The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 480, titled:
March Astrology Forecast 2025
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on February 27, 2025
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released April 3rd, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m talking with astrologer Austin Coppock about the astrological forecast for March of 2025. Hey, Austin – welcome back.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
CB: Hey. We’ve got a big month of astrology ahead to talk about. As we talked about in our year ahead forecast, March is one of the most consequential and active and important years of 2025. So in the first half of this episode, we’re gonna catch up and talk about news and events that have occurred from an astrological standpoint since our last forecast a month ago, and then in the second half, we’ll jump into a deep dive of the astrology of March of 2025. Sound good?
AC: It does. It sounds like a plan. Sounds like an ordeal, a gauntlet.
CB: It’s gonna be a whole thing. We’re just gonna, you know, ride through it and see how it goes. I’m gonna do a quick overview of the astrology of the month ahead as sort of a preview of what we’ll talk about later in this episode. And for those of you that just wanna jump ahead to the forecast, you can use the timestamps to do so. But here’s the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the month. And then here we have the planetary aspects calendar that was designed by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co where they have some lovely graphics just like this one as well as personalized astrological almanacs. So this shows some of the major aspects that are happening this month and when they go exact and their sort of orbs of influence in terms of certain aspects rising and peaking at certain points and then declining later on.
Finally, here is the planetary alignments calendar for March. And the major astrological things that we’re gonna be talking about in this episode is that we open the month with Mars having recently stationed direct in Cancer and starting to move forward again. But then right away on the first of March, we have Venus slowing down and stationing retrograde in the sign of Aries.
After that, we have Mercury moving into the sign of Aries on March 3rd. Then the following week, we have a Mercury-Venus conjunction while Venus is retrograde on March 11th. Then a Sun-Saturn conjunction on the 12th of March, followed by the beginning of eclipse season which starts in earnest on the 14th of March with a lunar eclipse in the sign of Virgo, which is the first eclipse in that new series of eclipses taking place between Virgo and Pisces.
The following day after the eclipse, we got Mercury stationing retrograde for three weeks on March 15th. Then the following week, we have a Sun-Neptune cazimi on the 19th. The Sun moves into Aries on the 20th. Venus is cazimi and conjoins the Sun on the 22nd at the halfway point through the retrograde cycle. Then we get a Mercury cazimi on the 24th. Venus retrogrades back into Pisces and conjoins Neptune on the 27th. Then we get our second of two eclipses with a solar eclipse in Aries on the 29th. And then the very next day, Neptune moves into the sign of Aries on the 30th of March.
So it’s gonna be a crazy month, and we’ve got a lot of astrology to talk about. But yeah. But first, let’s transition to talking about the news and like, catching up. Hey Austin, it’s been quite a month since the last time we talked, yeah?
AC: Absolutely it has. Yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. You know, as we struggled with in the planning session, there’s literally too much to talk about just in the news, leaving out individual lives that don’t make the news.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So there’s way too much news to talk about. It’s been a huge month in terms of news, especially in terms of the US and what’s happening in the country, and frankly just a lot of terrible stories. So we’re gonna cover some of the highlights, mainly ones that we have something to say about astrologically or where we have a clear astrological connection. I did cover a lot of news and recent events in the Mars in Cancer episode – the Mars Retrograde in Cancer in US History episode that I just released today – I think, what, two days before I will have released this forecast in the future – so you can see more coverage of some of the current events in that episode if you’re looking for more analysis of current things and how it relates to the astrology, especially in terms of Mars retrograde.
So speaking of Mars retrograde, that kinds of opens up the main cluster of stories that have been going on this month, especially in terms of the United States where with Mars retrograde in Cancer, that is not only the Sun sign of the United States with the birth chart that most astrologers use for the birth of the United States with the Sibley chart that has the Sun in Cancer, but that chart also has a whole stellium of four planets in the sign of Cancer, making that a very important sign in the United States’ chart. And I think one of the most important aspects then that’s been happening this month, or alignments, has been the Mars retrograde in Cancer that has been just grinding over all of those placements this month until Mars slowed down and came to a stop or a station which represents like, an exclamation mark next to that Mars retrograde. And what’s been happening as one of our opening news stories is that the new Trump administration and Elon Musk have been just taking a metaphorical chainsaw to the government over the course of the past month and cutting through a bunch of different programs, firing a lot of different government workers, and in some instances just axing entire programs or departments entirely. And I think this is really, this has been striking because the most striking image of this over the past week has been this image of Elon Musk like, holding up a chainsaw at some conference. And I think that’s like, my primary image right now for what just happened over the past month with Mars stationing, because what’s funny about that is the symbol for Mars in ancient Egyptian astrological texts was a knife. And it’s always been associated with that cutting function or that hacking function, whereas Cancer is associated with the Moon and with things that are like, protective or nurturing in nature, which can sometimes represent like, things in the government that are supposed to like, either protect or take care of or in some instances like, withhold bad things from happening to people. And in this instance, the combination of those is just a lot of those programs just getting hacked apart in different ways.
Did you see that, like, that image of Elon holding the chainsaw?
AC: Yeah, it’s pretty on the nose. And it’s especially astro good, because Elon’s a Cancer rising. And so when planets visit the sign of the rising or the Ascendant, people very often enact those things. You know, as an interesting contrast to that, I myself am also a Cancer rising. And so, you know, as you said, it’s Mars visiting Cancer, which is this domain of – I have to say the parental, right? Because a parent both keeps the children from dangers that they might otherwise encounter, helps them when they get hurt, and then also like, feeds and support them, right? And that’s the nature of many of the programs that have been targeted. And so one thing Mars can do is burn those to the ground or slash them.
For me, it’s literally just been a crazy parenting grind. You know, I was like, oh, what’s this Mars in Cancer gonna be? You know, it’s Mars forever in my first house. And it’s just like, oh, okay, so your new full time job on top of your other jobs is just definitely parenting. There’s been – and it’s not that I became a parent this month, right? Lucian’s closer to a year than not. But one of the things the Mars in Cancer did was every time we were supposed to have someone come over and help, like, that fell through. So it just – the Mars labor of parenting just kept falling back to us. I was like, all right, that makes sense for Mars in Cancer. Like, what is the – if we’re looking at Mars retrograde in a potentially positive way – it’s like, what heroic labor are you called to?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Carry the baby for 45 minutes until he finally falls asleep.
CB: Yeah. There’s something about especially the end of a Mars retrograde where there’s just this exhaustion that you feel through this huge expenditure of energy and of concentrated having to have this like, output constantly that you really feel. And I always forget until the end of a Mars retrograde like, what that sort of sense of exhaustion is. But we’re definitely all in it now for different reasons.
But so back to the government programs, though; that was a good analogy that you were using of just that parental analogy essentially with Cancer and the Moon. But so what’s happening, though, or what seems to be happening with this Mars retrograde is just there’s programs that are being cut under the guise of fiscal conservatism, but the problem is that a lot of them are just being cut indiscriminately, different government programs and different government workers. And some of these are like, aid programs to help out other nations, which is very Cancerian. Some of these are programs meant to have oversight or like, regulatory things in order to keep people safe. There was like, one program that was cut that was specifically policing like, financial crimes against the public that was just axed entirely. And then there’s other programs that were meant to encourage like, diversity and inclusion, which are positive things that are also being cut across the board, both in terms of the government as well as the private sector due to the pressures and threats that are being exerted on those different programs.
So this is part of like, a broader reactionary movement that was already outlined last summer by the Heritage Foundation in the Project 2025 playbook that was discussed so much in the media last summer. So this isn’t, you know, surprising, but it is shocking how far it’s going. Because in some instances, it’s going even further than they had outlined. But in that book, they had talked about “dismantling the administrative state, empowering the executive branch” under Trump, and “restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life.” So again, there we’re seeing a lot of these Cancerian sort of motivational themes coming up in terms of what some of the underlying motivations are supposedly for some of these things that are being enacted now.
AC: Yeah, it’s really clear.
CB: Yeah. So I did a whole research project on Mars in Cancer over the past month that I just released today, and I found a bunch of other instances in the past of Mars in Cancer in US history where there are these periods sometimes of groups attempting to push back progress that had been made in terms of civil rights. And I think we’re seeing echoes of that now to some extent in our time in terms of how this period will be looked back on in retrospect. And the only silver lining I can say is that sometimes these instances of these extremes that are happening right now in terms of this sometimes cause so much outrage that it really causes people to fight harder in order to defend the progress and the rights that previous generations fought so hard for to establish in the first place. So that’s the only – it’s one of the few like, optimistic things I can at least try to say about this having looked at the history of what this has looked like in the past and then what the outcome has been subsequent to that.
AC: Yeah. You know, and I think if we were doing the history of this Mars retrograde, we absolutely need to see what happens as Mars goes through the same set of degrees for a third time. Right? We have two-thirds of the cycle, but we haven’t – you know, often a thing will happen by the time the planet gets to the direct station that then allows for the completion of the story, the third act, which in many – with Mars, right – is often a struggle with or a pushback against an offensive. Right? You know, because it’s the language of – Mars tells stories with the story structure of wars or struggles.
CB: Right. Right. Yeah. That will be interesting, because we’ll be retracing that for like, the next couple of months now between now and, what, early June before Mars finally departs from both Cancer and Leo and completely finishes this entire retrograde period.
AC: Yeah, and even just the Cancer part is – we’ve got seven weeks from now just for the Cancer part, much less the entire wrap-up.
CB: Right. Which is gonna include the final Mars-Pluto opposition as well in April, which is – yeah, something to look forward to.
So let’s see – other topics. So one of the things is as anticipated, the Mars in Cancer period and especially the station has brought a lot of focus on immigration. And that’s something that we had talked about, because we noticed if you go back and listen to the monthly forecast from last fall, there was this sudden like, vibe shift where like, over the summer, there was a period where the Mars-Jupiter conjunction was forming in Gemini for a while, and that was Kamala Harris’s rising sign, and she was doing this whole joyful warrior thing. And then all of a sudden in like, September, Mars changed signs and moved into Cancer, and there was this huge vibe shift, and all of a sudden, most of the presidential campaign shifted to talking about immigration and related things, including, you know, various nonsense and stuff that was being said back then. But one of the major things, or one of the most notable things that’s happened amongst many notable things in terms of that, or one of the most chillest incidences is that Trump has opened up a camp for 30,000 immigrants in Guantanamo Bay and has already started shipping people there. And the issue with that, of course, the long standing issue with Guantanamo Bay is it’s not fully in the legal jurisdiction of the United States court system because it’s outside of the continental United States. And therefore, it has had a long history over the past like, 25 years of contentiousness in the US once it was opened up after the September 11th attacks and the Bush administration started sending prisoners there during the course of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And many people got stuck there in limbo for like, many years. So now all of a sudden, Trump has set up camps there, and yeah, it’s pretty chiling. In my research, I had learned that Guuantanamo Bay was first taken over by the United States in 1898, which was also a Mars in Cancer year.
AC: Yeah. So something that just occurred to me – Chris, when you looked at, you know, because plug for Chris’s Mars in Cancer episode – the retrogrades – there’s just an extraordinary amount of research there. So when you were looking at things, did you see any Guantanamo-ness during the 2007-2008 retrograde which was partially in Cancer? Because I think at the very least it became a campaign issue in the 2008 election. And I don’t know if that’s when it was in that period that some of the humiliating abuses were being leaked, but it was not – you know, it was not not a topic during the last time Mars was retrograde in Cancer.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it was a huge point of contention in the 2007-2008 presidential campaign because it was seen as such a negative mark on the United States that it was having these people imprisoned indefinitely that were completely outside of the US courts and justice system. And Obama campaigned on that partially, of wanting to close the camps in Guantanamo, and then he got into office and attempted to do so, and Congress blocked him because they wouldn’t let him move the prisoners to the actual continental United States so that they could enter the actual US court system. And Congress was trying – the Republican Congress was trying to argue that it was because they were terrorists and therefore shouldn’t be allowed on the US soil or something like that so that Obama during the course of his two terms ended up transferring and moving, doing deals with different countries to move most of the prisoners back or to return most of them to whatever country they came from. But he wasn’t able to move all of them out by the end of his term. By the time Biden finished his term, it was down to something like a dozen people or something like that and was effectively almost not operational at that point. But now, Trump has set it up and has expanded it, and there’s like, pictures of these huge like, camps being set up there.
AC: Yeah. It’s shameful.
CB: Yeah. So you and I were talking about this yesterday, and you were talking about the connection between Mars’s fall and almost this idea of like, prisons with Mars being in its fall there. And one of the things I pointed out to you was that there’s actually an ancient text, the Michigan Papyrus from like, the second century, that says that the signs of a planet’s exaltation are like its throne, but the signs of a planet’s fall are like its prison.
AC: Which is, yeah, it’s so good. Like, that’s amongst the most perfect metaphors. And you know, one of the things in my study of exaltation and fall that I find most very useful is that you have vertical metaphors. Right? To exalt is to rise, and to be depressed, right, is to be pushed down, or to fall obviously is vertical. In my basics classes, a lot of times I talk about a planet that is in its fall as being like, down in a hole or stuck in a trap. Like, there’s a pit that they fall into. You know, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. And when we were talking about this, it’s really interesting to think in terms of prison. Because one, I also talk about it as a trap. Right? And a trap is something that you get into and you can’t get out of, and you’re kept in – you’re in an extremely debilitated condition when you are in a trap. Right? You don’t have your power. You are unlikely to seem very dignified if you got your leg in a bear trap. And what’s interesting about like, the prison with fall is prisons these days are built above ground for the most part, but historically, you know, dungeons are the prisons of the past. And very often, prisons/dungeons went down vertically. And I believe we still have some of this language that’s used in reference to putting someone in solitary confinement. Because what is it? It’s you throw the person in the hole. Right? Which was no doubt a literal hole not too far back in history, whereas now it’s just another room in the complex. And then Mars – right – Mars being stuck in that prison space in Cancer is just, yeah, it’s a too good metaphor. Obviously having no power, being forced to do things to survive that we could describe as undignified. Right? This is the exaltation, fall are part of the dignity system in astrology, and the different circumstance we find ourselves in allows us greater, lesser, or no dignity. Right? If we’re talking about being in a position of negative dignity where our worst tendencies are brought out or we’re put in a position, you know, like that, it’s very on the nose, but in a deep and true way, and I think can help us think about and have sympathy for a planet in its fall. And of course, those who have the planets in their fall in their natal charts.
CB: Yeah. Well, and because the problem with having prisons or camps like that that are outside of US legal jurisdiction is the potential for abuse or torture or other things like that with no oversight. And you had brought up, actually, that there was already the previous month another prisoner story in January, right?
AC: Yeah, yeah. I was gonna mention it last month, but there was more than enough to talk about. You know, one of the things that the – one of the secondary things that the devastating LA fires brought into focus was the use of prison labor to fight fires in California, which a lot of people were not familiar with before. And it sparked a lot of thought and debate about prisoner’s rights. Like, is that a cool thing for them to do? Is that slave labor under a different name? You know, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s that Mars in Cancer is thinking about, you know, with it being in the sky so long, like, pulling our thoughts to what about people who are in this position? Right? In this fallen position, who are in this trap or pit? Like, what about them?
CB: Right. Yeah. Definitely. And there was one other prison story that came up this month as well where Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew to El Salvador and met with the president of El Salvador. And afterwards, the president made a statement like, on Twitter, saying they had talked about negotiating housing US prisoners there in El Salvador, including US citizens, which was another bizarre, egregious, just like, terrible concept that’s like, starting to emerge right now over the course of the past month with Mars’s stationing.
AC: Right, because the prison system in the US is so intolerant of any abuse. You know, it’s a bunch of Boy Scouts there! We can’t be constrained by that. Like, it’s madness.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that was a major topic that will, I’m sure, continue to unfold here in the future unfortunately.
Moving on. Other major topics is Trump announced that he said he plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza and to turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East or something to that effect. And when asked if they would be able to return, he seemed to say no, basically. And if that happens, then that’s by definition ethnic cleansing when you literally “cleanse” the entire location of a specific ethnic group in a geographical area. And I noted in the Mars in Cancer episode that there’d been past instances in US history of this type of imperialism. For example, in the Philippine-American War that started under a Mars retrograde in Cancer, and where there were just these really notable instances of atrocities and brutality that were committed. And back then there were huge debates about it at the time, including like, the prominent figures at the time like Mark Twain who spoke out about it really emphatically in terms of saying that becoming like, an imperial or colonial power wasn’t supposed to be what the US was about. And that was one of the recurring themes of the Mars in retrograde Cancer periods is sometimes the like, stated idealistic goals of what America is supposed to be according to some of its foundational documents versus the reality of what happens and what its actions are periodically when things like this take place.
AC: Yeah. Brief Mars retrograde aside for the Philippine-American War – just as a Mars retrograde thing, the events of that war actually forced a redesign of the standard issue officer’s pistol, because the stopping power was insufficient.
CB: Okay.
AC: Just a Mars retrograde thing like having to rethink standard equipment. We don’t need —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — to go into it.
CB: Changes to things like that. Yeah. So that was another, you know, we’ll see that actually plays out, but that was a major topic this month.
Another major topic that’s unfolding really rapidly over the past week or two, and one of the most significant things geopolitically in terms of world events that’s happened in the past month is that the US evidently has suddenly changed signs in the Ukraine War and has turned on its former ally, Ukraine, and is now seemingly partnering with Russia and starting talks about ending the war with Russia directly that don’t include Ukraine. So this is some kind of weird inversion of the 1945 through 1946 Mars retrograde in Cancer that happened immediately after World War Two, which is when the US and Russia went from being allies in World War Two to suddenly being enemies during the start of the Cold War. And now all of a sudden, we have some bizarre inversion of this where the US seems to be in the process of essentially selling out Ukraine. And this was one of the scenarios I talked about with Nick Dagan Best when we did a Venus retrograde episode in December talking about Russian history, because one of the things we noticed with this Venus retrograde is that this Venus retrograde in Aries happened in the spring and early summer of 1945. And what happened at that time is that’s when World War Two in Europe came to an end and the Russians on their side of the battle defeated Germany. And then in the later part of the Venus retrograde, it was – Russia was having like, victory parades, basically, in Russia after World War Two to celebrate the victory. And it’s looking like now that this Venus retrograde may partially coincide with something like that again today. Some points are still unclear, though, since we also have the Saturn-Neptune conjunction which is getting so close this year and especially this summer and then eventually going exact in January, and that being implying that this is a much larger turning point for Russian history, so that I’m not sure if the seeming evidently possibly impending end to this war is like, sufficient to cover all of that symbolism, or if there’s something bigger or broader that’s also going on at the same time.
AC: Yeah. And it’s very interesting – as I mentioned in a previous episode but now that we’re at the doorstep of this time, it bears reiterating. So we have this simultaneous Mercury and Venus retrograde in Aries in March, and we had that during the spring of 1945. And it is literally the last days of Hitler while he’s in the bunker that we have these retrogrades. And the movie Downfall – clips of which were used to make the, I don’t know, maybe the most popular meme video of the 2000-teens that Hitler finds out about something and freaks out – it’s like, that reconstruction of the last weeks in the bunker is all the top Nazis finding out that it’s not gonna work out. Like, Steiner’s not coming. It’s not gonna be a thousand years of anything. It got maybe a week left. And so it’s this profound reversal, right? And that’s literally during the – like, that’s the reversal of Mercury and Mars in – excuse me, Mercury and Venus – in Aries retrograde. And so it’s a powerful historical movie, and it’s also literally Mercury and Venus retrograde. And it’s so interesting to watch it with the knowledge of the astrology.
CB: Yeah. There was so much going on in 1945 that has parallels with today, especially due to those – the Venus retrograde and then the Mars retrograde that came like, immediately afterwards.
AC: Yeah. And on a larger scale, it’s very interesting because that sort of – 1945 is when we began to see the consequences of Uranus in Gemini. The rearrangement of the United States’ role in the world and the world in general. And right now, we are more at the brink of that great rearrangement rather than more than, you know, halfway through and starting to see what it might look like. But that’s another important connection. Like, the Uranus cycle isn’t that far off.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, we’re right at the cusp of it this summer. Like, that’s what’s crazy is we know some of the most significant changes in the world that were right on the verge of that, and we can see it all constellating now, but especially in terms of the United States just because those Uranus returns are always so consequential for it.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So one last Mars in Cancer thing that was very striking and very strong before we move on was that tariffs became a major subject in the news and continue to be a huge thing in the news. And especially tariffs as a form of protectionism and as a form of economic nationalism has been a major part of Mars in Cancer where there’s this aggressive form of protectionism that’s taking place. And this has already sent shockwaves through the economy and like, continues to as the world and different US allies are like, grappling with if the US is actually going to do this and impose these really aggressive tariffs which then causes counter tariffs and disruptions with trade and everything else. So one of the things it’s doing is it’s turned some of our neighbors and allies against us, including causing a huge rift with Canada and starting to affect that whole relationship with like, for example, like, the US hockey team being booed at a hockey game between the US and Canada. And it really reminds me of the intense wave of protectionism that occurred in the United States after World War One when Pluto went into Cancer and basically transited through Cancer for that entire period between the end of World War One and the beginning of the US entering World War Two. And remember, that was just this intense period of the side of the US that wanted to stay out of foreign wars and keep to itself even if there was terrible stuff happening in Europe and elsewhere was winning out for a long time. And then Roosevelt in the 1930s like, saw what was coming and did the best he could to like, try to gear the country up for eventually having to enter World War Two, which it eventually did, but that there was intense turn inwards. And I’m seeing like, echoes of that here with this intense Mars station in Cancer and this sort of like, aggressive protectionism and nationalism that’s sort of taking place.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s so very Mars in Cancer. You know, if we go back to like, Cancer and parenting, Cancer also speaks to that – it sort of thinks in the language of like, family unit, which would apply – and one’s family unit and wanting, with Mars there, like, wanting self-sufficiency, right? And not getting entangled in other business. Even being spiky, right? If we think of crab shells, they’re not necessarily smooth and soft. Right, spiky. Like, pushing away what’s not inside the small circle of care. And so that, like, pointed economic protectionism or inward turning is a really good match for extended Mars in Cancer, especially for a nation that celebrates its birthday in the middle of the Sun’s time in Cancer and has three other planets there.
CB: Right. Yeah. The problem that I noticed when I went back and researched this is that Mars retrograde periods and tariffs have actually come up in the past, but one of the most notable instances of that in American history was in the early 1930s when they pushed through some tariffs in the early 1930s, but all the economists at the time – like, a thousand economics – warned the president at the time not to do this because it was gonna be a disaster. He didn’t listen; he signed the bill anyways, and then it was just an immediate disaster that worsened the Great Depression, that alienated America’s allies, and that also helped to make things worse in Germany and in Italy, which helped to spur the rise of the fascist movements there.
So it was such a disaster that in 1932, the people that sponsored the tariff bill were voted out, and Roosevelt first became president partially running on an anti-tariff platform saying that he would remove them, because it was seen as part of the source of exacerbating the economic problems of the Great Depression. So that makes me very nervous in terms of the implementation of that now, as well as that there have been other periods in the past that I found of Mars retrogrades in Cancer that have kicked off major economic downturns and periods of crisis, including the Mars retrogrades that were happening in 1929 and 1930 and 1931 that coincided with the great stock market crash at the end of ‘29 and the onset of the Great Depression. And then even 2007 and 2008 was a Mars retrograde in Cancer, and that was the mortgage crisis that led to eventually all the banks like, starting to fail in 2008, which led to the Great Recession. So I thought that one was interesting because it was actually like, a housing crisis that started it, and of course Mars is retrograde in Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon which is always traditionally associated with the home and the living situation or place of origins.
AC: Yeah. Well, and if you think of what pops a bubble, right, it’s something sharp. Right? And Mars hath rulership over the sharp things in a way that no other planet does.
CB: Exactly. So —
AC: And also just before we move on, if we’re talking about tariffs, like, the term “trade war” is a real thing. Right? Like, how do you start a trade war? Well, like, that has to be Mars in a somewhat unorthodox place. Right? Mars in Aries starts a war war. Right? But what kind of war does Mars in Cancer wage? Right? Much more likely to be something, you know, on a personal level often people with Mars in Cancer get accused of being passive-aggressive. What does that look like as a country? Right? Not attacking them, but I’m not not attacking them. Right? Like, that’s what trade wars are.
CB: Right. Yeah. Or having an unnecessarily aggressive almost like, emotional response to something based on an internal feeling of discontent that you’re being taken advantage of or something like that and then lashing out. And that’s, you know, often Trump’s stated motivation for this, like, almost like, psychologically is he keeps claiming that like, other countries are taking advantage of the United States and we need to like, fight back somehow or something like that. And yeah, it just keeps making me think of that Mars in Cancer stationing there.
AC: Yeah, and well, that’s a good – yeah, that’s a good framing of the Mars in Cancer thing, because there’s a lot of – on a personal level as well as otherwise, Mars in Cancer very often stimulates an overreaction to a perceived or real attack. Right? And —
CB: Right.
AC: — even if the like, the damage or the attack is something real, very often we have an overreaction that does not in fact solve the problem. Right? Which is part of something that we see with planets in fall is that very often part of the trap or prison is being pushed into a reaction that doesn’t actually solve the problem but may make it worse, or may just add additional difficulties on top of it. It’s something I, you know, try to avoid doing every time Mars is in Cancer in my first house.
CB: Yeah. That’s very good advice. All right, so the last thing I’ll say in this section to close out the politics section was just Pluto in Aquarius and the concentration of power.
So this is something I’ve discussed a lot in the past few episodes, like in the year ahead forecast or the February forecast when we were looking at like, the inauguration chart for this new presidency and seeing that really heavy Sun-Pluto conjunction which I attempted to interpret as a concentration of power in the executive branch. And I think that that’s really, really manifested in a way that even went much further than I was even – or much faster than I was even anticipating, even though that seemed like an obvious interpretation of that just because Pluto is traditionally associated with power in modern astrology over the past century and the Sun is always traditionally associated with the king or the central figure. So what you get with that is essentially drawing a huge amount of power to putting everything under the control of the president.
So this is in the process of creating a constitutional crisis, though, and I think that’s the part that’s relevant to right now is this is the early part of the Pluto return going back to when the US Constitution was signed in the late 1800s when Pluto was in Aquarius. But also when the Constitution was signed, Mars was in Cancer, and it was getting ready to go retrograde in Cancer later that year. So part of the constitutional crisis we’re seeing is also getting activated by that Mars retrograde that’s happening right now at the beginning of the presidential term and the actions that are taking place. And what was set up in the Constitution was the three different branches of government, and part of why it’s creating a constitutional crisis right now is there’s a real test of whether Trump is gonna be checked by the judicial branch and stoped in terms of some of the executive orders, or whether he will ignore some of those and just proceed to do what he’s doing anyways.
There’s also his attempts to potentially wrestle control of money and the monetary funds from Congress where usually Congress is the one that apportions funds, and that’s part of the separation of the different branches. But one of the things he’s talking about doing is setting up a sovereign wealth fund, which in other countries just becomes like, a slush fund for the ruler or for autocrats, essentially.
So I really, I believe this is what the Pluto return of the United States is all about and about whether our form of government with three different branches and checks and balances, as well as things like term limits which were first set up in Washington’s first presidency when he decided to step down after two terms instead of continuing to go on beyond that, and this question of whether that form of government with its checks and balances and with its three different branches and things like term limits will continue to endure beyond this period in a period where so much power is being concentrated in the executive branch suddenly. And I don’t think it’s a given that it will or it won’t, but instead that we’re honestly at a legitimate crossroads here in terms of it having the potential to go either way. So that’s part of what we’re looking at right now.
AC: Yeah. That’s really interesting to think about from the Pluto return of the Constitution perspective. As we were talking about the other day, I have some difficulty – I think it’s difficult at this point to disentangle what is Pluto return from what is entering the Uranus in Gemini period. Because as we’ve discussed on the podcast, during the periods where Uranus is in Gemini, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the World War Two we have executive power always peaks. Right? We have Washington who could have become king; we have Abe Lincoln; and then we have Roosevelt, who – speaking of term limits – the… So with having a third term was not illegal until after Roosevelt. It was understood as a meaningful precedent and had not been violated since the time of George Washington, but it was not actually codified until it became an amendment after Roosevelt, and it was because of his unprecedented number of terms. And so, you know, this peak executive power and the question of term limits is also very much like, Uranus in Gemini question. And so how much is one and how much is the other? We will have to watch, learn, and take some time to disentangle. But we have that sort of – that Uranus in Gemini time is heading in the same direction. The difference is that, the meaningful difference, right, is that if it’s just Uranus in Gemini, then it resets afterwards, right? And we don’t continue having an executive with that much power. Whereas if it’s a Pluto thing, right, then that’s a much longer cycle; the suggestion would be that it doesn’t reset. That it’s a much longer precedent rather than a cyclical peak in executive power.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like, my thing is just returns always represent the end of a cycle, and therefore sometimes something at the end of a cycle dies or comes to an end. Like, sometimes it’s just like, in order for something else to emerge, like, there’s always a new beginning then when that creates a new cycle. But sometimes one of the questions is how final – to what extent are we talking about, like, a final ending of something? Like, for example, last year we had that bridge collapse that occurred exactly 47 years after it opened so that it was a perfect Mars return period that occurred, and then all of a sudden, you get the end point of that structure, which is just it ceases to exist after that point. And sometimes we do see that. Like, the collapse of something —
AC: Returns absolutely can do that. Yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: Without a doubt.
CB: Yeah, so it’s like —
AC: And sometimes they just test things, where it’s like, okay, you get to do another cycle. But sometimes the testing breaks them forever. And it’s frustrating with Pluto returns, because there are so few countries that have the same regime after 250 plus years.
CB: Right.
AC: But yeah, I think that your line of thinking is very interesting and valid, and I hope… I hope it’s not the annihilation of the Constitution that is signified.
CB: Yeah. So that’s something we’re gonna see playing out, and we’ll find out which of those two scenarios it goes, basically, over the course of the next however many years, but especially as you said during the course of this Uranus return to Gemini over the course of the next seven years. And then more broadly over the next 20 years as Pluto’s making its way through Aquarius where it was when the Constitution was created.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So we will check back in on that periodically and just —
AC: We get to find out!
CB: Yeah! We get to find out in this edition of the American drama that’s unfolding in front of us.
All right, so let’s move onto other news. One of the major things that was happening that was insane, basically, as soon as we recorded the last forecast, one of the things I made sure we focused on was the Uranus station that happened on January 30th, because there’s always like, weird unexpected disruptions that come out left field around that time. And what happened around that time is all of a sudden, there was this major plane crash that occurred over the Potomac River that was this huge tragedy when there was like, a military helicopter that crashed into a civilian airliner. And everyone on board died. And at first, I was associating it with that Uranus station, because then there started being other plane crashes around that time as well, but then it kept going. Like, it kept continuing over the course of February, which started to make me realize that it was part of other broader cycles. And one of the things that I noticed right away and that several different commenters pointed out in the news was that, for example, one of the things with the first crash over the Potomac is that there were some people from the US figure skating team that were on that flight who died tragically. And this invoked a previous incident that had happened in 1961 where the entire US figure skating team was on a flight to Europe for a major match, and the plane crashed and it killed and wiped out the entire US figure skating team. And early 1961 was both a Mars retrograde in Cancer period as well as Venus retrograde in Aries.
Or in another instance, I noticed in doing the Venus retrograde research that the last major commercial US airliner that crashed before this one in 2025 was in early 2009, and that was two eight-year Venus cycles ago, so that was again Venus retrograde in Aries. So I think that what we’re seeing with this bizarre rash of plane crashes in the US was something about these three overlapping indications of like, Uranus stationing in Taurus, Venus going retrograde in Aries, and Mars going retrograde in Cancer. And at one point, I even used AI and asked it like, what other major years had a large amount of plane crashes, especially commercial ones? And it said 1946 and 1978 were two that it returned, and both of those were also Mars retrograde in Cancer years. So I think it’s something about that. You know, there may be other things going on or something I’m overlooking, but that’s my best sort of grasp on it astrologically.
AC: Yeah, I thought it was curious. Usually when things are happening, I look – or I don’t even look at the chart, I just think of where things are. And I’m like, oh, well, there’s Mars. Right? Or oh, there’s that Saturn-Neptune. But I didn’t have that with – somebody actually asked me. They were like, somebody was like, oh – Kait was like, oh, somebody asked me to ask you about, you know, what’s going on with the plane crashes. And I thought about it, and I was like, you know what? I don’t know. Like, it makes sense that there’s some Mars connection, but it’s not immediate. Usually there’s such a – it’s so easy to pick one of the planets out of the lineup as the guilty party.
CB: Yeah. Like, one of the things I was thinking about was that the Sibley chart has that retrograde Mercury at 24 degrees of Cancer. So that is something then that’s gonna get activated during these Mars retrograde in Cancer periods is like, the planet that represents travel, which happens to also be like, retrograde in the US birth chart. And you know, that also is connected with… When I was doing the Mars retrograde in Cancer research, I kept seeing like, financial stuff coming up over and over again. Not just with like, tariffs and trades, but also sometimes with important financial developments in the US like the creation of the federal reserve in 1913, or other sometimes like, economic crashes and things that were occuring. And Leisa Schaim pointed out that, you know, in the Sibley chart, it’s the 8th house in the Sibley chart is Cancer, which may bring in some of that economic component. Yeah. But then —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — also you have this other component with Mercury potentially and some of these crashes.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So unfortunately, you know, of course not helping that is that one of the government agencies that Trump has been indiscriminately firing people from is the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA staff, as another function of like, cutting protective functions from the government. So we’ll see if that ends up helping or harming things in the long term.
All right. Moving on. Major like, event that happened in the US in February was the Super Bowl, and Kendrick Lamar performed at the Super Bowl with Mars slowing down and stationing direct in his 10th house, because he has Cancer in his 10th house with a Mercury-Mars conjunction in the 10th house. This is something we had talked about in previous episodes like, last fall when Mars first went into Cancer; that was when he was announced that he was gonna perform at the Super Bowl. And it was this amazing performance. Like, he honestly knocked it out of the park. And he kind of like, teased whether he was gonna perform his hit single that he had just won five Grammys for like, the week before the Super Bowl, which is the other big thing that happened. And then at the end, he played like, his single “Not Like Us,” which is his diss track that became like, the song of the year last summer in his rap battle against Drake.
So it was incredibly striking and incredibly just astrologically impressive that we get the first solo headlining rapper who’s performing his like, biggest song of his certainly of the year and potentially of his career – I don’t know if that’s going too far – and it’s like, this diss track against this other rapper. And he has that Mercury-Mars conjunction in his 10th house natally that’s getting activated. Like, it’s so literal and impressive that I thought it was just brilliant from an astrological standpoint.
AC: Yeah. Well, and it’s – you know, if we’re talking about Mars in Cancer, if we’re talking about Mars in a place which is not dignified or elevated. We talked about this when Mars first went into Cancer. Like, you know, part of a planet being in its fall is like, if it’s Mars, it’s fighting dirty. Right? And their back and forth has been, you know, a lot of shots well below the belt. Right? And so like, this is part of Mars in Cancer; it is not a knightly duel. Right? Like that is not what’s signified. But you know, you see the natal chart as like, this is person perfectly equipped, right, to destroy in a contest of those parameters. And so like, this being like, the cherry on top of peak moments for somebody who has Mars in Cancer in the 10th, and then with Mercury, so it’s with words is just astro perfection. Right? Chef’s kiss.
CB: Yeah. M’wah! Perfect. Yeah, it’s like the legendary hater example. But it’s a good example also that Mars sometimes can work for you if you’re fighting something, if you’re fighting against something, whether it’s you’re fighting against something or you’re fighting for somebody. But this notion of like, a fight as well as that it reminded me of this statement from the first century astrologer Antiochus where he’s talking about the malefics, and he says that they benefit the native at the expense of somebody else. And I can’t think of a better example of that than this where he literally hit this career peak and milestone as a result of this battle with this other rapper and this just like, savage takedown of this other person or this other rapper. So you know, I think we all benefited from it, though, because it was pretty legendary.
And the performance wasn’t without controversy. There was like, some complaints or pushback afterwards. But I felt like most of the criticisms were pretty weak, and overall it was a pretty notable like, stunning moment just in terms of like, culture and history, especially when you think about it in the context of that broader Mars retrograde cycle in US history and some of the things that have come before it.
AC: Yeah. So an example – something similar comes to mind. Not I think as meaningful as glorious as this extended and very public trouncing, but during the last Mars retrograde in Cancer in 2007, 2008, the UFC had a champion named George St-Pierre who was nigh invincible. And there was a contender named Matt Serra. Young Matt Serra with Mars in Cancer during the Mars retrograde in Cancer who nobody thought had any chance. It was just sort of a matter of getting the title shot out of the way, and GSP – or George St-Pierre – just continuing to win at everything. And in one of the biggest like, Vegas odds upsets in UFC history, Matt Serra – Mars in Cancer native during the Mars retrograde in Cancer – just like, knocked out George St-Pierre in one punch. And the world that watched people fighting in cages was stunned.
CB: Wow.
AC: And that was absolutely Matt Serra’s high point in his whole career. They had a rematch when Mars was not retrograde in Cancer, and he lost decisively, but he had that moment. It was that super extended period with Mars in Cancer for a Mars in Cancer person.
CB: That’s brilliant. I love that. Yeah, so shoutout to Mars in Cancer. I did not know – I am now impressed. This is like, the silver lining. Like, we’ve been, you know, doing all the Mars in Cancer stuff and pointing out all the bad things. I hope it doesn’t come across too much as like, just trashing that, because I think Kendrick is like, the opposite example actually, which is what’s weird is we’ve seen extreme negative instances of Mars in Cancer this past month, and then I think Kendrick actually is like, a shining example of how that placement can sometimes work out really well and how even a planet that’s in a difficult situation can sometimes be elevated through different means, as long as you’re doing something Martian with it. You’ve gotta lean into the energy somehow, which he did. But sometimes if you do that, it can still work out constructively.
Yeah. All right. So moving on. One of the things I talked about last month I think was the Venus retrograde that was coming up and the Oscars, because I noticed that Venus was gonna station retrograde on March 1st as we’re gonna talk about, and then the next day, the Oscars is scheduled to take place – the Academy Awards – on March 2nd. And that was really notable, because when Nick and I did our Venus retrograde research, we noticed that for example, eight years ago in 2017 when Venus was retrograde in Aries in the same cycle, there was this huge fiasco at the Oscars where they called out the name of like, the wrong movie at the end of the Oscars. The wrong people like, came up and started giving their acceptance speech for like, a minute or two until they were interrupted and they said there’d been a mistake and the wrong movie had been called due to a mixup with the cue cards, and then they had to bring the actual winners for the movie Moonlight came up to actually accept the award because they had actually won it. But there was this big debacle. And so I was kind of anticipating that there would be some sort of other weird debacle or other things, as well as significant turning point, in terms of this Oscars. And then over the course of February, it really developed, basically – like, the scandal of this Oscars became clear where there had been… Like, the lead contender for the Oscars this year had been unique, because one of the things that was unique about it is that this time, for the first time ever, a trans woman was nominated for Best Actress for an Oscar for the movie Emilia Perez, and the actress Karla Sofia Gascon. But then over the course of February, some not-very-old tweets resurfaced that were racist, basically, that she had put out, and all of a sudden, it created this huge controversy where like, the director had to distance himself from her. The studio, Netflix, distanced themselves and stopped promoting her, and then even other actors from the film had to distance themselves. So it turned into this huge debacle where all of a sudden, that movie which had been winning almost an abnormal number of nominations up to that point suddenly became persona non grata like, virtually overnight over the course of like, a week. And that’s gonna be an interesting thing to see how that actually develops in terms of what awards it actually wins once we get to the Oscars itself. But it probably significantly changed the chances of the number of awards that it otherwise would have won.
AC: Yeah. At the simple motional level with Venus retrograde, like, a planet that is approaching a retrograde station, things look like they’re moving in one direction, but actually they’re going to move in the opposite direction. And so very often as we approach Venus retrograde stations, there is a reversal of Venusian expectations. Awards and honors and prizes being core Venus significations.
CB: Totally. Yeah. Because astronomically, it’s like, Venus is going in a certain direction; you think it’s gonna go there, but instead it does a u-turn and all of a sudden goes in a different route. And that’s literally like, what’s happening here is like, yeah, it was a movie that was getting a lot of rewards in some of the earlier award shows, and then all of a sudden is not expected to get as many at this one. But we’ll still see how that turns out, since there may be further controversies or scandals or other weirdness surrounding this Oscars, as there often are when Venus goes retrograde in Aries every eight years.
AC: Right.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Quick aside – you know, having finally gotten to sit down and listen to you and Nick Dagan’s extremely well researched episode on Venus retrograde in Aries, you know, it really struck me that it’s this Venus retrograde in Aries that coincides with the things that happen in spring – like, late winter-spring every eight years, and that’s every other inauguration of the president for a while. That’s also events like the Oscars. It’s something I’ll be putting on my calendar for the rest of my life.
CB: Yeah. For sure. It’s really expanded – like, doing that research and seeing the consistency. But yeah, just that like, weird stuff happens like sometimes in those increments, it’s something you can set your watch to. And it’s been crazy seeing so many news stories come out that fit the same archetype that we had seen in the history episode that we otherwise wouldn’t have anticipated if we didn’t know that that’s what Venus regularly coincided with in this cycle.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So I’m sure there’ll be even more once the retrograde begins in earnest on March 1st.
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on to wrap up and do the last few news stories really quickly here. There was this cryptocurrency called like, a Libra coin that was released at one point by the Argentine president who promoted this crypto scam that was called Libra. It was supposed to support the projects in Argentina, but then soon after he promoted it, the price rose and then crashed immediately. And I noticed that this happened when the Moon was moving through Libra, and also that Libra is his Sun sign, and he has a stellium there. So it’s like a weird astrological connection with a notable news story involving astrology.
Additionally in adjacent cryptocurrency news, the largest cryptocurrency hack in history happened on February 21st when 1.5 billion dollars in crypto was stolen from the exchange Bybit. And this was really notable from an astrological standpoint because in the previous episode on Bitcoin I did with Crypto Damus – he goes by Crypto Damus on Twitter – back in 2020, we had noted how the previous biggest crypto hack occurred back in the mid-2010s when transiting Pluto conjoined the Sun in the birth chart for Bitcoin, which sort of acts as like, the birth chart for all cryptocurrencies as well. And that was the Mt. Gox hack that occurred back in like, 2013 or something like that. But what happened is just in the past few days, transiting Pluto came up and conjoined Mercury in the Bitcoin birth chart, and now we have the next biggest hack that has taken place of that in history. So it was a good reminder about Pluto can sometimes represent the sort of like, criminal underworld and things like that that can take place in connection with it, which is a good reminder.
All right. In other news, Luigi Mangione appeared in court for the first time since his arraignment, and this was notable because this happened on the Mars station direct in Cancer, and that was notable, of course, because the entire case started back in early December when Mars stationed retrograde in Leo, and that was when the original shooting took place of the murder of the United Healthcare CEO that he’s now gonna be on trial for. So there was an interesting just timing connection there that’s important to note that basically the murder happened when Mars stationed retrograde, and then when Mars stationed direct, the first court appearance happened for the suspect that they’re putting on trial for it.
AC: Yeah. That’s very tight. Right? It’s literally a martial act. And as I was telling you, I think the Luigi Mangione case has a interesting and weird resonance with what happened the last time that Saturn and Neptune conjoined in Aries, which we will be getting a preview of starting at the end of May. Last time that happened was very early in the 17th century – sorry, the 1700s, the 18th century. And as I went over this in the yearly, so I’ll try to be brief here. But there was an event that was referred to as “the 47 ronin” in Japan where there were a group of ronin, or masterless samurai, who did a big murder to avenge their lord’s shameful slaying. And it put the governing powers at the time in a very difficult position, because the people by and large thought that it was kind of awesome and honorable, even if, you know, a little murder-y. And yet the governing powers couldn’t simply condone vigilante murder.
And so there was this very difficult sort of figuring out how to punish them in order to not condone vigilante murder, but not set the people ablaze with anger about it. And it took the shogun several months to do that. And so it’s very interesting to me that we have, you know, we have a vigilante murder of a functionary of a system – the healthcare system – which is corrupt and harmful in many ways. And yet, you know, people don’t wanna condone murder; certainly the law can’t condone vigilante murder. And yet, there’s public support. It just seems like it has a lot of parallels, and the trial will almost certainly not conclude before we have the Saturn-Neptune, which was the sentencing of the 47 ronin occurred within three days of the exact Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries. And to add to the parallels, Luigi Mangione has Saturn in Aries. And so, yeah, there’s just a lot of parallels there, not to detract from Mars – for the actual act and arraignment, I think that’s very clear. But it seems to be linking into this slower moving piece of cultural background represented by the Saturn-Neptune.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s something I’ve learned a lot more doing the historical research is just when you see one planetary repetition, it can indicate something, but when there’s overlapping planetary repetitions like the field gets narrowed more, and it gets more specific.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: All right. So let’s move on. Last two quick stories – one, Saturday Night Live did a 50th anniversary show where it just had tons and tons of comedians and actors and other celebrities come back who had appeared on the show over the past 50 years. It was very Venus retrograde-y, because it was just invoking all these themes of like, looking back, of reflecting on the past, connecting people from the past with people from the present, and different themes like that. In some instances, it was invoking specific incidents that occurred on SNL under either previous Venus retrograde periods in Aries, or previous Venus retrograde periods in Aries that were also Mars retrograde periods in Cancer. The biggest one was that Miley Cyrus did a tribute to Sinead O’Conner, and they sang a song in honor of her which referred back to one of the most infamous incidents in SNL history when she tore up a picture of the pope in like, I think late 1992 when Mars was slowing down to retrograde in Cancer. And that was originally like, a protest against like, child abuse scandals in the Catholic church, but at the time, they weren’t as well known, so she received just a huge amount of flack for that and only later became validated to some extent. But them doing that tribute to her was very striking in terms of the Mars retrograde invocation as well as Venus retrograde. And then at the very end of the tribute, they had Paul McCartney play a Beatles song. And he specifically played a Beatles song that had a lyric that was mentioned in a Chris Farley sketch from 1993, and it aired almost exactly to the day when Venus was almost exactly at the same degree so that when the Chris Farley sketch happened with him and Paul McCartney in February of 1993, Venus was slowing down to station retrograde in Aries. And then at the end of this entire like, anniversary show, they invoked that previous sketch as Venus was slowing down at the same degree to station in Aries. So it was another just like, amazing sort of callback.
AC: Yeah, striking. What was the song? Was the line – was it – is there a song called “Van Down By the River?”
CB: No, it was like, “the love you make is equal to the love you take” or something like that. Do you know that Beatles line?
AC: I don’t.
CB: Okay. Not a big Beatles fan? Are you a big Chris Farley fan? Like —
AC: I found him very entertaining. I was 13 then, so…
CB: All right.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, seven-year-old me – huge Chris Farley fan, so yeah. He was one of those actors that died tragically young, so it was interesting seeing the power of not just Venus retrograde to be a callback and to bring things from the past into the present, but also for Mars retrograde to do that as well. And part of the thing I think we’re all learning here is that retrogrades in general can harken back to the past and bring stuff from the past back into the present.
AC: Yeah. I mean, they literally get you moving backwards, right? And the mind starts moving backwards. Then it’s natural to start revisiting.
CB: Exactly. So along those lines, final news story I just noticed a couple days again, which is a funny Venus retrograde one – shoutout to Astrology Noticer on Twitter who pointed this out that tickets just went on sale for Fyre Festival Two on February 24th, which is almost exactly eight years ago since this original fiasco where people were sold these tickets to go on to some like, island and to have some concert and party. And it was originally sold as if it was gonna be this wildly luxurious thing with like, luxurious meals and like, famous musicians performing and all this other stuff. And then people got there and you start seeing these social media videos come out of just like, people eating like, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and like, having really terrible sleeping accommodations, and like, none of the performers that they promised showing up. It was this huge debacle; it was one of the funniest debacles of the 2017 Venus retrograde in Aries. And even the founder actually who organized it went to prison for it. Like, he went to prison for like, financial fraud or something like that. But now he’s out, and he’s launching like, another one of these festivals that he’s trying to sell people on —
AC: Oh, that’s amazing.
CB: And he’s again promising people that there’s gonna be like, amazing acts and like, all this like, wild stuff. But when the interviewers are asking him like, who do you have booked right now, he doesn’t have anyone booked or he doesn’t answer the question, because it seems like it might just be another thing. So that is a hilarious repetition of events coming back again, and it’ll be interesting to see if anybody takes him up on it and buys one of these tickets. Because some of the tickets are going for starting at like, 1,300 dollars and going up to 1.1 million dollars for one of these tickets is how much he’s like, selling them for. So I don’t know – do you wanna get one and just go and see how it is, Austin?
AC: I’ll watch the documentary. The documentary about the original Fyre Festival was pretty funny. You know, like, being promised these luxury accommodations and then like, the guests would arrive, and they’d be like, “Here’s your tarp and plastic water bottle half full of spit.” Like somebody had been using it as a spittoon while they’re dipping tobacco. It’s like, “Here you go! Here’s your 13,000 dollar executive luxury influence package.”
CB: I love it. That is Venus retrograde in Aries sometimes of – yeah. Luxurious —
AC: It’s not what you thought it was gonna be!
CB: No. No. All right, so we’ll see if any listeners attend that, definitely let us know how it goes in the YouTube comments. But we will —
AC: Yeah, give us a review.
CB: — report back later on.
All right, I think that’s it for the news section, so let’s take a little break.
All right. Austin’s pee break was not sponsored this month, but I will act as a sponsor because I need to mention that Rob Bailey and I just finished recording the final lecture for our new horary astrology course, and as a result of that, the price is gonna jump next month from 400 – which it’s at right now – to 500 dollars by the end of the month, the end of March. So I wanted to give people a head’s up about this, because it’s actually an exciting new course that Rob and I have been working on for the past two and a half years. Two and a half years ago, we started recording new lectures for this new course, and it’s finally just about finished, and we’re putting the finishing touches on it.
So the course is divided into 12 different sections where we teach people the history, the philosophy, and the practice of horary astrology, which is an ancient practice where if somebody has a single important question, they can pose that question to an astrologer, and the astrologer casts a chart for the moment of the question. And the chart mysteriously will actually describe both the nature of the question and the circumstances surrounding it as well as the outcome to the question. So you can actually find the answer to a single, important question by casting a horary astrology chart.
So during the course of this 12-part course, Rob and I go through a series of lectures where we teach people the earliest principles for answering horary questions based on late Hellenistic and early medieval astrology. And we’re really excited about it, because as far as we’re aware, it’s one of the first courses on horary that teaches the earliest texts and earliest methods of answering horary questions. And all of the earliest horary texts used whole sign houses. So in our course, we teach people how to use whole sign houses to practice horary astrology, and this makes our course somewhat unique as one of the first in modern times to do this by going back to the earliest horary texts and explaining their methods and replicating them in contemporary times, as well as based on our personal experience of practicing horary over the years.
So it’s a really amazing course. Horary is a great thing to learn for any astrologer’s toolkit in addition to natal astrology and electional astrology. It really expands your understanding of how horary can work and is a great way to apply some of the principles in a more limited setting to a single question in trying to determine its outcome.
So like I said, the price is currently 400 dollars, and if you sign up now, you get permanent access to the course, including future updates to the course as well as access to some live Q&A sessions that we plan to do in the future, as well as some other additional lectures and interviews with different horary astrologers that we plan to add to the course in the future, plus the private discussion forum for students of the course. So it’s a really great benefit and a great value, so if you want to get in on that, if you’ve thought about signing up in the past, then this would be a great time to do it before the price jump one month from now. Yeah, and that’s my pitch for the horary course.
Horary – yea or nay, Austin? You’re a big fan?
AC: Yeah. Well, it’s… I don’t think there’s room for a yea or nay. It’s one of the branches of astrology. You know, it’s the branch for answering those simple but very loaded questions, right? “Will I get into the college I applied to? Will she come back to me? Will…” Yeah, like, et cetera. I’m getting fanciful. But —
CB: Yeah.
AC: No, I mean, it’s the like, it interfaces perfectly with if you’re a practitioner who takes clients, like, one thing I see is that sometimes people will book like, a full natal consultation, but really they just wanna know the answer to one question. It’s really about one question. And so if you’re a professional, budding or veteran, like, having horary as part of your arsenal’s very important. And we know that historically, there are a number of astrologers who would just open the door on Sunday and then just read horaries for people all day long. You know, it doesn’t replace natal nor can natal replace it. It’s one of the big branches. And a very practical branch at that.
And I think it’s really nice that you’re offering a horary course that’s rooted in the earlier sources. A lot of the overwhelming majority of horary that’s available is drawing from like, early modern texts like William Lilly or sometimes Bonatti, but not going back to that Hellenistic strata. And so I think it’s really great that you’re making that available. If someone has their basis in astrology, a Hellenistic base, then being able to extend that – apply that – with horary is nice rather than having to travel 1,500 years to England and reconcile some of the systemic differences.
CB: Yeah. Well, one of the benefits I had is when I got into traditional astrology 20 years ago, some of the earliest horary texts were starting to be translated. Like, you had Rob Hand’s translation of Mashallah’s text on reception, or you had Ben’s translation of Sahl ibn Bisher. And this allowed me to start practicing those earliest horary methods like, right from the beginning of my journey with horary astrology, especially in that whole sign framework and that early medieval framework that is still so similar to the late Hellenistic authors like Rhetorius. So I’ve been practicing that for over 20 years now; I’m excited to introduce a whole new generation of students to that approach and to make it more mainstream again like it was once over a thousand years ago.
So people can sign up for the course or find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right, my friend. Shall we talk about the astrology of March?
AC: Oh, let’s do it.
CB: All right. So let’s jump right into it. So opening up March, one thing is I wanna say right away is like, we’re still coming off of the Mars retrograde station, and that energy is still very prominent by the time March opens, that Mars is still just kind of like, camping out in that degree of like, 17 degrees of Cancer, 18 degrees of Cancer. And it’s still moving so slow that it’s just like, barely coming off of that, and I think we’re still gonna experience this intense energy of that station still radiating outward from it for another while, at least another couple of weeks as Mars tries to get going forward again.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And on an experiential level, you know, Mars’s direct station often shows – you know, it is, “Oh, this is the point from which I can move forward.” Right? Like, there tends to be an end to the chaos that people experienced during the Mars retrograde, but that point that we move forward from is not necessarily a point of ease. It’s just that the challenges, the difficulties have had enough time to make themselves clear, and we begin the hard task of figuring out how to adapt to them, how to overcome them, how to deal with them, et cetera, et cetera. Right? It’s moving forward, but it’s the planet of pains in the ass and challenges and exertions, right? So we’re just starting that. March 1st is less than a week after the station. And of course, a big chunk of our March action – some of the later stuff, some of the earlier stuff – all occurs in Mars-ruled Aries. Right? So even if the Mars station wasn’t still active as the month begins, we’re dealing with Mars-ruled shit for half of the month.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s still – like we were saying earlier – this sense of exhaustion sometimes coming out of a Mars retrograde period, because even in its most constructive manifestations, oftentimes a Mars retrograde can represent a huge expenditure of energy in some part of your life based on especially what house or what part of your chart it went retrograde in. And so there can be this sense of like, exhaustion but starting to move forward again and slowly starting to regain strength. At the same time, the end of a Mars retrograde there can still be this sense of having the aftermath of a smoldering conflict which could still threaten to reignite as you try to make your way out of a volatile period and still being in kind of the danger zone where you realize that things could flare up again, or you could have like, after effects of that still if you don’t proceed with caution.
AC: Yeah, and especially this post-retrograde leg of the journey, because there’s a lot of incendiary – you know, if there are still embers burning, there’s plenty of incendiary materials blowing about in March.
CB: Absolutely. Like, the winds of change are blowing in, especially with eclipse season coming in in March, which is the biggest thing happening. And that could easily like, reignite some of those fires.
So the Mars retrograde is still very potent and very strong, but all of a sudden, we get this new energy that comes in right at the top of March, which is that Venus stationed retrograde right away on March 1st in the sign of Aries. And this is, even though we’ve had the build up to this Venus retrograde for the past couple of months now – honestly, since the beginning of January when Venus first moved into Pisces, which is the sign it will later retrograde back to – and even though we’ve seen a bunch of events from the past that connect to previous Venus retrograde periods in Aries already start to come up and become present again and become obvious over the past couple of months, this is really the most intense part of the Venus retrograde. This is the nucleus of the Venus retrograde where its energy becomes the most potent, and it begins like, right at the top of the month.
AC: Yeah, we get the actual, visual station where Venus is no longer moving forward across the back – like, the stellar background. But instead stops and then starts moving contrary, right, backwards. And before too awful long, disappears. Right? And this is another important part of Venus retrograde is Venus goes away. You know, Venus is for most of her cycle, the brightest planet in the sky other than the Sun and the Moon. And so this is a period where already Venus is dimming, but then for about three weeks, there’s just no Venus in the sky. Like, literally the brightest jewel of the heavens is nowhere to be found.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah, that notion of Venus – because it’s been so bright. Like, that’s the other thing is just before Venus is like, getting ready to go retrograde, Venus is at her brightest and has been over the past month. And so we can see some of the Venusian themes becoming more prominent in terms of society and in terms of personal events. But then all of a sudden, it slows down and stations, and part of the Venus retrograde process that’s gonna take place over the next 40 days and 40 nights starting March 1st is the process of Venus going into the underworld and having this journey or this dark night of the soul during the course of the conjunction with the Sun, and then eventually reemerging on the other side a changed person. And for some people, especially those that are tightly tied into this Venus retrograde cycle or if Venus is a timelord for you this year, or if you have personal planets in the first like, 10 degrees of Aries or the last 10 degrees of Pisces that this Venus retrograde is gonna hit, then it could be very personally relevant for you as part of this journey and this transformation that you go through that you go into that sort of underworld phase and then eventually emerge from on the other side.
AC: Yeah. And part of the nature of that journey is a deep questioning of Venusian things, right, which usually comes down to what and who do I really want? Right? Like, you know, I’ve been doing this – is this what I really want? Like, I’ve engaged with this professionally – is this what I really wanna be doing? Is this the shape? Like, I wanted to do this for a while, but do I still really wanna do this? Right? And on a relational level, like, which can be of course romantic, but can also be friendships. It’s like, “I don’t know, it’s been a long time; we’re just kind of friends out of habit. Are we really friends anymore?” Right?
What’s good about the Venus retrogrades is they pull you away from your assumptions about what you like, what’s a source of joy, what’s good, who’s cool, who are you close to, and make you look at the reality as it is now rather than just an idea you’ve had. Or like, “Oh, yeah, you know, we’re really close. Actually, we haven’t hung out in two years.” Right? It’s like, you know, because we have this idea about our relationships, about our sources of joy and pleasure. Like, “Oh, I really love this band; this is my favorite band. Actually, I’m pretty fucking tired of them. Maybe they’re not – maybe that’s not really my jam!” And sometimes through that process of questioning, you get a legitimate and powerful reaffirmation, and re-encounter with “Oh, no – this really is the love of my life. And I know that better now because I stopped just assuming that and like, journeyed to the heart of the underworld and saw it again.” Or, you know, on a lighter, like – “Yeah, this really is my favorite band; they’re the fuckin’ best.” Right? But what you can get, what can come out of that questioning can be a powerful affirmation, but it doesn’t feel like a powerful affirmation at the time. It feels like starting to question things. And often there can be questioning of things that you’d rather not – you’d rather it just be fine. And so there’s a discomfort and an ambivalence during that questioning phase.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s like you have to question are the things that brought you joy and harmony and pleasure in your life still the things that bring you joy and harmony and pleasure, or is there something that has to be revisited and retooled about that?
So one of the keywords I use that is often really useful is “redesigning” some part of your life, or rethinking the relationships in some part of your life, especially based on what house Venus is going retrograde in. And sometimes this can be very literal, this process of redesigning something or, you know, giving a makeover to something. Like, if a person has Venus going retrograde in their 4th house or over their IC, sometimes it can literally be like, redesigning their home and living situation where they start, you know, looking at their surroundings and thinking like, is this still bringing me like, joy and happiness and harmony in my environment, or is there something I wanna change that would bring me more joy or more harmony or more pleasure in terms of my living situation? Or, you know, if it goes retrograde in the 10th house, something about your career. If it goes in your 1st house, something literally about your body or your appearance and so on and so forth.
AC: Yeah, very much so. Or, you know, and especially for people who are Venus-oriented as creatives, right? We’re talking about the thing that is beautiful or sparks joy or has artistic merit – the Venus retrogrades often bring that rethinking to, well, what do I wanna create? Right? Like, is this really what I wanna be making, or like, do I want work that does this? Like, do I wanna be putting out this kind of work? And if I wanna do that, what do I – you know, how do I move my, what type of practical redesign is necessary? You know, I don’t wanna write children’s books anymore; I wanna write the great American novel. Right? That’s what I really want. And so, you know, there’s that creative side to Venus as well as the relational.
CB: Absolutely. So some of the keywords that I wanted to mention that commonly come up as we’ve seen in Venus retrogrades are themes like revisiting the past. So sometimes this can mean past relationships, like former lovers come back into your life for some reason which can sometimes be life-changing and other times it can just be like, a period of reflection, of like, oh, okay, you know, that was that relationship and that was a different time in my life and now I’ve changed and moved on, and it was simply a looking back that occurs that doesn’t always have to be like, monumental or consequential.
Sometimes there can be breakups. I know that the last Venus retrograde in Leo that occurred in 2023, there were all these like, celebrity breakups and some like, pop culture magazines were calling it the summer of breakups. So it’ll be interesting to see if we see any notable, you know, celebrity or prominent separations at this time, because one of the things that happens in the Venus retrograde is that Venus goes retrograde, it conjoins the Sun, but then there’s literally this separation or this wrenching apart of those two planetary or celestial bodies after that. I think sometimes as a result of that, that wrenching apart motion astronomically can symbolically coincide with people having this wrenching motion where some relationship or some person in their life has to be separated for some reason.
AC: You know, Dorotheus actually briefly talks about that in Book Five. You know, like, a quasi-horary way says that when Venus is retrograde and somebody asks if their lover or husband, wife, et cetera, et cetera will come back – if it’s before the Venus-Sun conjunction, before the cazimi, then they are likely to come back because those planet – the Sun and Venus have a union to make. But if it is after the Sun and Venus have made their conjunction and they are, as you just described, moving apart, then it is likely that the split is permanent.
CB: I love that. That’s brilliant. I love that all these ancient astrologers like, 2,000 years ago were, you know, getting very similar questions still to today where people were like, “Will my lover return to me?” I just —
AC: Right. “Are we done? I don’t know; I don’t feel like we’re done!” You know?
CB: Right?
AC: Like, human problems.
CB: Yeah. Except they had like, funny Roman names like Claudius Maximus the Third or something like that, and yeah. Human life is very similar across ages and cultures. Like, that’s one of the my favorite things I always learned about studying the history of astrology.
Okay. So breakups sometimes. But sometimes there can be through the process of the entire retrograde, there can be like, a separation but then a getting back together where sometimes people get back together with exes or sometimes people have a separation or like, a rough spot in a relationship, and they move apart for a period of time during the course of the retrograde. But then sometimes they decide by the end to get back in the relationship and to reaffirm the relationship so that the relationship can sometimes emerge stronger than it was when they went into it because they went through that period of questioning and of testing and of even doing like,m a structural test of the relationship itself to see if it could survive some major shakeup.
AC: Yeah. There’s a lot of ambivalence through the retrograde portion. And then by the time we get to the direct station and especially after that, it’s generally clear that it’s gonna go one way or another. But that’s not the period that occurs during March; it’s the bringing things up for question that maybe people didn’t expect to question. Yeah, this is the raising of questions for the most part in March. And so it can be confusing. I’ve gotten a lot of value out of maintaining ambivalence during the retrograde period. Like, let yourself wonder about things without feeling like you need to decide right now. One of the extra difficulties I see people encountering is trying to make a decision before they’ve actually had enough time to really think – work – through it, and then having to go back on a decision that was a going back on another decision. But like, letting the scales like, fly and wobble and let the case be made for yea or nay or this or that before trying to make it permanent.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. So there can be other things – important relationship turning points. And then sometimes it can just be a matter of like, doing things differently than other people, but in a way that’s still interesting to you. That’s one of my favorite things about retrogrades is sometimes retrogrades can be weird because the planet suddenly starts moving in a way that’s different than the way all the other planets are moving. And sometimes that can simply manifest and you doing something that comes off as weird societally or something that’s different than what the majority of people are doing in relationships. But you know, if that works for you, then sometimes just going with it and going with what seems natural and seems right to you and sometimes following your heart in terms of that can be okay.
AC: Yeah. And this is especially true when we look at the lives of people born with Venus retrograde where often success in the Venusian sphere looks really different than it does for most people, and in a way that, you know, as I with a Venus not-retrograde, if I tried to do that, that shit would not work at all. One of my favorite examples that resonates with this month is the UFC fighter Nate Diaz. Nate Diaz has both Venus and Mercury retrograde and conjunct in Aries, which doesn’t happen very often. Gonna happen this month. And Nate is rude and inarticulate in a way that speaks volumes, and he is absolutely beloved. He is charming and has charmed millions, has a massive fanbase in a way that you can’t imagine that being charming, and yet it’s charming. Like, he will slap interviewers mid-interview. Like, it is – again, this is Venus retrograde in Aries! And like, he’s – yeah, look up “best of Nate Diaz interviews.” Mercury conjunct Venus in Aries, both retrograde, and like, the most antisocial anti-communicative possible behavior, beloved, charming, and praised for what he communicates. Right? It’s not something, it’s not a formula you can replicate, which is very common with Venus retrograde people. It’s like, that only works for you. It’s like the opposite of like, of what’s in the like, what is it? How to Influence People and Be Liked, or that famous book? But it’s like, the opposite of the rules you should follow to make friends, and yet —
CB: Right.
AC: — it will work for some people.
CB: How to Win Friends and Influence People?
AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like the Satanic inversion of that, but it works for the chosen few.
CB: Right. Yeah, I like that. That’s really good. So in terms of this retrograde, there’s gonna be some turning points this month. So Venus is gonna station retrograde as I said and begin the intense phase of the retrograde cycle right at the top of the month on March 1st. But then it’s gonna hit the cazimi later in the month where it conjoins the Sun about three weeks into its retrograde phase, and this is gonna take place it looks like on the 22nd of March. So this is usually like, the turning point; it’s the middle point of the cycle. But it’s usually when whatever the problem is that’s set up at the beginning of the retrograde, at the beginning of the month, starts to take a turn towards a resolution, which won’t finish until the middle of April when Venus actually stations direct and starts moving forward again. But there will be a crucial turning point later in March around the 22nd where you start to see a glimmer of like, what the outcome of this Venus retrograde period is gonna be for you.
AC: Yeah, and what like, how you’d like to move forward. What you’re gonna be moving forward to. Right? What is it that you really want, and then how do you move towards that rather than like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.” Right? And if you don’t know what you want, you can’t move towards it.
CB: Right. Yeah. So and then we’ll get Venus stationing direct in Pisces on April 12th, so around the middle of April. So this is something we’ll be revisiting and coming back to in the future as we talk about the second half of the Venus retrograde when we do our next forecast at the end of March.
All right, so that is like, the opening of the month with that Venus retrograde, and then a few days later, we get one of our first ingresses of the month, which is that Mercury moves into the sign of Aries on the 3rd of March. And this is the sign that Mercury’s gonna spend a lot of time in because Mercury’s gonna slow down and then go retrograde on the 15th of March at like, nine, 10 degrees of Aries. So that’s one of the things that’s weird this month is we don’t just have Venus retrograde in Aries, but we’re also gonna have a Mercury retrograde in Aries overlapping essentially at the same time. So —
AC: Right.
CB: Go ahead.
AC: Oh, I was just gonna say, right, so Venus is this underworld of the heart, right, and is going backward and seeking the concealed and forgotten truth of love and desire. This is accompanied by the thinking and the communications, right, the mercurial sphere. And in some ways, it sort of doubles down on the Venus retrograde because Mercury likes to think about and talk about whoever he’s hanging out with. Right? If Mercury’s with Saturn, it’s Saturn stuff. And so here we have Mercury with Venus, so it adds even more, you know, Mercury serves to sort of vocalize and help think about and calculate and you know, worry about the Venus things. So in some ways, it intensifies the Venus retrograde and yeah, there’s like, a multiplicative effect.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah, an intensification, but also echoing some of those themes of things from the past coming back into the present, having to revisit things, having to revise old things. You know, Mercury retrograde is also associated with like, miscommunications, technical snafus, delayed communications. I forgot to tell this hilarious story from the last Mercury retrograde where I ordered this like, old book from England and they shipped it out, but they sent it like, to the wrong place and it got sent back to them in England. And then they sent it a second time, but they shipped it the day that Mercury stationed retrograde. And they sent it, and then again sent it with the wrong information so then it accidentally got sent back a second time. And then it wasn’t until Mercury like, stationed direct and got out of its retrograde and out of the shadows periods that they sent it a third time, and the third time was a charm and I finally got the book. But it was just like, a funny very literal example of some of the miscommunications, the delays, travel delays and other snafus that can sometimes come up during Mercury retrogrades in a really classic way.
AC: Yeah. And so, you know, another way that it’s an intensification is just that it’s two of the inner planets retrograde at the same time. And so that like, reversal of expectations, that often jagged alteration to expected trajectories where I thought it was going this way, I guess it’s going this way, but it’s also going to reverse again – you know, there’s more of that, and it adds to what is part of the quality of this month is potentially very confusing. Because all the while, we’re in – you know, under the shadow of the eclipses. Right? And things in the shadow are harder to see. And so we have this obscuration as well as these reversals, inversions, sudden change in trajectories. It’s very confusing.
CB: Absolutely. And then there’s gonna be this huge Neptune component as well where both Mercury and Venus will retrograde back into late Pisces where they’ll station direct conjunct Neptune, which is gonna bring elements of —
AC: Right.
CB: — confusion and miscommunication and deception, and then the final eclipse of the month in Aries like, culminates with Neptune moving into Aries, which we’ll talk about, but I just wanted to echo and emphasize what you just mentioned.
AC: Yeah, yeah, right – Neptune’s a big component of that. And not only is this just happening during the eclipse season, but Mercury and Venus in addition to visiting Neptune again will be right on the North Node, which is the eclipsing point. So like, even their direct station will be at a point that is veiled in shadow. Right?
CB: Absolutely.
AC: Confusing! Confusing. Hard to know if you got it right.
CB: Yeah. That’s a really good point. So Mercury when it goes into Aries and stations retrograde there, it’s gonna be not only transiting Aries which is ruled by Mars, but it’s also gonna be widely square Mars, which is still moving very slowly around the middle of Cancer. And as a result of that, I think we’re gonna get some Mercury-Mars flavor to this Mercury retrograde as well. So some of the keywords I was writing down of things that it made me think of of a Mercury retrograde in Aries squaring Mars is like a flurry of words, of angry or like, fighting words. A miscommunication that leads to a fight or a conflict. Anger in general. Words said impulsively that are later taken back. Things you say in the heat of the moment that later you realize you have to walk back at some point in the future. Having intense debates. Speaking tactlessly or having a blunt communication style, or even using like, curse words or foul language could be one of the themes that comes up not just in like, interpersonal relationships, but even in like, the news or something over the course of the next month.
AC: Yeah, definitely. Yeah there’s —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — a potential for a lot of viciousness, especially because when Venus is retrograde and in a Mars-ruled sign like this, sometimes you get instead of Venus sort of using emotional sensitivity to patch things up, you can also – like, that same Venusian intelligence can be used to make things sting all the worse, right? Instead of a little medicine, it’s like a little extra poison. Right? A little acid. Like, when we have Venus – yeah, it can be Venus as a weapon rather than as the olive branch, where it’s like, “I’m gonna say exactly the kind of thing that I know is gonna drive you crazy, because I’m trying to create strife or pain for you rather than reconciliation.” Right? To drive apart rather than to bring together.
CB: Right. Absolutely. So as a digression, one of the things I wanna say is I wanna actually talk about the featured electional chart of the month, because my electional chart for this month actually occurs really early because I think people should try to get in some of their important stuff early at the beginning of the month before things get crazy with like, the Mercury retrograde and the eclipses and everything else. And because a lot of that’s already building up, it’s kind of hard to like, nail a perfect electional chart this month or a very good one, but the chart that I do have is set for March 5th, 2025, at about 10:30 AM local time with Gemini rising.
So when you do that, when you cast a chart for that, cast it for 10:30 AM in whatever your city is, and you should roughly end up with a chart that has Gemini rising. And you wanna adjust the Ascendant until it’s at around 12 degrees of Gemini, and if you do that, you’ll put Jupiter right on the degree of the Ascendant.
So this chart features Jupiter rising in the first whole sign house in a day chart, putting the most positive planet right on the degree of the Ascendant. The Moon in this chart has just moved into Gemini where it’s applying to a conjunction somewhat widely – about 10 degrees away – with Jupiter, but still within the 13 degree orb of the Moon. So we’ve got a nice Moon-Jupiter conjunction that’s forming at the time of this electional chart. We do have Venus is already retrograde, but Mercury is still moving direct; this is a little bit about a week before Mercury has stationed retrograde, and it’s applying to a conjunction with Venus as well as widely that sextile with Jupiter, which it will not complete but it’ll still get pretty close to. And this is basically the best I can find in order to slip something in before the actual Mercury retrograde takes place when we still have a little bit of auspiciousness going on in terms of that Moon-Jupiter conjunction and before the intenseness of eclipse season really sets in shortly after this point. Once you get within about a week of the first eclipse, things are gonna start moving very fast and becoming very intense in terms of some of the great beginnings and great endings that start taking place at that time.
So this is the electional chart I would recommend for the month. What do you think, Austin? Are you gonna squeeze your stuff in early in the month rather than later as well?
AC: Yeah, I’d actually picked this out the other day —
CB: Oh great.
AC: Somebody asked me when, “Ah, I gotta do a thing soon; when should I do it?” And this is what I picked.
CB: Nice. All right. Well, that always makes me feel good when we end up with the same charts as we often do. Yeah. So if people are looking for longer term electional charts for later in the year, then they can still get ahold of my year ahead electional astrology report for 2025, which contains the single best date for each of the next 12 months over the course of 2025. And then Leisa Schaim and I are also about to record our monthly electional astrology podcast for patrons of The Astrology Podcast in order to talk about other dates in March in order to especially if you have to do something during some of the craziness of March when you should try to do it for optimal results. So you can do a search for that at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast to get access to that electional report that we’ll be releasing in the next few days.
All right, so that’s the best election of the month. And now we move into the thick of things where things start getting crazy, basically. After the first week of March, we start moving into eclipse season. Because one of the things I established a year ago when I did a series of episodes on eclipses is what we found is that eclipse season really begins about a week before the first of a set of eclipses, or the first of a pair of eclipses. And by that basic metric, our first eclipse occurs – it’s a lunar eclipse in the sign of Virgo on March 14th. So that basically puts things around March 7th or so; we’re gonna enter into that like, shadow that falls over things where all of a sudden, the pace of events is going to increase. We’re gonna start seeing some major, major stories in the news as we always do during eclipse season. One of the things we see is like, the sudden rise and fall of different prominent figures starts taking place, as well as just a series of major beginnings and major endings in different people’s personal lives based on where this eclipse is falling in your chart.
How are you feeling about this first Virgo eclipse, Austin?
AC: I think I have moved past dreading it.
CB: Past dreading it? To the acceptance phase.
AC: Yeah, well, this is my nodal opposition.
CB: Okay.
AC: Austin has the nodes in Pisces and Virgo, and one malefic on each! And you know, born between eclipses, so the eclipse seasons… Virgo-Pisces eclipses are always dramatic, both at the time and in retrospect. Not always bad. So this one, which is like, night of the 13th/14th, like, calendar date 14th in most places but most people experience it as the night of the 13th. It’s our first eclipse in Virgo, and we are going to have a number of those. This is a lunar eclipse, and it’s on the South Node, and… A lot to talk about. It’s worth noting that so with the South Node, a lot of times what you get is sudden disappearances or sort of a collapse, or there’s just nothing – there’s no energy in that area, or people stop doing things. I was telling you, Chris, I’ve experienced this already just since the South Node’s ingress into Virgo. I quit a habit that I’ve had for 18 years, almost on a whim. I stopped chewing tobacco. And had a number of things where it was just easy to let go of things, and that’s the positive side of the tail of the dragon or Ketu or the South Node is that letting go of things or things disappearing. Unfortunately, that movement from something to nothing can also be really destructive. Right? The one good example that’s scheduled for that time that you found was the potential for a government shutdown because if the money is not approved, then the money’s just not there to pay people. And that’s just as much the tail of the dragon as like, quitting a bad habit, right? But it’s that same energy of like, oh, we did this every day for 18 years and now it’s just gone. Right? Or like, well, of course you go to work and then you get paid for it, right? And then it’s just gone. And so that’s the energy.
And again, the nodes moved at the end of – mean nodes, end of January. The nodes moved in January, so we’ve been like, getting some of this, but the way that the nodes work is that the changes that they’re going to bring occur – like, they’re gathering and they’re sort of latent until they’re usually triggered by the eclipses where what’s invisible becomes totally visible. Right? Just like the nodes are not things you can see in the sky, right? You can’t land on a node, and you can’t use a telescope to look at a node. And yet, they’re responsible for the most visually dramatic thing that happens in the sky. Right? Which is eclipsing of the Sun and the Moon. And so it’s usually things that are at that shadow half-conscious sort of threshold of awareness that then suddenly become, you know, replace or overshadow the Sun or the Moon for this period of time, which is surprising.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. The fact that a new federal budget has to be passed by March 14th as the deadline and that that perfectly coincides with not just the eclipse, but also the Mercury stationing retrograde at the same that starts the next day, and the fact that this eclipse is ruled by Mercury because it’s in Virgo, and then Mercury’s going retrograde, just does not bode well for, you know, this being like, a calm period in which everything is just like, settled in a very orderly and calm fashion. It sounds like it’s gonna be pretty chaotic and, yeah, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know how to… It’s hard to plan for when you know that the waves are gonna be really rocky during the course of like, this entire month with huge shifts and changes taking place. And the thing about this eclipse is that we had the first – this is the second shoe to drop in a series of eclipses that’s gonna be bouncing back and forth between Pisces and Virgo for the next two years, all the way until early 2027, I believe, is the last time that we’re gonna have a Virgo eclipse in this series. So it’s opening up a whole series of changes that are gonna be taking place in our life in the Pisces and Virgo axis of our charts, and we already got an early preview of that last September when we had the first eclipse in Pisces. But now, we really get the other shoe dropping at the other end of things, which is in the Virgo sector of our chart. And the fact that this is the first eclipse that we’ve had in Virgo in many years means that this is gonna be experienced as something new and something different and opening up a sequence of events that represents a new chapter in our life in some respect.
AC: Yeah. It’s good to lay that out. This is the first of the Virgo eclipses. And this Virgo-Pisces series runs longer than most eclipse series. It’s not a neat year and a half. It kind of started early, and it ends a little bit late.
CB: Right. Yeah. It does end up being like, super long as a result of that; I was shocked to see it lasting all the way through early 2027.
So looking at the charts, there’s two things that are clear that it’s activating, because we always look at like, what are the closest aspects to the degree of the eclipse. And one of the things I’m seeing is that it’s really on the one hand emphasizing the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is already emphasized with the Pisces eclipse, but is getting re-emphasized here where the eclipse goes exact at 23 degrees of Virgo. So that means the Sun and Moon are just barely separating from Saturn, which is at 22 degrees of Pisces at the time of the eclipse, and then it means the Moon is heading towards an opposition and the Sun is headed towards a conjunction with Neptune. So for me, one of the things this eclipse is doing is it’s really highlight that Saturn-Neptune which is moving close, like, really fast at this point and getting —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — ready to come within a degree this summer. There’s something that’s kind of like, bubble popping to me about that, and that’s one of my keywords for this eclipse as well as the unfolding of the Saturn-Neptune over the course of the next few months is gonna be some bubbles bursting in different areas of society or different areas of people’s personal lives. So that’s one aspect of this eclipse, and the other aspect is that it’s very closely trining Uranus. And that’s actually the next aspect that the Moon makes after it completes the opposition with the Sun. So that’s a little bit more positive because it has a somewhat like, flowing innovative energy that can be somewhat liberating, although unexpected and somewhat disruptive. But at least for some people, that’s somewhat positive. But I have a hard time with the bubble-popping part of the Saturn-Neptune end of things.
AC: Yeah. And sometimes letting go of something is profoundly liberating. Like, oh, I don’t have to do – like, I’ve been trying so hard to do X, Y, and Z – and if I just drop X, that’s okay. You know, like, lightening your load. Like, there’s surrender with South Node a lot of times – themes of surrender or sacrifice or letting go where there may be a loss, but the nothing – the emptiness which is actually space and time which is gained – is far more valuable than the thing we were trying so hard to hold onto. And thank you for bringing up the Saturn-Neptune, which are not only racing towards close conjunction, but also right on the North Node. Right? The dragon’s head. And so very intimately involved with these eclipses.
So I would use – as I’ve been thinking about it, bubble-popping I wouldn’t disagree with that. But the kind of images I’ve been getting are like, structural collapse. I was thinking of just like, a jello mold melting in the Sun, or a house of cards. You know, you see that with a lot of Saturn-Neptune stuff historically; you know, it’s like there’s a fortress, but instead of – and then the invading army comes, and as soon as the first cannonball strikes the walls, they all just fall down. And there’s like, no siege. There’s no prolonged anything. You would expect – you know, it looks like a Saturnian thing; it looks like a thing of walls. Like, walls and reinforcing structures. But it just kind of falls apart. And that like —
CB: Like the last one we had, what, 40 years ago – the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction was in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
AC: Right. Which was, you know, that’s not what anyone expected. People thought that was a castle wall; there might be a siege, et cetera. It just sort of fell apart. And worth noting that that one also coincided with the North Node for a while. And then we didn’t have one that was Saturn-Neptune North Node until just before the American Revolution. So this like, North Node-Saturn-Neptune alignment happened once in the 20th century, zero times in the 19th century, and then once in 1773 when it was in Virgo. And coincidentally, timed the Boston Tea Party revolt. But I don’t wanna get too caught up in that. But yeah, that like, collapse energy. And so, you know, like, the Soviet Union collapsing is a very dramatic example, and it’s probably useful to scale that back in some ways, especially if we’re just thinking about “What does this do in my life?” But, you know, it’s worth thinking about, like, what structures are fragile and that we put too much energy into trying to build up? But like, actually, it’d just be better to let it go and build somewhere else or do something else. Like their, you know, collapse is not a positive thing – like, things falling apart is not what we hope for – but being able to move on from a project that’s never going to work, right? That you’re just feeding, that’s just sucking you dry, is a positive thing. And you know, not to be lame, but I do think trying to find the silver lining is probably really helpful with the stuff we have coming over this next month or two, because there’s not a lot of like, “Here’s a beautiful new thing; here’s an exciting new opportunity.” there isn’t classic benefic action where there’s the introduction of a new good or the strengthening of an existing good. A lot of the goods that people experience would be, oh, something that was destroying me got destroyed. Right? The negation of a negative, which is at the end of the day when all the sums are tallied, just as positive in net effect, but through reverse method.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that’s a really common experience that people have that something comes to an end in a very definitive sense under eclipses, and sometimes that can be hard to let go of something. It’s like the end of one cycle, and you’re having to let go of things. Like, sometimes if it’s like, in the 10th house, it can be like, the end of a career that comes somewhat unexpectedly or suddenly, or the 7th house can be the end of a relationship or the 4th house could be the end of a living situation. But then oftentimes even though it sounds cliche, like, when eclipses close down one thing, sometimes it’s so it can open up that area for other opportunities that will come up later in that same eclipse cycle over the course of the next two years —
AC: Yeah.
CB: So —
AC: Sorry.
CB: So that’s why I often say they’re major beginnings as well as major endings.
AC: I like that you brought up that a disappearance or a collapse brought about by an eclipse cycle will often later be shown to have freed up energy and time and resources that can be invested in a project that the same eclipse cycle will show. You know, I see that very often, and you know, we have these paired functions of the North and South Nodes of, you know, creating – letting go and then holding on really tightly. The North Node, it’s the dragon’s mouth, and the mouth bites down on things and by eating things, we make them part of us, whereas with the tail, we look at letting go. We also have the back half of the animal lets go of things, right? Like, that’s no longer part of us; we’ve extracted all of the nutrition. It’s time to let that go. And so I very often see as transits the series of eclipses and the nodes in that pair of houses sort of re-distributing, rethinking how energy and time and resources are allocated. Right? Like, you have two hands. You can’t hold onto three different things with both hands. If you wanna hold on to something with both hands, that’s how you’ve invested your hands. Right? And if you’re trying to hold onto two things, one of them has to let go if you want to firmly grip the other. And so that kind of, yeah, redistribution of hands is very often really evident when you look back on a whole cycle of a year and a half, two years of eclipses in a pair of houses.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a great point in connection with the South Node being here and really coloring this one. So yeah, you know, standard eclipse keywords to reiterate from past episodes because they’ll be relevant again here, but as I said, major beginnings and major endings. The end of one cycle and the beginning of another. The death of the old, and the birth of the new. Sometimes during eclipse season, like, we very commonly see like, the downfall of some public figure as well as in other instances a lesser known figure being catapulted into the spotlight. And then finally in our personal lives, oftentimes something new begins or you start doing something new that you don’t realize how significant it’s gonna be in your life because you can only see that in the long term. On a long term timeline, you realize what you started under the eclipse ended up being a major new chapter of your life that grows and snowballs into something significant or something life-changing in some instances, but usually it has very humble origins or starts very subtly you so may not recognize the significance of it at first.
AC: Yeah. And part of that – and this is part of the sort of language of shadow that the nodes speak – is that often the new thing that’s begun starts as just being pulled in a direction. Right? And a pull is not necessarily something you can see. It’s like, it’s almost tidal where there’s something about it. You just kind of feel pulled in a direction. And you know, this is that like, latent or beneath the visual… Beneath the spectrum of what can be seen clearly where you’re just kind of, you’re just pulled in a direction, and there’s something there, but you often don’t see what it is until later. And the same thing with being pulled away from something. Just like, you find your fingers like, slackening; you’re just not holding on to something as tightly as you were for reasons you will discover later. But again, it doesn’t begin as like, nodal stuff doesn’t begin with a fully formed thought that then is put into action. It begins with pushes and pulls that are later understood better.
CB: Yeah. So this first eclipse is very important because it’s a new eclipse that represents a new beginning or some new phase with Virgo being activated and everyone just thinking about what house that’s falling in their chart, and that being an area of major beginnings and major endings. But it’s one that will unfold over the course of the next two years. And then this is the start of eclipse season, but then it’s just the start, because this is the beginning of a two-week period where we’ve really found over the past two years that it’s this period in between a pair of eclipses that represents the most intense phase of eclipse season. And so that’s gonna be the two-week period starting with this first eclipse that occurs in Virgo on the 14th, and then going for two weeks until we get our second eclipse of the month, which is the eclipse that will occur in Aries at the very end of March.
AC: Yeah, and in that two weeks, right, it’s a very important two weeks. We get the Aries ingress, right? We get the Sun moving from the last sign back into the first sign; that is a moment that’s been used for, I don’t know, at least 1,500 years to predict the nature of a year, the year to come. And so we have that like, that genesis point, which is also of course the seasonal change – the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and fall in the south. But that very important moment happens in these shadowy weeks in the dragon tunnel between the two eclipses. And then we also have Venus’s union with the Sun, the Venus cazimi, in that same pair of weeks. And —
CB: Absolutely, yeah.
AC: — we get Mercury’s conjunction with the Sun. So all these like, for lack of a better term, very important meetings between – scheduled meetings between – the Sun and these planets, all of this happens during these like, shadow weeks.
CB: Yeah. And because that’s the halfway, the conjunction with the Sun or the cazimi that both Venus and Mercury make is the halfway point through their retrograde cycle, and is also usually the turning point where there starts to be a glimmer of hope or a glimmer of the resolution of whatever the issue that was set up at the beginning of the retrogrades of Venus and Mercury, those are gonna be super crucial turning points that occur right in the middle of the two eclipses with Venus’s cazimi happening on the 22nd and Mercury’s cazimi happening on the 24th. So within those, you know, pay attention to those days, because whatever possibilities arise at that point, especially if it looks like a glimmer of hope, will probably become more important and stronger themes over the course of the next couple of weeks after that.
AC: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Just following the theme of things being obscured or absent, right, between these two eclipses – eclipses both being phenomenons where the light of the Sun and Moon are notably obscured, there will be no Venus nor Mercury rising in the sky. You know? There’ll be two less visible planets than normal. They too will be obscured for the entirety of those two weeks.
CB: Right. That’s a really good point.
AC: Yeah, like a weird song of absence.
CB: Yeah. And that conjunction is where they change signs and then begin heading towards their process of emergence again, but they’re still basically at the very bottom of a cave at that point, and they can see the opening and the light at the end of the tunnel. But there’s still a long way to go before they get out.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So one of the things that Venus and Mercury do later in the month is they both retrograde back into Pisces, and when they do that, both of them are gonna first conjoin Neptune, which is in the final degrees of Pisces getting ready to move into Aries. And then both of them are also gonna station direct in late Pisces conjunct Saturn. So that’s part of the shift that happens late in the month is this weird exchange of planets moving between Aries and Pisces with the two inner planets moving from Aries back into Pisces to station there, and then Neptune and the Sun, of course, moving into Aries at the end of the month.
AC: Yeah, and you know, worth pointing out again that both Venus and Mercury are going back to and will reappear next to that Saturn-Neptune conjunction and then with the dragon’s head, right? And so, you know, like, the point of moving forward is, you know, what’s suggested is it’s accepting the Saturn-Neptune stuff which may be like, that certain things have fallen apart or are falling apart, and that’s where we need to move forward from rather than something else entirely. Right? Like, you know, the Venus and Mercury both further emphasize the Saturn-Neptune-North Node dynamic rather than doing something different. Like, it’s, yeah. There’s, you know, as we’ve talked about, there’s a profound overlap of all of our big stories this month. You know, it could be that we had a Venus retrograde and a Mercury retrograde and a Saturn-Neptune thing and all that, but they were in different places, whereas all of our big stories – like, everything is intersecting and reinforcing each other. There’s like, a huge confluence between all of these things all happening in the same space and at the same time. So there are gonna be so many intersections and synergies to what’s happening. It’s not three big things that are happening but are all different; it’s like, five things that are kind of all the same big thing, but kind of five different things.
CB: Yeah, absolutely, and they’re all interconnected.
AC: Yeah. Interwoven —
CB: It’s tricky —
AC: — is probably the right word.
CB: Interwoven.
AC: Sorry. I was correcting myself, not you.
CB: That’s a good word. I’m struggling a little bit where Venus returns to the sign of her exaltation, and there’s something that’s almost positive about that about Venus being lifted up and almost like, put back in her throne or Venus in the sign of exaltation is like, achieving a sign of royalty or prominence. But she’s in a prominent place despite also being conjunct Saturn and being weighed down by the impact of like, time or age or health matters or something like that, while also having this conjunction with Neptune which is making the picture not very clear and sometimes giving an overly idealistic slant to things, especially in terms of relationships. Venus is really stuck in between those two contrasting energies of Saturn and its tendency towards realism or coldness versus Neptune and its tendency towards idealization and a lack of clarity. And then on top of this, Mercury has retrograded back into Pisces where it’s stationing there, but it’s going into a much more fallen state of —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — both debility in terms of zodiacal placement, being in Pisces in the sign of its fall or depression, but also just that conjunction with Saturn, which is often something that hampers communication. It can make communication more serious or more critical. But then Neptune is giving the opposite. Like, Neptune is like, communication that’s deceptive or that’s not clear or is overly rosy for some reason that’s usually not accurate. So it’s weird that Venus is like, doing better to some extent and there’s like, a reassertion perhaps even of the Venusian principle of maybe things like women or something like that, but Mercury and its ability to communicate clearly is being severely hampered here.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, it’s used that idea of the exaltation as the throne. Like, Venus returns from the underworld to the throne to find the castle in which it stood fallen to ruin, right? Like, there’s like this Neptune-Saturn-Rahu thing is not helpful at all. And so it – there is sort of a like, well, there’s a very sort of melancholic quality to Venus’s time back in Pisces, because Venus is very powerful there, and you can be very powerful, but in a – you can, you know, make the best decisions and have the greatest deftness of skill and power, but in a situation that has been to which ruin has come. Right? It’s like, well, what do I do about this? And it’s maybe the collapse of a story. Right? Like, in the ruins of a story that you thought was true about your life or about the world and that seems, you know, that hangs now in tatters. And yet – yet – you’re not over, and the world isn’t over, and you can move forward from a powerful point. Right? Like, with power, but from a ruined place.
CB: Definitely. There’s something about this retrograde and the fact that both Venus and Mercury are returning back to a spot in each of our personal charts that they were transiting in January and February that makes me think that there’s some things that happened in some of our lives in January and February that we thought were over that we have to return back to or revisit for some reason. And that’s gonna be part of the process of especially late March when Mercury and Venus return back to Pisces as well as early April where they station direct and then eventually move out of that sign again.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right —
AC: Yeah, there’s a lot to be seen here. Because again, there’s great drama in like, in Venus’s eventually direct station and time back in Pisces. But then there’s more to come. Right? Like, that’s not the end of the cycle. But it is a very pointed and sort of melancholic, dramatic point in that cycle.
CB: Absolutely. We need to talk about the culmination and arguably potentially the most important event of the month, which is the solar eclipse that occurs in Aries at the very end of March on the 29th of the month. And this is the big one. Like, this is a pretty notable eclipse that we’ve been looking forward to and has been on my radar for quite a while, because every other eclipse in this series over the past year or year and a half has coincided with major geopolitical events in the world especially. And the one that has made me the most nervous is that a year ago, when Iran and Israel started shooting missiles at each other for the first time with the first direct missiles shot at each other, that was under the eclipse season that was occurring in Aries a year ago. And then six months after that, when they started again openly shooting missiles at each other again, that was during the next eclipse series. So one of the things we talked about in the year ahead forecast is anticipating some sort of continuation or potentially even an escalation of that conflict that occurs around the time of this eclipse. So that’s one of the major things that I wanted to talk about right from the start just because that’s been such a reliable thing over the past year or two.
AC: Yeah, no, it’s definitely worrying. And you know, after some of those events and in addition to the missiles flying, we also had a lot of the senior leadership in Iran die in a plane crash. There have been assassinations. And this cycle of eclipses in Aries and Libra – which this is the culmination of, this is the final episode of this – is historically correlated very strongly not only with wars for Israel, but also assassinations in general. Like, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed under this nodal cycle, and we’ve seen a lot of assassinations and other decapitations where an organization becomes leaderless – not necessarily through a physical decapitation, although that seems not off the menu for this cycle. So yeah, if we’re talking about big endings or big finales to a series, here we are. This one so far has proved quite violent. And you and I are both quite concerned that more is to come.
CB: Yeah. And even just sometimes the mysterious like, disappearance of like, a head of state or people in a leadership role. And when some of this was happening last year, we were theorizing about it and the fact that you could kind of approach that in two different angles in terms of the symbolism where on the one hand, it’s Aries, which in the body parts assigned to different signs of the zodiac, Aries is always the head. So it’s like, the head or literally like the leader of something. But then on the other hand, Aries is also the sign of the exaltation of the Sun, so the Sun – which represents like, the centralized authority figure – being in the sign of its throne or being raised up to its most prominent point. But then suddenly when you have eclipses there, suddenly you have the disappearance of something, of that leadership person, or the extinguishing of a light that’s otherwise leading. And sometimes that can happen very dramatically and as you said violently in the case with the leader of Iran last year. And I think that happened when like, Mars was on the node or something like that. But then you also had last year with the eclipses, like, Biden for example stepping aside during the presidential race was historic. And one of the things that we noted was that the last time that that had happened was in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson stepped aside similarly and didn’t seek re-election, which was also solar eclipses happening in Aries. So sometimes this notion of like, a leader disappearing or stepping down more broadly is also very relevant.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s see, what else is there to say? Yeah, this is the – so this sequence began – when was our very first eclipse on the Libra-Aries axis? It’s been at least —
CB: I mean, that was —
AC: — a year and a half.
CB: That was October 7th.
AC: Was that the very first one?
CB: That was Libra – I think that was the first solar eclipse in Libra happened like a week – it started a week after October 7th when everything just went crazy between Iran and Palestine – or between Israel and Palestine.
AC: Yeah, you’re right, because that was – the one was in Taurus, so we were finished up the Scorpio-Taurus series. Right. So —
CB: Right.
AC: — October of 2023 is when the Libra-Aries sequence began.
CB: Yeah. So then that also means that Aries didn’t begin in full until the first solar eclipse in Aries which occurred one year ago in the spring of 2024, and that was the one that I really took note of, because that was the first time that Iran launched missiles directly at Israel. That up to that point, a lot of it had been done through proxy wars and like, idirect and covert stuff like that. But then all of a sudden for the first time, the news was pointing out that this was the first time that they had openly shot missiles at each other. And even though it was done partially for show and not much damage happened either time, symbolically we still took great note of that because we knew it was happening under eclipses, and that sometimes when stuff happens under eclipses, it’s things that look small at first, but you look back and realize the significance in retrospect, that it was a much more momentous beginning than you realized at the time.
AC: Yeah. And I think a flight of missiles is not that subtle. But yeah, and you know, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know, some time last year in thinking about this I went and looked at the Aries ingress chart. What does the chart look like for Iran at the moment of the equinox, which is again used historically to predict events. And Mars is conjunct the degree of the rising in Iran’s Aries ingress, which is a strong predictor of intensified hostilities if not outright war. There was one other year where Iran had Mars conjunct the Ascendant in the Aries ingress chart since the revolution, and that was the year that Iraq invaded Iran and began destructive and bloody war. So —
CB: Wow.
AC: — there are lot of – yeah. And if you look at the chart for post-revolution Iran, then you also have an Aries Sun. Right? Which of course overlaps with the area where these eclipses have happened. And the rising is Leo, which is ruled by the Sun, which makes sense of the like, chunk of leadership dying shortly after the last eclipse last year as well as the, you know, the other issues. So very, a lot of fingers pointing to Iran during this period.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And so we’ve been talking about that and talking about the potential for a major geopolitical event to happen around this time, especially around these two eclipses for a while now. And of course, the last eclipse that occurred in Pisces in September – that was like, to the day that Israel exploded the pagers that everyone was carrying in Lebanon. So the other half of this could also bring something up with Israel and Lebanon again, and then of course because this eclipse series goes back to October of 2023, may bring in all of the events surrounding Palestine as well to whatever the next phase of that is in terms of these eclipses and in terms of what’s happening with the US and Israel and Palestine and whatever they’re gonna do.
AC: Yeah. And —
CB: So —
AC: Probably also some other crazy shit in other regions. This is —
CB: Right.
AC: — the one where I’m most aware of the astrology, but this is, you know, this is a storm. And things will look meaningfully different in several parts of the world after this clears.
CB: Yeah. Because the problem is it’s also overlapping with the Venus retrograde, and we know this particular Venus retrograde has always been important in the history of Russia going back more than a century. So it’s like, important developments happening taking place there. I was trying to look back at history for some clues about this, and remember last year we saw so many parallels with 1968 and 2024, especially in terms of the presidential election. So one of the things I was talking to our friend Nick Dagan Best about is I was like, well, what was happening then – if that parallel continues partially due to Venus and due to the eclipse series, then what was happening in early 1969? And Nick said that well, that was the beginning of Nixon’s administration, and one of the things that he did is he secretly bombed Cambodia, but it didn’t come out until later on. So in terms of looking for historical parallels, like, that was one. And then, of course, the one that makes me really nervous that I talked about earlier is this is also this year – 2025 – with the repeating Venus retrogrades and Mars retrograde in Cancer, some of the parallels are 1993, which was when the Waco siege happened at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term. It’s a repetition of 1961, the beginning of 1961, which coincided with another sort of military fiasco, which was the Bay of Pigs —
AC: Bay of Pigs, yeah.
CB: — invasion. And then it’s also a repetition of 1929, which I was looking at that, and the financial market collapse happened later that year in October. So the parallel would be later in October this year if there was any sort of repetition, but one thing I didn’t know is that there were early warning signs where in March and May of 1929, the stock market had a major correction and took a major dip and started to destabilize, and that was an early warning sign of the larger crash that would occur later in 1929. So I’ll be paying especially close attention to possibilities of like, a geopolitical event that further throws things off with the economy or something like that as a potential scenario that I’m paying attention to.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, in many ways it sort of ushers us into this period of history that we’re going to be in for a while. Like, it’s a lot of the things that people have taken for granted will not be there. You know, we are – I think it’s not at all crazy to say that we are moving into over the next eight years the greatest, the most significant rearrangement of the geopolitical situation that we’ve seen since World War Two, and that we will also see equally significant rearrangement on an internal level in a lot of the major regions and biggest countries in the world. And it’s not all going to happen all at once, but it’s gonna take a lot of the next I think eight years is not a bad time frame to sort of include it. But you know, we’re entering that. We get the Uranus in Gemini period very soon. We’re getting the Neptune piece by the end of the month. We’ve already got the Pluto piece – like, you know, this is what the foyer looks like.
CB: Absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned the Neptune piece, because that’s closely tied in with this eclipse in Aries where we have the eclipse in Aries which occurs on the 29th. And then literally the very next day on March 30th, Neptune moves into Aries for the first time and begins the first preview of what’s gonna be a transit that’s gonna last all the way through like, the next something like 15 years – through the late 2030s, right?
AC: Yeah. I think it’s about 14. But yeah, 14, 15. And we talked at length about Neptune in Aries on the yearly. I think we probably did a half an hour just on Neptune. And so I’d strongly encourage people to go review that, because we’re going to talk about it now, but we’re not gonna do another half an hour just on Neptune. At least I don’t —
CB: Right.
AC: — think we are. But it’s very significant. Neptune only changes signs every 14-ish years, and you know, and when it does so, it creates a massive background shift that is sometimes easily discernible, but is sometimes only clear in retrospect. You know, it’s almost like the quality of the collective fantasy or dream or story that everyone’s telling themselves about what is happening. Right? And you could say, well, the actual events are far more important than the story – but as the story changes, the way people think about it and tell the story changes, it starts shaping events tremendously powerfully. And of course, a Neptune sign change is not just a new dream emerges; it’s also an old dream dies. And that narrative collapse or collapse of like, the bursting of the bubble of a particular dream is really triple down on by these configurations. Because it’s not just that Neptune is leaving Pisces. It’s that we have Neptune-Saturn, Saturn which brings an end, and then we also have Neptune’s configuration with the eclipse point – the North Node – right? Yeah, and so it’s… Yeah, it’s the end/beginning of an era. And Neptune in Aries historically has had some heroic but also very violent dreams.
CB: Yeah, we talked about in the year ahead forecast how the Civil War broke out in the United States like, the day that Neptune moved into Aries for the first time in the middle of the 1800s, or how there was this other huge civil war happening in China that reached its most bloody phase around Neptune in Aries in the 1800s. You know, in the year ahead forecast when we were talking about this, what I saw was that eclipse happening in Aries at the end of March, and then immediately Neptune going into Aries and then two months later Saturn goes into Aires. And I was trying to describe it as like, a cascade effect or a chain reaction where it’s like, the eclipse almost seemed like it would coincide with some geopolitical event, but then it would cause these huge ripples and shifts over the course of the next few months. And you came up with a great analogy of how there can sometimes be like, an earthquake but then it can cause a tsunami that has like, aftereffects, and I thought that was a brilliant analogy.
AC: Thank you. Yeah, yesterday I was trying to summarize all of this stuff in my head. I was like, okay, so what would I just tell somebody? Like, what’s it like? What’s like, a simple image instead of going on and on about planetary cycles? And I was like, “It’s a storm. No, it’s not just a storm – it’s an earthquake and a storm. It’s a storm-quake!” And I was like, “Oh, maybe it’s a tsunami where like, you have one event, which is the earthquake which then sets the giant wave in motion.” And then, you know, if we’re thinking of for example the Fukushima disaster, right, you have earthquake which sets tidal wave in motion, which then wrecks structure of nuclear power plant which then causes leakage. Right? Where it wasn’t, it’s not just, oh there was an earthquake, or like, oh, there’s a wave, or oh, there was a meltdown, or you know, radioactive leakage. Like, that domino quality.
And I did like tidal wave or tsunami just because it gives us Pisces symbolism, right? Like, we have a lot of difficult stuff going on in a sign usually very accurately described using oceanic imagery. And there’s something sort of invincible and inarguable about like, the advancing wall of water that seems to resonate with some of these like, the historic shifts that are coming. Right? Like, you can’t argue with massive changes to the geopolitical balance and order of the world, right? Like, you can’t be like, well, I’m gonna vote against that. Right? Like, you know what I mean? It’s just so big. You can just – I don’t know, I’m just imagine that moment staring at the wall. And it doesn’t destroy everything, but it changes things in a way that you have to rethink about how to build and where to build. Yeah. Anyway.
CB: Yeah. So what we’re looking at in March is the earthquake, though – like, the initial event, I think, that shakes things up. Probably especially a major geopolitical event in one area, but honestly, we’re probably talking about at least two different major parts of the world having significant geopolitical shakeups that —
AC: In a way that probably intersect.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Anyway. I don’t mean to – go ahead.
CB: But then part of the wave that it creates afterwards is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction which Neptune goes into Aries on March 30th, but then Saturn goes into Aries on March 24th, and then the two of them start forming this extremely close alignment in early Aries over the summer where they come within a degree of each other. And they don’t —
AC: And just —
CB: — go exact.
AC: But they hang out so close —
CB: They’re so close —
AC: — all summer.
CB: — and they’re in the sign in Aries that had just been activated by the eclipse and just been activated by the Venus retrograde in Aries and just been activated by the Mercury retrograde in Aries. So for each of us, even personally, it’s retreading ground that had already been tread a lot with a lot of major beginnings and endings and revisions in the recent past. But then all of a sudden, you have this huge new energy that comes sweeping in like a sort of tidal wave this summer. But then the conjunction doesn’t go exact and then it recedes later this year, and then it comes back with a vengeance in early 2026 when that conjunction goes exact, especially in like, January and February.
AC: Yeah. Even though they spend so much time so close, there is just one exact conjunction, which is about a year away.
CB: Yeah. So this graphic I meant to say actually for those watching the video version was – Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co just made it for me last night to help visualize, because I needed something to really visualize this wave and how close it gets and how it recedes and then comes back. And I thought that was just a really brilliant illustration of that just to show the intensity of the Saturn-Neptune wave that’s coming in this summer, but that really begins at the end of March when Neptune goes into Aries just after the solar eclipse.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a nice illustration, and we have just that one perfect point.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But there’s so much conjunction, right? Like, we have that thick, ample-bodied curve leading up to that over the summer.
CB: Absolutely. So one of the things, though, is with the Aries eclipse, because it’s the last eclipse in Aries, some of that energy isn’t completely new. It’s probably a series of changes and beginnings and endings that we’ve been experiencing in the Aries sector of our chart coming to some sort of culmination at this point in late March. So in terms of just trying to personalize it, just paying attention to what house is that falling in your chart, and what topics have come up the last two times that we’ve seen eclipses in Aries, which is, you know, last fall around September and October of 2024, and then especially last spring in like, March, April of 2024 when we had the first full set of eclipses in Libra and Aries.
AC: Yep. It’s the last installment.
CB: Yeah. So it’s an ending but also a new beginning. Unfortunately for you and me, what’s funny about the timing is because that happens at the very end of next month, by the time we have to record the next forecast episode, it’s gonna have to be right around that time, potentially before it happens. So we will have seen the impact of the first eclipse and whatever crazy events that will be unleashed when eclipse season begins around the first week of March and especially the second week of March. But we’re gonna be like, right in the thick of it by the time we have to record the next forecast episode next month for April.
AC: Indeed. Indeed.
CB: Yeah. So that’s gonna be a bit of cliffhanger, but hopefully some of the events will have started to constellate well enough and we will have seen, you know, most of the Venus retrograde and the Mercury retrograde and the first eclipse, so I think we’ll be in a lot better position to understand the trend and the direction that things are going —
AC: Oh, I think they’ll be – oh sorry, go ahead.
CB: — as we head into that solar eclipse in Aries.
AC: Yeah, I think there’ll be plenty to talk about. I don’t think we’ll be waiting for events to occur where we’ll be like, oh, well, I guess it hasn’t happened yet!
CB: Right.
AC: Right? There’s gonna be plenty, plenty.
CB: Or like that it was a slow news month or something like that.
AC: Yeah. Yes, exactly! I’m not concerned. I’m not concerned; I think it’s fine to part it out into different episodes. But yeah, Neptune in Aries for 14 years. It’s a new dream. Is it heroic, or is it stupid and violent? Right? Is it empowering? Is it brutal and chauvinist? Right? Like, Neptune goes either both ways with the symbolism of the signs, and the history gives us all of it. But you know, it’s very fiery and it’s very assertive. There’s a dream of competition and yeah, competition at its best; individual excellence – right? We see a lot of sports actually were invented during Neptune in Aries. But a lot of wars were fought. Last time was the Civil War. The one before that was the War of Spanish Succession – again, often called “World War Zero.” It’s not a particularly safe or peaceful dream.
CB: Yeah. The new defense secretary who got in just recently, Hegseth, he’s been making some statements about how we will “revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military” and how they’re going to emphasize the war fighters. And I keep hearing like, some of his like, phrases and things like that, and it keeps making me think of Neptune in Aries.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Perfectly on schedule.
CB: Right. Absolutely. All right, my friend. So that’s a little bit of a cliffhanger, but I think that’s good for March in terms of trying to get into the details and cover this as much as we can within the time that is allotted to us. But that was a lot of astrology to cover for March, but yeah – thanks for covering this with me.
AC: Yeah, thanks for doing the show, and you know, you put in so much work into these Mars and Venus cycles. I’m going to Bernie Sanders meme – like, “I’m asking you again to watch Chris and Nick’s deep breakdown and history of these Mars and Venus cycles.” It’s obviously a tremendous amount of work, and there’s so much of value there. I learned a lot.
CB: Yeah, and there’s a lot we found that’s relevant in talking about current events that I just didn’t wanna reiterate or recapitulate completely here, so people can check those out – both the Mars retrograde in Cancer that’s out now, as well as the Venus retrograde. I did mean to mention the day that we’re recording this. We recorded this today on February 25th, 2025, starting with Gemini rising here in Denver. But I just wanted to say that for the record, and then I’m gonna release this like, two days later. Events happen so quickly in the news these days that I think it’s really important to put a timestamp on things so it’s —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — clear when we recorded. What do you have coming up? What are you working on? What are you doing in March? Are you battening down the hatches, or what’s your March look like?
AC: Yeah. It looks like baby, writing, and teaching. While I’m doing that, you can visit my website. I’ve got recordings of lectures, classes, workshops on astrology, remediation, astrological magic. There’s also a list of graduates – the few, the proud – that have actually graduated from my three-year program. You can book readings with them; I strongly suggest it. So that’s what I in particular have going on.
Sphere and Sundry is – after a period where a lot of the classics, the favorites, were not available because everything got a facelift, everything got new bottles – starting this week, a lot of the classics will be available for purchase again after months of being off the shelves. So the Asclepius series is back up. After that, the Venus in Libra series is gonna be back up. The Regulus series is going back up, and then by the end of the month, the Jupiter in Pisces series. So big happy restock at Sphere and Sundry.
Also, the second decanic series that we did came out last month – the one for Capricorn three, AKA “the throne.” Should check that out. It’s excellent. If you need mastermind, superbrain moments, I highly recommend it.
CB: That sounds amazing. What are your websites for that?
AC: So it’s AustinCoppock.com and SphereAndSundry.com.
CB: Brilliant. All right. I’ll put a link to your website below the description for this video or on the podcast website for this episode so people can click it to go check out your offerings and all the cool stuff both you have and that Sphere and Sundry has. I’m excited about that sort of shift being finished so that some of those series are coming back.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, it’s nice; it took a lot of work, but it’s like, the new – all of the revisions that happened are unabashedly beautiful. You know, as I said in a previous episode, I don’t even like nice things, and I can see the difference. Like, wow, that really is beautiful. Every bottle has been individually painted and marked, and it’s really nice.
CB: Yeah. Well, I do like nice things, and I can tell you that that redesign was worth it, and it looks really beautiful. Yeah. So good job on that.
Let’s see, as for myself, I’m gonna keep working on the podcast. I’m thinking about doing a Neptune in Aries in history research episode because that’s one of the outer planet ones that we haven’t drilled into as much as we could have. So if people would be interested in me doing an episode like that, let me know in the comments. And if I have the energy, I’ll see if I can pull that off this month, although with doing Mars this month and doing Venus the previous month as huge research projects was kind of a big set of research things to do, so we’ll see how it goes.
I’m still working on the 5th house episode and researching that, but it’s coming along nicely. If, you know, current events in astrology can stop dragging me away from that to focus on researching other things. And then I released for patrons of The Astrology Podcast all the research notes I took as I was researching Mars in Cancer, and that contains a bunch of bonus material that didn’t make it into the Mars in Cancer episode and that also provides a nice outline that you can follow as you watch that episode. So I like doing things like that, because the patrons are the reason that I’m able to drop everything and do these huge research epds to study astrological history and then present that to everybody. So it’s nice to be able to give them some bonus content as a thank you for supporting my work through my page on Patreon. So if you’d like to get access to that as well as early access to any new episodes I do over the course of the next month, then go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast and sign up for my page.
All right. I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast, so thanks a lot, Austin, for joining me. I appreciate it.
AC: My pleasure.
CB: All right. And thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Good luck this month! We’ll see you again next month. But otherwise thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next time.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.