The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 476, titled:
February Astrology Forecast 2025
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on January 29, 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. In this episode, Austin Coppock is joining me, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrology of February 2025. Hey Austin – welcome.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah. I’m glad to be back. Our last episode was the big year ahead forecast episode a month ago, and now we’re gonna get back into the details by looking at the astrology of February, and we have a lot to talk about this month, yeah?
AC: Indeed we do. And we have a lot looking forward and a lot looking back. January had some headlines. Did you hear about anything happening in January?
CB: I didn’t. You’ll have to tell me. Has the news been busy, or has it been a slow news month?
AC: You know what? There have been a few things. I wrote them down for you. Maybe, you know, I’ll surprise you. There’s like —
CB: Okay.
AC: — one less great US city than there used to be.
CB: Right? All right. Well, we’re off to a good four years then, I guess, if it’s only one currently. All right.
AC: You got —
CB: So —
AC: — a couple left.
CB: Yeah. All right, so in this episode, we’re gonna spend the first hour talking about news and events that happened since our last forecast a month ago and talking about the astrological correlations with those news stories.
Then in the second half of this episode, we’re gonna jump into a deep dive into the astrology of February and looking at the astrological aspects and alignments that are coming up over the course of the next month. So as always, there’s gonna be timestamps on The Astrology Podcast website or in the description below this YouTube video if you wanna jump ahead to the forecast. But first, before we get to the news, I wanna give just a quick overview of the astrology of February.
So first, here’s the Planetary Aspects Calendar for this month that was designed by Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co, and it shows some of the different major alignments that are gonna take place during the course of the month, when they go exact, and the different orbs for when they’re getting close and so on and so forth. And here’s the actual Planetary Aspects and Alignments Calendar for February from our wall calendar for The Astrology Podcast. So right at the top of the month, we have a Neptune-Venus conjunction on February 1st in the sign of Pisces. Venus is slowing down and has already entered its shadow degrees where it’s preparing to go retrograde in Aries next month, so most of February is that process of slowing down and stationing retrograde.
Then on February 4th, Venus moves into Aries, which is the sign it will go retrograde in. And the same day, Jupiter stations direct in the sign of Gemini, and this is its last station in that sign before it zooms over the next several months through the rest of Gemini and heads into Cancer later this year.
The following week, there’s a Mercury cazimi when it conjoins the Sun on the 9th of February. Then the very next day, there’s a Mercury-Uranus square. The day after that, a Sun-Uranus square on the 12th – or on the 11th, I should say.
The following day, there’s a Full Moon conjunct – a Full Moon in Leo that is squaring Uranus. So it’s a very disruptive, unexpected Full Moon energy that we’re gonna be experiencing around the middle of the month.
Two days later, Mercury goes into Pisces on the 14th. Then a few days after that, the Sun moves into Pisces on the 18th. Mercury squares Jupiter on the 20th. Mars slows down finally in Cancer and stations direct on the 23rd of February, which is one of our most significant transits this month besides Jupiter stationing direct in Gemini.
Then Mercury conjoins Saturn on the 25th, and then finally we get our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in Pisces on the 27th of February.
So those are some of the major alignments that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. But first, let’s get to the news, and let’s talk about some major news and other stories that have been happening over the course of the past month.
So there was a ton of news stories this month, and honestly, there’s way more than we can actually cover in this episode. So we’re just gonna try to do as many as we can and we’re gonna focus just on news stories that we noticed a really compelling astrological correlation with, since this is an astrology show primarily and that’s gonna be our primary sorting mechanism is just ones where we noticed an interesting astrological correlation. And we’re gonna go through chronologically, roughly, starting in late December and early January and then working our way forward through the month.
So in terms of the first events and the first stories in our list, the major thing that we opened the year with was this really tense Mars-Pluto opposition that happened at the very beginning of January. And that energy was very much present on New Year’s Eve, because the Moon swooped in and activated both of those planets in that opposition on New Year’s Eve night. And as a result of that, there was actually three major stories that coincided all around the same time with that energy.
So I had noted last fall when we first started talking about this opposition that sometimes when I was looking at past history that it had come up during acts of like, terrorism or other things like that. And indeed, that night one of the news stories was in New Orleans there was this guy who drove through a group of pedestrians on New Year’s Eve, killing more than 15 people and injuring more than 30. And it was this like, gruesome sort of horrific not accident, but attack that happened on New Year’s Eve. Did you see that, Austin?
AC: Yeah, I did. It was hard to miss it. That and the fact that it was paired with another car-based sort of act of terror at the same time made it, yeah, difficult to ignore. Just a little bit about that Mars-Pluto. So you know, with Mars, we sort of have the whole host of aggressive actions, and with Mars we – although Mars’s sphere extends outside of war, we do have all of the like, weapons and armor and attack and defense of war. But when Mars, as you know, is paired with Pluto, we get violence that seems nihilistic, right? Or pointless. You know, I’m sure the person who did that attack thought they had a point, but did that really, did that make a point? Did that advance a human cause? Like, no, not really. And that’s very common with Mars-Pluto is these acts that just seem like nihilistic acts of violence. Pluto sometimes robs things or conceals any sort of reason or meaning. It’s just, you know, with Mars-Pluto, it’s just the violence without the “Well, we’re attacking or defending, and we’re fighting over a thing.” You just have the sort of violence hanging in the void.
CB: Yeah. Because Mars is already – in ancient astrology was – the planet of war and violence, and then Pluto takes things to extremes. So you get like, extreme acts of violence and destruction happening under hard configurations between those two planets. So there was that attack in New Orleans, but then also as you mentioned, in Las Vegas there was a guy who took a Tesla cybertruck and parked it in front of Trump Hotel in Vegas, and he blew up a bomb there and also committed suicide basically at the same time in what was also seen as a sort of terrorist act at the time, although later some of the officials, the police, were saying that he wrote a suicide note and it appears to have partially been like, a suicide. And there was a lot of weird ambiguity surrounding that and what that was all about.
AC: Yeah, it seemed very strange. I didn’t get to the bottom of it, and it didn’t seem like the bottom of it was available, which is also another Pluto thing where things are, you know, there’s a level of mystery/senselessness. Where it’s like, was there a hidden reason, or am I in error in looking for a reason and assuming that there are things that will make this totally make sense?
CB: Yeah. He was trying to convey some sort of message, but weirdly in some of his notes, he seemed to support Trump and Musk, so it wasn’t clear ultimately like, what his point was. But it was just another very striking image that we basically opened the year with right on that Mars-Pluto opposition. And then we kind of thought that that was it, or those were the major news stories, but then days later, one of the things that began at the very beginning of the year that was also tied in with the Mars-Pluto opposition is that these fires started in Los Angeles. And they’re still investigating the origins of the fires, but one of the reports I read in The Washington Post at one point said that they were investigating that a fire had been started on New Year’s Eve as a result of fireworks, and that they put that fire out, but there was the possibility that it may have reignited days later, which sometimes happens as a result of winds. So we’re still not clear like, if that’s true or what the origins of the fires truly were, but it would be interesting if those fires started also on the Mars-Pluto opposition on New Year’s Eve or had their origins there. But regardless of what happened, there were these huge fires that began in Los Angeles days later, and then that’s been one of the major catastrophes that happened this month.
AC: Oh yeah. Well, and they may or may not have started on that Mars-Pluto opposition, but they began terrifyingly visible just as soon as Mars retrograded back into Cancer, which was another very important Mars thing early in January. Mars retrograded back into Cancer on the 6th. The fires are reported and already raging by the 7th. And so that’s a very important ingress or regress, because Mars will be in Cancer until the 17th of April. It’s gotta a extended period of time there. And it’s one of those – the extensive damage, right? Like, we’ve got – as of this point, where not all of the fires are out, it certainly seems like the worst is over, but that doesn’t mean that everything is over. We’ve got, let’s see – there were some 200,000 people that were displaced so far as a result, coming up on 18,000 structures destroyed. Let’s see. At least 29 people have been killed. There are a number that are still missing. You know, it just basically destroyed all of Altadena. It’s completely transformed the Palisades, and there are also spots of destruction from smaller fires in other places in Los Angeles. You know, it’s changed the face of the city in a way that we won’t probably fully understand for years. But one of the things that’s like, too easy astrologically and unfortunately right on the nose is that Cancer is the sign ruled by the Moon; it’s the place of like, home, comfort, safety, nurturance. And so Mars – the red planet, the burner – coming into Cancer and that correlating with the destruction of, you know, tens of thousands of homes is, you know, it’s unfortunately too literal, as we often see with the astrology.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I had used the analogy when we were talking about, you know, Mars retrograde and how it just like, Mars is so slow and it just like, extends a Mars transit. So the stretching it out over this extended period of time, what is usually like, a very quick transit, and so I used the analogy of like, eating a really spicy hot sauce and then having the burning in your mouth that just like, won’t go away for an extended period of time. And I was really struck watching the news stories how one of the things with the fires is that it was like, fires, which is usually something that burns up quick and then goes away, but these fires were like, extended over an extended period of time, and they were struggling to get them under control as they spread to different areas and how that symbolism of like, Mars retrograde in Cancer was these fires that were just out of control and burning for an extended period of time.
AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that these fires got started and burned through the sort of peak or center of the Mars retrograde, which is where Mars is as close to earth as it gets and also as bright and visible for the entirety of the night. So it’s like, most visible, closest, brightest, this period. The center of that Mars retrograde was on January 15th, and the days leading up to that saw the Full Moon in Cancer, which is usually quite nice, quite comfortable, quite moist and refreshing, instead exacerbate that Mars, because the Full Moon was conjunct that Mars retrograde. And so instead of putting out fires, it threw lunar gasoline on them.
CB: Yeah. That’s really striking.
AC: Yeah. Go ahead.
CB: One of the things I noticed was astrologers were noting that in the incorporation chart for Los Angeles that Mars is actually in Cancer in that chart, which is set for April 4th, 1850. And Mars is at nine degrees of Cancer in that chart. But what I was really struck by is Mars had been retrograde earlier in that year, and it had actually gone retrograde in Cancer and Gemini over the months like, leading up to this incorporation. So that means somehow this Mars retrograde that happened in Cancer this year was tying back to this previous Mars retrograde in the incorporation chart of the city itself.
AC: Yeah, that’s wild. And you see that Mars is retrograde back into Cancer, puts it right on the Ascendant of the incorporation chart. Like, bringing that fire to the doorstep.
CB: Yeah. I mean, this is a noon chart, but for sure that as well as, you know, this huge Aries stellium that’s in the Los Angeles chart itself that includes like, Mercury, Saturn, Sun, Venus, Uranus, and Pluto all together in a line. So yeah. So that was a major thing that happened, and the impact of that is still being felt. I mean, one of the things that was notable —
AC: The fires aren’t still all out as of this recording. There’s still some burning.
CB: Okay. Yeah. And one of the things in the news, because we also have the Venus retrograde that’s heating up because at the beginning of January, Venus moved into Pisces, which is the sign it will retrograde back to. And so in some ways, I started seeing a bunch of Venus retrograde stories coming up at this time as well, and it reminded me of the last Venus retrograde in 2023 when there was the fires in Hawaii during that Venus retrograde in Leo. And then for this one, of course, what was really striking in the news was that there were so many well known celebrities who had homes in Los Angeles whose houses burned down during the course of this. So there were pictures of that in addition to just the, you know, thousands and thousands of other just regular people who also lost their homes at that time.
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to separate it from the kind of unrelated but somehow still related difficulties that the entertainment industry has been going through, which I would say seem like Saturn-Neptune things. But you know, a lot of the big production companies, production and distribution companies, have been having a hard time making money. People aren’t going to the theaters. The business models are changing. Tastes are changing. Like, there’s this sort of – it’s actually really interesting to see that LA chart, because it feels like a Saturn return for Hollywood as an industry. And I see now looking at that chart that the city of Los Angeles was founded with or incorporated with Saturn in Aries, and so it’s about to have a Saturn return. And that’s separate from the Mars thing as an indicator of fires, but it seems like there are portents gathering around LA. That’s unfortunate.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
AC: It was —
CB: So —
AC: — as someone who lived there for five plus years, it was, you know, it was strange to see. Like, oh, yeah, I remember going to someone’s house in Altadena; I wonder if it’s still there. Oh, I remember taking a trip out to the Palisades. I remember the Santa Ana winds, right? Which are very strange if you haven’t experienced them. My memory of them is driving up to North Hollywood to go to kung fu class and there’d just be weird, fierce, hot wind blowing, which usually the wind is cool. You know, usually like, ooh, it’s a breeze! Right? Ooh, or it’s like, a wind that bites or cuts. But it’s this weird wind that blows off the desert, and you know, it doesn’t look like a windy day. It doesn’t look stormy. You just get like, these bursts of hot wind coming from nowhere.
CB: Well, and that was why the fire spread so quickly, right? Because of the winds. There’s these crazy winds and there were just these crazy almost like, apocalyptic pictures and like, video coming out during the early phases of the fire about this like, fiery inferno that was moving so fast and consuming so many different homes. And it reminded me of the Mars retrograde in Aries in 2020 when there was also these huge forest fires on the west coast and we just saw these pictures from like, San Francisco and other areas where —
AC: Oh yeah, we had one get within about six miles of the house then.
CB: Yeah. Well, the sky was just completely red so that it looked like you were on Mars from some of those pictures at the time.
AC: Yeah. And it was that same combination of crazy wind. We had one climb maybe 20 miles in one afternoon, just zipped right up the five and destroyed I think about 5,000 structures within 15 miles of me. That was right on the Mars retrograde station square Saturn.
CB: Wow. Okay. All right. Well, I wanna keep going since we got a lot —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — to cover. But so one of the things that happened is that the Venus – with the Venus retrograde that was striking that – and the fires – is that it actually delayed the Academy Award nominations. And Nick Dagan Best and I just released a whole seven hour deep dive where we went through the past century of this Venus retrograde which recurs every eight years, and we looked at the entire past century all the way back to when it started in 1905. And we kept finding that there were these important turning points in the Academy Awards where there was often some controversy or some first or some turning point in the Academy Award history whenever this Venus retrograde happened. And of course, this Academy Awards is about to happen the day after Venus stations retrograde at the very beginning of March. The station is March 1st, and the Academy Awards are March 2nd. So the fires, the impact of the fires, will no doubt feature prominently there. And it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. Like, eight years ago the last time this Venus retrograde happened was when in 2017 they called the wrong movie for Best Picture at the end, and there was this huge controversy because they called up the wrong people and then they had to fix it. Like, Jimmy Kimmel had to come out and say, “No, there’s been a mistake,” and then they brought the actual winners up on stage and it was this huge debacle. So it will be interesting to see how that goes here. In preparation for that, one of the news stories that happened this month on January 5th is the Golden Globes happened. And that night, Demi Moore and Jodie Foster both won awards the same night, and I found this really striking because they were both born the same year only a week apart, and they both were born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio. So I had actually talked about their charts as Venus retrograde examples back in a Venus retrograde episode in 2003, so I was really interested to see both of them winning these awards on the same night as Venus was getting ready to go retrograde in Pisces. And that night, transiting Venus – because they were born only a week apart, they both have Jupiter at three degrees of Pisces in the same place. And what’s interesting is that Demi Moore was born with Pisces rising, and Jodie Foster was born with Sagittarius rising, so they both have Jupiter ruling their Ascendant, and it’s placed at the same degree at three degrees of Pisces. And that night when they both won the award, transiting Venus was exactly at three degrees of Pisces conjoining both of their natal Jupiters. So it was this really interesting instance of like, what’s more broadly known as time twins, which is when two people are born at the same time and have roughly the same chart. And even though they were born a week apart, so it’s not quite an exact instance of time twins, it’s similar in concept because it’s like, you know, sometimes skeptics will argue about time twins and say, “Well, two people are born with the same chart have different destinies, so therefore astrology doesn’t work.” But the reality is what happens is that sometimes you’ll see these overlaps in the two people’s chronology at very important turning points in their life, and that’s what we saw here with Demi Moore and Jodie Foster when they won this award the same ni8ght.
AC: Yeah, that’s great. And also, I don’t know, it makes me want to try to pick winners based on transits because the ruler of the Ascendant having a transiting conjunction from Venus like that is sort of as directly as astrology could describe getting an award. You know, we talk about like, luxuries and pleasures and art and relationships with Venus, but awards? Like, getting a golden thing for being awesome is also very much a classical indication of Venus. If you look at Hellenistic delineations – I’m thinking of Firmicus – for good Venus positions, he talks about how, you know, this person will be the winner of prizes. They will be congratulated for their work. They will get wreaths, et cetera, et cetera. Because Venus is like, you know, another thing Venus gives is pleasant social recognition or positive social recognition. It’s like, “You’re great!” Right? Like, that’s a Venus thing.
CB: Yeah. Like an affirmation of you and what you’re all about.
AC: Yeah. What a great job you did! Here’s an extra prize. Right? You already got paid for it, like, everything’s already happened, but here’s extra. Right? That’s the quality, that benefic quality.
CB: Yeah. So and with Demi Moore in particular, now she’s favored as potentially the favorite actress to win the Academy Award at the Oscars for Best Actress. And it’s interesting because she had Pisces rising, so this Venus retrograde of course is gonna be going through her first house where it’s the most prominent. And it was interesting – I loved that because in the year ahead forecast when I was trying to describe this Venus retrograde and how Venus will go retrograde in Pisces and then it will conjoin Saturn, I was talking about like, a woman who is like, exalted in status and was eminent but who was successful despite struggling with issues related to like, time or health or age or other topics like that. And that’s like, interestingly, kind of similar to the theme of The Substance itself, the movie that she was in, which is very Venus retrograde-y, and it was interesting how that ended up playing out there and will play out just during the course of seeing this award season and seeing this movie and seeing her become very prominent at this time for different reasons.
AC: Yeah. Nice. It’s been on my list for about a month and I haven’t gotten around to it. I will definitely watch The Substance.
CB: I think you will like it. I think you’ll like it a lot.
AC: I saw a review and I was like, “I know I’m gonna like this.”
CB: Right. All right. So we’ll return to that more, and I may do a whole separate episode on like, the Oscars and the astrology because there’s a lot of interesting stuff with different movies that are nominated that are all very Venus retrograde-y this year, including like, The Substance, Anora, the musical that’s getting so many awards – the lead actress in that has a interesting Sun-Mercury conjunction on the degree that Venus will station. So I’ll save that for another time.
All right. Moving on. Another major event that happened is former President Jimmy Carter died on December 29th, 2024. And this was really striking because this ended up being another Venus retrograde story partially because he came into office in 1977 during the Venus retrograde in Aries and the buildup to that. So he ended up passing away then basically, and then his funeral was held as Venus was again slowing down and preparing to go retrograde in Aries as one of those eight year repetitions.
So his funeral was held in early January, and the flag was actually at half staff during the inauguration this year due to his death, which was really striking that imagery of being a Venus retrograde eight year repetition and him coming into office when Venus was at that same place in 1977, and then having Venus recur and having the flag be at half staff after his passing away.
So it was not just that, but also some of the things that happened during his administration also starting coming up and becoming relevant again in the news when Trump, for example, started talking about the Panama Canal, which was sold during the Carter administration back to Panama. So there’s all these weird Venus retrograde repetitions happening right now in the news.
AC: Yeah. You can see it coming. You can feel it coming, too, but you can also see the evidence in the news feed.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, and Venus – I don’t know if you saw it, but Venus reached its maximum elongation around January 10th, which is when it gets the furthest from the Sun just before as it’s preparing to station retrograde and it gets the brightest. And it was just super bright. It’s still pretty bright at this point, but it was really, really bright around the early to mid-January, and it was conjunct Saturn in the sky. So you could see Venus as this really brilliant like, brightest star in the sky, and it was right next to this really dim star which was Saturn.
AC: Yeah, there’s been some good skywatching in January. That Full Moon with bright Mars – it was Mars at its brightest right next to the Moon at its brightest.
CB: Right. All right. So moving on. The other major thing was TikTok’s closure and temporary reopening. And I was paying attention to this partially because I decided to post my horoscopes on TikTok for the first time at the end of December and beginning of January, and they did really well. But that made it so that I was paying more attention to TikTok than I have at any time in the past. And one of the things I noticed is that the site was scheduled to close on the 19th of January, and as soon as the Sun got within 10 degrees of a conjunction with Pluto, there was just this impending sense of doom and like, dread that suddenly swept over that entire place when all of them realized that this was actually happening. And the Supreme Court issued a decision, basically, around that time that said they weren’t gonna stop it from closing. So it was really striking in the build-up to that Sun-Pluto conjunction what the vibe was of like, this thing could actually die. And different people who had put so many hundreds of hours and days of work into creating their profiles and videos there and having whole businesses based on it having to face the possibility of losing that – it was really striking. And then on January 18th, it actually closed, and that night as it closed, the Venus-Saturn conjunction actually went exact in Pisces in the sky, which was really striking to watch. But then the very next day, it reopened with a note thanking Donald Trump for helping to bring it back. But it turned out that once he got back into office, he signed an executive order to give it a 75-day extension, but he’s asking for a lot. He’s asking for like, half of the company or something exorbitant like that, so it’s not actually clear if they’re gonna work out a deal and if it’s permanently back at this point. And it’s actually not available in the Apple app store, so people can’t sign up for it. And if people deleted the app, which a lot of people apparently did when it closed, they can’t get back into it.
So there’s these ongoing negotiations, and it’s not really clear if it will be back for good. And what’s interesting is that Venus is gonna go retrograde and the day that it stations – or not the day that it stations, but it’s gonna retrograde back and conjoin Saturn on the day that the 75-day extension ends so that there’s gonna be this weird recurrence where Venus conjoined Saturn the first night it closed, and then Venus is gonna be conjoining Saturn again when that second extension hits.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And it also makes a lot of sense that social networking, these types of sites, would answer to Venus. Right? It’s a network of people who are, you know, it’s inherently social and therefore under Venus’s dominion. You know, there’s a communicative, informational, mercurial part of it, but it’s really about people, right? And it’s about connecting what you’re doing to people. It’s about, you know, with there’s also a lot of trying to charm people or look cool or do something that entertains people, right? It’s all very – it’s all anchored very clearly in the Venusian sphere. And you have some history that suggests the same where we have the fates of other social networks being sealed on crucial Venus moments as well.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it’s literally called “social networking,” you know, as sites, and that social aspect of Venus is really important. So once I started paying attention to Venus retrograde stuff and I saw that Venus-Saturn conjunction, and I realized this was tied into the retrograde, I decided to look back eight years earlier and see what happened. And it turned out that eight years earlier almost to the exact day on January 17th, Vine closed, which was like, the video precursor to TikTok where people could do Vines which were – what were they? They were just like, five seconds long or 10 seconds or something incredibly short, of like, short social media videos. But it was a huge phenomenon that a lot of younger people used and a lot of younger creators got their start doing video content in that eventually TikTok was inspired by when it started a few years later and then became wildly successful by 2019 and 2020. So Vine was like, the predecessor to TikTok, and it closed almost exactly eight years to the day to when TikTok shut down initially. So that was one repetition, but then I decided to take it back further, and I was like, well, what happened eight years before that in early 2009 the last time Venus was going retrograde in Aries and Pisces? And it turns out that that’s when everybody was, there was this mass exodus where everybody was leaving the most popular social network up to that point in the 200s, which was MySpace, and they were all going over to Facebook. And MySpace was in absolute freefall in early 2009, and it turned out in February of 2009, one of the cofounders stepped down from being CEO of MySpace. And he stuck around the board for another couple of months, but then two months later in April of 2009, that cofounder plus the other cofounder who was Tom – who was the famous Tom on MySpace that was everybody’s first, you know, friend on MySpace that you were automatically assigned to, so everybody knew his name. He became like, the most famous person for a period of several years when MySpace was huge. Tom and the other cofounder left the company in April of 2009 during that Venus retrograde. So basically, MySpace was falling apart as a similar repetition in 2009.
If that wasn’t enough, get this. Eight years earlier, the very first social networking site, which was called Six Degrees of Separation, which introduced many of the basic concepts that we take for granted in social media today, it closed its doors on like, December 30th, 2000, right before Venus went into Pisces and began the slowdown to the Venus retrograde period again in Aries during that year. So even the very first social networking site shut down under the same Venus retrograde.
AC: Yeah, it’s wild. It makes me wonder what it is about this particular retrograde which was in those previous iterations almost entirely or entirely in Aries that points to social media. Yeah, I was sad when MySpace puttered out. I don’t think I’ve been able to fully engage with another social media platform since.
CB: Well, you and I met on MySpace —
AC: Yeah!
CB: — it’s funny, like —
AC: MySpace was – dude, I met Kait on MySpace.
CB: Your wife? Okay, wow.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And you got your start writing on MySpace, like, writing – or at least that’s when you became famous. That’s how I first knew you is writing that blog —
AC: That’s when anybody cared about what I wrote.
CB: Right.
AC: That was the first time anybody gave a shit. I’d written things before, but. But yeah. No, that’s – that chronology’s fucking amazing.
CB: What’s funny is I wanna take it back further, because obviously there weren’t social networking sites, but I wonder if there was like, some newsgroup or something eight years before 2001, or if there was some like, penpal system or maybe it goes back like, hundreds of years and there was like, some Stone Age like, social networking site like thousands of years ago that this Venus retrograde’s tied into.
AC: Right, because the idea of a social – or the phenomenon of a social network is not uniquely digital. It was made massive by means of that technology, but social networks are a thing.
CB: Right. Yeah. Socializing, creating nets of social people. So anyway, that’s a whole thing. A bunch of TikTok users went to RedNote during the course of this, which is a Chinese social media platform. And there was all these news stories about this sudden like, interaction of like, people from the US and people from China and this like, cultural exchange that was suddenly going on during the course of the month even once TikTok came back. And I thought that was interesting, because that was one of two major tech stories really involving China this month that really centered on the Sun-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius. And I think that’s really important because of the important role of Aquarius in the birth chart of China that we’ll come back to and talk about later.
Before we get there, though, there was a bunch of international news that happened this month, right?
AC: Yeah, there were several things, all of them on these Mars inflection points. The first one occurred the day that Mars regressed into Cancer, which in the chart of Canada is the 10th house. And Canada has both the Sun and Moon, along with Uranus, in Cancer in the 10th. And the 10th in a nation’s chart is the place where you see leadership, whoever the prime minister, chief executive, president, whatever that chief role is called. And so on the very day that Mars regressed into that space, Justin Trudeau announced his resignation. And so I thought that was very striking, right? You have that trouble, and the trouble that Mars brings as well as a regress. Like, and a plan to withdraw, to regress from that position. And you found some interesting connections with his chart or his life and this Venus retrograde cycle as well.
CB: Yeah. Nick and I talked about him a little bit in the Venus retrograde in Aries episode that this retrograde’s important for him, but he’s had some really challenging stuff come up in his life during this Venus retrograde in Aries, which is in his – Justin Trudeau’s – 8th house where he has his Moon. And one of the like, early really tough ones, one of the first ones for him is that his parents got a divorce, like this very public separation that was very publicized at the time, during the Venus retrograde in Aries in 1977 when it retrograded across his Moon basically and his mom left. And she was like, touring with like, the Rolling Stones or something like that. Nick had a whole story about it. And then I thought this one as a recurrence was interesting, so it’s like, he had that sort of traumatic, important early life event happen then – of the breakup of his parents’ marriage – but then in this one, he had then a recurrence of this Venus retrograde that’s about to happen in Aries in his 8th house and his 7th house. And I thought it was striking that part of the precipitating event that caused him to step down was that his finance minister resigned, and she was a really crucial player in terms of his admiration and his coalition. So there might have been something tied in with that as well.
AC: Yeah. Interesting. I’d heard that but don’t pretend to know enough about Canadian politics to comment further.
CB: Yeah. I pick up things sometimes, but that’s often one of the issues of – I always meant to say why we often focus on US news better, because I always have this personal philosophy that I try to like, not talk about things that I don’t know much about as a general rule in my life. And I do my best to follow – you know, I know a lot of US news, and I try to follow some international news. But oftentimes, we don’t have as much coverage just because I don’t like speaking about things I’m not knowledgeable about.
AC: Yep. In the wise words of George Bush, “I’m not an economist.”
CB: Right. Definitely. All right. There was another major piece of news internationally?
AC: Yeah, well, we had a pair of things occur – important things of a very martial nature – occur on that Mars-Sun opposition on the 15th, which was right after the Full Moon which was the 13th. That like, 12 through the 15th was just all Mars. And so the first was that the South Korean president who had declared martial law on the Mars retrograde station in early December was arrested on the Mars-Sun opposition on the 14th, 15th. I think it was 14th in Korea but would have been 15th here – or South Korea. And so I understand it was a rather messy affair, but we just have the, you know, like, the two crucial events so far in that story. The declaration of martial law which was immediately reversed on the station, and then that person’s arrest on the dead center of the Mars retrograde. And so it’s, you know, it couldn’t be more literal or timed more perfectly with the Mars scandal.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible, and that just goes to show —
AC: Did I say “Mars scandal?”
CB: The Mars scandal? I mean —
AC: The Mars cycle. I mean, Mars is full of scandal, but the Mars cycle is what I meant to say.
CB: Yeah. It just goes to show how the retrograde stations are tied in with the full solar phase cycle and that the other important parts of the solar phase cycle are not just the retrograde station and the direct station, but you have the conjunction and the opposition like, right in the middle of those.
AC: Yeah, that opposition is really worth looking at. Its drama struck me some years ago. Because again, it is the night where Mars is opposite the Sun just like the Moon is when it’s full, and so it’s the brightest that Mars is. And Mars rises in the east in the same second as the Sun sets in the west. And so, you know, just the actual astronomy of it is quite dramatic. In my little notes, you know, I’ve tried to name it. I’m like, oh, it’s red night or it’s crimson night, or whatever, which yeah, made me feel bad when that occurred and Los Angeles was burning down. I was like, oh —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — too literal. Too literal. Too literal. Can we keep it lyrical, Mars? Can Mars be about metaphorical fires and challenges? Can we do that? Can we —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — just do modern astrology for a little bit?
CB: A little psychological. It’s about —
AC: Yeah!
CB: — your inner child and stuff like that?
AC: About your drive, right? How you’re aggressive. Yeah, your inner child’s aggressive impulses.
CB: Right. Maybe. We’ll see. We’ll circle back to that. So in other Sun-Mars opposition news that happened around the same time, there was a Gaza ceasefire was announced on January 15th. And that was also basically the day of the Sun-Mars opposition halfway through the Mars retrograde cycle. So this whole thing is still unfolding, and there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding it still, but on one side, some hostages have been released. And then more recently over the past few days, there’s been these images and pictures and videos of Palestinians reentering Northern Gaza for the first time in 15 months since everything began. And I thought that might also tie things into the solar cycle, because I remember in like, November of 2003, for example, talking about the Sun-Mars conjunction in Scorpio that was happening at that time. So it was interesting here so many months later this happening at the Sun-Mars opposition.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: And other things – patron Sarah Hartshorne noted that Mars was retrograde at 26 degrees of Cancer the day that the ceasefire deal was announced here in January, and that this ties back into where Mars was at 26 degrees of Libra on October 7th, 2023. So it was a close connection to that very degree between these two dates of like, the ceasefire deal and the original start of everything. And then apparently she pointed out that even the ceasefire plan was originally posed by the Biden administration on May 31st, 2024, when Mars was at 23 degrees of Aries. So these degrees around 26 degrees of the cardinal signs seem to be really crucial for everything. And it’s unclear if the deal will hold, but the first phase of the deal expires in early March when Venus stations retrograde in Aries.
AC: Yeah. Well, at least some hostages have been released. Right? There’s some good at least that’s come from the ceasefire as I understand it.
CB: Yeah. Well, and also —
AC: Any good is better than no good, maybe?
CB: And also the Venus retrograde and sometimes Venus retrograde can be like, a return back to something. One of the ones that we saw in the 1945 Venus retrograde in Aries was there was this popular song during World War Two about returning home like, after being gone for a very long time. And it became super popular with all of the like, American GIs that were fighting around the world and that were about to return home. And so here you have the same thing. On the one hand, you have hostages like, returning home, but then you also have thousands of Palestinians returning back home to the North for the first time in 15 months. So maybe there’s a similarity of themes there as well.
AC: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting.
CB: Yeah. So moving on. Biden gave his farewell address on January 15th, and one of the things I thought was interesting is that in the Venus retrograde episode that we recorded on January 10th, Nick and I talked about how President Eisenhower gave his farewell address in 1961, whi8ch is during the Venus retrograde in Aries, which this then was a recurrence of. And so interestingly, Biden then a few days later after we recorded that episode, he mentioned Eisenhower’s famous farewell address and specifically how Eisenhower had warned of a “military industrial complex” in his farewell address, which is like, this famous remark that’s been repeated a lot over the past 20 years. I remember it was talking about like, a lot in the 2000s during like, the second Iraq war that Bush initiated.
So Biden invoked Eisenhower in his farewell address, and he used it to warn of what he called a “tech industrial complex.” And he said, “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.” I thought that was so striking just because Eisenhower gave his farewell address on January 17th, 1961, when Venus was in Pisces slowing down to retrograde in Aries. And then Biden gave his on January 15th, 2025, when Venus was in Pisces slowing down to retrograde in Aries. And also both had Mars retrograde in Cancer as well, because this was always a recurrence of planetary periods of Mars.
So in completely unrelated news, Trump had a line of tech billionaires at the inauguration that were sitting in front of his own cabinet that was people like, you know, Elon Musk who’s the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos who was I think one time richest man in the world as the head of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg at the head of Facebook. The head of Google was there in the same line of guys. There was a bunch of basically like, richest tech billionaires in the world.
AC: Yeah. I guess two quick things on that. One, you know, I’ve often discussed when talking about Pluto’s movement through signs how Pluto gives a different face to the nightmarish, death-dealing force that it carries, and how when it was Pluto in Scorpio in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, it was occult serial killers like Richard Ramirez or – excuse me – sex occult killer figures who were very popular then. And we’ve been talking about what face Pluto in Aquarius will wear, and I think like, evil tech Plutocrat, right? Like, as a figure, as appropriate villain and source of anxiety and fear for Pluto in Aquarius is a pretty good match. Right? Like, it’s the sort of Lex Luthor style villain. And I suppose on another note, it’s almost refreshing to see the like, the Plutocracy out in the open, because it’s not that this happened in the last six months. The United States has long been subject to quite undemocratic forces, and so it’s shocking to see it so out in the open and likely indicative or characteristic of the era that we’re entering.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I think with Pluto one of the things that I’ve been talking about for along time with the – this was the first Sun-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius, and this is really important because it sets the stage for the next 20 years of Sun-Pluto conjunctions in Aquarius and that synodic cycle is very important because just like we’ve been talking about the synodic cycle between the Sun and Venus which results in like, the Venus stations and conjunctions, or the Mars retrograde stations and conjunctions and oppositions with the Sun, this was the Sun and Pluto doing this for the very first time in this sign during this 20-year phase. So it was really setting the stage and planting the seeds for a lot of things that are gonna develop over the next 20 years. And the inauguration and this thing with the tech billionaires taking this new, much more blatant role in terms of intermingling with politics and having powerful roles sometimes like, directly and influence over the executive branch and the government itself – this is a new phase of this I think that’s in escalation.
AC: Yeah. Well, and the simple symbolism of the Sun with Pluto. Like, the Sun is that which makes things visible. And so being able to see something as clearly as possible, and then also I would add that we are fortunately, unfortunately, probably unfortunately very much continue to be in the cyberpunk timeline wherein giant corporations and those that head them become huge players in some scenarios on the same scale or larger than nationstates. Like, that’s part of every cyberpunk vision of what was in the ‘80s and ‘90s the near future, like, the 2020s or ‘30s. And now that we’re here, yeah, there’s an unfortunate increasingly perfect match, for what it’s worth. Like, that’s part of all those visions.
CB: I mean, yeah. It’s just weird because practically speaking if you had told me that that was happening 10 years ago or something, I would say, “That’s a little exaggerated.” Like, surely it’s not – things aren’t gonna be that bad. But like, we’re kind of there at this point, and this is the very beginning of Pluto in Aquarius, so it’s striking.
Let’s keep moving through the news. So Trump was inaugurated on January 20th. It was moved inside due to the cold, due to a cold snap on the east coast. And what was interesting is there was a Washington Post headline at the same time saying the last time this happened was 1985 during Reagan’s second inauguration, which – guess what – of course was Venus slowing down to station retrograde in Aries. So it was another eight year repetition of Venus when they moved everything inside due to the cold.
So yeah, we had the tech billionaire thing that were sitting in front of his own cabinet, which was extraordinary as part of the Sun-Pluto conjunction. But there was also something else. There was something I had researched and found in the Venus retrograde series that sometimes they coincide with a major comeback. Like, Judy Garland for example in one of the 1950 Venus retrogrades in Aries made this legendary, major comeback performance under this Venus retrograde in Aries. And I realize that’s part of what we saw here with Trump was this crazy comeback of him coming back into office at this time during this retrograde exactly eight years from the last time Venus was retrograde in this sign when he first came into office. And what was interesting is this has happened under other Venus retrogrades before. Like, Richard Nixon in 1969 – he came into office under this Venus retrograde, and that was a major political comeback at the time as well because he had lost eight years earlier during the previous retrograde to Kennedy. And Nixon lost to Kennedy even though he was the sitting vice president at the time, and then he tried to run for like, Governor of California or something like a year or two later and he lost that as well. So it looked like Nixon was just like, done politically. And even he thought so. But then somehow, he was able to stage this major comeback and become president in 1969. So this is similar, and it was a good learning thing for me that sometimes Venus retrogrades are like, comeback basically. And you know, we’ve all experienced that in personal lives partially because think about Venus retrograde being like, old relationships coming back into your life. But here sometimes it can be a political or like, career revival of some sort.
AC: Yeah, an honor or a confirmation like we were talking about with awards.
CB: Yeah. So there was also repetitions of like, a vice president having to attend the inauguration after losing that happened in 2001 with Gore during this Venus retrograde as well as 1961 with Nixon. Even Hillary eight years ago – Hillary Clinton – having to attend in 2017 because she was the former First Lady was like, part of that. And then of course you had Kamala Harris having to attend this inauguration.
There was a comet that showed up and became visible in the days before the inauguration. It was Comet 2024 G3 Atlas. It became very bright after its closest pass to the Sun on January 13th and developed this really striking tail. And I thought that was again notable that we keep seeing these comet things happening.
AC: Yeah. It seems like there’s a comet in attendance whenever anything important happens for, I don’t know, the last four years now, five years.
CB: Well, the past year especially. I mean —
AC: Oh, especially, but they’ve been showing up.
CB: In April, in October right before the election, and then again right before the inauguration. So in the inauguration speech, Trump kept talking about it being the beginning of a new golden age. And that really reminded me of the Emperor Augustus, because Augustus was the first Roman emperor, and he also presented his reign as a return to this mythical golden age. And since that’s my like, time period of like, you know, Hellenistic astrology I wrote the book on, it was really hard not hearing that and like, seeing the connection, because Augustus also promised this period of peace and prosperity and harmony after Rome had just been through a civil war. And Augustus portrayed himself as this like, divinely ordained leader who was bringing stability to Rome after this period of conflict. And what was weird is that a comet appeared during the funeral of Julius Caesar, who was his adopted father. So Augustus basically used that for political purposes or propaganda purposes to say his adopted father had been deified and therefore by extension he was also a god as well, and that became the beginning of his reign was that comet that appeared at that time, which is crazy.
AC: Well, no. I mean, the comet that appeared at Julius Caesar’s funeral began years and years of vicious civil war in Rome that ended with Augustus as the victor, but there were years of brutal reprisals and multiple civil wars. So if that was an indicator of anything, it was the bloody years to come.
CB: Right. And the beginning of that transition of power when the previous leader of Rome died and then Augustus began his rise.
AC: Well, yeah, but that’s when the ill-fated triumvirate began.
CB: Right. Yeah. So we’ll see how that goes. In the days before the inauguration, Trump launched this cryptocoin just a few days before on like, the 17th. And this is another Sun-Pluto conjunction like, beginning of an era thing, because tons and tons of people bought this thing and he made – it became worth like, billions and billions of dollars, and Trump and his closest associates own the majority of it. So he potentially made billions of dollars in a matter of days from this coin, although it creates this interesting conflict of interest that I thought was interesting because it invoked the beginning of Carter’s presidency again during that same Venus retrograde in Aries, because Carter famously had to put his peanut farm in a trust during his presidency and then later he eventually sold it because he was putting pressure on him saying he had a conflict on interest, you know, being president of the free world and having this farm where things could be influenced in some way. So there’s an interesting repetition of that here because it sort of creates a conflict of interest where Trump has billions of dollars worth of this coin now that’s come off of him becoming president again but also is enacting deregulation and other rules that will influence cryptocurrencies, including his own. It may also put him in the position of being able to be influenced financially by different foreign governments who could pump up the, you know, invest a bunch of money and pump up the value of the coin or take money out or other things like that. So it’s weird seeing how much cryptocurrency has become a major hallmark of his presidency at the very beginning of this Pluto in Aquarius period.
AC: Yeah. The inauguration taking place on that Sun-Pluto conjunction is just anchoring all of these Pluto in Aquarius themes to it. Like, in a more obvious way than I think we could have even guessed. Like the front row seating for the Plutocrats. Like, the launch of the coin, the cryptocoin, right beforehand.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, it’s —
CB: Yeah. If somebody had written —
AC: — it’s not subtle.
CB: If somebody wrote this as like, a script, I would have told them to like, tone it down, because it’s like, a bit much.
AC: You’d be like, no – that takes place like, three weeks later. Like, that happens, that’s part of the story, but like, not all in episode two.
CB: Right. You’re like, “No, Austin, this all happens the exact same day.”
AC: Yeah. No, it’s like, that’s implausible. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: We’re stretching the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. All right, so moving on. With Mars retrograding back into Cancer, one of the things we had talked about and anticipated that’s actually come true now with Trump coming back into office, one of the first things he immediately began doing is rounding up immigrants and increasing – they’ve apparently there was news reporting yesterday that he set quotas for ICE on how many immigrants, I guess, that ICE officials have to detain. I’m not sure if that’s per day or week or month or what have you, but it’s like, forcing them to start going out and like, arresting people much more aggressively. There’s all these videos of people being arrested and deported.
This was foreshadowed in the fall when Mars went into Cancer and then all of a sudden, there were all those discussions about immigration and illegal immigration, and Trump was saying even that really absurd stuff about like, immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio – that was when that whole thing was happening in Mars in Cancer. So in the year ahead forecast, it was obvious we sort of anticipated that when Mars came back into Cancer that this would be a major theme, and indeed it has been, and probably continue to be or I would say actually increase this month, especially around that Mars station in Cancer that’s gonna happen around mid- to late February will probably be a major escalation or turning point with respect to this.
AC: Yeah, or an inflection point. I think the theme around immigration is also pointed to by the ongoing upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Right? Saturn and Neptune being the two most opposed in terms of closed or open, you know, fortress-like borders or completely permeable borders. And so I think that, yeah, in addition to the Mars cycle, we also have that conjunction which is ongoing and still upcoming pointing to it and timing it as well, which would suggest that it would take that issue well into the next couple years.
CB: Yeah. I mean, we’ll see how that goes. I do think there will be a connection between the Mars station that happens around – what is it? Like, February 22nd, 23rd?
AC: 23rd.
CB: And then a week later, Venus stations. I feel like there’s gonna be some event that happens that sets off like, a controversy, and it could be related to this topic, which then feeds into the Venus retrograde that sets it off like, a week later. Because under Venus retrogrades, there’s very commonly major protests that happen. So I’ve been looking and trying to anticipate like, what could happen at the Mars station on February 23rd that sets off, like, a wave of protests around the end of February and beginning of March, and it could be related to this. That’s at least one of the like, vectors that I’m looking at since is Mars is stationing in Cancer and we know that the Mars in Cancer transit has been very much tied in with sometimes controversies and other things surrounding Trump’s views on immigrants and immigration.
So related to that, Trump is also trying to get rid of birthright citizenship, and he issued an executive order attempting to make it so that people that are born in this country don’t necessarily become citizens, which is basically a clause that’s been with this country since the 14th amendment that was passed after the Civil War back in the 1800s. And in the 14th amendment basically makes it a law that if you’re born in this country, then you become a citizen. So a federal judge blocked his executive order already on January 23rd calling it “blatantly unconstitutional” because it’s in the 14th amendment that if you’re born here, you’re a citizen. And I thought this was so fascinating, because just astrologically and abstractly at least, everything personal and moral and ethical aside, but we had talked about the 14th amendment a year ago in the 2024 year ahead forecast in December of 2023, because I discovered the night before we recorded that forecast that there was this 79 year repetition of Mars where Mars would go retrograde in Cancer in roughly the same degrees every 79 years. And that the 14th amendment was passed during a Mars retrograde in Cancer year that is connected with this current cycle. And what was fascinating is like, I was connecting that at the time with what was in the news, which was the 14th amendment contained the insurrection clause that if you had fought against the government or participated in an insurrection that you couldn’t run for public office, which was passed after the Civil War so that people that had fought against the Union, basically, couldn’t run for office afterwards. But the other part of the 14th amendment was this citizenship clause – basically the birthright citizenship clause. So that was passed in the 1800s after the Civil War. Then 79 years later was 1946, and that is the year that Trump was born. So he was born the year that Mars was retrograde in Cancer as well, and his Mars is in Leo, but it’s just coming off of that Mars retrograde in Cancer. And then 79 years after Trump was born is right now when Mars is again, you know, retrograde in Cancer. And so that law that came into being under Mars retrograde in Cancer that gives people birthright citizenship is now under attack and potentially could be dissolved, although it seems unlikely he’ll be able to pull that off. But he’s gonna try at least, evidentially.
AC: Right. Like, being contested by someone born in that same cycle. Yeah, that’s extraordinary.
CB: Yeah. Like, I’m really getting into these retrogrades, but also planetary returns over long periods of time. There’s something very special there that I’m starting to uncover with that, and I’m pretty interested in it just abstractly as an astrologer.
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: All right.
AC: Also on a birth timing level, right? Like, the 79th year is you will do or yeah, at the 79th year is when this person will do their Mars thing. Right? Like, in a sense, that’s the uber Mars return if you live that long. And so like, from a natal timing perspective.
CB: Well, because the other part of what I saw with it is that sometimes the destruction of something is built into its creation is one of the other things that I’m working on. Because this is what happened with the bridge thing last year is that was a 47 year Mars repetition where it had this difficult Mars thing built into its birth chart when the bridge was built, and then when the Mars period returned and completed after 47 years, the bridge collapsed suddenly. So that it’s like, if there’s weaknesses in something structurally when that activation takes place, it could crumble. Which is interesting, because it takes it back to the old ancient length of life rules, remember? Where —
AC: Right.
CB: — a person’s supposed to live as long as the planetary period. So anyway.
AC: Right, each planet allots a lifespan using these numbers. And then you modify that with aspects to it.
CB: What’s interesting, though, about those years is the ones that are handed down in the tradition have like, no astronomical relevance or anything whatsoever. And I think somebody messed some – like, seriously fucked something up during the transmission, because these are the ones that do, and they come from the earlier strata of the tradition. Like, the 79 years of Mars. And I think these might be the true numbers that are supposed to be associated with those length of life calculations.
AC: A hundred percent.
CB: And somebody messed something up, because the other numbers that have been with the tradition for a hundred years now or 2,000 years now don’t have hardly any astronomical basis. So that’s another angle I’m working there.
AC: Yeah, that seems quite likely to me. Or if the other numbers are relevant, maybe they’re these larger cycles, these great cycles, but minus 12 because of a reason. But these larger planetary periods have to be the basis for the length of life that each planet gives.
CB: Right.
AC: It seems unthinkable otherwise. But yeah. Keep me posted.
CB: I will get back to you on that. All right, moving on. There’s a lot of other news that happened with Trump, but there’s too much to cover. These are just the ones I found that were the most compelling astrologically, especially because many of them tie back in with things we’ve discussed already in previous episodes. So we’ll continue to cover other stuff as it unfolds in the future.
Other news. Quickly, on January 21st, which was also right on the Sun-Pluto conjunction, there was this 500 billion dollar private sector investment announced in AI infrastructure that was a joint venture called Stargate that involved the founder of OpenAI and ChatGPT, Sam Altman, who made an announcement at the White House that day. And apparently, they’re gonna use this to build these massive data centers, and they’ve already started building them in Texas. And then the other part of it is they’re also gonna be putting huge amounts of money into power and electricity, because I was reading that AI data centers could reach up to using 10 percent of US electricity by 2030. And it’s only at like, two percent or three percent or something right now. So we’re just talking about massive amounts of power and energy that are gonna be pumped into these data centers, which is also – as I discussed in the year ahead forecast – causing everyone to start moving towards using nuclear energy again all of a sudden out of nowhere.
And also on this conjunction, Trump immediately revoked Biden’s executive order that was addressing AI risks, basically, that was trying to put some guard rails and regulations and like, safety protocols in place for all this crazy AI stuff. And Trump revoked that order, basically, so that all of this stuff is just going to move very rapidly at this point.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. It’s made me revise my thinking about what to title this maybe e8ight year period of history that we’ve just entered. My unserious title for it was “Cyberpunk Clownmageddon,” and I feel like that’s moving up the ranks. I feel like Cyberpunk Clownmageddon is becoming a more accurate descriptor than some of the other more dignified phrases that I proposed.
CB: I like that. That is better.
AC: Or descriptive. We’ll see.
CB: Clownmageddon. All right. So moving on really quickly to finish up my last piece of news. The latest thing that happened is that there’s this new AI that was just rolled out by a Chinese company called DeepSeek that completely surprised everybody this week. And what was really striking about this is that DeepSeek R1, the new AI model, was released on January 20th. They released it like, right on the day of the inauguration but also on the Sun-Pluto conjunction. And it was by this Chinese AI company. And what surprised and shocked everybody – all the news right now, especially over the past few days, has been talking about this being like, a shocking and surprising event that’s completely shaken things up, and I think it’s because Uranus is stationing direct in Taurus right now over the next few days. So what we’re experiencing the Uranus station and the surprise and upset of that. So what was surprising about this new Chinese AI model is that it completely surpassed the most recent AI model by OpenAI, which is one of the leading AI companies that makes ChatGPT. The other thing about it is that it’s fully open source, and it’s much, much cheaper than western AI models.
So this came as a huge surprise to everybody because the conventional wisdom was that Chinese AI companies were a year or so behind American companies, partially because the Biden administration had put export controls on hardware that’s used for AI development and computations. He put export controls so that it couldn’t be exported to China, basically, in order to keep the American advantage over AI, I guess, as part of that attempt. But what happened is this came out. It turns out that the Chinese AI companies are way further ahead than the western companies expected. And this AI app is so good that it immediately shot to the number one of the app stores, and it’s the number one app in the Apple app store right now, moving ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And what happened is this news really built up over the past few days. Today is Tuesday, the 28th. And as soon as the markets opened on Monday, all the tech stocks just plummeted and crashed, and Nvidia in particular lost 600 billion market cap, which was the largest single day loss in US history for a company like that. And Uranus stations in Taurus on January 30th. And you have people using these keywords like “unexpected,” “rattling the industry,” and “a classic disruption story.” So I thought that was just, that was incredible.
AC: Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, like, that 10 days between the Sun-Pluto conjunction and Uranus’s station.
CB: Right. So I thought it was interesting that there was then, because that means that there were two major Chinese companies that came up in major ways this month around the Sun-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius, the first Sun-Pluto conjunction in that sign. And I think this is because Pluto in Aquarius, when I did a year ago the deep dive with Nick Dagan Best on Pluto in Aquarius in history, we kept seeing China come up as a country with technological innovations every time Pluto was in Aquarius over the past 2,000 years. And I think we’re seeing a recurrence of that now. And I think this is due to Aquarius being prominent in some very early base chart in China from thousands of years ago that’s probably been lost. But even without knowing what chart that is, I think even more recently, the current chart for china, which is set for like, October of 1959 – or maybe it’s ‘49 – it has the Ascendant at one degree of Aquarius and the Moon at three degrees of Aquarius, so it already has like, the current government’s chart for China has Aquarius very prominent. And I think that’s why this Sun-Pluto conjunction at one and two degrees of Aquarius this year was so crucial. But it also is just the beginning of like, 20 years of Sun-Pluto conjunctions in that sign, and this is the beginning of a very long AI tech race between the US and China that’s gonna play out over the course of the next two decades.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good catch. It makes me wanna look back at my Pluto in Aquarius and China research, because I went back quite a ways, and I can’t recall it all right now.
CB: Yeah. Well, a lot of mine was about gunpowder. Like, gunpowder was the huge recurring thing that developed in China like, slowly over the years and then eventually was exported to the west. Or you had like, the silkworms and how China developed that but tried to keep it, you know, private. But then eventually like, the west sent spies to like, steal the silkworms and were able to be successful in like, getting some so that they then created their own silk industry. So the whole idea of international espionage as part of this is gonna be a thing as well.
Anyway. Thank you for – there’s so many news stories I wanted to cover so many. That’s all we have time for today. I’m gonna do a follow up on Venus retrograde repetitions in the news probably in early February, because there’s a bunch of interesting ones. But I think that’s good for the news, yeah?
AC: I think so.
CB: Cool. All right. Let’s take a little break.
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All right, let’s transition to talking about the astrology of February at this point. I wanna start by first showing the February astrology calendar again, just to give you a quick preview again of some of the major transits and alignments this month.
So in terms of where to start, one of the things I wanna mention – because I already mentioned this in the news section, but – Uranus is gonna station, basically, a day or two after we release this forecast. It’s stationing on January 30th at 23 degrees of Taurus. And this is really important, because this is one of the last stations in Taurus, and Uranus is gonna zoom into Gemini in July of this year after this. But I think this is important because we’ve already seen some major shakeups and things in the news, but there may be more to come in the next few days, so I wanna make sure we don’t overlook or not emphasize that energy, especially because it’s tied in with the New Moon in Aquarius on January 29th that kind of sets the tone for the opening of February as well.
AC: Yeah, February opens sort of in the wake of Uranus’s destabilizing station, and it being a direct station like you said, it’s the beginning of Uranus’s march into Gemini, which won’t happen until – excuse me – until July. But it’s forward from this point. It’s headed towards that with no interruptions. And so yeah, like, it’s not just the same old Uranus in Taurus. And so those, you know, those vibrations are happening. We also have just had the nodes, the eclipse points, move. The head and tail of the dragon change signs. There are two calculations – one being the mean node, which change basically today, and then the so-called “true node” having switched about two weeks ago. And so this is very important, not only because the nodes spend about a year and a half in a given pair of signs – so, you know, they last longer in their pair of signs than Jupiter does in a sign – but because this change has occurred just in time for the North Node to join Neptune and Saturn at the end of Pisces. And not only is that significant in and of itself, but will be spending half-ish of the Venus retrograde with Venus in Pisces with Neptune and Saturn and the North Node. And so this is an extremely important addition to the astrology of the next several months. This is, you know, the show could not happen the way it will without the North Node moving into the end of Pisces.
CB: Yeah. Because the nodes in ancient astrology are referred to as the eclipsing places, and they tell you where eclipses are gonna happen. And we’ve already had one eclipse in Pisces back in September that kind of opened that series, but we’re gonna have the next eclipse in that series happen in Virgo now that the nodes are in those two signs, in Pisces and Virgo, coming up here in March, right?
AC: Yeah. Yeah. And then onto a full set of Pisces-Virgo eclipses during the second half of the year. And the nodes, of course, also act – the nodes are also meaningful transiting points, even if there’s not an eclipse occurring, if the North Node is conjoined something exactly in your chart, that matters.
I remember years ago I was debating whether – debating with myself – whether the nodes mattered when eclipses weren’t happening. And I looked back at a period of time where I decided, really without warning, to stop writing my annual almanac. Right? I did like, an annual almanac for five years in a row where I wrote about every day, every month, every major ingress, et cetera, et cetera. It was a big project. And one year, I was like, “You know what? I’m not fucking doing it,” just before I was due to begin. It took me about a quarter. And I look back at that, and the South Node was conjoining my Mercury in the 10th house, suggesting a profession involved with creating words. The South Node was conjunction my Mercury by degree when I’d made that decision. There were no eclipses. There weren’t eclipses for several months on either side. But it convinced me that the exact conjunctions from the nodes matter quite a bit, even when eclipses weren’t occurring.
CB: Yeah. I had a person, I had a South Node conjunction with a planet in the 11th and just like, a friendship that ceased to be as prominent in my life at one point when I had a transit like that. So that was a similar thing where it also showed me that sometimes the South Node really can indicate a decrease of something.
AC: Yeah, there’s often a fadeaway. I remember being kind of shocked at how quickly I just dropped a giant project. Like, I don’t do that. I usually persist way too long.
CB: Right. Like an eclipsing, hiding, fading away.
AC: Yeah, it’s just not – yeah, like, the Sun or the Moon’s light – it’s just not there. Right? It’s just not there anymore.
CB: Right. So this is Pisces, and that’s where the South Node’s gonna be, and then the North Node’s —
AC: North Node.
CB: — in Aries.
AC: North Node will be – is entered Pisces, and the South Node is entering Virgo.
CB: Right. Sorry. I reversed them in my mind. I was just thinking about because the other thing that’s happening that happens at the very end of January but we open February with is that Venus has moved into its shadow degrees where on January 28th, Venus passes 24 degrees of Pisces, which is the degree that it will later retrograde back to and station direct at all the way in like, April. So that means we’ve also not just entered the like, pre-pre-retrograde when Venus moved into Pisces on January 2nd, which is like, the sign it will retrograde back into. But on January 28th, we’ve officially entered the range of degrees in Pisces that Venus is gonna actually return to, which are the sensitive degrees for people if they have especially planets in the last decan of Pisces or the first decan of Aries.
AC: Yeah. And if we look at the chart of February 1st, we actually see Venus conjunct the North Node conjunct Neptune with Saturn there, and the Moon’s on top of it. And so like, February, the very first day of February actually looks like the end of March. We have the same thing that’s going to recur. It’s that – like, that’s not all of the let’s call it chaos. Excitement, chaos, drama, et cetera, that March and April will bring. But those are a lot of the players. The North Node, Neptune, Saturn, and Venus. And leading up to that, we get the exact conjunction of Neptune and the North Node, and we get one exact conjunction between the North Node and Saturn.
And I found, as I was telling you earlier, I accidentally stumbled on a really perfect Saturn-North Node thing just earlier today. I’d seen Nosferatu the other night, which was fantastic – loved it. Great. Deep, masterful sort of revisiting of a classic piece of cinema. Love Dave Eggers. But I was curious about the astrology of it, and I was hoping that maybe it was a Saturn in Pisces thing, because Nosferatu had been originally released in the ‘20s, and then there had been a Werner Herzog version that was released in the ‘70s. And I didn’t remember the dates, and so I was like, “Well, you know, you get a lot of sort of classics of imagination that occur when Saturn’s in Pisces; maybe this is one of those.” And it wasn’t that. But what I did find is that all three versions of Nosferatu have a Saturn-North Node or Saturn-Rahu conjunction. And you just can’t do better as far as symbolism is concerned. Saturn is that which is ancient or decaying, like Court Orlok, the vampire in Nosferatu. You know, he’s ancient, he’s kind of dead, he’s kind of alive. He is, you know, in many ways the cinematic introduction to the category of the undead in horror cinema. And then, unlike most people that are dead, the vampire – the nosferatu – is extremely hungry. Right? And this is a very consistent feature of the North Node. North Node, which is often also called “the dragon’s head,” and the head is where the mouth is. And so there’s often an endless hunger which looks like an obsession, can be ambition, can be directed in more and less constructive ways. But you have this hunger for something wherever the North Node is. And so you have the hungry undead with Rahu plus Saturn. And it’s just kind of right there. And so it’s Saturn-Rahu in different signs, but it’s also Saturn-Rahu with Nosferatu.
CB: That day – we basically open that day with a Venus-Neptune conjunction, which is also —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — conjunct the node. And I think this is important, because normally that would just be a quick aspect that would come and go over the course of the day, and it would be done. But because Venus will hit Neptune once and then it’ll go retrograde, it’ll come back and hit Neptune two more times. So sometimes Venus retrogrades, relationship stuff can come up in a person’s personal life. There can be like, new people that come into your life or new relationships at that time. There can be old relationships that come back from the past. And I think one of the initial experiences of this first hit at the beginning of February could be like, something looking really good on the surface, or somebody coming into your life or somebody coming back into your life where you have this really idealized like, picture of things where it seems like picturesque or like, a movie. And it almost seems like too good to be true. But then during the course of the Venus retrograde, you may have to revisit that initial connection or reconnection to see if it was exactly like, all it was cracked up to be, or if it was as good as it seemed at first, especially because Venus after passing over Neptune the second time will slow down and station direct conjunct Saturn, which could bring a sense of realism, a sense of maybe the reality of things being a little different than what you thought at first or something like that.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s worth noting that with that North Node combination with Neptune makes the fantasies that are present stickier, more entrancing, more easily – yeah, like, they tend to ensnare with it. The North Node with Neptune, there’s that boosting quality. And again, there’s a hunger with the North Node which could show with Neptune-North Node that there’s like, a hunger for the fantasy that makes us – or the vision, the dream, right? I like “dream” because dream is a little bit more neutral than fantasy but can be a nightmare. But you know, it might be a hunger for a particular dream that makes us vulnerable to it. Or the dream itself might be somewhat ravenous. I’ve been meaning – yeah, hypnotic from Maire Masco in the comments is a nice way to put it. Entrancing. Fascinating. Right? And I’d spent a little time researching North Node-Neptune conjunctions but unfortunately wasn’t able to go deep yet. I have one example that I think is really interesting. So it’s a roughly 17 year cycle, and the last time we had a North Node-Rahu conjunction was during 2008. It was during the northern hemisphere’s spring of 2008. And it was timed almost exactly to the point that Barack Obama becomes the clear victor of the Democratic primaries. And I was really struck by that, because you know, the huge part of Obama’s campaign was the hope and change. And that was, you know, being an adult back then, I remember – how should we say – how powerful that dream was. Obviously, it was powerful enough to win the United States presidency. But it made me reflect that so a Neptunian dream on a large scale is almost always going to involve hope as part of the slogan, but this was Neptune-Rahu conjoined in Aquarius, right? So it’s hope and change. Right? Aquarius wants a different and better future. And I have the dates written down for other iterations, but I wasn’t able to get further than that. Nonetheless, I thought that was a pretty strong instance. And it’s also important to note that that North Node-Neptune conjunction was in the first house of Barack Obama’s chart. Right? So he’s very – where he has Jupiter – so he’s very well suited to carry that banner.
CB: Right. And that was back when that election happened when Uranus was in Pisces opposing Saturn in Virgo, and that was part of the chart theme as well, because he ended up being the change candidate especially when pitted against eight years of Bush up to that point, but also John McCain who was pretty old at that point being his opponent in that election. And I think the Uranus-Saturn opposition went exact on election day or something like that?
AC: Yeah. Oh, that was a huge part of it. But like, that – it was you know, like, the substance of the – excuse me – yeah, like, the symbol of the campaign, which was very iconic.
CB: The hope part.
AC: Yeah, like, the hope and change. And you know, had that image of him. And I was like, oh yeah, that is a North Node boosted Neptune dream.
CB: Yeah. I think that makes total sense, especially for the hope part. I was just bringing in the Uranus opposition as being part of the change part.
AC: Yeah. I think Aquarius likes change in and of itself, but the ruler of Aquarius being opposite Uranus like, locks that in.
CB: Right. Before we move on completely, because I didn’t want to transition away from it earlier completely before giving some keywords, the Uranus station at the end of the month, because it’s on the last day of January and bleeds over into the first few days of February, I think we should give some keywords for that. Like, unexpected disruptions, shake ups, something that comes out of left field. One of the things I noticed that just came out actually that may be related to it is that late last night, Trump issued a memo that halted all federal spending, and supposedly it’s pending reviews that the money doesn’t go into things like DEI or the environment or other things that he doesn’t like politically. And I have some quotes from an article. It said, “Experts said the memo was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions from assistance to homeless shelters to financial aid for college students. Trump’s nominee to lead the budget office has vowed to try to move power overspending from Congress to the executive brand.” And I think that’s part of the key thing here, because that was what I talked about in the year ahead forecast of the Sun-Pluto conjunction on inauguration day is that that was about – that spoke to me symbolically about the attempt to accumulate more power in the executive brand and the presidency than there had been in the past. Here usually Congress is the one that allocates funding, but Trump is trying to move that power, the power for funding federal things, to his own office, to the White House essentially. So yeah. I think that could be one of the things is depending on how that plays out or if it gets stayed by a federal judge, that could be an unexpected disruption financially for like, a lot of people.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense with Uranus, right? Like, Uranus in Taurus like, disrupting flows of capital. Like, expecting the funding to be there for something and then suddenly it’s not there. And outside of that particular example, there may also – other people may also experience, oh, you know, there’s no – we don’t have the money to do that. Oh, no, there is the money to do that. Because Uranus is though always disruptive, sometimes delights with a surprise. You know, sometimes it’s something out of nothing, and sometimes it’s something into nothing.
CB: Right. So and that happened yesterday; the stock market – all the stocks tanked because there was this sudden like, news that this new AI came out of nowhere and disrupted all the expected things about AI. You know, that’s gonna be also personally relevant for Trump and Vance who both have their Midheaven around those degrees of Taurus. So having Uranus like, stationing on the degree of your Midheaven. And we remember back last summer with the Mars-Uranus conjunction, that was actually when he picked Vance, like the day of that conjunction around the time of their shared Midheaven. But then there was also like, that unexpectedly violent incident in Pennsylvania at the same time.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So anyway. Uranus station and the disruptiveness and unexpectedness, but also rapid pace and developments happening as part of the opening of the month. In terms of electional astrology, I did wanna mention that February 1st is actually – when we looked at the electional astrology this month, in my opinion, it’s the best date of February for launching new ventures and undertakings using the principles of electional astrology. So I just wanted to give my best chart for the month real quick.
The chart for the month is gonna be February 1st, and there’s a few different rising signs because February 1st is actually such a good day this month, but there’s three different options for rising signs. But I’m gonna give the two primary ones.
So the first one is February 1st around 11:30 in the morning – 11:30 AM local time. So that’s 11:30 here in Denver, but it also basically should be roughly 11:30 in your location, whatever city you’re in in the world – just set it for 11:30 in your location. And the chart I’m shooting for, you should adjust it until the Ascendant’s in late Taurus. So if you do this, what you end up with is a chart with Taurus rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, which is exalted in Pisces in the 11th whole sign house. And the Moon is also in Pisces where it’s applying to a conjunction with Venus most of the first part of the day in most time zones.
So this is a very 11th house focused chart, which is good for friends and groups and social movements and other things like that with the ruler of the Ascendant exalted. It also has Jupiter in the 2nd whole sign house in a day chart, which is pretty good for financial things. And the ruler of the 2nd house is Mercury, which is up there in Aquarius applying to a trine with Jupiter with reception. So it’s creating some good connections there with 2nd house financial things and 10th house career and reputation things. Yeah, and it’s just a pretty solid chart. There’s some challenging things with short-distance travel and communication potentially with Mars in the 3rd house being a little bit more combative. So that’s option number one for rising signs, especially if you need your chart to be more focused on the 11th house of friends and groups and the 2nd house of finances.
Alternatively, another good chart is an hour later at about 12:30 PM local time. So this chart should give Gemini rising, and you should adjust it until the Ascendant is around 11 degrees of Gemini so that Jupiter is right on the degree of the Ascendant. So this is an excellent chart that brings that positive Jupiter, which is slowing down and getting ready to station direct. Jupiter’s only two days from stationing direct, so it’s practically direct at this point. And this chart makes Mercury the ruler of the Ascendant, and it’s placed in the 9th whole sign house which is the place of education, foreign travel, religion, spirituality, beliefs, politics, publishing, and other things like that. And Mercury is applying to a trine with Jupiter with reception, which is creating a very positive connection between the first house Jupiter and the 9th house Mercury.
This chart moves the Moon-Venus conjunction in Pisces to the 10th house, which is still pretty solid. The only downside is that Mars has moved to the 2nd house of finances, so it’s not as good for financial matters as a result of Mars being retrograde in Cancer in the 2nd house, but otherwise good for first and 9th house activities.
Yeah, so those are the primary charts for this month in terms of electional astrology and in terms of launching things. Leisa Schaim and I are getting ready to record our electional astrology podcast for February where we’re gonna go through the rest of the month and highlight at least five, maybe six, seven other auspicious charts during the course of February and later dates for our electional astrology podcast which you can get access to through our page at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast on the electional astrology tier. And if you’re looking for dates that are further ahead in the year, we also still have our 2025 Electional Report where we looked at the entire year ahead and we picked out the single best chart for every month over the course of 2025 if you’re looking for planning dates like, this summer or later in 2025 and so on and so forth. So you can get that report at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report.
All right. So that is our election for the month, which is right at the beginning of February. Let’s keep it moving. Let’s move to February 4th where we have a big day, because we have two benefic ingresses that take place already on February 4th where Venus, which we started the month with Venus in late Pisces as we’ve seen – Venus moves into Aries on the 4th, which is the sign that it’s gonna retrograde in. And the same exact day, Jupiter stations direct in the sign of Gemini, which is the last time it will station in that sign before it zooms through the rest of it and enters Cancer later this year in June.
AC: Yeah. It’s a fun pair of ingresses. The – or ingresses, it’s a fun ingress and station. Jupiter is I think less complicated than Venus. Do you wanna talk about Venus or Jupiter first?
CB: Let’s talk about Jupiter because Jupiter’s shorter, and then —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — Venus will take us back into the whole retrograde thing.
AC: So yeah, Jupiter’s direct station is nice in the sense that when Jupiter’s direct, it tends to offer reward and opportunity. The retrograde phase of Jupiter is often crucial for following up on, making good on, like, locking in an opportunity for like, growth, expansion, a project, you know, personal improvement or whatever. But it’s the direct phases where we tend to experience the actual reward rather than the fight to retain it or to follow up on it. And so not only is Jupiter entering a more positive phase, but it does so in a near perfect trine with its ruler at this point, right? Which is in Gemini, the ruler is Mercury, and Mercury is only one degree away from a perfect trine, very much enabling like, a rapid positive turn for that sector of Gemini. Jupiter does still have to make its third and final square with Saturn, but it won’t actually do that until it leaves the sign of Gemini. And so any of the positive developments that people have been experiencing while Jupiter’s in Gemini are set to get back on track and begin moving forward probably quite rapidly. Some of the projects or things that were going well for a while but kind of slowed down and there hasn’t been as much progress over the last four months are likely to jump back into swift motion. You know, it’s a happy about-face. Like, oh, these things can move forward again. Like, oh, all those annoying changes we had to do to make things better are actually paying off and now we’re moving in the right direction.
CB: Yeah. Especially it probably refers back to something when Jupiter stationed over the fall. That would have been when the Sun was in Libra, so we’re talking about maybe like, September or October when Jupiter stationed retrograde in Gemini.
AC: Yeah. It would have been early fall like that.
CB: Yeah. Okay. So this is gonna be a hugely important turning point, because Jupiter went into Gemini back in like, the May time frame of last year of 2024, right?
AC: Mhmm.
CB: When we had that whole pile up, stellium of planets in Gemini. And for a lot of people in terms of like, your personal life, usually that’s a period of growth and expansion when it comes to whatever whole sign house Jupiter has just ingressed into your chart. So that’s been going on since last May. But usually at the retrograde station, you run into some issues with that or there’s some slowdowns or obstacles that come up back in like, September. And at this point, when Jupiter stations direct, usually a lot of that gets worked out and things start moving forward again. And there’s this sudden like, burst of typically – especially if you have a day chart – like, positive things happening in that area of your life that matches the house that Jupiter is transiting through. And whatever that transit’s supposed to be about for you usually gets delivered very rapidly over the course of like, a few days where Jupiter suddenly the volume gets turned up and it becomes very loud.
So I think that’s gonna happen in people’s personal lives; it’s also gonna happen in world events because we’ve seen a lot of the stuff with artificial intelligence being incorporated into a voice component where there was all these voice AI apps that came out over the past year. I think there’s gonna be something related to that, something related to voice, to language, to translation. Like, live translation and communication that happens around this time in early February, not just because Jupiter is stationing, but also because of that nice trine from Mercury at the same time from Aquarius.
AC: Yeah. And it’s only a few days later on the 6th that the Moon conjoins newly stationed Jupiter, so.
CB: Nice. And I showed you that AI like, voice thing the other day where I was like, talking to the AI and you could just like, rapidly talk back and forth to it, right?
AC: Yeah.
CB: So —
AC: It was called Gemini, right?
CB: Yeah, it’s literally called Gemini. Like, Google Gemini. And OpenAI has their version as well. But there’s just something incredibly striking about that that you can have little quick back and forth conversations with the artificial intelligence at this point to tell you things in a way that’s different somehow compared to before where you could use voice to just like, google like, a short question or something like that. There’s a conversational component of language that’s been incorporated here that’s different and unique in some way.
AC: Yeah. It is an unprecedented development.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s probably like, relatively positive, that February 4th date with those two benefic activations happening at the same time.
AC: Venus is a little bit more complicated. I don’t know that —
CB: It is more complicated.
AC: Yeah, because it’s one, Venus is moving from the sign of exaltation – Pisces – into a place that’s harder for Venus. Right? Like, the in exile, in detriment. You know, Aries is a harsher, rougher, more direct place. There’s not as much appreciation for artistry or subtlety, and relationships are often tested via conflict. The heat gets turned up. Which is not to say there’s nothing to enjoy with Venus in Aries, but it is traditionally a harder place to be. And not only is Aries a harder place to be, but Venus is getting increasingly close to the retrograde station. Venus is slowing, getting slower and slower and slower, and so what we see in Venus’s sphere as Venus moves into Aries is going to be complicated. What gets brought up is increasingly complicated and not, you know, as we get close to a planet’s retrograde station, you know, this area that’s going to be crossed three times, it means that – like, those subjects are going to need three passes to understand or unpack. And so things get complicated where like, what it looks like at first or at the first layer is, you know, it conceals other things. So yeah, it’s, you know, it’s important. It’s interesting. You should pay attention. Both the positive feelings and excitements as well as the anger that comes up. The frustration, right? Those martial, those Mars-Venus feelings. You know, frustrated passions, anger, et cetera, et cetera. Like, all that stuff, it’s coming up as soon as Venus goes into Aries.
CB: Yeah. That’s gonna be a definite vibe shift on February 4th. And I’m glad you mentioned that, because that’s gonna last for such a long time since Venus just stays in Aries all the way until March 27th once it gets in there. And you brought up how Venus in Aries is like, opposite to its own sign, to its domicile, and how that can be somewhat awkward or different for Venus at first. And then even Venus going retrograde also part of the symbolism of that is doing something that goes against the grain or something that’s unconventional or something that Venus doesn’t typically do so that you get both of those senses of Venus being like, a little bit out of place in some way. But that out-of-placeness doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but instead sometimes with like, Venus in Aries, you just get Venus doing things that Mars usually does. And so you get like, a more direct Venus. You get a more abrupt or sometimes confrontational Venus that likes to go quicker and do things at a more fast pace. And sometimes that can be a little jarring at first, but you know, some people do very well with that Venus in Aries placement.
AC: Yeah. You know, in a sense, you know, whenever I look at Venus in a particular place, it’s well, what is there to enjoy here? Right? Like, what is the aesthetic of this place? What is beautiful? What kind of relationships are there to be had? And Aries, especially the first portion of Aries, is it’s very kinetic. It’s at times it can be brutally direct, sometimes violent. And when you look at people with – famous people and non famous people – with Venus in Aries, when they have a strongly Venusian nature, you have sort of the quality of yeah, I guess people call it a bombshell. Right? When someone’s presence and appearance disrupts everything that’s going on. One famous example being Marilyn Monroe, right, whose presence as a bombshell like, destroyed the rooms she entered. We also have Jack Nicholson, who is violently charismatic. And so you also have sort of —
CB: Lady Gaga.
AC: Okay, Lady Gaga. You also —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — have that cheering for one side of a contest or being swept up in a conflict. Right? Which is half of the enjoyment of fandom in sports and increasingly politics. The like, enjoying like, watching the struggle unfold. Right? Yeah, like, that’s what they’re – it’s another, yeah, I don’t know, I often think of Aries as being a place where gladiatorial matches happen. Right? And there’s such high drama and passion. It may not be a classical Venusian environment, and it’s not an art museum. But there still is, there’s still quite a bit of drama and beauty and dramatic moments. But it’s not – I guess what it’s not that Venus often brings is direct and in a traditional sign, or a place of traditional dignity, Venus tends to bring peace, which is not the case at all during Venus retrograde phases or leading up to them. And it’s also certainly not what we see in Aries.
CB: Yeah. Venus in Aries, especially retrograde, doesn’t take shit from anyone. And oftentimes, there’s these protests, especially like, women’s protests start happening under these Venus retrogrades. Like, eight years ago, it was the women’s protest after Trump was inaugurated, which were the largest protests at the time in US history up until three years later when Venus went retrograde again in Gemini and then that was the George Floyd protests. But even going back in history, in 1913 when Venus was retrograde in Aries, the suffragists held these huge protests to get the women’s right to vote. And then eight years later was right after they got the right to vote, and the first Congress that women had been able to vote in the first official like, election that women were able to vote in in 1920, at the end of 1920, that Congress came into effect in early 1921 when Venus was retrograde in Aries and started actually passing laws, including some really positive ones for women’s healthcare.
AC: Yeah. Perfect. And so on a like, personal watching your astrology note, you don’t have to wait until Venus is retrograde in Aries to see and feel this coming. Like, this stuff should be popping up and trying desperately to get your attention early in the month. I feel like there’s once you start paying attention to the astrology, there’s no excuse for being surprised by the Venus retrograde. Like, it’s gonna spend all month, all of February, introducing itself to you. And this movement into Aries on the 4th should be a particularly unsubtle moment.
CB: Yeah. It’s gonna start getting really loud as soon as it goes into Aries, and then it’ll reach peak loudness once it actually stations retrograde on March 1st through April 12th. But you can already see it coming a mile away. And people can look back eight years ago and understand whatever was going on back then may give you some preview in early 2017 of some of the themes that are gonna come up now. Or you can go eight years before that to early 2009, and that may be some of the themes, especially if you see a recurrence.
I’m noticing people that have placements in early Aries or late Pisces seem to be the ones most impacted by this retrograde because Venus will actually go over those degrees. And like, Lady Gaga was one I found where she really exploded on the scene during this Venus retrograde in early 2009, and it turns out it’s because she has her Sun in early Aries as well as placements in late Pisces. Like, her Mercury’s in like, mid- to late Pisces.
So people with Aries and Pisces placements are gonna be the most affected by this, but the Venus retrograde is not usually a singular event. But instead, it’s like, a series of events that unfolds over a period of time. And for many of us, the buildup to that has already begun.
AC: Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s a significant period. Which we’ll probably be talking about for the next two months straight.
CB: Right. Are there any other things you wanna mention about it, about like, going back and revisiting old relationships, revising or rebalancing current relationships? It can often be a turning point within a current relationship or with something going on in your partner’s life.
AC: Yeah. I think that – I mean, those are all relevant things. This leading into Venus retrograde I find that people get – it’s almost like some of these topics like how things are in your current relationship or with your current relationship status. If you’re with someone, or if you’re not with something, there’s like, it’s like things start to get itchy where there’s something not quite right that needs your attention. Right? Being itchy is the way your body tells you that some part of you needs more attention, right? And to notice that itchiness, right, which is suggesting a reversal, because that’s a huge part of the Venus retrograde is it’s bringing things up, it’s bringing up what you’re connected to, what your passions are connected to, which may be partnership. It may be your personal investiture. Your passion for a project you’re doing, a career you’re doing. A hobby, whatever. It’s like, this emotional focus. And the Venus retrogrades bring that up for question. And very often, people sort of go back and forth with well, what if I didn’t do this? Or is this as important to me now as it has been? Right? Is this something I’ve just sort of taken for granted? And a lot of times, people will see, will feel a fading of passion or uncertainty about what they have come to take for granted as a place of great pleasure and enthusiasm. “Well, of course I love this!” And Venus retrogrades bring that up for question. And it’s not that because they’re brought up for question that the planets are telling you to negate that. It’s an inspection, and it’s a coming back to and bringing attention to something so that you can renew the passion, or maybe it is time to move on. Maybe that is an artifact of a different time, right? Maybe that’s just sort of like, a still photograph of your heart from eight years ago and you’re in a different place now. But Venus’s retrograde brings that necessary reinvestigation, that check-in with where you are in the living present rather than the last time you remember coming to the heart of things. And so all of that’s like, getting moving and pulling you towards it during this lead-up to the station.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s like an opportunity to change or to redesign something in your life, and to revisit the foundations of that. So some time – and usually the location of what you’re gonna change or revisit or redesign is whatever house Venus is going retrograde in. So sometimes people if it’s happening in their 4th house, it’s like, they literally redesign their home or decide to redecorate something, which sometimes involves going back to a decision that you made sometime earlier about like, how you wanted to have the design and layout of your home look like, and then rethink and retooling something foundational about that, which can sometimes involve taking things down and deconstructing some things in order to build it back up again in a way that fits your more ideal sense of beauty and harmony and design that you would like for your living environment. And you can take that same principle and apply it to every house. Like, if it’s in your 7th house, sometimes you may wanna look at the foundations of your relationship and like, take some things down in order to build them back up again in a more idealized sense. Or if it’s happening in your 10th house, that may be happening in your career sector. If it’s in your 11th house, it may be happening with your friendships and so on and so forth.
AC: Yeah. You also see that – yeah, 2nd with finances. You know, 10th, profession. I have one coming up that I already – I have Mercury in the span of Venus’s retrograde sweep. And I’m already certain what that’s gonna be. I’ve been feeling like, an itchiness around getting back to writing. Right? I have Mercury in the 10th house, and I used to just write all the time. And the last several, it’s coming up five, six, seven, eight years, I just haven’t been writing as much. And so I can feel the like, dissatisfaction with not doing that growing. And that’s one of the phenomenological with experiential pieces of feeling the Venus retrograde coming. It’s like, I’m mad that I’m not doing that. Right? Or like, if you’re increasingly sick of doing something because you’d rather be doing whatever the other thing is – like, these attraction and repulsion cues are part of the language of Venus, you know, that these phases speak to you through.
CB: Yeah. It’s happening in my 3rd house, and I realized I had this impulse… Eight years ago I published my book in early 2017, and that was part of my Venus retrograde story in my 3rd house is my book came out and made a huge splash in the astrological community. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, available in fine bookstores everywhere. But one of the things I did immediately after I put the book out is I had seen that YouTube was becoming really popular and that I needed to get into doing YouTube and doing video versions of the podcast, because I had been doing just audio sense I started the podcast in 2012. And then —
AC: Oh, I remember that shift, yeah.
CB: Well, yeah, but it’s like I knew I needed to do it years earlier, but I was like, “No, I need to focus on finishing this book.” I was working on it for 10 years to publish the book. And I was like, “I need to wait until that’s done and then I’ll start focusing on doing video.” And then as soon as the book was published in like, February of 2017, I immediately started experimenting with buying a video camera and buying lights and learning lighting and videography and then you start seeing me doing video versions of the podcast from that point forward. But that summer, there was this whole process of like, doing test videos and tooling and retooling my lighting and setup and everything else. And recently, you know, over the past year, last summer I started experimenting with this setup, of setting up this camera in my living room with my couch in the background and recording here for better video. But over the past few weeks, I just really got the urge to actually start recording full podcasts here, and fine tuning the lighting and everything else. And this is the first episode I’m officially doing that on. And I didn’t do that because Venus is going retrograde, but I just at some point in the process of naturally having that arise from within me, that impulse, I did realize that this was eight year repetition of when I started, and that’s probably part of why I’m having this impulse to change the look and the video and the aesthetics of everything right now.
AC: Yeah, and it rules your 4th, so you’re having to literally rearrange things in your home.
CB: Right. Yeah. That’s true. As well —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — as my 9th house, and I’ve got all my books in the background and doing it on The Astrology Podcast.
All right, so we’ll talk more about Venus retrograde. It’s a big topic.
AC: We in fact will not shut up about it for months and months.
CB: No. Get ready for this. Yeah, if you thought last time was bad in 2023 when I wouldn’t shut up about Venus retrograde, like, this one is gonna be a doozy.
So let’s move on, though. Things get a little rocky, a little bit unstable —
AC: I really need a pee break.
CB: Oh you need a break? Okay. Let’s take —
AC: Yeah, I’ve been secret messaging you for the last couple of minutes, “After Venus, need pee break.”
CB: Oh god. I see it now.
AC: You know, this is Venus in Aries, right, energy. This is – the subtle messaging isn’t working, so I’ll be back in 60 seconds.
CB: All right. We’ll be right back.
Austin’s pee break is sponsored by Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. And this is the astrology program that we use and recommend here on The Astrology Podcast to animate charts. You can get a 15 percent discount on the software by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.
Austin’s pee break is also sponsored by AstroGold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer. From the creators of Solar Fire for PC, AstroGold includes modern plus traditional techniques. And you can get a 15 percent discount by using the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ on their website when purchasing the software at AstroGold.io.
All right, we’re back. So let’s transition to talking about the second week of February where things get a little bit rocky and some curveballs come in, and there’s some unexpected developments, some Uranian energy, that starts coming in on February 9th. Because we get the Mercury cazimi on February 9th, which is Mercury conjoining the Sun and going right into the heart of the Sun. But both of them are squaring Uranus at the same time, so there’s some sort of unexpected disruptive component to this conjunction that’s different than normal, and it continues to evolve over the next few days. Because on February 10th, Mercury exactly squares Uranus. Then on February 11th, the Sun exactly squares Uranus. And then finally on February 12th, we get our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Leo which is also closely squaring Uranus at the time. So this Uranian energy, which we already sort of came into the month with after the Uranus station in Taurus on January 30th, gets reignited through these connections with the Sun and Mercury with Uranus around the middle of the month.
AC: Yeah, it’s that same volatility which we got kind of a rumble from at the very beginning of the month impacting various spheres, right? And so yeah, like, that sort of ongoing set of – it’s an ongoing sort of sequence of disruptions, surprises, on an individual level. There’s often a need to shift to plan B or go to the backup plan because that was possible before was not – or excuse me, something that was possible before became not possible, or something that was blocked before shook loose, and now you can do plan A rather than plan B. But there’s, you know, there’s adaptive necessity, because the, you know, paths opening and closing and factors emerging and disappearing which are likely to materially impact plans and expectations in that area, or in a variety of areas here.
CB: Right. And it’s bringing up this tension between Aquarius and Taurus again, which sometimes is like the tech sector versus like, the financial sector in some broader sector. Or like, things materially with Uranus recently stationing in Taurus and things that are happening – we’ve seen like, social media be a major component of Aquarius over the past several years, and that could be part of it. Like, some curveball or unexpected story that comes up in terms of social media, in terms of AI, in terms of tech in general.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Well, and with Taurus we also have like, commodities and currency.
CB: Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking, because that’s what’s already happening this week is we’re seeing like, two different like, things coming up in terms of commodities where you have all the tech stocks in the stock market tanking due to AI news. But then you also have Trump issuing that order to cut off federal funding across the board that’ll have ripples in and of itself so close to this Uranus station in Taurus. There’s something about, yeah, this relationship between Uranus in Taurus and the Aquarius planets and this like, acceleration of technology that’s happening.
AC: Yeah. There may be – I mentioned there will also be some developments around how much power the tech aspirations will require. That the electricity being the sort of Taurus fuel for the wide-reaching Aquarian aspirations.
CB: Yeah, that’s huge.
AC: That’s an ongoing story. That’s not like, oh, the nuclear power plants all get built in these three days in February, or you know. But like, it speaks to that.
CB: For sure, yeah. I think that was one of my realizations that Pluto in Aquarius, it’s not just about AI, but it’s also about energy. Like, energy as being a major component of this Pluto in Aquarius period that we haven’t thought about for a long time. So much of like —
AC: Yeah, it’s the new oil.
CB: Exactly! Like, so much of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in the earth signs from like, the early 1800s until 2000 was about the rise of oil and the way that oil impacted the world and the economy and geopolitics and everything else. And it’s like, this new Jupiter-Saturn triplicity shift into Aquarius, into air signs, that started in 2020 that’s now being accelerated by Pluto into Aquarius I’m realizing the shift of that is electricity and power being a focal point, but in a way that’s different compared to the oil age that we’re coming out of essentially.
AC: Yeah. I think that’s dead-on there. Yeah, because electricity is sort of a meta commodity. Right? Because it’s what are you using to – because you can use a hundred things to make electricity. You can’t use different things to make oil. Right? You can refine the oil, but it’s just there. Whereas like, how is the electricity being generated, how is it being stored, how is it being sold, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, I was happy to see that on your outline because I’d been thinking about exactly the same thing. And I —
CB: Yeah.
AC: I think other people on the internet had maybe thought that too.
CB: Yeah, I’d wrote some notes this month – one of the things that was striking was that hydrocarbons have been the fuel of economic development for the past 200 years, which includes oil, coal, yeah, everything that comes from like, fossil fuels essentially. And I didn’t know that it was it was in 1855, in April of 1855, that this scientist published a paper where he showed how essentially what he called at the time “rock oil” – which was used for like, medical purposes up to that point – could be used instead of like, whale oil to make kerosene. And that was the switch. That was the crucial development in the modern petroleum industry. And I cast the chart for that, and Pluto has just gone into Taurus at that time —
AC: While Uranus is in Taurus.
CB: — where it caught up with Uranus in Taurus.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And the nodes were there at the same time, so there was about to start being eclipses in Taurus as well. So we’re having some sort of parallel here right now with this shift to the energy economy, which is evidently starting to feature this comeback of nuclear energy, but also electric as the whole grid is gearing up to shift towards electric cars and things like that.
AC: Yeah. Well, and it points back towards some of the issues that have been raised around crypto where they’re in some ways limited by a measure of the amount of power poured into their generation.
CB: Right. Although with that, the crypto people responded to that which was a growing controversy and pushback against crypto that it was using so much power to mine the cryptocurrencies that most of the major cryptocurrencies switched away from having to mine them and using electricity, basically, in order to do it, to just running the codes without having to use as much electricity. So —
AC: Yeah. It’s more —
CB: — most of them switched from that.
AC: Yeah, it just seems like an interesting instance, because you have, you know, it’s like, what is the guarantor? Like, what is a currency backed by, right? And you know, obviously gold was used to back currency a lot. But in some senses, it’s like, you can back a currency with anything that’s truly valuable and exchangeable. Right? And electricity backing a currency in this air – like, this 200 years, right? I’m not saying this happens tomorrow. Makes a lot of sense.
CB: Right.
AC: And crypto is sort of like, an early, like, an echo of a future where that is true.
CB: Yeah. That’s true. As well as like, scarcity and the uniqueness of something, or sometimes just an idea being a sort of currency in and of itself. Like Trump and his image being the idea of something that’s like, valuable that he’s now selling because there’s limited quantities of his coin with his name on it.
AC: Yeah, I would prefer currency backed by something a little bit less volatile than a single person’s reputation, but you know.
CB: Yeah. I mean, well, you’re not an economist, my friend, so —
AC: That’s right! Me and George Bush.
CB: Yeah, exactly.
AC: Neither of us are economists.
CB: All right. So let’s look again one last time at this Full Moon in Leo if there’s anything else to say aside from it being this disruptive —
AC: I mean, it’s loud.
CB: — upstart energy.
AC: It’s the Full Moon in Leo is always loud. You know, Leo tends towards high drama. Like, Leo is performative, which is one of its excellences. But yeah, especially with Venus being well into Aries, right, we have these expressive feeling planets – both Venus and the Moon – both in fire signs. Venus getting ready to do something even louder, and then the Moon at its point of maximum visibility. So you know, it’s definitely loud and dramatic.
CB: Right, it’s loud, it’s dramatic, it’s showy, it’s fashionable. Just thinking of like, the Venus retrograde in Leo that happened last year. One of the nice aspects that’s forming this month – except it doesn’t complete, and I wish that it did – is by this time, Venus which is at five degrees of Aries and it’s like, applying to this sextile with Jupiter, but it slows down and it stations retrograde before it gets to Jupiter. So it’s like, one of those classic medieval aspects of like, you know, something positive that’s like, forming in the future where the person is reaching for the wished-for thing, but then it’s frustrated and it’s pulled back at the last minute when there’s a course change before it can complete or obtain that thing.
AC: Yeah, it looks like it’s gonna happen. And then —
CB: Right.
AC: — it just doesn’t quite happen.
CB: Yeah. Like, Venus changes her mind and has to go back to the past to deal with something, to deal with like, Neptune and Saturn again in Pisces before it actually obtains the connection or completes the connection with Jupiter.
AC: Yeah. There’s a big side trip. There’s a big delay. There’s a magical underworld goose chase before Venus and Jupiter can make that sextile.
CB: Right. What were you saying yesterday that Venus has to like, go through the underworld and go through the seven gates to meet up with her wayward sister?
AC: Yeah, I mean, that’s the Inanna myth, right? Is she gets an email from her sister. “We need, you know, you’re invited to attend a funeral; I really need you right now.” And you know, Venus, Inanna, shows up at the address, and it’s a big hole in the ground, and there’s a weird elevator, and she’s forced to give up her coat, her rings, her cell phone, her wallet. You know, increasingly intimate apparel. And you know, appears before her sister quite awkwardly for the Venus retrograde. Right? It’s increasingly weird and uncomfortable. Like, I didn’t think – this wasn’t on the RSVP. And so we’re getting – yeah, like, we’re getting towards that awkward reunion of Inanna and Ereshkigal as we move through this month.
CB: Right. She’s stripped of all of her power and like, worldly possessions and goods and brought down to like, her lowest point, which is in personal experience sometimes the middle part of the Venus retrograde —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — where people experience the dark night of the soul and the internalization process that sort of like, goes through that before you emerge out the other side of the cave.
AC: Yeah. And we can – this is certainly, excuse me, this is no doubt built around Venus’s disappearance from the sky in the middle, like, in the early part of the retrograde. Like, where’s Venus, right? Venus is in the underworld. Right? Venus has gone down. Again, that entered those strange caverns, and yeah, it is a dark night of the soul. Maybe it’s a dark night of the heart. You know, it brings together Inanna, who was having a great time before this, who’s like, the glorious goddess of victories innumerable and celestial glory, and it’s her reuniting with her sister whose lot was to rule the underworld. Right? Like, the bottom of the sewer system where all miseries and tragedies and deaths flow down to. And it’s her sister, you know, it’s Ereshkigal having lost her consort in some of the stories. And so it’s like, vulnerability and pain – it’s the bottom, right? You know, it is the sister who was reveling in celestial glory being brought to that point underneath rather than up above. And the sort of mutual change that occurs when those two parts of a person are put into complete and immediate contact with one another.
CB: Right. Or it’s like, it’s like that part in the Barbie movie where Barbie’s like, dancing and living this idyllic lifestyle but then all of a sudden, she starts thinking about death, and she starts thinking about mortality and doesn’t know why these unsettling thoughts are starting to like, encroach into her consciousness at this time. And it’s like, by mid-February, much of February is gonna be that for people. It’s gonna be that point where like, these weird thoughts start encroaching into people’s consciousness of like, something that’s not right. Something that needs to be changed or something that you wanna retool about your life that you start to feel on the horizon.
AC: Yeah, I would say we’re, I don’t know how far down, but we’re definitely on the elevator during the second half of February.
CB: Right.
AC: Like, there’s a descent happening. And there’s like, an emotional gravity pulling us towards that bottom or central point. And we’re not there yet by the time we get done with February, but the pull is very clear.
CB: Right. All right, so after the Full Moon, our next significant ingress is that Mercury goes into Pisces on the 14th, interestingly right on Valentine’s Day. This is our Valentine’s Day chart. Just looking at it, and early in the morning it’s kind of rough because the Moon is applying to Saturn like, very early in the morning, but it breaks that opposition later in the day. So hopefully that doesn’t put too much of a damper on Valentine’s Day for a number of people, Valentine’s Day before Venus retrograde, but it’s not nice that it starts off with the Moon opposite Saturn, which is more of a cold energy.
AC: Yeah. I mean, I consider Valentine’s Day to be a supremely poorly elected holiday. You know, I’ve lobbied quietly for years to get it moved to a more naturally Venusian and celebratory day.
CB: To like, Taurus season or Libra season?
AC: Well, my first thought was move it to the day every year that the Sun occupies Venus’s degree of maximum exaltation, but then I found out that that’s Saint Patrick’s Day, and we already have a holiday where you’re supposed to have an awesome time and wear green, which is Venus’s color, and kiss random people, which is a Venus thing. So there’s literally already a Venusian holiday – at least in America – on that day. So that…
CB: You know, a funny Venus retrograde thing I found in history in like, the mid-20th century during this Venus retrograde in Aries – one year on Valentine’s Day, the pope canceled Valentine’s Day and said that it was no longer gonna be in the official Catholic calendar of celebrated holidays because they were trying to remove some stuff like that to focus more on Jesus and things related to, I don’t know, celebrating his timeline. So that was like, one of the worst Venus retrograde Valentine’s Day was the day Valentine’s —
AC: That’s funny.
CB: — Day got canceled.
AC: I mean, the pope is right. That one, the February 14th version needs to be canceled.
CB: I know, but it’s literally named after Saint Valentine’s, and all of a sudden, the Catholics don’t celebrate —
AC: Yeah.
CB: —- even though it’s continued to be celebrated by, you know, other non-secular people.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It should be moved.
CB: All right. We’ll revisit this. So Mercury into Pisces February 14th. Sun into Pisces February 18th. Mercury square Jupiter on February 20th, and this is when we get into the most I don’t wanna say interesting, but important part of the month, which is that Mars starts slowing down at this point, and it just like, camps out at 17 degrees of Cancer for a very long time until eventually it stations direct on February 23rd at 17 degrees of Cancer. And this is a sudden – like we were saying earlier – exclamation mark next to Mars where the energy of that Mars in Cancer transit that we first got a taste of last September when Mars was transiting through Cancer for a while, and then now has returned recently since early January, really gets amped up at this point towards the end of February in this third week around February 23rd.
AC: Yeah. And so Mars – excuse me – Mars is actually in that one single degree from the 12th of February until the 9th of March is when it finally gets out. Right? And so that’s not like, Mars in a sign for three weeks. Usually Mars does about 15 degrees in three weeks. Actually, that’s three-and-a-half weeks coming up on four. It’s just Mars at just 17 from the 12th of February all the way to the 9th of March. And so if you have things at 17 degrees of a cardinal sign, or near that, you know, make room for Mars, who’s gonna kind of move in and just stay there.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Cleaning.
CB: I’m not looking forward to that. That’s not gonna be fun for me, personally, that has stuff close to there. Let’s talk good things, bad things to summarize some of our Mars retrograde things.
AC: Right, so it’s the direct station, which I would prefer to a retrograde station with Mars.
CB: Sure.
AC: On the direct station, it’s no longer time – like, forces are no longer in disarray and retreat. It’s like, the direct station is a push to get organized and to face the challenges that have now emerged, that are present, and figure out how to tackle what’s up. Right? Because Mars spent so much time in these degrees introducing a variety of challenges. Like, this is what the challenges are during this time. The direct station is like, okay, we’re gonna do it all again, but this time having some idea where we are, and what will be required of us. And so Mars gets going very slowly. There’s this sort of like, okay, I am ready to face this. I am ready to leave this behind and take this on, but I need to – very often, there’s like, sort of a needing to train or get in shape. Like, become fit for the tasks that have been put before you, which are, you know, can be physical or have a physical component. But you know, could be a lot of other, could exist in any other area of the life as well. And so it is a moving forward energy, but it’s not bursting off of the starter blocks like in a sprint. It’s like, okay, we’re organized, let’s get moving. Let’s head back into it, but this time on purpose.
CB: Yeah. There’s definitely some people that have Mars prominent in their chart or where this Mars retrograde is more constructive in their charts where they’re gonna have a tremendous amount of sustained exertion of energy for a good purpose or to focus on a good thing. And this is gonna be the turning point where they start seeing some progress or some gains or some results as a result of the sustained effort that they’ve been putting in in this area of their life. And that can be really constructive and really positive thing as a good turning point.
AC: Yeah. I will say for Mars in the middle decan of Cancer here that this is, Mars is a co-ruler of that decan. It’s the ruler according to the triplicity method. And so what I see in practice is that Mars isn’t good at all of the Mars things just because it’s in a decan, but it is good – it’s very useful for, how should we put this, works of protection, fortification, armoring. I’ve seen that in terms of physical regiment or culture rehabbing injuries or doing exercises to proactively strengthen let’s say knees that tend to get fucked up or a back that’s prone to injury. I also see that Mars in the middle decan of Cancer having a positive effect on people’s financial planning, because that’s very much a vector of safety/danger. Right? Keeping the home safe is like, thinking about all that stuff. And then there’s also like, literal security, military stuff. But it is quite good for preservative and defensive works.
CB: Yeah. We talked about in previous months about the tendency of Mars in Cancer to wanna protect that which is familiar or that which one associates with their home or their origins or sometimes fighting to defend that in some way as a more positive expression.
AC: Yeah. Like, what you care most deeply about. Like, the familiar. Excuse me, not – yeah, the familial as well as the familiar. Like, what your care is invested in is what’s in Cancer.
CB: Right. But then the downside of that is we also saw the darker side of that, which can sometimes be like, what was the word? It was like, nationalism or like, weird forms of —
AC: Nativism was the term used.
CB: Yeah, it was like, nativism. There were some issues with like, racism and other things like that became more prominent at that time. Obviously, part of the focal point of this as I said earlier in the episode is probably gonna be some of the things that are happening in the US right now in terms of what Trump is doing with immigration and the potential for some conflicts or controversies surrounding that to erupt around this time, which then tie into a week later the Venus retrograde which begins immediately afterwards. I think there’s some sort of connection there. There may also be – one thing I talked about in the year ahead forecast is I felt like the Mars retrograde that started in Leo in December and the fact that Mars went into Leo right before the election took place, there was this weird ascendancy with the Mars retrograde of an almost like, masculine energy. I don’t know what else to call it besides that. But I think during Venus retrogrades, one of the things I see very often is an ascendency of a more feminine energy for lack of a better way to call that. And I think there’s some sort of tradeoff here that happens where the Mars stuff hits a peak at this point when Mars stations direct, the masculine whatever this has been over the past several months, but then all of a sudden, there’s this fiery angry protesting like, Venus energy that comes in really strong at the end of February and the very beginning of March. And I’m really interested to see if there’s a connection of events between like, Mars setting something off that then provokes this reaction with Venus.
AC: Yeah, there should be. I mean, Venus is literally stationing retrograde in Mars’s sign. Right?
CB: Right?
AC: And those stations are a week apart, or less than a week apart. And so, yeah, when you were characterizing the end of February, it’s very much – I don’t know how to put it – it’s like we’re in the pipe, right? Like, it’s going – like, Mars’s stationing leads directly into Venus’s station. And we also just sort of quietly in the encompassing background, we have the North Node and Neptune making their conjunction. Right? Which is, again, like, there’s this like, myth-making investment in story that is just like, happening in the background that will be doubly relevant again when Venus comes back to it. Yeah, like, in the background, right? Stories are recruiting. They’re trying to pull people in, but the action, the foreground, is Mars and then Venus absolutely.
CB: Yeah. And I think in people’s personal lives, there may be a connection as well. Like, especially people that have lots of cardinal placements in their chart, especially if you have a cardinal sign rising, that means Mars and Venus are gonna be stationing in angular houses in your chart almost simultaneously. So there may be some connection there as well where we talked about the more constructive side of the Mars retrograde, but for those that have been experiencing the Mars in Cancer and the Mars retrograde as more negative or challenging, you may experience this direct station as starting to come out of a series of events that have been centered around conflict or strife or accidents or other challenges that there’s another important turning point in that story. For some people, it can be the point where you hit the lowest point but then you start to come back out of that once Mars starts moving forward again, and that may also connect in some way with setting off the Venus retrograde. Like, the challenges you’re experiencing in the Mars retrograde part of your chart could somehow hand off to and precipitate the Venus retrograde redesigns that start like, a week later.
AC: Yeah. What occurs to me is sort of with Mars stationing direct – okay, this is how it’s gonna be. Right? Which may not be favorable, but it’s like, there’s no way around dealing with this. I have to contest this or I have to fight this battle or I have to like, climb this hill. It’s like, if this is the way it’s gonna be – because I wasn’t sure while Mars was retrograde, seemed like maybe we could go another way – this is how it’s gonna be. Then immediately cue Venus – then that means I can’t do this, or I don’t wanna do this because I’m doing this. Right? Like, it immediately hands off – like, once Mars is fixed in its course, like, once we know where it’s headed again, then Venus is like, oh, okay, now I know what I need to dispute. Right? What I can’t be invested in anymore, or what I need the new things I need to reinvest my passion in because of the clarity provided by the Mars direct. Because it becomes a known rather than just sort of – Mars retrograde hands out a lot of chaos, chaotic martial events that have uncertain trajectories, and Mars direct is not necessarily more favorable, but it is considerably more orderly. It has a course and a trajectory again. And so we can begin narrowing things down.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So pay attention to what houses these two stations are happening in your chart as important turning points. It may be a little bit more challenging in the Cancer sector of your chart, and there may be some positive things happening in the Venus sector of your chart. So after Mars stations, on February 25th, Mercury conjoins Saturn in Pisces. Then we get our second lunation of the month, which is a New Moon in Pisces on February 27th. Let me pull up the chart for that really quickly.
So this one didn’t – like, the Full Moon in Leo stood out to be because it was very closely square Uranus so that we were getting that unexpected disruptive energy very strongly. This lunation wasn’t standing out to me as much. It’s like, we have the Mercury-Saturn conjunction is still very strong. Sometimes that can be like, inhibiting communication for some reason. The Venus-Jupiter sextile is very close. This New Moon is basically about as close as that sextile gets, but then like we said earlier, Venus turns retrograde so it doesn’t complete it. There’s something that’s wrong.t here’s something that Venus has to attend to so that the positive outcome doesn’t manifest at that time. What else are you seeing about this New Moon?
AC: Well, I see it as a, you know, it’s a strong sort of relocation of the center of things into Pisces where there’s a lot happening. Right? We have Saturn, Rahu, Neptune, Mercury is there and Mercury will return, Venus isn’t there but Venus will return. And so you know, it’s a plunge into the fantastic, sometimes nightmarish, colorful, emotionally loaded, mythically landscaped Pisces place. Right? You know, it’s a water sign, and there’s a lot of what is due to occur is very emotionally loaded. And so you know, we’re deprived what dry, Aquarian foresight and concern that we had for a lot of the month. And it’s just all in on Pisces. And it’s going to be a little confusing. You know, there are some very strong currents in play and some very strange creatures to be seen beneath the waves. Not all of them real.
CB: Yeah. Because one of the – you mentioning that brings up something I forgot to mention because we focused so much on, you know, Mars is stationing direct and Venus is stationing retrograde at the beginning of March, but we’re also getting ready for Mercury to go retrograde in March as well. And that shadow period begins on March 1st when Mercury passes 26 degrees of Pisces.
This is another graphic that Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co designed for me to show this Mercury retrograde period that’s gonna weirdly overlap with not just the Venus retrograde, but just some of the crazy eclipse season and other stuff that starts happening in March, which as we talked about in our year ahead forecast, March and April is basically like, the most explosive part of the year that we spent maybe the most time talking about is that eclipse season just looks really crazy. But one of the things to start thinking about by the end of February is when Mercury starts hitting those later degrees of Pisces, events are gonna start happening in world events, but also in our personal lives that we’re gonna return to later, because it’s gonna initiate something that looks like it’s one and done, but in fact we’re gonna revisit again during the course of that Mercury retrograde.
AC: Yeah. Like, the outer edge of February looks a lot like two months later. We’re not done with any of that for a while.
CB: Yeah. And it looks like we almost close the month with like, a Mercury-Neptune conjunction. Mercury gets to about 26 – so it hits its shadow – 26, 27 Pisces conjoining Neptune on the final days and the first day of next month. So there’s this nebulous energy to communication that’s making things not as clear as they seem or making communication deceptive in some way around this time just after that New Moon in Pisces.
AC: Yeah, it’s very confusing.
CB: Yeah. All right. And then we kind of end on a huge cliffhanger, basically, because Venus stations the first day of March, which means that whole energy is just gonna intensify and become super, super prominent both in the news as well as in people’s personal lives. But we’re like, just hitting that by the time February ends. So it’s gonna be super interesting to see where we’re at by the time we record the next forecast at the end of February, because that’s gonna be like, just starting to happen and we’ll just be coming off of the Mars station at that time.
AC: Indeed.
CB: Indeed. All right —
AC: It reminds me of, it’s an Edgar Allan Poe story. The Maelstrom? We’ll be at the lip of the maelstrom by the end of February.
CB: Nice. All right, my friend. Is there anything else about February or the end of February that we wanted to mention before we wrap up?
AC: I don’t think so.
CB: All right. Well!
AC: Edge of the maelstrom.
CB: Yeah. The edge of the maelstrom. I think that’s a good to end on – that this is to be continued very much. We’ll be very on the cusp of like, moving into one of the most critical and active but also kind of problematic parts of the year, frankly, because I think there’s gonna be some major geopolitical stuff in March and April that’s gonna pop off. And that’s something I know both you and I have been sort of preparing for with some trepidation.
AC: Yeah. It’s time to climb into the washing machine for a few months.
CB: Right.
AC: And you know, get through it.
CB: Yeah. We’ll see how it goes.
AC: But it’s gonna be really – once you’ve been in there for a few minutes, you’re gonna start hallucinating. And there’s gonna be some – this is not gonna be boring. This is going to be, with Neptune and Venus involved and all that, it’s going to be very colorful and have a lot of personal depth, and a number of people will probably discover things about themselves, their lives, their souls that they didn’t know before, but the process will not be gentle.
CB: Right. Sometimes —
AC: It’s sort of like, instead of a float tank, right, where you like, leave your senses and you’re free to travel to more subtle realms, it’s like the washing machine version of that where you’re getting spun around and jostled.
CB: Right. Like a sleep deprivation tank that like, vibrates?
AC: The sleep — I don’t know about those. Is that – you have one, right?
CB: No, I haven’t done that. You don’t know what a sleep deprivation tank is?
AC: They’re sensory – they’re not —
CB: Oh, sensory – no, well, I mean —
AC: That was my joke is that you have a hard time sleeping.
CB: Yes. I do have a – it’s called my body is a sleep deprivation tank. But maybe that was a fortuitous slip up there, because that’s actually a good – sleep deprivation tank is already what the news is becoming at this point, and I’m sure by March and April we will all be living in one.
All right. Thank you, this was awesome today. Thanks for joining me for this forecast episode. It feels good to not have to, you know, look at the entire year ahead after that huge December forecast and instead try to break things down. I’d been looking forward to this because since we focused on big picture stuff so much, we didn’t get to do the fine-tuning of the micro analysis of the monthly forecast, so it was nice to get back into the details with you again here today.
AC: Yeah, it’s been a festival of granularity.
CB: Good. All right. All right, well, what do you have coming up? What are you doing in February?
AC: Okay, so actually in two days on the 30th of January, we’ve got a new series coming out from Sphere and Sundry. This is a decanic series. This is the third face of Capricorn, which we made last year. And which I dubbed in 36 Faces for the few people who’ve gotten to read it “the throne,” and so it’s about managing your shit. It is a series that has benefits for good judgment, authoritative speech, wealth management, a variety of other things. It was elected, designed, and consecrated in order to help people boost their sovereignty would be the quick version of it.
Sphere and Sundry also has some of the relabeling sale that was opened late last year. There’s still some stuff left. And the totally redesigned label, like, the whole new aesthetic, all the new stuff is also going to be coming out over the next month. So Sphere and Sundry has a lot going on.
My recordings of my classes and workshops and lectures are still very much available on my website, and if you’re interested in the next round of entry into my Fundamentals of Astrology program, we’re gonna be doing that in April. So if you’re interested in that, sign up for the mailing list. That doesn’t go out anywhere else. And I think – and then as far as what I’m doing, I’m just trying desperately to get as much facetime with my decan book as possible before my Year Two and Three classes start back up. My teaching schedule is lighter right now, so I’m doing my like, summer sabbatical but during the winter, and just grinding through decans as fast as I can.
CB: Nice. That’s exciting.
AC: It’s actually brutal and slow, but it’s exciting because every decan that gets done does not need to get done again.
CB: Yeah. Brutal and slow is what I call exciting if you ever listen to one of my seven-hour podcast episodes.
What are your website URLs?
AC: All right, so I’m AustinCoppock.com, and you can find the magical goods at SphereAndSundry.com.
CB: Brilliant. All right, I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this episode.
As for me, I am gonna work on an episode – after Nick and I recorded the Venus retrograde episode in Aries on January 10th, there’s been a bunch of news stories that brought up repetitions of some of those retrogrades that we mentioned from the past from the 20th century. There’s been a ton of repetitions in the news since then. So even though it’s early to do it, I think I might record a Venus retrograde repetitions in the news episode sometime in early February, and that’s something I’m working on right now. So if anybody notices any major repetitions in the news that connect back to one of previous Venus retrograde years in Aries, then let me know in the comments on YouTube because I’m trying to collect as many of those as I can for that episode.
Let’s see, other things. I did a livestream for patrons the other night that was really awesome and then released the recording to them, and I think I’m gonna do more of those with like, a live Q&A. I’m also working on the 5th house episode of The Astrology Podcast right now, and it’s become not huge – I’m trying to keep it more doable this time – but I’m still working on the research for that, and as soon as that’s recorded, I’m gonna release that to patrons of The Astrology Podcast for early access.
I am also gonna do a Venus retrograde webinar I’m thinking this month with students of my Hellenistic astrology course where we’ve been doing these chart reading webinars every month for our monthly like, webinar on the first weekend of the month. And we did one on Mars retrograde in December that was amazing where people shared past retrograde stories about how Mars retrograde worked out in their life, and I think I’m gonna do another one of those this month for Venus retrograde. So I’m looking forward to that.
And then finally, I’m also recording one of the final lectures in our new course on horary astrology with Rob Bailey. We’ve almost finished revising and expanding that entire course, and we’ve got two lectures left to record. So we’re gonna see if we can get one, possibly two of those recorded this month which will finally complete the expansion of our new horary astrology course that teaches the oldest methods of horary astrology where a lot of the earliest authors that wrote on horary in the western tradition used whole sign houses. So we’re teaching a course following those approaches, which is gonna be really great and hopefully somewhat groundbreaking. So —
AC: Yeah, that’ll be great.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll be launching that soon, and I’m very, very excited.
But other than that, I’m just gonna keep working on The Astrology Podcast. I’m gonna start doing more short videos on YouTube and trying to do more quick like, one to three minute shorts and clips and things like that as well on social media. So be sure to follow for that.
If you want early access to the episodes, of course become a Patron through my page on The Astrology Podcast website through Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. And otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode. Thanks to all the patrons that joined us for the live recording of this today as well. We got a lot of awesome comments today, and thank you to Austin for putting this together with me and doing this awesome deep dive into the astrology of February.
AC: My pleasure.
CB: All right. That’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast, so thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode. Good luck in February, and we’ll see you again next time.
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