ve got this whole new Venus retrograde we’re about to experience. We’re already starting to see some news stories that we’ve identified as being important, but there’s gonna be a whole lot of other ones that are gonna come up over the next few months. So it’ll be really great for us to watch and study as a community now that we’ve looked back and we have our eyes open and we know what to look for; I think that’s gonna make it a lot easier to identify some of the major themes of this retrograde going forward.
NDB: That is the aim. That’s why we made such a long, detailed episode on this topic is for exactly that reason – to drive these points home, and see how they resonated over a course of 120 years, which is just amazing. That’s how long it takes, basically, for Venus to move from one sign to another entirely. So it was a really good span for us to pick, even if it was epic in length like one of those house episodes that we’ve been doing.
CB: Right.
NDB: And that we’ll be returning to doing! Isn’t that right, Chris?
CB: The 5th house. I’ve been putting – yeah, this is me procrastinating about doing the 5th house episode is doing like, an eight hour episode on Venus retrograde in Aries with you.
NDB: Right. Way to procrastinate!
CB: Yeah. Pray —
NDB: Expert.
CB: Pray that I do not procrastinate further, my friend. 120 years – that brings something full circle that you said at the very beginning of this, which is that because Venus takes a full 120 years to retrograde through an entire sign, that sets up generations of people that experience Venus retrograde in certain parts of their chart or they experienced the retrograde of Venus through a singular sign during the course of their lifetime, but how that then can be different for different groups of people that experience different centuries of Venus retrograde in a different place and can set up completely different cultural experiences of Venus, which is really interesting to think about in terms of the big picture of mundane astrology and the experience of different humans during different centuries.
NDB: Yeah! I really believe that. The thing I was hinting at earlier – in the 19th century, you have Venus retrogrades in Taurus and Libra. In the 20th century, you have Venus retrogrades in Aries and Scorpio. That might tell us something really fundamental about the different between people born in the Victorian era and people born in the 20th century, and you know, certainly if you ever read Victorian novels, those people were sure different from us, so. Yeah. It’s a really interesting way to look at different eras in human history and give yourself tools that allow you to distinguish these different characteristics that they have.
CB: That’s interesting, because it also means that people like, anybody born with like, the Sun in Aries in March let’s say in the 20th century all experienced this Venus retrograde in Aries consistently, whereas in the coming century now that Venus is starting to retrograde back into Pisces, it’s starting to emerge that, which is gonna be 120 years of like, Venus moving through the sign of Pisces and emphasizing, you know, a completely different sign and different people born in different parts of the year experiencing that so differently.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, there was a Venus retrograde in Pisces back in the late 19th century; it’s the one that is now in Capricorn. It moved into Aquarius in much of the 20th century, and now it’s in Capricorn. But for instance, Lenin had, you know, Venus retrograde in Pisces, even though it’s not the same cycle as the one we’re in now. It’s another tip of the starpoint, the one that’s, yeah, headed for Capricorn now. So it does, that’s the way these retrogrades move – backward through the signs and eventually they come back into a sign where they were a little while earlier. You know, it’s funny – in 1492 when Columbus, you know, when America discovered Columbus as it were, Venus was retrograde in Scorpio at the time. But it was 1492, so you know that wasn’t obviously the retrograde where Venus is retrograde in Scorpio now. That was the retrograde that is currently in Gemini, because over the course of that 500 plus years, that’s how far back that particular star point has gone – from Scorpio all the way back to Gemini. So it does travel continuously.
CB: But one of your things is that because of the eight year repetition that you truly believe that the arm of the star that you keep tracking it, and that that maintains the repetition from earlier periods even when it crosses into new signs, so that for you, this is partially or primarily a technique that’s actually independent of zodiac even though I’ve been emphasizing the zodiacal component so much in this episode.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s an either/or situation. The zodiacal component is important insofar as over the course of a human lifetime, if you live to be 80 years old, you’re basically gonna feel the Venus retrogrades in the same five signs. They’ll travel somewhat over the course of that lifetime, but it’ll basically seem almost stable. But if you wanna study the cycle over the course of several hundred years, then it really is handy to have a system that is independent of the zodiac so that you can follow it on its own course, and that you’re not reliant on the zodiac being your only frame of reference for you to follow those points. And there certainly is something to it. Like, those points have a relevance of their own astrologically speaking. It does matter, you know, even if Catherine the Great had it when – was born when it was in Gemini and then, you know, her son’s killed when it’s in Taurus and her great-grandson’s killed when it’s in Taurus and then by the time the people who killed her great-great-great-grandson, by the time he dies, it’s in Aries. But it’s that same repetition has been going on for those hundreds of years. And that is something that I’ve found is really worth following. But it’s not instead of the zodiac; it’s just, it’s another frame of reference that you can use. And that’s really the main purpose behind it is so that you can follow it over a long period of time.
CB: Right. That makes sense. One of the things I have to say – I was skeptical about going into this, as I’ve always focused more on the Venus retrograde in terms of the shadow degrees. You know, the degree that it will retrograde back to or passing the degree afterwards. So I always thought that the Venus retrograde period was most intense during the retrograde itself, that like, 40 days, but then it would extend outwards a little bit to the pre- and post-shadow degrees where there would be a series of events that would like, build up to and set up the retrograde. And then there would be like, a cool-off or a come-down period after the retrograde. And then I extended that at a certain point to the entire sign that Venus will retrograde through, whether that’s just one sign or two signs, which extended the period considerably when it was – like, in this instance this year, two signs, so that it starts in like, early January and it goes all the way until June. And I’d always been I don’t wanna say “skeptical,” but I hadn’t paid much attention to the period of maximum elongation as being tied in with that. But I will say that I went into this skeptical of that, but then by the end of this research and putting this together with you today, I’ve emerged sort of convinced that the degrees of maximum elongation are also very important in terms of this work. And I also just think it’s stunning that we accidentally ended up scheduling this on the day of maximum elongation, because that was completely accidental.
NDB: Right. Right. Well, I mean, the other thing about the maximum elongation – because there are two of them that straddle either side of the retrograde – and if you consider that period of time, the 50 or so days prior to the station, the 40 days-ish of the actual retrograde, and then the other 50 days – it’s a total of 156 days more or less, if you take it in total. That 146 days is pretty much exactly five percent of the total eight year cycle. So you really can divide the eight year cycle into these 20 equal parts, and five of those parts are these retrogrades that begin and end with maximum elongation. So what I’m saying is mathematically, this is all just so symmetrical and even, and even sort of easy to divide into these subdivisions that are relatively equidistant. So yeah, the sort of, the mathematical perfection of all this is also kind of amazing. And that’s something else to consider when you’re using the maximum elongation as the ultimate goalposts if you will of this cycle is that mathematically they put you at this very distinct percentage that is in itself symmetrical to the rest of the cycle, you know? Like, even the fractions are. So it’s remarkable for that as well.
CB: And that’s one of your primary innovations is you developed this study, system for classifying the different Venus retrograde phases based on the maximum elongation.
NDB: Yeah. This is a system I’ve designed. The letters in the middle – that’s a 10-fold division system, and the letters – the A, B, C, D, E, the black and white – those are the phases. Those just tell you if Venus is in a morning or evening star sort of state, regardless of visibility. Just if it precedes the Sun or follows the Sun in zodiacal order.
And then the numbers on the outside – as you can see, there are 20 of them, and they’re in four colors. The red intervals are the intervals that begin and end with maximum elongation and have the Venus retrograde in the middle. You can see in the middle of the red interval, a white – sorry. I’m going backwards! The black interval, C, is turning into the white – the black phase C, I am tired. And the —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — white phase A are at the midpoint of that Red Two in the top right corner. So it’s going from evening star to morning star during a red interval. The white intervals are just regular morning star. The blue intervals are where the exterior conjunctions happen when Venus is on the other side of the Sun and it’s making a conjunction to the Sun in a geocentric context but not retrograde. And then the black intervals are evening stars.
So these are perfect – like, each one of those intervals is five percent of the total 20-fold division. As you can see, that is symmetrical and nicely divided into these four parts that themselves repeat in a sequence.
CB: So —
NDB: So —
CB: — the long and short of it is that the one that we’ve just focused on, which for most of the 20th century coincided with Venus retrograde in Aries, is what you call in your system “Red One,” right?
NDB: Correct. Yeah. It’s moving counterclockwise, so it’s going from the Red One to the White Five to the Blue Four to the Black Three. But yes, the Venus retrograde in Aries in the 20th century is the Red One. And then a year and half later, the Red Two is the Venus retrograde in Scorpio. A year and a half after that, the Red Three is the Venus retrograde in Gemini. That will happen in 2028. The Red Four is the Venus retrograde in Capricorn that we last had in 2022; we’ll have again in 2030. And then the Red Five is the Venus retrograde in Leo; we just had that in 2023, and we’re gonna have it again in 2031.
So yeah, these are the intervals that I identify with those particular Venus retrogrades. But again, when you go into past centuries, the Red One used to be in Taurus, and before that it was in Gemini. So this just gives me a means to follow the cycle independently of the zodiac. And it works really well, and it’s not hard to learn.
CB: Nice.
NDB: And I do have a video on my YouTube channel called “An Introduction to the Venus Synodic Cycle” that does explain this in more detail than we’ve done here.
CB: Nice. Yeah. I would recommend people checking that out for more information about your classification system, but I think now we can all see and understand more your motivation for why you wanted to create that system in order to be able to track this cycle across centuries independent of what sign of the zodiac it was going through since it shifts —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — during the course of a century.
NDB: Exactly. And yeah, Astro-Seek is a place where you can calculate these intervals and phases very well. Petr’s been very accommodating with that. He got right on it as soon as I put out the video in 2022. And of course, we’re coming out with Nechepso astrology software, which will be out soon, and it’s gonna be calculating the Venus intervals and phases as well. So if you are signed up to use Nechepso, then you’ll have another, you know, piece of technology to help you study this beautiful cycle and give it context.
CB: Where is it on Astro-Seek? Or what is it called? I mean, I know you can google “astro-seek Venus cycle” —
NDB: Venus – yeah, it’s Venus Phases and Intervals. That’s what it’s called on Astro-Seek. Go to Planetary Phases and Venus Phases and Intervals, because that’s what it is. It’s a map of the Venus phases and intervals. So go to Astro Tools, and then down to Planetary Cycles. And then after Planetary Cycles, you select that, and then go for Venus Phases and Intervals underneath Optional Calendars and Cycles.
CB: There it is. Okay. So here I see a system where it’s labeling it based on phases, and it’s calling it White E, Black C, et cetera.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
CB: Nice.
NDB: Yeah. Those are the phases, and then there’s also the intervals, which are the 20-fold color ones.
CB: Oh, and it has a nice little explanation just below that as well as a little picture of you from a podcast interview we did.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: Nice.
NDB: Last time I was in Denver.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah. Looking good!
CB: Good times.
NDB: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that, and yeah, like I said, Nechepso will have that as well, so I’m looking forward to that. And thank you. Thank you for, you know, giving me the chance to, you know, lay that all out and explain it. And yeah, this exercise has made it hopefully more clear to people why I designed that thing and how I use it.
CB: Yeah. That was brilliant. This has been fun going through all of this with you and doing this sort of historical research and hopefully creating a new foundation for further Venus retrograde stories in the future.
So everybody should let us know in the comments what you think and if you find other interesting Venus retrograde things from history or repetitions that we didn’t notice. Definitely let us know in the comments, and we will use this as a foundation to build up even more understanding of Venus retrograde in the future as we go into this new Venus retrograde that’s starting over the next few months.
NDB: Yeah. And probably in 18 months’ time, we do an episode on Venus retrograde in Scorpio. The Red Two.
CB: Yeah, that would be great to just do this every time we have a new one, because the Venus retrograde in Leo was so loud last time that it really got me into Venus retrogrades and looking at the history even more. And so that was why I really wanted to do that for this one.
We’ll also have to check in at the end of this retrograde at like, this summer, and just like, summarize everything that’s happened and see what we’ve learned and how that tied in ultimately with historical events.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot for joining me. What’s your website? NickDaganBestAstrologer.com?
NDB: I’m at NickDaganBestAstrologer.com! Good lord, I’m tired! NickDaganBestAstrologer.com. I’m available for consultations. I believe we have a promo code that we keep forgetting to mention on yours —
CB: We don’t actually. We don’t use promo codes anymore. But just that you do consultations for Venus retrograde especially.
NDB: Okay. All right! Yeah. I’d forgotten whether or not we did that. Okay. I stand corrected. But yes, I am available for Venus retrograde readings or anything else going on. Yeah, certainly if you have a lot of planets in Aries, you may very well want to speak to me soon.
CB: That’s right!
NDB: I’ll leave it to you to decide, yes.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: It might be useful.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, thanks for joining me, Nick. I appreciate it.
NDB: All right, thank you, Chris. Thank you again. I love it, as always. These marathons are challenging but always rewarding.
CB: For sure. Awesome. All right, well, thanks everyone for watching this episode and sticking with us. Good luck in this Venus retrograde, and we’ll see you again next time.
[END CREDITS]
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