The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 479, titled:
Mars Retrograde in Cancer in US History
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on February 25, 2025
—
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
—
Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released April 3rd, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
—
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be looking at Mars in Cancer in history, especially focusing on United States history. Hey Nick – thanks for joining me.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Thanks for having me back, Chris! Great to be here.
CB: Yeah, we are back again. Last month we did a landmark episode where we did Venus retrograde in Aries in history, which repeats every eight years. And we took that back more than a century, and we found a ton of really striking correlations in the past when Venus went retrograde with events that were actually happening either in the news today that had already happened or there was actually a bunch of other events that happened after that, so much so that I did a follow up episode talking about all the news that came up. So I wanted to do something similar with you here today with Mars based on this premise that when a planetary cycle of a planet repeats, sometimes there’s an echo or a repetition of things from the past that happen again in the present.
Yeah, so last month you weren’t able to join me for that follow up because we had a tech snafu, but I’m glad you’re back with me today.
NDB: Yeah. It’s great. The gear’s working. We’re ready to go. I was really bummed out to miss that last one, but I’m really excited for this. Everyone’s in for another treat.
CB: Awesome. Excellent. All right. So I wanted to do this episode because there is a lot of just crazy, insane stuff happening in the news right now in the United States as Mars is slowing down and getting ready to station direct after its retrograde period in Cancer. And clearly this is coinciding with a lot of major events and a huge turning point, essentially, in US history at a number of different levels.
So obviously there’s a lot of different factors underlying that. You have the Pluto return of the United States; you have the Venus retrograde in Aries we talked about last month. But also you have this Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo that’s been happening since last fall that encompassed both the later part of the US presidential election and its outcome, but also things that are happening now early in this new presidential term. And I just posted a clip yesterday because I went back and I listened to our Pluto in Aquarius episode that we did one year ago in January of 2024, and we said some pretty prescient stuff where we were talking about the Pluto return of the United States and how even though astrologers are used to like, looking at the US Sibley chart for the Declaration of Independence, which has Pluto in late Capricorn, that actually most of the system of government in the United States was created more than a decade later when Pluto had already moved into Aquarius. So the true Pluto return of the United States, at least in terms of the government and the different systems of like, checks and balances and everything else, is actually happening right now, and that’s part of what we’re seeing. And I think we said some pretty prescient stuff in terms of that a year ago.
NDB: Yeah, we definitely did. And you know, speaking of Pluto, at the very end of the year, the topic of today’s episode – the Mars retrograde – it went retrograde actually in Leo at six degrees of Leo in December. It had already made one opposition to Pluto in November when they were both at 29 degrees of the cardinal signs. But then now with the Mars retrograde, there was a second opposition to Pluto in Leo to Aquarius, I think at the beginning of January. And there will be another one in April once Mars stations direct in Cancer, which it’s gonna do I think in about five, six days from when we’re recording this. And yeah, it’ll move back into Leo and make a third opposition to Pluto, its third opposition in four or five months, whatever it is. So that’s also striking; that’s not something that happens… Well, Mars is opposite Pluto once every two years, but to have three passes because of the retrograde really extends that whole experience and the whole dynamic between the two planets.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because especially that first opposition on November 3rd was like, so close to the presidential election, and then the second opposition was very close to when the new Congress was sworn in. And then we have the craziness of all of the astrology that’s coming up over the course of the next month or two in March and April of 2025 which we talked about a lot on the year ahead forecast. So a big piece of that, even though there’s like, these longer range planetary cycles that are happening, is actually Mars going retrograde in Cancer is important but potentially overlooked part of that, because while as I just mentioned, for example, the US Constitution where many of the different things in the US government were enshrined – like checks and balances between the different branches and different things like that – while part of what’s happening right now is Pluto returning to Aquarius and coming back to that, the other return that’s happening right now is that Mars at the time of the signing of the US Constitution had just gone into Cancer and was getting ready to turn retrograde in that sign. So this current Mars retrograde that we’re experiencing right now is actually also a reactivation and a return back to that original founding chart of the US Constitution. So let me show that chart really quick. There we go. So this is the signing of the US Constitution. There’s debates about the exact time. This is just a noon chart. But we can see Pluto there at 14 degrees of Aquarius conjunct Saturn at 23 Aquarius. And we see Mars at two degrees of Cancer. And what will happen is it was about 72 days away from stationing retrograde at 27 degrees of Cancer, you know, once the Constitution was signed and then everything that happened subsequent to that over the next several months.
NDB: Right. And that involved – so the whole process after the Constitution was signed, all the different states had to go back and ratify it with their own governments. And then amidst all this as well, the famous Federalist Papers were drafted, and you know, as the whole Constitutional Convention had stirred up all these other issues, sort of the other stages in defining the country were also taking shape at this time as the states were ratifying the Constitution. But yeah – the Constitution is quite solidly from the signing through most if not all the ratifications… I think maybe New York ratified it when, you know, they were one of maybe the last two states. By that point, you know, Mars had left Cancer. But most of the states ratified it when it was in Cancer, so yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s really striking to me, because like with the Pluto return, there’s something about going back to the very like, foundations of the creation of something and then sometimes that can be like, the end of a cycle and you can see the end or the destruction of something. Other times, you can see revisions to that or major changes to it as it’s preparing a new like, long cycle. And that’s some of what we’re hearing today is basically there’s like, a constitutional crisis that’s either some people are saying either has already happened or is about to happen in terms of the accumulation of power in the executive branch and how that’s creating conflicts in terms of like, the judiciary branch for example and other things like that, which just goes right back to the way everything’s set up in the Constitution.
So with all that in mind, one of the things I wanted to do this month is with Mars stationing direct and all these momentous events happening right now, I wanted to go back and look and see what happened during other Mars retrograde periods in US history. And what I found is there’s a certain fixed number of Mars retrograde periods that have happened, and I went through and wrote notes, and we studied and did a whole writeup on some major things that happened and we found a number of really significant turning points in US history that we’re gonna talk about today during these different Mars retrograde periods.
So here’s a slide for those watching the video version with some of the dates that we’re gonna go through over the course of this episode. I don’t know if we’re gonna cover all of them, but these are all of the Mars retrogrades in Cancer that have occurred since the US Constitution was signed back in the first Mars retrograde on our list, which is 1787 through 1788. So there’s something like, 20-ish entries on this list. Maybe for the audio —
NDB: And —
CB: Go ahead.
NDB: Oh, I was just gonna interject that because Mars goes retrograde in Cancer every 15 to 17 years, the previous Mars retrograde prior to 1787 predates the Revolutionary War. So you never – you know, even though the Revolutionary War was a good seven years, you never had a Mars retrograde in Cancer transit happen during the actual war. But by 1787 when they’re drafting the Constitution, yeah, it’s four years after the Peace of Paris is signed. It’s six years after Yorktown, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, this is when the transit happens is when they’re actually getting down to establishing what the country is gonna be, which is, you know, what was being done during this time.
CB: Yeah. So and for those listening to the audio version, maybe I will just read off the dates really quickly. So the first retrograde on our list is 1787 through 1788, and that’s the signing of the US Constitution as well as the period that you were just talking about of like, starting to ratify it and go through the ratification process with the different states, which we’ll talk about more in a minute.
The next one after that is 1802 to 1803. Then there’s one right after that from 1804 to 1805. Then 1819 to 1820. 1834 to 1835. 1849 to 1850. 1851 to 1852. 1866 to 1867. 1881 to 1882. Then 1898 to 1899. Next we get to our second column, which is 1913 to 1914. Then 1929 to – sorry, 1928 to 1929. 1930 to 1931. 1945 to 1946. 1960 to ‘61. 1975 to ‘76. 1977 to ‘78. 1992 to ‘93. 2007 to 2008. And finally now – 2024 to 2025.
NDB: Yeah —
CB: So —
NDB: — maybe we just explain to our listeners that sometimes in that list that you were reading out we had a set of dates that would be about two years apart. And those were instances where you would have a first Mars retrograde that went retrograde from Cancer into Gemini, and then two years and two months later, you would have the next one which would go from Leo to Cancer. And since Cancer is in both of those, we included those too. So once in a while, you do get those pairs, and then sometimes they’re just single ones like this one – 2024 to 2025 is, well, Leo to Cancer, but yeah. We don’t have another one going into Cancer.
CB: Yeah. So Mars goes retrograde every 26 months, so just over every two years. And sometimes it goes retrograde and it stays in a single sign, but it seems like most of the time it will go between two signs so that the retrograde technically falls between two signs of the zodiac just like it does in our instance for our current period where for example the actual retrograde itself, it lasts for about 77 days, right?
NDB: Yeah. It’ll vary from sign to sign. Mars is very asymmetrical, but that’s a good average anyway.
CB: Sorry, let me pull up the image again for just our current retrograde to give people a —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — a sense of our framework for this. So here is the Mars retrograde graphic for those watching the video version that was designed by Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co that does amazing graphics and also personalized almanacs. So this Mars retrograde period, the retrograde itself astronomically is when Mars slows down in a sign of the zodiac, and it stations retrograde – it begins moving backwards, which is what retrograde means, which is did on December 6th, 2024, when it slowed down at six degrees of Leo and then began moving backwards where eventually by January 6th, it actually moved back into Cancer. And then on February 23rd, Mars will slow down again and station direct at 17 degrees of Cancer. I did mean to say that we’re recording this on Thursday, February 20th, 2025, and we started it looks like about 15 minutes ago, and it’s 12:30 right now, so we started at 12:15 PM in Denver, Colorado.
So – sorry?
NDB: Oh, I was just gonna say, just a reminder to people who are very new to astrology – Mars, of course, is not actually moving backward in outer space. The phenomenon of following retrogrades is something that we witness from earth. It’s the way the planet appears to be going, so it appears to be going backwards – just in case anyone tries to call us out on anything silly like that.
CB: Yeah. I mean, retrograde is like, an apparent phenomenon where Mars moves backwards from our vantage point, but in symbolic systems like astrology that take into account the perspective of the observer, moving backwards from the perspective of the observer is still symbolically significant.
And so the retrograde itself lasts for about 77 days, but that’s the nucleus of the retrograde is when it’s actually moving backwards. However, part of the way that retrogrades are experienced I’ve been talking about a lot over the past year or two is that they’re often experienced as an extended transit of the planet through either one or two signs that it’s transiting for an extended period of time. So when you take that into account and you think about it as an extended transit of a planet, in this instance through two signs because Mars is going retrograde in both Leo and Cancer, then we’re actually gonna be using the extended definition where for our purposes the entire let’s call it “retrograde period” is gonna be the entire time starting from when Mars first moves into the sign that it will retrograde back to, which is Cancer. So it first moved into Cancer on September 4th, and the period extends all the way until Mars finally departs from the sign that it went retrograde in, which is Leo in this instance, and it will not depart from Leo until June 17th. So that creates a pretty long span of time from September 4th until June 17th, but during that entire time, Mars is really hanging out in those two signs of the zodiac, and so it does create a distinctive period of time that has a unique quality and in which there’s usually like, a sequence of events that’s unfolding over the course of that several month period.
NDB: Yeah. And since these only occur every 15 to 17 years, the retrogrades in Cancer, it’s still a remarkably small interval of time that we’re looking at relative to the overall history that we’re examining. So yeah. I mean, 10 months seems like a long time, and it certainly is, but relative to the overall cycle of Mars it really is just a small portion.
CB: Right. So for our purposes, so this retrograde – there’s occasionally some retrogrades – or there were some retrogrades in the past – which occurred only in Cancer. Like that one at the signing of the US Constitution, Mars stationed very late in Cancer and then it retrograded back to early Cancer. But a lot of them take place, as we said, between two signs, so this one’s taking place between Leo and Cancer, and there’s another one that also takes place between Cancer and Gemini where it starts in Cancer and then it retrogrades back into Gemini.
So we’re gonna focus on the Mars retrogrades in Cancer for the entirety of this episode, and that’s gonna include ones that happen in Leo and Cancer as well as the ones in Gemini and Cancer. But we’re really gonna focus on the Cancer side of things especially since that’s where Mars is stationing here in just like, three or four days on February 23rd or February 24th. And that seems to be coinciding with a lot of major turning points in terms of like, the US events and things like that. So that’s one sort of provisional statement, right, that we’re focused on Mars in Cancer but also sometimes it’s in Leo and Cancer and sometimes it’s partially in Gemini and Cancer.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. And also we’re gonna focus on US events, because that’s what I’m focused on giving people some perspective on and some insight into right now with so much craziness happening here right now. We’ll occasionally touch on some international events, especially as it relates to like, the US interacting with other specific countries that were relevant in the past or in the present, but it was gonna be, you know, doing like, two or 300 years of US history was already too much, and trying to do the entire world history for 300 years would be way too much. So that’s one of the reasons why we’re gonna focus especially on US history today.
NDB: Yeah. Some other time we’ll have to do the astrology of the Philippines or of the Kurdish people or what have you – all the other great threads that we found but don’t have time for today.
CB: Yeah. Well, we’re gonna definitely talk about the Philippine-American War as like, one of the examples of like, Mars retrograde, but yeah. We found other ones, like the 2007-2008 Mars retrograde with Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf where there was this crazy constitutional crisis during the Mars retrograde in Leo, and yeah, that has a lot of interesting parallels with today in the US just as a general example.
NDB: Sure. And the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and then her election years earlier was during a Mars retrograde in Aries; she had a very Mars retrograde ordered career, I would say. So yeah, there were all these very interesting threads we found that maybe someday we come back to.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And we’re also gonna focus just on Mars in Cancer to get a sense for what that’s about and really drill into that based on history, and we’re gonna not be looking for the most part at other Mars retrogrades where there’s important things happening in US history, of course, but I really wanna get a sense for what this Mars retrograde is about and specifically looking for repetitions in the past that are actually relevant to news stories today, because I found that there’s way more than you would expect where things literally in the headlines today are repeating headlines or themes from past Mars retrogrades in Cancer over the past two or three centuries.
So one thing we need to touch base on really quickly, which is your area of specialty, is planetary periods and the idea of these Mars periods. This is something I’ve gotten really into, especially over the past year, looking at longer term planetary periods. I’d always used, you know, for the past 20 years since I got into Hellenistic astrology the shorter term Mars planetary period that’s used in Hellenistic astrology, which is 15 years, where Mars will very roughly repeat its position. But a year ago before I did the 2024 year ahead astrology forecast, like the night before that, you and I had a conversation, and you pointed out to me this 79 year period of Mars which was a much closer repetition where about every 79 years, Mars will very closely go retrograde in the same signs of the zodiac not very far off from the same degrees. And one of the things that I recognized —
NDB: Four degrees.
CB: Four degrees. So one of the things that I recognized about that right away is that was actually the planetary period that the ancient Babylonian astrologers used that was called the goal year periods. They had this special set of very long term planetary cycles that they used in order to track things and potentially to make predictions, and they had two for Mars, and one of them was 79 years, which is a very close repetition, and the other one was 47 years, which is also a pretty close repetition of Mars.
So here is – for those watching the video version – the 79 year repetitions where for example in 2025, Mars right now in February is getting ready to station direct in the sign of Cancer after being retrograde in that sign. If you go back exactly 79 years, in February in early 1946, Mars also was retrograde in Cancer and getting ready to station direct in that sign. And if you go back 79 years before that to 1867, you’ll see that Mars again stationed direct in Cancer around the same part of the year. If you go back 79 years before that, it takes you to 1788; that was the Mars retrograde that was connected with the signing of the US Constitution and the subsequent ratification process. And then it keeps going back to 1709, to 1630, and so on and so forth. So it’s this very impressively precise astronomical cycle that is one of the longer cycles for Mars.
NDB: Yeah. 79 is also a near perfect cycle of Mercury. So at 79, it’s the cycle of Mercury and Mars that make very close repetitions at the same time. I think the reason, the circumstance where I was telling you about the 79 year thing was I was pointing out that the person I believed would win the presidential election is turning 79 in June, and if you look at that person’s solar return in 2025 when that person turns 79, indeed the position of natal Mercury and the position of natal Mars are very, very close to the natal positions in that person’s chart, so. It’s basically true of virtually anyone’s 79th solar return unless you’re born right at a station; it might be a few more degrees off or something, but yeah. Generally true. So and that’s the thing about the Mars cycle is all of its cyclical returns involve it aligning with the cycle of another planet at the same time. Not the first 15 year return, but the second one at 32 joins it with the cycle of Venus. The next one at 47, interestingly, joins it with the cycle of Jupiter, because Jupiter’s cycle isn’t perfectly 12 years; it’s a little less than that. It’s 11.7, 11.8, something like that – I always forget the exact figure. So one will have their first Jupiter return at 12, and the second one at 24 where it meets up with Venus. You get the third one at 36, but it’s a little loose. But by the time you get to 48, actually the closer synodic return where Jupiter is closest to the natal position relative to the Sun in the solar return actually happens at 47. It’ll be off by about 10 to 15 degrees, but it’s closer than at 48. So 47 is an age where I think of Mars and Jupiter coming together; it’s a very interesting – and when you see charts with people who have strong Mars-Jupiter configurations or, you know, evenmore if Mars and Jupiter are together in the 12th house, you know the age of 47 it’s almost like a shorthand. It’s gonna be a very big deal to that person.
And then after 47, you get to 64, where it joins up with Venus again, and then after 64 it’s 79. So the total system, it’s very interesting. The cycle of Mars involves alternating sums of 15 and 17. The first return is at 15. The next one is 17 years later at 32. The next one is 15 years later at 47. The next one is 15 years later at 64 – 17 years later at 64. Next one is 15 years later at 79. If I screwed up the math there, I apologize, but I think I got it right. Arithmetic isn’t my forte. But yeah!
CB: No problem.
NDB: Yeah. 15, 32, 47, 79.
CB: Yeah. So alternating periods of 15 and 17 years is like, the core of the Mars cycle. And so that connects it then. So 79 years, for example, is what is that again? It’s 47 plus 32?
NDB: Yeah. 47 plus 32, yeah. And those are the, yeah, those are the closest Mars returns you get until you can get up there, you know.
CB: Okay, got it. So let me show what that looks like just to really help people visualize the 79 year one, because that’s our most important repetition cycle. So here’s our chart for right now. Let me actually back it up to when we actually started. So we started at 12:15; we snuck in that Gemini rising. Or maybe it started a little earlier than that.
So here’s Mars. We can see Mars stationing right now at about 17 degrees. Oh, this was… Yeah, okay. So this is three days from now. So February 23rd, 2025, Mars is stationing direct at 17 degrees of Cancer. In Solar Fire, I’m gonna set it to 79 as the increment to jump and then set it to years, and I’m gonna press the back button to jump exactly 79 years backwards to the day. And that brings us to February 23rd, 1946, where we see Mars is there at 14 degrees of Cancer, and it just stationed direct there one point nine days ago. So very close repetition between and —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — connection in terms of planetary periods between February of 1946 and February of 2025. And then you can jump back 79 more years, and you see it brings us to 1867, and Mars is stationing direct again in Cancer around the same part of the year in February. And then you jump back one more time, and it brings you to February of 1788, and we see Mars again stationing direct in February of 1788 in Cancer.
NDB: You’re still on 1867 there. There we are. Okay.
CB: Oh, maybe there’s a delay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s a very close repetition. And then if we go back to the present, let’s change it to 47 years. Let’s say it’s February of 2025. We’re gonna now jump backwards by 47 years. And we see 47 years ago was February of 1978, and we see Mars is retrograde at 22 degrees of Cancer, and it’s stationing in Cancer in nine point six days. So it’s not as close of a repetition, but it’s still pretty close in terms of the retrograde roughly in the same sign and not too far off in terms of degrees. Let’s see. 47 before that was 1931, and here we see that Mars is at 29 degrees of Cancer, and it’s getting ready to station direct at 27 Cancer in 15 days.
So yeah, so those are some of the cycles that we’re working with is like, there’s this 15 year repetition, a 17 year repetition, and then the really close ones are the 47 years and especially the 79 year repetition. So as I said, this is all tied in with Babylonian goal year periods, and this is something I’ve gotten super into over the past year and have applied in a number of different ways. Patrick Watson has got very into it as well, and he’s doing some good work on it. And Nick, you’ve done a lot of really good work on as well. But yeah, it really started a year ago when you cued me in on that, because when you did, I suddenly realized what the implication of that was —
NDB: Right.
CB: — when, you know, right before we did the year ahead forecast, and you can hear it in my voice when I like, talked about it in terms of the implications for the outcome of the election because I knew it was taking us back to the US Consitution’s founding, but it was also connecting other events in that cycle, one of which was when the 14th Amendment was created in the 1800s, which is under this same Mars retrograde. And then the other was in 1946; that was when Trump was born, and he has Mars in the first house, and it was just coming off of that retrograde in Cancer and Leo, so it’s very much built into his birth chart, basically.
NDB: Yeah. I’ve been, I mean, as you know, I started by getting really fascinated with the Venus cycle. And of course once I had that down pat, I had to get into the Mars cycle as the natural companion to Venus. And they’re really fascinating to study in tandem, because whereas the Venus cycle is very elegant and symmetrical and evenly distributed through the signs over a 250-year period, with Mars it’s asymmetrical and completely warped. It’s, you know, one of the most warped of sort of elliptical orbits of the planets in our solar system. So it’s not – there are certain signs that get a lot more attention from Mars than other signs. And that’s always been the case due to its orbit. So it’s interesting for that reason as well. Whereas Mars retrogrades will happen in Cancer every 15 to 17 years, for them to occur in Aquarius or Pisces can take 32 to 47 years. When Mars was retrograding in Aquarius in 2018, that was the first time since 1971 that it had been retrograde in that sign.
So it’s really interesting for that reason as well, and very useful in consultations. Because right away now whenever I see someone with like, an early Pisces rising, an early Aquarius rising or something like that, I know that that one Mars retrograde transit across their Ascendant at that one time, and you know, you can usually bank on there being a relevant story in that. So it’s a really good cycle to know.
CB: Yeah. And something – because we did years ago in like, 2016, you and me and Austin Coppock did an episode on Mars retrograde, which is our general all about Mars retrograde and what it means episode, and that was one of the things we talked about was how Venus has this very clean eight year period that repeats very closely every eight years off by two days. And those repetitions are very obvious, but the Mars cycle is a little bit more erratic or like, discordant, and there’s something about that that’s almost like, speaks to the nature of like, Venus versus Mars in some ways as well.
NDB: I fully agree. I mean, Venus’s symmetry – the symmetry to its cycle – really adds to how we see Venus astrologically, I think. And absolutely the true – in an opposite sense – is true of Mars, that it’s rough, patchy, asymmetrical, and warped. So yeah, they reveal themselves in very different ways, and I don’t mind guessing that the earliest astrologers delineated Venus and Mars in part because of the relative nature of their orbits and how they appear.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That it’s like, Venus has this more almost like, harmonious eight year cycle that’s very even and very regular, whereas Mars has this more inharmonious or discordant cycle that kind of jumps around and moves around even though it has a melody of its own. But there is almost some sort of like, musical idea behind that, and you have that ancient notion from the Pythagoreans that the planets each emit like, a note or like, a sound, and we might use that analogy here when we’re trying to understand what we’re seeing with these repetitions, which is that every time Mars goes retrograde in Cancer, we’re hearing it play like, a certain note or a certain almost like, song starts playing over again. And you hear this like, background noise like, starting to come in to the back of like, the movie that’s like, telling you something, as opposed to those other years when like, the Venus retrograde in Aries music starts playing. And what’s cool about that is that sometimes during certain years, their music starts playing at the same time, and you start hearing both of those songs. And that was something we were exploring in the last couple of episodes, which is this notion of like, joint recurrences.
So right now this year in 2025, we’re experiencing one of those joint recurrences that happens every 32 years with Venus when it goes retrograde in Aries and Mars when it goes retrograde in Cancer. And so those years are like, 2025, 1993, 1961, and 1929 are when Mars and Venus both go retrograde in those same two signs, so that creates an even closer connection, especially with those two years, because you have overlapping planetary periods being activated.
NDB: Yeah. It’s really fun to watch, and you get all kinds of wonderful results following that pairing.
CB: Yeah. Wonderful and not so wonderful results, as we’ll see.
NDB: When I say “wonderful,” I mean, you know, for an astrologer who loves finding interesting information. Yeah. So no, sometimes the stories are grim.
CB: Yeah. There’s gonna be a lot of astrologer good stories that we – like, hashtag astrologer good, which is like when something terrible happens, but you’re so fascinated by the astrology of it, you’re kind of like, impressed at least astrologically at how well things are lining up despite it being sometimes like a terrible, terrible event.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s start getting into it. So part of what we’ve learned is that there’s certain themes. Part of what I’ve really learned over the past year of starting to follow long-term planetary cycles is sometimes when you see a really distinctive theme happening in the news and you are able to connect it symbolically with something that’s happening in the sky at that time like the Venus retrograde in Aries or the Mars retrograde in Cancer, all you need to do is start looking back at past times in which that happened, and you’ll start seeing past instances where the same thing happened. And this takes a lot of work and a lot of research to do, especially when you’re doing some of these long-term periods, but it can be really rewarding.
So one of the things I wanna do is I wanna go through and talk about some of the themes that are coming up today, and how those came up in the past. So one of the ones that came up right away like, last fall that I noticed in the news is there was this very distinctive vibe shift that happened in September where before that, we’re like, in the height of the presidential campaign; Kamala Harris has just like, jumped in and taken over for Joe Biden. There’s a Mars-Jupiter conjunction that’s forming in Gemini, which was her rising sign, and she’s doing this whole like, joyful warrior thing, which is very like, Mars conjunct Jupiter in her rising sign. But then all of a sudden at the beginning of September, Mars shifted and moved into Cancer, which is the sign it would later retrograde in, and there was this whole vibe shift. And all of a sudden, the focus started being about immigration all of a sudden, and that was constantly what Trump was talking about, and there were these themes about immigration, especially of Mexican people immigrating to the US and Trump focusing on illegal immigration, but also making up a lot of wild and often untrue stories about like, claiming Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs or that they were here illegally, and it was like, both of those stories turned out not to be true, because not only was there no like, widespread instances of that, but the community of Haitian immigrants that he was talking about in Ohio was here legally under this specific like, program that had been set up by the US government. But it was like, that happened, and then there was just all these other stories of both immigration but also instances of just like, blatant racism that started coming in the news that was very distinctive when Mars was in Cancer. And so based on that in like, the year ahead forecast and other things, I said that’s clearly gonna be a major theme that’s gonna come back again very strongly once Mars goes back into Cancer in January and during the early phases of Trump’s term, which on the one hand is like, an easy call, because obviously if he made so much of his campaign about supposedly illegal immigrants, obviously he was gonna make that a large part of the focus of his, you know, first hundred days or what have you. But also I think the intensity and how far some of its gone has also been shocking at the same time, that it’s actually like, happening and stuff like that, and the extent to which they’re going in some instances.
NDB: Yeah. To put it mildly.
CB: Yeah, to put it mildly. I don’t know how to phrase these things sometimes. Like —
NDB: That was sarcasm. I’m sorry.
CB: No, I mean, there’s been some terrible stuff. Like, they’re rounding people up. The White House Twitter account the other day put like, a thing out about like, ASMR getting rid of illegal immigrants, and it was about people being – like, they were laying out chains and like, clanking them and then showing people being carted away in chains, and it was just very creepy. In addition, there are stories about setting up now a camp for 30,000 people in Guantanamo Bay for people that are deporting or for immigrants, and that’s really creepy, because that’s outside of like, US jurisdiction in terms of certain laws and like, oversights and things like that that would be there if it was on actual US soil. So there’s some not good things happening. And one of the things in identifying that as a theme is we started looking back at previous Mars in Cancer periods, and we noticed that this has actually been a recurring theme in US history that’s distinctively that there’s been very important turning points in the past when Mars has gone retrograde in Cancer.
So one of the first ones that was the most striking that you found, actually, was the Chinese Exclusion Act that was passed in 1882. And this actually —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — was passed under the Mars retrograde in Cancer that occurred in that time frame, right?
NDB: Yeah. There’s a whole timeline to it. There had been first the Act itself was signed in or passed in May of 1882, which was a couple of months, like two months or so, after Mars had gone direct in Cancer. But Mars was still in Cancer. But the thing is, the previous October – just as Mars was going retrograde in Cancer – the US had confirmed a treaty that they signed with China that sort of set the stage for them to be able to put the Chinese Exclusion Act into effect.
So the whole process of them arriving at passing it spanned the duration of that Mars retrograde in Cancer transit that took place over the course of 1881 going into 1882 so that by the time it was passed, it was coming out the retrograde, but Mars was still in Cancer. The parameters we’ve set for this episode are still in play, and yeah, the whole process – once you know about like, how the law came to be passed, it’s very closely tied to that whole retrograde cycle.
CB: Yeah. So what this was – so this is the Mars retrograde that was from September 24th, 1881 to May 8th, 1882 using our broader time frame as you were just talking about. And so what happened with this I was learning – I learned a lot about US history. Like, I’d learned a lot of things that I hadn’t thought about since like, elementary school of just like, major things that you learn about in terms of, you know, growing up in the US. But then my focus so much as an adult has been ancient history due to writing my book on Hellenistic astrology and everything else, and so my focus has been Greek and Roman history 2,000, 3,000 years ago. So it’s been really interesting over the past couple of weeks especially going back and digging into this and learning more about certain aspects of US history – sometimes good things, other times really terrible things. And this was one of the ones that was not good, that is kind of like, a dark side of US history.
But my understanding of part of what happened is, interestingly, like a little over a decade before this, when Venus went retrograde in Cancer, the US signed a treaty with China that opened up trade relations and made the two countries like, the favorite partners for trade relations. But also it opened up immigration between the two countries, and then what happened is over the course of the next decade in the 1870s, there was a bunch of immigration from China to the US, and especially a lot of Chinese immigrants came over and started working on the railroads that were being built in the 1870s. But then what happened very quickly during the course of that decade of the 1870s is all of a sudden there started being this major pushback against Chinese immigration and a rise of a lot of like, racism in some instances against Chinese people, which eventually culminated in this act being signed on May 6th, 1882, called the Chinese Exclusion Act. And what it did is it actually banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US, and it became the first major law to restrict immigration in the United States, because up to this point, like, immigration was just something that was completely open. And even after this point, for the most part, it continued to be open for most groups. Except all of a sudden, it just completely excluded Chinese people not only from immigrating to the US, but even for those who were here already could not receive citizenship. So it denied this entire group of people citizenship. And what’s crazy about this is it lasted for like, 60 years or something like that. Like, it didn’t get repealed or lessened until like, the 1940s or something like that I think, right?
NDB: 1952, actually during a Sun-Venus conjunction – like, exterior conjunction – what I call the Blue Three. So there was still a Venus-Sun in Cancer mitigating factor in I think June of ‘52 when it was repealed. And it’s interesting that you bring up the Venus retrograde in Cancer and the way it can work in tandem with the Mars retrograde in Cancer, even if they’re events that are a decade apart. Indeed that first treaty was signed in 1868 during the Venus retrograde, and then by 1882 with the Mars retrograde, the US is taking all that back and denying these Chinese immigrants citizenship or a lot of their rights broadly speaking.
In 1900, there was something called the Boxer Rebellion in China. That occurred during a Venus retrograde in Cancer – at least the middle of it – when these Chinese activists basically, they were tired of having all these European imperialists run their country. And they were trying to fight back, and I think six or eight foreign nations, including the United States, Russia, Germany, Britain, all the big guns of the time went into China to fight back this Boxer Rebellion. And it’s almost like the Boxer Rebellion – I mean, it wasn’t a Chinese Exclusion Act, but it was like, a Chinese effort to expel their invaders, and it’s an interesting sort of counterpoint to everything that was happening in the US over this time.
CB: Okay. And that was a Venus retrograde?
NDB: Yeah. In June of 1900.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. Well, part of the point that I wanted to make once I realized that with our Venus retrograde that happened in July 28th of 1868, which is when the Burlingame Treaty was first signed which opened up immigration as well as favorable relations between the US and China during that Venus retrograde in Cancer is it made me realize that sometimes in US history, especially when the benefics are doing important things there and they’re not afflicted, sometimes it either opens up immigration or it lessens or fixes problems that had been set up previously during Mars retrogrades or other malefic transits in Cancer. So that was what was so interesting about this is that in 1868, the Venus retrograde in Cancer literally opens up immigration and positive relations between two countries, whereas about a decade later when Mars went retrograde in Cancer, it cut it off and it closed that down. And it closed it down for quite a long period of time, and there were some subsequent immigration acts that we’ll talk about in other periods in US history, but eventually a lot of those acts which also set quotas on like, people from Europe and different groups from different countries and ethnicities and things like that, but eventually a lot of those laws were undone in 1965 when Jupiter ingressed into Cancer and Lyndon Johnson passed this immigration act that helped to lessen and remove some of the restrictions, including on Chinese immigrants that had been there for decades at that point. And I thought that was amazing because Jupiter had just ingressed into Cancer, and it was getting ready to station there when that immigration act was passed in 1965.
NDB: Yeah. This is always something interesting for me to follow, you know? People who’ve seen us do past episodes, I always notice like, in the Revolutionary War there was a Venus retrograde in Gemini at the time, but you didn’t get a Mars retrograde in Gemini during that war. In the Civil War, there was no Venus retrograde in Gemini, but there was a Mars retrograde in Gemini; that was when Sherman burned down Atlanta in 1864. Similarly, the Second World War, you did get a Mars retrograde in Gemini, but not a Venus. So it’s interesting – like, if you can get the two of them close enough that they’re triggering each other like that, then it gets very interesting. That’s what we’re seeing here. I have seen other examples like this as well.
CB: Yeah. But part of my point is just that so we’re gonna focus on Mars retrograde today, which is often setting up problems when it comes to things like immigration and conflict surrounding it or other things like that. Or sometimes it’s negating immigration; it’s saying “no” or it’s shutting it down or other things like that. But there are other transits outside of that that sometimes happen in Cancer that can sometimes either open up immigration or make things go more smoothly, or it can sometimes fix wrongs that were set up in the past. But we’re not gonna – because we’re gonna focus on Mars retrograde today, we’re mainly gonna be focused on things that are more challenging or negative —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: But I did wanna mention that there’s other stuff in a broader picture if we wanna do a larger series that are sometimes connected that are offsetting things when it goes through Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. I’d say the “Too Long, Didn’t Read” of this is I mean, thankfully Jupiter does go into Cancer later in 2025, and hopefully that helps balance out some of what’s going on now. But Venus isn’t gonna be retrograde in Cancer again until maybe the end of this century or something? It’s gonna be a long time. Maybe only in the 2100s. So we’re gonna have to wait a long time for that to come around.
The last Venus retrograde station in Gemini was in 1988 at zero Cancer moving into Gemini, so yeah. It’ll be a while because we see it.
CB: Interesting, okay. Yeah, that’s something I genuinely actually don’t understand about this year is, you know, in the horoscopes when I did individual horoscopes for people, I really focused on that – that the Mars retrograde is gonna create a lot of issues in the Cancer sector of our chart in the first four months of this year of 2025, especially whatever house Mars is retrograde in in Cancer. But then some of those issues would be smoothed over or improved or fixed in the second half of 2025 when Jupiter goes into Cancer in June. I genuinely don’t understand how that’s gonna work out in terms of US events, because it looks like a pretty dark set up for the foreseeable future. But given what the astrology’s saying, like, it will be interesting to see if there is some sort of improvement or offsetting or some sort of silver lining that starts to happen in the second half of this year. That seems unlikely, but we’ll see what happens.
NDB: Yeah. One wants to hope.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Okay. But so the Chinese Exclusion Act – that was a major one in 1882 during that retrograde. But that wasn’t the only one.
So another one that came up in 1929, the retrograde that happened around 1929 and 1930 through ‘31 was this other period called the Period of Mexican Repatriation is what it’s called in the history books and online, which is kind of like, euphemistic. But basically starting in 1929, the US for the first time it started rounding up Mexican immigrants and sometimes just people that were born in the US that were actually US citizens but who had Mexican heritage and just like, rounding them up and sending them on trains back to – sending them to Mexico, basically. And it was a really dark period because part of what was happening is the – especially at the end of 1929 – is the economic crash happened, the stock market crash of 1929 happened – which also is a recurrent theme, economic crashes sometimes, which we’ll talk about as a separate one. But one of the things that started happening is they started when jobs got scarce and the economy got bad is they partially started scapegoating immigrants. And this was happening during a Mars retrograde that took place in 1928 and 1929, but it really peaked in the early 1930s during the early part of the Great Depression and really seemed to center on this Mars retrograde that happened from 1930 to 1931 that happened in Cancer. There’s a title slide for this one; so it was August 28th, 1930, through June 10th, 1931. Yeah. So this was one of the first – because even prior to this period, there wasn’t a lot of… You know, they had the Chinese Exclusion Act, and they started excluding Chinese immigrants especially or even people that were here who had Chinese heritage. But this is one of the times that it really ramped up. Because even prior to this time, there wasn’t a lot of border enforcement or like, other things like that. And for the most part, immigration in the US in the 1800s and early 1900s was something that was pretty open for different groups. And this is one of the points where it really started to change in the early part of the Great Depression during these two Mars retrogrades that happened back to back in 1928, 1929 and then 1930 and 1931.
NDB: Yeah. It’s also right around this time that there finally is a border of some official note between Canada and the US. Like, you know, up until that point, there had just been nothing. You know? You could just go back and forth; there was no one to check on you or what have you. I think in part because of Prohibition. When we start talking about Canada a little bit later, we’ll get into that deeper, but because of Prohibition in the ‘20s, liquor of course was not prohibited in Canada and it was being made there and sent down to the States, so I think that’s why they started actually just setting up border crossings was to stem that. If there had been no Prohibition, maybe it would still be an open border. Who knows?
CB: Okay. Interesting. Yeah, so this is another major period of this with Mars retrograde in Cancer of increased focus on immigration and sort of exclusion of specific groups from specific countries or sometimes even ethnic groups. I also noticed there were a couple of retrogrades in Cancer in the 1970s. There was one from 1975 to 1976, and then there was another immediately after it from ‘77 to ‘78. So this is the pair that always recurs in like, 15 and 17 year increments or something like that, right? WHich is the first set is in Cancer and Leo, and the next one is in —
NDB: Cancer to Gemini, and then Leo to Cancer.
CB: Got it, okay.
NDB: Yeah, in ‘75, the retrograde station was in quite early Cancer. I think it was like, two degrees of Cancer. So yeah, in ‘75, it was mostly a Gemini retrograde, but it did start in Cancer and there were some… Even if it just went to two degrees of Cancer, that meant you got several weeks or a month extra of Mars in Cancer apart from its regular passage. But yeah, I mean, Mars goes retrograde in Cancer every 15 to 17 years in some capacity, but that particular pattern will repeat itself I think every 32 years like all the others, basically, if you break them down to 32, then the patterns become more sort of familiar in terms of it being Leo to Cancer, Cancer to Gemini, or just in Cancer or what have you.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I guess my main point is just that sometimes you’ll get two Cancer retrogrades that are back to back that are spaced out so you get, you know, this period where there’s one that happens over a two-year period and then immediately after that you get another two-year period of Mars retrograde in Cancer. And other times, you’ll get a large gap of like, 15 years before you’ll see a Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Correct.
CB: So with this one in the 1970s, I’m pretty sure the main thing that this retrograde was about in the mid-1970s was immigration to the US from Vietnam. Because of the end of the Vietnam War and the Fall of Saigon especially in 1975, all of a sudden there was a large wave of immigrants coming from Vietnam to the US. And initially from what I understand, a lot of the US was like, open to this and relatively like, hospitable or welcoming partially because the early waves of Vietnamese immigrants were like, people that had helped the US – like, translators and stuff during the Vietnam War. But then there were basically during the course of the decade, there were subsequent waves of immigration, and at a certain point there started being a lot of pushback in the US to these waves of immigration and also different like, racism and stuff that started happening as a result of that as well.
NDB: Yeah. It got pretty serious. There were boatloads of refugees, you know, trying to get over. It got pretty nasty.
CB: Right. So I think that was one of the primary things that came up for me when I was looking at this set of retrogrades in the mid-1970s. But then finally the last major thing I wanted to mention in terms of immigration that I found is I took the cycle all the way back, and I found one very early before the period we’re even talking about, which occurred in 1629 through 1630. And this was a Mars retrograde in Cancer period that started September 17th, 1629, through June 27th, 1630. And what’s interesting about this is that this was the beginning of a wave of immigration to this continent, I should say, from European settlers from England came over in a large group and settled in New England. And this was called the Great Migration from England at this point in time from 1629 to 1630. And I thought this was really interesting and striking because, you know, it just goes back to the point of every group aside from Native Americans ultimately being immigrants to this continent and to this country because of those different waves of immigration that have taken place at different points over the course of the past several centuries. But this one was also especially interesting because one of the things that they did when this group of Euopeans came over from England is they brought some of the English laws and customs and things like that and started those as traditions in New England, which interestingly eventually culminated in the incorporation of some of that as influences into the US Constitution when it was eventually created under a subsequent Mars retrograde in Cancer. And the Constitution was actually a 79-year repetition that goes all the way back to this wave of immigration that occurred in 1629 and 1630, which is —
NDB: Right.
CB: — one of the things I found the most fascinating is it was actually tied in with that longer term cycle of 79 years from Mars.
NDB: Yeah, Boston was founded just after that. Boston was founded September 17th, 1630, so yeah, some of these people were coming over and founding Boston almost —
CB: Exactly.
NDB: — immediately.
CB: So look at this. So you’ve got in terms of the 79-year repetitions, it’s like, 2025, 1946, 1867, 1788, 1709, and then 1630 which is that first really big wave of people immigrants from Europe to North America, to New England, basically. So and they brought things like, not just some of those forms of setting up government and like, representation and other things that later get incorporated, but also part of the reason they left the UK was due to the civil war and due to things going on with religious like, persecution and issues with you know, their religious beliefs compared to the dominant belief by the rulers in England at the time, which then becomes one of the reasons why religious freedom becomes a thing partially that gets incorporated into the US Constitution later on in subsequent Mars retrograde cycles when that’s created.
NDB: Yeah. They even found Holland too restrictive or too, yeah, too intolerant of them, so yeah, they had to find their way to the New World. Yeah, it’s so interesting the way that connects so cleanly in those 79-year intervals.
CB: Yeah. So I thought that was incredible, and that’s one of the things I found striking. So anyway. So broad point of that is that sometimes the Mars retrograde periods can be times where themes having to do with immigration come up in the US, and sometimes like, waves of immigration but also sometimes there can be challenges to immigration or the rejection of immigrants or even racism and things surrounding that.
NDB: Yeah. Right at that same time in 1629, the British actually invaded and seized Quebec. Britain and France were constantly fighting wars in the 1600s, virtually nonstop, even compared to following centuries. So yeah, for a brief period during that time, the English were holding Quebec. Of course, a whole more than a century later, they would take it outright, but this was just kind of like, seizing it while they were at war and holding onto it until a treaty was signed and they gave it back. But you know, it’s interesting that that came up as well, because certainly you have another context up there where there are two cultures clashing because of – well, I don’t know if it’s immigration in that instance, but certainly strangers are coming in.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s a major theme with Mars retrograde in Cancer, especially in terms of the US and US history. So another major theme that I wanted to move onto is sometimes citizenship coming up in relation to immigration, but also sometimes there’s like, progress in some of these instances that can be made with respect to that. So one of the ones that’s coming up right now in the news is the 14th Amendment. And the 14th Amendment was passed in 1867, and this was connected with a Mars retrograde in Cancer because most of the states ratified the 14th Amendment when Mars was in that retrograde period back around 1867.
So what’s important about that is this is actually the one that we first were talking about a year ago, because the 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War and one of the clauses in or one of the things in it is that it said that you couldn’t run for government if you had been part of an insurrection in the past. And so this was passed because after the Civil War, they didn’t want like, the leaders of the southern states to then come back into power and fight against the US from within the government again basically after they had just got done fighting a war. So that was the initial context in which we became aware of this, because a year ago this was being discussed in terms of Trump and whether like, January 6th for example meant that he should be excluded from like, running for the presidency again was like, a major topic of the news. And we were noting how that was coming up again during this presidential election when the same Mars retrograde would happen that happened when the 14th Amendment with that clause was passed.
What we didn’t anticipate a year ago when we discovered that was that other even more important provisions of the 14th Amendment would come up, and one of them is birthright citizenship. Because one of the primary things the 14th Amendment did is it made it so that it made it explicit that if a person is born here in the United States, that they become a citizen of the United States as a result of that. So that’s the birthright citizenship clause that is literally like, in the 14th Amendment, which is ratified by most of the states during this Mars retrograde in Cancer in 1867, and now that Mars retrograde in Cancer is repeating in one of those 79-year cycles in Cancer, one of the first things that Trump did is he’s challenging basically the notion of birthright citizenship and he’s trying to make it so that people who were born here, if they were born to immigrant parents, do not necessarily become citizens, and this is something that is probably gonna be escalated all the way to the Supreme Court this year in terms of a decision on that and a decision on whether they can change that without doing like, another amendment to the Constitution basically, or if they can revision that somehow.
NDB: Yeah. That remains to be seen. But it is pretty grim.
CB: Yeah. So that was really important because it was like, the 14th Amendment was taking place, and that was actually a positive thing. But the passage of these amendments, it was being pushed through by the – what were they called? The Radical not abolitionists —
NDB: The Radical Republicans.
CB: The Radical Republicans in the 1800s, which was Lincoln’s party at the time, were at the time the abolitionists. And they were the ones pushing for on the one hand like, freeing the slaves, which was abolition, but also giving rights to Black people and slaves who had been freed after the Civil War was this Congress that was trying to push through things like the 14th Amendment and other stuff at the time. Because the other thing the 14th Amendment does is it gives equal protection for the law and for things like that, right?
NDB: Yeah. That’s the idea is it’s supposed to level the playing field, so yeah. You know, we’ve come to take it for granted at this time. That was the interesting thing. I know the phrase “Radical Republican” sounds like oxymoronic in the 21st century – or maybe not so much anymore – but yeah. This was a faction that was in power during the Civil War and after Lincoln’s murder. And really, Lincoln relative to these men was, you know, definitely not radical. So yeah, they were an important force during that whole time to shape the country in the way it needed to be shaped as the war was ending.
CB: Right. So I wanted to point that out, because sometimes we have this interchange. Because on the other hand, though, they were able to push through a number of these things immediately after the Civil War, and this was the early Reconstruction period essentially is this Mars retrograde in Cancer. But they had a very short window where they were able to push forward some things, but it also was a huge conflict, because there was huge opposition from the other side that didn’t want these things. And one of the things that they weren’t able to push through, for example, during the Reconstruction period was giving Black people the right to vote, basically, which is something that was like, on the table and they were trying to push through but weren’t able to. So part of what we’re seeing here is sometimes we do see instances of progress in terms of civil rights or other things like that through great striving and effort and action and other things like that. But other times, we see obviously like, negative things that are happening in terms of civil rights, which is part of what’s happening right now, and that’s actually the connection to today is we’ve just seen this huge wave of things related to diversity and inclusion that are all being rolled back across both the government and private sectors suddenly during this Mars retrograde in Cancer. And I think that’s part of the connection of what we’re seeing today, and we can get into some of that more when we come to some of the subsequent sections when it has to do with the history of Mars retrograde in Cancer and major instances of like, racism and reactionary movements basically.
NDB: Yeah. And maybe I’ll just interject quickly here since we’re talking – I mean, the one predecessor to these discrimination laws, of course, is the way the state treated First Nations peoples. And certainly when it came to the struggle in the Plains in the 1800s. There was a treaty signed in 1851, very close to the Mars retrograde in Cancer, called the Fort Laramie Treaty, which designated certain lands that would belong to Crow or Lakota or Cheyenne or Arapahoe people. And then 15 years later at the end of ‘66, there was a struggle involving this same land and the same people between the state and these particular tribes. It’s called the Fetterman Massacre, and it’s a terrible – I mean, of course, worse things would happen later in the century, but it’s certainly a struggle between two peoples over claiming land, and certainly the US is involved. So to that degree, you know, it does tie in here, although obviously the immigrant shoe is on the other foot in that case, I guess.
CB: Yeah. Land disputes and things like that seems to be a major theme as well as, yeah, the history of the relationship and the just terrible things that were done in terms of Native Americans and the US – or the US government or US settlers – and different things like that.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So okay. So citizenship is a major issue, and that ties in with immigration, but sometimes you can see it as a distinct thing as well in some ways because it was also tied in with civil rights and other things like that.
All right, so I think that’s good for those topics, and there’ll be other instances of those that will come up and we’ll come back to that later. So I wanna move into the next section, because one of the other major things that came up that was connected and obviously a recurring theme is racism and reactionaries or reactionary movements.
So in terms of racism, one of the really notable ones I found was the Mars retrograde in late 1945 and early 1946 in Cancer occurred right after the end of World War Two. And one of the things that happened is all of the vets – all the veterans and GIs – were coming home from being overseas, and many Black World War Two veterans came back to the United States and experienced really intense waves of racism that were happening as they tried to get resettled back in the United States. So for example, in 1946, there was a really famous case of a man named Isaac Woodard who came back, and he was like, riding a bus back home to the South after being in the war, and he was dressed up in his military uniform as a veteran now at that point, or as a soldier. But he got pulled off of a bus and he was like, brutally beaten and attacked by the local police force and actually the local police – I think it was the captain – and they ended up actually blinding him in both of his eyes with like, a billy club. And then this was happening very close to the Mars retrograde in Cancer in the early part of 1946, and then there ended up being this large legal case surrounding it. So it was this really —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — distincted, important, and publicized like, instance of racism, basically, that was occurring at this time tied in with this Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. It made a huge impact. You know, Harry Truman was president at this point. Harry Truman was someone who used the n-word quite commonly, and even after he was president. He wasn’t a hateful racist, but he was definitely a racist. But when this incident happened, he was so outraged that it was instrumental in him deciding to integrate the US armed forces, which was a major thing. You know, even though – and that’s the point is, you know, even a racist like Harry Truman said, “Look, these men have just fought for our country; they’ve just fought for independence for other people’s freedom. It’s just unthinkable that this is happening.” So yeah —
CB: Right.
NDB: — I mean, it even melted his heart that much.
CB: Right —
NDB: That was also during —
CB: That was what was striking to me about it was that Truman was the one, because the case was just like, dropped by the local courts, and it wasn’t actually even being investigated. Like, the police weren’t gonna be charged, and then Truman himself intervened and pushed to get the case investigated and tried. But then they eventually did, but it ended up being this like, sham trial, basically, that had an all-white jury who voted not to convict, basically, the police and the captain who was on trial. So it ended up being this just like, travesty of justice. But one of the things that it did is it motivated, it convinced Truman that something needed to change, and he started pushing for some level of civil rights after that.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, he was humane. I mean, even before he was president when he was senator, he did – as a politician, he was generally pretty fair with African-Americans. But as a private citizen, he had the same crummy attitude that a lot of white people had. That being said, he was still humane enough, and also he realizes it’s his job. He is their president, and they have just fought for their country. So the whole thing was pretty clear to him, you know, regardless of this or that stupid attitude.
CB: Right.
NDB: The path forward was clear. So yeah, it really wound up changing a lot.
CB: So by the next Mars retrograde which happened in Virgo and Leo two years later, he sent the first comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress on February 2nd, 1948. So I wanted to mention that, because sometimes there can be – I think one of the take home lessons is sometimes there can be really terrible things that happen during these Mars retrogrades in Cancer that are striking incidences of racism and even brutality that occur. But sometimes it can cause a reaction of like, shock and horror in people that stirs up opposition and gets people to act, and sometimes the positive repercussions of a tragic or horrible instance of injustice can have, you know, repercussions down the line in the future that can help to move things forward or create progress, I guess.
NDB: Yeah. And just to revisit briefly the point about Venus retrogrades in Cancer being an antidote to the Mars retrogrades in Cancer, Harry Truman was born with Venus in Cancer just about to go retrograde. And when the bill did pass desegregating the armed forces, it was in July of 1948 while Venus was retrograde in Cancer. So it is interesting. Like, there is, even in this instance, we’re seeing a similar thing where the interchange between Mars and Venus retrogrades in Cancer have this, you know, call and response type of effect.
CB: Right. That’s a good point. So —
NDB: There was also a very bad incident in Tennessee – Columbus, Tennessee, or Columbia, Tennessee – I think it’s Columbia, Tennessee. Something that started off, you know, as an argument between a Black woman and a white shopkeeper and her teenage son got into it, and one thing led to another, and he was arrested for attempted murder and assault – the Black teenager, that is – and then the whole town sort of like, the white and Black populations had a standoff and things got very ugly. I think at least one person got killed. And it was another one of these sort of, yeah, big cases that wound up setting a lot of other things happen down the road, let’s put it that way, sort of. It probably radicalized people in that area in both directions, I suppose.
CB: Okay. That’s a good keyword, like, sometimes like radicalizing people as a result of an injustice or like, violence or something Mars-related that’s occurred.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, vengeance, comeuppance. It can take many forms. But there’s some element of that, for sure.
CB: And what was the name of that like, incident for…
NDB: Oh, Stephenson, I think. What’s the – Stephenson… Yes. His name was James Stephenson.
CB: Okay.
NDB: In Columbia, Tennessee, February 25th, 26th, 1946. Yeah, it was pretty bad.
CB: So that’s very close to the Mars station, then, if it’s February of 1946.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So another one I wanted to mention is reactionary movements that try to undo gains that are made in civil rights. So an example of this is the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 during that Mars retrograde in Cancer that was occurring in that period where a group of white supremacists were just determined to regain power and reverse the gains that were made by African-Americans during the Reconstruction era. And you had this city that —
NDB: It was a coup.
CB: I mean, it’s called a coup sometimes, but it seems more like a massacre. But “coup” is relevant because they had a mixed government of white and black Americans that were running the city of Wilmington. But all of a sudden, there was this large mob of white people that came and like, destroyed and killed a bunch of people basically, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So that’s why it’s sometimes referred to as a coup.
NDB: Well, no, it’s – because there was like, it was trying to sort of seize the government. So it is referred to as a coup d’etat, you know. I mean, a massacre just means killing people; a coup d’etat means you’re killing people, but you’re also literally trying to take control of the government without, you know, by undemocratic means.
CB: Right. So it was like, this white supremecist mob overthrew the legitimately elected but also biracial city government, killed numerous Black citizens, and drove many more out of town.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So from Wikipedia there was this quote I had where it says, “Historian Laura Edwards writes, ‘What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole,’ as it affirmed that invoking ‘whiteness’ eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protections under the law that Black Americans were guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.”
And I thought that was really striking, because of obviously the, you know, passage of the 14th Amendment and its ratification by most of the states during that previous Mars retrograde in Cancer just a couple of decades, a few decades before this. Yeah, so —
NDB: 32 years earlier.
CB: 32? Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what I wanted to mention about that, because I think this is something that’s partially happening right now where sometimes progress that’s made under previous periods, there can be this sense of undoing this, and this attempt by certain reactionary groups to take things back to the past. Because the idea of the past and like, going back to the past is sometimes something that comes up with retrogrades, because when a planet turns retrograde, all of a sudden instead of moving forward in the signs of the zodiac and like, progressing or almost having progress and moving into new areas, the planet suddenly turns around and starts moving backwards as if to return to an earlier period of time. And that’s actually what this concept of being a reactionary or having reactionary movements. In political science, it’s like, a reactionary or reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo or to like, a previous political state of society which the person believes possesses positive characteristics that are absent from contemporary society. So it’s not just… Like, part of it is like, opposing basically progressive social or political change in attempt to restore or undo those things and go back to some like, idealized time in the past where everything was better, which involves like, removing the rights basically of other people and progress that has been made in terms of that, because they’re reacting against these perceived, these changes that have happened in society and in culture.
NDB: Yeah. Revolutions always have reactionaries.
CB: Okay. How so, or how does that work?
NDB: Oh, just yeah, in the French Revolution, in the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution, they were, you know, the Soviets were fighting the White Russians, and also sometimes the anarchists and sometimes they were aligned with the anarchists. There was a big civil war between factions. The White Russians wanted to either maintain the monarchy or go to some kind of republic. Yeah. The French Revolution was, you know, very factionalized, and there was a monarchist faction. Of course, they soon lost their heads, but you had a series of reactionaries because you would have one faction take over, and they would run the country for a little while and then they’d be overthrown and sent to the guillotine, and some new group would come in. But yeah, in all those revolutions – Greece, Russia, you name it, there are always the reactionaries, the people who wanna keep things the way they are and push back.
CB: Got it. Okay. So some of the notes that I wrote when I was researching this, because I thought it was an important like, theme or keyword that we’re seeing echoes of in different time periods, including today, but it’s like, an opposition to progress where reactionaries believe that recent changes that are social or political or economic are harmful or undesirable, and they view these changes as a decline from a better past, although what constitutes “progress” is subjective, but the reactionaries generally resist it. And there’s this desire for restoration where the core goal is not just to stop further change or progress, but to actively reverse it. And I think that keyword of like, reversing things might be relevant for both the retrograde but also the Cancer side of things.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So they want to return to a previous societal structure, a previous set of values or political system, and this often involves an idealized or sometimes romanticized view of the past. And —
NDB: Yeah —
CB: — this is both the retrograde side but also the Cancer side, because if you think about Cancer sometimes and its rulership by the Moon, sometimes we associate with like, memories and ancestry and our —
NDB: And the exaltation of Jupiter. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think it’s really it’s the two of them. Because Jupiter in Cancer is about a kind of consistency, you know? About like, things being always the way they are. You know, that same kind of dreamworld that someone trying to return back to is thinking of.
CB: Okay. So yeah, so this also emphasized tradition, established hierarchy and traditional values, and there’s a tendency sometimes towards authoritarianism where while not all reactionaries or authoritarian, there’s often a tendency towards favoring strong authority and hierarchical structure as a means of restoring and maintaining the desired past order. And you know, so that’s one of the things that happened with the Wilmington massacre or coup, but you know, we’re seeing some of that today just in terms of like, you know, Project 2025 was put together by the Heritage Foundation, and that was this whole blueprint for what’s being put into place right now. And a lot of that involves reversing or getting rid of some of the things involving civil rights and especially like, diversity or attempts to create a more inclusive society and other things like that, which is a lot of the progress that has been made over the course of the past century or even two century in terms of taking America out of its origins of slavery and the oppression of an entire group of people or other related things and creating a society that is less oppressive and more diverse or inclusive. One of the major things that we’re seeing with this Mars retrograde in Cancer is an attempt to undo many of those things. But there have been instances of that in past Mars retrogrades as well.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that is a major theme. Another one, though, that I wanted to mention in this section is there can be really distinctive instances of courage in the face of racism and in the face of oppression that can sometimes be really brutal. One of the instances that you found, I know, from the 1960 Mars retrograde in Cancer you wanted to talk about was Ruby Bridges, right?
NDB: Oh yeah. I mean, a couple years earlier in ‘57, of course, there was a high school in Little Rock that was desegregated, and the National Guard was called in, et cetera, et cetera. In November of 1960 in New Orleans, there was a six-year-old girl who had to go through the same thing that those teenagers in Little Rock had – you know, being escorted into a school because she’s the first non-white student to attend it. What a thing to put on top of a six-year-old kid! I just, you know, it boggles the mind. I mean, it was bad enough to do it to teenagers, but teenagers at least are sort of nascent adults, I suppose – not that it excuses anything. But a six-year-old? To have to live through that is just unthinkable.
I mean yeah, this was still the Civil Rights movement was still sort of gaining traction. Martin Luther King had been instrumental in the bus boycotts in Montgomery in ‘56, ‘57, and there was the Little Rock thing. But so much of what was to come was still ahead, to state the obvious. So yeah, Ruby Bridges was really a pioneer. And yeah, it’s heartbreaking any time you see that footage or read about it.
CB: So she basically like, as a six-year-old, she faced intense hostility and racism, but was really courageous during the course of that. And her family also got a huge amount of pushback just because she was trying to go to an integrated school, and her father was fired from his job.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So this was all playing out during the Mars retrograde which happened from August 2nd of 1960 through May 6th of 1961. And she started going to school in November —
NDB: November.
CB: November, so that’s close to or just before the Mars station —
NDB: Station.
CB: Got it.
NDB: Correct.
CB: Okay. So then that’s important because then the next several months of her early part of going to school and experiencing all of this is the Mars retrograde itself. And I think that’s really important point, because like I said earlier, these Mars retrogrades playing out over several month period are usually the unfolding of a sequence of events. And while sometimes we can identify a singular event that’s really important or powerful within that period, usually there’s an unfolding of a whole series of things that are happening over this period of time.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. And yeah, it’s pretty magical. Ruby Bridges herself, she was born September 8th, 1954. She had the South Node, Jupiter, and Uranus in Cancer. The Mars retrograde went retrograde pretty close to her South Node. She was born not too long after Mars retrograde herself, like, a month or two after. And her Mars is in Capricorn opposite the Cancer. You see this sometimes; there’ll be a six-year interval between Mars retrogrades in opposite signs. For instance, in 2018, we had a Mars retrograde at nine degrees of Aquarius, and then at the end of December this year we had Mars retrograde at six Leo – virtually an opposition six and a half years apart. And you had a similar thing between 1954 when Ruby was born and 1960 when she’s going to school and has people shouting at her and she has to be escorted by armed guards and all that stuff.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s a really good point in terms of the natal placements involved, and then sometimes there’s also like, broader, you know, outer planet transit and other things. We’re focused on trying to identify the Mars retrograde here, although obviously there’s other stuff going on, both in terms of the mundane astrology as well as people’s like, individual transits during some of these different periods we’re talking about.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So I think that’s good for that section, although we’ll revisit that as a topic more later. Another major area or topic or theme that keeps coming up during these Mars retrogrades in Cancer that I noticed in boundaries and borders as well as related things connected to land, disputes over land or boundaries, redrawing boundaries, issues of expansion and exploration and conflict in connection with that.
So one of the most striking examples I found – that we found – was that the Louisiana Purchase occurred in 1803 during that set of Mars retrogrades in Cancer at that time. And this was a really important like, turning point in the US history, right?
NDB: Well, yeah, the Louisiana Purchase – Napoleon was just about to go back to war with England. There had been sort of a year pause in their war, but he knew England was about to declare war on him, and he needed money. And he knew he wasn’t gonna be able to do anything with the French-American territories because the British had the navy. Two years later, he would try to fight the British navy, and Nelson would, you know, toast him at Trafalgar. But even here in 1803, Napoleon knew he had to, you know, he needed money more than he needed some distant colony. And so he sold it to the United States. I think it was Monroe he sent over – James Monroe – over to negotiate the whole thing if I remember correctly. Or maybe it was John Quincy Adams. One of those guys. Might have been Adams. Sorry.
CB: Okay. So this was finalized on April 30th, 1803, where Mars had just gone direct in Cancer after the retrograde. But most of the groundwork was being laid during the Mars retrograde itself —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — which is, again, just an example of how the unfolding of a process can sometimes take place during the extended Mars retrograde period.
So the Louisiana Purchase was this really pivotal point in American history, because it dramatically expanded the size of the United States and therefore also kind of shaped its future. And they bought the land from France for 15 million dollars, which is approximately 340 million in today’s dollars, and it doubled the size of the United States, adding all or part of the present day states Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Texas. So just like, a huge amount of land that was suddenly added to being part of the United States as a country.
NDB: Yeah. I presume you mean East Texas, right? I mean, most of it still belonged to Mexico until that eventually went away later on. Yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So that was really crucial in terms of a turning point involving borders and land.
So another one that was really crucial in a subsequent Mars retrograde in Cancer was the Missouri Compromise of 1820. And this was another Mars retrograde in Cancer that was really crucial in terms of borders and especially disputes over borders, because this is in the early 1800s where the founders of the country, you know, during the first Mars retrograde and the US Constitution didn’t really deal with and didn’t address the issue of slavery. And during the course of the 1800s, it keeps being this like, building conflict that’s building up and building up, and then they keep putting these like, stopgap measures in place in order to stop it from exploding into a civil war, which it eventually does. But the Missouri Compromise was one of those times when they attempted to like, put a stopgap measure in place basically, I think is one way to put it, right?
NDB: Yeah. The idea was to have equal number of slave states and free states so that one never, you know, outnumbered the other, in which case one could dominate the other politically and call the shots. A lot of this —
CB: Right. But that —
NDB: — was coming out of —
CB: — was the crux of the issue is that there was new states. It was Missouri that wanted to become a state and be added to the Union, but then it created a sudden conflict over whether it would be a free state or whether it would have slavery, and they ended up working out a deal where they allowed Missouri to become a state and to have slavery, but then they added Maine in the north as a new state that did not have slavery in order to balance having free states and slave states based on a political compromise basically.
NDB: That was the idea.
CB: Okay. So part of this, though, is that there’s like, a conflict that like, comes to a head at that time over that issue and then they put this like, temporary thing in place, basically.
NDB: Yeah. Essentially a timebomb that eventually will go off. But at the time, you know, just allows them to kick the can that much further down the road so they don’t have to be the ones who fight the Civil War or what have you.
CB: Okay. Got it. And then eventually that doesn’t work and the Civil War takes place just, what? Three, four decades later?
NDB: Yeah, four decades later. There is also, you know, in 1850, there’s the California Compromise in February of 1850 not long after there had been a Mars retrograde going from Cancer to Gemini. And this was another, you know, kicking the – because by now, the war with Mexico has been won, and the United States is now bicoastal. They have the rest of Texas, Arizona, California, et cetera. So this problem surfaces again. And yeah, if it wasn’t for the California Compromise, the Civil War might have happened a decade earlier and the Confederacy might have been in a better position to win it at that point. So it did kind of, in this case, work out in some way. But yeah – both the Missouri Compromise and the California Compromise of 1850 are, they’re sort of conjured and advocated for and approved over the course of that Mars retrograde in both cases in 1820 and 1850.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So those are things, and then one other example that I thought was really notable in terms of this is the Mars retrograde of 1867 also included what happened during it was the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, basically, during that time. And this was another period of like, expansion and redrawing of boundaries, as well as an interesting major interaction and deal that was made basically between Russia and the United States during a Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah, that’s right. And the craziest part – this is something you found, but I went and looked it up in the literature, and it’s totally true. In 1741, when the Russian expedition with Bering – you know, the guy who the Bering Strait is named after – these Russians sailed to Alaska and claimed that – Bering died of scurvy. It was like, just a couple of his men survived to tell the tale, but they did claim it for Russia. And that was during a Mars retrograde in Cancer when Bering was breathing his last, you know, scurvy-ridden life, Mars was retrograde in Cancer when that happened. So there’s even, you know, when you go back into the far history, it’s still there.
CB: Yeah, I thought it was incredible when I found that that, yeah, they said the Russian expeditions began exploring Alaska and the major one, Bering’s expedition, took place in 1741, and that was a Mars retrograde in Cancer. So it’s like, the Russians first explore basically Alaska and start taking it over during a Mars retrograde in Cancer, and then over a century later when Mars retrograde in Cancer repeats, they sell Alaska to the United States.
NDB: Yeah. It’s really something else! Yeah. I did a lot of research on US-Russian stuff, and you know, we came up with Mars retrograde stuff in Cancer for a lot of different subjects, as the listeners will keep —
CB: Yeah, and I wanna —
NDB: — discovering as we go on.
CB: I wanna talk about that as a separate section later or a little – well, I mean, I guess we could talk about it now if you want to.
NDB: Oh, okay. Well, I wasn’t necessarily gonna talk about it now. I was just gonna say Russia and Mars retrograde in Cancer, there isn’t that much. This Alaska things comes into play. And obviously the US and Russia have had a lot of interactions over the years. But it’s an interesting one of the only gaps – the only gap – we found in terms of finding threads.
CB: I mean, I don’t think that’s entirely true, because 1946 was a huge, huge, major turning point that Mars retrograde in Russia-US history. So while we didn’t find —
NDB: There aren’t —
CB: — a lot of other stuff outside of that, these two actually are pretty significant – this Mars retrograde in Cancer with Alaska, but also —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — 1945 and 1946, which is the beginning of the Cold War with the —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — United States and Russia. And that was crucial, because that was the 79 year ago period from today.
NDB: Right.
CB: So there’s a very important bookend there.
NDB: Yeah. That’s the time of WInston Churchill coining the phrase “Iron Curtain” during a speech in Missouri, sitting next to Harry Truman. No, you’re right, and we’re gonna, when we talk about Canada, the first Soviet spies are found in Canada in February of ‘46 as well, so. Yeah, they’re definitely – the Cold War is starting good and proper during that Mars retrograde in Cancer, no doubt about it.
CB: Okay. Well, I was gonna put off talking about Russia, but maybe now is the time to do it. So —
NDB: Okay.
CB: US-Russia relations I do think is a significant one. We have the Alaska thing, but the Mars retrograde in Cancer that occurred from like, the second half or the later p[art of 1945 through the first half of 1946, what happens is World War Two ends in 1945 towards the middle of 1945 first in Germany in like, May and June, and then in Japan over the summer. And then pretty soon after that, there starts being these tensions between the United States and Russia. And especially in the spring of 1946 when Mars retrogrades back into Cancer just like it’s doing this year, those tensions started being very overt and being made very explicitly. And the most striking instance of that that was very close to the Mars direct station in Cancer was Winston Churchill, as you said, giving that famous speech where he talked about an Iron Curtain descending over eastern Europe basically, and he was talking about like, eastern Europe and how the Soviet Union had taken over all of these countries that were now becoming Communist countries that were under the control of the Soviet Union.
NDB: Right. From Stetten down to, where’s that place down in Croatia on the Adriatic – yeah, a famous speech. There were all – I mean, the Soviets and the Americans had been allies in the war, after all. So for instance, like, after Japan is conquered, the US is in part of Korea and the Soviet Union’s in part of Korea, and they’re both trying to wrangle their own political influence in the country at once, splitting it in two. Also the US – well, the Soviets and the English had sort of split Iran in two during the war because they didn’t want the Nazis to get the oil from there. And they were also – you know, the Soviets were maneuvering to get the Kurds their own state, and the Iranians were pushing back and the British were outraged and all this. It was happening all over the globe where the former Allies were now kind of fighting over the spoils, you know, is one way to put it certainly. Or at least the spoils of influence, if not the spoils of materials or whatever.
CB: Right. So here’s the – I forgot to put the title slide for September 7th, 1945, through June 20th, 1946. And so Churchill gives that speech, the Iron Curtain speech, on March 5th, 1946, and this is only 12 days after the direct station of Mars in Cancer where he warned of the Soviet Union’s threat to peace and stability in Europe. He called for the United states and Britain to work together to stop the spread of Communism. And this speech basically helped to usher in the Cold War more overtly at this point, basically. It made the phrase “the Iron Curtain” a household phrase at that point and also started to sort of shape American’s Cold War policy at that time of like, containment of the Soviet Union. In response to Churchill’s speech, Stalin – the leader of the Soviet Union at the time – denounced it as “warmongering” and accused Churchill of promoting a racial theory similar to Hitler’s, arguing that the English-speaking world sought to dominate others. So I thought that was really striking, especially that keyword like “warmongering” was, you know, Stalin’s characterization of it during this. So it’s really crucial and important like, how that’s setting things up, because that would then become a decade-long, you know, conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, which became the two dominant like, superpowers after World War Two that were playing these different like, geopolitical games over subsequent decades until the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But what’s crazy about that is that now it’s 79 years later, this current Mars retrograde that’s taking place, and all of a sudden, things are rapidly changing in terms of US-Russia relations, and especially in terms of the Ukraine War, which the United States has been backing Ukraine over the past, what, three years now since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But now all of a sudden, it seems with the Trump administration has suddenly turned on Ukraine is now negotiating with Russia in order to basically like, have Ukraine surrender. And that’s part of what’s emerging in this Mars retrograde all of a sudden.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is a real strange revisitation to that period in ‘46, or sort of almost like a bizarro world version of it, of course, because the sides are changing again. The former Allies are apparently allies again.
CB: Yeah, it’s a weird inversion where 79 years ago, yeah, the Allies in World War Two that worked together – the Soviet Union and Russia – suddenly openly became enemies, and now all of a sudden, there seems to be this like, bizarre confluence that’s happening between the Trump administration and Russia suddenly opening up diplomatic talks and working against its previous ally, which was Ukraine.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So yeah.
NDB: It’s kind of wild that 1946 is 79 years after 1867 when the Alaska purchase happened. You know, like, just to put that in perspective. Yeah, you know, a big change in the relationship. Obviously, Russia had been through a revolution in the meantime, so it wasn’t the same country exactly. Yeah, the other thing —
CB: Right.
NDB: — in February of ‘46, George Kennan wrote this famous paper. He was sort of the architect of the containment doctrine, although he always felt that it was taken way too far. And in the end, he thought it did more harm than good even though it was his idea. Kennan was a real – he had been in the Russian embassy as a worker. He spoke very good Russian. He was totally obsessed with Russian literature. And it’s funny – there are two George Kennans. There had been an earlier George Kennan like, almost a century earlier who had also gone to Russia, I think as some kind of explorer or something like that. But this George Kennan, the 20th century one, was this Russian expert and wrote this really important paper that was very influential. I think, you know, Churchill had read it by the time he’s giving his Iron Curtain speech, and in some ways, Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech is just the PR version of Kennan’s containment paper.
CB: Right, so he did that in February of 1946.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And that was the one that advocated this policy of containment of the Soviet Union.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So and now suddenly there’s this weird – so to the same extent, I guess we could say that 1946 was an important turning point between the US and Russia. Right now, obviously, we’re at another very important turning point between the US and Russia that’s playing out over the course of this Mars retrograde, but then of course we’ve also got other things happening in the background like the Venus retrograde in Aries, which you and I did a whole separate episode for patrons on about that being important in terms of Russian history. One of them – I mean, unfortunately, one of the ones that it seems to be how that’s manifesting now, which is one of the scenarios we talked about was 1945 when Venus was retrograde in history, that was essentially when the Soviet Union had a victory over Germany at the end of World War Two and then celebrated that victory. And it’s very quickly sort of shaping up that this Venus retrograde in Aries is gonna be a repetition of 1945 in terms of Russia seemingly potentially doing a victory lap in terms of what’s happening in Ukraine, although we’ll have to see how that goes.
I know it’s tricky, because it’s overlaid with another important cycle which is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is also happening this year and next year, and that’s also been very crucial in Russian history but sometimes more challenging.
NDB: Yeah, and it’s the darndest thing, because the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is happening in Aries, and of course the Venus retrograde is in Aries earlier in the same year. And this is a weird pattern that happens. You know, sometimes Venus goes retrograde in the same sign that a Saturn-Neptune conjunction is happening. In 1953, it was an opposition, but I think yeah, in 1881, it was Venus went retrograde in Taurus while there was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Taurus. You know, it is something that happens sometimes that’s curious and that I wanna sort of work out more. But yeah —
CB: Right, but —
NDB: — both of them are very big for the Soviet Union, yeah.
CB: But to zoom out more, I mean, the last time there was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction was in Capricorn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that was at the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Soviet Union essentially, which is a very Saturn-Neptune keywords.
NDB: Yeah, and the time before that was in 1953 when Stalin died, which was also an important turning point for them. And then the time before that was in 1917 during the actual Bolshevik Revolution. And those are the three Saturn-Neptune conjunctions of the 20th century, and Russia’s right in the middle of all three of them. And it continues; you can go back into the 19th and 18th centuries. Last time Saturn and Neptune were conjunct in Aries was 1703 when Saint Petersburg was founded, so yeah, you know, there’s all kinds of full circle stuff going on there. So while I would agree with you, today on February 20th, it does look like Russia’s being set up for a W. You know, things – not everything is sort of settled yet, and things can still go in curious directions, not least of – I don’t wanna get sidetracked, but you know, I think Europe is likely to pick up the slack that Trump wants to drop, especially since he’s just sort of alienated them himself.
CB: Right.
NDB: You know, France —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — is a country that’s run on nuclear power, and all the uranium they used to control is now controlled by Russian militia groups, so it’s a good bet that France wants to get in on this and probably some other people too.
CB: Okay. Yeah, we’ll see what happens —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — especially because the Saturn-Neptune, it gets so close to going exact. It gets within a degree —
NDB: Less.
CB: — this summer. Less than a degree. But it doesn’t go exact, and then it retrogrades out. And then it comes back and goes exact early next year at the beginning of 2026, right?
NDB: That’s correct. I mean, my astrological opinion is that it’s close enough this year that it counts, because it’s less than —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — a degree, and yeah. You know, I don’t need them to stick their tongues down each other’s throats; they’re meeting. They’re together, you know?
CB: Yeah.
NDB: So yeah.
CB: Well, that’s one of the debates Austin and I were having was like, because intuitively, it’s like, I feel like they’re close enough this year, and there’s so much other stuff going on this year that I would think we see it. We see what the conjunction is about in a near perfection of the event happening this year when it gets so close, especially in June and July. But then there’s this question of if there is something that’s not fully completed until early next year when the aspect goes exact, and for that we’ll have to see how it goes.
NDB: Sure. Yeah. I would say that the aspect next year is a culmination of sorts, but I think Saturn-Neptune is very much in effect when they’re that close. I mean, heck, even last year, Saturn and Neptune were close enough in June that their retrograde stations where about four days apart. And in between those four days was the Trump-Biden debate, which was a very Saturn-Neptune phenomenon where —
CB: Right.
NDB: — there’s this sudden sort of clarity, you know? In ‘89 it was the Berlin Wall comes down, and suddenly the West and East can see each other.
CB: Well, that was —
NDB: In 1953 —
CB: — right on the Saturn station, when Biden —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: Trump and Biden had the debate when Saturn stationed in Pisces.
NDB: Right. Within a few days of Neptune. Like, I think four days or something like that, if I remember correctly. So yeah, it was a very sort of – so I even think like, that debate was a preview of the Saturn-Neptune as far as I’m concerned. Like you could really see it. The effect —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — was definitely very Saturn-Neptune.
CB: Well, that – because that was when – that’s kind of in some ways that was when the election was clearly gonna be lost in retrospect. And what was interesting about that is we saw Saturn station retrograde in Pisces the day of that debate, and part of the issue was Biden’s age. It suddenly became really clear to everyone that Biden’s age was so advanced that his mental facilities had declined significantly over the past three years of his presidency, four years. And then what was interesting is that then Saturn went retrograde for several months after that point, and then it stationed direct in Pisces about a week after the presidential election. And almost to that – I think it was to the day was when Trump visited Biden at the White House for the first time —
NDB: Right.
CB: — after the election and they had a meeting. It was stunning, actually, seeing that play out at the time.
NDB: Yeah. And it was even crazier, because when that Saturn went retrograde with the debate, it retrograded backwards in Pisces as Jupiter was moving forward in Gemini so that by July, when Kamala Harris was actually taking over, you had a Jupiter-Neptune square – or sorry, Saturn-Jupiter square, rather. Saturn was square Jupiter, and that square would hold – it still holds now. They would never get further than about seven degrees apart from July of ‘24 up until now, up until like, they – when Jupiter makes its ingress into Cancer this summer and Saturn’s in Aries, they’ll be square still! But what was interesting about that is both Trump and Harris have natal Saturn-Jupiter squares. So it was like, as soon as that square was coming into place, Kamala comes in to replace, you know, Biden by virtue of that Saturn station. So yeah, there was a whole kind of operatic, you know, thread to the whole thing. It was epic length.
CB: Right. For sure. So to bring things full circle, just the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, though, and that important role that that’s played in Russian history over the past century lets us know that this is similarly a very important turning point in Russian history, especially over the next year or so as this Saturn-Neptune conjunction is taking place. In addition, this obviously being an important turning point in US-Russia relations at the same time, and everything that’s happening in Ukraine and the US selling out Ukraine during this Mars retrograde in Cancer evidently as being part of whatever’s unfolding right now.
NDB: Yeah. And whatever pushback the Venus retrograde has in store, I think.
CB: Right.
NDB: Will be the step after that. Yeah.
CB: That’s a good point. Okay. So one last thing I wanted to mention about this, about the onset of the Cold War during the Mars retrograde in 1946, is one thing that actually made me a little nervous that I saw is in 1946, there was a plan that was presented that the US developed about attempts to stop nuclear proliferation, especially of nuclear weapons, after World War Two where the US had developed and then used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 just before our Mars retrograde period began. But this Mars retrograde period in Cancer then subsequently that started in September and lasted until June of 1946 was the period after the war where suddenly there was this huge growing international concern about the control of atomic weapons. And so the US during the course of this Mars retrograde, what I found is that the US started researching and putting together plans basically to attempt to present some sort of controls for nuclear weapons, especially to the Soviet Union. And it eventually culminated in June 14th of 1946 with the Baruch Plan where the US presented a plan to the United Nations for international control of atomic energy, but ultimately it was rejected by the Soviet Union. And what was crazy is that I guess there’s debates about how serious this plan was, but part of it actually involved the US giving up —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — not developing atomic weapons, and that they would share their knowledge of atomic weapons or atomic power with other countries in exchange for a guarantee that other countries would not develop atomic weapons and would also be open to inspections in order to enforce that, basically. But the Soviet Union was already in the process of developing its own atomic weapons program, and so they ended up rejecting the plan. But I thought this was really important, because this seemed like, or some of the things I was reading were saying that this was one of the last best chances of nuclear weapons not being proliferated as they were in the 20th century that occurred so early on in 1946. It was our last chance before that happened to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but it fell through during this Mars retrograde period in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. That’s just it. I mean, think about it. When the bomb first dropped in August – or the two bombs – in August of ‘45, the Soviet Union and the Americans were allies. So when you get into the autumn, yeah, there is serious conversation about just making it available, making the information available to everyone. If anything, the Baruch Plan – by the time it gets to June and Bernard Baruch has that plan come out – you know, it’s been muted somewhat, because by this point, they do have a sense of the Iron Curtain and all this stuff is shaping up. So they’re less certain about it. And I think that’s why it falls through. But it certainly was definitely in late ‘45 being bandied about quite seriously that, you know, they would just sort of share the information, and it would belong to everyone and so on and so forth.
CB: Yeah. Well, and the Baruch Plan was in June when it was presented to the UN, but it was based on earlier reports that were much more closer to the nucleus of the Mars retrograde. Like —
NDB: Right.
CB: — the March 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report, which was titled formally, “Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy.” And this was like, Robert Oppenheimer was involved in like, contributing to this internal US report that then gets incorporated into the Baruch Plan, but yeah, it was based on this committee of atomic energy that was set up on January 7th, 1946. So that’s like, right in the heart of the Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So again, it’s just another example of how things are usually unfolding or developing during the course of a Mars retrograde in Cancer, and then sometimes you see the outcome of that as a crucial event.
NDB: Yeah. And funny enough, I mean, the US at this point is the only nuclear power until – if I remember the date correct – August 25th, 1949, not long after Uranus has left Gemini, it’s just gone into Cancer, and they discover the Soviets have just tested a bomb. And that’s when they know, “Okay.” You know, there are now two nuclear superpowers. So it’s interesting; Uranus goes into Cancer, triggering that same spot where the Mars had been when they were trying to find a different way.
CB: Right. That’s crazy. So the last thing that’s really striking about this that I realized is I looked at the date of the Baruch Plan, and I was looking at the chart for it, and I was like, “Why does this chart look familiar?” And I was looking at the chart, and the date was June 14th, 1946, and then I realized —
NDB: It’s my dad! My dad’s birthday!
CB: Yeah, well, in addition, that was the most important thing that I immediately thought of. I was like, “Hey, that’s Nick’s dad’s birthday.” But then the next thing I thought of was, “Hey, that’s Donald Trump’s birthday.” And I thought that was insane that the day that this plan for the control and the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons was presented happened to be the same day that Donald Trump, who’s now the current president, was born on this – it was actually a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius that day, which gives another interesting sort of point of astrological significance and strikingness to it, in addition to coming off of that Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo.
So this makes me a little nervous, because sometimes I already said on the year ahead forecast is just one of the things with Uranus going back into Gemini later this year in July – sometimes returns bring things up that happened or that started the last time the planet was in that sign. And one of the things, of course, that happened when Uranus was in Gemini last time 84-ish years ago was the development of the atomic bomb. And so it made me a little nervous —
NDB: And the deployment, which is, yeah. What we’re really scared of.
CB: Right. The last and the only two times that atomic weapons have ever been deployed on a civilian population in 1945 when Uranus was in Gemini. So that makes me nervous just seeing a repetition of that, just knowing Uranus is about to come back into that and why there would be some things harkening back to that that would become relevant again in our time. But then also seeing that, for some reason, the current US president was born the day of this attempt to control nuclear weapons and when it failed, basically, and then the world just went crazy developing thousands of nuclear bombs that then put the entire world on the brink of destruction when then subsequently over subsequent decades there was a few incidences where nuclear war almost broke out that could have like, destroyed humanity, essentially.
NDB: Yeah. We came very close in 1983. So, you know, if that had happened, you wouldn’t have even ever existed.
CB: That was the submarine incident?
NDB: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it is daunting, especially when you consider that Putin has threatened to use them since the war with Ukraine broke out. And yeah, you just, you hear political pundits just over the last two, three years talk about it as a real potential thing that could happen. You know, whereas up until just a few years ago, it was the kind of thing that everyone agreed is just unthinkable and can and should never happen. So yeah, it is worrisome.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So this is getting us way off of the topical thing. I think —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that’s good for US and Russia, if we —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — if this is like, a section. But I’m trying to think of whether to go back to my topical thing, or to stick with 1945, because there’s actually one last point I wanted to mention about 1945 that’s really important, which is huge, which is that in October of 1945, the United Nations was founded. Or the United Nations officially comes into existence, let’s say, in October of 1945. The charter had actually been signed in San Francisco in June of 1945, but the first… Like, it comes into existence and the first general assembly takes place on January 10th, 1946, in London. And that’s during the Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. That’s an important one for sure.
CB: So this is important because the UN was intended as a forum to like, avoid something like World War Two from happening again by getting nations to like, talk and do diplomacy and different things like that. But it also ended up being something that became important during the Cold War as well with all of the different things that happened during the course of that, both in terms of successes in some instances of the United Nations as well as sometimes failures.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s the kind of that if it didn’t exist you would have to invent it, you know, in this kind of political climate. But at the same time, you know, the same people who create the thing want it to be neutered enough that they can still do what they want, so it’s… Yeah, it’s a tough thing to run, but it certainly has had its ups and downs.
CB: Yeah. So the actual chart for the United Nations is actually really striking. So here’s the chart for October 24th, 1945, at 4:45 PM in Washington, DC. What’s striking about this chart is it actually has Aries rising and Mars at 23 degrees of Cancer in the 4th house applying to a conjunction with Saturn at 24 degrees of Cancer. And Mars is slowing down; it’s already moving slowly at this point, and it’s getting ready to station retrograde in Leo in December. And then it’s gonna retrograde back into Cancer during the early part of 1946 when the Security Councils and everything else first start meeting.
NDB: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the Mars-Saturn and put the chart up, because this is what makes the ‘45, ‘46 Mars retrograde in Cancer very different from all the other ones we’ve been looking at is it involves this very extended conjunction with Saturn. You said at the beginning of the episode one of the things about a Mars retrograde is Mars just stays in the same sign for a very, very long time, and so when it’s moving along with Saturn in this United Nations chart that Saturn’s about to go retrograde even sooner in about 12 days. So the two of them are gonna be moving in tandem for months after months after months; that conjunction is in place, you know, during the Iron Curtain speech, I believe, and the events in February. So it really sort of extends itself, not unlike what I was mentioning earlier with the Mars-Pluto opposition we have now, it can just stretch out these configurations for better or for worse and extend the influence that they reflect.
CB: Yeah, as well as the fact that when it stations in Leo, it’s gonna station pretty close to a conjunction with Pluto or at least not too far from a conjunction with Pluto which is at —
NDB: Somewhat.
CB: — 11 degrees of Leo here.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So and then the United Nations chart, you know, is so fascinating, because on the one hand, it has this tension with the Mars-Saturn conjunction that’s so close in Cancer with Mars getting ready to retrograde at the bottom of the chart in the 4th house. And then over in the 7th house, it has this very like, optimistic, idealistic-looking Venus-Jupiter conjunction – actually, Venus-Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Libra in the 7th whole sign house in terms of the ideals and the attempt in the 7th house to like, bring people together and have diplomacy and harmony and unions between people. But then on the other hand, you have this Mars ruling the Ascendant in the 4th house conjunct Saturn and the tensions over both 4th house as well as Cancer things, which can be like, you know, your nation, where you come from, land, borders, other disputes as we’ve talked about – like, border disputes with Mars in Cancer and other things like that.
NDB: Yeah. And I mean, you know, funny enough – on the one hand, it points to the oft lamented ineffectiveness of the United Nations. You know, the Mars-Saturn conjunction is sort of like, frozen in place, if you will. It has to move very slowly to move at all. And also the idea that this is the onslaught of the Cold War. I mean, there are hot war parts of the Cold War, but it’s largely – you know, certainly when we’re talking about nuclear weapons, it’s a cold war. It’s a war that actually isn’t fought between the US and Soviet – at least not their militaries. Their Secret Services are involved in other countries fighting wars on their behalf, but yeah, it’s a cold war. It’s a Mars-Saturn conjunction. I mean, it really reflects the times. The nature of the conflict, the fact that it’s mostly people frozen in fear. It’s mostly people just, you know, wanting to be very careful about every step they take, or maybe not take any steps at all, you know? It’s yeah —
CB: Right.
NDB: — I think it really reflects what was happening at the time.
CB: And like, an intractable conflict —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — is very Mars conjunct Saturn as well. And so it’s important then that, you know, that means that because Mars was in Cancer and it was slowing down to retrograde in Cancer, that means Mars retrogrades in Cancer and Leo are very important for the United Nations, especially this 79 year one that we’re in the repetition of right now in 2025. But then also, that means the United Nations was also born with Uranus in Gemini just like the United States was, so as soon as Uranus goes into Gemini again in July of this year, that means the UN is also gonna be having its Uranus return. So returning back to something about its foundational principles that are revisited and potentially revised.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. That’s not everything about 1945, but we’ll come back to 1945 in other topical stuff, but I think that does put a nice context on what’s happening now both with US-Russia relations but also in terms of world relations right now, especially in terms of the US and other countries and everything that’s developing right now in the context of the Mars retrograde in Cancer in ‘45 and ‘46 being the foundation of the United Nations.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Cool. All right. I think I wanna take a little bit of a break. So we’ll be right back.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right, we’re back from break, and now I wanna move into a section talking about Mars retrograde in Cancer and how it relates to things like tariffs, trade, US monetary policy, but also sometimes financial crises that can sometimes happen that I also noticed under this Mars retrograde in Cancer.
All right, so let me pull up our first section. So the first section I wanted to talk about is tariffs. So a major topic in the news over the course of the past few weeks since Trump got into office is he immediately announced that he was gonna put tariffs on two of the United States’s main trading partners, which was Canada and Mexico, as well as tariffs on China. And that caused immediate sort of – the stock market actually dipped majorly as soon as that was announced and has caused major discussions and debates. Some of those tariffs he like, put a delay on or he put on hold for a little bit. But that’s something that I’m sure is gonna be playing out over the course of the next month or two. And what I noticed when I started looking back to this is I noticed actually that there were major incidents of tariffs in US history when Mars goes retrograde in Cancer. And the main one that I noticed was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 during a Mars retrograde that was from 1930 to 1931, and it was preceded by an earlier version of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in May of 1929, which was during the Mars retrograde that happened right before, which was 1928 through 1929. So basically, 1928 through 1931, there was two Mars retrogrades in Cancer back to back again, and a large part of them partially was focused on the economic crash that happened in 1929. We talked about some of the Mexican like, “repatriation” period that occurred starting in 1929, especially when they started scapegoating Mexican immigrants. But then one of the things they did is he put tariffs in place. And what’s interesting about this in 1930 is that a bunch of the economists, or a bunch of different business leaders – like, over a thousand business leaders – all said this was a terrible idea and like, wrote a letter to the president basically urging him not to pass this act because they knew it was gonna have a negative impact on the economy. But he still went ahead and did it anyways. And then what happened is it actually worsened the Great Depression and quickly made things worse, basically, as the US sunk even further into the Great Depression and the financial crisis that was associated with it, which gets kicked off during this Mars retrograde in Cancer, especially the one from 1930 through 1931.
NDB: Yeah. President Hoover didn’t wanna impose these tariffs, but he was under pressure from his party; the Republicans really did. There were members of his cabinet who threatened to resign if he didn’t go through with it, so he did reluctantly. And then when it all came apart, of course, he got blamed. But he was kind of, you know, somewhat forced into it, I suppose. Goaded into it, anyway.
CB: Okay. So the Mars retrograde in 1928, the dates for that were August 9th, 1928, through May 13th, 1929, and that was in Gemini and Cancer. And then immediately after that, there was this next one – August 28th, 1930, through June 10th, 1931, and that one was in Cancer and Leo. And they signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on June 17th, 1930, which is just before the second retrograde really kicks in. But then the effects of it and the impact of it basically really set in during this Mars retrograde. And the tariff backfired disastrously; it further choked economic growth, and because of what it did also in terms of imports in Europe, some of the historians say that it may have contributed to the economic strife that empowered the fascists in the 1930s in Europe in Italy and Germany. And because it was such a debacle, it ended up being the last major time that the US attempted to impose such major tariffs in a really significant way until essentially today, until recent times.
NDB: Yeah, different – I’m sorry, just to interject – I mean, through the decades, different political thinkers of different stripes, left- and right-wing, have repeatedly pointed to this tariff act being one of the biggest mistakes the country has made. You know, it’s sort of been the truism up until now, so it is kind of strange to have it suddenly sort of resurface this way.
CB: Yeah. That’s what was so crazy about it is looking back and seeing this during this Mars retrograde period and that all US presidents subsequent to that like, really took a lesson from that was striking because it happened – like, the negative impacts of it happened really immediately, so much so that there developed this huge opposition to it within the US because you could see how it was impacting the economy and worsening the Depression, so much so that Roosevelt – help me out, first name?
NDB: Franklin!
CB: Franklin Roosevelt! Not —
NDB: Delano! Yeah.
CB: Not Theodore. Franklin Delano – FDR ran in 1932 and got elected partially on saying that he was gonna repeal the tariffs, which he did once he got in.
NDB: I’m glad you brought that up; I was about to bring him up, because when he first started saying that, it was in like, June, July of ‘32 in his campaign, which was Venus retrograde in Cancer.
CB: Nice. Okay. So the counterbalance comes in —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — through Venus after the Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. There was the tariffs, and there was also something called the bonus army – these World War One veterans were supposed to get like, allotments of money. But because of the Great Depression, they wanted their allotment sooner, and they marched on Washington to protest. It was a peaceful protest. And the military came out and, you know, I forget if they shot people; they certainly like, you know, hurt people. Amongst the military figures that day, I believe both Eisenhower and McCarther – if not McCarther, one of those like, future World War Two generals were involved in that in clearing out this so-called bonus army from Washington, DC. There was a whole sort of, you know, riot or what have you, and people definitely got hurt. I forget if people got killed, but that was also happening during the Venus retrograde. So you had that happen – really bad optics. You know, Hoover turning on his own veterans. And then, yeah, Roosevelt comes along and says he’ll trash the tariffs, and it just it’s an easy campaign from there.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So and it was so – basically part of what happened is that a lot of countries retaliated against the US when the tariffs were imposed, and it bred a lot of ill will against the US because other countries resented it. And also the whole world trading system collapsed partially as a result of this. So in the end, even supporters of the Tariff Act of the bill ended up being surprised at how devastatingly negative the consequences were even though, like I said, over a thousand – it was 1,028 economists in the United States wrote this petition to Hoover asking him to veto it. But the – let’s see, the outcome of it, the impact was so negative that the two sponsors of the bill, Hawley and Smoot, that it was named after did not get re-elected in 1932 at their next period of election.
So I think tariffs are really important in this Mars in Cancer because part of the thing with tariffs is protectionism, is like, sometimes they’re used for different reasons. There’s like, three different reasons or three different motivations behind tariffs, which are supposed to be generating revenue, restriction and protectionism – which is number two, and then reciprocity, which is like, trying to get better trade deals basically with trading partners. But the whole element of protectionism especially, I think, is very much tied in with the Mars in Cancer part of thing, because it’s like, something that’s like, centering and trying to protect supposedly your own interests and your own country over those of others, and with a somewhat aggressive action or move. Yeah. And it has to do with Cancer and the Moon, and the Moon’s rulership over Cancer I think is behind a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about today. Because one of the things the Moon does, and even in ancient astrology it was associated with nurturing and the mother or the parents and with almost that impulse to protect or defend something is sort of like, a Cancer impulse. But especially when you put Mars there, Mars wants to be very aggressive about defending its own turf, defending where it’s from. You sometimes get like, turf wars or argument about who’s from where and who’s representing like, what ancestral or like, locational background.
Like, that was one of the interesting debates that came up – controversies that came up – last fall. As soon as Mars went into Cancer, Kendrick Lamar was announced to be the headliner for the Super Bowl, but then there was a little controversy because it was gonna happen in New Orleans, and a lot of people said that the rapper Lil Wayne should be the one headlining the SUper Bowl because he’s from New Orleans and so he had more of a right, they said, to represent and to play in that city versus Kendrick who is from Los Angeles. And I thought that was a really interesting and insightful initial sort of preview sometimes of what Mars in Cancer is about on a small scale, which then in this instance when you’re talking about tariffs sometimes becomes a large scale of like, countries, trying to do protectionism or protect their own interests and putting that ahead of anyone else.
NDB: Yeah. I agree the pronoia of the Moon, if you will. You know, looking out for that. But I think the exaltation of Jupiter in Cancer really does also come into play in terms of what Cancer is, and because the Moon certainly is, you know, rooted in home and what have you. But the sort of the element of having an identity – you know, like that it’s a team, you know, with regard to a country. I think that plays into the Jupiter in Cancer motif, the idea of like, really prizing the strong, steady hand of consistency of like, having all the necessities covered, if you will. I don’t know if I’m articulating it the way —
CB: Sure.
NDB: — I want to.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I definitely see the Moon’s component here as more of a consistent thing that connects almost every single topic that we’re talking about. And it also ties back to even the first topics that we were talking about with like, racism and things in connection – the Moon’s connection – with like, one’s family and one’s lineage and one’s ancestry.
NDB: Sure.
CB: And sometimes one element of that is – of ancestry – is like, your racial ancestry and things like that. The problem sometimes when you put Mars in Cancer there is like, a tendency to want to be aggressive about that or aggressively promoting that or creating divisiveness surrounding that with Mars having its fall or its detriment in Cancer. And that was actually one of the things I forgot to mention in the racism section that was a major one that I found, which is that the Ku Klux Klan was formed shortly after the Civil War. And within the first like, year of that, Mars went retrograde in Cancer, and that was when they started becoming really violent and really aggressive as a group that started like, terrorizing Black people, especially in the South, after the Civil War. And that was like, a major instance I thought that was really striking of Mars retrograde in Cancer and its connection with not just like, racism or like, a passive racism, but sometimes a really overt thread of this sort of racial almost like terrorism that has run through the country over the past century or two and how that sometimes comes up with these Mars in Cancer retrograde periods, but that you can trace it back to really pivotal foundations like that.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right. So getting back to tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was really that instance of that, and it was connected with both of those retrogrades in 1929 and 1930. But there’s actually other instances of tariffs, as well, and one of them that I thought was really interesting was in 1913, the Mars retrograde in Cancer coincided with the Revenue Act of 1913, which is also sometimes called the Tariff Act of 1913. And what’s interesting about this is in doing all this research, I’ve had to learn like, a lot about tariffs and the history of tariffs over the past history of the country. And in the 1800s, tariffs were used much more commonly to create the majority of the government’s income actually came from tariffs during most of the 1800s. But what’s interesting is that 1913 was the turning point where the US moves more completely away from using tariffs to generate income, and in this bill, they started using taxes basically direct taxes to generate income, which the tariffs already were, because a tariff is kind of an indirect tax basically because you make people pay extra for a product and then that money goes to the government especially for importing a product. But here, interestingly during this Mars retrograde in Cancer, was the pivot point where the US started moving away from tariffs in 1913 and moving towards doing an income tax even though a couple decades later in 1929 and 1930 when there was another Mars retrograde, there would be some backtracking on that and an attempt to go back to this idealized past of using tariffs for income, but then that ended up being a disaster.
NDB: Right. But I mean, it still happens. I mean, I think that the fact that they were used in the 1800s is exactly what Trump likes, you know? If millionaires don’t have to pay out of there pocket – instead, you charge some Canadian lumberyard to have the privilege of selling their lumber in the States or whoever, then that’s easier on the millionaires; they don’t have to pay taxes, and the government can still raise money, so I think that’s what he’s thinking.
CB: Well, it’s like, that and also the protectionism aspect of things of like, using it as an aggressive act to get a better deal because he’s like, the dealmaker or he thinks that’s part of his persona is like, making great deals by acting aggressively. And that almost seemed to be like, part of his strategy here was this opening strategy of doing this really aggressive thing of saying we’re gonna put – that the US was gonna put – these major tariffs on two of its biggest trading partners and allies, like, Canada and Mexico, and its two neighbors – but then immediately within days, like, suspending or postponing that pending whatever deal negotiations that he’s trying to work out. It’s like this really aggressive form of negotiation or protectionist negotiation.
NDB: Yeah. And Canada fought back hard. Chrystia Freeland said, “Hey guys! Cut it out!” That was the announcement. Well, you know —
CB: I mean, I think —
NDB: — it was more than that.
CB: Yeah, the Canadian response has actually been much more significant with that. It has —
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: — created huge discord between the US and Canada and Mexico, which is actually honestly bizarre to see suddenly our greatest ally – like, the US and Canada – and suddenly this huge strife between the two countries as a result of this.
NDB: Yeah, I mean, the Smoot-Hawley tariff also drove a wedge with Canada, and Canada retaliated with their own tariffs and the whole thing became a big mess, which is probably close to what happens this time if it follows through after this pause. Yeah. You know, there is a time and place for tariffs in certain industries and certain contexts, but you know, this is really gonna hurt the whole continent and I don’t see who it serves. Yeah, it’s his attempt to make himself look like he’s a really good dealmaker.
CB: Right. Well, and then it’s like, in the 1800s, one of their issues was they wanted to protect these really fledgling US industries that were just starting to develop, whereas in Europe they already had very advanced industries that were producing a lot of goods that could very easily be imported into the US. But then the US industries wouldn’t develop, so they were partially using it strategically in order to give —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — US companies like, the ability to develop. And in modern times, there’s still some of that where for example with like, electric cars – like, China in way ahead than the US, and so the US has been using some tariffs strategically over the past decade in order to allow the US automakers to try to develop more of an industry in electric cars before the US is like, flooded with cheaper cars from China because China’s electric car industry is partially being subsidized by the government. So it’s like, sometimes there’s strategic use of tariffs, but —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — what Trump did when he came in is just put like, blanket tariffs on not just China but also our main other trading partners and allies.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. It can be a workable strategy in some cases, but it’s not a policy, you know? Like a blanket policy. So yeah, that’s where the problems will be.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll see how that worked out. But the Tariff Act of 1913 was signed into law October 3rd, 1913; that retrograde period was September 15th, 1913, through May 1st, 1914, so it fell right at the beginning of that. And like I said, it reestablished a federal income tax and substantially lowered tariff rates at that time from 40 percent – which is like, crazy high – to 26 percent. And it also established a one percent tax on income about 3,000 dollars per year, and that tax at the time affected only approximately like, three percent of the population who were making 3,000 per year back in 1913.
So it also put a provision establishing a corporate tax of one percent, so this is a huge shift in federal revenue policy towards taxes and away from tariffs, so it’s really interesting now, and we’ll see what happens in terms of like, taxes – both personal taxes as well as corporate taxes – as the year plays out as well.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Trade – there was one other major trade thing, though, as a major theme with Mars retrogrades in Cancer. And this is one that you were found and you focused on, which is that NAFTA was signed during the Mars retrograde in Cancer in 1992, right?
NDB: Yeah. There’s a lot of Canada-US stuff in this Mars retrograde, and obviously trade is gonna be the number one thing, because that’s the main thing we do with each other, aside from co-host podcasts. So yeah, NAFTA was signed by the three leaders of the three countries – Canada, Mexico, and the United States in I think it was December 17th, 1992. Mars was retrograde in Cancer. So I mean, you know, amongst other things, we’ve wound up here in part because we had had a NAFTA, you know? And Trump made it his business to take it down. So yeah, you know, this is kind of in some ways chapter two from that whole episode.
CB: Yeah. And I think that’s really striking, because it’s going back to and going back on those agreements in some ways from 1992 when you return back to something, and that’s one of the themes I meant to mention is just one of the things we’re seeing is that sometimes when a planet completes especially a long cycle, it brings an end to something or sometimes in an extreme sense, something dies. And then either a new form of that can be born again or a new version of that, or sometimes there’s just a passage of one thing to make room for another. I think that’s what we’re seeing oftentimes with returns, and in the most extreme sense, like, Patrick noticed an example last year when that bridge collapsed in Baltimore – it was exactly almost like, 47 years from when it was founded. And so it was an exact Mars period, and then the bridge collapsed. So that there was something about the seeds for its own destruction were built into the birth chart, and then when that Mars period came all the way around and completed, it was over and it collapsed and it sort of died at that time. And I think sometimes when we’re looking at retrogrades, that’s what we’re seeing in the most extreme scenarios. In other instances, we’re seeing like, a new phase have to emerge after the old phase ends.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed. It’s also interesting —
CB: So that’s true for Mars retrogrades, but it also may be true for the Pluto retrograde, and that’s one of the big questions right now – or with the Pluto return of the United States – is, you know, what are we moving into a new phase of? What is ending, and what may or may not collapse in terms of the original framing and creation of the government with the three branches and the separations of power and other good things like that, versus what parts like, don’t survive into this new phase is one of the questions.
NDB: Yeah. Actually, this is a good chance for me to just interject something that I kind of wish I’d brought up when we did our Pluto in Aquarius episode, because there’s something I remember. I don’t think we – stop me if we did talk about this, but I don’t think we did. The Pluto return of 1778, the one that happened in the middle of the Revolutionary War, that was a Pluto return from the early 1500s when Jacques Cartier first arrived at what would be called New France. Jacques Cartier was the first French – he was the French explorer who claimed, you know, “discovered” and claimed what is now eastern Canada. And so he – and it’s like, virtually to the year that Pluto went into Aquarius is when he went in and claimed this land. So what happens one whole Pluto return later? The American Revolution happens. France is – Quebec’s already been conquered by the British 20 years earlier. But when the Revolutionary War ends, all the Loyalists – all the Americans who were loyal to the British – move up to where I’m from, Montreal, and it’s sort of like to, you know, to Quebec, it’s the end of New France in the sense that like, even when the British had first conquered them, they sort of let them have their own society. It was a French world; it was still relatively untouched even though the British now owned it. But now after the American Revolutionary War, it’s, you know, all these outsiders come in, and New France is no longer what it had been for over 200 years.
So I think there’s, you know, like, if we wanna get any sense of what a Pluto return might mean, that’s one of the sort of closest ones I can think, because you gotta go back to the 1500s to think about the 1700s as a return. So yeah, I just wanted to interject that. And since we are talking about things between the US and Canada, you know, it’s worth mentioned. Both countries —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — celebrate birthdays where the Sun is in Cancer. You know, I wouldn’t wanna make too much of that – birthdays for countries are kind of symbolic more than anything – but nonetheless, both countries celebrate their birthdays when the Sun is in Cancer, so that Mars retrograde transit in Cancer also is, you know, touching all of that – the way the countries think of themselves.
CB: Yeah, for sure —
NDB: What people living in the countries think of the country, I suppose.
CB: And their self identity and also sometimes like, what happens when your identity or when there’s a threat or a pressure from the outside and how sometimes that can force people to really redefine who they are. And that’s been an interesting thing with seeing some of the reactions in Canada recently, because it seemed like, you know, one of the things we were seeing over the winter was like, Justin Trudeau and his downfall, essentially, during this Venus retrograde especially, and him stepping down and it seemed like the opposition was going to be swept into power in subsequent elections. But now it seems like this has like, thrown that off to a certain extent, because now all of a sudden there’s a lot of like, anti-US sentiment and a question of how that’s gonna affect like, the Canadian elections as they now have to identify, you know, more as an independent country that has what’s turned into seemingly like, a hostile neighbor.
NDB: Yeah. It has galvanized people in Canada, no question about it. And changed – yeah, I just saw a news report earlier today that what’s-his-name – Mark whatever his name is – the Liberal candidate who’s likely to replace Justin Trudeau as the leader of that party, his chances have gone up significantly since the whole, you know, since Trump’s election.
CB: Okay.
NDB: So yeah, that is shifting in a big way.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: You know, booing national anthems at hockey games and stuff like that I guess is gonna be par for the course for the next little while. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So Pluto – oh yeah, you made a great – I meant to say this before we move on. You made a great point in the Pluto in Aquarius that we recorded a year ago, the Pluto in Aquarius episode that I released as a little four-minute clip, but one of the things you said I released as a clip on YouTube, one of the things you pointed out was that one of the major things that happened under Pluto in Aquarius at the beginning of the US in the 1700s was the US Constitution was created. It created the three different branches of government that are supposed to not only be independent, but provide checks and balances on each other to keep things from getting out of whack and to avoid the possibility of it turning into a monarchy or like, a dictatorship. But then one of the final things that really happened with that is Washington, during Pluto in Aquarius, became the first president, and he did two terms, but then at the end of that, he voluntarily gave up power even though he was so popular that he actually could have become a king and set up some sort of like, monarchy at the time. But instead, one of the most important things that he did is he relinquished power and walked away from it. And you pointed out that Napoleon, who partially came to power during the course of Pluto in Aquarius, and some of the things surrounding the French Revolution, that at the end of his life, he was reflecting that if he had only given up power when he got it in the way that Washington did, that he would have been remembered very fondly in French history and celebrated. But instead because he used the Revolution and essentially became a dictator or a monarch or a king, he eventually was overthrown and seen as something negative and regressive.
NDB: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Really, Napoleon rose once Pluto was going into Pisces. You know, the Revolution was Aquarius, and then when he’s invading Egypt, Pluto’s gone into Pisces, and from there he becomes Consul and Emperor or what have you. But yeah, the gist of what you’re saying is completely true. I remember saying that. That is very important, the fact that Washington voluntarily passed the reigns of power over to, in this case, John Adams was the next elected candidate. But the idea of being that, yeah, you know – Washington absolutely could have said, “You know what? I’m king from here.” He could have been a total Trump and he would have had plenty of support most likely. So the fact that he didn’t do that really set the country on the course that it’s been on up until, yeah, the Pluto return as it were.
CB: Right. Well, and that’s important because it’s coming up again now, because on the one hand, there’s already been somebody that’s introduced a bill to like, extend presidential terms so that they could have a third term even though after Roosevelt Congress passed a bill making it so presidents can only have two four-year terms. So there are already like, there’s already a testing of that limit, and then yesterday the White House posted a picture that was like, a mock – the White House Twitter, the official Twitter account – I think – or maybe it was Trump’s Truth Social posted a mock like, Time magazine cover with him wearing a crown and saying that —
NDB: Right.
CB: — it’s good to be king or something like that. Or “Long live the king.” It said “Long live the King,” actually. So – which is like, people could like, write off as like, “Oh,” you know, “whatever – that’s not serious” or anything else, but it’s like, the fact that we’re in this Pluto return to Aquarius where many of these foundational principles of the US democracy were laid, including just having two terms, means that we are revisiting some of those things, and there is an open question whether we emerge from this period still with those original ideas intact, or whether, you know, there’s been other countries over the past few decades – like Russia for example – where term limits and then Putin in his rise to power was able to circumvent and then eventually essentially get rid of that at this point. And there was something similar that also that happened in China. So the US is now at its turning point where that’s like, a legitimate, you know, question potentially.
NDB: Yeah. And you know, it occurred to me while we were talking – when Franklin Roosevelt did run for his third presidential term in 1940, that was just after Pluto had ingressed into Leo, the opposite sign. So there’s, you know, just some interesting shadow stuff happening there as well.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good point.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So moving on. This broader topic that we got a little bit away from, but it started with tariffs and trade. The other thing that keeps coming up, though, that I see in Mars retrograde in Cancer periods is US monetary policy. Like, really foundational stuff about US monetary policy keeps coming up over and over again in this Mars retrograde in Cancer period. And one of the reasons for that, actually, that Leisa Schaim suggested to me is that it may be because Cancer is the 8th house in the US Sibley chart. So you could be getting things from that like, you know, trade with other countries since the 8th house is other people’s money. But the 8th house also has to do with things like taxes and financial matters and other things like that as well. So the most striking example of this that I thought was the most impressive is that in the Mars retrograde in Cancer in 1913, the Federal Reserve was created. And I think that’s really huge because of the important and like, independent role that the Federal Reserve has on US monetary policy, which also can indirectly affect like, the worldwide financial markets as well.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. It was a major, major turning point along with the tariffs of 1913. The Federal Reserve, I mean, it’s… Yeah. Changed the country, you know? And there’s still loads of people clamoring to get rid of it.
CB: Yeah. So it was, it’s basically the central banking system of the United States. It was created December 23rd, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act after there was this series of financial panics that led to the desire for more centralized control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises like this. And that retrograde was happening from September 15th, 1913, through May 1st of 1914. So that creation of the Federal Reserve falls right in the middle of that on December 23rd, 1913, and that retrograde is interesting, because that one was entirely in Cancer. It started at 24 degrees of Cancer when Mars stationed retrograde on November 26th, and it retrograded back to five degrees of Cancer on February 12th of 1914. So this is the Federal Reserve. And one of the things that’s interesting about the Federal Reserve is that I found this quote that said,
“Interest rates remain the most potent weapon that the central bank can wield against surging inflation – a tool that the Federal Reserve turned to in 2022 to tame the hottest inflation in 40 years.”
And I thought that was really interesting, because one of the things they can do, one of the things the Federal Reserve does is it controls interest rates. But that’s like, the weapon or the tool of the Federal Reserve, which is like, a very Mars-coded type language.
NDB: Right.
CB: But its primary function ultimately is to protect things, which is like, kind of the Cancer element of things. And one of the things it tries to do is during periods of inflation, the Federal Reserve over the past century tries to make it so that there’s a soft landing after a period of inflation as the rates are adjusted in order to avoid there being like, a major recession after a period of inflation. And that’s one of the things that it’s trying desperately to do right now because most of the time, it has actually not been successful. And usually, following a major period of inflation like we experienced since 2022, usually there’s a major market downturn and like, recession that occurs right after that. So that’s one of the interesting questions this year is whether the Fed one – is able to manage the US having a soft landing without going into a recession, but then the other question is two – the Fed is actually an independent entity, which they appoint people very infrequently so that it’s not usually subject to the whims of like, who’s in the White House and usually acts independently. But I just saw a story yesterday that Trump is already trying to bring the Federal Reserve under the control of the White House, essentially, to a certain extent as much as he can potentially.
NDB: Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me, especially because Trump was inaugurated during a Sun-Pluto conjunction. Now let’s just go back to the founding of the Federal Reserve for a second; it was founded December 23rd, 1913, right? So what degree is the Sun at on December 23rd? One degree of Capricorn. And where was Pluto when the Federal Reserve was lending 30 million dollars to Bear Stearns in March of 2008, you know, as things were starting to crash? Pluto was conjunct the Sun of the Federal Reserve when that was happening; this was 96 years later. 96, of course, is 79 plus 15 – it’s another synodic Mars return. So yeah, in the winter of 2007, 2008 when Mars was retrograde in Cancer, the Federal Reserve is having the Pluto transit conjunct its natal Sun as it’s lending 30 million dollars to Bear Stearns to try and, you know, prevent what was inevitable, I suppose. All the more interesting because Ben Bernanke had the Sun at like, 22 degrees of Sagittarius and when he had been sworn in as Chair of the Fed a few years earlier, Pluto was conjunct his Sun, and then he winds up being the guy when Pluto is conjunct the Fed’s Sun that, you know, this happens in the middle of the financial crisis of that period. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff.
So coming back to Trump wanting to take control of it, there does appear to be – keep in mind when the Fed was founded, the Sun was opposite Pluto. Pluto was just going into Cancer, so that was like a Pluto half-return of the Fed and the life of the Fed going from 2013 to 2008. So yeah, I mean, unsurprisingly, there’s a strong Pluto relationship with the natal chart for the creation of the Fed, and the, you know, obviously the transits it’s had since its creation. So for —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — a president who’s not inaugurated during a Sun-Pluto conjunction to wanna take control of that, you know, almost seems – yeah, just seems to be in keeping with everything else we’ve seen about the astrology of the Fed.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It’s a terrible idea, and we’ll have horrible financial repercussions if the Fed becomes partisan —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — both nationally and internationally, but yeah. I mean, that was my primary – in our year ahead forecast, that was my primary reading of what the Sun-Pluto conjunction in Aquarius on inauguration day indicated, because Pluto primarily in astrology we associate with power is one of the main keywords for Pluto. And sometimes like, power plays or power control. Whereas the Sun represents the central figure or the main authority so that in ancient astrology the Sun always represented the king. So if you have the Sun and Pluto conjoining in the inauguration chart, at the very least, you’re gonna have a greater centralization of power or attempts to centralize more power and accumulate more power in the executive branch under the presidency, basically. And that’s for sure what’s been happening across the board. It’s just a question of like, how far that goes and how much power the executive branch and the president is able to accumulate in canceling out or taking things away from other things that other branches are supposed to be doing. One of them that’s creating a constitutional crisis right now is the legislative branch and whether the legislative branch can stop or put stops in place to say that Trump can’t do certain things when he makes certain executive orders. And then the other one is Congress where he’s also trying to potentially wrestle control away of monetary policy where Congress is the one that’s supposed to apportion money and funds. And one of the things that Trump is saying he’s gonna do is set up a sovereign wealth fund, which in other countries that sometimes becomes like a slush fund basically —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — for dictators or for monarchs. And it would be something that would be more in control of the executive branch instead of Congress, which is supposed to be the one in control of the funding.
NDB: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Yeah, and with that Sun-Pluto conjunction, of course, Trump’s natal Pluto is conjunct JD Vance’s Sun. So even in terms of the inauguration itself, he had the synastry along with the transit. It all follows, you know, everything that’s happening isn’t surprising. It all seems almost obvious.
CB: I mean, it seems obvious now, and we saw it like a train or like a slow motion car wreck of it coming over the past year or even over the past four years or eight years or what have you. But it was also, yeah, it’s been a weird reflection seeing it actually happen, and like, this is it. Because also, you know, you and I have been talking about like, the Uranus return of the United States for more than a decade, how that’s always coincided with a major war in the United States, either the Civil War in the 1800s or like, World War Two and the Revolutionary War. And anticipating that is one thing, but seeing all this stuff start to constellate and it actually happening is much different, and it’s not like, obvious. It’s —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — very jarring to see this happening in real time.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, yeah. I agree. I mean, I’ve been expecting it, and yet I’m also jarred. You know, because even when you’re expecting it, I mean, Trump is still gonna do the Trump thing and go much further than you even thought he was gonna go. You knew he was gonna —
CB: Right.
NDB: — be, you know, wreckless, and then it’s like, oh! I even underestimated that. So yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, I don’t mean to sound overly confident about it, but you know, it does all follow, what he’s doing, astrologically.
CB: Sure. Yeah. All right, so Pluto in Aquarius – I just wanna see if we wanted to move on. Because you kind of jumped forward to my next section I was gonna have —
NDB: Oh, sorry about that.
CB: — which is financial crisises or crises. So financial crises, sometimes government intervention in the economy, but also sometimes like, financial crisis that stokes the flames of racism, xenophobia, and nativism is something I’ve seen under this Mars retrograde in Cancer. One of the most striking examples of this was actually the last Mars retrograde in Cancer that occurred before this one, which is the Mars retrograde in Cancer in 2007 through 2008, which actually coincided with the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession of that time period of 2007, 2008, and 2009. And what was interesting about that – it began to unfold during the course of the Mars retrograde in Cancer, but what’s so fascinating about that one is that remember, it was originally started by a mortgage crisis. It was started about —
NDB: Right!
CB: — houses, about people’s houses and living situations, and people due to relaxed regulation, basically, that started —
NDB: Subprime mortgages, yeah.
CB: Yeah, that actually started partially during one of the previous Mars retrogrades in the 1990s in 1992 —
NDB: In ‘92, yeah.
CB: — when they relaxed some regulations, allowing banks to… Originally what’s funny about that one is that they did it in order initially… The Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, they actually did that in order to allow people with lower incomes the chance to give them a better chance to be able to take out a loan for a house, to get a home, basically, and become homeowners, which is theoretically a good thing. But then in removing some of those restrictions or relaxing some of those regulations, which relaxing regulations and removing regulations may also be a Mars in Cancer thing, but in doing that, it set it up for the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 and 2008 when banks were giving out loans to too many people who couldn’t afford them. And then all of a sudden when a large number of those people weren’t able to pay back those loans, a bunch of banks started to fold, and that led to the financial crisis, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s really important also as a reference point that makes me really a little bit nervous right now, the fact that… You know, I always associated the financial crisis with when it really culminated in like, the fall of 2008 when all those banks started to fail and some of them started getting bailed out. But that whole crisis actually started in the second half of 2007 through the first half of 2008, and that perfectly aligns with the Mars retrograde in Cancer period that occurred that year. And then it led us into this huge recession and huge financial crisis. And what makes me nervous about that is we also saw another parallel with one other major financial crisis, which was the 1929 stock market crash that occurred later in that year in October, which was preceded by a Mars retrograde in Cancer earlier that year and where there was an initial couple of dips in the stock market in March and May of 1929 that were early warning signs of the upcoming financial crisis and the parallel with those, because that was also remember not just a Mars retrograde in Cancer year; it was also a Venus retrograde in Aries year. And so the parallel time frame of that would be basically March and April and May of this year would be the exact parallel with early 1929 where there could be a preview of a larger potential issue, but then it’s something that could – if there was a repetition of history, which sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t, but if there was, then it could be a larger financial crisis that’s like, brewing sometime later this year.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, there’s so much recklessness, you know, with the tariff, the possibility of the Fed moving in house. All you need is one thing to go wrong, and things could go very wrong. So to have all these, you know, chairs stacked up on top of each other, it doesn’t look like the mountain’s gonna hold, you know?
CB: Yeah. Well, and there’s new elements of like, recklessness and deregulation. One of them is like, Bitcoin is like, the wild west at this point, and while there had been some attempts at regulation of it sort of over the past few years, now a lot of that’s been removed, and it’s been interesting seeing how sometimes that is interacting with the larger economy even though it’s a very erratic thing that’s subject to ups and downs pretty dramatically. And that’s one of the things I’m curious about with Pluto in Aquarius. You know, Trump has become the cryptocurrency or the Bitcoin president, and one of the things he did a few days before he was inaugurated was like, launched his own cryptocurrency called TrumpCoin, and it went up and then immediately like, lost a bunch of value, and then they released MelaniaCoin, and that did the same thing – went up, and then all of a sudden lost a ton of value. So I’m curious the extent to which things like that could play some role this year in some of the weird destabilization that’s going on.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, again, you know, we have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction coming up, which tends to be very, like, reality hitting you, you know? Very like, hyper real, super real. It can be a cold bucket of water in the face, if you will, and it follows the Venus and Mercury retrogrades in Aries. It, you know, goes into Aries after they’ve done that retrograde into Pisces and whatnot. So you can sort of see the planets setting up, you know, one situation leading to another leading to another. Things happening in March during the Venus and Mercury retrogrades that people only realize during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction once they get into Aries the real consequences of where they stand.
CB: Right. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, I mean —
CB: Like, Saturn-Neptune sounds like a bubble popping to me. But also one of the things I said on the year ahead forecast and the past I think the previous forecasts, one or two since then for February, was just whatever happens in March, there’s so much activity or it seems like especially there’s some major geopolitical event or events that happen in March and April during the Venus retrograde in Aries and during the eclipse series that partially happens in Aries. But then immediately after that happens, you know, the day after the Aries eclipse, Neptune goes into Aries, which is the beginning of a very long transit through that sign that lasts for more than a decade. And then a couple months later in June, Saturn goes into Aries. So it’s almost like there’s some events that set off a chain reaction or a cascade effect in March and April that then have much more long term implications over the next several years and over the next couple of decades.
NDB: Yeah. And probably a delayed one, you know? Like, things go wrong in March and April, but some people only realize in June that, you know, March was messed up. You know, that kind of thing. Like, realizing after the fact. But yeah, that’s what I expect. I’ll just remind you and the viewers that indeed the Venus and Mercury stations are triggering the last solar eclipse by opposition and the upcoming solar eclipse by conjunction. So these are not just your average Mercury and Venus retrograde stations. And then when Venus does station direct at 24 Pisces, that’s triggering the last lunar eclipse we had. This is how eclipses work in astrology; you know, if they’re triggered by a powerful planetary station, even just a transit will trigger an eclipse, but two stations in the same month triggering two different solar eclipses? This is, you know, it can be pretty big!
CB: Right. Yeah. So much. And I’m gonna talk about more of this on the forecast episode at the end of this month, but the recession issues and sometimes crashes are something that makes me nervous.
So moving on. One of the major themes that also comes up with Mars retrograde in Cancer is homes, and we’ve talked about this already that the Housing and Community Development Act in 1992 was passed, and that was something that was, you know, relaxing some regulations to make it easier for people to buy homes. Then the subprime mortgage crisis happened 2007, 2008. Another one that happened that I noticed is right after World War Two, in the Mars retrograde from 1945 to ‘46, there was actually a housing crisis. There was both – because all of the GIs came home, all the veterans came home, but there was a housing crisis at the time, and it was hard finding places to live. There was also a minor I don’t know if it was a recession; I don’t know if you would call it a recession, but there was a minor drop in the economy in 1946 as the US was trying to switch from like, a wartime economy back to doing domestic production for just like, consumer goods and stuff. And there was – you do see this dip in terms of the economy until they were able to get things going again in like, ‘47, ‘48.
NDB: Yeah. I know there was a major railroad strike. Truman might have forced them to stop it, if I remember. Or he almost did? I forget the details, but that’s in the spring of ‘46 during the retrograde or coming out of it. So yeah, if you have a big railroad strike, that was the idea – I mean, you know, war had stimulated the economy. Famously, the war had ended the Depression. But then when the war ends, yeah, you know, suddenly people need jobs again and homes, and they’re trying to start their lives, and there was bound to be just a transitional bump between, you know, those two realities. And that’s what 1946 was was, you know, still very close to the war having ended, but too soon for everything to just totally go back to normal.
CB: Right. Yeah. So I thought that was interesting with housing crises happening sometimes —
NDB: Oh, oh, oh! Sorry! One other thing – my parents having both been born in the spring of 1946, there’s a term we love to use even this day – “Okay, boomer!” Baby boomers. They start during that Mars in Cancer! Think about it. I mean —
CB: Oh, right!
NDB: — you know, like, that’s, like, all these GIs are coming home and having tons of babies. And that’s starting around September of ‘45, right? And you know —
CB: Totally.
NDB: Yeah, my mother’s born in – Trump himself – born in June of ‘46. He must have been conceived October-ish ‘45.
CB: Right.
NDB: You know? I guess his dad wasn’t coming back from the war, but you know, all the same. Yeah. I mean, that’s how we got baby boomers – it just occurred to me.
CB: Totally. That’s a really good – I’m glad you made that point, because I’ve actually been seeing a string of baby and pregnancy related news stories over the past few days as Mars is stationing direct in Cancer, so much so that I realized that that’s like, a thing. There was this bizarre story that’s in the news right now about this woman who got in vitro fertilization but then it turns out that the clinic had like, implanted the wrong baby – the wrong eggs – inside of her from somebody else, and then the baby popped out and she, they realized that they’d messed up. But she wanted to – it was her baby, so obviously she wants —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — to keep it. But she informs the clinic what happened, because one of the issues was that her and her husband were white and the baby was Black, so that’s how they knew immediately that they hadn’t implanted her eggs. So she informs the clinic, and the clinic informs the original people whose eggs it was, and then the people whose eggs it was then sue the woman who just had the baby because now they want the baby and think because it was their eggs that they have more like, I don’t know, rights to it.
NDB: Right.
CB: The woman doesn’t wanna give up the baby, because it’s like, her baby, and she’s attached —
NDB: She carried it in her body. I mean, that’s —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. I get it.
CB: But then so she tries to fight it with lawyers, but her lawyers say due to the way the laws are set up, we’re gonna lose this case. You’re gonna have to give up the baby to this other woman or this other couple, which she does. She has to surrender the baby. But now she’s suing the clinic —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — for, you know, malpractice and everything else. And her lawyer says that one of the issues is that in vitro fertilization is a largely unregulated area, and there’s a lack of regulation that should be in place for this issue. So it’s this whole like, debacle, but I thought it was interesting that was in the news along with a few other stories this week. So I’m really glad you brought that point up about babies.
NDB: Yeah, no. That’s interesting. I didn’t know that had happened.
CB: Yeah. Okay. So and I think, you know, that just goes back to Cancer being ruled by the Moon. You know, again, like, ideas of like, mothers and things like that and yeah, so it’s interesting that somehow —
NDB: And safety. You know, like that kind of safety – you know, you’re in the womb. You’re looked after.
CB: Right. Yeah.
NDB: You’re nurtured. Yeah.
CB: Which is interesting, because I… You know, that’s one of the things that’s happening right now in a broader government scale is Trump is just tearing apart a lot of the government —
NDB: All the nurturing.
CB: All the nurturing! Which like, you know, our older Libertarian friend, Alan White, would have referred to as like, the nanny state more derisively. But more positively, it’s like, sometimes it’s restrictions and regulations in place that stop bad things like, happening, including banking or housing crises, but also, you know, we were talking about this in vitro fertilization thing and potentially there being a regulatory issue there where bad stuff’s happening that shouldn’t happen because of a lack of care being put in place.
NDB: Yeah. Lack of oversight.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: I had no idea it was unregulated like that. What a thing to happen! I would love to see the child’s chart. I’m sorry to sound like a coldblooded astrologer – I mean, people’s lives have been upended and ruined, but I would love to see that child’s chart; I’ll just be honest.
CB: No, totally, because that’s what I was thinking, because what’s so fascinating then is like, at some point in the child’s future, that is gonna be activated again and they’re gonna be aware of what happened when they were born and that they were born biologically to another mother from the mother that raised them. And I bet you anything there’s gonna be some Mars retrograde at some point in that person’s future where they’re gonna go back and revisit this and potentially even reconnect on some level with their birth mother when that placement’s activated again. I would place a bet on that.
NDB: Yeah. You know, Trump can be reckless with the economy; we can be slightly reckless with our astrological predictions. Sure.
CB: With our predictions.
NDB: Why not?
CB: Yeah.
NDB: It’s the age.
CB: Yeah. We’ll see what happens. Okay. So that’s good for that section. I wanna move into another section now. One of the other things that came up during some of these Mars retrogrades, especially two of them, was I noticed that there were some really striking military debacles or failed military operations or blunders or fiascos. I was having a hard time figuring out how to phrase this. But one of the most notorious examples which was both a Mars retrograde in Cancer and Venus retrograde in Aries was the Bay of Pigs in 1961 at the very beginning of Kennedy’s presidency where they attempted to like, invade Cuba, and it was this completely failed US-backed military operation that was not only failed but caused this huge international incident, basically, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I think it was a good thousand men, some of them killed, a lot of them taken prisoner. There was eventually a prisoner swap, I think, at the end of ‘62. But yeah. You know, I mean, and basically what happened – like, Kennedy had been president not even for 90 days. This was a plan that was, you know, the Republicans expected Richard Nixon to win the election. Richard Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president, so he was just gonna continue the Eisenhower regime, and you know, along with the Dulles brothers just do business as usual. But then Kennedy wins the election and he inherits the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and then he’s sort of set up to fail, and you know, from that point on, he feels like he can’t trust people like Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. I forgot John Foster Dulles was dead by now, but Allen Dulles was still the head of the CIA, and you know, the Bay of Pigs was his thing. So Kennedy fires Allen Dulles as head of the CIA, and then when Kennedy is murdered, Allen Dulles is appointed on the Warren Commission, and he’s the only guy on the Warren Commission who doesn’t have another job, you know, distracting him. I’ll just, you know, leave that there. But yeah, that was basically the deal that Kennedy was so new, he was told, “Yeah, you know, this is an operation still in place,” and he goes along with it because the men in suits are telling him he should and that it’s all good, and then it wound up humiliating him very early in his presidency. And that set the tone for everything that followed, I think. Although even – like, on the very first day, there’s a famous picture in January of ‘61 when the Mars retrograde in happening. Kennedy’s first day in the Oval Office, there was a big sort of uprising in what was the Belgian Congo, which had just become independent. And there was a political leader named Patrice Lumumba who was, you know, trying – he was voted in, and he was trying to take control of the country, but the sort of Belgian reactionaries – there we go, there’s the reactionaries – had him, with the assistance of the CIA, had him abducted and killed. And Kennedy had wanted to save and help Lumumba, and there’s a famous photo of him being on the phone on his first day in the Oval Office being told that Patrice Lumumba has been killed, and he’s just, he’s devastated. So like, that begins him being disillusioned with the whole CIA thing, but then the Bay of Pigs thing happens and that really changes things.
CB: Right. Okay. So and I wrote a summary of it if we didn’t summarize it enough, but basically the Bay of Pigs happened April 17th, 1961, through April 20th, 1961, just as Mars is coming off of this retrograde in Cancer. And Mars was in Cancer at that time. And it was a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, and they were planning to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. But then it ended in disaster, and the invasion was poorly planned and executed, and the invading force was quickly defeated. So this is a major embarrassment for the Kennedy administration as we said, but it also further heightened the Cold War tensions, which of course had been there since the beginning of the Cold War during that Mars retrograde previously in 1946 and 1945. I think this was the thing where after this, Kennedy famously said he was gonna like, break up the CIA, right?
NDB: Well, he fired Dulles, and he made some intimations to that, although obviously he didn’t. It occurs to me that this is kind of funny – at least two of the soldiers, you know, who attempted to invade Cuba at the Bay of PIgs, at least two of them were found 11 years later as part of the Watergate break-in team. They were two of the Watergate burglars. And Watergate happened when Venus was retrograde in Gemini – well, from Cancer to Gemini. It had started in Cancer; it went to Gemini. So I’m seeing another, you know, the guys who are arrested during the Mars retrograde in Cancer and then they get this – or sorry. They lose the Bay of Pigs when Mars is retrograde in Cancer, and then they get their next big break with the Watergate thing, and then that falls apart on them during the Venus retrograde.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Kennedy, the quote supposedly attributed to Kennedy is that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” And then this becomes repeated a lot in, you know, conspiracies or theories about the Kennedy assassination, which then occurred just two years later in 1963 and like, one of the theoretical motivations for why that occurred.
NDB: Especially because the mastermind of the Bay of Pigs winds up being on the Warren Commission and like, the leading guy on the Warren Commission. So it’s, you know, it’s not all that cloak and dagger; it’s all quite out in the open.
CB: Okay. Yeah. And interestingly, as another parallel, Eisenhower before he leaves office that year on January 17th, he gives his famous farewell speech where he warned of a “military industrial complex” and warning about this as being an issue and this is an often quoted thing. Especially I remember when I was like, you know, becoming an adult in the 2000s and the second Iraq War was taking place when George W. Bush invaded Iraq that these notions of like, the military industrial complex and Eisenhower’s warning about that where commonly invoked. And I thought that was incredible, because you and I mentioned that I think as a Venus retrograde thing in our Venus retrograde episode, and then Biden when he gave his farewell speech in January, he mentioned it. He actually cited Eisenhower and his warning of a military industrial complex, and then Biden himself warned of I think he said a tech industrial complex or something like that, and that America was being – the democracy was being threatened by an oligarchy, basically.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So it was a nice repetition of both a Venus retrograde and the Mars retrograde from 1961.
NDB: Yeah. And they’re both dire warnings about the Gemini who’s about to take over the job, so there’s also that, I guess.
CB: Of Trump now versus like, Kennedy in 1961? Okay.
NDB: Yeah, there have only been three Gemini Sun presidents – the third being George H. W. Bush.
CB: So the part that is nervous, of course, about that, is that period is coming up then over the next few months in terms of Trump’s presidency and just in terms of the potential for like, a military debacle. I have been anticipating a major geopolitical event that happens in March and April largely related to the eclipses, because over the past year every time there’s an eclipse, Iran and Israel have started firing missiles at each other openly for the first time. And so the next set of eclipses we’ve anticipated could potentially be an escalation of that, which if true could be a major thing that happens if that’s what all of the crazy astrology is about over the next two months that comes up in March and April, especially around that Aries eclipse. But we’ll have to just see what happens.
NDB: Yeah. I’d say – yeah, I mean, that’s an obvious one to think about. But I also think Europe is, you know, primed for some trouble as well —
CB: Right.
NDB: — obviously. Yeah.
CB: Of course. Yeah, with Russia and Ukraine. For sure that’s gonna be another obvious like, major geopolitical one.
NDB: Yeah. But also, you know, France wants their uranium, so they also wanna go after Russia. And then depending on how the German election goes, they could wind up being on the side of the Russians; you never know. So things could – yeah. You know, it doesn’t necessarily play out that way, but that’s entirely possible.
CB: Yeah, but some of those are like, political realignments and things like that. Like, I’m talking about a military operation of some sort that maybe doesn’t go as smoothly as hoped and turns into a big thing. Because the other thing – it’s not just the Bay of Pigs. So the Bay of Pigs was my first example. My other example is the Waco siege in 1993 was the other one that was under both a Mars retrograde in Cancer as well as a Venus retrograde in Aries at the same time, so that’s that 32-year repetition we mentioned at the beginning where every 32 years, the Mars retrograde in Cancer and the Venus retrograde in Aries happens. So that’s only two times before this, which was 1993 and 1961.
So in 1993, the Waco siege really closely like, matched that, and what happened – like, how would you describe that one again?
NDB: Well, there was a compound. There was this religious cult, I suppose you’d call them, called the Branch Davidians. They had this compound in Waco, Texas, that was sort of sealed off largely. And this group – I forget the number of people – there were dozens. I don’t think there were a hundred; maybe there were a couple of hundred —
CB: There were.
NDB: — at the most —
CB: Well, no, I mean, well, actually, I don’t know how many. I just know that there was 76 people that were killed, including 25 children.
NDB: That were killed, right. That’s the number. So this group had a lot of weapons apparently. They were known to go to a lot of the sort of the gun shows and what have you. So the ATF were doing a raid. They suspected them of having, I think, you know, unregistered guns or something or, you know, some kind of gun thing that they had broken, which being in Texas would have to be pretty egregious. But yeah, the ATF basically tried to raid the Branch Davidian compound, and the Branch Davidians indeed were armed and started firing back. And what would have been in other cases a one-day, you know, CIA – not CIA – ATF operation turned into a two-month siege from February to April. As I recall, when it ended, it ended in tragedy with the whole place burning down. It’s still —
CB: Right.
NDB: — somewhat controversial who started the fire; that’s a whole other thing. But I think – sorry, excuse me – I think on the direct station of Venus was the day the fire happened in April as I recall.
CB: Yeah. The siege was like, it was a 51-day standoff that was happening in early 1993 from February 28th to April 19th. And then on April 19th, there was like, a gas leak or something, and there was an explosion or something and a fire was set. And then 76 people died, including 25 children, and it sparked this huge national debate about the use of force by law enforcement agencies, the rights of religious groups and other issues like that. So it was, again, it was – you know, that was not military per se; that was law enforcement. But there was some sort of similar echo there to 1961, because it was kind of like a military or law enforcement fiasco or like, blunder of an operation that’s done which ends disastrously.
NDB: Yeah. It really radicalized a lot of people. Like, think about it – like, when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building… Was it in Little Rock? Where did he – no, no.
CB: Oklahoma City.
NDB: Oklahoma City! Thank you. I’m sorry. When Timothy McVeigh blew up that building, I mean, you know, Waco was one of the things that he was avenging, if you will. It was a sort of, you know, it radicalized people like him. So yeah, I have no doubt that, you know, some of those people are MAGA hatters today or what have you. So yeah. And the Bay of Pigs similarly also radicalized people, because you had the Cuba Revolution was only two years earlier, so those Cubans who were attacking at the Bay of Pigs really thought they had a chance of taking their country back, that this was just some little blip, but when the Bay of Pigs fell apart, then they realized like, you know, America’s not really gonna help them get their country back and they really are exiles. And so like, yeah, you know, attitudes hardened. And I think the same thing happened with Waco. You know, people might have already had a certain attitude, but then something this tragic occurs or this humiliating, and people really sort of double down. They lean into the rage they feel over it.
CB: Right.
NDB: And I think you —
CB: And it didn’t just – go ahead.
NDB: Go. No, sorry. Yeah. You know, just that. These events really radicalized people. I know Waco certainly did, and yeah, the Bay of Pigs did in its own way.
CB: Yeah, and it didn’t – like, Waco didn’t even just radicalize right-wing people like Timothy McVeigh, but it also radicalized some left-wing people. I remember like, being in high school and like, a teacher showed a documentary about it, and it was just very, you know, it was like the penultimate example of like, government and law enforcement overreach and militarization or something like that which bred anti-government sentiment in different areas. So that gives us two different scenarios where on the one hand, we’re talking about like there’s a big geopolitical military thing like in 1961. The other option is a local, you know, national like, law enforcement debacle or overreach or something like that, I guess, is the alternative scenario that’s closer to what happened with Waco.
NDB: Yeah. But I mean close enough. There’s still something, you know, common in the two. Certainly they’re failed government operations if nothing else.
CB: Right.
NDB: Interesting – excuse me again – interesting side note to Waco is that Janet Reno was the Attorney General in charge of that whole thing, and she has a natal Sun-Mars-Pluto conjunction in Cancer. She was born July 21st, 1938, and she has those three planets conjunct at the last degree of Cancer, so yeah. You know, just in terms of comparing the nativity to the event, there’s something there as well.
CB: Yeah. That’s striking. Because we had talked about her as in the Venus retrograde episode as being the first woman attorney general who’s sworn in under that Venus retrograde in Aries in 1993. But then that’s interesting that the Mars retrograde is like, immediately this crisis and negative thing happening.
NDB: Yeah. No, that’s true. And then in Clinton’s second term, he nominated a woman who had the natal Venus retrograde in Aries – Madeline Albright – to be his Secretary of State. And then when he left office and George W. Bush became president, he made a Venus retrograde in Aries – Colin Powell – his Secretary of State. But that’s, you know, it just keeps going on and on.
CB: It’s like, you know, they say it’s like turtles all the way down. It’s just like, Venus retrogrades in Aries all the way down.
NDB: It’s turtles all the way down, yeah.
CB: Exactly. While we’re here, it’s worth mentioning that the other major terrible thing that happened when Mars was stationing direct in Cancer in February of 1993 was the first World Trade Center bombing took place where a bomb exploded in the basement of the WOrld Trade Center in New York City that killed six people and injured over a thousand, although it ultimately wasn’t – I mean, ironically, that was also a failed, you know, “military operation” on the part of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But it would be their first attempt at attacking the World Trade Center bombing. And then almost exactly eight years later when Venus then again went retrograde in early 2001, they finalized the plans for the September 11th attacks which then happened later that year.
NDB: I was looking through my database when I was looking at Waco, and I just saw something that I feel I have to throw in here. On November 24th, 1992, the United Nations voted to urge the US to end their sanctions against Cuba.
CB: Oh wow. Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So there was another repetition of US-Cuba relations at the 32 year repetition of 1961.
NDB: Yeah. This was November 24th, ‘92, so Clinton had just been elected but was not yet inaugurated. So maybe this was some kind of strategic hope, like, “Oh, the Americans have elected a Democrat for the first time in 12 years; let’s see if maybe he’ll bite here.” He did.
CB: Well, okay. Well, and you know what’s – depressingly, Cuba is again in the news right now because Trump just announced that they just started, he didn’t just announce – they set up camps where they’re planning to put at least like, 30,000 immigrants in a detention center in Guantanamo Bay. And what’s – not interesting, I have a side point about that, which is I found that the year that the US first government control of Guantanamo Bay was a Mars retrograde in Cancer year, basically, during the Spanish-American War.
NDB: Yeah. And they’ve held it ever since. It’s always been there for them to take people that they don’t want to enjoy the benefit of American law.
CB: Right. And that’s the problem is that because it’s outside of the continental United States, it’s not within the boundaries of American court systems. It’s like, military courts and stuff like that, which then opens up the possibility for abuse or for people to get stuck there without adequate representation and other things like that.
NDB: Yeah. I’m sure we all remember the Abu Ghraib photos of 2004, you know, the photos of people at Guantanamo as well being tortured and humiliated. Those images came out during the Venus retrograde in Gemini of 2004, and yeah. You know, I mean, that’s what’s potentially in store for people who didn’t commit acts of terrorism, so yeah.
CB: Yeah. I mean, in the worst case scenario. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but yeah, there’s no reason to set up stuff outside of the US law —
NDB: Unless you plan on doing something outside the law.
CB: Yeah. And ultimately, like, that’s the problem is because there’s a difference between – like, I can already hear people responding to like, the immigration section that we did earlier at the beginning of this and saying, you know, “We just wanna enforce the laws of the country, and if people are coming here illegally then that’s wrong and there shouldn’t be an issue with enforcing the rules.” But the problem is that what some of this gets tinged with that’s already happening is an element of dehumanization of people. Like, the thing with like, the chains over the past few days that the White House tweeted about ASMR – that someone loves listening to like, people being shackled and carted away – there’s an element of dehumanization to that, I think, that is tied in with that Mars in Cancer. And that’s the part where it’s wrong and where morally it’s not justified and where it gets scary and where other elements can also come in, including things like racism and other things like that. So yeah. Anyway, but to bring this back to closing out this section, I thought that was a very literal possible manifestation of Mars retrograde is the idea of a military debacle or a military blunder or fiasco with Mars representing the military in ancient astrology and a retrograde being like, a blunder or a fiasco or something going awry – something doing something it’s not supposed to or intended to.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, interestingly, there was no Mars retrograde in Cancer during the Revolutionary war. There was no Mars retrograde in Cancer during the Civil War; it was just after. No Mars retrograde in Cancer during the Second World War; it was just after. You know, I’m sure there have been wars that have been fought while Mars was retrograde in Cancer, but it would be interesting to do a survey of, you know, battles that occurred during that retrograde.
CB: Yeah. Well, and one thing – two things – we saw, I guess we weren’t gonna cover, but this is a good time to cover them, of examples of that recently is we saw that with in December, right on – like, within days of Mars stationing retrograde in Leo, you had that South Korean president who attempted to institute martial law. But then he was like, immediately shut down by I think the congress or the courts at the time, and they arrested him. And now during the course of the Mars retrograde, he’s like, being put on trial and is being charged for what he did basically. And what was interesting is that we saw – when I started researching this, I started with the 2007 retrograde, and when that happened in Pakistan, apparently Pervez Musharraf, who was the leader of the country for many years up to that point, he tried to do something similar, but then he also experienced a downfall during that Mars retrograde —
NDB: Right.
CB: — which was fascinating seeing a parallel there with what just happened with South Korea.
NDB: Yeah. And Korea’s just got all these Mars retrograde in Cancer things throughout its history, at least going back to ‘45, ‘46. In October of ‘07, North and South Korea had their second summit – their longest summit – and it seemed to be the most promising at the time, but it fell apart not long after that. You know, in like, the period of ‘45, ‘46 that we were talking about earlier, that is exactly when the split between the North and South into capitalist and Communist factions occurs. Korea has just been liberated from Japan, and different factions are scrambling to consolidate power here and there. The Soviets have Kim Il Sung, and they get him back into Korea, and he tries to start a Communist group in Seoul in South Korea, and that gets shut down and is declared illegal. So he goes north and he starts his group which eventually becomes the regime like, two years later for North Korea. But it’s exactly during that Mars retrograde in Cancer that Korea splinters in this way, or at least those splinters start to manifest.
So yeah, there’s a lot of Korean stuff I found. We don’t, you know, need to get into all of it here, but quite consistently I was really amazed at how much of their history was linked to that Mars retrograde in Cancer. And maybe it really – you know, I mean, again, since ‘45, ‘46, I don’t know going back further. I’d like to study more older Korean history, but when you think about it, it makes a certain amount of sense because they’re a country that has always – you know, half of it’s always occupied by foreign powers. The other half is, you know, a sort of a constant military failure if you will, right? North Korea is like, you know, a daily Bay of Pigs. So yeah, there’s something interesting there. We hinted at this earlier, but that whole period of ‘45, ‘46 – that Mars retrograde with the Saturn that we saw – yeah, you had all these countries recently liberated or what have you and they’re just scrambling to try and get control of the country, of the surrounding area. So that’s interesting. Korea is just one of those places where that was the reality.
CB: That’s very striking, because of course over this Mars retrograde over the past several months, one of the things that’s been in the news is North Korea sending troops to Ukraine to fight alongside the Russians —
NDB: Right?
CB: — which is crazy, because then it’s like, it’s North Korea and Russia teaming up in order to fight in a war, which is like, a new development, a new level of something going on in terms of world events.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So all right. So you did your South Korea thing – if you’re gonna do your South Korean thing, then I wanna briefly do my Pakistan —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — sidenote.
NDB: All right. Yeah.
CB: If you feel like it. All right, I just wanna mention because that Mars retrograde in 2007, 2008 was all really important stuff happening in Pakistan with Pervez Musharraf, and he was trying to control things. And one of the things was the opposition leader you mentioned earlier was Benazir Bhutto, and they tried to assassinate her twice – once towards the beginning of the Mars retrograde period in I think it was in October, but then they attempted to again, and the second time they were successful and murdered basically the opposition leader who was trying to run against Pervez Musharrah who had become this quasi military dictator at this point. And he attempted to declare a state of emergency on November 3rd, 2007, where the constitution of Pakistan was suspended. But eventually, basically, he was overthrown essentially during the course of this by the end of this retrograde. And then he eventually went into exile, and interestingly, 15 years later – which is a Mars period – he died on February 5th, 2023, a few weeks after Mars stationed direct in Gemini. And he was 79 years old, and when I took that back and looked at his birth chart, he was born August 11th of 1943 with Mars in late Taurus getting ready to slow down and station retrograde in late Gemini. So basically —
NDB: Right.
CB: — he died on the repetition of the Mars retrograde in Gemini that happened when he was born.
NDB: Yeah. I think he also – he had the Venus retrograde in Leo, and if I remember correctly, he first came to power in ‘99 close to that Venus retrograde in Leo. That’s the other thing. When he’s 56 – remember 56 is always that magical Venus return for politics. Yeah, and Benazir Bhutto, she was killed during the Mars retrograde in Cancer; the first time she was elected Prime Minister of Pakistan was in 1988 during the Mars retrograde in Aries. She natally – she was born June 21st, 1953; she had the Sun at 29 Gemini and Mars at four Cancer. So not retrograde, but she did have natal Mars in Cancer. And that retrograde she was killed under was a Mars retrograde that was going from her natal Mars to her natal Sun.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. That’s really tragic. So yeah, but Musharraf was born basically just before that Mars retrograde in Gemini and Cancer. He was overthrown during a Mars retrograde in Gemini and Cancer in 2007, 2008, and then he died on the Mars retrograde in Gemini and Cancer in whatever, 2023.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Is that it? Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. I’m seeing here he came to power, he was installed in power October 12th, 1999, and yeah, Venus was just coming out of that retrograde.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I wanna focus on the Mars stuff, but so anyway. So that’s a side note, but it means there’s just this whole other world of like, Mars retrograde stuff outside of Cancer that we’re not getting to for the most part in this episode aside from our frequent digressions. But I just wanted to give people a taste of those, both to show you that we’ve studied some of that stuff and if people would like to, they can let us know in the YouTube comments if they’d like us to cover, you know, some other Mars retrogrades in other signs as well as more international events that’s like, we have focused on that and found some really interesting stuff, and there’s tons of interesting stories to share there, even though we’ve decided to focus this episode on US history for the sake of the central changes that are happening in the US right now with this Mars retrograde in Cancer. But people can let us know in the comments if they want us to do a follow up on other Mars retrogrades around the world.
NDB: And I hope you do, because there’s some great stuff there.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So related to the military debacle theme, another one that I noticed was sometimes themes of imperialism and instances of US imperialism, even in its like, early nascent form. And one of the most striking examples of this that I saw was the Philippine-American War that happened in 1899 on a Mars retrograde in Cancer. And this was in the middle of William McKinley’s first term as president, and it came – because there were two things that happened with this retrograde. This retrograde was 1898 through 1899, and it initially started with in the first half of it, the end of the Spanish-American War where basically Spain and the United States went to war and Spain lost, and then American took basically in the treaty that was signed during the actual retrograde period at the end of 1898, it took like, a few different things, including I think Cuba, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Cuba. It basically became —
NDB: Dominican —
CB: — protector of Cuba —
NDB: Maybe they already had Dominican. I think they might have taken that from the SPanish earlier. I stand corrected.
CB: Okay. But one of the things that they —
NDB: But Phillipines too, yeah.
CB: Yeah. One of the things they took from Spain in this treaty at the end of the year at the beginning of when Mars was slowing down to station retrograde was the Philippines. The US annexed. But then the Philippines, as the Mars retrograde really gets going at the very beginning by January of 1899, the Philippine people are like, hey – like, what is this? Because they were already in the process of like, starting to fight a revolution I think against the Spanish, so then when the Americans came in, all of a sudden in early 1899, it becomes this major protracted war between the Philippines and America. And it was a really brutal, gross like, war where a lot of atrocities were committed. And yeah, there were a lot of internal debates within the United States at the time about this being a completely unnecessary war and that the US was turning into a colonial power or like, an imperial power that were actually like, happening – like, high level debates among very famous people, including Mark Twain, who were like, speaking out against this and saying this was not a good direction to be taking the country.
NDB: Yeah. Twain was traveling Europe at the time, literally having dinner with Kaiser Wilheml and the like – people who were already quite happy being imperialist. But he kind of, you know, rushes home to speak out against what’s happening. And he had an unlikely ally in Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, who was also very against the war.
CB: Yeah. So the first Phillipine Republic was declared on January 21st, 1899. That’s when they’re like, declaring essentially their independence. But then the war begins with the US on February 4th, 1899, when Mars is at 22 degrees of Cancer and it’s just three weeks from stationing direct. And this war would actually go on for a few years, but the fact that it started under this Mars retrograde was really notable, especially because of the intense debates that it caused within the US about anti-imperialists arguing against the annexation of like, another foreign country. And then I found there was some weird… One of the themes that came up with this war that I thought was striking was this sort of like, phrase about the US the pro-war people were talking about that the US – they were like, the US needs to do this to be a protector of the Philippines against —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — other countries who would otherwise moved in. And there was this sort of like, paternalistic rationale for the war, which I thought was interesting and seemed reminiscent of like, the Mars in Cancer themes to me.
NDB: Yeah. It’s the same mentality that fueled the scramble for Africa. You know, oh, we have to take this territory or otherwise it’ll fall into the hands of the French, and god knows what they’ll do! You know, that kind of talk. So yeah, no, that’s absolutely the line that the Americans are taking. When they first get involved in the war, they’re getting involved to liberate Cuba specifically. You know, Theodore Roosevelt goes over; the Rough Riders – all that stuff. It’s to liberate Cuba. But it quickly becomes like, oh, well, we gotta take control of these lands to make sure, you know, no one else takes them. You know, yeah, we gotta protect these people. So yeah, it’s totally paternalistic; it’s quite common. And since we’re talking about the Philippines and imperialism and Mars retrograde in Cancer, wouldn’t you know that on March 16th, 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan “discovered” the Philippines, Mars was at 28 Cancer and it only just stationed direct 19 days earlier in 1521?
CB: Wow.
NDB: So like, yeah – the Philippines can’t catch a break. Whenever Mars is retrograde in Cancer, someone’s coming around to mess with them unnecessarily.
CB: Yeah. That’s terrible, but I guess impressive from an astrological standpoint. Like, that there’s some places that you just have this close tie-in with this specific retrograde being so important.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Interesting. So yeah, that’s like the Alaska parallel then with like, Russia initially —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — sort of finding or exploring Alaska during one Mars retrograde in Cancer and then 79 years later selling it to the United States under that subsequent Mars retrograde in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. It was more than 79 years, but it was another Mars retrograde. It was 126 years.
CB: Okay. Right, right. Okay. All right, so the last thing – so just to summarize this and to make it like, so this isn’t just like, me saying this, I found this quote for the Philippines War that said,
“The US annexation and war sparked a political backlash from anti-imperialists in the US Senate who argue that the war was a definite example of US imperialism and that it was an inherent contradiction to the founding principles of the United States contained in the Declaration of Independence.”
And additionally on Wikipedia, it says, “Some anti-imperialists opposed the annexation also on other grounds,” but yeah, I just wanted to mention that, because there’s something about that where sometimes in this instance at least, there’s an intense debate within the United States about the US doing something – like, in this instance, a military move – that some view as inherently contradictory to the principles and like, higher ideals theoretically of the country, and this long standing internal tension between the higher ideals of some of the founding documents of the country versus the practicalities of what the country sometimes often does or is at different points in its history.
NDB: Yeah. The argument that the United States is aspirational, that the things that it puts into its documents are what it aspires to but not necessarily what it can meet. I mean, after all, you know, a country that declared that “We hold these truths to,” you know, to be, what is it? “All men are created equal?” Sorry, I usually know that line by heart, but it is late in the day for me. Yeah, you know, they can declare that all men are created equal and yet own slaves and not really deal with the contradiction much. And you know, so right out of the gate you have that, you have the idea that the United States is aspiring to something that it’s either, you know, unable or at least not ready to actually meet. That it’s what it, you know, these ideals are what it wants to be, but not what it is.
CB: Right. Yeah. Both that slavery, that huge numbers of people were enslaved, but even that phrasing of like, “All men are created equal” but that even women at the time like, weren’t granted the right to vote until, you know, the 1920s.
NDB: Yeah. Or even men who didn’t own property, right? I mean, even they didn’t —
CB: Oh right.
NDB: You know? Yeah. Even just your ordinary dude didn’t have a vote. So yeah, I mean —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — but I think that’s the thing is I’ve come to see, you know, the American Revolutionary War and all the revolutions that followed, from the French to the Greek to the Russian, the Chinese, the Cuban, the Haitian during the French – all those revolutions, it’s almost like it’s one event happening over 200 years. And that declaration ushering in this new world that we all live in, you know, everyone takes it to heart, you know? First it’s the men who don’t own property; they’re like, oh, all men are created equal? Well, I should have a vote. And then, you know, women think they should have a vote, and people of color think they should have a vote, and then people in the Philippines say, well, wait a minute – we’re created equal; we should be able to live up to these principles too.
So yeah, I mean, it sparked – it’s the revolution that keeps on giving, I think, is the reality of it all. The American Revolutionary War just kicked off a whole revolutionary age. And we’re still —
CB: Right.
NDB: — going through it. You know? We’re still in the middle of it. It’s like the Crusades. You know, when we talk about the Crusades, it sounds like one event, but it was a whole series of wars that took place over 200 years, you know? And this is that kind of era.
CB: Yeah. That it’s a constant – there’s a back and forth where progress is made at certain important turning points, especially through great effort and sometimes sacrifice, but then at other times sometimes there’s a step backwards, which is literally what Mars and other planets are doing when they go retrograde is they start stepping backwards and like, retracing their steps. And in some instances, there is pushback or this reactionary movement that tries to push the progress back and take us backwards in time, but that typically on a longer timeline, most of those temporary detours and backtracking are only temporary, and that on the long like, span of time, typically like the progress of human rights and civil rights continues to push forward, although which in my more aspirational or like, idealistic or hopeful encouraging side of things, that’s the way I like to look at things and I think is true in the long span of so far US history, although I do know also in the long span of time that sometimes like, different nations like, rise and fall and go through different transformations as they become sometimes going from one thing going to another. Like, for example, with the Roman Republic, which had —
NDB: Right.
CB: — more of a democratic orientation, and then all of a sudden you had a military general, a dictator, who rose to power and then turned it essentially into a military dictatorship with the Roman empire with Caesar and with Augustus in the first century BC. So yeah, it’s tricky, because there’s different scenarios.
NDB: There are. Yeah. I mean, the version of the future I like to believe in is the one where, you know, we are getting closer to the aspiration. And we’re just, you know, inching towards it too slowly, but steady. So yeah. Whether or not that’s actually true – I mean, sure. Things could go in any number of directions, but yeah, that is what I think is somewhat likely to happen in the big picture.
CB: Yeah. For sure. That was the other thing is in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was the final thing that removed a lot of the final restrictions that were there on different things in terms of voting and allowing it for all people, so that was the other thing. You mentioned like, property owners and that was one of the surprising things. I think there were some instances in the 1800s of Mars retrogrades when property owners – when people that were not property owners were actually given the right to vote, and it was striking seeing that as a change that happened at one point that, again, was kind of like Mars-related in terms of owning land or property.
NDB: Right.
CB: I think I wanna take a little break here, if that’s okay with you.
NDB: That’s fine, yeah.
CB: The astrology software we use here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.
For Mac users, I recommend the software Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer made by the creators of Solar Fire for the PC. You can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ through their website at AstroGold.io.
All right, we’re back again for the third and final part of this episode. And here I wanna talk about some like, miscellaneous things we found in our research. We’ve pretty much finished going through topically all of the major things that I wanted to talk about in terms of major topics that arise, and in putting this episode together I was actually struggling all the way up until the last minute about whether to go through topically like we did or whether to go through chronologically like we did in the Venus retrograde episode. But I was concerned that if we went through like, chronologically, it might be too boring, or it might be like, too much of a spattering of different things rather than showing the consistent narratives. So I hope that this approach that we did take here works. But now as a result of that, we do have some miscellaneous ones that we didn’t include or that we meant to include in earlier sections but forgot. So we went through and we compiled a list of some of the ones, so we’re gonna jump around a little bit here in this third section to different periods, and then we’ll conclude with some concluding remarks to wrap up the episode. Sound good?
NDB: Sounds good. Sounds like what we agreed a few minutes ago before we started recording!
CB: Right! All right. So one of the things is I wanted to close out the last section about imperialism, because part of the reason I saw that as a trend, and I pointed out the Philippine-American War, but it’s like, that’s coming up again now with the Mars retrograde in Cancer recently where it’s like, Trump is talking about invading Grenland. He’s talking about invading Panama for the Panama Canal. He keeps talking about making Canada the 51st US state, which just a US president should not be doing, should be not talking about like, other sovereign countries – especially like, neighbors and allies – and making, you know, what would essentially be forcibly taking them over in any way.
NDB: He’s also talking about taking over Gaza.
CB: Yeah, well, and that’s the most – it’s like, all those other ones, it’s like, people are trying to laugh off, or they’re just like, oh, that’s Trump being Trump or what have you, but now he’s talking about like, ethnically cleansing Gaza and saying the plan is to remove all the Palestinians from there and then make it the Riviera of the Middle East or something like that. And then when people have asked him if Palestinians would be able to come back, like, he doesn’t seem to be saying “yes,” which if that’s true or if that’s attempted to be implemented, you know, becomes essentially the definition of “cleansing” an ethnic group from a geographical area.
So sort of to bring some of that to a close, that last section we did, that’s part of the reason why some of the stuff like the Philippines and the intense debates that took place internally about US imperialism and whether acting in that way was contrary to the stated ideals of the country and how the country sometimes despite those stated ideals still does things that are completely contrary to that, that’s why that’s relevant again today because it’s a matter of how far that’s gonna go in our current time period, and a lot of that’s coming up again with this current Mars retrograde in Cancer. And we’re gonna have to see how things play out also during the course of the Pluto return as well during Aquarius over the next couple decades.
So related to that, the Panama Canal Treaty was actually signed during a previous Mars retrograde in Cancer, right?
NDB: I didn’t have the date up.
CB: This is a pop quiz, Nick. I’m gonna be quizzing you from now on.
NDB: I wasn’t expecting to be quizzed on the date.
CB: So September 7th, 1977, the Panama Canal —
NDB: Oh, that one! Yeah, I’m sorry. Okay.
CB: You’re like, “Oh, that Panama Canal!”
NDB: I thought – no, I thought you were talking about like, at the beginning. No, no, of course when they handed it back. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking. My apologies.
CB: Yeah. So the treaty has called for the gradual transfer of control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama, signed September 7th, 1977, and this was during right after Mars went into Cancer on September 1st, 1977, and started building up to the Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo back then. And that’s actually interesting, because that’s the 47 year repetition of right now, right?
NDB: Yeah. So that was when Jimmy Carter agreed to give the Panama Canal back to Panama; that’s what was being signed on that day.
CB: Got it. Okay.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So that’s being activated again, so that’s partially why that’s in the news again now due to the Mars retrograde repeating from back when that treaty was originally signed and now it’s being revisited. Yeah, so that’s all I wanted to say about that; we’ll see how that goes, just to close out that section, not just with Panama but with all of these other places.
So moving onto some other miscellaneous stuff, one of the things that people have been seeing in the news a lot over the past few weeks and asking about is like, what is up with all these aviation accidents where there’s been just like, tons of plane accidents suddenly over the past few weeks. One of the earliest and most notable ones was that plane that crashed as it was landing over the Potomac near Washington, DC, and a lot of people died and it also was carrying some US figure skaters from the US figure skating team. And this immediately invoked a previous crash which occurred in 1961 during the same Mars retrograde in Cancer period and also overlap with the Venus retrograde in Aries when there was a major plane crash where the entire US figure skating team was flying to Europe on its way to a major match, and it crashed and it completely wiped out the entire US figure skating team, which was this huge tragedy and disaster that happened back then.
So one of the things that’s happening is we’re seeing an individual repetition of that with the Venus and the Mars retrograde in Cancer, but what’s interesting is I went through and I checked other – I used an AI, Google’s AI, and was asking it like, where there other periods – other years – in which there were a lot of major aviation disasters. And what was interesting is one of the years that it returned, it returned two sets of years over the past eight decades since like, the 1930s. One of them was 1946, it said was a high… An aviation year where there were a lot of crashes, and 1946 of course is one of our Mars retrograde in Cancer periods. And then the other one that it gave me was 1978, which it said was an unusually high number of aviation accidents that year, and that was also a Mars retrograde in Cancer year. So there’s something about this Mars retrograde in Cancer that may be relevant for some of the crashes that have been going on over the past few weeks.
NDB: Yeah. ‘78 was, of course, 32 years after ‘46, so you know, they’re coming – it’s Venus and Mars together in those two years. But yeah, there certainly is a lot this year, but yeah, it’s kind of mind-boggling. Some of it is, you know, probably due to some cuts that are being made lately in certain departments, but then some of it is not accountable to any kind of specific policy or what have you. It’s just it seems to be happening a lot.
CB: Yeah. Well, that is one of the things that’s being cut as just like, an axe is being taken to the federal government is, you know, they fired a bunch of people involved with the FAA, with the Federal Aviation Administration, and that includes things like air traffic controllers. So that’s certainly not helping. But that’s part of like, this general across the board cuts to like, so many different agencies were it’s like, Mars in Cancer retrograde is just like, very literally like taking an axe to so many of these agencies and just cutting and firing people very willy-nilly or like, what’s a better word for that? Like, very —
NDB: Randomly.
CB: Yeah. Like very… I had a word —
NDB: Piecemeal?
CB: No, it’s not piecemeal, but it’s like, it’s not well thought out. Because for example, one of the ones is they fired a bunch of people from the Department of Energy, but they didn’t realize that a bunch of those like, 300 people that were fired or something like that worked on nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons controls, so all of a sudden they had to backtrack and ask many of those people to come back to work because they suddenly realized that they had in their rush to just fire people somewhat indiscriminately – I think that’s the term I was looking for – they were firing people that were playing necessary roles in the government to help like, protect certain things. So again, it’s that the Mars in Cancer, it’s like somebody running around with like, an axe just randomly cutting down trees. But it’s like the government and government agencies, and also sometimes people that are playing protective roles – like, especially protective and overseeing roles in government agencies, including like, financial agencies. Like, the one that was closed down that was literally its entire purpose was to protect people who had been the victims of like, financial crimes and things like that, and now that’s just gotten completely axed. So there’s something broader about it’s not just like, as our friend Alan might say, like the destruction of the so-called “nanny state,” but it’s more than that. It’s like, legitimate protective agencies are being cut and eliminated to some extent as well. And there’s something that’s gonna have probably not good long term implications in terms of that or ramifications.
NDB: Yeah. It stands to reason. I’m reminded – didn’t Elon Musk also fire everyone at Twitter when he bought it? Like, didn’t this also – and then he had to rehire some people at Twitter because he had fired people who were too important or too central to how it runs? I seem to —
CB: Yeah, it’s like —
NDB: — this all seems like an echo to me. I mean, obviously the federal government is not Twitter, but it’s just, I’m sensing a playbook being followed here.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it’s absolutely his playbook. And that was the Mars retrograde in Gemini, wasn’t it?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Back in 2022. Yeah. I mean, they’re using his playbook and he’s the one running the agency – DOGE – which is going in and instituting a lot of these cuts. But it’s like, I was there for Twitter, and the problem with that with Twitter and cutting and just getting rid of tons of people in the interest of cost-saving is now, I mean, one – the website, in removing all restrictions and other things, is much more blatantly like, racist than it ever was prior to that time. But two, like, the website is much jankier and like, doesn’t work as well just functionally because he cut it down to a bare minimum crew of what it takes to run it. And it can continue to coast most of the time just based on the stability of the platform that he had inherited from the founders who had run it successfully for like, a decade. But it doesn’t work as well as it did before, and like, videos commonly don’t load and pages crash and stuff like that. So it’s like, it becomes a glitchier form of what existed prior to that time. And unfortunately, I think that’s also what’s gonna happen with many of these government agencies, especially if you’re cutting people out indiscriminately instead of in a more deliberate or thought out manner of some sort. You’re necessarily going to then end up having negative repercussions because you’re gonna accidentally remove things that you didn’t realize were necessary, like, you know, people that are running the nuclear arms portions of the country.
NDB: Yeah, it might be important.
CB: Yeah. We covered that. The Super Bowl performance – this is something I’m probably gonna end up talking more on the forecast, but I thought it was notable because this Super Bowl performance that just occurred with Kendrick Lamar, who has a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Cancer in the 10th house, and it was like, this major Super Bowl performance. But one of the things I wanted to mention about that is that it was the most highly watched Super Bowl performance since 1993 when Michael Jackson performed. And that, of course, is a perfect repetition of both the Mars retrograde in Cancer but also the Venus retrograde in Aries. So I thought that was incredibly stunning that Kendrick dethroned the previous like, most-watched Super Bowl performance that was back to 1993 the last time that Mars was retrograde in Cancer and Venus was retrograde in Aries. And Michael Jackson himself, when he did that performance – prior to that time, this Super Bowl was largely like, marching bands and stuff like that in the 1980s and before that. And —
NDB: Right.
CB: — when Michael Jackson did that as like, you know, the biggest popstar at the time, that set a new standard for what the Super Bowl halftime was supposed to be like and what we’ve grown accustomed to at this point in terms of usually like, a major musician or popstar headlining the Super Bowl at that point. So it set a new like, foundation for that.
NDB: Yeah. Good point. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what I wanted to say about that, though, is then I thought the Super Bowl performance was incredible, and you know, it was something that was more incredible if you had followed, because one of the things that he did is the main song that he performed, of course, was “Not Like Us,” which was his rap battle diss against Drake from the rap battle that took place last year in the late spring and early summer.
NDB: I noticed he was dressed in a Canadian tuxedo; that didn’t escape anybody, I don’t think.
CB: Right. Yeah. That was supposed to – it was a possible like, additional reference or diss to Drake, who is from Toronto. So you know, that was interesting as a Mars retrograde thing, though, especially in his 10th house, just because he was performing his biggest hit that he just won a bunch of Grammys for. He won five Grammys for it just a few weeks earlier before the Super Bowl. It was like, a diss track, which is such a Mars thing to have that be the central focal point or the most popular song. And I thought that was an amazing manifestation of his own Mercury-Mars conjunction in the 10th house in Cancer, his Mars in Cancer. I had already talked about the previous dispute that came up in September about, you know, people representing different places and the dispute about whether he should have performed, since he’s from LA, versus like, Lil Wayne who is from New Orleans to represent that city. But even Drake’s entire – or Kendrick’s – entire thing was partially about representing LA and representing where he was from with Compton versus Drake representing like, Toronto and Canada. And even though Kendrick only performed… There’s like a lot of stuff there; I don’t know how much to go into. But there’s a lot of other stuff in terms of like…
NDB: Are you trying to say like, in terms of like, a fealty, a loyalty to the home, you know, place? Like, that sort of that Cancerian attachment to an idea of home? The hometown? That kind of thing? Is that where you were going, or?
CB: There was a major element of that, but one of the things I think that people overlook now because he only performed the first half of the song, which is, you know, usually seen as the most devastating part where he’s like, accusing Drake of really bad things. But the second part of the seong, he actually says something that arguably is almost as bad, which is he accused Drake of being like, a colonizer and appropriating Black culture and different regional cultures inappropriately. So like, there’s these other Mars in Cancer and Cancerian elements; even the name of the song itself and the entire thesis of Drake’s – of “Not Like Us” – is that hes accusing Drake – Kendrick is accusing Drake – of being like a tourist, basically, and taking advantage of or appropriating different regional Black culture elements in rap with himself not fully being in some way. So there’s these interesting like, subtexts of, you know, location, where you’re from, and like, culture and race and everything else that go into that that’s connected with all of that. On top of that, even though for people that followed that entire beef, or people that like rap music, for example, it was largely received as a pretty amazing performance. There was some controversy after where some people were attacking it for different reasons, but – which I think brings up some of the things that we’ve been talking about, because I personally felt like there was an element of that that brought some of the old, you know, ghosts in American culture from past Mars retrograde in Cancer in US history where it’s just like, if you have a Black performer who’s presenting rap music, and he’s the first solo Black performer presenting that at the Super Bowl in history, then there’s gonna be people that automatically reject it simply on like, racist grounds, essentially. And while that wasn’t the only reason and there were legitimate criticisms that people had or reasons why people didn’t like it, including just like, if somebody isn’t familiar with the rap beef, maybe it’s not as interesting, or if they’re not into rap music, it’s not as interesting. But there were some elements of that that I felt like was relevant as a moment in American history, especially because he tried to make it, I felt, like, as subversive as he could within the limits of what he could do with that large of a stage at the Super Bowl, which is to say that he actually couldn’t make it probably as subversive as he could have gone, and yet he still slipped in things that felt somewhat subversive and referencing things from the past and America’s history, including the thing about he made a line at one point to the 40 acres and a mule thing from the Civil War era where there were promises made about what would happen after the Civil War after the slaves were freed that were not fulfilled and that fell apart during the Reconstruction era. And it was interesting seeing him use that big of a stage to call back to some of those previous events in American history.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Does that make sense?
NDB: Absolutely. Yeah. Cancer – yeah, the Moon is also memory, you know? If you have Cancer friends, you know they’ll never forget if you hurt their feelings or something like that. But yeah. The Moon is memory. So there’s a natural sort of, you know, association with Cancer with having that kind of, you know, sometimes it’s nostalgia or a darker a version of it. But whatever the case – or something like this, yeah. You know, calling back to roots. Calling back to the past is, you know, to my mind, lunar.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it also is a retrograde thing. It referred back to that era we were talking about immediately after the Civil War during the early Reconstruction era where there was this brief period of time where the people in favor of civil rights were trying to push through different things, and they were able to pass the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment. But then there was a failure, and part of that was because of the weird circumstances where, for example, Lincoln in order to be reelected, he picked a Southern, more conservative Democrat running mate, which in that – yeah. Which is hard to… So he picked a more conservative or southern running mate. But then by a weird twist of history, then, as a result of that, when Lincoln was assassinated, it made it so that there was a Congress that was trying to push for civil rights and for the rights of Black people. But then his vice president who became president then was stalling some of that and was hampering some of it and conflicting with Congress. And then it led to more problems in terms of the Reconstruction era where very quickly after like, a decade, it seems like things started to shift, and many of those potentials didn’t end up being fulfilled as much as they could have, which then put in place systemic issues especially in the South, but in the US in general that took another century to work out and attempt to fix or bring to some resolution.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, indeed, it did… Where things went wrong in 1876, there was a very close presidential election. And the deal was done in the backroom. Rutherford Hayes, the Republican, was gonna be allowed to be president, but in exchange, they had to roll back, you know, all the Reconstruction laws and what have you that had been in place for the past decade. So it was like, a decade where it had some life and then it was extinguished.
Andrew Johnson, who became president when Lincoln was killed, yeah, he was the only Southern Democrat who had been against secession. And yeah, Lincoln was desperate to win the ‘64 election; he thought he was gonna lose. There was definitely a point where he was convinced he was gonna lose. And —
CB: This is in the middle of the Civil War.
NDB: This is. Literally like, you know, the election of course is in November. In September, Sherman is burning down Atlanta, which is not, like, the most successful way to campaign for presidency. So yeah, having a Southerner on his ticket was, you know, he saw it as being vital in order to just win the election and keep fighting the war. Had he lost the election, he probably would have been arrested and executed, you know? So the stakes were very high.
CB: Yeah. So this is something you were explaining to me when I was like, remarking at what a – in retrospect – like, dumb move it was for Lincoln to pick somebody who is so antagonistic against the agenda that he and his Congress were trying to get through during the Civil War and during the Reconstruction after of giving Black people civil rights. And that picking that vice president seemed like such a mistake in retrospect, but you were pointing out to me that he basically had to because he had the potential of losing that election, in which case everything would have been lost, so that was a compromise he had to put into place in the middle of the Civil War to try to keep things together.
NDB: That’s exactly right, yeah. He really didn’t think he was gonna win, and he needed – I mean, it’s interesting. You know, these days it’s almost like, it’s understood that you have that kind of strategy that, you know, if a Northerner is running for president, you get a Southerner on the ticket as a VP; that was Lyndon Johnson to Kennedy, or you know, so on and so forth. But yeah. You know, Lincoln would have been in big trouble. I mean, you know, we know that Trump —
CB: To a certain extent. But actually, it’s much different, because in the 1800s, that was what I was surprised about – that it was more common for a presidential candidate to pick somebody from the opposing party to be his VP, whereas today you would never see that. Even if they do try to do like, different regional things, it’s always gonna be from the same party.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, the parties – it’s only like, really recently, like the last maybe 40 years, like since Reagan or so that, you know, Republicans are conservative and Democrats are liberal. Because you used to have liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. It used to be less sort of defined and Manichaean and black and white like that. That’s interestingly a fairly recent development that it’s that, like, the way it is today where it would just be unthinkable to, you know, for parties to cooperate in any way. It used to be a lot more normal.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So anyway, I just wanted to say I thought it was striking that, you know, Kendrick referred back to something from the Reconstruction era about… Could you explain what the 40 acres and a mule thing? It was partially, it was like a —
NDB: Yeah. It was just a promise of, you know, you’ll get a little land and a beast of burden to help you build a life was the idea. I know Spike Lee, his production company is called 40 Acres and a Mule; it’s kind of like a punchline in the African American community now. But yeah, that was, you know, at one point what was proffered as a recompense for generations of slavery.
CB: Right. And just like, the promise or the potential of being able to truly have a fresh start as like, citizens and being given the proper resources that would be necessary to build a community out of nothing, having no inheritance of like, generational wealth which every other free American or most other free Americans or like, let’s say slave owners, for example, had up to that point. But then what happens instead is that the Reconstruction era largely ends up being a failure. There’s the rise – like I said during that Mars retrograde of like, groups like the KKK who are actively burning and like, lynching people, as well as governments actively attempting to disenfranchise Black voters or surpress things or eventually doing segregation and different things like that and creating different classes in society and everything else that then took more than a century to work out of.
So one of the reasons I’m bringing all of this up and going back to all this is that there’s something incredibly important to me and like, inspiring about Kendrick giving that performance – like, one of the biggest performance in American culture that can take place, which is performing at the Super Bowl, during this Mars retrograde in Cancer and what a moment that is. And regardless of whatever like, weak, kind of lame criticisms there were surrounding it, what a moment that is just in the context of the broader series of American history, especially through the Mars in Cancer periods that seems like a triumph to me. And what’s interesting about that is the Michael Jackson one – one full 32 year cycle earlier – also was that. But it wasn’t seen as much of that, even though on paper, like, Michael Jackson was actually like, a Black man who was the biggest popstar in the world, in America, but was also a Black man. But because he wasn’t presenting as much of a Black man as like, Kendrick, it’s probably wasn’t remarked or it didn’t receive as much, you know, because he wasn’t doing rap music, for example. He was doing pop singles. It didn’t receive the same kind of like, pushback that it could have received; and yet, that was also something of a, you know, a notable point in terms of American history as well, even though it wouldn’t have been seen as such because of how he presented and because of the changes in the pigmentation of his skin color later in his life.
NDB: Yeah, that, and also – I mean, Michael really didn’t do political material. I mean, he did things like, you know, everyone’s gotta – you know, “it doesn’t matter if you’re black and white” – I suppose that’s political, but not like, making references to 40 acres and a mule. You know, Michael would not have been that militant.
CB: Well, he didn’t about like, Black history things, but that was actually one of the funny criticisms I did see when I was researching that performance is one of the criticisms he did receive for that performance is that he focused on his like, “heal the world” theme, which he had released like, an album not long before that. He was playing some hits from that where there was like, a children’s choir singing “Heal the World.” And one of the things is that people were arguing that it detracted from him putting the focus on that, which is arguably a little bit more political in that it’s attempting to do something more political or have a positive, uplifting message or what have you. But he did that instead of playing some of his like, greatest hits —
NDB: Right.
CB: — I thought that was a really interesting parallel, because that was actually one of the things that came up with Kendrick is that he didn’t play some of his like, greatest hits. And some of the criticisms of Kendrick, even from within the Black community – like, Charlamagne tried to argue that he should have focused and played more of his hits than he did. But he didn’t; he focused on more of his newer music as well as two of the diss tracks with Drake. So I thought that was an interesting parallelism there with Michael.
NDB: Yeah, no, that is a good point. I’d forgotten; I hadn’t seen the Michael show since the 20th century. Yeah. I mean, what I meant by “political” is, you know, making these direct references to slavery and Reconstruction. It’s very different – I mean, yeah. Having children sing “Heal the World” is definitely a political statement. So to that effect, I retract what I said.
CB: Okay. Yeah. Different types of politics, but yeah.
NDB: Fair enough. Yeah. Touche.
CB: All right. So I think that’s all I wanted to say about that. I just thought there was some interesting connections there that really tied in with everything, so I wanted to give that a moment. Other things happening right now in the news – Saturday Night Live just did the anniversary special like, last weekend. Its 50th anniversary – it was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and it did this like, extended special with a bunch of skits where it brought back a bunch of people from like, actors and comedians and other stars who had been on Saturday Night Live over the past 50 years as this like, looking back and this celebration and bringing old stars and reconnecting them with new ones. It was very Venus retrograde-y. But one of the things that was really interesting about it that happened is they did a performance of one of Sinead O’Connor’s songs, and it was referencing back to this very famous incident that occurred in the Mars retrograde in 1992 —
NDB: Two.
CB: — yeah, with Sinead O’Conner where she famously did a performance on SNL and then at the end of it, she held up a picture of the pope, and she ripped it up and said something about like, fighting the real enemy. And at the time, she said this was like, a protest against child abuse in the Catholic Church, but this was before the reality of that abuse was like, wildly known and publicized and accepted as it is today. So she received just like, a huge amount of criticism and pushback and even SNL itself banned her from the show and mocked and parodied her on the very next Saturday Night Live like, a week later. So it was this huge like, Mars retrograde debacle for her in that early part of her career before she would later be justified. And there was something very striking about seeing them —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — finally, like, many years later – 32 years later – during another subsequent Mars and Venus retrograde, you know, honoring her and doing a callback to that by having it was Miley Cyrus like, gave a performance of her song.
NDB: Right. Yeah. The thing about Sinead tearing up that picture was there had been a really big scandal in Ireland with regard to, you know, child abuse by priests. And the pope, you know, did know about it and all that stuff. So what we later all became a lot more aware of was already sort of in Ireland a really hot issue as it was. But this was pre-internet, so you wouldn’t necessarily have known. Your average Saturday Night Live viewer wouldn’t necessarily know the latest news happening in Ireland with regard to priests and children. So when she did it, it just it seemed out of context to enough people that it was easy for them to mock it. But yeah. You know, within a decade, everyone was like, “Oh, that’s what Sinead was talking about.” You know, it all made a lot more sense later on.
Yeah, and then just shortly after that Saturday Night Live performance, there was this big sort of Bob Dylan celebration concert where a lot of different artists performed at Madison Square Garden, performed Bob Dylan songs. And Sinead was on the bill; she was supposed to sing a Bob Dylan song. But she went up to the audience – this is like, within two weeks of the Saturday Night Live thing – and some people in the audience started booing her. And the booing got louder and louder, and she just sort of stood there. And then she broke into an acapella version of a Bob Marley song called “War.” It’s a song where the lyrics are based on a speech given by Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia. When Italy had invaded Ethiopia, he gave this amazing, one of the great speeches of the 20th century about war and imperialism. And Bob Marley took that speech and used the speech’s lyrics for this song “War.” And that’s the song that Sinead sang. Different songwriter named Bob, but it’s a songwriter named Bob, and she sang the song words – very, very powerful moment. And then Kris Kristopherson, a natal Cancer Sun with Mars in Cancer, came out and escorted Sinead offstage, like, sort of comforted her and said, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” It was a powerful moment. And yeah, you know, it just sort of capped everything that had happened with the Saturday Night Live thing. If anything, it was even more of a shock, because there she was being booed by this… I mean, this was a Bob Dylan audience, you know. Bob Dylan himself had been booed more than a few times in his career, so it was kind of also ironic, her getting booed in a concert celebrating an artist who had once been brave enough to be booed. But anyway, I’m digressing.
CB: What was the date on that? Do you remember?
NDB: It’s October of ‘92. It was probably like, mid-October?
CB: Okay. So this is all Mars in Cancer then.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. The Saturday Night Live tearing up the Pope was October 3rd, ‘92, and I can go to my Bob Dylan or Sinead O’Connor file to find out when that concert was.
CB: This was the date for the ripping up the Pope, and this is Mars at 11 degrees of Cancer, and yeah it was getting ready to station retrograde later at 27 Cancer. So this one was entirely in Cancer.
NDB: Yeah. And the concert was October 16th, so yeah. Like 11 days after the Saturday Night Live thing.
CB: It’s interesting that this like, Mars is at 11 Cancer here when she ripped up the page and then – the picture – and Mars is at 11 Cancer, and it’s opposing, it’s applying to an opposition with Uranus at 14 degrees of Capricorn. And like, what she did – and also like, the Sun is squaring it at 10 degrees of Libra, but – what she did was like, shocking. Like, a lot of people were shocked and like, outraged about it, partially as you said because they didn’t understand the context. But that’s a good reminder that a lot of these different Mars retrograde periods and the events that happen under them are experienced differently in some instances or modified in different ways depending on what planets Mars is aspecting at the time that it’s stationing and going retrograde.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: With Saturday Night Live, you actually noticed that Saturday Night Live was actually founded on one of the Mars retrogrades, right?
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, in October of 1975, Mars was just getting ready to go retrograde in early Cancer. Mars was actually at 28 Gemini at the taping of the very first episode, but that was the first episode of the first season, and so most of that first season of Saturday Night Live was taped with Mars in Cancer and most of it Mars retrograde in Cancer to Gemini. But yeah.
CB: Nice. Maybe that’s partially why that there was like, some connection between that creation – the creation close to that Mars retrograde – and then one of the most famous events in SNL history being that Sinead O’Connor performance.
NDB: Yeah. It easily is one of the most famous. And yeah, it’s funny that they’re having the celebration now and just everything’s full circle.
CB: Right. Yeah. It brings up a lot of keywords when I was seeing that, because it’s Mars retrograde and Venus retrograde, but it’s like, when I was seeing them do that special and bring back so many people from the past history of the show, there was these keywords that were coming up like looking back to the past, reflecting, reuniting, reminiscing, reliving good times from the past – in some instances —
NDB: It’s all very Cancerian.
CB: Well, it’s Cancerian, but also it’s in some ways it’s Venus retrograde where you’re going back into the past and you’re like, reliving good things. In some instances, with like, the Mars retrograde, you’re going back and reliving challenging things. I mean, the Sinead O’Connor thing was referring back to what was before at the time experienced as like, a negative event or a blemish in SNL history. Yeah. But those are also retrograde terms. When you talk about the past, that’s also like, a retrograde thing.
NDB: Indeed. The one other – you know, in ‘75 as we said, Mars went retrograde from Cancer to Gemini. Two years later, there was the Mars retrograde of ‘77 to ‘78 where it went from Leo to Cancer. And during that retrograde, Saturday Night Live had a couple not Sinead O’Connor level, but first Elvis Costello in December of ‘77 was a guest. And he started playing his current hit, and then he stopped after a few bars and told his band, “Let’s play another song,” and he played a brand new song that no one had ever heard, and that got him banned from Saturday Night Live. And the ban was later lifted and in fact later he did a spoof of that appearance with the Beastie Boys when they were guests on Saturday Night Live. But then shortly after that in February of ‘78 when Mars was retrograde in Cancer, Chevy Chase had been a cast member in the first season and then he left to make movies. In the second season, he came back as a host, and Bill Murray had replaced him on the show, and the two of them got into some fistfight backstage just before taping. And if you watch the episode, you can see that things were kind of… Yeah. Testy. So yeah, there is something about like, the Mars retrograde just even in the broader sense of Saturday Night Live where, of course, it’s a live show. You know, part of the appeal of the show is that something can go wrong and often does. So events like that, you know, really unplanned events – things that become very notorious – until Sinead O’Connor tore up the picture of the pope, Elvis Costello changing songs in the middle of his musical piece was the big scandal of Saturday Night Live up until that point, or one of them anyway. So yeah, it all follows with that.
CB: Nice.
NDB: Disruptions.
CB: Right. One last one I noticed that I wanted to mention as well is Saturday Night Live ended its entire tribute special with a callback to a famous Chris Farley sketch that he did in 1993 under this Venus and Mars retrograde where he did this like, mock interview with Paul McCartney from the Beatles. And at one point towards the end of the interview, it’s like, a joke, but he asks him about this line from a song in Abbey Road where it says, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” And what was so striking is that the end of this entire tribute special, they had Paul McCartney give a performance to cap it off, and then he played that song that referred back to that line from that Chris Farley sketch. And what was crazy about it is that the original Chris Farley episode on February 13th, 1993, when Venus was at nine degrees of Aries and Mars was retrograde stationing direct in Cancer. And the tribute special aired on February 16th, 2025, when Venus was at seven degrees of Aries getting ready to go retrograde just like it did in ‘93, and Mars was slowing down and getting ready to station direct in Cancer. So it was like, this perfect like, callback and echo that was coming up with both planets hitting those retrograde points.
NDB: Beautiful. I’ll just interject quickly that 32 years before Paul McCartney was on Saturday Night Live, in 1961 when Mars was coming out of the retrograde in Cancer and Venus was going retrograde in Aries, this is when the Beatles first started playing as a four piece. They had been in Hamburg; they had a fifth member – Stu Sutcliffe, who was the bass player, but he stayed in Germany because he started dating a girl there – and so the four piece Beatles with Paul McCartney on bass. So Paul McCartney being the bass player in the Beatles, the Beatles being a four piece band, et cetera, et cetera – that all dates back to 32 years before he was on Saturday Night Live.
CB: Wow. That’s incredible. All right. Let’s run through some random miscellaneous ones that we wanted to make sure we mentioned but didn’t have —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — spaces for previously. One of the major ones you found was the Mars retrograde in Cancer when the World Bank was formed in the 1945-1946 retrograde, right?
NDB: Yeah. The actual – what’s it called?
CB: The Bretton Woods Agreement? Is that what you’re talking about?
NDB: Thank you. Bretton Woods, yeah. The Bretton Woods Agreement was signed in June of ‘44, and that was what created the World Bank. But the World Bank was actually established when representatives from 28 nations signed and created the World Bank December 27th, 1945. So yeah, right in that same window as United Nations and everyone else. Yeah. The World Bank is right in there.
CB: Got it. Okay. And what’s the significance of the World Bank? I guess it created a new international economic order, and it also one of the goals was to promote trade and stability.
NDB: Trade, stability. I mean, it’s also, you know, it was something of a Cold War appeal to weaker nations to come on the side of the West rather than go with those nasty Soviets. So there was an element of that, of fighting a sort of soft power war, you know, in the Cold War struggle for the hearts and minds of less rich nations. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. And maybe that’s connected partially also in some ways to the other financial things that we’ve seen show up in the US and its history with this Mars retrograde in Cancer to whatever extent maybe like, the US exercised power, control partially through the World Bank with its involvement there or something.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it was – yeah. The idea of like, hey, the world’s gonna, you know – hey, small country that doesn’t have a lot of money! The World Bank’s gonna help you build that airport that you need to get your economy going. And you know, these kinds of things. Yeah. You know, it was just kind of the American version of the same thing China’s tried to do in Africa where they build highways for African countries as a sort of PR thing.
CB: Right, of exercises of like, soft power or something like that.
NDB: Sure. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Another one I know you wanted to touch on that you found was the Scottsboro Boys.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: What year was that?
NDB: That was 1931, March of 1931. I wanted to bring it up earlier when we were talking about racism, but it just, you know, we were doing the stream of consciousness thing and it slipped by us. This is a very famous event in American history and certainly with regards to the history of race relations in the US. There were a group of young boys, like teenage boys – Black boys – on a train in the South. I wanna say Alabama, but I could be wrong, but I could bring up the chart so I can give you the proper details. But basically there was a rape acusation, and it became a very big court case.
CB: There was a false rape accustation?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it was a preposterously fake one, but it was the kind of thing that happened, yeah. And yeah, it was a major, major event of the ‘30s. Pretty much any piece of African American literature that I’ve read from that decade will make plenty of references to it, or even just anyone writing about that era. It’s a very – yeah. It was probably the biggest case of its kind for that decade.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So I didn’t know a lot about it; I was trying to research it, but the summary that I came up with was that it was like, a wrongful not just accusation but then they were immediately imprisoned and put on trial with just like, a sham trial, basically. And it exposed like, the pervasive racism and prejudice and especially lack of due process that African Americans faced in the South at the time.
So the trial though was highly charged, and there was this atmosphere of racial prejudice, and the defendants were provided with inadequate legal representation so that it turned into this entire like, miscarriage of justice that played out over the course of many years. Because like, they kept getting like, tried and then retried it seemed like, and then eventually imprisoned. And just watching the entire sequence of it unfold was pretty like, horrifying, basically – like, learning about this. But then eventually later on, like many, many years later in 1976, the Alabama governor George Wallace pardoned Clarence Norris who was the last surviving defendant who still had an outstanding conviction at the time. And I thought it was striking because this happened later in the same year as a Mars retrograde in Cancer in ‘76. And it was such a like, landmark case and it was so notorious that it was actually part of the inspiration for Harper Lee’s book To Kill A Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 just before Mars went retrograde in Cancer like that fall when basically —
NDB: Right.
CB: — To Kill A Mockingbird became really popular. And Cancer is Harper Lee’s 10th house and Midheaven. So she drew on this case partially as part of the inspiration for To Kill A Mockingbird, which became a famous book about basically a similar scenario which is like, a Black man being arrested on false charges of sexual assault and then the potential for racism and prejudice to like, influcence the legal system in a negative way.
NDB: Yeah. Fantastic book. Great movie as well. Gregory Peck, as I recall. Yeah. Very powerful work. Harper Lee was from Alabama, so you know, it’s the kind of story that she would have literally grown up with. And yeah, I mean, there you go. It’s one of the great books of that era.
CB: So one of the things it did is that there was a landmark Supreme Court decision surrounding it that then influenced subsequent law in the United States. And this ended up like, establishing an important legal precedent regarding the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial. So it’s one of those instances of something negative and terrible happening, but then sometimes it’s setting as a result of that an important precedent later on that helps it so that something similar wouldn’t happen to other people. Like, future generations are spared the injustice that an earlier generation or group of people experienced under a Mars retrograde earlier. But also it became this like, rallying cry for the Civil Rights Movement that inspired a lot of activism and raised a lot of awareness after that point as well.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I know I’ve heard Angela Davis talk about it. I know I’ve read Malcolm X talk about it. I know – yeah. I mean, you know, it permeates the discourse. It was such a fundamental event that was so just naked and obvious, and yeah, the injustice carried on forever. I mean, you know, give me a break; the one living kid gets pardoned in 1976? By George Wallace, who, you know, 13 years earlier was trying to block the integration of Alabama schools by standing in the doorway and preventing people from going in? Yeah. The whole thing was – it’s just terrible. Which is – yeah, I wish I’d thought of it earlier when we were talking about the subject; it just slipped my mind in the moment.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s a good one to include.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So they were represented by an inexperienced and unprepared local attorneys who like, hardly defended them, and then the trials were rushed. The defences were inadequate, and then the juries were composed entirely of white men, which just reflected the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from jury service in the South at that time. So major one just in terms of Mars retrograde ones and that theme sometimes of —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — injustices taking place, but then Mars… You know, Mars does sometimes like, goad people into action as a result of like, anger and outrage. And sometimes that anger and outrage can provoke or can spur movements that lead to social change.
NDB: Indeed.
CB: All right. So let’s see, moving on. I mentioned like, one case, but just to reiterate, there was like, a huge of amount of post World War Two racism that like, Black GIs experienced upon returning to World War Two. And that was, again, one of those examples of… In the army, you know, different Black men were able to rise up the ranks to a certain extent and enjoy freedoms and other things that they might not have experienced as much at home. But then all of a sudden, it’s like, they come home, and especially when going to the South, some of those freedoms and things were like, curtailed or actively suppressed. So there’s just this recurring theme sometimes of when progress has been made, sometimes it being repressed or pushed back sometimes during those periods.
Since we’re on this topic already of like, the history of racism in the United States and its connection with this Mars retrograde, I did wanna mention one of the most significant – I haven’t even mentioned actually one of the most significant ones in the entire history of US history that’s connected with this Mars retrograde, which is I found that the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in the Mars retrograde in the middle of the 1800s. And this was a huge book that helped to act as like, an expose about the horrors of slavery, which ended up helping to like, raise awareness about it, eventually leading to more pressure for the Civil War eventually to take place and to the eventual abolition of slavery like, a decade or two later.
NDB: Yeah. 15 years later. The book came out in 1850, so yeah. Close enough. I know that when Harriet Beecher Stowe met Lincoln at the White House – I think it was in 1864 – he said – somewhere I’ve got the chart for it, but – Abraham Lincoln said to her, “Oh, you’re the little lady who wrote the little big that started this little war” or something to that effect. He basically accused her of starting the Civil War, although he said it in that sort of amiable, folksy, Abraham Lincoln way. So he probably didn’t mean offense, but yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah. So this was the Mars retrograde which occurred from August 30th, 1851, through June 11th of 1852. And what was striking about this as I was researching it more is originally, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized where she was writing it as a series of short, like, pieces that appeared in a abolitionist newspaper from June 5th of 1851 until April 1st of 1852, which really closely like, maps this entire Mars retrograde period. But what happened is it became wildly popular during the course of the entire span of the Mars retrograde period, and originally it was only intended as a shorter narrative that was gonna run for a few weeks. But then it had this huge popularity because it became instantly popular and so she expanded the story significantly. So much so that like, people would protest if she missed an issue or an installment of it, basically. So there’s like, this energy behind it that’s building up for the entire Mars retrograde period, and then towards the end of the Mars retrograde period, she publishes it as this like, as a book basically, which just immediately becomes this massive bestseller that sold over 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States alone – which in the middle of the 1800s is absolutely unprecedented for a book at that time to sell that many copies. So it was wildly popular, and then it fueled, it added this like, fire under the abolitionist movement to push for the outlawing of slavery basically, which then as you said would eventually partially help to contribute to and culminate. Because like, that had already been brewing for years as we’ve talked about up to that point where the US kept, you know, putting these supposed compromises in place for years, for decades up to that point, to keep pushing the issue off and pushing the issue off to avoid the almost inevitable conflict that would eventually result. And you know, one of the things that’s actually interesting as a side note about that, aside from the racist portion of that, which is the overall major component of slavery, there was also in addition to that this financial component where the southern economy was largely based on slavery and the essentially free labor that that provided versus the northern economy that had removed that or wasn’t based on that at a certain point. And I think that’s also one of the reasons why the Mars retrogrades in Cancer were connected, because it may again go back to some of that financial history of the United States. And it may be connected to, again, the hypothetical Sibley birth chart of the United States where Cancer is the 8th house of that chart, and there’s a Cancer stellium of four planets in Cancer, including ruler of the Ascendant which is Jupiter in the 8th house, so the financial component that’s tied in with that entire complicated picture of slavery in the 1800s and US history.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you’re right. The book was, I mean, just an unparalleled success. The fact that she wrote it in a serial form and that it sort of extended itself with popularity was not uncommon in the 19th century. Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky, they all wrote books that were serialized and then later published as entire works. But it’s the level of success and popularity and the impact, obviously, of the book that makes this stand out.
CB: So one – couple last points about that – one, even though it fueled the abolitionist movement, there was also this huge pro-slavery backlash in the South where the book is just like, fiercely condemned. It’s often banned. And southern writers produced a flood of so-called “anti Tom” literature where they attempted to portray slavery in a more positive light and discredit Stowe’s account. So it wasn’t just this like, sudden like, you know, person publishes a book and all of a sudden, everybody realizes slavery is wrong. But instead there’s oftentimes this controversy, because you’ll get this opposing side that suddenly just as forcibly tries to argue the opposite case and tries to push back, even if their side is objectively morally wrong. And that’s part of what plays out during the Mars retrograde as well is this intense anger and controversy and debate and almost like, battle that takes place over a period of time.
NDB: Absolutely. I mean, when Lincoln runs for president in 1860, he’s not running on a campaign that he’s gonna, you know, end slavery. He’s about as radical as he says he doesn’t want any new slave states created; that’s his position. But voters in the South, by this point, you know, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been out for 10 years. Voters in the South are just thinking, you know, everyone in the North is Harriet Beecher Stowe. You know? Like, Lincoln is Harriet Beecher Stowe, and every – that’s what the North wants is to take away slaves. Destroy our economy. Et cetera, et cetera. So that is, like, so when they vote to secede, that’s kind of what’s going through their minds. You know, that was never Lincoln’s campaign. You know, not unlike this past election, Kamala Harris never said anything about trans people, yet somehow a lot of people thought they were voting against her on that basis. So sometimes these things happen with voters.
CB: Well, I mean, although another side of that, it’s like, there’s… With politicians, there’s some things that they will say or not say, I think, that are actually in their intentions. And despite whatever —
NDB: True.
CB: — public statements like, Lincoln had to make in order to get elected or to play politics in the middle of the 1800s, I think there’s parallels in modern times. Like when Obama first runs in2008, on paper, he’s officially like, “against gay marriage” because it’s seen as political suicide at that point that you would be unelectable if you opened at that point as being officially pro gay marriage. And then he at one point before his second – during his second election campaign in 2012, he, you know, “evolves” on the subject and then comes out as pro in favor of gay marriage and then is re-elect – because by that time, it’s more politically palpable to the country to adopt that position. He’s re-elected and then, of course, the Supreme Court effectively legalizes gay marriage in 2015 under the Venus retrograde in Leo that summer.
Sometimes when I hear about Lincoln, like, I see parallels of what was happening with Obama where I personally – obviously I don’t know what is in Obama’s heart, but I very much doubt that he was like, actually adamantly against gay marriage or didn’t believe in that prior to 2012, regardless of whatever public statements he felt were necessary to make in order to get elected in 2008 in order to serve the greater good of getting into office and then pushing for social change, rather than shooting himself in the foot and not getting elected and not being able to enact positive social change by not playing the political game of what you can say or not say when you’re running for office.
NDB: Sure. Absolutely politicians do that, and I kind of have that feeling about Obama’s position on gay marriage myself. In Lincoln’s case, I mean —
CB: We’ve had this argument before, so I don’t wanna go into the whole argument about —
NDB: Okay, but yeah, it just, you gotta do more reading. Anyway. Okay.
CB: Well, you, me, and Patrick have had this argument about Lincoln before and about what… Yeah. The questions of the evolution of his thoughts. But that’s why I wanted to like, frontrun that argument by just saying I don’t know. Like, we can have that as a separate thing, but I think the South – it’s not like the South seceded and like, that Lincoln didn’t have any feelings about abolition or something like that, or that that wasn’t already…
NDB: The reason he’s a candidate is because he was in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and he made – and he wasn’t running for president at that point; he was running for a Senate seat which he lost. But you know, everything he says in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, everything he says all down the line certainly, like, you know – it would have to be in the depths of his soul that he was always against slavery for it to be true, because anything —
CB: Everything Obama said prior to 2012 —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: You know, everything Obama said prior to 2012 is that you would have taken it if you just read it on the surface level that he was absolutely against gay marriage. I very much doubt that that was true in 2008 and that it just magically changed like, three years later.
NDB: Well, Obama was running for president. When Lincoln laid out his position in eight debates with Douglas, he was running for the Senate, and you know, he was really – I mean, he was an underdog. He didn’t have any dream of being president or having that kind of influence.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. I think —
CB: Don’t know.
NDB: — Frederick Douglass is probably the best sort of witness and voice about, you know, following Lincoln at the time and getting a sense of how Lincoln changed. Certainly by the time we get to 1865, Lincoln has grown and evolved. But that was, you know, what Douglas thought was that, you know, Lincoln gradually loosened up, but that he came from a far more narrow position earlier. I really don’t see any historians who contradict that.
CB: No, I mean, over a longer time, but we were initially talking about the initial point about the South seceding right when Lincoln is inaugurated basically. Like, Lincoln gets elected; South immediately secedes —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — in anticipation of the assumption that he’s gonna be an anti-slavery president.
NDB: Right. But he’s never said anything to that effect. He’s never said it. In fact, he’s —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — very explicitly said what he is against, which is just it being extended in other states. So I mean, yeah, maybe they do know what he’s really thinking. Maybe he really is, you know, fully against slavery in 1860, and maybe every southern voter knows it in their heart and that’s why they secede. But it’s all, you know, assumption on everyone’s part. We have no, you know… Yeah, you know, okay. Maybe deep down, Lincoln’s heart was pure all the time, but he didn’t say anything of that nature until the end. When he introduces the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s really – as much as anything, it’s a political move to make sure that Britain and France don’t – well, in particular, Britain – doesn’t come in on the side of the Confederates, because England by that point has a firm policy on being anti-slavery. And so as soon as Lincoln does make the war about slavery, and once we get to 1863 it is – or 1862 – it is about slavery at that point when he makes it about it. And then that means England can’t come in on the side of the Confederates like they were kind of toying the idea with – not unlike the way France came in on the side of the Rebels in the Revolutionary War after Saratoga, you know? So yeah, that was, you know, in terms of everything he said, it was pretty clear.
CB: I understand the political expediency and strategicness of like, outlawing slavery for those reasons and other things, but there had already been a several decade build-up —
NDB: Yeah. Oh yeah.
CB: — and tension going back to the very founding the country that the founders were not able to reconcile and basically created a conflict and left it unattended that would then eventually culminate in the Civil War. But it was like, building up for decades up to that point partially in Lincoln’s own party of the Republicans and the abolitionists within that party who were pushing for slavery for moral and, you know, idealistic reasons of like, giving human beings civil rights —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — so —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — I don’t wanna like, go —
NDB: That was what I meant. You know, what I was saying that there absolutely was a movement, but Lincoln was not the most radical voice of that movement by any stretch. He just he became famous through those debates and he became a good political, you know, a good candidate for the Republican party which was virtually brand new. It was only the second time they ran an election; they were formed in 1856. But yeah, but that sort of – what you’re saying underlines what I’m getting at is that really like, Harriet Beecher Stowe might have had a bigger effect on the secessionist movement of Lincoln’s election, you know, in reaction to Lincoln’s election than Lincoln’s actual campaign. I think if I had said it that way, you know, we would have been 20 minutes ago we could’ve —
CB: I mean, maybe, but it’s like, the South didn’t secede when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. They seceded the moment Lincoln was elected. So for whatever reason, they’re reacting to it – we can table that discussion. We can have a whole —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — podcast episode if people would like about —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — you and me debating Lincoln and Lincoln’s public versus private state. I mean, the broader thing as a side issue, I’ve come to appreciate lately over the past few years and especially in past year the pressures of what a person feels like they can say publicly versus what they feel like they actually think privately. And one of the things I’ve been reflecting on that recently, especially with some of the political changes lately, is how sometimes the tides – the political tides – shift quickly and all of a sudden, things that were okay or that were en vogue suddenly become not en vogue. And one of the things, you know, that I’ve talked about for several years now that I’ve been nervous about is astrology potentially becoming one of those things that’s like, en vogue and falls out of vogue. And one of the reasons I talk about this as much as I can and have been concerned about it is I’ve seen that happen in the other time periods. And one of them was in the middle of the 4th century, and you see it in the life of a single astrologer, which is Firmicus Maternus, who writes his big astrological texts – it’s one of the biggest surviving astrological texts besides Vettius Valens. He writes it in like, 227 or like, 230 CE, and this is like, right as the empire is converting to Christianity – the Roman Empire is converting to Christianity, and Constantine is starting to make it the official state religion. And within Firmicus’s lifetime, things change rapidly, and all of a sudden, Christianity becomes like,t he dominant religion and then starts outlawing other pagan religions as well as other pagan practices like divination, and astrology is one of those things. So it’s like, we see Firmicus at one point in like, the year 230 writing this big astrology text and being a big astrologer and being super knowledgeable about it. And then like, 20 years later, all of a sudden, Firmicus writes this other texts that’s attacking the pagan religions, but he’s mysteriously quiet about the subject of astrology and historians always debate, like, did he stop practicing astrology? Did he change his mind about it? Why doesn’t he mention it? You know, other things like that. And there’s just like, sometimes people say or do things when the political climate changes because they feel pressure —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — for different reasons that are hard to see if you’re just reading their public statements. But sometimes the things that a person doesn’t say can sometimes speak just as loud as the things a person does say. And you know, I felt that with the changing political climate. Of course, I’m blowing some of that out of the water today by just like, us talking as openly about all of this as we have today. And you know, we’ll see if we come to regret that later on, but —
NDB: Well, I mean, hopefully not. You know, I don’t think our takes are so hot, but yeah. You know, Evangeline Adams taken to court in New York City. Alan Leo taken to court in ENgland. You know, front page headlines in the middle of the first World War – zeppelins are bombing London and yet, Alan Leo’s astrology trial is on the front page of London newspapers in August of 1917. You know, I think of Alfred Vita, the German pioneer of cosmobiology, who he had a government job, and after Rudolf Hess did his attempted flight to Scotland to try and broker a peace with England, Hitler blamed it on Hess’s interest in astrology, which was kind of justified, at least to that extent. And he wound up, you know, coming down on astrologers. Alfred Vita was repeatedly grilled by the Gestapo, and eventually he was afraid for his family. He was caring – you know, he had his wife and kids, and he had some kind of government job with a pension. And he wound up taking his own life to make sure that he didn’t lose his pension and his family would survive. You know, there was Karl Ernst Krafft who, you know, was a gifted astrologer, but he was a Nazi sympathizer. At first he thought he could get in, you know, with the Nazis, but of course after the Hess thing, that all went south, and Krafft ended his life dying of dysentery on a boxcar on its way to a concentration camp. So yeah, there’s some heavy duty things that can happen to astrologers. And —
CB: Yeah. It’s like, we now know better. We see what it’s like sometimes when suddenly the political landscape of a entire country like, changes radically over a short period of time and like, how things can shift suddenly. It gives us more insight into how that’s been in different periods for astrologers when similar shifts in society and in like, history and culture have taken place.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So all right. To round out this section and bring it back to what we were talking about with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – I’m done with that part, but one of the things I discovered about the same Mars retrograde in Cancer that was occuring in 1852 is that during that Mars retrograde, Solomon Northup met Sameul Bass sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1852. And Solomon Northup was the famous person that the book and the subsequent more recent movie 12 Years a Slave was based off of. And he was a Black man from like, New York, from the North, basically, who was a free person who was captured and enslaved in the South for 12 years until what happened is he was like, working one day after this 12 year period, and there was this worker named Samuel Bass who came and worked on the same farm. And Sameul started expressing some abolitionist sentiments at one point during this Mars retrograde, basically, to Solomon, and then Solomon confided in him that he was actually somebody who was a free man who was captured and enslaved and imprisoned essentially falsely. And then Samuel agreed to help him and started writing letters to people he knew in the North, and eventually a shopkeeper from the North that knew Sameul from his previous life came down and helped to free him. And this happened – it initially started, the initial connection between Solomon and Samuel happened I believe during the Mars retrograde in Cancer in 1852. And I think that’s really striking, because that’s the same Mars retrograde in Cancer that where at the same time, Harriet Beecher Stowe is publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the same time. And then Solomon is freed, and then about three or four months later, he writes and publishes the book 12 Years a Slave the following year in 1853.
So I wanted to mention that; it’s just pretty incredible —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — in terms of just some of the most notable. And then that book, 12 Years a Slave, helped to confirm and like, bolster some of the claims that Harriet Beecher Stowe made in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to help counter some of the like, pro-slavery people that were trying to paint slavery in this like, rosy light.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right.
NDB: Incredible book. I read it a few years ago.
CB: 12 Years a Slave?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I’d only – I hadn’t watched the movie because it was such a heavy movie that I kept putting it off for years and I finally actually just watched it a few months ago, so that was why I was actually really struck when I saw that Mars retrograde as I was doing this research coinciding with it.
All right. Moving on. We mentioned the Compromise of 1850; I think we’ve now covered all of that sufficiently enough, but just the historical significance of the Compromise of 1850 occurring in a Mars retrograde prior to the Civil War is just incredible, because that was one of the last things, basically, that delayed the Civil War essentially and kicked the can down the road until it would take place like a decade later.
NDB: Yeah. And I’ve seen a few arguments that if the Compromise had not happened in 1850, the South could have seceded then, and there could have been either the Civil War but it wouldn’t have been as, you know, “easy” for the Union to win. I would argue it wasn’t easy for them, but they did have, you know, more troops, more weapons, et cetera, et cetera – hence why I once referred to the Confederates as an underdog – not out of sympathy – because they were a smaller army with less weapons. But yeah, you know, it’s… I forgot what my point was.
CB: Just that if the – that the Civil War could have taken place if the Compromise of 1850 didn’t happen.
NDB: Yeah. You know, either the South could have seceded without, you know, the resistance that the Union showed a decade later, or it could have gone to war, but the outcome wasn’t as guaranteed, so it could have been a very different situation. And it came close.
CB: One of the weird things that I found about this, the Missouri – the Compromise of 1850 – is there was this politician named Henry Clay who returned to the Senate in 1850 to help get this compromise through. And he’s known like, in the history books as the “Great Compromiser” because interestingly, he had played a major role in the previous crisis which is the Missouri Compromise of 1820. And the Compromise of 1820 was passed during a previous Mars retrograde in Cancer in March of 1820, and then this guy who was involved in that one returns like, 30 years later on a subsequent Mars retrograde in Cancer in order to help push through this other compromise to avoid a war, basically, or to eventually —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — in retrospect we can see postpone a war.
NDB: Yeah. He hadn’t been gone for 30 years, though. I mean, his retirement was reasonably short; I forget how long, but not that long. But he did come back to do that. It was sort of —
CB: Right.
NDB: — it was him, it was Daniel Webster, and yeah. You know, there was a sort of last minute deal by, you know, some of these grander old men of the Senate. And yeah, Clay himself had Mars retrograde in Pisces – sorry, in Libra, rather – and Venus close to retrograde in Aries – in Gemini. I keep saying the signs wrong. Obviously it’s getting stretched out.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Well, what’s crazy is like, that was towards – and then did this, and that was one of the last major things that he did, and then he promptly died like, two years later. So this was like, towards the end of his life as one of the last great major things.
NDB: Yeah. And I think Daniel Webster died even sooner after that. I think Daniel Webster died within months. Daniel Webster died, yeah, October 24th, 1852. So he died even sooner than Clay. It’s like, they put it together, and they died is how that went.
CB: So and what the Compromise of 1850 did is it allowed California to enter and become a state as a free state that did not have slavery. It organized the territories of New Mexico and Utah without restrictions on slavery. It settled a boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico. It abolished the slave trade but not slavery itself in the District of Columbia, but it also created a stronger Fugitive Slave Act that made it easier for slaveholders to reclaim slaves that had escaped from bondage in the South. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that’s part of the like, “compromise.”
NDB: Yeah. That’s what got Mr. Northup in trouble. You know, that clause – the Fugitive Slave thing. Because now you had these “slave catchers” going up to places like Boston to find ostensibly escaped slaves, you know, someone else’s property as it were.
There are a number of things in 1851 —
CB: Well, claiming they were escaped slaves —
NDB: Yes, exactly.
CB: — but then like, stealing their identity.
NDB: Exactly. There was another sort of – it was really kind of a riot. Some slave catchers went up to Pennsylvania, I think from Maryland or Virginia or somewhere, to catch some slaves that had run away. And the people in this Pennsylvania town sort of fought back and stopped them, and it became this big, you know, riot and there was a court case over it and all this stuff. Because yeah, sometimes people in these northern towns didn’t want these southerners coming up to reclaim their slaves or abduct innocent people or whatever it was that they were doing. So yeah, that became this whole other issue – the Fugitive Slave thing.
CB: Okay. And it’s like, one of the things about these compromises and stuff is this is all playing out with these intense debates and battles over a period of months before it’s eventually concluded where like, I have some of the dates. Like, February 5th through 6th, Clay delivers an impassioned speech in the Senate defending the proposal and arguing for compromising and national unity. But then on March 4th, there’s this other guy named John Calhoun who’s a staunch defender of southern rights and slavery, and he delivers his last major speech where he opposes the compromise, and he argues that it doesn’t adequately protect southern interests. And then they keep arguing, but then that guy dies – John Calhoun dies – on March 31st, 1850, and his death —
NDB: He’s the one, yeah.
CB: And his death removes a major obstacle to Compromise, because he was a really powerful opponent. So then that allows Clay and the others to push things through. So it’s like, again, there’s just these whole sequences of things that we’re just barely touching on sometimes pointing to it as a singular event. But usually it’s like, the unfolding of a sequence of events over a period of time.
NDB: Yeah. Calhoun had been, you know, threatening South Carolina’s secession when Andrew Jackson was president like, in the early 1830s. So you know, he knew where he stood all that time.
CB: Okay.
NDB: But yeah. Yeah —
CB: Speaking —
NDB: — I remember someone had just died just after giving a speech. Webster and Clay died the following year, but Calhoun, their opponent, died earlier, yeah.
CB: Okay. And speaking of —
NDB: And they were all three of them Venus retrograde guys. Sorry! I know you don’t wanna – anyway. Yeah?
CB: Speaking of Andrew Jackson, that actually brings us up to one of the other major ones that you found that was interesting that happened during his presidency, right?
NDB: Yeah. This was a surprise to me. The national —
CB: The national debt.
NDB: — debt. Yeah. In January of 1835, Congress declared that President Jackson had paid off the entire national debt, and it stayed paid off for two years, and it remains apparently the only two years in American history where the US has been debt-free, go figure. So that just, since we’re talking about a lot of different financial, you know, crashes and World Banks and all these things, I just, you know, it seemed like an interesting thing to mention. You know, it was —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — a surprise to me.
CB: Yeah. That is really striking. Although there’s a whole like, story surrounding like, how that was accomplished as well as like, how successful that was afterwards where one of the things is like, he was opposed to the Second Bank of the United States, and he closed it down because he saw having a national bank as unconstitutional and as a tool for the wealthy. But he was deeply focused on like, fiscal conservatism and eliminating the national debt.
One of the things that was the focus at that time, it was tariff revenue where the primary source of revenue at the time was tariffs. But also one of the things that they were doing was land sales at the same time – sales of public land. So I think some of that’s important, because that’s actually some of these things are like, coming up again where sales of public land are one of the things that are currently being discussed by Trump, but also Trump admires – we’ve talked about in the last episode, the Venus retrograde one, how Trump admires and he keeps mentioning William McKinley because he associates like, tariffs with William McKinley. But he also admires and I think now has like, a bust of Andrew Jackson, who was like, a populist president in the Oval Office, I think.
NDB: Yeah, and Jackson was kind of the Trump of his day in the sense that, yeah. You know, his followers were all the anti-establishment people. Andrew Jackson voters were people who wanted him to, you know, drain the swamp, et cetera, et cetera. There was a lot of that similar kind of posturing.
And yeah, his inauguration party is legend, right? Andrew Jackson is elected; he’s inaugurated, and he has a big party at the White House. Everyone’s invited. And it’s just this like, crazy, bacchanalian orgy of liquor and mayhem and what have you. Good times.
CB: Right. So he eliminates the national debt, but and there’s like, a celebration about this, but then it’s a short-lived success because it was super short-lived. Because just two years later in 1837, the United States experiences this major economic depression, which is the Panic of 1837. And ironically, the actions taken to eliminate the debt would then contribute to the next financial crisis which occurred. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — sometimes —
NDB: And closing the bank, I think, also did.
CB: Right. Exactly. So sometimes, you know, for his thing, attempts to like, eliminate debt and cut things out as a attempt at fiscal conservatism can sometimes have unintended like, side effects.
NDB: Yeah. They don’t elect economists to be president, which is kind of… Maybe counterintuitive.
CB: Right. We could have like, a very boring like, economist or like, accountant president someday.
NDB: Someone who gets it. Someone who knows how it’s done and what the mistakes are and not to make them.
CB: That would be nice. Since we’re on the topic of Andrew Jackson, I did notice that during the Mars retrograde in 1835, there was this famous assassination attempt on Andrew Jackson’s life, and this was actually the first attempted assassination of a sitting US president where there was this unemployed painter who attempted to shoot Andrew Jackson. And he actually, he shot and then the gun like, mysteriously didn’t work or like, jammed or something. But the guy, the assassin, anticipated this, so he brought two pistols, and he pulls out a second pistol and attempts to shoot Andrew Jackson. And then the second pistol just like, miraculously fails, and then Andrew Jackson famously like, starts beating the guy —
NDB: Beats him with a cane.
CB: — with his cane. Right.
NDB: Jackson – yeah. Now, that is the first, that happened within days of the debt being cleared, incidentally. Those two events happened very, very close together. So that is the first attempt on a life of a sitting president, but it’s not the first time Jackson’s been shot at or shot. He was very into dueling. I’ve got charts for a couple of his duels. One time I was listening to an audiobook about him – a biography – and it almost became a tone poem. The phrase “I demand satisfaction” just kept coming up over and over and over in this one chapter. Like, he just, he was like, yeah, totally gun crazy and loved getting into duels. It was something that was done in the day, of course, you know. Alexander Hamilton, et cetera, et cetera, but yeah. He was really into dueling. And I know he walked around with at least some like, bullet or gunshot or something in his body from a past duel from long before when he became president.
So yeah, by the time that guy tried to kill him, like, you know, Jackson had had more than a few guns pointed at him by that point.
CB: Okay. So here’s the chart for that. So the attempt on Jackson’s life was January 30th, 1835, and we see Mars is retrograde here at three degrees of Cancer. So yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: That was that Mars retrograde. There was one other I noticed in the 1970s like that. I mean, on the one hand though, like, that attempt – everyone marveled at just the miraculousness of that like both guns misfired. And like, they calculated the odds of that as being like, astronomically high because there was no visible reason that the guns should have like – that both guns – should have misfired like that. And it’s like, you know, sort of reminiscent of our current time period like last summer where there was that attempt which Trump seems to have like, turned his head at the last minute so that the bullet just like, whizzed by him and whizzed by his ear. So there’s like, I don’t know, reminiscent of that. And then I did notice Ford in 1975 during the Mars retrograde in Cancer in 1975, there were these two separate assassination attempts in California on the life of President Ford within a span of 17 days. So that was —
NDB: Both women! Both women shooters. Women are almost never shooters, right? I mean, you know, when it comes to mass shooters or presidential assassinations, it’s never women, and yet —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — two women who didn’t know each other, two women, totally different cities. Squeaky Fromme from the Manson family and then Sara Jane Moore, who I think was in Sacramento or something like that. So totally different, you know. It’s not a conspiracy. But it happened twice in one month – two women, which was quite rare. Squeaky Fromme’s gun wasn’t loaded, so that’s, I don’t know much about killing people, but I’m pretty sure if you wanna shoot someone, there’s gotta be bullets in the gun. And the other woman was, yeah, you know, stopped before she could do it.
CB: Okay. So that was during Mars was getting ready to go retrograde, it looks like. Let me see if I’m sharing the right one. Mars is getting ready to go retrograde in Cancer and Gemini, and Venus was retrograde in Leo at that time.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So yeah. Anyway. So that was striking. Moving on.
The Panic of 1819 – this was a Mars retrograde in Cancer, and it was the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States. Did I mention this?
NDB: No.
CB: No? Okay. Yeah. So this is one —
NDB: I mean, we’ve talked about it, but not here. Yeah.
CB: This is one I should have mentioned in the financial crisis section, because it was one of the ones that I really perked up my ears. Especially whenever you hear firsts during a retrograde sometimes that’s good to note, because a first can sometimes set a foundation for repetitions in the future.
So it was the first widespread and durable financial crisis in the United States, and it was followed by a general collapse of the American economy that persisted all the way through 1821 – so for like, two years. Wikipedia says,
“The Panic heralded the transition of the nation from its colonial commercial status with Europe towards an independent economy.” And they said that it marked the end of the “era of good feelings and ushered in a period of economic hardships and increased sectional tensions. While it didn’t last as long as some later depressions, it had a profound impact on the young nation.”
So that keyword’s important, because I kept seeing this keyword come up in the 1800s especially during these Mars retrograde periods, which is the word “sectionalism” or “sectional tensions.” Had you heard of that before?
NDB: Yeah. You know, like sect. Like in astrology, you have the lunar sect, and the solar sect. You know, you could say Venus and Mars are a sectional faction.
CB: Right. So I was looking for a definition; one of the ones I found is it said sectionalism in the context of US history refers to excessive loyalty or devotion to the interests of one’s own region or section of the country rather than to the nation as a whole.
NDB: Got you, okay.
CB: So it’s a form, in this context, usually in the 1800s it was a form of regionalism that becomes politically and socially divisive. So crucially it’s not just having regional differences; it’s when those differences become the primary source of identity and political loyalty, overshadowing national unity. So of course during the 1800s, this was often like, the North versus the South and like, the free states versus the slave states and stuff like that. But…
NDB: Sometimes it can be North and South Carolina arguing over who does barbecue better and things like that. I mean, it can be even more sort of localized than that. Or counties.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: You know. West Tennessee and East Tennessee arguing. You know, it can, yeah. I know what you’re – now that you mention it, I mean, that was – this is what the Civil War changed. Well, or it helped change, was centralizing the country, you know? Making it the United States of America. But yeah. That definitely is what the – I mean, even, you know, even during the Revolutionary period, the colonies that got together to fight that war weren’t necessarily friendly. You know, New Jersey and Pennsylvania got into a little war with each other, and everyone had their own interests. And of course, the Virginians thought there were too many Bostonians, and the Bostonians think there’s too many Virginians and so on and so forth, so. Yeah. I mean, that’s always been there. I guess the country was more like that at the beginning and still quite like that in the 19th century, and maybe there’s still – there is still some of it in the country now, but nothing like it was, you know, in those days I think.
CB: Right. Yeah. So you know, it was much more distinct as a regional thing in the 1800s. But it also more broadly sets up like, an us-versus-them mentality, and I think that’s one of the things that’s become more relevant today where, yeah, favors this us-versus-them mentality and the strong identification not just with different regions but also different like, political beliefs or approaches or like, parties, for example. And sometimes it threatens national unity by taking it to an extreme in terms of stuff, and I think that’s one of the ways that it’s like, manifesting now in modern times in different ways.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Oh yeah, so just that Panic of 1819 and just the fact that it was the first financial crisis again makes me nervous —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — in terms of this year being a repetition of previous years like that, especially 1929. So we’ll see how that goes.
And the last thing is I noticed one last Mars retrograde in Cancer – during one of the Mars retrogrades in Cancer in the middle of the 1800s, they funded – the Louisiana Purchase took place. But then at the same time, they funded the Lewis and Clark expedition, and then several of the early months of the actual Lewis and Clark expedition happened during a Mars retrograde in Cancer at that time. So I thought that was striking, because there was this broader thing about not just the country being expanded in terms of that purchase of a large amount of land from, you know, another country, from France, but also the exploration of that and the process of like, westward expansion. In the Lewis and Clark expedition, I wasn’t seeing a lot – I was trying to understand the significance of that, but the only thing that came up is they did have first encounters with a number of Native American tribes. And so that may have been part of the foundation, then, for of course then subsequent retrogrades where you have different things that happened in terms of taking lands from different Native American groups and evicting them from those lands and different things like that.
NDB: Yeah, but Lewis and Clark weren’t doing that. They were just exploring. Jefferson had just bought, he had just made the Louisiana Purchase in April of 1803, and so then he got Lewis and Clark to go see what we just bought. You know, go out west and see what this new part of America is, because the French had owned it and had been out there, but no – to my knowledge – no English-speaking person had. Or, you know, if they had, we don’t know much about it.
CB: Right. I wasn’t saying that they were doing that; I was just saying it was the first contact —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — then between this group of explorers that was funded by the US government with different Native American tribes and therefore even though some of those interactions were positives – some were actually not positive. There was one tribe —
NDB: No, it’s true.
CB: — that it was actually a very tense encounter. But then that in some ways became the foreshadowing of so much negative things that would come later on in terms of the place of Native Americans in like, US history.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. That brings me to last – that’s actually the last thing. The only thing we skipped over was actually that the Nuremberg trials as well as the parallel trials with Japan were happening during the Mars retrograde in 1945 and 1946. They didn’t conclude, but most of the arguments by the prosecution took place and concluded —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — including showing very close to a pivotal period in the Mars retrograde like, some of the things documentaries of the Holocaust and what had taken place were being presented at these trials. And it was shocking to everyone.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, keep in mind, I mean, we’ve all seen footage from concentration camps at this point, but in October of ‘45, this is fairly fresh, you know, film material. I know Eisenhower when he liberated one of the camps, he insisted that it all be filmed, because he said if we don’t film this, no one’s ever gonna believe it happened. There’s still people who think it didn’t happen.
CB: Right. Like Holocaust denialists.
NDB: Yeah. The trial ultimately lasted a year – the German one – and it was in October of ‘46 a full year after it started that the prisoners were hanged, of course, except for Goring who had a cyanide pill tucked away and he took care of himself the night before because he didn’t wanna, you know, lower himself to being hanged by the enemy.
CB: Right. Yeah. So it wasn’t concluded until a year later, but the trial began on November 20th, 1945, which is 13 days before Mars stations retrograde in Leo, and then it would retrograde back into Cancer. So there was something about that about reviewing a war and wartime atrocities that had taken place, including what happened in the concentration camps, that I thought was relevant about that Mars retrograde period in 1945 and 1946 and something striking about that in terms of the legacy of that.
NDB: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right, my friend. Were there any major Mars retrograde in Cancer things that you researched that you found that we forgot to mention here?
NDB: Oof. I mean, I’m sure there are. Especially once we decided to just sort of focus on American history, because I was going all over the place. I guess the one thing I’ll just mention in passing – you remember years ago, before we knew the truth, you and I disagreed on what Hillary Clinton’s time of birth might be. And my main argument – I guess I thought she was Gemini or Cancer rising – was I took three events from her life. In 1960, she’s just turning 13, and she’s still a Republican at that point, and the Nixon-Kennedy election happens. She lives in Chicago. And she is somehow privy to she learns about how the Democrats in Chicago are stuffing ballots or, you know, cheating in the election, and she becomes very disillusioned by that. 15 years later, October 11th, 1975, the same day that Saturday Night Live broadcasts for the first time, she married Bill Clinton as Mars is about to go retrograde in Cancer. And then 17 years after that, it’s November of ‘92, and he’s being elected president; she’s becoming First Lady. And it was because of those three events happening when Mars was in Cancer that I thought, well, that must be close to her Ascendant because it keeps timing her life that way.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And you ended up being right about that because of that brilliant use of Mars retrograde. Because at the time, there was basically two what looked like more reliable times. There was one time that was like, eight PM, which gave either late Gemini rising or early Cancer rising, and there was an eight AM time that gave Scorpio rising. Right? Am I —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — stating this correctly?
NDB: That’s correct. Yeah.
CB: Scorpio rising. Okay. Scorpio rising —
NDB: Because she’s a Scorpio Sun, yeah.
CB: — with Mars in Leo in the 10th house. And that’s what I thought it was, partially because of what I was told by this older astrologer who convinced me that Hillary was like, giving out the opposite of what the correct time was, and I like, believed that. But it turned out not to be true, and then later, the birth certificate was released and it turned out that it was Gemini rising. And you were right, and part of the reason you were right is because you were picking up on this important Mars retrograde period in Cancer and Gemini that was so crucial because it was going through her rising sign.
NDB: Yeah. It was the only reason! It was really, you know, it wasn’t a reason; it was the only reason I made that call. It just seemed like too strong a pattern, you know, to ignore. So yeah. That was it. I wasn’t trying to like, take a lap on that; it was just, you know, since we’re talking about Mars retrograde in Cancer, it occurs to me, hey, you know. That was what served me well.
The cycle of Mars is really useful for that very reason because retrogrades and conjunctions to the Sun occur so infrequently, moreso in some signs than others, but even in the ones that they do somewhat frequently, if it’s only every 15 to 17 years, it really gives you these small windows in time to look at that… You know, you can just, you can look at someone’s entire life and pull out little periods that you know are gonna be important because there’s that Mars retrograde going over their Ascendant for the, you know, first time in their life or one of two or three times in their life, and it’s a really reliable method for that. And using it in alongside the Venus cycle, because they do different things. The Venus sort of sets this regular eight-year rhythm that you can follow, and then Mars is just sort of dropping in in these seemingly random spots, you know, over the course of the decade. So yeah, if you know how to use those two planets and their cycles, there’s so much you can do in terms of shorthand or they’re very handy with rectification for sure.
CB: Yeah. That’s a really great point. I will always assist you in taking a victory lap —
NDB: Thank you.
CB: — on your past successes and predictive prowesses, especially when it comes to these planetary periods which you’ve been using and exploring for longer than anybody I know. And you know, that takes us back – I think this is where we start giving some of our concluding remarks for this episode. And you know, part of the reason I wanted to do this, I’ve once again, you know, put off doing the big 5th house episode because I wanted to take the opportunity since Mars is stationing direct in Cancer and because I could see so many current events that were coinciding with that transit that could be identified somewhat independently, I wanted to take the time because we saw last month in the Venus retrograde episode how much that all you have to do when you see that there’s a major astronomical event taking place and you can see it correlating with current news events that are significant, that all you have to do is take that back based on the planetary periods to the last times that that same astronomical event occurred, and you’ll start seeing how contemporary events are a repetition or an echo of previous astronomical alignments where similar events will have happened in the past. I wanted to sit down this month and do that with this specific Mars retrograde and just this part of it – the Cancer side of it – and see what we found. And I’m really glad that we did, because I think this helped to expand the work, especially not just on planetary periods, but especially this idea of the Babylonian goal year periods and these long term planetary cycles which for Mars are like, 47 years and 79 years. And by applying that to American history, we can really see how that’s played out over the long span of like, three and 400 years, I think we’ve been able to make some great headway and progress in terms of research into those planetary cycles by doing that work this month. So I’m really glad that we did it, and I feel like we found quite a bit, so thanks for doing this with —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — me today and helping me with this research process.
NDB: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure. I love doing it. And it’s really, it’s the right sign. Like, you could only do this to this level with the Mars retrogrades in Cancer, Leo, and Virgo, because the others are so infrequent. Yeah, we wouldn’t be able to do as much detail. We could do some very interesting things with the more rare Mars retrogrades – Aquarius being the absolute rarest. But in terms of —
CB: So how rare is Aquarius?
NDB: It’s every 32 to 47 years.
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: I was gonna say earlier when we had Elon up, Elon was born just before Mars went retrograde in Aquarius in 1971. And then it didn’t go retrograde in Aquarius again until 2018, which was the summer that he first tweeted about something about… Yeah, yeah, Tesla and stock prices. And then smoked weed on Joe Rogan. So it was sort of this big, you know, he was more public showing at the time, I guess.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So you know, this is still a new area of research, a new field of research, especially with these Babylonian goal periods over very long spans of time. But I’m really excited about how much progress we’ve made over the past year now ever since, you know, you were the one that got me on this track originally back, like I said, in December of 2023 when I was late up at night researching the year ahead forecast for 2024. And then I was trying to understand the Mars retrograde that was gonna take place in Cancer and Leo starting in the second half of 2024, and the implications of that for the election, and then you were like, well, you know that’s a 79 year repetition of Mars that happens every 79 years. And then I suddenly for the first time – I had always heard of the Babylonian goal year periods, but I had never looked up what the years actually were or what it meant astronomically. And then I looked it up and realized what a close repetition that is for Mars every 79 years. I realized that Trump was born under this same one. I realized that, like, the 14th Amendment was passed under one. And then I realized that the US Constitution was created under one. And all of a sudden, it all fell into place, and you can see my shock and, you know, to be honest, somewhat discouragement in having that realization in the year ahead forecast when I mentioned this at that time, as well as my like, trepidation surrounding what the implications of that seemed like what they were, which I expressed to whatever limited extent I felt comfortable at the time.
But yeah, we’ve done so much great research then since that time, and I think there’s still so much more to do. Because we have now covered Venus through one cycle – Venus in Aries – and we’ve covered Mars retrograde in Cancer. But you know, we touched a little bit on Mars retrogrades in Leo, but we didn’t do all of the Mars retrogrades in Leo, which is the other side of this, for example, is something that we left out. So we got like, some of those – the ones with Cancer – but there’s also some Mars retrogrades in Virgo and Leo that we left out, right?
NDB: Yeah. There’s ones that just happened in Leo, and there’s ones that happened going from Virgo to Leo. And they also occur every 15 to 17 years. Leo is absolutely the most common sign for Mars retrogrades, and Aquarius the least. So that’s the axis —
CB: Okay.
NDB: And signs closest to Leo are more common; signs closest to Aquarius are less common.
CB: Okay. And that’s gonna become relevant, because we have this retrograde, which is in Leo and Cancer, which has just happened and is happening this year. But in two years’ time, there’s gonna be another Mars retrograde in Leo and Virgo just two years from now around like, 2027, right?
NDB: That’s right. And it’s the same, it’s the 32 year return of the Mars retrograde going from Virgo to Leo that was happening in early 1995 when I read my first astrology book ever.
CB: Nice. I love that. Maybe that will be the culmination then of your planetary period career somehow at that time.
NDB: Well, who knows! Hopefully it goes on longer than that. But I wanna thank you, because I’m in the opposite boat. I had never heard of goal years! I knew —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — I was doing something kind of quasi-Babylonian. I was, you know, I told myself, you know, I jokingly called myself a neo-Babylonian astrologer, and I felt like, okay, you know, I know these planetary periods are used in Hellenistic astrology as a timing lord, but then I started looking at the transits and seeing similar things that you’ve been finding. And so I just, yeah, I was like, oh yeah, this must be what the Babylonians did! But I didn’t know they were called “goal years” or that they specified this or that period. So yeah, I’ve also in starting to collaborate with you on this material, I’ve also actually learned what it is I’m doing! What it is I —
CB: Right.
NDB: — sort of found instinctively, you know, 20 years ago.
CB: Right! Yeah. I mean, this is literally one of the earliest astrological techniques and like, timing techniques would have been these planetary periods. And the Babylonians 3,000 years at least, if not earlier, you know, possibly 4,000 years ago actually when it comes to Venus and some of the Venus retrograde cycles as Demetra and I discussed in the Inanna episode – they discovered that the planets would recur in these periods. Like Mars in 15 years or 47 years or 79 years. And the Mesopotamian scholars are aware of these periods surviving, and they can see that they were used in order to do astronomical and mechanical things. Like, for example, the Antikythera Mechanism integrated and used these planetary periods, and that’s how it was able to calculate the positions of the planets so accurately because these periods are built into it and they’re so precise. So Mesopotamian and historians of like, ancient astronomy know that the ancient Babylonians used these periods for astronomical reasons. But what we’re discovering here right now for the first time is that these periods are incredibly potent for astrological reasons as well because they mark the repetition of not just planetary cycles, but with those planetary cycles and their repetitions, we also see the repetition of events on earth as well at the same time in human history. But it’s only through studying human history through these long spans of time in this painstaking way that we’ve done it here in this episode and the recent ones that you can truly see the full implications of that.
NDB: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. And I mean, the one advantage we have that the Babylonians didn’t is, of course, computer technology – the fact that we can, you know, yeah. We can do things on a much more sophisticated level, although I’m sure the Antikythera Mechanism was great in its day and I’d love to have a crack at it myself sometime. But yeah. You know, we have this technology that allows us to just work on a greater volume of material than I think would have been possible without it. Do it faster. Do more. So on and so forth. So yeah, with —
CB: Absolutely. And you know, the Babylonian and I should say Mesopotamian astrologers, they discovered these periods, but one of the things they did is they had the Astronomical Diaries where they went out every night and they recorded what they saw in the sky and where the planets were. But one of the interesting things about the Astronomical Diaries is it did include some information about political events that occurred at the time or sometimes they would note the price of things in the market. So they would track the prices of things and they would also note the height of the Euphrates River. So they were tracking things like that. And even though these are subtle and occasionally mentioned in the Astronomical Diaries, the Astronomical Diaries were actually the longest running scientific program in history because they were started like, somewhere around 800 BCE, and they ran all the way until around like, 100 BCE or even later. So for at least like, 700 years they were tracking not just the positions of the planets, but they were occasionally tracking things that were happening in the world at the same time that were correlating with some of those events. And I truly believe that the Mesopotamians then would have seen how some of these planetary periods were coinciding with repetitions of events and echoes in history, so therefore they had these very powerful techniques in ancient astrology, which we’re only just now rediscovering here in modern times.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So —
NDB: Yeah, I remember, you know, coming back from England and showing Schmidt all this stuff I found with the Venus retrograde and Charlie Chaplin and Hitler – the stuff we did in that last episode. And he was just giggling and like, I don’t know what to do with this! It was, you know, that was a fun moment hitting him with this. And then, yeah, I just dug in and kept studying it over and over, year after year, and it keeps on delivering. It keeps on giving.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So you know, so planetary periods, the repetition of history and events and themes and echoes and repetitions, that’s what we’re getting to. It’s very exciting. Like, we’re making amazing progress. I think we’re doing like, really important work, because it’s like, we did this, we did the Venus retrograde one. We did the eclipses thing a year ago. Yeah, I’m excited —
NDB: Then Uranus and Pluto.
CB: Uranus and – oh yeah! We did – you’re right. We did the Pluto in Aquarius episode, which is a huge one, and we did the Uranus repetitions —
NDB: Gemini.
CB: — as well. We just like, keep doing this approach where this is truly like the empirical study of astrology where we’re looking at what events correlated and coincided in time with certain planetary alignments, and you know, doing our best to be clear about what things coincided at that time within the time spans after defining those timespans clearly. And this shows that astrology is not just this, you know, woo-woo, like, symbolic system that is completely subjective and that people are, you know, creating their own systems of that’s not objectively occurring in reality. But instead, it’s showing that astrology and the correlation between celestial movements and earthly events is something that’s happening constantly throughout history sort of regardless of humans being aware of it or paying attention. That these planetary periods are recurring in history, and you know, humans often – because it’s like, common knowledge that history – like, people have that colloquial saying that like history repeats or that history echoes or different things like that. But what most normal people don’t know is when that’s happening, usually there’s some planetary period or repetition in the background that is timing it, essentially.
NDB: Yeah. I always say, you know, I think there’s a whole section of people in the world who think astrology is nonsense – and I don’t hold that against people, because if you don’t know anything about astrology, if you have any sense, you would think it’s nonsense, you know? But there are – I mean, it’s unfortunate, because I think astrology is a calendar system that you use to study history the way we do. You don’t really need to believe anything other than, you know, the ephemeris has been done accurately, has been calculated accurately. But if you just sort of look at this calendar and look at history and see how they correspond, you know, man – I hope that’s our imagination doing it, you know? But I don’t think so. It’s just too overwhelming. There’s too much stuff. You know, we can keep doing episodes like this just, you know, over and over and finding new stuff and finding new angles. And yeah, you know, it’s not coming from our imaginations. It’s just coming from analysis and repetition. And it’s gonna keep delivering the way it has.
CB: Absolutely. And the identify of current themes that are happening under a current astrologically significant astronomical moment like a retrograde in a certain sign of the zodiac, and identifying some of the contemporary news stories and themes that are connected with that on some basic level. But then going back in history and looking at what happened the previous times that same astronomical event happened, there’s this reciprocal thing where you learn about, you start to understand what’s happening now better by seeing what the repetitions were in the past. And that’s one of my hopes for this in addition to this being a research episode where we’re trying to push the boundaries of learning about these long term planetary periods is I hope it’s helped to give some perspective on the current place in history that we’re in at this present point in time, because obviously we’re all aware at this point that we’re at some sort of crucial moment and like, turning point in history where things are changing very rapidly and moving very quickly. We’re suddenly in one of those like, famous like, you know, “hope you live in interesting time” type moments, curse moments, unfortunately. But yeah. I hope this has helped to give people some perspective about where we’re at as well as what some of the potentials are in the future, both good and bad.
One of the things about doing this episode just like the Venus episode is we’re recording this now three or four days before Mars stations direct in Cancer, but there’s still going to be a bunch of news stories that are gonna come after today that, you know, some of which may have already happened as we’ve been recording this for the past like, six hours today. There’s gonna be other stories that emerge over the next couple of months between now and June that are connected with this Mars retrograde still, and we’re gonna collect some of those if there’s some interesting correlations that emerge after this time while the Mars retrograde is still unfolding and wrapping up. But I’m hoping that other people will help us with that just like they have with the Venus retrograde episode where what I’d like people to do is if you notice either a correlation that we overlooked or missed of Mars retrograde in Cancer in the past that coincided with a major event or if you notice other contemporary stories where themes that we mentioned in this episode as being past correlations start happening now in modern news and headlines and events, then let us know by posting a comment in the YouTube comments under this video on YouTube. That’s really the best place – Nick is pointing downwards right now, that’s good. So post it in the YouTube comments because that’s the best place where we can all as a community, as a group of researchers and astrologers, pull our research by posting in the comments there as the best place. That way other people can see what observations have already been noted, and people won’t – sometimes when people email me, it ends up like, doubling up or repeating the same stories. But if we all post them on YouTube below this video, then we’ll be able to have some sort of like, collection of that to build over the next few months. And then perhaps at some point we’ll do like, a followup episode, both talking about other historical repetitions maybe that we missed if other people notice some and want to like, gently or respectfully like, let us know if they noticed a cool historical one, or both also contemporary ones that emerge over the next few months.
NDB: Yeah. And that next Mars retrograde we were talking about, the one that goes from Virgo to Leo in late ‘26, that also coincides very closely with a Venus retrograde in Scorpio just like it did when I read my first astrology book back in ‘95. So we’ll be ready to do an episode of Venus retrograde in Scorpio by then, and also the Mars retrograde, so. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I think that would be a good time to do possibly the Leo retrograde one in the future, if not a Virgo retrograde one, once we have that next retrograde. Yeah. So I’m gonna release – thanks everyone for all the patrons who support this research, because it basically – when you sign up through my page on Patreon, it allows me to like, put aside time to do all of this research. We had about 60, 70 pages of notes that we wrote over the past few weeks in preparation for this episode and doing all this historical research. I’m gonna release a PDF of the show notes that contain a lot of the research we did, which includes a lot of what we covered but also some bonus material as a bonus for patrons of The Astrology Podcast. So if you’d like to get access to those notes, or if you’d like to support our work in doing this, then sign up through my page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast in order to get access to that stuff, and it’ll help us encourage us to do future episodes.
You know, you can also – to help, you could get a consultation with Nick. Nick applies these methods within consultations, which is a great way to like, personalize some of this stuff. You actually use these planetary periods in your consultations, right?
NDB: Oh yeah. I have been for years and years. And yeah, and thanks to the Venus retrograde in Aries episode, you know, some of your viewers have booked readings with me to talk about how Venus retrograde in Aries has operated in their life, and you know, the feedback’s been wonderful just in the last week or two since we’ve been doing that. So yeah. This is a cornerstone of what I do in chart consultations. And planetary synodic cycles work very well with solar returns and annual profections, which I’d be very happy to explain to people who book me, so yeah.
CB: Excellent. All right, what’s your —
NDB: Nick Dagan Best – yeah, NickDaganBestAstrologer.com.
CB: Awesome. Cool. I’ll put a link to that on the description page on the podcast website for this episode or below this video on YouTube so people can check out your website and your consultations.
I think that’s it for this episode. Thanks a lot for doing this with me, Nick. This was incredible. We did another long research episode, but I’m so happy and stoked with the research that came out of this, and I hope it, you know, echoes on and creates a new foundation for other astrologers doing this type of work in the future for, you know, future times to come.
NDB: Thank you for having, Chris! The timing is perfect; in five minutes, I have to wake up my kid to take her to school, so like, we couldn’t have done it better.
CB: All right! Excellent. Timing is everything. Thank you for staying up all night with me to record this episode. Thanks everyone for watching this episode of The Astrology Podcast; I appreciate you. Have a good time, and yeah, I’ll see you again next time.
[END CREDITS]
If you’re a fan of the podcast and you’d like to find a way to help support my research, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to subscriber benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, the monthly electional astrology podcast, an exclusive podcast series called The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. For more information, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Special thanks to the patrons on my Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, and Berlynn West.
People often ask me if I’m available for consultations, but unfortunately I’m not right now because the podcast takes up so much of my time. However, I did create a consultations page on The Astrology Podcast website that has a list of astrologers that I recommend for astrological consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
Finally, shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening May 22nd through the 26th, 2025. Their in-person conference is sold out, but you can still register to get a virtual ticket where they’re gonna stream the conference simultaneously online in May, and you can register for that now through their website at NORWAC.net.