The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 483, titled:
Saturn-Neptune Conjunctions in History
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on March 25, 2025
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released April 10th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be talking about Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history. Hey Nick – thanks for joining me.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Thanks for having me, Chris. What a cheerful topic – I can’t wait.
CB: I know! I thought I wanted to open our cheerful topic with a cheerful opening, and yeah, we have just finished doing a two-week intensive research session going back and researching Saturn-Neptune conjunctions which occur approximately every 36 years. And we took it all the way back in 36-year increments and documented things that we found that happened in history, and we’re gonna talk about that today during the course of this episode. And part of the context is that we have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s forming this year where it’s gonna come within a degree, I think in July of 2025. And it won’t go exact, but then it’ll retrograde away and come back and go exact in early 2026 in February. So we did a research project in order to understand the current conjunction by looking back and seeing what previous conjunctions have coincided with, and I think we found a lot of things.
NDB: We sure did. And let us be clear – the Saturn-Neptune, they come very close together this year. I mean, they are zodiacal minutes apart. So yeah, it’s not a partile conjunction as we call it, but it is very close, so I still think 2025 is quite a Saturn-Neptune year as well 2026 will be one.
CB: Absolutely. Absolutely.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So for data, today we’re recording this on Thursday, March 20th, 2025, starting right at 11:05 AM in Denver, Colorado. Here is our little electional chart for starting today just to show the chart data. We were shooting for Jupiter on the Ascendant; we’re starting a little late, but still with Jupiter in the rising sign, which is excellent. And yeah —
NDB: First day of spring for you, first day of autumn for us.
CB: Yeah, in the southern hemisphere. And you can see that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Right now, Neptune’s at 29 degrees of Pisces and Saturn is at 23 Pisces, and they are headed very quickly towards a conjunction that, as you said, is gonna come very, very close this summer. So let me actually show a diagram of that which Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co made for us. And this shows the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 2025 and 2026 and just how close it gets by July within less than a degree, and then it goes back a bit later in the year and then it comes back and goes exact on February 20th of 2026.
So that’s what we’re looking at, and you know, this is important because these are two very slow-moving outer planets. Saturn has like, a 30-year cycle – 29.5 years – whereas Neptune has a much longer cycle, right?
NDB: Yeah. What is it? 160 something years? Something approximating that. I should know —
CB: Yeah —
NDB: — the exact number on hand, but something like that.
CB: 165 years. And that’s actually the other diagram I was just looking for that Madeline DeCotes made us as well, which is this lovely diagram that shows the Saturn cycle of 29.5 years and the Neptune cycle of 165 years and how as a result of that they’d meet up about every 36 years, give or take.
So we’re gonna be paying —
NDB: That’s a fantastic diagram. I just wanted to say that’s a fantastic diagram; I hadn’t seen that until just now.
CB: Yeah, Madeline actually literally just made it for us last night, so shout out to Madeline from Honeycomb.co that has amazing visualization graphics and other things you can download as well as their annual planners that have great astrology graphics as well.
All right. So this month I almost did a research project on Neptune in Aries because that’s the other thing that’s shifting this month is Neptune is about to go into Aries on I think the very last day of March. But I decided to focus on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions and do that as the research project for this month, because I think it’s more, it’s gonna speak more immediately to things that are happening right now over the next couple of years, both in terms of changes and geopolitical shifts especially that we’ve already seen happening recently and that are getting more intense and that will continue to over the next year or two. But also because Saturn-Neptune conjunctions are a little bit easier to study in history because they have that regular recurrence every 36 years. And with the orb, you get like, a two- or three-year time frame, sometimes longer, if it goes over into two signs and which you can study to see what events really stood out to you in history at those times.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. I mean, a Neptune in Aries episode would be great, but it would be an episode that had nothing from the 20th century, nothing from the 18th century, so on and so forth. There would be much larger gaps between the events in the timeline that we’re looking at. So yeah, this is a great one for us to really like, start in the present and go way, way back, but at these regular 36-year intervals. So it’s a lot more fulfilling in that way, I’d say.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So ironically there’s more to study because it’s shorter than like, you know, Neptune in Aries. However on the other hand, compared to some of our other previous research projects, we’re actually looking at much larger increments of time, because for example, in January we did Venus retrograde in Aries, which occurs every eight years. So we’re looking at eight year repetitions over the past couple of centuries. Then in February we did Mars retrograde in Cancer, which happens about every like, 15 to 17 years, so that was a longer term cycle, and we even got into some 79-year and 47-year repetitions with that. Now with this, we’ve got something that’s about 36 years or just, you know, almost every 40 years, so that’s a larger jump where there’s only three of these happening per century. So it gives you like, a much more interesting sort of time frame or time window to look at compared to what we’d been looking at before.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So in terms of there being three of these a century, I wanted to actually show a diagram for that, because I actually had one. Like, for example, the 20th century, just showing you that there’s been just three of these, where there was one conjunction that took place in the late 1980s, there was another conjunction that took place in the early 1950s, and then there was another conjunction that took place around 1917. So that just gives you about three of these conjunctions or three really distinct periods that last anywhere from about three years, if the conjunction just takes place in one sign, or sometimes it can extend to five or even six years potentially if the conjunction extends across two signs in terms of the sign-based conjunction.
So three really distinct three- to five-year periods to study in each century is still a relatively like, short span of time, and you can definitely see some distinctive things happening during those periods.
NDB: Oh yeah.
CB: Yeah. But in terms of like, you know, the Venus retrogrades – because you always talk about like, the percentage of time in which Venus is retrograde, and I don’t know what the percentage is here. But that at least gives you some idea that we’re not talking about like, huge swaths of time necessarily.
NDB: Right. We’re looking at like, roughly a fraction of one out of seven, you know. If you’re thinking three to five years out of 36, you’re somewhere in that range anyway, as opposed to Venus, which is, yeah, you know, it’s quite small. Like, a quarter of the cycle I guess, if you’re including my maximum elongation criteria.
CB: Sure.
NDB: But yeah, it’s quite small.
CB: All right. So in terms of our sequence today, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna spend the first part of this long episode – like, this is gonna be a workshop, this is a whole thing that we just spent two weeks studying intensely. We’ve written like, 130-page research notes document and outline which is gonna be available to patrons. But we’re gonna spend the day like, talking through our work and talking through our research and some of the highlights of it, so this is gonna be a long thing.
The way we’re gonna divide it is in the first – I think it’s gonna be about two-thirds of this episode, we’re gonna spend that going backwards chronologically through the most recent set of seven conjunctions, starting with the current one in 2025, then going back to 1989, and backwards in 36-year increments all the way until the 1770s where in 1773, there was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction right around the time of the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and the beginning of the United States, essentially. So there’s seven conjunctions in between prior to our current one in 2025 and 2026, and we’re gonna go through each of those in a really detailed fashion, talking through each one of them. And then once we complete that, we’re going to then go into another section, a smaller section, talk about recurring themes that we’ve noticed that have come up, which includes the eras we just covered but also extends further back into earlier centuries where we actually went back as far as actually like, 500 BCE. So we went as far back as about 2,500 years before now studying every conjunction in 36-year increments. And so instead of going through all of those in order, we’re just gonna jump around to some of the highlights in the later part of this episode.
NDB: Yeah. It’s a good structure.
CB: Yeah. Well, that is the one we chose. We will find out if it’s a good structure —
NDB: Fair enough.
CB: — as we go through this.
NDB: Sure.
CB: So some of the events that we discussed are gonna be obviously of the nature of Saturn and Neptune. And it’s gonna be like, obvious how it connects to those planetary significations. But in other instances, we’re gonna learn new things about this alignment that perhaps we didn’t know before or unexpected. And that’s gonna be okay as well. That was one of the things that was interesting as we did this research project, I think, for both of us, right?
NDB: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. All kinds of revelations. And “revelations” is a great keyword for Saturn-Neptune as well. They’re very often involved.
CB: Yeah. And we didn’t really have a lot to go off of in terms of precedent, because it’s like, Richard Tarnas didn’t really cover this extensively in his book Cosmos and Psyche that otherwise has very extensive treatments of most of the other outer planet alignments. But with Saturn and Neptune, he just has a very short sort of like, perfunctory chapter on it somewhere like, later on that has some interesting insights, but is not as extensive as other parts of the book where he researched more thoroughly.
NDB: It occurs to me I think Tarnas was born with a conjunction, so it’s an interesting omission, but there you go.
CB: Okay. And then later in our research, after we’d already done the bulk of it especially in terms of the last seven cycles, I actually remembered the work of Andre Barbault, and that he had done a lot of outer planet research. And I pulled out one of the only translations; I have like, maybe two translations of his works into English. And in one of them, he did outer planet cycles, and it turned out he had covered this, and ironically like, he had covered the same like, seven ones that we did, and he found most of the same highlights. So that was a little annoying, because like, we kind of like, reinvented the wheel by going back through all of that ourselves before I had realized another astrologer had established the outlines of some of that. But he didn’t really go into it with much detail. Like, it’s a very short treatment basically where he does mention the most important thing that happened on each conjunction, but a lot of his focus also was looking at the development of each cycle in between conjunctions when Saturn and Neptune would make subsequent aspects. And some of that got a little messy, because he gets into like, focusing a lot on minor aspects and things like that, so there wasn’t as much there that we were able to draw on. But it was interesting to see that there were others who, you know, had come to similar conclusions, at least in identifying some of the main points of some of the major conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, if anything, it’s kind of encouraging that, you know, separate from us – and we didn’t, yeah, we hadn’t looked at his work until we were close to being done ours. And so realizing that we’d sort of retread a lot of things that he had crossed already in some ways is encouraging. Yeah, it may be a bit frustrating that we possibly arguably wasted time, but at the same time, the fact that two independent studies would assemble ultimately largely the same collection of examples also just speaks to what is consistent in this kind of astrological research that two different investigators working at two different times would come up with very similar results.
CB: Right. Yeah. And some of it wasn’t like, mind-blowing, because it’s kind of obvious that like, the Soviet Union fell on the conjunction in 1989. World War One happened under the conjunction of, you know, 1917. So some of that’s pretty straightforward. But nonetheless, yeah, it was interesting to see that overlapping stuff. But other than that, it’s like, not a lot of astrologers have done this type of work looking at these conjunctions in history and going as far back as we did all the way back to 500 BCE. So we’re gonna create a new foundation here and tread a lot of new ground that I hope will create a foundation for future research and for other researchers.
All right. I did wanna give a shout out – speaking of researchers – to some of the different astrologers who contributed to this as research assistants. So most of the research I did for this episode, and then Nick did a ton of research for this episode. We also had some help from other astrologers, such as Orla Connolly at OCAstrology on Twitter. We also got help from Lindsey Turner, who’s at BadPaster.me on the internet. We had help from Sam Ogden at BrotherMoonHealing.com. And yeah, those three really helped us with some different pieces of this in different eras, so I wanted to give a shout out and a thank you to them. And we’ll mention some of them in particular when different research topics come up.
NDB: Yeah. Thank you to everyone.
CB: All right. So I’m gonna release an extensive written outline document, like I said, to accompany this episode to patrons of The Astrology Podcast through my page on Patreon, because it’s literally only through their sort of crowdfunding of this research that I was able to literally take like, two weeks of my life and devote it to like, studying this 24-seven to produce as much as I did. So I release those notes to them as a thank you for helping to essentially like, fund this research. So if you’d like to get access to that PDF, you can sign up at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast and find the entry for this episode, and you’ll find the PDF notes there.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s a substantial document. This document we used for this episode is like, over 170 pages long. So it’s, yeah. It’s epic.
CB: Yeah. It’s literally a book. And it’s something, you know, maybe we’ll turn into a book at some point in the future. But essentially what we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna do a workshop and present essentially a book on this topic, on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions.
All right. So let’s get started by first – we’ve already done this a little bit, but I just want to define the current era and talk about it briefly before we jump into our first historical period.
So our first is the current Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s happening in 2025 and 2026. So this conjunction is a little bit unique because it actually started in Pisces, but it goes exact in Aries. And the exact conjunction’s gonna take place on February 20th, 2026, at the first degree of Aries at zero 45 Aries. But as we said earlier, it’s gonna come within one degree by July of 2025, but doesn’t go exact.
So by orb, if we’re using a 15-degree orb, which is the orb that we’re gonna use consistently throughout this episode for the degree-based aspect as distinct from the sign-based aspect, it really first comes into orb in the first quarter of 2024 when it first moves into 15-degree range between those two planets. So basically, the first quarter, the first three months of 2024, this 15-degree range begins. And then it’s gonna peak around those two closest aspects in July of 2025 and February of 2026, and it’s gonna stay within a 15-degree orb until approximately quarter two of 2027. So those are gonna represent the most intense phase. And then finally, I’ve noticed that sign-based aspects, especially for conjunctions – like, a sign-based conjunction – that it already becomes operative when the two planets move into the same sign. So when you take that into account, Saturn first moved in Pisces and joined Neptune on March 7th of 2023. So that’s the beginning of functionally like, the conjunction between those two planets starts to build up at that point, and indeed that year we did start to see different world events start happening of a Saturn-Neptune nature. So that’s the opening of our range – March 7th, 2023 – and then they build up to the conjunction in Pisces, and then eventually conjoin exactly in Aries. And Saturn will not depart from Aries until April 13th of 2028, so that’s gonna be our final endpoint for this conjunction is when Saturn breaks the sign-based conjunction or otherwise known as a copresence with Neptune by departing and moving into Taurus while Neptune is left behind in Aries.
So overall, that gives us about a five-year time frame for this current conjunction from March of 2023 to April of 2028, with it becoming more intense the closer it gets to the exact degree-based aspects in July of 2025 and February of 2026. Does that make sense?
NDB: Yeah. It’s because this conjunction happens at like, the exact conjunction happens at the very beginning of a sign, this is why this one is a good five years long, because it does wind up spanning two signs. In some other instances, if the conjunction happens to happen somewhere in the middle of the sign, then the period will be shorter probably about three years, because it’s less likely that the two planets will be copresent in two different signs; they’ll just be copresent in one.
CB: Right. Like the 1989 conjunction only happened in Capricorn, so then —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — like, the sign-based one gets shortened to three years then. Although sometimes you do still have to pay attention to if the 15-degree orb becomes operative before the planets have moved into the same sign, then the conjunction already becomes operative at the 15-degree orb. So it’s just a matter of which ones comes first. But whichever one comes first or last, that’s when it becomes operative, whether it’s the degree-based orb of 15 degrees, or whether it’s the sign-based copresence.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So just wanted to make that clear from the outset in terms of outlining our methodology. And when we mention different events, it’s gonna typically be because that event falls within that range of either the sign-based conjunction or the degree-based conjunction with the 15-degree orb.
NDB: Yeah. And we’ll always specify that.
CB: For the most part. We might not always specify it, but —
NDB: We’ll try to be as clear as possible.
CB: Yeah. I just don’t wanna – because we have so many events to mention, like, we’ll mention sometimes, especially early on, but I know later we’re gonna start jumping and go through quickly because we’re literally talking about hundreds, possibly thousands of events. I’m not sure.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Any other preliminaries before we get started and jump into things?
NDB: No. Let’s do this!
CB: Okay. So with 2026, we’ve established some of the things. I’m thinking about just jumping into – I’m actually thinking about jumping into 1989 and just like, going straight into that instead of dwelling on current events since some of this is still like, ongoing and developing. And then maybe we’ll refer back to some of the current —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — events. What do you think?
NDB: Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s the best idea.
CB: Okay. If that’s the case, then what we’re gonna do – so we’ve, you know, we’ve established the current time frame and that we’re currently in the midst of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. We’ve been in the midst of one since 2023. So some of the themes that we’re gonna talk about are we’re gonna highlight because they’re already clearly operative and happening in our own time, whereas there’s gonna be other events that might be mentioned from the past that could be potential events but haven’t happened yet, and that’s gonna be like, one of the fun little, you know, things we get to find out over the next couple of years is like, which of the historical events are gonna manifest, you know, from the past? And we have some fun ones and some not-so-fun ones.
NDB: Yeah. Spoiler alert – bubonic plague.
CB: Right. Is that one of the fun ones, or not fun ones?
NDB: Well, depends who you are! Depends what —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — your kicks are, I suppose, yeah.
CB: Depends if you’re the bubonic plague. If you’re the plague, you’re having a great time.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So all right, let’s talk about 1989. So let me put up the infographic. This conjunction was unique because it was actually a triple conjunction in Capricorn between Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. So that does complicate things a little bit because we have the presence of Uranus there at the same time. But nonetheless, there are some important and distinctive themes about this conjunction that we will surprisingly find recur under earlier conjunctions as well.
So by degree, all three of the exact degree-based conjunctions – because there were three of them – so sometimes there’s just one conjunction, and other times there will be three. This one, we had three conjunctions, and they all took place in the same year all in 1989, with the first one on March 3rd of 1989 at 11 degrees of Capricorn. The second one on June 24th at 11 Capricorn. And the third and final exact conjunction on November 13th at 10 degrees of Capricorn.
So by orb, the range was quarter four of 1987 – it came within 15 degrees – all the way to quarter one of 1991. And here’s a little diagram that shows that and shows the build up and the fade away, starting in late ‘87 and going into early ‘91. This one is a little unique because in late 1991, Saturn stations in early Aquarius just 16 degrees from Neptune. So there is a little bit of an argument about whether the degree-based orb should actually extend all the way to late 1991, because it’s like, one degree outside of our standardized orb of 15 degrees. But for the most part, we’ll be focusing on this period from 1987 to 1991 as the primary range.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: By sign, it was a little bit more narrow, because the first Capricorn ingress took place February 13th of 1988 when Saturn first went into Capricorn and joined Neptune. And then Saturn departed from Capricorn for the final time on February 6th of 1991, breaking the sign-based copresence after Saturn went into Aquarius. So that defines our range, and these are some of the major events that we’re gonna talk about that happened during this period and that show up in the history books essentially during the course of this conjunction.
So the two biggest events and the two main ones, of course, that this time period is known for is one, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then two, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which dissolved at this time, ending the Soviet Union and then eventually from there the new country of Russia emerged as – initially at least – a democracy.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s huge. That was a huge turning point in history, right?
NDB: Absolutely. And the kind of thing that seemed impossible until the moment it was inevitable, you know? And in some ways, it was almost kind of an accident in some ways – very Saturn-Neptune. If you know the story of the Berlin Wall coming down, there were East Germans escaping through I think Austria into the West, and some local official was trying to like, stave off the rush, and they were interviewing him on TV and asking about like, you know, when the situation was gonna be sorted, and somehow he blurted out that, you know, people could cross right away. It was all very confusing. It wasn’t what he intended, but just like, sort of like, because of something he said on TV. I’m not getting all the details thoroughly covered, but it was sort of like, an official said something on TV that made everyone think that they were now allowed to cross over, and so this rush happened. And yeah. It would – until that very night, it seemed like something that was probably a pipe dream, and then it just happened so fast.
CB: Right. So it’s like, the Berlin Wall was that Germany was divided into two parts – into East and West Germany – since after World War Two when the Allies, like US and the UK, got one half and divided one half of Germany, and then the Soviet Union divided and got the other half of Germany after the two invading armies in World War Two that defeated Germany like, took over each half and then split it in two. And at one point, what was it, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Soviets started building a wall in order to make it so that people couldn’t leave.
NDB: They built it overnight, virtually overnight, in August of 1961 – I think pretty much the same week Obama was born. If I remember the date correctly, it’s August 13th, 1961. Because people were just crossing over before that, and you know, then they had guards and barbed wire. But then, yeah, one morning the wall was just there. So yeah. I mean, it sort of staved off this outflux of people from East Germany that they’d been trying to control by other means for the previous 16 years.
CB: Right. Because it was, you know, Saturn – which is a wall or like, a physical barrier that separates two things. But there was also like, an ideological component to it, because that literally divided like, the Communist Eastern bloc countries under the control of the Soviet Union versus the democratic like, Western countries like the US and UK and France and everywhere else essentially. So during the course of the 20th century, the Wall becomes like, this symbol also of the Cold War and of the ideological fights between like, socialism versus capitalism and all of these other things. And then all of a sudden virtually overnight in 1989, the wall just like, crumbles and disappears, and something that had previously both physically but also ideologically separated people became no more and just crumbled away. And then not long after that, you actually get a reunification of Germany where East and West Germany, which had been separate for so long and had developed over the decades in very separate especially like, economic trajectories all of a sudden were united once again into a single country.
NDB: Yeah. I had the privilege of visiting Berlin in the summer of 1991, which was a year and a half after the Wall came down. But East Germany still very much looked like East Germany – or East Berlin looked like East Berlin, and West Berlin looked like West Berlin. And it really was like two different worlds in one city; it was really astonishing. Even though you can take the local transit train from one end of the city to the other, the difference in the landscape at that point was really, really something else.
CB: Because of the like, economic depression on the eastern side?
NDB: Yeah, I mean, the way the buildings were built, the cars that people drove. You know, in East Berlin, people still had these sort of East German or Soviet cars, whereas in West Berlin, people were driving, you know, the same things that people were driving in France, England, the United States at the time. So yeah, it was just, it was a really stark difference between the two halves if you will.
I was there again in 2016, and you know, it has all sort of somewhat leveled out. But yeah, in ‘91, it was really, it made a huge impression at the time.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s one of the themes that we’ll talk about later that I saw as a recurring theme in history, which is sometimes like, the setting up but also the breaking down of walls, borders, and boundaries seems to be one of the recurring themes that we’ll see with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, with Saturn representing the boundary or the wall, and Neptune representing the disintegration or dissolution of something.
NDB: Yeah. Or a reconceptualization sometimes. Like, if a border is redrawn or, yeah, you know, Berlin had once been this unified city, and then they put a wall between it, and it was cracked. And so yeah, it’s like a reconfiguration if not as you said.
CB: Yeah. And also the merging of two things that were separate was another thing when this wall went down, sort of like two droplets of water that are separated by a border, but then when you remove that border, they naturally like, come back together and fuse and then fully intertwine.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that was a key moment in this that happened relatively early on, very close to the conjunction, actually – like, very close to the third conjunction, I believe, right?
NDB: Within days. I think it’s like, four days apart or something of that nature. It’s really, really close, that third conjunction, to the fall of the Wall.
CB: Okay. So the other more major thing, though, is that this was part of an entire domino effect that was happening at the time, which is the revolutions that were taking place in many Eastern bloc countries that were previously under the control of the Soviet Union at that point started to rise up and demand their independence from the Soviet Union. And over the course of a relatively brief few-year period, essentially between roughly like, 1987, 1988 through 1991, all of these countries broke away and gained their independence from the Soviet Union. And then the Soviet Union itself didn’t – it ceased to exist in the form that it was and became for the first time a democracy all of a sudden.
NDB: Yeah. And it was amazingly largely a peaceful process, apart from Romania, where the president and his wife were executed very quickly. In every other case, it really was just, you know, popular uprising and popular support that created a momentum that no political machine was prepared to, you know, push back again. And so it was really just a formidable movement, and like I said, largely peaceful.
CB: Right. So what are some of the countries then? You mentioned Romania, but we also have other countries like Ukraine —
NDB: Bulgaria. Yeah, Ukraine, Bulgaria.
CB: Ukraine breaks away and gets its independence.
NDB: Yeah. Poland. Czechoslovakia, which then would become the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Hungary. Bulgaria. Romania.
CB: Got it. Okay. So that’s a pretty short span of time for all of these countries suddenly to have these revolutions.
NDB: Sorry, I left out the Baltic states and Belarus and those people would get very upset with me if I did that; I must include them as well. So that’s Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus along with all the other names. Sorry for the omission.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s just a huge amount of countries in a relatively short span of time from the beginning of this conjunction to the end of it, which is just a huge shift and marks the end of the Russian Communist state, which had began at a previous conjunction in 1917 and 1918, which was a conjunction that coincided with the Russian Revolutionary, which is when the Bolsheviks and essentially the Communists took over and then set up the experiment of having an entire state that was based on Communism at the time, which was unique.
NDB: Yeah. And we’ll cover that when we get to 1917. But it is —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — gonna come up, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, I just wanna mention it, because to telegraph and to give some preview that it’s like, one of the things we found in this research – and we knew going into it because we’d already seen this, but we found it even more extensively – is that it turns out that this was not a one-time event in Russian history, having this Saturn-Neptune conjunction coinciding with such a huge turning point, but in fact, Saturn-Neptune conjunctions come up repeatedly at many, many different important turning points in Russian history going back more than a thousand years.
NDB: Yeah. It’s really remarkable. I mean, I was kind of harping on you about it for a long time, but then you went and did the research and you found even things that I hadn’t seen, so it was, yeah. I think we’ve both been impressed by just how consistent it is. And again, that’s one of the things I love about doing this kind of work, because some astrologers if they wanna study Russia, they’ll think about, you know, the empire and the chart for the empire and the Soviet Union and the chart for the, you know, so on and so forth. Whereas I love this approach where we can look at all the regimes that have ruled a given area over the course of time and still see these patterns repeat themselves. Like, it’s almost irrelevant that there were different regimes at different times. I mean, obviously not totally irrelevant, but for the purposes of this research, in some ways it is, because no matter what, no matter who’s in charge, you see these cycles surface at really relevant times.
CB: Yeah. And one of the other things is also when you see an event like this happening, a major event in the history of a country, and it’s clearly coinciding at the same time with a specific astrological alignment, usually you can then take that alignment and go back and study previous times it happened in the history of that entity. And sometimes you’ll find repetitions and like, precursors to that under the same alignment in the past. And that’s one thing that we found very strikingly in Russian history with this conjunction, but also will come up in other areas during the course of this study as well.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So the last thing about this is that it also marked the end of the Cold War, which is huge because the Cold War dominated so much of the 20th century, really especially since the last conjunction that occurred in the early 1950s especially, which is when the nuclear arms race exploded and the first hydrogen bomb was used, as we’ll talk about when we get into that period. But it’s an interesting bookend, then, you know, that conjunction in the early 1950s versus literally the end of the Cold War at the subsequent conjunction at the end of the ‘80s and beginning of the ‘90s.
Yeah. Do you have anything to say about that, or?
NDB: Oh, well, I mean, yeah. That’s the stunning thing is just the Cold War really, effectively, beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and then the period in the early ‘50s – ‘52, ‘53 – being a sort of, you know, high peak of the overall Cold War with regard to weapons development, with regard to both sides sort of stiffening up their resistance to each other. They had, of course, been Allies during the Second World War, and then things sort of gradually came undone between the alliance once the Nazis were defeated, and certainly by the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union got their own atomic bomb in 1949. And from that point forward, the United States, you know, felt like they were in a very different position because they were no longer the only ones with that bomb. And yeah, then the Chinese Revolution happened just after the Soviets got the bomb. So by the early ‘50s, the mood was very paranoid and fear-driven, whc8i is another theme that we’ll see come up frequently when it comes to this conjunction.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. So that’s important as a turning point and then obviously the relevance to today is important as we’ve reached another really important turning point in terms of like, US-Russia relations that’s happening right now in terms of Russia-Ukraine relations that’s happening right now, especially when you think back to this conjunction happening in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and Ukraine gaining its independence versus, you know, what’s currently developing in 2025 and 2026. But obviously today we’ve reached another incredibly important turning point, both in Russian history as well as in Ukrainian history that we’re seeing unfold before our very eyes. And this, the importance of it in a historical standpoint we can understand better by comparing it and realizing what happened the last time one of these conjunctions took place in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
NDB: Yeah. And then by extension, we follow that lineage all the way back to when, you know, Russia was fighting off the Mongols nearly a thousand years ago. So yeah, it’s amazing, the whole trajectory, the way this 20th century story has a relationship to a much, much larger narrative in which it’s only one chapter.
CB: Right. For sure. All right, so that’s the biggest event that was happening under this conjunction, but I wanna talk about some other events that did come up during this conjunction in the late ‘80s, some of which are relevant today or in different ways.
So another one that happened in a completely other area in a different country but had this similar like, feel to it was the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that happened in China, which happened in the time frame around April through June of 1989. And this was a series of like, pro-democracy protests in Beijing that ended up being brutally suppressed and crushed by the Chinese government. So this was important, and it kind of like, shocked the world at the time and led to widespread condemnation of the Chinese government at the time. But I thought it was important to note, because it’s an interesting contrast with other countries where their uprisings were successful, whereas in this instance the uprising ended up being put down at this time.
NDB: Yeah. China did not go the way of the Soviet Union when it came to its relationship to Communism. And this is something we can come back to when we get to the 1950s when Communist China suddenly becomes a thing and Mao has certain feelings about Stalin that are more in line with his own worldview. And then when Stalin dies, Mao’s gonna come to see the Soviet Union in a very different light, and I think that’s when the relationship starts to change. But anyway, that’s a little bit of preview for where we’re going in a few minutes.
CB: Right. Yeah. Well, and the thing that unites both of them that we found is that The Communist Manifesto was published on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction back in the middle of the 1800s. So in terms of the, you know, ideological influence that that played on both of those separate governments, it sort of ties back into that conjunction at the founding of that new ideological sort of like, structure or outline.
NDB: Absolutely.
CB: All right. So yeah, so that was important in China. Elsewhere, something that’s, you know, more localized event that didn’t have the same global impact but is somehow becoming relevant again today seemingly at the recurrence is that in 1989, the United States invaded Panama and deposed the leader of Panama, who was General Manuel Noriega. And you know, this is coming up again recently because Trump is like, threatening to invade Panama to take over the Panama Canal. So this stood out to me, then, obviously, as I was researching historical events that happened around the conjunction, and then seeing that that invasion began December 20th of 1989, which is not very long after the third conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. I remember it well. The US military played the Van Halen song, “Panama,” on blasted it on speakers over and over to torment Noriega, who was holed up in his palace or whatever. Yeah. This was someone who had been, you know, installed by the US government, at one point had been an ally, but just sort of went rogue. And George W. Bush felt it was – or H. W. Bush, rather – felt it was necessary to go in there and get him out.
CB: Okay. So yeah, so that’s a major one, and we’ll see how that develops, you know, in terms of whatever’s happening between the Trump administration and their plans. Potentially – in the news, it’s been said that they’re drafting plans for some sort of military operation, so we’ll see if there’s a recurrence then of those two things now that there’s a recurrence happening between those planets.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Other major news – the Persian Gulf War took place shortly after this time, so this was the first Iraq war, essentially, where initially in August of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. And then in early 1991, the United States and coalition invaded Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. So that war —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — took place during that time.
NDB: Yeah. Jan 15th, 1991, I remember it well. I was shooting pool at a bar with my friend, and we were watching it on TV – which I’ll get to in a moment as well, that phenomenon. But there’s one thing we’ve skipped. Prior to the Gulf War, there’s another really big international event that happens —
CB: I’m not doing them chronologically; I’m just, I have a —
NDB: Oh, okay.
CB: — sequence of just ones I was going —
NDB: Fair enough.
CB: — through.
NDB: Okay, fair enough. But I think this is a good place to introduce this. In early February of 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. He had been in prison since 1964 for his activist actions against apartheid, and the South African regime knew for some time that he would eventually be released. In fact, for those of your viewers who watched our Venus retrograde episode, when he was released from prison in February of 1990, it was pretty much exactly eight years from when he had first been let off Robben Island, which is this island just off the coast of Cape Town where he was kept for the bulk of those 20-something years that he was in prison. I guess he was there for 18 years, at Robben Island. But in ‘82, they moved him to a prison that’s here in Cape Town, actually virtually adjacent to the school where my kid still goes to – a prison called Pollsmoor. And there he had slightly more sort of comfortable accommodations. He could do some gardening, things like that. And then in 1988 during a different Venus retrograde, they moved him to this town, Paarl, which is about an hour north of Cape Town, and that’s where they kept him until the day they let him go in 1990, about 18 months later. I think he had some health issues that needed to be addressed before they let him out. But this was an enormous event, and really shook the world in many, many ways, and it ultimately led to speaking of this sort of redrawing of – well, I don’t think boundaries were necessarily redrawn, but the country was, you know, really sort redesigned from scratch, if you will, when it was reinvented in 1994 when they held their first truly democratic elections.
CB: Right. Because this is the end, essentially functionally the end of the apartheid state.
NDB: Yeah. And —
CB: And what was that, for people that don’t know?
NDB: Apartheid was a policy that existed here in South Africa from 1948 until essentially you can say Mandela’s release in 1990 or shortly thereafter that was rigorously designed and enforced racial separation that involved relocating sometimes large numbers of people from homes that they had lived in for quite some time into areas that had no amenities or transportation. There were sort of like mass deportations into rural drop-off zones where people had to sort of like, survive somehow in the middle of nowhere. And just all kinds of – even relative to American segregation, it was a level of brutality and discrimination that was incredibly dehumanizing. And there was a police state set up to reinforce it. I mean, I’m always talking to people here who describe what the police state was like at the time, and it does sound very scary, even relative to say what folks in the Soviet Union might have had to endure. It was really, really oppressive and heavily censored. It’s amazing how many people here – yeah, just like, there was so little real information coming into the country. So you know, for instance, my wife really only learned the truth of things when she was in her late teens and she took a trip to England to be a nanny. And the woman she worked for insisted she sit down and watch BBC and see reports about apartheid in South Africa so that, you know, Anna could really understand what was going on in her own country. And you hear those stories a lot. It’s really, really something. I mean, it almost seems unbelievable except for, you know, in this day and age, it becomes easier to believe that media could be that sort of contained and cooperative with dangerous regimes.
CB: Right. So that’s another instance of things that were kept separate and artificial barriers in place that suddenly disintegrated and disappeared under a somewhat short span of time.
NDB: Exactly. And the interesting thing, not to pivot entirely, but having discussed the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Panama, the collapse of apartheid, and the Gulf War, and Tiananmen Square – all these events, one after the other in such a short period of time, culturally speaking, were largely responsible for a cultural shift we had in media whereby people used to watch either the six o’clock news or the 11 o’clock news – a one hour program on television – where they would be informed of the most important stories of that day. They pivoted from that to the culture of 24-hour news. You know, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, any of these events that we’ve just been talking about – these were things that people wanted to sort of watch happen in real time. And it really culminated with the Persian Gulf War, where, you know, whereas certainly in the Vietnam War era, people were watching the war nightly on the six o’clock news as it were. But now we went from that phenomenon, which had a huge impact on people’s perception of the war, to this Gulf War thing where we were really watching the whole thing from beginning to end before our eyes on television, with just occasional commercial breaks.
CB: Right. So that’s one of your Saturn-Neptune events here is the rise of the and adoption of the 24-hour news cycle.
NDB: Yeah. There’s huge – I mean, this is gonna come up again. Thematically, there are always it seems really big shifts in media, media consumption. Like, how media’s consumed or what it’s used for, how it’s delivered, etcetera, etcetera, during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions.
CB: Right, so this —
NDB: And I think that was a big part of it.
CB: This will tie it back, because one of the ones you pointed out is that at the previous conjunction in the early 1950s is when television adoption suddenly rapidly took off.
NDB: That’s right. The 1952 presidential election when Eisenhower was elected – that was the first election that was televised. And at the same time in Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth was having her coronation. Her father died in early 1952, and her coronation was gonna be in the summer of ‘53. And so people in the United States and in Great Britain and in Canada and Australia, what have you, anywhere where they either wanted to watch the election or the coronation, people went out and bought TV sets in large numbers – something that had been really just a novelty luxury item that a few, you know, people in the know had, suddenly became within a few years something that over 90 percent of households had in their home. So it was a major, major revolution.
And there are even some Saturn-Neptune things about why people were tuning into these things. Like, if you think about a coronation, you know, a royal coronation in Great Britain, until it was televised, this was something that really only, you had to be a lord or an aristocrat to actually witness this thing, to participate in it at all. And suddenly the whole country and the whole world could see this sort of otherwise mysterious ritual play out before their eyes. So there is – that’s another element that we’re gonna see with Saturn-Neptune is being able to see something that has up until that point been blocked from view, not unlike say, the Berlin Wall coming down. You know, suddenly when that happened, East and West Berlin could see each other again. So this is another element of that. Ditto for the American elections. Because the American election was televised in ‘52, the existing model whereby a lot of backroom deals were done – you know, where it was just like, men with cigars in some backroom sort of working out this or that detail – suddenly everything had to be done out in the open, you know, with a huge crowd and seemingly more democratic and participatory than it had been up until that point. So that’s another facet of it is just this sort of new level of insight or access or visibility that occurs with Saturn-Neptune, and in this case by virtue of the media and what was suddenly available with television.
CB: Yeah. And a different level of immersion and a feeling that you’re actually there witnessing the events, like, is the commonality I’ve seen between the last three conjunctions. It’s like, you know, television in the early 1950s and all of a sudden, like you were saying, you can actually witness from all the way across the world the coronation of Queen Elizbaeth and the elaborate pageantry of all of that. You’re able to witness through television like, in your own home, potentially. That brings like, a new level of immersion and like, feeling like you’re experiencing something there and you can feel what it was like to be there that would have been, as you said, unheard of prior to that point. And then you jump forward to the next conjunction, and all of a sudden, there’s like, all of these crazy events where the world is changing rapidly and all of these boundaries and borders and restrictions and impressions and things that people thought would never go away all of a sudden break down, and you’re seeing it live like, 24 hours being talked about on the news. You’re seeing images coming in from all over the world as they’re happening so that you almost feel like you’re experiencing those things as they’re happening. And now, you know, since 2023, we’ve had a similar revolution that’s taking place in terms of immersion and experience with AI-generated images and video where there was this huge ramp-up as soon as Saturn went into Pisces in 2023. And you could see the very beginnings of AI-generated video and how like, janky it was, and like, you could see the potential, but it was just obviously AI-generated, including the images, where it would show images of people and they’d have like, 10 fingers on one hand or something like that. But all of a sudden over the past year, by 2024 and 2025, I’ve noticed as the Saturn-Neptune conjunction has gotten closer, you now – it’s gotten so good that you really in some instances cannot tell the difference for sure with some AI-generated images and now recently even with some AI-generated video. It’s become so good that it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. And that’s, I think, one of the great turning points in terms of immersion that’s happening in our time, in addition to virtual reality has become more common. Like, Apple having released its virtual reality headset last year in 2024. And now more recently, the new keyword is “augmented reality,” where Meta, for example, released a set of augmented reality glasses recently that’s merging the digital world and the real world in your eyes so that you can see like, a digital display or info about things that you’re looking at in the world through your normal glasses. So that seems to be the turning point in terms of immersion that’s happening in our time.
NDB: Yeah. I think another thing is language translation. You know, even in ‘23, I could see videos of like, an American guy speaking English and then they would do a, you know, some kind of AI thing and suddenly he’s speaking French articulately in his own voice with an appropriate Parisian accent or what have you. And his lips are making those words, although this was an American guy who didn’t actually know how to speak French. So you can think like, for instance, future viewers of The Astrology Podcast might before long be able to tune in to watch you and I, but if they’re in Italy and don’t speak English very well, they could just switch on the “Italy” button and you and I are suddenly speaking fluent Italian to each other, talking about Saturn-Neptune conjunctions as if we were born and raised in Italy. Or, you know, the Zulu language here in South Africa or any language. So there are all these possibilities, too – talk about breaking down boundaries. If we get to a point where everyone can speak to everyone, that can be quite a game changer in ways that we can’t possibly imagine.
CB: For sure. It’s funny you mention that, because that’s one of my much earlier events, which is in the – what was it – 1524-ish conjunction —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, which allowed – because prior to that point, you had to know Greek. You had to know ancient Greek or you had to know Latin to read the Bible, and this tended to be something then that only the clergy could read. But then he translates it into the normal, everyday vernacular language, and this was like, a huge revolution so that people could read it in the original language, and it broke down the barriers that were put up by language. So that’s interesting that you mention that.
NDB: Yeah. Similarly, John Wycliffe in 1380 also translated at least parts of the Bible, if not the whole thing, into English, which had a similar temporary effect; it wasn’t quite the effect of Lutherism, but obviously eventually England would be on board as well.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. So back to our period. One of the things I was gonna mention about the first, the Persian Gulf War, the first Iraq war is especially in the late 1980s was Suddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, both in the war but especially against Kurdish populations back then. Especially around 1988, there was a particularly important chemical attack, and this was really important because one of the things I noticed was chemical weapons comes up as a keyword for this Saturn-Neptune conjunction. The most notable example and the first one I noticed was in World War One around that conjunction around 1917, World War One was the first major war where chemical weapons were used, and that was a huge piece of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. But when I started looking outside of that for other recurrences, this is one of the things that came up that was very famous was Saddam’s use of chemical weapons especially in the late 1980s.
NDB: Yeah. There had been some used in their war with Iran earlier in the ‘80s, but certainly like, using it to the scope and to the degree that they did against the Kurds was quite unprecedented, like, even relative to past uses. It was, yeah. Just brutal.
CB: Yeah. So and that was also is worth mentioning just in and of itself that the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War was taking place in like, 1987 and 1988, so that was winding down at that time. So that’s somewhat important, because it brings up Iran, and Iran does come up in some of the earlier ones, like in the conjunction in the early 1950s, right?
NDB: Yeah. It was in 1953 that there was this CIA-backed coup to oust, you know, a leader – Mosaddegh – who the Americans would have considered socialist or something like that, but really all he wanted to do was nationalize the country’s oil reserves. You know, countries owning their own resources – a similar thing happened in Guatemala and the United Fruit Company the following year in ‘54. But yeah, there was a coup to oust a leader who was not as friendly to the US as the US thought he should be, and they introduced this coup to really keep the existing Shah, the royal leader that they had installed in 1941 when they were fighting the Nazis and the Nazis wanted Iranian oil, and so the Brits and the Russians went out and took out the existing Shah, put in his son, and now the Americans had inherited that whole situation. And with Eisenhower now in the White House, and the people he chose to run the CIA, there was now this new sort of level of interference in countries. And this would be something that would come back to bite everyone when the Iranian Revolution happened a quarter century later.
CB: Right. That, the CIA engaging in that coup on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the early 1950s became the core wound, basically, between the US and Iran, because then eventually later the Iranians would overthrow that leader who’d been —
NDB: The Shah.
CB: — put into, the Shah who’d been put into place by the CIA. And it would lead to subsequent decades of tensions between Iran and the United States, all the way up and to this day. And then now we’re seeing the recurrence of that with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction right now, and there’s, yeah. I think Trump has been telegraphing that there’s gonna be an attack on Iran a lot recently, and we basically just been waiting to see if that’s gonna happen and what it’s gonna look like and how bad it’s gonna be. Especially on this conjunction I’ve been paying attention to that comes up at the end of the month I’ve been very nervous about and have talked about several times on the podcast recently. But the recurrence of that conjunction, again, potentially could bring into focus the relationship and antipathy between Iran and Israel that goes all the way back to that conjunction in the early 1950s.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So moving onto other ones. I wanna start hitting some other ones really fast. One that I noticed that was really striking was under the 1989 conjunction, just after it, Yemen was unified where Yemen used to be divided into two parts – like a North Yemen and South Yemen – and in 1990, they were unified and became like, a single state or a single republic. And that’s, you know, relevant right now because Yemen is in the news because Trump just recently on the eclipse that just happened in Virgo launched what has been said in the news was his biggest military operation in the Middle East since he was inaugurated in January when they started launching strikes on Yemen. So I thought it was interesting that Yemen came up under this last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the late 1980s.
NDB: Yeah. That was a sort of a brief respite for Yemen. They endured a lot of bombing by the British in the ‘60s, and you know, in this instance, Trump is not the first US president to have bombed them even in the 21st century. I think they’ve all done it. So yeah, it’s been going on for a while, but certainly it seems to be going to another level now, particularly because like you said if Trump’s taking on Iran, then Yemen is seen as their client state, and so yeah, you wouldn’t fight one without fighting the other. Or you are sort of fighting one by fighting the other, even.
CB: Right. Yeah. Oh, right, that’s a good point – the connection between Iran and Yemen.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Moving on. Other things that happened in the late 1980s under that conjunction – one of them that started was the first Intifada, which was an uprising among Palestinians basically that started in late 1987. And there’s different arguments about the dating, but it’s said to have gone from late 1987 from December of ‘87 until at least some people date the end to the Madrid Conference that happened in 1991. And if that’s true, then it would fall like, pretty much perfectly in that orb of Saturn and Neptune which was between late ‘87 and early 1991. Others date its conclusion to the Oslo Accords in 1993, but nonetheless, one of the things that does come up over and over again that we’ll see under the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is these uprisings that take place.
NDB: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: I was kind of surprised by that, because it’s something I associate more with Uranus, and one could argue, you know, because this is a triple conjunction happening in the 1980s that this is just the Uranus factor of things that’s causing rebellions and things like that, but surprisingly as we went into centuries, we noticed that, no – like, actually uprisings are relatively common under Saturn-Neptune conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah. In fact, I would say Saturn-Uranus conjunctions in 1988, even though Neptune was already in place by ‘88, 1988 is a bit more of Saturn-Uranus and ‘89 is a bit more Saturn-Neptune, although they’re all involved all the time. Saturn-Uranus conjunctions tend to be more conciliatory and cooperative, so whereas in ‘88 you have, say, Reagan going to Moscow to sign an anti-nuclear treaty or indeed the Iran-Iraq War is ending, the Soviet Union’s pulling out of Afghanistan, South Africa’s ending its war with Cuba and Angola. So everyone was sort of like, wrapping up all the, you know, nastiness that had defined so much of the ‘80s right at that time of the Saturn-Uranus conjunction in ‘88. But then ‘89 is when sort of everything sort of snowballs, and it’s not just sort of people being cooperative and trying to start a new page, but just sort of events taking their own course and overwhelming the control of the authorities involved.
So I think there is a discernible difference, even though indeed when you’re talking about the Saturn-Neptune of 1989, it does get roped into the Saturn-Uranus of ‘88, certainly. Like, they all kind of coexist. And by ‘92, of course, Uranus and Neptune are conjunct, and that’s the inevitable crescendo of that period.
So yeah, I mean, it’s complicated, but not. And indeed you’re right. I think that the Saturn-Neptune conjunction ironically does seem to be a lot more involved with the sort of popular uprisings, and Saturn-Uranus more so with actually like, you know, enemies trying to sort of bury the hatchet or somehow come together in some way. Keep in mind the previous conjunction in ‘42 had been when the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to work together to fight the Nazis. So it does stand to consolidate things, so yeah.
CB: Okay. Yeah. Well, I haven’t gotten into that conjunction yet, so I can’t say. But I can say I did see a recurring theme – especially in the Middle Ages, there kept being a bunch of peasant uprisings under Saturn-Neptune. And oftentimes, it was like, the lower class or those who were oppressed in some instances like, getting inspired and like, rising up in some instances. And that seemed to be part of it. And sometimes that could be like, religiously motivated or inspired,other times it could be ideologically motivated, as we’ll see in other instances. But this was a major notable one. The write-up that I have, at one point, it said that this was “a largely spontaneous Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip characterized by widespread civil disobedience, protests, boycotts, and stone throwing by youths against Israeli soldiers. While initially largely nonviolent, it became increasingly violent over time, resulting in significant casualties on both sides, though disproportionately Palestinian, and ultimately it led to the Oslo Accords, though falling short of achieving an independent Palestinian state.”
And I think that was the important thing is that it ended up – the first Intifada ended up kind of pushing the Israelis to the negotiating table, which is what led to the Oslo Accords in 1993, if I sort of understand the sequence of things broadly. But I thought it was interesting. One of the things we’ll see earlier, especially in some earlier eras that was interesting going all the way back to the 1800s was some civil disobedience and sometimes like, nonviolent protests occasionally came up with Saturn-Neptune going back to Henry David Thoreau penning a lecture on civil disobedience under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the mid-1800s that would eventually go onto inspire people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Junior, when they ended up practicing different forms of civil disobedience and peaceful protest.
NDB: Yeah, and ironically, Thoreau gave that talk the same week that Marx completed The Communist Manifesto, so make of that what you will, in early 1848. I’m also reminded when Napoleon invaded Spain in 180 – well, it was late 1807, but 1808 effectively – the Spanish population rose up in revolt. And there was a term that we’re very familiar with now that was coined at the time – guerilla. Sort of, you know, fighting war by non – like, specifically military means, but still being, that is, you’re not an official military; you’re a civilian fighting the military, and you’re doing it somewhat undercover and usually based on springing ambushes and things of that nature. So yeah, the popular uprisings, be they sort of guerrilla movements that originated when Spain fought Napoleon, or like you said the sort of nonviolent resistance that was proposed by Thoreau in ‘48 or the Intifada starting in late ‘87 – just sort of these popular resistance movements that are not, you know, not orchestrated by a specific group or leader but just sort of the people pushing through on their own. You know, sort of a, yeah, popular uprising.
CB: Yeah. Popular uprisings and insurrections is a major keyword, and while, you know, with Thoreua and others, there can be a nonviolent component, we’ll see plenty of others that were violent for different reasons. So and this one obviously is relevant again today and has been over the past few years, you know, for sure after by the time Saturn went into Pisces and began the copresence with Neptune. And I’m sure we’ll see another important turning point, but somehow it will harken back to this conjunction in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So we’ll see how that continues to develop.
Another major one that came up in the late 1980s was the Satanic Panic really peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially centered on this conjunction. And I originally found this because I was studying another period where this book on like, witchcraft and like, how to identity witches was penned back in the 1500s on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And I was reading the description of this book, which I’ll look up the name of in a minute, but it was called the Malleus Maleficarum, which was published on the 1486 conjunction. And I was reading the like, contents and the description of the book, and it just has a lot of like, craziness and a lot of paranoia and a lot of things like that that it outlined in this book thinking about witches and thinking about them being everywhere and doing all sorts of terrible things. And I was like, that sounds a lot like the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and then all of a sudden I remembered the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and how that sort of had a crescendo in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s before dropping off by like, 1992, 1993, forward. So that was a major thing was basically people letting their dark religious imaginations like, run wild into really dark places was part of that in the late 1980s, right?
NDB: Yeah. And it really – I mean, there were these really elaborate scenarios concocted that, you know, certain segments of the population were entirely convinced had actually occurred. It was wildly overblown.
CB: One of the descriptions I have is it says, “The Satanic Panic refers to a period of moral panic in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, fueled by unsubstantiated claims of widespread Satanic ritual abuse of children, which led to false accusations and convictions.” Yeah.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So that was – so that’s a theme that I ended up finding runs throughout different periods, which is sometimes there are periods of paranoia where people like, start freaking out about stuff. And Neptune is like, there’s a deceptive quality to Neptune. And there’s a dark, fear-based quality to Saturn. And sometimes when you get those two put together, basic fears that people have from Saturn get magnified and run amok because people start thinking up all of these elaborate crazy scenarios that aren’t necessarily happening, but people become convinced that it’s part of some like, wider spread thing that’s like, taking over society and that, you know, the world is ending and we have to fight it against it and stuff like that. And what’s interesting is part of the comparison if you go back one Saturn-Neptune cycle earlier, it was the one in the early 1950s, and that was the peak of McCarthyism where there was this one senator named Joseph McCarthy who was lying and exaggerating and claiming that the Russians and the Communists had like, infiltrated the US government and that they were everywhere, and he started doing witchunts, basically, in order to – and he started like, accusing random people of being Communists or sympathizers or different things like that. And they started ruining people’s lives, but it was based on very little evidence and oftentimes based on lies or based on paranoia. And so that’s one of the commonalities that I see that happens sometimes between Saturn-Neptune periods is periods of like, intense paranoia.
NDB: Yeah, indeed. So yeah, August of ‘49, the Soviet Union gets the bomb. October of ‘49, Communist China wins their war. And then by January of 1950, so shortly after all that, is when – or I think February of 1950 – is when McCarthy first holds up his list of names of Communists who have infiltrated the government. So there’s a whole sort of sequence that spills out of the situation, you know, having slipped out of the hands of the United States, and yeah, just got everyone very, very worked up so that by ‘52, ‘53, and then ‘54 when McCarthy had his downfall, just things escalated further and further and further. All kinds of people, you know, had their lives ruined. You know, lost careers that would have been very promising and productive. It was incredibly destructive.
CB: Yeah. But what’s always interesting about it to me is in both instances, not too long after the conjunction separates, just like you see the wave in the graph I’ve shown of the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions dropping off as they move away from each other, there’s like, a drop off in those panics, those moral panics or periods of paranoia suddenly dissipate and like, go away and cease to be as intense after the two planets move sufficiently far away from each other, especially after the 15-degree range and once they break the sign-based conjunction. So it’s like, by, what – ‘53, ‘54, McCarthy has this public downfall and people stop taking him seriously. Or with the Satanic Panic, by like, 1992, 1993, there’s been more skepticism about this, and people are starting to realize this isn’t actually like, a widespread thing, and it stopped being this constant story in the news.
NDB: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah. So that’s really important then as a potential theme and something to pay attention to. We have all sorts of like, different versions of that that are floating around today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some sort of intensification of that over the next year or two in terms of like, paranoia or like, claims about things that are happening in society or the government or other things like that that may end up in retrospect, even just a few years from now, turning out to be not true or based on lies or paranoia or even misinformation.
NDB: Yeah. I guess one expectation I have as this conjunction, you know, culminates and then wears off, that to some degree we’ll go back to being a society that more or less believes the same set of facts. It doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily agree on what is good or what is bad, but at least like, you know, have a much more similar version of reality than we’ve had over the last 10, 15 years. That’s at least my expectation, you know —
CB: That’s very —
NDB: — once we move through this.
CB: — idealistic.
NDB: Very ambitious.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: I might be naive, but you know, call me a fool.
CB: I mean, I certainly think the period —
NDB: Let’s just say relatively speaking. Yeah. Relatively —
CB: I certainly think that the —
NDB: — speaking.
CB: I certainly think that the period of polarization is gonna hit an extreme over the next year or two as this conjunction is most intense and people’s realities are gonna be the most divorced from each other. And I do hope some of that starts to come back into more of like, a consensus view of reality after this point, although, you know, there has also been like, a lot of long term things that have been set in place since the ‘90s, since the rise of some of the like, partisan news networks and things like that that I don’t know if you can put that rabbit like, back in the hat, or what’s the phrase? You know —
NDB: Toothpaste back in the tube.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That rabbit back in the tube, you know? Common phrase.
All right, so that’s something we’ll return back to, but we’ll leave it there for now.
NDB: Sounds good.
CB: I did notice in the late 1980s the conjunction comes into play a little bit after the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash. But it turns out that there was a savings and loan crisis, and then a mini-recession that happened in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. And that’s something that my ears perked up to a little bit because of some of the threats of a recession or financial destabilization that we’ve been talking about after the Mars retrograde in Cancer and the Venus retrograde research that we did in Aries, which have coincided with that in previous periods, including 1929, the big stock market crash that led to the Great Depression at that time. So that does make me a little bit nervous about some of this, and it also had to do with deregulation hitting a peak in the late 1980s, as well as a bunch of other things like fraud, mismanagement, and other things like that that eventually led to a government bailout.
NDB: Yeah. A lot of it sort of fell on George H. W. Bush. Even though a lot of it had sort of been, was dust that had been kicked up by the Reagan administration, it was left to Bush to cope with it. And of course, the famous line – he ran for president in November of ‘88, and his widely quoted line was, “Read my lips – no new taxes,” and then of course before long there were taxes because of the recession. So yeah, and that helped him lose to Clinton four years later.
CB: Right. Although ironically, it was like, the honorable thing, because he needed to raise the taxes. But even though it was like, unpopular.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you know, amongst certainly relative to a lot of the people who served before and after him, H. W., you know, had a lot more to clean up, I suppose, as opposed to make messes of his own, so yeah.
CB: Sure. All right, moving onto other major, major things that happened under this conjunction. One of the biggest ones is that in 1989, the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee in CERN at the CERN like, research institute in Switzerland. And I thought this was a huge one. This is arguably one of the largest events, especially because it had to do – if you think about the World Wide Web and what it eventually became, it really broke down a lot of borders, you know, international borders, in terms of the sharing information, in terms of connecting people, through the internet. I can’t think of a better metaphor for that idea of like, breaking down barriers than the World Wide Web.
NDB: Yeah, especially at the beginning. I remember thinking, oh boy, they’ll never be able to put this toothpaste back in the tube. And much of the 21st century has been about them putting that toothpaste back in the tube, which it turns out they can do, but yeah. I remember just feeling so inspired by the freedom, by just how much was changing at the time. See? I am naive! But yeah, I think it ties in nicely with what I was saying about the cultural shift to 24-hour news channels. Like, just our overall relationship to media and the screen and all of that technologically and just, like you said, metaphorically in terms of people in different countries being able to just sort of reach out and speak to each other. It’s massive. Yeah, it’s very, very Saturn-Neptune thing.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Another thing that happened was environmentalism started getting mainstream international governmental support at this time close to this conjunction. So one of the things that happened is that in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change was established as part of the United Nations. And they ended up commissioning a report, basically, to like, assess what the situation was with the environment and with global warming and other things like that. It was commissioned in December of 1988, I believe, and then it was published of August of 1990, so it follows very close to our area. And I think that’s potentially important and could set things up potentially for future conjunctions and the government response or lack of response to environmental changes or global warming or other things like that becoming very relevant and very important.
NDB: Yeah, that’s one thing I’ve been kind of expecting with the Saturn-Neptune is – this was largely what I meant when I was talking about all of us sort of coming back to having, you know, the same view, the same facts, I think as the climate situation just becomes more stark. It’s just gonna be harder for people to have divergent opinions, you know? Your opinion can’t really change the weather. So yeah, that’s largely what I was referring to. You know, hopefully in other areas as well, but with regard to the human view of climate change as the reality really sets in and it makes it harder and harder for folks to, you know, either be in denial or propose alternate theories. You know, eventually it’s just like, it’s on your doorstep, and that’s that.
CB: Right.
NDB: There was also in March of ‘89, there was the oil spill, the crash of the Exxon Valdez, which I mean, it’s the kind of thing that’s happened a few times since, and we’re almost becoming inured to it. But at the time, it really seemed just like, the most horrible thing that had ever happened, and a lot of people volunteered to go over to, you know, where the crash had happened – I think it was close to the Arctic – to wash oil off, you know, birds, waterfowl, and what have you. Yeah, it was really heartbreaking and hard to watch. And again, coming back to that media thing, it was another one of these events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, et cetera, et cetera, where just the whole world was invested in this one event that was not just something that happened over the course of an hour, but you know, it took weeks and months of involvement and intense engagement with the story.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and then probably also motivated environmentalism efforts when you’re seeing like, live news reports of like, you know, baby animals covered in oil.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah, there’s a real sort of – one thing I’ve seen here and there with Saturn-Neptune conjunction is a real sort of shift in value for certain things. Like, things that might have been really valuable suddenly are worthless and vice versa. I would imagine, for instance, if you owned a home on beachfront property in Malibu last Christmas, you know, you were sitting on something that was worth several million dollars. And now, you know, you’ve got a plot of land that insurance doesn’t wanna give you a dime for. So you know, there’s instance like that that come into it, just a total sort of recalibration of value of what’s important, what isn’t, what’s attractive and what isn’t.
CB: Yeah. I noticed one of the things I saw when all of the people that were born in the late 1980s under this conjunction like, you know, 27 to 30 years later when they had their Saturn return when Saturn returned to Capricorn back in, what, like, 2017 through 2020 – a lot of them, part of their Saturn return story is many of them were doing things that were incredibly idealistic. And it was like, they were trying to bring concrete change to the world, but they were motivated by very high ideals about what the world should be like. And it was very insightful to me at the time seeing those Saturn return stories about what that conjunction was about partially in the late ‘80s.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. Because you’re absolutely right – you have a little micro-generation of people who don’t merely have Saturn in Capricorn. You know, that Saturn in Capricorn that they have is tied in with these two outer planets that have entirely different values and priorities than a mere Saturn in Capricorn would have. So yeah, it’s a very special generation for that reason, and that’s a really good point. That Saturn return was hugely powerful in terms of what that generation was trying to accomplish at the time.
CB: Right. Yeah. All right, moving onto the last two stories for this conjunction. One of them I wanted to mention briefly is in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, there was a significant resurgence of measles that happened, and then there was also a global polio eradication initiative that took place. And these were important and this is relevant because one cycle earlier in the early 1950s is when the polio vaccine was first developed under that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And then even going back to the mid-1800s, some of the first vaccination efforts were taking place, especially surrounding the anthrax vaccine that was developed by Louis Pasteur around that time on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So I thought it was notable, then, that there were some resurgences around this time in the late ‘80s of efforts surrounding vaccines in particular. One of the things they developed about measles was that they needed to do two doses rather than a single dose, because the single dose was failing, and that’s why there was a resurgence of it at that time. So they instituted that in 1989, recommending a second dose of the vaccine.
And then with polio, in 1988, the World Health Assembly launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which was basically focusing on vaccination efforts in order to vaccinate polio worldwide even though in much of the developed world it had been wiped out for the most part over that 36-year period since the polio vaccine was developed in the 1950s under the previous conjunction. So I thought it was interesting, though, that they ramped up like, global eradication efforts around the time of this conjunction in ‘88, ‘89.
NDB: Yeah. It just occurs to me, I know Mozambique – a country that borders South Africa – is currently on a campaign to eradicate malaria, which used to be a lot more rampant in, say, if you lived in Mississippi 200 years ago or what have you. So yeah, there’s things of that nature as well, whether they be vaccines or other measures taken to really, you know, contain dangerous microbes or dangerous airborne diseases that can wipe out large numbers of people very quickly.
CB: Right. For sure. Yeah. So and this, of course, has become relevant again today because recently Robert Kennedy, Junior, became the Health and Human Services nominee of the Trump administration, and he’s been promoting like, anti-vaccine policies for the past few decades. And he’s already in the process of starting to institute some anti-vaccine policies now as part of the US government. So that’s probably gonna be something that we’re gonna see develop. And then recently there’s been reports in the news just in the past few months of measles outbreaks due to people not vaccinating their children in the United States. So we’ll have to pay attention to that, but presumably because vaccines are tied in with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in history over the past two centuries, that’s gonna be an important aspect of this Saturn-Neptune conjunction as well over the next two to three years.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s worth reminding folks that Robert F. Kennedy, Junior, was born in 1954; he has Neptune at 26 Libra and Saturn at eight degrees Scorpio – so about 12 degree orb between his Saturn and Neptune. So he is a Saturn-Neptune guy effectively.
CB: Okay. So he’s born on a conjunction within the 15-degree range; that’s interesting.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. The last major story I wanted to mention for the 1989 conjunction was I was doing some research about how prohibition was one of the major things that happened on the 1917 conjunction where the US like, outlawed alcohol or attempted to for a period of time that went disastrously before eventually having to repeal those laws. And I realized at one point – because like, prohibition of alcohol like, literally saying “You can’t drink” or saying no to alcohol or negating it is such an obvious combination of, you know, Saturn which is like saying “no” to something or negating something, and Neptune, which can be drunkenness or drugs or alcohol or other things that you experience where you’re taking like, a substance that alters your perception of reality. So I started looking around at other conjunctions, and then I realized that was also a theme in the late 1980s and early ‘90s because that was when the US anti-drug campaigns really ramped up. And part of that is that from the mid-1980s forward, the crack cocaine epidemic really exploited in the United States. But also it really reached a fever pitch where they also started doing like, educational efforts in schools like the D.A.R.E. program, which started in the early 1980s in California. But by the late ‘80s, it went national across the United States in schools across the nations where there was like, this specific program that was set up to like, teach kids about drugs in the US and to try to like, ward them off of drugs. And even in 1988, the White House created the role of a so-called “Drug Tsar” role in the government of somebody to oversee, like an office to oversee, the anti-drug efforts. And this was taking place during the course of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. So I thought that was really interesting. You know, because I was growing up in the early ‘90s and went to school, and you get exposed to like, D.A.R.E. was like, a major program and stuff, so I remember it very vividly. Although it was interesting, because like, later studies sometimes questioned – like, one study ended up showing that kids that were exposed to that program ended up having higher instances of experimenting with things like psychedelics rather than lower. So there were some like, questions later on about whether the program actually worked or whether it was doing the right things and like, teaching kids about drugs, or whether it was like, backfiring —
NDB: Right.
CB: — to some extent. And I don’t really know where that’s at at this point in terms of schools and things like that, but it was definitely an intense period of like, anti-drug efforts, especially around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
NDB: Yeah. And I’m also reminded like, in the ‘80s, you had the crack epidemic. Now that was something that went on for much of the 1980s and early into the early 1990s, but I think it’s when we got to about Saturn-Neptune, there’s a total parallel with the AIDS crisis as well. In both cases, like with the crack epidemic and AIDS, where it’s only by the end of the 1980s as we get into the Saturn-Neptune, that the general public is talking about it like it’s a problem as opposed to sort of, you know, fringe activists if you will. That, you know, it just didn’t get much traction even though they were, you know, both phenomenon were killing loads of people. But they just weren’t, it just wasn’t making the evening news, you know? There you go again with that culture shift. So yeah, when you got to Saturn-Neptune, people are talking about the crack epidemic. People are talking about AIDS. We’ll come in a bit to Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist who died of AIDS in 1989, him being a sort of important cultural figure that year. So yeah, there’s a sort of like, you know, things coming to the surface. Finally everyone – you know, again, this idea that by this point, by the end of the 1980s, people agree that there is a crisis happening because a lot of people had just been in denial about it up until that point. So I think that’s also like, another interesting element to that whole thing.
CB: Sure. Yeah. And obviously there’s overlap, especially with the AIDS epidemic, with other things like the, you know, Pluto in Scorpio transit from the early ‘80s forward —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — as well as some other outer planet cycles like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the early ‘80s when the AIDS —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — epidemic was first actually mentioned. And I did a whole episode talking about that with Gary Lorentzen. But certainly by the late ‘90s, you know, I think especially with the drug campaign, one of the things was like, First Lady Nancy Reagan’s phrase, “Just Say No” to drugs campaign was like, a major thing that was being promoted in terms of like, drug abstinence was like, one of the things that was being promoted widely at that time.
NDB: Yeah, sure. Although she was out by the time the Saturn-Neptune happened, but it was in the sort of the general sort of more – like, I mean, the whole thing about —
CB: She was not out by 1987 and 1988; that’s not true.
NDB: No. No, no, no. I mean, I was talking about ‘89, sorry if we’re crossing wires on that. All I meant was the sort of, I mean, Nancy Reagan’s campaign was a bit more sort of like, naive and not necessarily – like, it was just sort of like, “Don’t try drugs.” By the time we get to Saturn-Neptune proper, there’s more of like, a realistic understanding of the crisis itself, how people are being affected, just how widespread it is, as opposed to like, a slogan. So I think there was like, by the time we got deeper into Saturn-Neptune, the conversation was changing. But yeah, you’re right, the —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — sort of the —
CB: That’s a good point.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Like, the devastation of different communities, especially different like, Black communities in major cities from the crack epidemic.
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. Which was not sort of Nancy Reagan’s target or her message at all. So yeah, the Saturn-Neptune is real sort of like, reality is there. You know, you might like it, you might not like it. But suddenly sort of there’s a clarity that had not been available or present up until that Saturn-Neptune comes along – kind of ironically clears the smoke, if you will. Clears the dust and the ambiguities and makes some things a lot more concise and understandable and visible.
CB: Yeah. There’s also celebrity involvement. So it’s like, celebrities were being enlisted to do PSAs for like, anti-drug stuff, including television commercials and things like that, like the – I don’t know what the date of that was, but the famous like, “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs,” like, eggs breaking thing.
NDB: Yeah. I think that was early – that’s probably like, 1990, ‘91. I think that qualifies in the period we’re talking about if I remember correctly.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah, that’s a good one.
CB: For sure. All right. So that is the last major thing. There’s a bunch of other like, miscellaneous things, like even really interesting ones. Like, one of them is like, Ayatollah Khomeini issuing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for a book that he published at that time, which was an interesting like, religious edict calling for the —
NDB: Yeah. And he also —
CB: — death of a novelist.
NDB: Yeah, and then Khomeini himself died in 1989 during the conjunction as well. And as I recall, they were carrying his coffin through the crowd, and somehow his corpse slipped out of the coffin.
CB: Wow.
NDB: You know, there on TV news. Yeah. And you know, given what we were talking about, you know, the coup in 1953 in Iran at the previous Saturn-Neptune, the death of Khomeini, you know, really put Iran in a whole new situation because the guy who had spearheaded the revolution in ‘78, ‘79 was gone, and now you had, you know, a movement without its leader.
CB: Okay. That’s really important. That seems really relevant then. The last thing I wanted to mention and then I wanna take a break and move onto from this section is there was also interestingly like, culturally at this time, the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was the rise of grunge music. And I otherwise wouldn’t like, mention this, except I noticed in a previous period at the beginning of the ‘50s was the rise of like, the Beat generation. And there’s some sort of similar like, a melancholic attitude or something like that that seems like a parallel between those that I think is important culturally. And that’s actually gonna be one of the shortcomings of our study is that we ended up focusing primarily on like, geopolitical events and other things like that, and we’ll mention some arts and music and other things, but it’s an area that we didn’t get into as much that almost deserves its own separate study. But I did notice that there was this shift towards like, grunge music that happened pretty quickly in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that seemed relevant as part of that conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. I think, I mean overall, what you are getting – because the same can be said of hip hop as well, that there was a cultural shift in both rock music and hip hop in the sense that like, during the ‘80s – it’s really funny when you hear young people complain about boomers, because that’s what I was doing when I was a teenager in the mid-’80s because the media was run by the grown-ups. You know, you’re supposed to be a teenager; you’re supposed to like your teenage music. But there was all this like, you know, the 40- and 50-year-olds were controlling, you know, all the record labels, the video channels, what have you. So there was tremendous sort of adolescent and young frustration with the sort of the saccharine presentation of music. Hip hop and rock in the ‘80s had a lot of, you know, like, if you had a hard rock band in the ‘80s, they were wearing hairspray and these sort of colorful costumes, and it was very elaborate. And hip hop had a sort of sanitized thing to it as well. And then when you get to the late ‘80s, everything gets a lot more – again – real. A lot more sort of, you know, I mean it seemed revolutionary when Guns N’ Roses were a heavy metal band who didn’t wear the fancy outfits and the hairspray; they just wore the jeans and leathers that they wore on the street, and that seemed like this huge, you know, turning point. Or hip hop going from say, you know, Fresh Prince or what have you to NWA and Public Enemy – artists who were speaking a lot more about the world as it was. There was authenticity, I think, was a really key thing for both of those musical movements.
Prior to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and what was happening in music, a lot of music just seemed insincere and inauthentic and manufactured. And I think especially by virtue of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all going into Capricorn, the idea of doing things yourself, of being sort of anti-Capricorn if you will or turning the Capricorn thing on its heel and being deliberately non professional, deliberately sort of anti-slick, anti-manufactured, there was a real —
CB: Right.
NDB: — real emphasis on being authentic, and I think that’s a Saturn-Neptune thing is to be, you know, is to see things for how they are and to present them that way.
CB: Well, yeah, that’s one – there’s a polarization though, because that’s one side of it is like, sometimes it leans to the Saturnian side, and then you get an idealism behind that, which is the ideal is to be fully authentic and to present yourself as you are. And so you get like, with the grunge people I think of them wearing like, flannel shirts and like, torn-up jeans and stuff like that. And Kurt Cobain, you know, couchsurfing and coming and even being homeless and stuff like that, and then —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — singing about that and that experience of like, coming up from nothing or from a lower-class background or what have you. But then there’s a polarization, because sometimes it can lean to – with Saturn-Neptune – can lean towards the other side of that, which is that both Saturn traditionally has deceptive qualities in traditional texts could be associated with deception, and Neptune has deceptive qualities, so there can be this other polarization which is a presentation that’s actually false and deception and paranoia and other things becoming more prominent. So I’m only adding that just because I wanna be clear that you get both sometimes with this conjunction.
NDB: Sure. And of course, I mean, it was only – you know, grunge was authentic for about two weeks, and then of course, you know, the corporate bandwagon jumped on board, and K-Mart was selling torn jeans and —
CB: Right.
NDB: You know, my friends and I were being accosted by model agencies; this is a true story. I once did a photoshot for GAP wearing grunge clothes somewhere. In a box somewhere I’ve got these pictures of me decked out in GAP grunge clothes with literally these two beautiful women models on either side of me. And then another friend of mine did the same —
CB: I have to see those pictures.
NDB: I wish I had them – yeah, and then my friend Steven Legary who has the same birthday as me, he wound up, he did a similar photoshoot, but his wound up on all these like, you know, on the sides of city buses and everything. And I felt like I had dodged such a bullet for, you know, they chose Steve’s pictures over mine. But it was really funny. So yeah, it was an attempt at being authentic; it was authentic to a point, just like, say, when NWA released their first album, there was something very sort of real about these were guys who came out of Compton and were talking about their lives. But then, you know, within two weeks or a month, whatever, it becomes just sort of the standard. Everyone is making records that sound like they came from Compton and that they’re telling you the real story.
So yeah, I mean, it quickly became sort of as inauthentic as anything else, but it did —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — come from an authentic place originally, you know.
CB: Of like, describing your life of having a hard life or coming from a hard background or hard area? Because one of the recurring themes that goes back into the Middle Ages is especially – and I don’t know what the phrase is in the Middle Ages, it’s like, you have peasant uprisings. But later on, like, what are the terms for like, lower classes or people that are on the —
NDB: Proletariats? Or peasants?
CB: Right. And like… Or yeah, there’s other terms. Like, I was looking for like, synonyms, but just like, people that are getting the short end of the stick in society or are struggling to some extent. But sometimes the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, you see them banding together and rising up for some reason. Or in that instance, what we were talking with music, it almost becomes like, an idealization of some of those hard —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — lifestyle type situations of like, people coming from a hard background in each instance, and then that becomes idealized as like, the thing everyone thinks is not great, but somehow, yeah, like, you get replicated in some ways.
NDB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, we were talking about TV in the 1950s. When TV became this big thing, the movie industry had to change because now they had this competition they never had to deal with before, and that’s when you started getting these big, colorful, big widescreen, you know, The 10 Commandments or these big movies that, you know, just wouldn’t look the same on TV screen. And they were sort of these big, epic stories and more manufactured than anything and of course in full color, which had not been the norm until the 1950s. So yeah, you know, you do get that sort of that pushback. You have the stark reality, and then you get the sort of the really manufactured – you know, the next level. I mean, eventually the industry just sort of coops that aesthetic and, you know, streamlines it I guess.
CB: Yeah. All right. I think that’s good. There were just two notable – there’s a ton of birthdays, but there were two notable ones I wanted to mention just because it was funny that both Daniel Radcliffe and Elizabeth Olsen were born in 1989 near the conjunctions. And I thought it was funny, because one of them has played a wizard, and the other one has played a witch, with Daniel Radcliffe famously playing Harry Potter and Elizabeth Olsen playing the Scarlet Witch over the past decade in multiple movies in the Marvel series. So it was funny harkening back to like, the Satanic Panic and the, you know, previous conjunctions like, anti-witch hunting books that were penned. But it was funny that two of our most famous like, wizards and witches in contemporary times were born on this conjunction.
NDB: Indeed.
CB: Indeed. All right. I think that’s it for this section, so I’d like to take a little break.
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All right, so we’re back from break, and we’re gonna move into the second part of this where we’re going to jump to the next conjunction, which is 1952 to 1953, and I wanted to take some time to like, let that first conjunction really breathe and get into it so that we could really set the stage for what we’re doing here and some of the themes we’re gonna see and the sequence of things, and now I think we can move through some of these other conjunctions a little bit more quickly, especially as we get further in, further back.
So let’s jump to 1953. Here is my title slide for the conjunction of 1952, 1953. The data on this conjunction is that by degree, the first conjunction happened November 21st, 1952, at 22 Libra. The second one happened May 17th, 1953, at 21 Libra, and then the third and final exact conjunction occurred July 22nd, 1953, at 21 Libra. So by orb, it came into orb of 15 degrees around the third quarter of 1951, and that lasted all the way until the fourth quarter of 1954. In terms of the sign ingress, the sign ingress begins the conjunction a little bit earlier before that when Saturn first moves into Libra in November 20th of 1950. And then the egress or Saturn leaving Libra happened October 22nd, 1953. So as a result of that, for this conjunction, that gives us an effective range of starting when Saturn first moves into the sign-based conjunction with Neptune on November 20th, 1950, all the way until Saturn moves out of orb of Neptune once it’s gone into Scorpio on October 28th, 1954. And here is a lovely graph just to show you the 15-degree orb and the range that that sets up in terms of the most intense parts around the exact conjunctions of 1952 and 1953.
All right, so these are some of the topics that we’re gonna talk about of some of the major things. These are not all the topics that we’re gonna talk about; we’ve already mentioned some of them in passing. But where to start with this one is that the early 1950s are the early intense years of the Cold War. So as soon as World War Two was over, tensions started rising almost immediately between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was able to develop the atomic bomb by the end of the 1940s and test their first one. And then one of the first things that happens early in this series is that the first hydrogen bomb is tested early in the 1950s by the United States, and this really ramps things up in terms of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons and makes the Cold War tensions that were already present even more intense as both societies kind of start freaking out, kind of getting very paranoid, and other things surrounding that, right?
NDB: Yeah. By this point, it’s getting real, because of course the atomic bomb is demystified by this point. It had been used in 1945 and that took people back enough. But certainly like I said until August of ‘49, the United States was the only country that had anything resembling this kind of weapon. So at least as far as they were concerned, you know, it was a relatively safe playing field. But once the Soviet Union got the bomb, that really shifted things. And so yeah, you know, then it becomes necessary to get a bigger, more dangerous bomb than what the Soviets have, and the arms race is afoot.
CB: Right. So this is when the nuclear arms race really takes off, and our period begins only a year, then, after the Soviets first detonate their weapon.
So Cold War tensions, there’s a lot of things to that, but that becomes really intense. We’ve talked already about the period of paranoia, because this also, this conjunction coincides with McCarthyism when they start doing like, they get really paranoid because there was some basis to that, because the Soviets actually had sent spies that were spying on things like the nuclear weapons program even during World War Two, so much so that when… I think Truman told Stalin about the nuclear bomb, he wasn’t super surprised because he already knew as a result of spies that they had it, right?
NDB: That’s right. Yeah. At the conference in June of ‘45, Truman told him as if he was letting him in on a secret, and Stalin’s just, you know, stone-faced like, “Oh, that’s really good. Good luck with that.” Meanwhile, he’s known about it for ages.
CB: Right. So and one of the early events that occurs that goes along with that is there was actually a couple called the Rosenbergs who were executed in the United States in 1953 for being spies and for accusations of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. And the build up to that, which happened for like, several years before they were executed was actually very intense because there were a lot of calls for them to have leniency on them or to not execute them before they actually did, right?
NDB: Yeah. You know, in hindsight, I think it’s been determined that Mrs. Rosenberg was probably not as guilty as it was suggested at the time. Julius probably was, but still, you know, whether that merited the death penalty was a whole other question. Certainly, I mean, it motivated a whole sort of movement against it, but at the same time there was obviously there was plenty of people in the country who were in support of it. And it was happening just as the Korean War was ending, not long after Eisenhower had been elected. So it was – and just before Joe McCarthy was gonna fall, but not when he had fallen just yet. So yeah, it was a real sort of peak in that whole thing in terms of the consequences. I mean, the Rosenbergs look like a very, you know, ordinary couple, and they had kids that were being left behind, so yeah. You’re taking away both parents of some children. The person who wound up raising their children was the writer – I forget his name offhand, but he wrote the lyrics to the song “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday. I remember that. He was a real devoted political activist. But yeah. It was a big, big deal. And there had been other arrests of, you know, spies. Canada, they had found some spies in Canada in 1946 sharing nuclear secrets. I think that was when it first emerged that, you know, that the Soviets did have spies in places where the spies they found in Canada. And —
CB: Right.
NDB: — from there, it just got uglier and uglier.
CB: Right. And then this is also a period when the CIA was like, very active with their own covert operations on the part of the US, and they were doing things like we talked about earlier, like deposing the leader of Iran at that point and installing somebody that was more favorable to the United States. So there was a lot of themes during this period of the early ‘50s of like, covert operations, propaganda, the unseen threat of nuclear war. There was also a lot of like, high ideals of like, these ideas of these great struggles between different ideologies of like, capitalism versus socialism, and this struggle for global dominance, essentially, where you had different countries in these different spheres of influence are taking sides in this broader like, ideological struggle that emerged during the course of the early Cold War.
NDB: Yeah. And of course, you know, the hydrogen bomb was made public ultimately, but of course these weapons programs – until they are tested and approved – are done through very covert means themselves. You know, no one knew the atomic bomb had existed until it was dropped on Hiroshima, and similarly obviously the whole weapons program, the whole element of it is that you’re building things in secret and then suddenly sort of announcing, “Hey, we have this finished new thing that can do this much damage.”
And speaking of the CIA and weapons that are being developed in secret, there was another little weapon they were trying out around this time. In March of 1953 at the peak of the conjunction, probably like, one of the most Saturn-Neptune-esque charts I’ve ever seen, the CIA created this program called MKUltra where they were using LSD, which was still a fairly new discovery or invention at the time – it was only about 10 years old – but they were testing it for its potential for psychological warfare as an actual weapon. And it was actually being tested not only in my hometown of Montreal but at the Allan Memorial Institute, which is next door to the hospital I was born in in Montreal. And they were basically administering LSD to patients in a mental hospital and studying them without their consent or knowledge. One woman wound up —
CB: Are you trying to tell us something about why you’re so good at astrology?
NDB: Yes, that’s right. Because 15 years before I was born, someone gave LSDs to some mental patients in the hospital next door.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Yeah, no, one —
CB: That explains a lot.
NDB: Yeah, one woman took her life eventually. Like, the program lasted until just before Watergate was exposed. And then it all came to light during the Church hearings. And yeah, there was a big to-do. I think eventually Canada demanded an apology, although I’m sure the Canadian officials were probably in on the secret; I don’t know.
CB: Right. Because what they were doing is they were trying to like, systematically develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and to force confessions or even do like, mind control and things like that.
NDB: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you know, they thought they would be able to literally sort of, yeah, administer LSD to people and then tell them to go kill so-and-so or to go steal such-and-such. So —
CB: Or to have like, a truth serum.
NDB: Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s what they thought they might be working with at the time. So yeah, I think there was also there was a CIA agent who was accidentally dosed and wound up also taking his life. So yeah, there were some really nasty consequences to it all, and it went on for longer than you would think, and probably in some way dovetailed with LSD becoming this recreational phenomenon in the ‘60s in some way.
If I remember correctly, the CIA bought like, every dose from the Sandoz lab in Switzerland, so there was a lot of it in the USA suddenly, and only a matter of time before people learn the recipe, I guess.
CB: Yeah. One of the things I was reading was that it was saying that the program was partially driven by some of those Cold War fears and like, paranoia where they feared that the Soviets and other adversaries potentially could use mind control techniques themselves, so then the CIA’s like, “Well, we’ve gotta develop that first, then” or “We’ve gotta develop our own.” And I found this – there’s a quote on Wikipedia that says,
“The project began during a period of what English journalist Rupert Cornwell described as ‘paranoia’ at the CIA, when the US had lost its nuclear monopoly and fear of Communism was at its height.”
So I thought that was such a striking paragraph just thinking about this in the context of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction going exact at that time.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. Because if the CIA’s paranoid, holy moly. No one’s safe, you know? And that was – I mean, this was just after Eisenhower had taken power, and he appointed his own CIA head and all this, so it was, you know, in a new regime, everyone wants to prove themself and show that they have some great new idea that their predecessor didn’t. So you also get some of that I think.
CB: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that, because that’s a separate section that I wanted to go into is an entire section, which is the election of Eisenhower, who – this represented a major shift in the political landscape of the United States because it ended a 20-year period of dominance of the Democrats up to that point, coming out of the era of Roosevelt, of the Roosevelts basically, and Eisenhower was a Republican, and it ushered in a period of Republican dominance for a period of time.
NDB: Yeah. Although it’s funny – like, he hadn’t been like, a lifelong Republican or what have you. At one point, the Democrats thought they could get him to be their candidate. But he was – I mean, because he was sort of against Truman, that he opted to be a Republican. So in some ways, him going into the Republican party and becoming the candidate was the thing the party needed to have that kind of facelift because he didn’t have some age-old association with the Republicans. You know, he was just sort of an outsider who was coming into the party.
CB: He was like, a —
NDB: So I think —
CB: — he was a decorated —
NDB: General.
CB: — general, basically, at that point from World War Two.
NDB: Yeah. But he’d been in charge of the whole, you know, European assault on Germany. You know, ironically because Marshall, his superior officer, was needed in the White House. Marshall wanted to be the guy leading the charge into Europe, but he was too high up. He was an advisor to Roosevelt, so he had to take his second-in-command, Eisenhower, and he got to have all the glory of spearheading that whole operation. And that made him very famous and popular and, you know, widely celebrated across the political spectrum, and so that made him an ideal candidate for whichever party got him.
CB: Right. So I wanted to mention this just because it seemed important that it was coming out of the New Deal era where you had, you know, Roosevelt come into power in 1932 and he’s coming in partially on the heels of like, the Great Depression and the previous Republican president making it worse as we talked about in the Mars retrograde in Cancer episode by instituting tariffs that actually deepened the Great Depression and also helped to lead to the rise of some of the fascists in Europe due to some of the issues it did with the trade wars and things like that. So Roosevelt comes in in 1932; he partially runs on an anti-tariff, you know, approach to the presidency, and he follows through with that, but then he institutes a lot of those New Deal social welfare programs and different things like that during the course of his presidency. Fights World War Two. But he has those, what, almost four terms; he has three different full terms in office. So there’s this huge, long period of essentially Democratic dominance of the White House especially, and then eventually this period when Eisenhower comes in around the Saturn-Neptune conjunction represents this reaction to it, and you get this war hero general coming in, but he’s also somebody who empowers the CIA. And then the CIA starts like, running amok, and like, overthrowing governments and doing all this stuff, and he eventually ends his presidency – Eisenhower – on a Venus retrograde in Aries warning people about the military industrial complex as we talked about in that previous Venus retrograde in Aries episode. So I just thought that was notable because – and it was something I noted that this began a period of Republican dominance because we’re seeing a little bit of repetition of that right now where the Republicans just swept into power in all branches of government after the 2024 US presidential election and that’s kind of where we’re at today.
NDB: Yeah. And you can make a parallel between Eisenhower and Trump insofar as they are both candidates who sort of came into the Republican party from the outside, you know. There’s not these people who have been stalwarts of the party, you know, for ages as they worked their way up the greasy pole to the presidency. They sort of, you know, they come in and almost take over the party, or certainly they’re seen as being a new facet of, you know, a new center of power in the party that hadn’t existed until they sort of came into the scene. So there is —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — also a parallel, I’d say, in that.
CB: Yeah. And I’m thinking also just about the ideological shift in the country in both eras that we can kind of see happening currently or that, you know, the re-election of Trump as well as not just Trump, but also the Senate and the House maintaining Republican majorities as well as the Supreme Court, for that matter, and seeing a similar sort of ideological shift that was happening in the early 1950s forward with Eisenhower coming into power. So there’s something there that’s kind of important and kind of notable.
So one of the biggest things geopolitically that happened in this period, though, in connection with that was the Korean War took place pretty much entirely within our range of the conjunction, our full range between 1950 and 1954, right?
NDB: Yeah. The war itself started June or July of 1950, and our range starts in November. But November of 1950 is the month when China sort of comes in and turns everything around, makes it like, the war goes into people realize this isn’t gonna be easy once they get to November of 1950 because China comes in on a sort of counterattack. And I think —
CB: Why don’t you set up what actually happened first?
NDB: Oh, sure. Okay. Well, I’ve mentioned, you know, Communist China won their civil war in October of ‘49. They become a country in early 1950. Mao goes to Moscow and meets with Stalin. And you know, Mao’s not exactly treated like an equal as he expects to be, but nonetheless, you know, he’s now under the sort of the common turn umbrella if you will. The common turn was the Communist International; there was still this idea that the Soviet Union could conceivably run the entire Communist world or the entire world out of Moscow. And yeah, you know, one way or the other, I think this was, there was some kind of agreement that China could support agitation in Korea. They already had Kim Il-Sung in place, you know, who would be the future North Korean leader. And so yeah. With that in mind, Korea of course is this peninsula that just sort of hangs off a part of China. You know, very vulnerable. Water on three sides, et cetera. And remarkably small. Like, when you look at a map, it’s amazing to think that you have these, you know, two very distinct countries occupying that small amount of space.
But yeah. You know, one thing led to another. The Communist forces were advancing on the South —
CB: So what happened was the Soviet Union and China backed North Korean forces who invaded South Korea, and they pushed the South Korean forces all the way to the brink, all the way to the water’s edge essentially, right?
NDB: Yeah. But like, that’s – pushing them to the brink of the water’s edge is what starts to happen around November of 1950. You know, like, that’s when it sort of goes to that level.
CB: Right. But that’s the beginning of the war is the North Koreans invade the South with the backing of Russia and China. And then the US and a coalition of international forces connected with the United Nations, which is newly formed, send troops in to back up the South Korean forces. They land troops, and then they push the North Koreans back all the way much further than the original like, border had been up to that point. And so the North Koreans are like, on the brink of losing the war, and so then all of a sudden China jumps in and commits because they don’t want the United States especially to take over the Korean peninsula. So the Chinese commit a bunch of forces, and they push the US and the other ally UN countries back again. And the war becomes this constant pushing back and forth across that dividing line, that parallel, right? What parallel was it?
NDB: Oh, I should know it by heart; I used to.
CB: 38th parallel.
NDB: Thank you. Yeah. I used to have that committed to memory.
CB: And that’s important because that’s one of the themes that comes up over and over again is like, boundaries and borders but also sometimes like, imaginary borders or boundaries, or boundaries that are ambiguous in some way. And this becomes one of them as this war keeps being fought like, pushing each other back and forth in this proxy war that essentially ends up becoming like, the US versus China fighting through the Korean forces. They keep pushing each other back and forth across this boundary until eventually there’s an armistice not long after the final conjunction. And then they end up creating an actual border between North and South Korea with a demilitarized zone, which is kind of evocative of the Berlin Wall, for example.
NDB: Yeah. Very similar situation. And actually precedes the Berlin Wall. You know, not the border, but the actual wall. Yeah, it’s a very peculiar border. And yeah, you know, that’s a excellent account of the war and how it was fought. And with that in mind, yeah, the border as it finally stands is very defined, and then there’s this building that can be accessed from either side where, you know, the border guards can stare each other in the eye and what have you. It’s a very peculiar set-up.
CB: Right. So they create this heavily fortified border, and so that’s one of the themes is that while sometimes we see the breaking down of walls like we did in 1989 with the Berlin Wall, sometimes we see the building up of walls under these conjunctions as well.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s more than a wall. Like, it’s a whole sort of cultural cutoff. I mean, there are people who have families on both sides of that border who won’t see or speak to each other for 30, 40 years at best, if ever. So it really is such a strange place for that to happen.
CB: Right. It’s very much like East and West Germany, but an almost extreme version of that because North Korea becomes very cut off, like a Communist sort of like, island unto itself and like, kingdom. Whereas the South, you know, through its connections with other countries and through trade and being like, a capitalist country has like, flourished financially over the past several decades.
NDB: Well, certainly compared to North Korea they’ve flourished, yeah. And yeah. I mean, the thing is like, if you compare Germany, like first of all, Berlin was fairly deep inside East Germany. Like, you still had to go into East Germany, and then if you were in Berlin you could be in that West Berlin part that was free. And Germany is a country that, you know, you can barely drive across in one day, even with the Autobahn, it’s like, you know, it’s a whole day’s drive from one end to the other at best. Whereas Korea, you know, is much smaller. So to have, you know, the society broken in two and totally cut off from each other in that kind of physical space is that much more sort of severe and remarkable. You know, you can divide Germany in half, and you still have these two reasonably sized countries that you can, you know, drive around that have different parts of their landscape and what have you. But yeah, in Korea, it’s just such a different thing.
CB: Yeah. For sure. So the armistice agreement gets signed just five days after the final conjunction, right?
NDB: Yeah. It’s like, June or July ‘53. Right around the same time that the Rosenbergs are being executed, all that’s happening very, very close together.
CB: Got it. All right. And then connected in the same continent, one of our other major events that takes place under this conjunction is that Tibet is annexed by China. Tibet is invaded by China in October of 1950, and then the Chinese government takes over Tibet and essentially annexes it officially by 1951.
NDB: Yeah. The Dalai Lama doesn’t leave until 1959, but by that point, China’s in total control of it, and yeah. You know, as far as they’re concerned, it’s always been theirs. It’s not unlike the story Russia has about Ukraine.
CB: Yeah. One of the things that this kind of represents is an early version of that we’ll see come up over and over again is like, the end of a dynasty, because it really, you know, the Dalai Lama then eventually leaving. But it ends the control of the Tibetans basically being in charge of that entire area, especially as a government or a continual dynasty that had lasted for centuries. While they flee and obviously continue, there’s something that ends at that point, it seems like.
NDB: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Okay. So we’ll see that come up a lot. Speaking about the end of things and the Cold War, another hugely important turning point takes place under this conjunction, which is that Joseph Stalin dies on March 5th of 1953, and he was the leader of the Soviet Union for decades at that point. And his loss and his death is like, a huge turning point in Russian history.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, for all kinds of reasons. First of all, it’s very ironic that the Americans elect Eisenhower to be this sort of, you know, strongman to fight Stalin, because that’s very much what the Americans have in mind. Like, they need someone who’s – they don’t see Truman being Stalin’s equal. They need someone with that kind of gravitas and stature. And you know, Eisenhower’s not even president for six weeks maybe, but something like that for the five, six weeks, and Stalin just dies, which is a sea change for the Soviet Union in many ways, not least because it will lead to Khrushchev in February of ‘56, revealing a lot of the secret machinations of Stalin. You know, just how many people have been sent to gulags or had their lives ruined – all these different details that were largely kept from the Soviet people.
Now, this revelation didn’t coincide with Saturn-Neptune, but it was all because like, you know, Stalin’s death led to that inevitability. And that wound up changing a lot of things for Communists around the world, because there were, you know, certainly in the West you had a certain pocket of people who had been die-hard Communists since the ‘30s when they learned of what Stalin had really been doing, sort of, you know, turned their back on it for good. And created —
CB: Right.
NDB: — the schism within, you know, left-leaning circles. So yeah, in all kinds —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — of ways, yeah. I mean, Stalin had really, you know, run the place essentially like a tsar since the ‘20s, and —
CB: So that’s like, 30 years he had been in charge.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So he’d been in charge for 30 years. So one of the things that happens with this that we’ll see as a recurring theme is that after he died, it triggered a power struggle within the Soviet Union as well as a period of de-Stalinization. And this is a really common theme that I have a bunch of other examples of where the death of a ruler sometimes throws a kingdom into disarray, and there’s internal fighting and political maneuvering surrounding it as well as a power vacuum. “Power vacuum” is one of the keywords that Lindsey mentioned as one of our researchers as a recurring theme of a way that she was articulating it that I thought was particularly good. But that power struggle and that period like you were mentioning of de-Stalinization where ideologically there was like, a shift between the Soviet Union in the 30 years prior to his death when he was the singular guy in charge of everything and he was ruling it with an iron fist versus the 30 years that came after this.
NDB: Exactly. And yeah, Lindsey’s absolutely right about a power vacuum, because Stalin dies in March of ‘53, and Khrushchev doesn’t really take power until the end of ‘53. And over the course of that whole year, there really are these different factions that are vying for power, and largely Khrushchev is kind of like the, you know, no one would have pegged him to be the guy who winds up taking over. He’s been kind of a clown. He’s sort of like the guy who Stalin keeps around to make him laugh. But he’s shrewd enough to sort of maneuver himself. His main adversary is this guy, Lavrentiy Beria, who’s a real sick, twisted person. Serial SAs – you know, he’s really, really bad. He winds up losing to Khrushchev and being executed at the end of the year.
A quick divergence – there’s a fantastic movie called The Death of Stalin; it is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Steve Buscemi plays Khrushchev. Michael Palin plays Molotov. And it’s a comedy about the death of Stalin and the power vacuum, what we’re describing. The one thing the movie doesn’t do accurately – I mean, it’s for the movie – is that it makes this whole year of 1953, how that unfolded, it makes it look like it happened maybe over two days. But apart from that, it’s very, very accurate and really, really funny.
CB: Okay.
NDB: And yeah, but that is essentially it. Like, for the duration of ‘53 from Stalin’s death until Beria is executed in I think December of ‘53, there is a power vacuum of sorts, and you know, the different other people who had been under Stalin – like Molotov, like Beria, like Khrushchev – are all trying to take control.
CB: Yeah. So sometimes there’s this power vacuum. There’s this political confusion and scrambling and working behind the scenes and other things that are done during these periods, but we’ll see repeatedly – especially later when I get into some of the summaries of earlier periods – a lot of similar repetitions of this, of like a powerful figure dies, creates a power vacuum, and then there’s a bunch of political intrigue. Sometimes the political intrigue that occurs afterwards causes – and the death of a strong leader – causes weakness in the country at that point, which leaves it open to vulnerabilities from external forces is like, one of the recurring themes that I noticed in other instances. Yeah. So but this is —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — a huge turning point at this point. And interestingly, a future leader of Russia was born at this time under this —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — conjunction. So Stalin dies, but then Vladimir Putin is born at this time under this Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Putin was born in October of ‘52, you know, according to our best sources. And yeah, he’s got the Sun in Libra and Saturn-Neptune in Libra, so that’s absolutely right. It’s quite ironic that he’s born just before Stalin dies.
And indeed, just another thing about the power vacuum – once Stalin died, there was an uprising in East Germany, actually. You know, the early rumblings of a sort of pushback, because of course it was only eight years earlier during the previous Venus retrograde in Aries that Germany had fallen into Soviet hands. So yeah, the power vacuum really stirred things up in a bunch of different ways. And I think ultimately, you know, even though it took another 36 years, it’s what leads to the Soviet Union eventually coming apart. You had to have someone as ruthless as Stalin to really make it run the way it had, so.
CB: Right —
NDB: The other thing I think —
CB: — that’s an interesting point, because like, you know, it was partially the reforms that people – not Khrushchev. In the 1980s, who was the guy in charge that was instituting the reforms?
NDB: Oh, Brezhnev.
CB: Brezhnev. No – well, Brezhnev —
NDB: Oh no. I’m sorry —
CB: — after Brezhnev.
NDB: Brezhnev died in ‘82; I’m sorry. Yeah, Gorbachev.
CB: Gorbachev.
NDB: He came aboard in ‘85, yeah.
CB: Because it was like, he was trying to institute reforms as part of it, is part of what was happening, and we’re at that conjunction eventually. But then everything just kind of falls apart, and instead of trying to force it to keep it together, which they did initially, eventually they just kind of like, let go and it falls apart. But it’s interesting that that was one cycle later, and here we see Stalin dying on this one. And this was not the only conjunction in Russian history where a major like, leader of Russia had passed away, right?
NDB: Not by a long shot. There’s quite a few. I don’t know – do we wanna list them all now, or do we wanna go further back in time and touch on them bit by bit?
CB: We’ll do a later, but just mention like, Alexander the Second —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — was a very famous one.
NDB: Yeah, Alexander the Second is killed in a bomb explosion in 1881, just before he was about to introduce all these very liberal reforms to Russia, which certainly would have taken it on a different course. Of course, Czar Nicholas the Second was deposed during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1917, and by the time his family and he are murdered in a basement in Ekaterinburg, I think Saturn and Neptune are still pretty close together by July of 1918. So you can certainly put him in there. And yeah, just broadly speaking, as the listeners and viewers are gonna see, Saturn-Neptune conjunctions are a real consistent factor in Russian history to a really remarkable degree, like we were saying, going all the way back to the Mongols. So yeah, there is a lot to cover there. But yeah —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Stalin was not the first Russian leader to die during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. One other thing I wanted to say about the Cold War – especially in the West – you know, Communism of course is about, you know, shared resources and trying to make society fair and even. But the thing that was often used as a sort of anti-Communist trope was the atheism of Communism. You know —
CB: Oh right.
NDB: Because when you think about it, I mean, some people might be – you know, especially if they’re Christian – they might be somewhat warm to the idea of sharing and doing more for poor people and what have you. But if you present Communism as this, you know, dark atheist force, it’s a lot easier for it to be demonized. And what’s really interesting is Eisenhower had the SUn in Libra, and when he was elected in October of ‘52, Saturn and Neptune were conjunct his Sun. This is absolutely unique in American history if not political history; I can’t think of another leader sort of coming to power while there’s a Saturn-Neptune conjunction on their Sun. He also had the Moon in Libra; we don’t know his exact time, but it couldn’t, you know. It’s obviously it’s touching all his Libra stuff. And one of the first things that Eisenhower did after he was inaugurated January 20th of ‘53, and on February 1st, ‘53, he converted to a Presbyterian church. He’d been raised – his mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. He’d been, you know, sort of raised in a more fringe religion, if you will, but it was seen to be very important for him to convert to the Presbyterian church which was sort of more of a standard American denomination. And you know, visibly. To show himself to be a church-going guy, because that was anti-Communist. And I think there’s an – you know, we’re gonna see another conversion when we go back further into the history of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions – someone else who does convert during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in order to take power of a country, which will come up again. But it was interesting. I mean, it was largely a sort of a performative bit of propaganda, I suppose. But that was the idea was to really emphasize, you know, church-going capitalist versus atheist Communist. And you’ll always hear in those old anti-Communist propaganda them being referred to as “godless.” It’s always the “godless Communists” when you hear things from the ‘50s and ‘40s about them.
CB: That’s a great point about the conversion, because that was one of the ones I found is like, way back, Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks in 1768 at a conjunction, and he would famously later become the Holy Roman Emperor a little bit later. And then you had Clovis became the leader of the Salian Franks in 481, and he would later convert to Christiniaty and found the Merovingian dynasty. So that notion you found of like, leaders that convert or have some kind of religious conversion seems like an important theme.
NDB: Yeah. The one I had in mind was King Henry of Navarre – King Henry the 4th of France. Following the Wars of Religion, during which they’d had a series of Catholic kings, and this was the period when there was tremendous repression against Protestants in France. Ultimately, like, the only choice – like, the next king in line after Henry the 3rd died was Henry the 4th who came in from the Bourbon family. Excuse me. So it was sort of a new family dynasty of French kings, but he had been a Protestant, and he agreed to convert to Catholicism in order to take the French crown. And so, you know, there again – I mean, it to some degree helped in the French Wars of Religion, at least until he was murdered in 1610. But it certainly calmed things down for a little while. And yeah, you know, so it’s another instance where it wasn’t Saturn-Neptune conjunct his Sun like with Eisenhower, but he did convert just before accepting the crown.
CB: Right. In all of these instances, sometimes it’s like, converting to the more established religion for like, the greater power advantage that that gives at the time in some ways.
NDB: Yeah. That’s certainly the case with Henry the 4th and Eisenhower, yeah.
CB: Okay. That’s important. Other piece which we already mentioned earlier but it ties in with Eisenhower, this is the period we were talking about earlier where television is popularized. And one of the reasons that it’s popularized is that this becomes the first presidential election – 1952 – where television is really a focal point and where the campaigns really used political ads and other things like that where they really focused on television as a new medium for getting candidates elected. And one of the things that they did is they for the first time televised the conventions – the Democratic and Republican National Conventions – and even importantly, Joseph McCarthy gave like, the keynote speech at the 1952 Republican Convention just to give you some like, crossover there in terms of McCarthyism and television and everything else that was going on.
NDB: Yeah. It was – I mean, McCarthy was an early TV star, you know, because he was right there for the medium. So you would see him often in those early days of American television. Which in many ways also was, you know, eventually led to his downfall when in May of 1954 he went a little too far and he was scolded on live television, and people, you know, really sort of saw a different side to him. And by the end of the year, he was censured, and within a few years I think he died in May of ‘57, so. Yeah, he rose by television and he fell by it. And coming back to the election, the fact that, yeah, Eisenhower was having that Saturn-Neptune transit conjunct the Sun, the fact that he’s kind of a new TV star in a way. You know, winning the Republican Convention and then the election all in front of everyone in their living room is, you know, unprecedented.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. He did like, campaigns like “Eisenhower Answers America” where he did these short simple direct ads responding to carefully selected questions from like, average citizens. And the power of like, visuals became much more important in this presidential election. And this event and having some of these big events televised became partially a driver for people going to buy television sets so that they could watch this.
ANother major event that we already mentioned during this time that was a major driver for television sales worldwide was the coronation of Queen Elizbaeth the 2nd, whose coronation occurred in 1952, right?
NDB: That’s right. Well, no – the coronation was ‘53. Her father died in February of ‘52, and that’s when she ascended to the throne, and they usually have the coronation about a year after the passing of the last monarch. In her case, the coronation was about 16 months or so after. But yeah, it was all televised on the suggestion of her husband, Prince Philip, who, you know, wanted to see himself as being a sort of modernizer of the monarchy. And in some ways, televising the coronation was the beginning of a snowball effect that leads to in 1969, the BBC does a whole documentary on the royal family. But then, you know, eventually it becomes this sort of paparazzi thing, and in some ways it leads directly to Princess Diana being killed in Paris in ‘97 while she’s running away from paparazzi. Because you never would have had that kind of media attention on the royals prior to the thing being televised. But it sort of it opened some kind of Pandora’s box that, yeah, to my mind you can see it leading directly to what happens to Diana.
CB: Right. And the like —
NDB: 44 years later, yeah.
CB: — the double-edged sword of the British royal family’s both like, sort of weird relationship with the media of sometimes using it to their advantage and other times being subjected to, you know, difficult things as a result of it.
So people would like, gather across the United States and Britain to – they would gather in their homes or in pubs or other public spaces to watch the ceremony. And the scale and the pageantry of it as well as all the visuals really demonstrated the value of like, television at that point in terms of as we were say, immersion, and it was the first major international event to be televised around the world. And there’s a lot of like, interesting stories about how it was televised and how they got the tapes out like, really quickly on the same day and stuff like that.
NDB: Yeah, I’d forgotten some of that. I know like, with Canada, they had someone ready to go and fly it over and all that. Yeah.
CB: Like a jet.
NDB: Yeah, which was also quite new at the time, yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah, so —
NDB: There was one thing I forgot to mention when we were talking about Eisenhower and that whole TV campaign. His vice presidential candidate was Richard Nixon, who was a senator at the time. And he had to – he was almost kicked off the ticket. There was some accused impropriety, you know, involving money. And what Nixon did was very shrewd; he got a half-hour TV spot. He had his wife, Pat, sitting in the corner, and he gave this direct, impassioned defense of himself to the American public. This is called the Checkers speech because he mentions that he never took any gifts from anyone, except for a cocker spaniel named Checkers who he gave to, you know, his daughter loves the dog so he’s keeping the dog. And you know, you can go stuff yourself if you don’t like that, but I haven’t taken any other money, blah blah blah. And he presents himself being a very sort of, you know, humble everyman. His wife wears a nice coat but not a very nice coat, you know, that kind of thing. A plain nice coat.
But it’s another early use of television. Very ironic compared to what happens to Nixon eights years later when he’s, you know, in the televised debates with Kennedy and he’s not as shrewd and media savvy as he was suggesting to us as he might have been in ‘52.
CB: Yeah. Okay. So I wanna show the chart for Elizabeth’s coronation occurred June 2nd, 1953, right?
NDB: That sounds about right. Her grandmother had just died not long before, like, in April or May or something.
CB: Here is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction; we can see Saturn’s at late 20 degrees of Libra and Neptune is at early 21 degrees of Libra. So they’re super, super close. Super conjunct. And what I find so striking about – I find a few things striking about this, but one of the things I didn’t realize that you had pointed out is that Elizabeth the 1st, whose coronation happened centuries earlier, was also had her coronation on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, right?
NDB: Yeah. She ascended to the throne November of 1558 when her older half-sister, Mary, who was Catholic, died. So this is interesting – it’s not exactly a conversion, if you will, but —
CB: What date?
NDB: Well, Mary died November 17th, 1558.
CB: Okay.
NDB: I might – 5:30 AM, apparently, in London. So yeah. Queen Mary dies; she’d been Bloody Mary. She’d been, you know, persecuting Protestants. These are both daughters of Henry the 8th, who of course had six wives and they’re each daughters of a different wife. So Mary dies, and she’s been Catholic, and she’s been persecuting Protestants. And then suddenly she dies, and Elzabeth ascends to the throne – Elizabeth the 1st – so yes. Both Queen Elizabeths ascended to the throne and were coronated during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, and yeah, and now you had a Protestant on the throne instead of a Catholic. So there was an element of conversion there, as well, if you – not one person converting but the country suddenly being converted, if you will —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — back to Protestantism. Yeah.
CB: So here’s the chart. Around November 17th, 1558, we have Saturn at 17 Taurus and Neptune at 24 Taurus. And I just find that so striking. I find it especially striking because one thing – I didn’t realize that those two had their coronation on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. Pretty – like, halfway into the research, I kept noticing like, women rulers kept coming up at different points in history, even like, surprisingly early on. Like, going back to like, a woman ruler in India at one point, and then there were like, two in Japan that were empresses. And it kept coming up over and over again, and so I was really struck by later in the research like, realizing that Queen Elizabeth herself in 1953 that her coronation was on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction and that she became the longest reigning monarch in British history at that point before passing away just, what, a couple of years ago now. And there’s something about these conjunctions where women in positions of power keep coming up in them at different points, but also as we’ll see in the next conjunction in 2017, women’s right to vote and to take part —
NDB: 1917.
CB: What did I say?
NDB: 2017.
CB: Okay. So 1917. As we’ll see, the women’s suffrage movement that culminates not just in the US but also in the UK and Canada, I believe, at that time —
NDB: Yeah!
CB: — with women getting the right to vote. And that goes all the way back to the middle of the 1800s where in the US, at least, the women’s suffrage movement began on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction with the Seneca Falls Convention, which I think is like, 1848 or something like that.
NDB: Correct.
CB: So I didn’t expect that at first. This was an unexpected thing. I’m still working out the details on why that is, of like, why women rulers or women in positions of government is a relevant signification of Neptune. I was spitballing like, the idea at one point of like, there was a question I talked about in my book about whether some ancient astrologers in the Greco-Roman tradition may have conceptualized Saturn as feminine. There’s a lack of clarity about whether Dorotheus did or whether that was a typo in a later translation of the book into Arabic. But some later authors like Theophilus took that as a genuine thing and thought that Saturn was feminine as a result of that translation of Dorotheus. So there’s some possibility that Saturn was conceptualized by some people as being feminine in the ancient world. If that was true, and then if you also think about the outer planets in terms of if you were attempt to apply things like gender – whatever you conceptualize that as – to the different outer planets, which is tricky in and of itself. But with Neptune, one might make the argument that perhaps it has more of the qualities we might associate with that in other areas of astrology. Maybe it’s because Saturn and Neptune meeting up is like a doubling up of some sort of feminine quality, therefore maybe that’s why it’s showing up as like, women in positions of power. I don’t know if that’s correct, but that’s just like, something I’ve been trying to work out over the past week of why this is showing up.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, when I think of the Saturn-Neptune who’ve come to power, there is something sort of mythical about their aura, which I guess is probably true of queens broadly speaking. But you know, Elizabeth the 1st or 2nd, you know. Well, I guess Elizabeth the 2nd because we got to see her grow old and be kind of regular, but certainly when she had her coronation, there was something very that had an extra I think aura of sort of mysticism to it, for want of a better word, in terms of how that monarch is perceived. And certainly Elizabeth the 1st would, you know, come up that aegis as well.
CB: Right.
NDB: Isabella of Castile and stuff, the other women that we’re gonna bring up, you know, similarly have some kind of aura of almost like, you know, supernatural qualities or something.
CB: Yeah. I mean, but there’s other women and other ones like Japan and India and other places, so I don’t know if that applies that they all have supernatural qualities. The only commonality is they happen to be women.
One other scenario that I thought is possible as well is that it could be simply instead of just, you know, attributing gender to both of those planets, there was one – a woman named Razia Sultana – in 1236 who was rose up to the position of being Sultan in India. And one of the things when I was reading about her that kept coming up consistently is how she was defying traditional gender norms because of the way she dressed and that she would like, lead her army and different things like that. And it could be that part of what we’re seeing is simply these women standing out because they are defying or they’re breaking the boundaries of traditional gender norms, and the – especially, you know, prior to recent times – the presumed ability of women to lead or something like that. And we’re seeing just people that are normally marginalized in society who get thrust into these huge leadership roles of actually being leaders in society. And so it could be something about that in terms of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and why that specifically is standing out.
NDB: Yeah. Certainly Elizabeth the One would qualify – you know, Elizabeth the 1st in the 1550s, because I mean, she would put on armor and not necessarily fight in battles, but she’s, you know, sort of present and supporting. And Isabella of Castile similarly, you know, she’s not necessarily getting involved in actual firing arrows or killing guys with swords, but she’s there on the battlefield. She turns up. She’s, you know, part of the effort. So there is an element of that, I think. And yeah, come —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — to think of it, Queen Elziabeth the 2nd during the Second World War was a mechanic for the British military. So, you know, before she was queen, there are all these photos of her, you know, wearing overalls with like, you know, grease on her, fixing Jeeps or whatever.
CB: Right.
NDB: So yeah, which was not something that it was thought women should be doing, I suppose.
CB: Yeah. So and then of course Elizabeth passed away in 2022, and then her son Charles, his coronation took place in I think May of 2023, and that was right after Saturn had moved into Pisces in March of 2023. So right after the Saturn-Neptune conjunction had started to build up.
NDB: Yeah. Good point.
CB: Yeah. So we’ll pay attention to that Saturn-Neptune conjunction over the next year or two, especially as it gets more intense, and see if there’s any developments there in terms of the British royal family especially.
All right. Other things about this. We mentioned this already in passing, but the Iranian coup took place August 19th of 1953, when the US orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of the country and installed – reinstated – the Shah. We’ve talked about the issues that this brought up.
Let’s see, other things to mention are just a couple. I mentioned the polio vaccine was developed during this time by Jonas Salk, and that was crucial. The other major thing that happened during this period, and you pointed this out, was actually that Scientology was founded during this time, and that’s a theme I’ve seen at different points is sometimes like, setting the foundations of new religions or religious societies especially. In particular, like, groups, for some reason, we’ll see in future ones like, moving to a new area and setting up a religious community is a really common theme. And you had written down the date of the incorporation of Scientology, which was February 18th, 1854 —
NDB: 1954.
CB: Yeah. 1954. One of the things I noticed, though, is that the church itself officially says that they began in 1953. So they actually place their inception closer to the actual conjunction, which was ‘52, ‘53, and I thought that was really striking.
NDB: Yeah. The date I thought I was giving was the day that their first physical church opened; that was my understanding of the date I have. February 18th, 1954, which incidentally is also the day John Travolta was born, and he of course is in the church of Scientology. But —
CB: One of the most famous Scientologists.
NDB: Yeah, I’d say so. So yeah, but yeah, ‘53, ‘54. I mean, maybe they incorporated, then they opened the building. I don’t know the specifics —
CB: Right.
NDB: — but yeah.
CB: Well, what’s interesting, though, is like, it was actually a process from like, 1950 to 1954 that really encompassed this Saturn-Neptune conjunction, because what happened first was that the founder, L. Ron Hubbard, published the book Dianetics in 1950. And this was kind of like a self-help, self-improvement, mental healing book that was like, somewhat – it wasn’t really religious necessarily as a text. But then over the next few years, especially 1952 to 1954, was the shift – it developed a movement around Dianetics, and he started incorporating more like, religious type concepts about like, thetans and other things like that so that it shifts into like, a religion or religious philosophy during the course of the actual conjunctions.
NDB: Possibly the creation of a church was, you know, meant to give it a kind of religious protection, I suppose.
CB: Right. There were different like, motivations for the shift in terms of speculations about why that shift took place for him and why he pushed it more in that direction. We don’t necessarily have to go into all of that, because I don’t – we’re gonna go across like, a number of different religions that came about or had things at different points during the Saturn-Neptune alignments. So I’m going to, instead of getting into the details, just sort of give some broad outlines in terms of that. But I thought this was very notable, especially in terms of even just the name and like, the crossover there.
NDB: Right. Good point.
CB: You know, “Scientology” is like, a very Saturn-Neptune thing, because Saturn – you usually think of science, but like, “ology,” you think of like, a religion or like a spiritual type thing. And —
NDB: Right.
CB: — yeah. Comes together on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Agreed.
CB: All right. I think that was the last major thing that I wanted to mention in terms of this one… The only other one that’s interesting, actually, that’s relevant right now is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, and was partially inspired by the McCarthyism of its era. But I think it’s kind of interesting that’s been coming up again like, recently. It was a dystopian novel that was a commentary on like, censorship, conformity, and the importance of independent thought.
NDB: Yeah. It’s about books being banned and there’s a secret society of people who each memorizes a particular book so that it’s never lost because, you know, they can’t be found to be written down or what have you.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Oh yeah, one other thing that happened here was the chemical structure of DNA was discovered in 1953. And this is important because it’s part of a broader theme that I noticed coming up more so with some of the earlier ones, but I think this might be an early example of it where there were things about, like, the hidden forces that are controlling nature where you can see something happening, but you don’t know what’s causing it until it’s eventually discovered sometimes under these conjunctions. I think this is a later example of this, but we’re gonna see more of that, especially when it comes to gravity, for example, in the 1917 conjunction and the confirmation – both the publication and confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. But otherwise, I think that’s good for this conjunction. Shall we move on?
NDB: Let’s do it. Let’s go to World War One.
CB: All right, let’s jump into the next conjunction right now, which is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that took place in 1917 and was in orb within a few years around that, both in terms of degree-based as well as the sign-based conjunction.
All right. So here is the data for 1917. This conjunction is like our current one, because it starts in Cancer, but it doesn’t go exact until the two planets hit early Leo. So as a result of that, it gets extended across two signs by the sign-based conjunction, although not by degree. By degree, there was only one exact conjunction, which occurred on August 1st, 1917, at four-and-a-half degrees of Leo. By orb, this conjunction came into the 15-degree range starting around the second quarter of 1916 and going all the way until the second quarter of 1919.
So here is the diagram for those watching the video version so you can see the orb on that and how it comes in in 1916 and then for the most part moves out of range later in 1918, but you see this like, little blip that shows up where it barely comes back into the 15-degree range in the second quarter of 1919. So still counting that. And then by sign, this one begins when Saturn first ingresses into Cancer and begins the sign-based conjunction with Neptune on August 24th, 1914, and then it ends when Saturn departs from Leo and breaks the sign-based conjunction with Neptune in that sign on August 12th, 1919. So this gives us a wider range since we’re talking about the transit of these planets through two signs that lasts from 1914 until 1919, and of course, when you start talking about anybody that knows anything about history a range like that, the first thing that immediately comes to mind is that’s exactly when World War One took place, which is a huge turning point in history. And this Saturn-Neptune conjunction is very much tied in with that event.
NDB: Very much.
CB: All right. So when does World War One start?
NDB: Well, war is declared at the beginning of August 1914 within a few days before Saturn’s ingress into Cancer. Pluto had just ingressed into Cancer; that was one of the things that always struck me when I first cracked open an ephemeris was that the First World War started when Pluto went into Cancer and the second one started when it went into Leo. But yeah, Saturn joins Pluto in Cancer just as, you know, troops are really mobilizing, as fighting hasn’t started – it’s about to start, but you know, Germans are marching west and east and trying to fight their enemies on both sides and catch them off guard.
CB: And it actually gets like, triggered by an assassination, right?
NDB: That’s right. Yeah. The assassination is in June. Archduke Franz Ferdinand is the heir to the Hapsburg throne based on Vienna. And he’s married to a woman who is not his equal in rank, and so she’s ostracized from court in Vienna, and therefore he’s really eager for her to be sitting by his side when he goes to, you know, visit Serbia, you know, because he can kind of get away with it, if you will. And even though he was actually probably the most pro-Serbian person in the Hapsburg court, he was targeted for assassination, and he and his wife were murdered in their open carriage in I think it’s June 28th, 1914. And then over the course of July —
CB: By who? Or for what motivation, briefly?
NDB: Okay, yeah. By a group called the Black Hand. A young guy named Gavrilo Princip, who’s really young – like, a teenager – and he’s part of this Serbian secret society. Maybe that’s the phrase you’re looking for.
CB: Right.
NDB: And yeah, I mean, basically they’re agitating for Serbian independence and the Hapsburg empire is looking to, you know, take up more of the Balkans than they already have. The Ottoman Empire has been losing wars just in the period of 1911 to 1913. They’ve been fighting Italy; they’ve been fighting Bulgaria, Greece, et cetera, et cetera, and so, you know, it seems like a good time to go in and get some more Balkan territory for the Hapsburg empire. And that blows up in his face, so to speak.
CB: Yeah. So one of the recurring themes I kept seeing that we’ll talk about more later but I wanna mention briefly is I kept seeing under this conjunction showing up in history secret societies and attempts to suppress them. And I also saw a number of instances of people working behind the scenes to overthrow a ruler sometimes, in addition to the other side things of either the death of the ruler under mysterious circumstances or the death of a ruler that throws the kingdom into disarray and creates some sort of power vacuum. So a lot of these are relevant here.
World War One was notable because it was the first war where literally like, the entire world becomes involved in it at a certain point. Although interestingly, one of the things I think that’s notable about this conjunction, which doesn’t occur by degree until 1917, is the United States doesn’t enter the war until around that point, right? Until 1917?
NDB: That’s correct. Largely, I mean, the people in the United States are largely against it. What turns the tide for the United States, the Mexican Revolution has been going on since 1910 just south of the border. By 1916 as the conjunction is starting to come into play, Pancho Villa, a Mexican sort of – well, he’s not – I mean, he’s part of the revolutionaries, let’s put it that way, but they’re running raids into the United States and stirring up trouble. And the United States sends the military after Pancho Villa into Mexico, and there are little skirmishes and what have you.
So back in Germany, there’s a guy named Erich von Ludendorff; he’s a major Russian general. He’s sort of the co-commander of the German effort. And he decides in order to destabilize Germany’s enemies, he’s gonna reach out to his enemy’s enemies. So for instance, it’s Ludendorff’s idea to get Stalin, who’s living in Switzerland, to get him on a train safely back to Saint Petersburg when the Russian Revolution breaks out because he knows Lenin will be a real troublemaker for the Russians and make the revolution even more sort of confusing. Another thing he does is he arranges for Irish revolutionaries to have weapons when they have their Easter uprising in 1916, which begins the whole Irish, you know, effort towards eventually getting their own country, albeit with a partition, in 1922 and then where they are today. So yeah, the Easter uprising in Ireland, and then there’s the Lenin being sent to Russia, and then with the United States, even though the Germans are just worried that the Americans will come in, so to make sure that they don’t, they send a telegram – a secret telegram – to the foreign minister in Mexico. It’s called the Zimmermann telegram, which basically proposes that Germany will send Mexico enough weapons to help them go back into the United States and take the territory that was taken from them in 1846, two Saturn-Neptune conjunctions ago. But the problem is this telegram is intercepted and decoded by the British. That’s a whole other thing; the Germans had also sent a similar mission into Afghanistan hoping to destabilize the British empire in India. But the envoy they sent to Afghanistan left his codebook behind, and the British found it, and that allowed them to decipher the Zimmermann telegram, and then they tell the Americans, “Hey, Germany is trying to get Mexico to attack you and take their territory back.”
There had been – the Lusitania was a ship that had been sunk by the Germans, and there’d been a lot of Americans on board. That was in 1915. People were upset about that, but it wasn’t enough just yet to go to war. But when they got wind of the fact that Germany was actually conspiring to get Mexico to attack them and to supply them with weapons, that really tipped the scales. The telegram came out and was discovered in January of 1917, and by April 2nd, 1917, American Congress is voting in favor to go to war. So it’s a very Saturn-Neptune event that, if you will. You know, a secret telegram, a conspiracy, that ultimately provokes the United States into changing its mind.
CB: Right. So the US comes in in 1917, which is the year of the conjunction, and then eventually the war ends November 11th, 1918. And one of the things that’s interesting about this war is a precursor, which we’ll see in the next conjunction 36 years earlier, is that under the 1882 conjunction, there was this secret alliance that was formed between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy that agreed to a defensive alliance or a defensive pact. And this ended up being the alliance that formed one bloc, essentially, of World War One, basically, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, Germany and Austria had always, you know, they had fought a sort of a little war in 1864, but from that time onward, they were pretty solid allies, especially with regard to Russia. Austria was very suspicious of Russia because Russia also had designs on the Balkans, and that’s where this really all gets crazy is it was really like, a gripe between Austria and Russia over the Balkans. But, you know, Germany’s gonna support Austria, and Russia has an alliance with France and England, and well, yeah – England has an alliance, but they’re not even sure they’ll come in until Germany invades Belgium and then Britain has to come in, et cetera, et cetera.
So yeah. This was set in motion not long, you know, that much earlier.
CB: Right. So that was one cycle earlier. Two things that I think are really important about this war that are so striking in terms of Saturn-Neptune things that are like, characteristic of this war that you always learn about is just like, basic facts about World War One. If you learn only like, five basic facts, is one of the things is that it was famously about trench warfare where you have these lines or these boundaries that get set up between the different armies, and then they’re trying constantly to like, move and push these boundaries, but by the end they eventually kind of can’t get moved very much and they get stuck in certain places. And to me, it’s like, reminiscent of what happened at the next conjunction with the Korean War where you also have them pushing these boundaries along that parallel until eventually by the end they have the armistice and agree to draw the line between the two countries there, and that’s the end of the war. Or, you know, another cycle later you get the fall of the Berlin Wall. So trench warfare is —
NDB: Right.
CB: — one piece of World War One.
NDB: Certainly, yeah. And I mean, sometimes, you know, they could be fighting over literally 50 feet of land, and thousands of men would die over that – a fairly small amount of territorial gain – that they could make, so it was really, really ugly for that reason.
CB: That’s crazy. So that’s one thing. The other really important Saturn-Neptune characteristic thing about World War One is this was the first major war where chemical weapons were used in a massive scale to kill lots and lots of people. And I think that turns out to be a major keyword for Saturn-Neptune conjunctions as well, unfortunately, is like, chemical weapons and also biological warfare. And we already saw – this is where I first established that as a theme because it’s so obvious here in World War One. But that was why I brought that up later, for example, with Iraq and Suddam Hussein —
NDB: Right.
CB: — using chemical weapons against the Kurds in like, a later development of that in the late 1980s. But here we see the sort of initial origins of chemical weapons in a major war.
NDB: Yeah. At first Germany used them, but part of the problem was the wind blew east, so the Germans would unleash these chemical weapons and then it would blow back in their faces. But then eventually, both sides were using them and soldiers just came equipped with gas masks. But it’s a really horrible way to die, as if being shot with a machine gun isn’t bad enough; this was really, really horrible.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: They were using like, chlorine gas, and so this like —
NDB: Mustard gas, yeah.
CB: This gas cloud would like, waft slowly over the battlefield and then you would just start hearing men like, coughing, and it would like, mess up their lungs and they would cough up like, part of their lungs and all sorts of like, terrible things like that.
NDB: Yeah. Really, really gruesome.
CB: So chemical weapons weren’t initially used when the war began at the very beginning, but it ramped up as you go into the war. And that’s what I find interesting the closer you get the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that it hits this sort of like, peak.
NDB: Yeah. Because it is about the time that the conjunction’s coming into play that the gas is introduced. Maybe in 1915, a little bit earlier, but 1916 is when I really think of it, you know, and the Somme and all that and Verdun. So yeah. It’s pretty much right in keeping there.
CB: Right. And then that gets tied in with the trench warfare as well. And one of the things I found interesting, I found one incredible repetition here, which is that chlorine was first produced in 1774, which is right on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction that took place in 1773. And this chlorine was the first gas that was used in World War One as one of the first major chemical weapons that became characteristic of that war.
NDB: Right. Good find.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Can’t make this up.
CB: No. There’s always like, a precedent or like, a repetition, so that’s something that we’ll see constantly in this.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So World War One. And then the big result of World War One, aside from the war itself, is the result of World War One was the collapse of a number of old empires. And this became really crucial and becomes one of our most characteristic and common themes that I saw that spanned the entire 2,500 year period that we studied, all the way back to 500 BCE, is I noticed that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions would often coincide with the collapse of an old empire towards the end of its lifespan at that point. And that was certainly a major thing that happened at the end of World War One.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. Russia, Hapsburg, Germany, Ottoman – all those empires, yeah, you know, ended right there.
CB: Yeah. So the oldest empire that collapsed at this time was the Ottoman Empire, which had been around for centuries at that point. And that was the most ancient one that collapsed. But even others, like I think it was Germany I noticed that specific empire had been around for 47 years, or that specific like, incarnation of it had been – which I thought was interesting, because 47 as we talked about in the Mars in Cancer episode is a planetary period of Mars, is a repetition of Mars.
NDB: Right. And Kaiser Wilhelm the 2nd was 12 years old when the empire was founded; he was standing next to his grandfather at Versailles when he was crowned, which – so by the time the war is ending, Wilhelm is 59 having his second Saturn return. So there’s all kinds of astrology right there in that, you know, just in that little part of the story.
CB: Right. So and with the Ottoman Empire, one thing that’s crazy is like, the Ottoman Empire was so old that it had been the reason for the collapse of some earlier empires. One of the most striking ones I found was going back to 1453 was the collapse, the fall of the city of Constantinople, which was the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire, which had been around for centuries up to that point for almost like, a thousand years. And then it was defeated by the Ottoman Empire in 1453 when the Ottomans took over the city of Constantinople, ending that empire on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And then centuries later, the Ottoman Empire itself falls under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Right. Yeah. And of course, Russia, you know, had been an empire for – well, if you go back to Ivan the Terrible, I guess by that point it’d been 500 years, so that’s not nothing.
CB: Right. That’s not nothing – 500. It’s pretty good, you know, for doing like —
NDB: It’s no Ottoman Empire, but you know.
CB: Yeah. We’re doing an empire measuring contest.
So World War One, the collapse of old empires. One of the things that happens is there’s a secret pact that’s signed called the Sykes-Picot pact, Sykes-Picot Agreement, in May of 1916 where some of the allies agree to divide up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories into British and French spheres of influence after the war. And —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — this is —
NDB: If Russia had not fallen to the revolution, they would have gotten, you know, Istanbul. Constantinople back. They would have gotten that, because they had always wanted that to sail their ships out into the Mediterranean. But yeah, it was largely a British-French operation, obviously, because Russia fell not too long after the agreement was made.
CB: Right. I’m gonna get into that in just a second. So we get that. We get the dividing up of an old empire. And literally – because you know, the parallel with like, the Ottoman Empire getting divided up like that is sort of like, you know, a few Saturn-Neptunes later in 1989, you get the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And I always think it’s so interesting that “dissolution” is like, one of the keywords of the 1989 breakup of the Soviet Union, because that’s such a Neptune keyword where something dissolves. So that’s happening with the Ottoman Empire. And then also relevant during this time period is the Balfour Declaration happens on November 2nd, 1917, when the British government expresses support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” And this ends up having significant long term implications that play out over the course of the 20th century for the creation of Israel, basically.
NDB: Yeah. It’s key. I mean, that’s the main thing that has to happen in order for Israel to become possible, it seems. And then there’s a whole string of that, because the Balfour Declaration is made, then that same month within days, the Bolsheviks take over Russia. Because the first part of the revolution was, you know, a different faction, but now the Bolsheviks take control. And when they do that, Woodrow Wilson in January of 1918 issues his 14 Points and basically offers all countries – of course, we later find out he only meant, you know, countries run by white people, but he says “all countries” – will have self-determination. You know, he lays out a plan for a kind of international order. He is, of course, and he is gonna be the guy who thinks of having the League of Nations, which of course later on Roosevelt will rechristen the United Nations. So Wilson lays out this plan to the world that suggests that any country on the planet will be able to be independent and free of colonial control. And this becomes a very important and seductive message for countries like, say, Vietnam, you know, or other places that are gonna fight very hard to overthrow their colonial overlords.
CB: Right. So this becomes in some ways, like, in some areas the end of colonialism after 1917. But in other instances, we still see some last vestiges of colonialism, essentially.
NDB: Well, yeah. I mean, you know, England and France basically, like we said, they divide up the Ottoman Empire between themselves. England – Britain – gives, or South Africa is given Namibia, which had been a German colony. And so on and so forth. But certainly like in, you know, insofar as England and France are concerned, they really ramp up their colonialism. But that 14 Points that Wilson puts out there really is a – like, it’s meant as a counterpoint to the Bolshevik internationalism. Because Communism is supposed to be this international movement, so —
CB: Right, which you’re about to talk about.
NDB: Right. So whereas Lenin is saying, you know, hey, everyone join together and the world will have this big, international, Communist order. So Wilson’s offering these 14 points, really, again to counter that internationalism with a different international vision – one that’s more appealing to, you know, nationalist sympathies.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s the other – arguably – the biggest thing that comes out of this conjunction in 1917 is that the Russians lose the war. They’re part of the axis with Germany that loses the – or sorry, the war ends, and around the same time, there’s the Russian Revolution takes place, basically. And the Bolsheviks and essentially the Communists rise to power as a result of this. And this becomes the start, essentially, of the Soviet Union eventually.
NDB: Yeah. The revolution happens while the war is still happening, because the war doesn’t end ‘til November of 1918; the revolution really starts in March of ‘17. But like I said, the first part of the revolution was not a Communist revolution; it was a popular uprising. Here we go again with that phrase.
CB: Right.
NDB: You know, people are freezing and starving. Soldiers are being sent out to fight without – not only without guns and without shoes, and then they have to wait for one of their comrades to get shot down and then they can take the shoes and the gun and start fighting. So it’s really, really grim. So it starts as a popular uprising, but as I said, Ludendorff has this plan to make the revolution, to destabilize it. Because the current revolutionary order still plans to fight the war; they just want reform. But Lenin has always been vociferously not only anti-war, but has been telling Communists in any of these countries should, like, you know, sabotage their own country’s efforts. So Lenin is like, you know, as a Russian, in favor of sabotaging Russia’s war effort, for instance, and he thinks German Communists should sabotage the German war effort. So Ludendorff, knowing this, arranges for Lenin to ride a train with some other leading Bolsheviks from Switzerland where he is. They ride up into Sweden. Like, so from Switzerland through Germany up into Sweden, then, you know, over to Finland and then down to Saint Petersburg. So they don’t go through the battlefield, as it were, but Ludendorff makes sure that Lenin can get to Saint Petersburg, which he does by early April of 1917, or April of 1917 anyway. And immediately, sure enough, Lenin being Lenin, you know, really stirs things up and by – I’ll leave out a lot of the little details in the middle, but – by November, the Bolsheviks are storming the winter palace and they take control of Russia and soon turn it into the Soviet Union. One of the first things they do —
CB: Right.
NDB: — is Trotsky goes to Belarus to negotiate with the Germans, a total Russian, you know, capitulation, if you will, which is why like, later when Germany loses the war and they face all these really sort of strict, you know, measures at Versailles, the argument against them is well, look what you did to the Russians when they surrendered to you. You know, you took a huge chunk of land and et cetera, et cetera. It was a very harsh penalty, and so the Allies felt they could justify being harsh with Germany in turn. And yeah —
CB: So up to this point, Russia had been run by a series of kings, basically. But then one of the things that happens is the king at the time, Czar Nicholas the 2nd, is forced to abdicate, and then him and his family are killed, completely ending that dynasty and wiping out their family lineage, and then installing this new eventually like, ideologically-driven state, which itself represents a stunning culmination and callback to a prior Saturn-Neptune conjunction less than a century earlier when The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 under that previous conjunction.
NDB: Right. Or 36 or so years earlier in 1881 when the same tsar, Nicholas the 2nd, when he was still just like, a 13-year-old kid, 12- or 13-year-old kid, and he saw his grandfather’s legs blown off by a bomb – Alexander the 2nd. So he had this, you know, there’s this – Nicholas had seen himself what the people might do to a tsar. And yet he was totally, nonetheless he was kind of… Yeah, he was unassuming. He didn’t, you know, he’s very shocked when he learns, you know, second before he’s shot down when he learns he’s about to be shot, he’s really, really stunned. He thinks that they’re gonna be, you know, taken out safely, just forced to be exiled from Russia. So yeah, it’s amazing how much —
CB: Which is what they had done, what, like, previous… You know, like in France, they kept exiling Napoleon and he kept like, coming back, which seems like —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — quaint now in retrospect that there used to be this like, weird gentlemanly thing that you would like, exile the opponent of a foreign war or something like that after hundreds of thousands of people have died trying to defeat him.
NDB: Right.
CB: And then he gets like, sent to an island or something to retire. But here they were like, no, they executed him and just wiped out his entire family.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, the difference being that the Russian revolutionaries really feel like they’re following the script of the French Revolution where there was an execution of the king. That’s the thing; these revolutionary ideas are absolutely related to each other, you know. To the point that like, you know, Trotsky’s very successful fighting the Civil War. Once they end the war with Germany, the Russians are still fighting amongst themselves, and Trotsky basically is a de facto general. And even though he has zero military experience, like Abraham Lincoln, he just sort of teaches himself at the local library how to be a military leader and winds up being pretty good, and yeah, keeps the Bolshevik revolution going. But the other Bolsheviks are worried that Trotsky’s gonna wind up becoming a Napoleon. So even there, they’re using that same, like, oh, you know, Trotsky’s doing so well militarily, he’s gonna be the Napoleon in this story, and we gotta watch out for him. So yeah, they really – the Bolsheviks absolutely believed that, you know, history is rhyming, as it were. That they’re doing just the French Revolution all over again with the same sort of, you know, plotline.
CB: Right. And what’s crazy is like, this conjunction is right in the middle of the year, and it’s right in between those two – first there’s the February Revolution in Russia earlier in the year in like, March, and then there’s the October Revolution that happens in November. And it’s just crazy to me how those two are like, on either side of this conjunction that’s so intense that’s at its most intense right in the middle of 1917. And then they set up a provisional government, but they represent – the Bolsheviks – represented this radical idealistic new order, and this eventually ends up creating the Soviet Union and what became the Russian state for the majority of the 20th century, which then, you know, on this Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1917, which then ends at a subsequent Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1989. And that’s one of the things that makes this so absolutely stunning from an astrological standpoint and from the standpoint of mundane astrology is literally seeing the beginnings of the Soviet Union on this first conjunction in 1917 and then seeing the end of it on a subsequent conjunction in 1989.
NDB: And Stalin’s death right in between in ‘53, which is the midpoint, you know, in time and in the narrative between —
CB: Right.
NDB: — those two other events. Yeah.
CB: And Putin being born, like, also at the same time in the same year, which then —
NDB: Sure enough.
CB: — becomes relevant as he’s the leader now that we’ve reached the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s happening at the moment.
NDB: Absolutely. And also, you know, in Putin’s story, he was a KGB agent in East Germany. I think he’s in Leipzig or somewhere like that. You know, fairly, he’s not in East Berlin or anything; he’s – yeah – I think it’s Leipzig or one of those, you know, sort of smaller cities in East Germany – running the local KGB office. And he is stunned when he sees the local people uprising and they storm the local Stasi office, which is the German secret police; they wanna get all the files they have there, you know, because the Stasi are very intimidating. And the KGB office is next door, and then the mob starts to head towards the KGB office and Putin has to go out there and basically, I think, threatens them with a gun or something like that. Like, you know, “Any of you come further, I’ll shoot you.” But yeah, as the story’s often told, like, this is Putin’s radicalizing moment, you know. He cant’ believe that the Soviet Union is just coming apart. You know, he thinks Gorbachev has totally messed things up. And yeah —
CB: He calls the fall of the Soviet Union later —
NDB: Right.
CB: — he called it “the great geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
NDB: Right. Which is, you know, yeah, debatable. But anyway. But it certainly, you know, it’s not just something that he watches happen outside his window or on TV. He does find himself face-to-face with the mob, and just manages to stand his ground and they don’t touch the KGB office. But yeah. You can just imagine the gears turning in his mind and how he’s, I’m sure, still refers back to that moment in terms of how he sees his role in all of this.
CB: Right. And also the extent to which, now that we’re one Saturn-Neptune cycle later, the extent to which he’s been successful in reconstituting… You know, because Russia was in a really bad state in the 1990s after the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the fall of things. And the extent to which he’s built Russia back up and in some ways returned it back to something like where it was before that fall in retrospect is striking. Like, not even getting into all the other issues with that or geopolitical things or other things happening right now, but just —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — in terms of where we’re at at this current point in history.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So —
NDB: No question about it.
CB: One of the big things, though, that comes out of the Russian Revolution, just to empathize, is just the rise of Communism. And Russia at that point became the first – it’s said to be the first, like, self-professed Communist state at that point after that conjunction happens in 1917. And then it begins this ideological revolution that ends up influencing other Communist and socialist movements worldwide over the course of the next few decades, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, for instance, I mentioned Vietnam, and actually Vietnam is worth mentioning because there’s a few Saturn-Neptune conjunctions before and after this that we would wanna include. So, you know, Wilson like I said issued the 14 Points in 1918. A year later in 1919, the war is now over, and Wilson is sailing to Versailles, to France, for them to have the big peace conference. And there is a dishwasher at a local hotel in Paris; I forget his exact name. It’s a Vietnamese name. But he will someday be known as Ho Chi Minh. But at this point, he’s a fairly young dishwasher in a Paris hotel. And he hears about Wilson’s 14 Points, and he tries to go to Versailles and have an audience with Wilson to ask for independence for Vietnam, and he’s turned away. Vietnam was a French colony, and France, of course, held onto it, and after the Second World War, Vietnam tried to fight for its independence against France, and they had a war with France that started in 1946 and ended in 1954. Dien Bien Phu was France’s last battle where they were, you know, mightily defeated by the Vietnamese, and that was during the Saturn-Neptune. And what’s interesting is France had first taken control of Vietnam in 1882 during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. But yeah, Ho Chi Minh’s story is just like, I mean, there were a lot of nations around the world, nationalist movements around the world, that were also looking to this moment for some new kind of level of freedom and equality. And if they —
CB: Right.
NDB: — couldn’t get it from Wilson, they would go to Moscow, which is what Ho Chi Minh did.
CB: Right. Yeah. And you also get other countries like China, of course, and their move towards Communism. So all of this brings up one of our next major points that I wanted to talk about this period in terms of how this affected the West and the US, which is one of the things this period is known for, especially between 1917 and 1920, is this period called the First Red Scare, which is that the Bolshevik Revolution sent shockwaves around the world. And the establishment of a Communist state sent fears, it fueled fears, that similar revolutions could occur elsewhere, including in the United States.
So this was not accelerated, but this was emphasized by labor unrest that started happening in the US around this time, but basically in the US, they started becoming very paranoid about Communism, and that’s why it’s called the period of like, the First Red Scare, because there’s a similar echo compared to the early 1950s when we have that period of like, McCarthyism and fears over, you know, Communist spies being everywhere. You sort of get a similar thing happening under this Saturn-Neptune conjunction between 1917 and 1920.
NDB: Yeah. But more specifically at the same time, I think it’s around June of 1919 – some time around there – there’s a bomb that goes off at the house of the US Attorney General. I forget the guy’s name. But I remember the name of his neighbor when this bomb goes off is a guy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who works for the government at that point; he’s Assistant Secretary the Navy. So yeah, the Attorney General has a bomb go off, you know, on his doorstep basically, and that triggers a huge crackdown on leftist movements. And involved in this police crackdown is a young government law enforcement wannabe – a guy named J. Edgar Hoover – who really starts to work his way into the government’s crackdown on Communists. So by the end of 1919, they’re deporting, you know, Communists and anarchists en masse on a big boat. It’s funny, the deportation thing again. What’s the anarchist woman? Emma Goldman, yeah. She’s among the people who are put on a boat and sent away.
CB: Okay. So yeah, it’s like, there’s some genuine threat in that there is the rise of like, new ideologies and leftist movements around the world, but then there’s also some propaganda and like, fear-mongering that takes place as well. And the Attorney General at the time initiates something called the Palmer Raids, where they orchestrate a series of raids on suspected radical organizations, often with little or no evidence, and these raids resulted in the arrest and deportation of thousands of people so that sometimes there was an erosion of civil liberties during this time is one of the keywords or one of the themes that I was noticing.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. That’s his name – A. Mitchell Palmer. He’s the Attorney General. A bomb goes off on his doorstep June 2nd. There were actually a series of bombing in eight cities that day, and the bomb on his doorstep is one of them, and that’s when the crackdown happens.
CB: Yeah. So suspected radicals were often denied due process and freedom of speech and assembly were curtailed. So yeah, this was a really interesting – there’s other stuff that’s passed, like there’s the Espionage Act is passed in 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, and the Immigration Act of 1918. Immigration is a theme that we actual see come up at different points in history under this. One of the most major ones we’ve talked about in a previous episode that comes up here as well is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which is right on a conjunction. But sometimes issues with immigration and borders and different things like that come up during these conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So that’s a major thing that’s happening. If that wasn’t fun enough, with World War Two and hundreds and thousands of people dying and then like, you know, fears about Communism, everything else, we get like, a lovely pandemic that takes place when the Spanish flu pandemic comes out of nowhere in 1918 and 1919 and kills just unimaginable amount of people between, yeah, the spring of 1918 when the first somewhat mild wave kicks in, but then a second wave comes in in the fall of 1918, and this is a far more lethal wave of influenza that spreads around the world with a very high mortality rate.
NDB: Yeah. It’s, yeah, stupidly called the Spanish flu, but it’s thought to have actually emerged from the US, I think from a military base in Kentucky or somewhere like that. But I mean, the way it spreads across the world, of course, is in the fall of 1918, the First World War is ending, and all these soldiers who have been gathered – they’re from all over the world. You have soldiers from India, soldiers from Africa, soldiers from Canada, soldiers from Australia, what have you, and they’re all leaving Europe at the same time to go back to their respective countries. And many of them are carrying that germ with them, and that’s how it spreads, and yeah, it kills a lot of people.
CB: Yeah. So here’s the diagram again, just to show the 15-degree orb that doesn’t show the entire story, but it at least shows how in 1918 when this thing is – it first really starts to spread, like I was saying, initially by the spring of 1918. There we go. Is like, this thing right here. But it’s like, depending on when it actually originates, like, it may have originated like, closer to the actual conjunction in later part of 2017. But it really shows up —
NDB: 1917.
CB: 1917. But it really shows up and starts killing people in early 1918 and especially later in 1918 in the fall. And then eventually, there’s like, subsequent waves, but it eventually like, drops off, starts dropping off the further and further away you get from the conjunction by later 1919 and 1920 especially.
So the thing, of course, that makes me nervous right now and one of the reasons why I’ve actually been researching that and I decided to open up a thread where we researched…
NDB: Pandemics.
CB: Pandemics. Well, because it’s actually two things. Because one thing that makes me nervous is this was an influenza pandemic, which is like, the flu, so it’s a specific type of pandemic by a specific type of virus. One of the issues right now is there’s been a bird flu virus that’s been going around in chickens over the past year that’s starting to get more and more serious so that in the US, they were culling or killing off hundreds of thousands of chickens in order to try to suppress this, because the immunologists are nervous about it jumping species. And right now, they say there’s not a huge threat, but that they’re trying to monitor it very closely because they say if it did start jumping species, it could mutate and turn into something more deadly like that influenza pandemic that happened in 1918 and 1919. So it makes me nervous, then, that we see a parallel between that period where there was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction and that we’re actually headed into the upslope of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction this year and next year. And I hope that’s not a recurrence that happens, but it’s something that definitely caught my eye when I started studying this.
NDB: Well, you know, usually there are government agencies who have qualified immunologists and —
CB: Right.
NDB: — other scientists on board, on the payroll, to help monitor these things and keep them under control. That’s how it’s usually been done up until now, so.
CB: Well, luckily, the current government is firing many of those people and also dismantling some of the apparatuses that were in place in order to like, track and try to counteract some of these things, including things like vaccinating the chickens or even they have stockpiles of some vaccines for an influenza-like virus right now. But the doctors, I’ve read, say they need to be updated so that those stockpiles could be ready if this thing did jump and mutate into something more deadly. But because the current administration has the anti-vaccine policies, that may actually create like, a weird perfect storm right now, which is the other thing that makes me nervous, and it’s the other piece why the vaccination component of these conjunctions could be relevant again, unfortunately.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So we actually found and have a whole subsection that we might talk about later of other pandemics that did occur under Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, especially some earlier bubonic plague pandemics, including the Black Death starting in the 1400s.
So one of the things that’s curious about this, you know, because I’m not an expert on this and I honestly never really thought about it until 2020 when we had that Saturn-Pluto conjunction as well as a conjunction of several other planets in Capricorn that coincided with the start of the covid-19 pandemic, and then all of a sudden, you know, every astrologer has to like, start looking into pandemics and was trying to understand that conjunction and then tracking that conjunction back into previous ones that coincided with the onset of other pandemics like the AIDS pandemic in the early ‘80s. But in studying this, one of the things that I’ve realized is while we put a lot of focus on the Saturn-Pluto conjunction rightly for the covid pandemic, there may be different types of pandemics that respond or track more with different planetary alignments. And that’s one of the things that I am nervous about here, seeing that this one really seemed especially tied in with that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that occurred back then. So the one exception I’ll say to that, or the one caveat I’ll put to that – there was also an overlapping Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in 1918 and 1919, which really coincided with the biggest spikes and deaths, especially in the deadly second wave. And I do remember studying that in 2020, because we also had a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn, and that was also tracking very closely with some of the larger spikes in deaths during that pandemic. And so that’s, there’s sometimes overlapping things that are accentuated broader, you know, planetary alignments, and we do not have a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction happening this year —
NDB: Right.
CB: So there’s other things to study, but – and we’ve done some work on this that we’ll possibly circle back to later in this episode talking about other instances of pandemics under this alignment, but I think it’s something that would be worth studying more because one of the realizations I had in doing this research project is, like I said, just that different pandemics may respond to different planetary cycles, and this one certainly the Saturn-Neptune alignment seemed relevant for a previous influenza pandemic.
All right. So that was a major thing in this conjunction. Another major thing that took place towards the tail end of this conjunction was Prohibition in the United States, which doesn’t get ratified until January of 1919 and doesn’t go into effect until 1920, which is just after our period. But the entire period leading up to it is the movement to put Prohibition of alcohol in place from 1916 to 1919, which really does center on our conjunction. And I think is important and also seems obvious symbolically that it’s like, Neptune representing alcohol and Saturn representing saying no or negating something, just in the same way that we saw the late 1980s conjunction be the peak of the like, “Just say no” to drugs period. This one in 1917 was like, “Just say no to alcohol,” to the extent that they like, banned it in the entire United States.
NDB: Yeah. But it’s, you know, earlier, you mentioned women being granted the vote, and there is a relationship. Prior to the First World War, there had been very strong movements in both the US and Britain by activist women fighting for their right to vote. In both cases, you know, they were repressed – certainly in England, quite seriously. But then war broke out, and these suffragettes as they were called in England or the women in America sort dropped their claim for the time being and served as nurses and in other helping capacities during the war. So that by the time the war was winding down, the feeling was that, yes, let’s give women the vote because they’ve contributed to the war. You know, so it was more like, after all that repression before the war that it was actually happening. And part of the agenda for women getting the vote was they wanted – like, it was women who wanted Prohibition at that time because the family unit, you’d have a working class family, and the man would get his paycheck, and he’d go to tavern where women weren’t even allowed in and blow the paycheck, and then women would have this, you know, violent, broke husband to cope with. So there was this whole social movement to outlaw —
CB: Right.
NDB: — alcohol for that reason.
CB: The husband would get drunk and then come home and beat —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — his wife.
NDB: Yeah. And not have any money because he’d spent it all in the bar. So what happens is, it’s actually beautiful ironic. So women voting, women getting the vote, is a big sort of thing that leads to Prohibition happening. But because Prohibition happens, of course alcohol goes underground. You have the speakeasies. You have the Jazz Age. But if you’re running a speakeasy, you can’t turn women away like you could with the legal taverns. If a woman wants to come into your speakeasy, you gotta let her in because it’s an illegal operation. So women start going to speakeasies; they start drinking, smoking, dating, et cetera, et cetera. So much so that by the time when Prohibition is repealed in 1933, it’s also women who voted to repeal it even though women had been like, the dominant force who put it in place in the first place. Or at least it was part of that movement that led to it. But they were totally linked. Like, women getting the vote and Prohibition in the United States were the kind of issue that, even though they are seemingly unrelated, were sort of like, tied together as part of a ticket. Not unlike, you know, if you’re left-wing today, you might have views on a set of subjects that aren’t necessarily related, but you’re likely to have the same views as other people on the left or what have you. So yeah, there’s a whole relationship there that’s very interesting.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So those are two of the most important social things in terms of especially in Prohibition in the United States, but it’s interesting how it works out with the Saturn-Neptune dynamic where it’s like, there’s an attempt to impose like, a rigid, moral structure based on an idealistic vision of a sober society. But then ultimately it proves to be largely unenforceable and led to unintended consequences such as organized crime and other things like that in the 1920s through bootlegging and speakeasies and other things like that. But nonetheless, Prohibition is one thing that happens under this conjunction, and then the other huge one is not just in the United States, but also in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany, they all – the women’s suffrage movement is successful during this time and women get the right to vote. So in Canada, this happens from 1917 to 1919 where most provinces granted women the right to vote. In the United Kingdom, it was in 1918 where they granted limited suffrage to women over the age of 30. In Germany in 1918, women gained the right to vote after the revolution. And then the United States, like we said, they actually passed an amendment – the 19th Amendment – to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. And this movement was really active pushing for that in the 1916 to 1919 period and eventually becoming successful.
NDB: Yeah. Quebec didn’t get it until 1939, but you’re right. Most of Canada did before that.
CB: Yeah. So and the, you know, as I mentioned earlier, what’s crazy about this is just the origins of it go back earlier. So one of the earlier cycles was – well, the primary earlier cycle that was most important from a US standpoint is just that the Seneca Falls Convention takes place in 1848, which is the first women’s rights convention in the United States. And it marked the beginning of essentially the women’s suffrage movement, and this is right next to the 1946 Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So you get the start of that movement on a conjunction, and then you get its eventual culmination and success under a subsequent conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that is incredible. So again, there’s something about that that’s just connecting possibly women in general, possibly broader themes, but especially women keep coming up on that conjunction.
All right. Other major things that happened – there’s a major scientific development right on this conjunction, and it’s Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity in 1915. But then a few years later in 1919, it’s actually confirmed through the Eddington Expedition through going to on this trip to view an eclipse. And through viewing the eclipse, they’re able to confirm Einstein’s theories, and this huge scientific achievement and revolution. Interestingly, primarily about his theories about gravity and about spacetime, which I find really interesting because I was able to trace it back to a much, much, much earlier Saturn-Neptune conjunction when Newton first started developing his theories of gravity, which Einstein’s theories essentially replaced. It was potentially under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, including the famous story about Newton first supposedly developing his theories when he had an apple like, fall out of a tree on his head and then starting to think about gravity. That story, if it happened, would have happened the summer as a Saturn-Neptune conjunction was taking place.
NDB: Yeah. And also while a plague was taking place, I think, right around that time as well.
CB: Right. Well, that’s the reason he was out like, on a farm was to get out of the —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — city, I think, at the time.
NDB: Yeah, because he was a Cambridge student, but they closed down school because of the plague, so yeah. He went to the farm.
CB: Right. So Einstein’s, though, general theory of relativity was huge; it changed our ideas of space and time and what gravity is, and realizing that gravity was not – because that’s one of the things about this that I think is relevant and why I think it’s tied in with Saturn-Neptune partially with gravity in particular, because it has to do with like, invisible forces that you cannot see but that are nonetheless doing things that you can kind of sense and that are affecting reality and affecting the physical world that are operating, you know, almost like, beyond your senses to some extent. But being able to articulate and codify what those laws of nature are is somehow tied in with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Is there anything else about that and about the Eddington Expedition or about Einstein? I have a quote that said,
“Spacetime tells matter how to move. Matter tells spacetime how to curve.”
There’s something about like, the curvature of space —
NDB: Of light around the – yeah. I know like, the Eddington Expedition is looking at the light around the eclipse and measuring it, and that somehow has to deal with confirming Einstein’s prediction.
CB: Yeah. Like, I don’t have a diagram of it, but if people look up like, you know, just an article about Einstein’s general theory of relativity, some of the diagrams that come up just about the curvature of space and curvature of spacetime are really informative about the symbolism here with Saturn and Neptune. Because with Saturn, you think about something solid. Like, something that has a foundation or something that’s like, fixed and rigid. But then with Neptune, it’s things that like, move and are elastic, and that’s why you get, you know, sometimes like, these themes of like, walls or other borders that are elastic in some ways that we’ve talked about already. But with this, you put the two together, and you get space being curved in some ways, and that being what gravity is essentially.
NDB: Right.
CB: Like, Einstein says that gravity is necessarily a force; it’s almost like, a side effect of space having this curvature based on if there’s like, massive objects nearby like a Sun or something like that.
NDB: Right.
CB: All right. So that’s a big deal. One other major thing I wanted to mention here – you had noticed other earlier origins of like, camera technology. And I talked about how the current Saturn-Neptune conjunction was coinciding with like, AI-generated video. One of the things I found interesting here was in 1916, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers was founded, and this played a really vital role in standardizing film technology, including establishing things like frame rates and other technical aspects of filmmaking that became really essential to the growth of the motion picture like, industry essentially.
NDB: Right. Yeah, that was a good find. I didn’t know that one. It strikes me that 1916 is right when Charlie Chaplin is becoming a huge star. He started making movies in 1914, but in 1916 is like when he really is becoming a household name, which is interesting because it’s in 1953 at the next conjunction that he finds himself exiled from the United States. And you can almost track his rise and fall, you know, from Saturn-Neptune to Saturn-Neptune. I bring this up, because of course, we covered him in an episode which maybe you wanna link in the corner or something.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good one. And then the last thing I noticed as a minor thing was in 1917, the Catholic Church published the Code of Canon Law, which was really important because it was one of the first comprehensive codifications of there used to be all these like, separate like, individual laws, but they finally created one big law or codification of the religious laws, basically, in the Catholic Church, and then that set a precedent that was there for several decades after that point. One of the things and the reason I originally noticed it, though, that was interesting is that it reaffirmed a ban on Freemasonry, which had been set up many centuries earlier on a previous Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And that was one of the themes I saw over and over again was sometimes attempts to suppress secret organizations on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, and this was one of the times that there was a recurrence of that with this 1917 law where they like, reaffirmed that Catholic believers cannot be members of the Freemasonry organizations.
NDB: No stoners!
CB: No stones – yeah. I get it. They’re Stonemasons.
NDB: Yes.
CB: Yeah. It’s good. I like it. All right. Well, with that, I believe – I think that’s it for the conjunction of 1917. And why don’t we take a little break?
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All right, now we’re gonna transition into talking about the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which occurred in the year 1882. So here is my title slide for that, and here is my info slide where this was just one exact conjunction, which occurred by degree on May 12th, 1882, at 16 degrees of Taurus.
By orb, it came into the 15-degree orb in the first quarter of 1881, and it eventually left that 15-degree orb by around the first quarter of 1884. Here’s a diagram that illustrates that for those watching the video version – it coming in in 1881, and then we see just a little blip there in early 1884 where it just barely comes back into the 15-degree range.
By sign, this one takes place entirely in Taurus. So that starts at the first ingress of Saturn into Taurus, where it met up with Neptune on April 5th, 1881, and then it ends when Saturn departs from Taurus for the last time on May 24th, 1883.
This one is unique because I did wanna note that Pluto is actually in Taurus, so it’s copresent with Saturn and Neptune at this time, while Uranus is trining the conjunction from the middle of Virgo. So that adds in some additional factors going on that color this Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and I haven’t been very consistent about always mentioning those, but I did wanna mention that for this one.
In terms of events, here’s a quick list of some of the things we’re gonna talk about as major events that took place under this conjunction around 1882. And let’s start right from the top, which is some of the things we already mentioned. I mentioned that secret pacts are a theme that I saw kept coming up, and with this one, we had the Triple Alliance being secretly formed, which would eventually become so important during World War One. But here it was the Triple Applicable between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy who form a secret defensive alliance, which then is one of the major things that gets activated during World War One.
NDB: Yeah. There was the previous year a Three Emperors League; this wasn’t a private agreement, but it was Franz-Joseph of Austria-Hungary, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Alexander the 2nd. Yeah. I guess he had just been killed, so it was probably Alexander the 3rd. So there were these sort of formal things on the surface, but yeah. Behind the scenes, these other alliances would form.
CB: Right. So this is important; it sets the stage of alliances for World War One one major Saturn-Neptune cycle later. The other major one we’ve already talked about is the assassination of Tsar Alexander the 2nd of Russia, which was a major development that took place on March 13th, 1881.
NDB: That’s right. When he was killed by – I mentioned – the bomb, Saturn was at 27 Aries; Neptune was at 12 Taurus. So it was just coming into range. But when he was killed, he was replaced by his son, Alexander the 3rd, who was born in 1845 and had the natal Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So not only has a tsar been murdered, but the replacements are – the new tsar, Alexander the 3rd – has the natal conjunction, so it’s a recurrence transit for him. And whereas his father, the one who was murdered, was becoming more and more liberal – he was about to introduce all these liberalizing reforms – Alexander the 3rd, because of what’s happened to his father, goes the other way and becomes quite reactionary and comes down hard on any kind of dissidence. A few years after his father is killed, there’s a plot detected; some students in Saint Petersburg are planning to kill Tsar Alexander the 3rd. And the conspirators are arrested; they’re offered the chance to recant, and they don’t, so they’re hanged. And one of them is the older brother of the man we know as Lenin. So when Lenin does embark on the Bolshevik Revolution, it is at least in part because out of vengeance for the execution of his older brother. And in fact, all of Lenin’s remaining siblings are part of this revolutionary movement.
CB: Wow.
NDB: It’s really a family deal. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: So sisters and a brother.
CB: So one of the things I found interesting about this one is the secret revolutionary group that carried out the assassination, which was named Narodnaya Volya, which means “people’s will” in English. And it’s a major example of like, revolutionary and anti-establishment energy. But on Wikipedia, there’s this quote that says that that group was “based upon a secret society apparatus of local, semi-independent cells coordinated by a self-selecting executive committee,” and that it espoused acts of political violence in an attempt to destabilize the Russian Empire and spur insurrection against Tsarism, justified “as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that they hoped would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime’s use of violence against the revolutionaries.”
And one of the things interesting about this is that that revolutionary group was led by a woman.
NDB: Yep.
CB: Do you have her name?
NDB: Oh, I do. I wasn’t expecting to come up with it, but I have it somewhere.
CB: Yeah. It was Vera Figner.
NDB: That’s it. Vera Figner. Yeah.
CB: Okay. So it was led by a woman. They were successful in assassinating the king at the time of Russia, and then this eventually sets – his son takes over, but then he becomes more repressive of revolutionary groups, which then bottles all of that energy so that it eventually explodes one Saturn-Neptune cycle later in the 1917 Russian Revolution.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s worth mentioning, speaking of Saturn-Neptune having to do with popular uprisings – Alexander the 2nd isn’t the first tsar to be murdered. His grandfather, for instance, was murdered in a building that’s maybe not even a hundred yards away from where he’s blown up with the bomb. But that didn’t happen during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, although it did happen during the same Venus retrograde that, you know, this murder happened under. But the difference is previous murders of tsars had been done by army officers or other sort of political coups. This is the first time that it’s actually just, you know, a popular uprising murder, if you will. You know, it’s not anyone from inside the machine who’s assassinating the tsar; it’s people out in the road.
CB: Right. Who are like, ideologically motivated.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, previous coups may have been ideologically motivated as well, but again it was happening from within the regime, not from outside.
There had been a few attempts on Alexander the 2nd’s life before they finally got to him, and I know that Dostoyovsky who wound up dying just a few weeks before the tsar was killed, Dostoyovsky was mortified at the thought that the people were now trying to kill the tsar. Like, it was one thing for a military coup to, you know, take care of a tsar who was maybe running the country into the ground or something, but for the people to do it seemed like some new level of chaos that he couldn’t fathom.
So yeah, there was something quite new about this, even though he was not the first tsar to be murdered by any stretch of the imagination.
CB: That’s really funny. He’s like, “Back in my day, we had military generals murder” —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — “our tsars!”
NDB: Yeah. What’s with these kids today?
CB: Exactly. Kids are always ruining things.
NDB: Killing tsars out of turn! Yeah.
CB: Exactly. All right. So I think that’s good for that, because we talked about all that so much. But moving onto other major events. Louis Pasteur developed the anthrax vaccine during this time in 1881, very close to the conjunction. I’ve mentioned how this is a recurrence later for like, the polio vaccine in the 1950s conjunction, but one of the things that’s so interesting about this one, in addition to it being tied into the history of vaccination, and this one specifically developed a new type of vaccination because they’d done other more rudimentary forms of vaccination since like, the late 1700s. But this one developed a new type of vaccination based on the principle of attenuation. And that was the important turning point here. But the other part that was important is that this conjunction, one of my names for this conjunction of 1882 is that this is really like, the germ conjunction, because there’s a bunch of themes around this time where germ theory is really being confirmed around this time. And germ theory was this idea that there are these invisible little hidden organisms that you can’t see, but nonetheless they’re causing things to happen. And in some instances, they’re causing people to get sick. And one of the things that Pasteur is he was a believer in the germ theory, and he was able to prove it and demonstrate it at this time. So it became one of multiple ways in which germ theory won out and was demonstrated at this time, which I think provides another interesting parallel with like, the gravity work that was done by Newton on an earlier conjunction or by Einstein on the later conjunction one cycle later, which is there with gravity we’re talking about a hidden, invisible force that you can’t see but that is nonetheless impacting the world in measurable ways. And similarly, here you have a hidden force that you cannot see because it’s too small to at the time, but nonetheless is causing things to happen. And during this conjunction, it’s really about the confirmation of that theory finally – the evidence becomes overwhelming.
NDB: Yeah. And of course, yeah, well, it segues to something else, but I’ll let you take care of that.
CB: Yeah. Do you have anything else about anthrax, though, or Louis Pasteur —
NDB: Oh, no, no. That’s good; I don’t have anything else to add. That’s perfect.
CB: Okay. In other areas, Robert Koch identified the bacterium that caused tuberculosis in 1882, which is a major development, again tied in with germ theory but also he becomes one of the – he’s a German physician that became one of the founders of bacteriology. So this is a landmark achievement just because tuberculosis had been a scourge for many centuries and this was finally identifying the bacteria that caused it.
And then in another interestingly adjacent but separate incident, this conjunction saw the assassination of President Garfield in the United States. But what was interesting about this is that he was shot in 1881, but he didn’t die from the bullets. And in fact, historians believe that he probably would have survived, but the doctors at the time – because germ theory hadn’t been fully accepted yet by the medical establishment – the doctors were like, reaching their fingers into his wounds and touching them with dirty hands without sufficiently or really at all sanitizing them. So sanitation didn’t really, hadn’t taken over as a concept because germ theory hadn’t taken over a concept. But then what happens is that he should have survived from this, but then he ends up dying of infection as a result of this after suffering for like, 80 days. And this becomes one of the reasons why germ theory gets accepted in the US, because people realize that he ended up dying from the infection from his doctors and not from the bullets. So much so that the guy – the assassin, the guy who shot him – famously later said when he was on trial, he said, “Yes, I shot the President, but his physicians killed him,” and that was part of his like, defense during the trial over the next year, which is so striking and incredible.
NDB: Yeah. The one thing I will add to that story is there were a lot of doctors sticking their dirty hands into this wound. So it wasn’t like, it wasn’t just like, two doctors; it wasn’t just five doctors. To say “dozens” is, I think, like, on point.
CB: That’s crazy.
NDB: Is it a hundred or not? I’m not sure. But like, it’s a lot. Because there’s all these different doctors. You know, everyone wants to save the life of the president, you know, so on and so forth. So yeah, it’s not just that doctors are sticking their dirty hands in his wound; there’s a lot of them doing it, which is even more kind of embarrassing and horrifying at the same time.
You know, for people who enjoyed the Venus retrograde, of course, Garfield was shot with Venus stationed direct, but at the same degree that Venus had been going retrograde at when Lincoln was shot, and the same degree that Venus had been at when William Henry Harrison died. So there’s also this weird thing going on there. But Garfield doesn’t die right away, like you said, and by the time he dies, Venus is well into the morning star. But there is that sort of path as well. But yeah, the Saturn-Neptune thing – the fact that Garfield dies the way he does – is obviously very different and pretty grim.
CB: Yeah. So in the years following his death, eventually medical journals in the US would start to like, talk about, you know, the way in which he may have died as a result of this, and about the need for sanitation and the use of antiseptic techniques and the acceptance of germ theory. So that’s why I think this is like, the germ theory conjunction is really one of the core things for this one.
All right, moving onto other stories. One of the things that happened as a result of the assassination, weirdly, was something called the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. And the reason for this is tricky and weird, because it’s because of the motivations of the assassin who was this like, deranged guy, but he thought that by assassinating the president, somehow he could get appointed to like, a government position. And there was this like, weird circumstances surrounding it.
NDB: Well, no, he thought he was entitled to a position. I mean, he shot Garfield because Garfield had not appointed him to a position, and he felt he was entitled to it. I think he had been supporting Garfield; I think he had even been like, onstage at some of the fundraising or campaign or something like that. But he clearly was deranged at the same time – not necessarily because he expected a government job. You know, this was kind of a period where, you know, you could get that kind of job if you were nice enough or donated enough to a campaign.
CB: No, I mean, he was rejected, but what I read was that he actually felt entitled to a government job under the spoils system, and somehow also thought that this would secure him a position.
NDB: Right. I mean, he was nuts, admittedly. I know at the trial he’s quite delusional, so yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. But it certainly – he thought he was entitled to a job even before he shot him.
CB: Right. So part of the reason this ends up affecting legislation though is there was a system in place for government appointments up to this point that was referred to as “the spoils system,” which is also known as the patronage system, which is like, this long standing practice where American politicians would give out government jobs and award them, basically, to political supporters and to loyalists regardless of their qualifications. And then in the 1800s, this system ended up fostering corruption and inefficiency and a constant turnover of personnel from administration to administration, of course. They weren’t carrying over.
NDB: And Chester Arthur, who was Garfield’s vice president who became president, he had always been linked to Roscoe Conkling, who was a total corruption political boss guy. So for Arthur to wind up being the president who oversees this reform is ironic in a way. I mean, Arthur winds up being good enough to do that, but the fact that he was one of Conkling’s people – and that’s kind of how he wound up being vice president – there was some irony there.
CB: Right. So anyway, so the public reaction and like, outrage about the motivations of the assassination ended up causing there to be movement, finally, to have reform surrounding this obviously like, bad area of the government. And they ended up passing an act which instituted a merit-based system for civil service. It also protected government employees from political firings and had some other really important provisions in it. But I just thought it was really interesting because of some of the discussions that are coming up again now in the early Trump administration, and without getting into all of that, it’s just weird that I’m seeing some similar like, keywords coming up whether they’re motivated for good reasons or not. But there’s like, weirdly similar discussions.
NDB: Yeah, it’s almost like this time it’s around, it’s Charles Guiteau who’s president instead of Garfield.
CB: Right. It’s like a reverse —
NDB: It’s a reverse Garfield, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Because you’re getting rid of – I guess that was the whole point of Project 2025 is to get rid of government appointments that carry over between administrations, and instead to install loyalists, basically, so yeah – it is basically reversing it.
NDB: Yeah. Make Conkling great again.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was notable. Elsewhere notable, one of the things you pointed out was the secret founding of the Standard Oil and Trust took place in 1882, which is very close to the conjunction. And this was a big deal, right?
NDB: Yeah. This is consolidation of Rockefeller’s, you know, oil operation and really creating effectively a monopoly or, you know, something certainly approaching one, resembling one. And yeah, I mean, this is Standard Oil; it’s gonna become so big that it triggers anti-trust legislation down the road. But for the time being, it’s setting the standard for how the oil industry is going to operate from here on.
CB: Right. So I thought it was interesting that it was like, another like, secretive sort of pact.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Again, that theme of like, doing things behind the scenes or having like, secret agreements or things like that. It ended up then creating such a monopoly that eventually there was a reaction to it about a decade or two later when they eventually started doing anti-trust both investigative reporting but eventually legislation to break up trusts like this one, and this ended up becoming like, the archetype for that.
NDB: Yeah. But you know, you can still drive around America and see those Exxon gas stations which used to be called Esso gas stations, and Esso was Standard Oil. So you know, the behemoth still lives.
CB: Elsewhere one of the things I noticed on this conjunction was in the United Kingdom in 1882, they passed the Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed women to own and control their own property, which was a major step for women’s rights. And I thought that was really notable, because this is the conjunction that happens right before 36 years later when in 1917 you have that conjunction and then all of a sudden women in the UK over 30 got the right to vote. So there’s some continuation here even in just the UK in a limited way of like, women’s rights issues coming up in these successive conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. Although, you know, it was limited to married women, I believe. Let’s not get crazy; we don’t want unmarried women having their own property. But yeah.
CB: Got it. Yeah, yeah.
NDB: One step at a time.
CB: The kids these days like, giving women property rights and stuff.
NDB: What are they thinking?
CB: Yeah. It’s like, Plato’s old thing that the youth are always like, corrupting things.
All right. Next thing I found – I thought this was hilarious when I found it. In 1882 in the UK, the Society for Psychical Research was founded. And it was dedicated to scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena. And I cannot think of a more Saturn-Neptune thing than founding a society for like, scientifically investigating paranormal phenomena then happening on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. Enough said! I mean, the 19th century was, you know, this was very big, certainly in the US, although I guess this was in England, and I’m sure there were similar forces at work, I suppose.
CB: Yeah. So this is coming out of like, the rise of spiritualism and other reported like, psychic experiences or the ability to talk to ghosts or dead people that was like, all over the place in the 1800s. But they wanted to apply scientific rigor, basically, to study some of these things and investigate claims like telepathy, mediumship, and all sorts of other phenomenon. So this is still a thing that is around to this day, and it’s gone on —
NDB: Can we interest them in astrology podcasts?
CB: I don’t know. We’ll look into that. We’ll bookmark that for later.
NDB: All righty.
CB: So that was a good one. Just to give people like, a taste of different Saturn-Neptune manifestations. Because one of the things you’ll notice is like, we didn’t outline what Saturn and Neptune mean at the beginning of this, but instead, one of the things we’re doing is we’re kind of like, finding what Saturn and Neptune mean when they conjoin through these events, which is sort of like, an empirical way of understanding those planets by looking and seeing what actually happened in history when they aligned. And it’s getting us a lot of different perspectives on the archetypal dynamics and scenarios involved.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Another thing that happened under this conjunction was in 1883, the International Patent Protection process was established under the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, and it basically established international patent protection, which I thought was incredible because it’s like, patenting something, but you’re patenting an idea, which is like, kind of a Neptunian thing because it’s like, what is an idea? It’s like, and you’re trying to formalize that you came up with that idea first before anybody else. And all of the like, ambiguities that come along with that.
NDB: Yeah. And you have to be able to prove that it’s totally original is the, you know, that’s the burden.
CB: Right. That your idea was original and that you did it first in time before somebody else.
NDB: Right!
CB: Because if somebody else had that idea first chronologically before time, then you don’t have intellectual like, ownership of it.
NDB: That’s right.
CB: Which, you know, then came up famously in other cases. Like, we talked about like, Edison or somebody at one point and some of the controversies surrounding the patenting of different things. Or no, maybe it wasn’t Edison. The sound one. Who was the sound guy that like, was claimed to have ripped off like, a woman where he patented the telephone? Alexander Graham Bell.
NDB: Alexander Graham Bell! Okay.
CB: Yeah. There’s like —
NDB: It’s also – yeah.
CB: — controversies surrounding his patenting of the telephone and another woman who seemed to have a very similar idea around the same time.
NDB: Oh, okay. It’s also interesting considering that Neptune itself, the origin of its discovery is also the source of some dispute as well. There are competing claims to who discovered Neptune, so there’s irony in that as well.
CB: That we will get to in the next conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Another one I’ve already mentioned is the Chinese Exclusion Act; we covered this extensively in the Mars retrograde in Cancer episode, because this happened under the Mars retrograde in Cancer. And the United States passed this act, basically, that barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US because a decade earlier, the US had opened up formal diplomatic relationships with China, and a bunch of Chinese people started immigrating to the United States, especially to work on like, the railroads which were being built out from the east to the west. And over the course of a decade, all of a sudden, the US like, started kind of freaking out about it, and there started being a lot of racism and other things which culminated eventually in this act, which not only barred future Chinese people from immigrating to the US, but it also barred anybody that was currently here from getting citizenship. And what was bizarre is that this lasted for decades and like, wasn’t really repealed until like, the middle of the 20th century.
NDB: Yeah. Something like the ‘50s, if I remember correctly.
CB: And this was actually, you know, prior to this time, immigration was pretty much pretty open in the United States. And this ended up being the first major US law to restrict immigration by race, specifically targeting Chinese laborers. Yeah, so permitting their entry and also denying them citizenship as well as restricting their ability to reenter the country.
So go ahead.
NDB: And I just – I looked this up to be sure. The law remained enforced until 1943, but Chinese immigration later increased with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which abolished direct racial barriers.
CB: Wow. Nice.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Under that conjunction in 1952 and 1953, wow.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible.
NDB: I remembered – I suddenly, like, a flash went off in my head and I’m like, “Wait a minute! When we were researching that for Mars, I remember it ended somehow in 1952 in some fashion.”
CB: Right. So I noticed going back further in the history and like, Rome, for example, there was this famous example that I might get to later where the Visigoths suddenly are this like, tribe that’s escaping the Huns. I think it’s the Huns, right? And they end up moving as a large group en masse into Roman territory, and that happens on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And the Romans at the time started taking advantage of them and basically abusing them, and it ends up causing friction between the two groups of peoples or the two whatever you wanna call it, so that eventually it culminates one Saturn-Neptune cycle later, 36 years later, with the Visigoths sacking Rome and like, destroying the city in 410 CE as the culmination of that. So there’s some sort of theme sometimes with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions that has to do with like, borders and like, the porousness of borders, or immigration or other things like that that can sometimes come up under these conjunctions, and that can take different forms. But symbolically it’s interesting – that, and then some of the things of course that are happening right now and some of the, you know, Trump running on immigration and now some of the – in some instances – very extreme anti-immigration policies that he’s putting into place, including creating a camp for like, 30,000 people in Guantanamo Bay or recently shipping off prisoners to Ecuador, potentially without due process. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on, and this conjunction obviously will promise to continue to probably be really important in terms of that.
NDB: Yeah. It also strikes me that the Visigoths eventually wind up in Iberia, where there are already Celts living. But the Visigoths come in and they establish their own kingdom there, which is effectively like, proto-Spain until the Muslim invasion, at which point of course you have Andalus. Largely Iberia is a, you know, Muslim-occupied territory with these former Visigoths now Catalans and what have you living there. Isabella of Castile, who has a natal Saturn-Neptune conjunction, she and her husband Fernando, the King of Aragon, fight the Moors and the last major battle will be during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Not the last – the most consequential battle, even though it’s five years before they effectively kick them out. And then of course, once that happens, she’s also the one who hired Christopher Columbus to sail to the New World. And that leads to colonialism. And so all these former Visigoths turned Adalusians turned Spaniards are now going to the New World where they’re conquering the Maya and the Aztec and everyone and establishing their colony. And of course, they’re part of the gene pool that are today’s Latin Americans.
CB: Right. Yeah. One of the things I noticed, you mentioned like, Isabelle and just the exploration of the New World. And that’s kind of interesting, because I kept seeing this theme coming up that I wasn’t expecting of exploring new lands and territories, and sometimes groups relocating to a new area and setting up like, a new thing there. This was oftentimes motivated by religious reasons or religious motivations. Oftentimes they were escaping religious persecution that was happening wherever they came from, and they were settling in a new area in order to escape that, and then trying to create a new religious community or a community that was based on an ideal surrounding that.
NDB: Right.
CB: That theme was actually first found by Orla, who noted that in – what was it, it was like, 1630 – Orla noted that the Puritans immigrated and established Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, which was on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Or you had noted that the Mormons arrived in Salt Lake City in 1847, which was on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. It’s actually – actually, I guess that’s the current – or no, that’s the next one that we’re about to hit. Or even I noted that even like, Muhammad was setting up the first Muslim community in Medina still by 622 and 624, which is when that conjunction was taking place, although the flight had already happened slightly before that in 620. But they were still setting up the community and establishing some basic things still by the time of the conjunction. So there’s this repeated theme of that for sure with religious groups. But I noticed that it sometimes comes up of just like, groups of people exploring unknown lands as well. Like for example, the beginning of Norse settlements in Greenland in 985 CE. The earliest European presence in North America by Vikings in 1021. Or Marco Polo departing for Asia in 1271. So I haven’t fully like, articulated what that is yet, but I think part of the archetype is like, exploring unknown lands.
NDB: Yeah. It’s also – you know, in France there was the Catholic-Protestant thing that we’ll probably get into. But there were the Huguenots – the French Protestants – many of them who wound up here in South Africa, you know, escaping the Catholic repression. And yeah. The Catholic Wars of Religion that chased them out sort of are bookended by two Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, which we’ll get into, so. Yeah. It is something that you see quite a bit.
CB: Okay. Nice. Yeah, there’s a lot there. All right, moving onto the last couple of stories for this conjunction of 1882. One of them that was wild is that time zones were first established in the UK in 1880, and US and Canada in 1883, so really centered on this conjunction. And I love that, because it’s like, these invisible borders or boundaries —
NDB: Right.
CB: — between different areas that you can’t see and in which like, time, you know, jumps an hour as well as like, a standardized system for trying to differentiate something as murky as like, time.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, you couldn’t make the trains run properly if you didn’t have this standard. That’s what really changed things, because until trains existed, you didn’t really need time zones, because nobody traveled fast enough for it to make a difference. But that was what made it necessary.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Particularly in the American continent.
CB: Yeah. So I thought that was amazing, just that idea of like, invisible borders or boundaries keeps coming up on these conjunctions. It even came up in like, 2017 when there was a Saturn-Neptune square, and there was like, three important turning points and discussions about house division that year that I was involved in. And I kept noting that the important turning points happened on the three squares almost exactly. So I realized that house division was one of those Saturn-Neptune things, because it was about, you know, trying to —
NDB: Establish an invisible border! Yeah.
CB: Yeah! Establish an invisible border about something that especially where people are often trying to say that it’s this or it’s that. It’s one or the other. It’s yes or no. That it’s like, black and white. But instead, it’s something that may actually be more murky where there may be like, overlap between multiple systems being true. And that’s where you get into issues.
NDB: Yeah. Well, thankfully, our community is sensible and mature and handles these matters with —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — great aplomb. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. We definitely have moved on from that, and I’m glad that issue was solved and will never come up again!
NDB: Yeah. Ever!
CB: All right. So moving on. The 1882 conjunction also saw the rise of a number of socialist and labor movements in Europe. And this is something that Barbault pointed out originally that I originally picked up from him that there were a number in like, Britain and France and a number of other EUropean countries where this started becoming like, a major theme.
NDB: Yeah. I believe the black flag of anarchism has its roots in France in about 1882, ‘83. Like, someone had flown a black flag in 1871 during the Commune, but the black flag being established as the anarchist flag I think dates to about this period if I remember correctly.
CB: Okay. So it’s like, part of the context is one cycle earlier in 1846 is when The Communist Manifesto is published. So that’s part of the context is starting to have one cycle later, like, the full development where that’s starting to impact society in a major way. But then also there was just like, the rise of different labor movements where there was increased labor unrest and the growth of these different socialist and anarchist movements in many parts of the world, and then that of course sets things up so that one cycle later in 1917 is when you have the first country – which is Russia – has the Russian Revolution and then all of a sudden you have a full blown country where Communism is the ideology and the main motivation.
NDB: Yeah. And you know what date Karl Marx died, of course?
CB: I do not.
NDB: March 14th, 1883 – Neptune at 16 Taurus, Saturn at 21 Taurus.
CB: Wow.
NDB: And he was, of course, a Taurus himself, yeah.
CB: So Marx died on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. That’s incredible.
NDB: Yeah. Pretty close to his Sun and Moon, which were both in Taurus.
CB: That’s like, who was the other one that was like, was it Newton that died on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction? There was like, somebody else like that where it was like, a really striking one as well, but it’s escaping me at the moment.
NDB: Okay, I’m sure I put it in the document. I seem to remember pointing something like that out, but I’m forgetting right on the moment.
CB: Right.
NDB: It’ll come up. But yeah, Marx also died on Saturn-Neptune, so that’s kind of perfect.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. All right, I think that’s good for 18 – sorry —
NDB: ‘82.
CB: — 82. Now let’s move onto 1846. We’re gonna jump 36-ish years earlier. So the time frame for this one is there were three exact conjunctions in 1846, which took place on April 4th, September 5th, and December 11th. It was all between 25, 26, and 27 Aquarius. By orb it began within 15 degrees by the first quarter of 1845, and it lasted until about the first quarter of 1848. Here’s a graph that shows that in the closeness, especially in those three exact hits all in 1846. And by sign, it actually crossed over across two signs – across Aquarius and Pisces – in terms of the copresence. So this one gets extended to be longer than usual. And it begins when Saturn first goes into Aquarius February 3rd, 1844, and it ends when Saturn departs from Pisces for the last time on April 3rd, 1849.
This one also I wanted to note that it overlaps with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction that was happening in Aries roughly around the same time around 1848, so it comes just towards the tail end of our Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1846. But nonetheless, I felt like there was some overlap there, so it’s hard sometimes differentiating like, what’s coming from the Saturn-Neptune conjunction versus what’s coming from this other really intense conjunction between Uranus and Pluto, and they are both ultimately important and operative at same time.
So in terms of events, the – go ahead.
NDB: I was just gonna say, it’s a lot of things happened very quickly during this part of the century, or this part of this decade, even. Yeah, there’s considerable acceleration in the United States and in Europe, you know, politically and socially and what have you. Anyway, please continue.
CB: Right. So here’s some of the events that we’re gonna talk about that happened during the course of this one. The first one we wanted to mention is that Neptune was actually discovered around the time of this conjunction, right?
NDB: They pretty much, they were exact to the degree – the conjunction – when they were discovered, September 1846.
CB: September 18th, 1846?
NDB: September 1846. It’s September 23rd, 1846, around 10 PM in Berlin. Well, actually, I have 10 PM; it says “night.” I don’t know what time.
CB: Yeah. So there we go. They were both at like, 25 degrees of Aquarius. So that’s crazy. So that’s right at the exact conjunction. Suddenly, this new planet is discovered and becomes real, and Neptune was interesting because they were searching for Neptune after having discovered Uranus, what, the previous century. They were searching for Neptune because there were unexplained perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, so that they thought there was another planet out there that was like, causing it. And as a result of that, you know, it was very Neptunian, because it was like, there was something that they thought that was out there that was causing things that they couldn’t see yet, but they knew it was there because they could see the effect it was having on other planets, or at least that’s what they thought.
NDB: Right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that is very Neptunian in and of itself – like, something that you can sometimes see, you can see the effects of even though you can’t visibly see it so that you kind of like, reach for something that you think is there. I mean, ironically, though, I think in retrospect they said that they were just like, doing the calculations wrong. That it wasn’t offsetting the orbit as much as it should have been or something like that? So there may have even been —
NDB: Right, but they found it —
CB: — some confusion there.
NDB: — regardless. Yeah! Like —
CB: Exactly! Which is also Neptunian when you like, accidentally stumble on something.
NDB: Like, you’re wrong, but you’re right anyway. Or you’re right for the wrong reason or something like that. Something to that effect.
CB: That’s good. I like that. All right. So the biggest – one of the things we’ve mentioned multiple times but it bears repeating because one of the biggest things that happened here that set up a foundation for all subsequent conjunctions after this point is that The Communist Manifesto is published. It’s completed on January 31st, 1848, and then it’s published the following month on February 21st, 1848. At that time, Neptune was at zero Pisces, and Saturn was at 13 Pisces, so they were active both by sign as well as by the 15-degree orb.
NDB: Yeah. And that’s a magical week. That last week of January 1848. January 24th, the Gold Rush begins. January 26th, Thoreau gives his Civil Disobedience lecture. And then January 31st, The Communist Manifesto is completed. And then two days later, February 2nd, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed between the US and Mexico, turning over all that territory to the United States where gold was just found a few days earlier. So —
CB: Right.
NDB: — it was, yeah, setting —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — the stage for much of what we’re about to discuss. But I just, I love to emphasize that all that happens in like, the same week! It’s kind of —
CB: Right.
NDB: — mind blowing.
CB: For sure. So in terms of The Communist Manifesto, is there anything you wanna say about it? So it’s written by two authors, and it has like, a idealistic —
NDB: It’s a pamphlet.
CB: Okay.
NDB: It’s a pamphlet. I mean, revolution is brewing in Europe, and so it really is a sort of, you know, a call to arms or like, well, it’s a manifesto laying out a sort of a framework and a plan and an ideology that’s ostensibly behind so many of these worker uprisings that are just on the verge of breaking out over the course of 1848 in Europe.
CB: Okay. So it gives this like, outline – well, one of the things it does, it gives a re-analysis of history through the lens of the ideology, right?
NDB: Yeah, you might – some people – like, it’s not as detailed. Later on, Marx writes Das Kapital,which is more of a, you know, historical —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Like, that’s a big tome that takes like, years for him to write, and it’s written by an older, wiser man. The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet written by, you know, a young idealistic journalist. And people sometimes confuse them. I’ve seen Jordan Peterson literally debate The Communist Manifesto thinking he was talking about The Communist Manifesto, and he was really talking about Das Kapital. But —
CB: Right.
NDB: But yeah, it’s – yeah.
CB: This isn’t an area that I specialize in, so that’s why —
NDB: Fair enough. Yeah.
CB: Do you wanna outline —
NDB: No, I know some – sure. Yeah. Communist Manifesto is really, like, it’s a pamphlet. There is that, you know, “You have nothing to lose but your chains” line, which is often quoted, but some people think that line’s in Das Kapital. But yeah —
CB: Let’s assume someone knows nothing about it and just like, explain it —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — briefly.
NDB: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, if like, when you were in university and you’re walking down the street and some young guy hands you a pamphlet that tells you, you know, the government sucks and you should go to this protest or, you know, it’s a young person sort of asserting their political view and sharing it with like-minded people. It’s not a long, you know, thorough document. That comes later.
CB: Okay. Yeah.
NDB: But it is, it does identify – like, he didn’t invent the concept of Communism. But he just, he sort of —
CB: What does it —
NDB: — he articulates it.
CB: — establish? What does it establish then, Nick?
NDB: The idea that if everyone bands together – actually, it’s great, it’s a manifesto of popular uprising. If everyone gets together and, you know, fights the powers that be as a consolidated unit, then they can really persevere. Like, you know, that’s a fairly good summary.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. And that ties together one of the things that we see coming up throughout history on these where we’ve talked about like, much earlier in like, the Middle Ages, there’s a bunch of instances of like, peasant uprisings.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Is there anything else you wanna mention about it, or?
NDB: No, that’s really it. You know, it sums it up. Yeah. It just it sort of articulates some revolutionary ideas that are out in the world at this time.
CB: Okay. Got it. So that, and as we’ve seen, like, one conjunction later, some of those ideas are leading to the creation of actual socialist groups or actual Communist groups in Europe. And then one cycle after that, we have Russia emerging as the first major Communist state. And then one cycle after that, we have the death of Stalin and the transition into that phase of the Soviet Union. And then one cycle after that, we have the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989. So there’s just this crazy throughline that you can follow all the way back to this point right here when there’s this pamphlet published.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. All right. Moving on. I already mentioned this, but the Seneca Falls Convention takes place under this conjunction, and this was the first women’s rights convention in the United States. Elsewhere there’s a piece of technology that premieres at this time that you —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — pointed out, right?
NDB: Yeah. It’s called the phantaskop. So daguerreotypes were invented in 1839; those are the proto-photographs, leading to what will be photography. But meanwhile, there’s this artistic show in Vienna at the Josefstadt Theatre where, yeah, this artist takes like, a rotating cardboard disc and then has like, all these different sort of lights and other cogwheels, and it projects images onto the screen. It’s sort of like, proto-cinema, if you will. Moving pictures. It certainly is moving pictures on the screen, so it’s proto — you know, people are sitting in a cinema and they’re not watching actors on the stage; they’re watching sort of technology make images on a screen is how we can best explain it. So yeah, it’s the beginning of cinema in some fashion even though it’s still half a century ‘til the Lumiere brothers will actually show their first movie in France, but yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay.
NDB: So it’s very Saturn-Neptune. Yeah.
CB: So there’s like, a throughline from here and then in 1917, I talked about the establishment of that organization that established standards – like, frame rates – for film and other things. Then we have the early 1950s, which is the popularization of television. Late 1980s and the 24-hour news cycle. And then today we have the AI-generated video that is becoming indistinguishable from actual like, shot video. So there’s, again, a throughline all the way back to one of the earliest points to the very origins of this technology.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: One of the ones that you noticed was really interesting is that Notre-Dame Cathedral began a major restoration at this time, right?
NDB: Yeah. Although that’s part of this larger timeline, because it was the cornerstone for Notre-Dame was laid – let me get the date here – yeah, here we are. The cornerstone was laid March 24th, 1163, so nearly 700 years earlier when Saturn was at 18 Sagittarius and Neptune was at 26 Sagittarius. So yeah. Quite close to the conjunction. So Notre-Dame Cathedral began construction during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Over 700 years later in 1845, they do a major renovation, and sort of – like, keeping the style but upgrading some things and making sure, you know, anything that was wearing out is replaced. And then, of course, Notre-Dame caught fire in April of 2019, which required a renovation, and those renovations were finished and the new Notre-Dame was unveiled just this past December as Saturn and Neptune are copresent in Pisces and already on their way to the conjunction. So yeah. I just, I thought it was interesting that Notre-Dame has this whole Saturn-Neptune theme going back, you know, by this point, 900 years or 850 years.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. I thought that was a really impressive one that you found, tying together the modern restoration in the past few years with this restoration more than a hundred years ago, and then the original founding of this church way long like, a thousand years ago.
NDB: Yeah. It’s wild.
CB: Incredible. In addition to just it being like, a building that’s religious – a religious building, a church – Saturn-Neptune. There you go.
NDB: Yeah. And of course, the renovation that was done in 1845 was inspired in part by Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which sort of turned the Cathedral, gave it an extra bit of, you know, literary mystique, I suppose, and generated enough interest that, yeah. They decided it was time for the renovation. And Paris was about to go through this huge renovation, anyway, so this was like, a precursor to that.
CB: Nice. All right. So I think that’s good. The major geopolitical thing that happened under this conjunction was the Mexican-American War took place from 1846 to 1848. So pretty much right on our conjunction. And this was a major, a big deal in terms of like, US history, right?
NDB: Well, absolutely. This is how the US took possession of New Mexico, Arizona, California, yeah, Texas effectively. Yeah, you know, the United States grew in size, and of course for Mexico, this was a huge loss. I already talked about how two Saturn-Neptune conjunctions later in the middle of the First World War, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution which is happening during Saturn-Neptune, the Mexicans are nearly enticed by Germany to go and fight this war again and take this territory back. Although Mexico ultimately opts to just decline, which actually puts them in really good graces with the US, the fact that they turned Germany down, because this was all being done secretly, but whenever things exposed and they learned that Mexico was like, “Actually, we’re not gonna get involved in that,” then the US starts to say, “Okay, you know, Mexico might be okay with us.” You know, it sort of heals some things.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So this was, you know, they’re annexing territory, ultimately. And I did find some instances where like, annexing territory seemed to come up, so it’s possible that that’s a recurring theme. It was also tied up with some ideological stuff surrounding the United States in the middle of the 1800s, specifically the ideas of like, Manifest Destiny and the idea that the United States had a divinely ordained right and duty to expand its territory and to spread westward, basically, and to spread democratic and capitalist ideals. So I thought that was interesting, the sort of like, ideological or religious motivation behind annexing territory, basically.
NDB: Yeah, excuse me, this is a really crucial period in that sense. You know, you were talking about migrations and all this stuff. And you know, I know Uranus-Pluto is happening at the same time, but the Saturn-Neptune – Neptune in particular, with Neptune being discovered… So while the US-Mexican War is happened, and as I explained, as soon as that treaty is signed or even just before the treaty is signed, gold is found in California. So what follows the acquisition of all this land is because of the Gold Rush, suddenly all these Americans from back east start going out west to find their fortune. To, you know, the sort of the same thing that happens today if someone from the East Coast moves to California, the idea that they’re gonna, you know, right their own life again, or find themselves, find their fortune, this kind of thing.
CB: Right.
NDB: And that phenomenon happens, but at the same time, there are all these revolutions in Europe in 1848, and a lot of the people who fall foul of these revolutions wind up moving to the US. So suddenly, the US has this new influx of immigrants from Europe, but they’re not merely, you know, Brits, French, Dutch, German like the usual population the US has been. Suddenly you’re getting Poles and Serbs and Hungarians. Italians. And so the US is becoming far more of a melting pot than it had been up until that point. So you’re getting this whole – and of course, for the first time the United States is also becoming Hispanic because they’ve just taken on all these former territories of Mexico. So the US is also becoming transformed into this more of a melting pot. You know, up until this point, it’s just been, you know, white Europeans and their slaves, and of course, First Nations people. And now you’re getting like, really people from all over. And of course, Chinese people are just starting to come over because of the Opium Wars. So there is something about this period involving migration within the United States and around the world. There’s nothing that sets the sort of the international melting pot order more than this period in history, and it totally coincides with the discovery of Neptune. And so I’ve often thought, we’re gonna get to the Irish Potato Famine – yet another migration situation that’s happening around this time – and so all these things that are happening really change the country very, very quickly, to such an extent that you’re gonna get a big anti-immigrant wave in the 1850s. But yeah, the America that we know starts to take shape around this time. The place that’s just, you know, you can be from anywhere. Come and become a new person – an American. That’s really starting to happen here.
CB: The like, melting pot. I just looked this up; I didn’t know this; this wasn’t in our document, but it turns out the term, the phrase “manifest destiny” was coined in 1845 by a journalist who was praising the annexation of Texas. And that, you know, Saturn was already copresent with Neptune —
NDB: Right.
CB: — in Aquarius at that time. So Manifest —
NDB: Think of the phrase. Manifest Destiny is like, Saturn-Neptune, you know?
CB: Right, literally.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, it’s a phrase that Canadians have never forgotten. I think they’ve remembered it lately. Yeah. It gets bandied about a lot.
CB: Right. Well, nor have like, First Nations people, because that’s part of the ideology that led to their forced removal —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — and destruction of their cultures from the lands that were being like, Manifest Destiny’ed.
NDB: Yeah. “What are you doing here? God told us we’re supposed to take this land! Why are you here? You’re not supposed to be here.” Yeah, it’s insane. Yeah.
CB: Right. So yeah, so that’s very important. Mexican-American War is very important, is the biggest thing. But this leads into another major topic, which is that not all Americans were on board with this, and there was a major debate about the moral ambiguities of the Mexican-American War, and the annexations that were taking place as well as the entire idea of Manifest Destiny. And one of the most important things that happens during this period is that Henry David Thoreau delivers a lecture on Civil Disobedience on January 26th, 1848, and this actually ends up becoming eventually later on hugely influential because his lecture in its written form will be read by Gandhi and then later also by Martin Luther King, Junior, and it will end up influencing them and some of their approaches to like, civil disobedience as well as like, nonviolent resistance.
NDB: Yeah. Tolstoy is another, you know, disciple of Thoreau as well. But yeah, absolutely. If you think about the work that Gandhi did here in South Africa and then of course in India, his whole strategy was very much inspired by Thoreau’s work. And of course, Martin Luther King is inspired by Gandhi and Thoreau. I mean, King does have armed bodyguards, but nonetheless, you know, he does certainly take on the police nonviolently. So with all that in mind, yeah, it’s quite the legacy, and that also comes right from this period.
CB: Right. So comes in with that in terms of feelings that the war is unjust, but it’s also tied in with the issue of slavery, which is a major moral issue that the US is fighting about internally in the middle of the 1800s because one of the issues is that there’s the potential for the new territories that have been taken or annexed from Mexico to become slave states. And so this fuels the conflict between the North and South over slavery. And that becomes one of the things that Thoreau is protesting as well when he’s outlining his ideas of resistance to civil government.
NDB: Yeah. And for people who know Thoreau mostly for his writings on Walden Pond, his retreat to Walden Pond happened in 1845. When he comes and gives this lecture, it’s sort of when he’s emerged from that. So even, you know, Thoreau’s work with Walden Pond, you know, about nature and so on and so forth is also tied into the Saturn-Neptune period as well.
CB: Nice. You mentioned another major story that happened during this conjunction is the Irish Potato Famine and how there’s this huge famine that causes widespread starvation and death, but also mass migration from Ireland to the United States at this time, right?
NDB: Yeah, and to Canada. A lot of them arrive in Montreal. In fact, the mayor of Montreal died of what was it? One of those diseases, you know, that get passed around by the Irish immigrants when he’s tending to them. Yeah, he dies in 1847; he’s something of a martyr. But yeah, there’s a terrible blight on the potato crop in Ireland, and the Irish people at this time – or at least the poor ones – subsist on potatoes, and so people are just starving to death. There’s also issues at the same time regarding, you know, landlords and people who live on property in the sort of, you know, the ruthless actions taken against poor people and how they’re gonna live. So a lot of things blow up, but indeed, a lot of Irish people wind up in the United States and Canada escaping this famine.
CB: Okay. So yeah, these conjunctions are all going – there’s three conjunctions that are all going exact in 1846, and one of our researchers, Orla, who was researching the Irish Potato Famine, this is the one that she worked on and worked out the most. She says that in 1846, three-quarters of the harvest was lost to blight, and that by December, a third of a million people were destitute. And the first attack of the blight caused so much hardship in rural Ireland already in autumn of 1846 that the first deaths from starvation were already being recorded at that time. So just in terms of like, thinking about the exact conjunctions, that’s what’s happening here is you were having like, widespread famine and suffering and death, and so much so that people have to like, pick up. Just like, imagine like, picking up your entire life and moving to an entirely different continent as a result of that.
NDB: Yeah. And with nothing, and you know… I mean, the Irish who turned up in Montreal – I mean, that was one little Catholic stronghold, and so, but there was a terrible typhus outbreak; that’s what the mayor of Montreal died of – typhus – because he was tending to all these dying Irish immigrants who had sailed across the ocean to escape a famine only to wind up with a typhus epidemic. So yeah, it was really grim. One thing after another.
CB: Okay. All right, anything else about that? Or about the history of the Irish before we move on?
NDB: No. No.
CB: Okay. I wasn’t – I couldn’t remember if there was like, another – I thought there was an Irish uprising that you mentioned later —
NDB: Well, there is, yeah. In 1916, the Easter Uprising.
CB: Right.
NDB: Which along with the Zimmermann telegram and Lenin being, you know, shipped to Petersburg was part of the German regime’s, you know, plot to undermine their enemies, and so by – because Irish independence was going to happen in 1914. Some form of it. And then war broke out, so it was tabled. And of course, a lot of Irish were also signed up, you know, drafted or whatever to fight the war. So you had this uprising, the Easter Uprising, in 1916 where some independence activists took over the post office in Dublin, and some other spots in Dublin, and they had an armed standoff with the British army. And they ultimately lost and they were executed – or most of them were, and the others were sent off to prison. One of the revolutionaries who wasn’t sent to prison, because he was born in New York and they were afraid that the Americans would retaliate, so they just put him in prison, and he was the future president of Ireland – of an independent Ireland. But yeah, this was – I mean, this is what leads to the Easter Uprising sort of, you know, happens and then is quashed. But then as the First World War ends, the Irish independence movement now is in full furor, and there is agitation against the British government in 1919, 1920 – all kinds of horrible violence goes on. And then when they finally reach a deal with the English, that they’ll have an independent Ireland but Northern Ireland will still belong to the United Kingdom, then a civil war breaks out between the two factions of Irish revolutionaries – those who accept the compromise and those who don’t. And then that gets really, really ugly. And ironically, you know, this problem in some ways has never stoped festering, until Brexit! Because when Brexit happened, suddenly Northern Ireland’s like, “Hmm, maybe unification is a good idea.” So it’s kind of funny how this – it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming years now.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So and then, you know, at this point in the US, the Irish become one of the then immigrant populations that initially is treated as like, outsiders basically, right?
NDB: Yeah. I mean, they’re arriving, like I said, alongside people from Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Italy, and these are all very – I mean, I guess the, you know, the Irish because they’re Catholic is, you know, already kind of disturbing enough to a lot of the American population. But yeah, there’s all these “foreigners.” Like I said, they’re not English, they’re not French, they’re not German, they’re not Dutch or Swedish. You know, they’re from these “other” places that Americans are not used to interacting with up until this point, and yeah, they’re all treated as… Yeah, as poorly as people get treated when they’re discriminated against.
CB: Right. That always blows my mind that like, Kennedy being the first Catholic president was like, not just a precedent but something that like, was pushing the bounds of like, permissibleness at the time as late as like, the 1960s. That it was like, edgy that —
NDB: Yeah!
CB: — a Catholic could be president compared to the religious, I don’t know, majority of the rest of the country.
NDB: Yeah. There’s footage in 1960 when Kennedy is running. You know, he’s called out on his Catholicism, and he, you know – I forget what exactly what he says, but something to the effect that his loyalty is to the country over the Pope, or you know, something to that effect. But that was, I think, always —
CB: Right.
NDB: — the concern is that they have loyalty to this other body, so they might not be loyal to the country is the rhetoric, anyway, behind this discrimination.
CB: All right. So that’s interesting then in terms of that and other, you know, we talked about the Chinese exclusion act on the next conjunction and the way that —
NDB: Right.
CB: — the US responded to like, large scale immigration then, but here’s another, you know, sort of ethnic group essentially that’s immigrating on another conjunction and how the US responds to that then. And then, of course, we have parallels today where we have the way the US is responding to other groups that are immigrating here.
NDB: Yeah. And even though the railroads aren’t quite being built yet, we do have Chinese people coming over because of the Opium Wars which happened in 1839 to 1842. So you are starting to see, like, Chinese people surface in the United States in noticeable numbers around this time for the first time as well. So yeah, it’s all starting to happen.
CB: Okay. All right, moving onto one of the other major, last major ones here – you mentioned the California Gold Rush begins, and this happens when literally there’s like, a guy on January 24th, 1848, who discovers gold, and then this sparks like, this whole rush of people that are going out to California in order to dig up gold and attempt to make their fortunes and become rich. And there’s something like, really interesting about that, how that happened so long ago and that became people’s reasons for like, moving out to California for this like, Neptunian ideal of like, hitting it big and becoming rich. But it’s interesting that for some reason there’s still this continual archetypal echoes of that in our country still with people later on in like, the 20th century like, actors and comedians like, moving it out to Hollywood in order to make it big in the entertainment industry, which is also like, a different sort of like, Neptunian type industry. And how sometimes —
NDB: Yeah, chasing after the shiny thing. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Somehow there’s still echoes of that sort of theme there today.
NDB: Yeah. Very striking.
CB: All right. One last major one – the Oregon Treaty of 1846 was major. I think you wrote this down, right?
NDB: Yeah. This is what established the western border between Canada and the United States, and yeah. You know, it’s the reason that Victoria is in Canada even though it’s a little bit south of the line, and you know, so on and so forth. Yeah, just easy enough to draw it along the 49th parallel.
CB: Yeah. That’s what’s really striking about it to me is that it was they used the 49th parallel to draw the international boundary between the US and Canada. Or between – yeah, what became the US and Canada. And you know, just the echoes of that elsewhere like we said during the Korean War, using that paralel in order to divide North versus South Korea and just again this idea of sometimes of like, imaginary lines that sometimes humans put in concrete and make become super important even though they don’t really technically exist tangibly until humans like, believe that they do.
NDB: Yeah. That’s absolutely right.
CB: Yeah. All right.
NDB: And I mean, talk about an invisible line. I mean, until Prohibition, I don’t think there was even a gate, you know? Like, you used to just drive down the road like, you know, today if you go between Belgium and Netherlands or whatever. You barely understand you’ve crossed a border.
CB: Right. Well, even not that long ago people could walk back and forth the Canadian border like in Niagara Falls and stuff like that without too much trouble, right?
NDB: Yeah, I mean, it’s still an international border. You still have to have a passport and all that stuff. Although I guess there was a time when just a driver’s license was enough. Like, pre-9/11 or something. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
NDB: I remember crossing the border with just a driver’s license in the past when I was young.
CB: Okay. And then finally the last major one, which you noted, which is that the Mormons founded Salt Lake City in – well, you noted that they had founded Salt Lake City in 1847, which is notable, but also notable that I noticed is that Joseph Smith actually died at the beginning of this conjunction in 1844. So this conjunction was huge for the Mormon religion, because you have both the death and essentially the martyrdom of the founder of the religion, and then you have the religious group itself finding this ideal land basically that they had – that Joseph Smith had like, promised or had written about in some of the Mormon documents and that they’d been moving around for many years up until that point trying to find a place where their group would like, settle and create a religious community and essentially like, a theocracy. They essentially do at this time.
NDB: Yeah. That’s right; I did have in the file Joseph and his brother, Hyrum Smith, were killed in jail by a lynch mob in Carthage, Illinois, on June 27th, 1844. And that’s what compels Brigham Young and the others to move out west – they gotta go where they’re not gonna be lynched. So yeah, one thing leads to another. But yeah, it starts with that murder, effectively – at least the impetus to go that far out west. And yeah. And in some ways —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — the Mormons are doing the same thing for their own purposes that other Americans are going to California for the Gold Rush – the idea that you’re after some, you know, great uplifting change in life, be it financial or spiritual.
CB: Yeah. Well, it was like, tied in with their theology, because like, Joseph Smith had written that like, Eden was actually like, somewhere in western America —
NDB: Missouri, yeah.
CB: Missouri. Yeah, originally it was Missouri, because their first settlement was there in Missouri. And then they got run out of there and then they went to like, Illinois and they were there for a little bit but then got run out of there again. And then eventually they settled in Salt Lake City and that became the final place. And now to this day, that’s still like, the center of Mormonism as like, a worldwide religion.
NDB: Yeah. And interesting – I mean, you know, the thing about their religion of course is it evolves very much around genealogy. And Mormons provide the great genealogy resources in the world, because it’s such a central part of their church. But it’s also it’s just something that’s available to the world. They’ve been, you know, if not pioneers, they may very well be pioneers of genealogy, but they’re certainly like, the greatest champions of it. So there’s something interesting in that as well – the Saturn-Neptune, the idea of like, you gotta be in touch with your heritage, or you know, trying to find lost things about the past. I think there’s something in that as well.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And as I said, this is also one of several different examples I found of like, religious groups escaping persecution and then going somewhere unexplored and setting up, like, a new society, a new religious society based on their own idealized principles, even going so far like Joseph Smith had written up like, idealized city planning things about how the city should be planned out. And then they essentially put those intro practice like, in this new city. So —
NDB: Right.
CB: — lots of Saturn-Neptune themes going on there. But I think that is the final major story that I wanted to mention for the 1846 Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. I remember there was – what I did wanna mention, actually, one other thing. I should have brought this up earlier. In 1847, the country of Liberia was founded – the Republic of Liberia, which was a country of former American slaves, established in Africa. And it’s interesting because in 1989, 1990, Liberia exploded into this massive civil war that really sort of changed that region forever. So there definitely is – and I had another date, I’m just, I’m looking for it. I know there was some episode between Sierra Leone and Liberia, I think in the 1882 conjunction around then where they were fighting over territory as well. So it’s just, yeah, but you know, this is another – I mean, Liberia is almost like, a reverse California. These are people going east to find their, you know, destiny and life and what have you. So even going in the other direction, there’s something happening here.
CB: Right. And it became the first democratic republic in African history.
NDB: Yeah. And along with Ethiopia, the only African country that was never colonized.
CB: Okay.
NDB: Although —
CB: Nice.
NDB: — some, yeah. There was – what was interesting, though, is the Americans who moved there, the former American slaves became known as Americans, and they established themselves – they kind of turned the country into the South, except with them in the role of the white people, and then the other Africans around them as, you know, not slaves, but definitely as second-class citizens. And that led to a huge uprising in 1980 where the Americans were overthrown and there’s footage of them being set before firing squads. But then from there, the country was destabilized; you have the guy who, you know, one of the leaders of that movement that overthrew the Americans, he was in charge and then there were competing uprisings and he was murdered in ‘89 in this military uprising. And then you had this, you know, total civil war situation going on with like, you know, eight-year-old soldiers and just terrible, terrible, terrible stuff that erupted from there.
CB: Wow. So that was on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction? He died at 89?
NDB: Yeah, yeah. There’s footage of him on YouTube; I won’t go into it. It’s really gruesome.
CB: All right. Well, on that note, I think that’s good for that section on —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that conjunction, and I wanna take just a brief break.
All right, so we’re back from break, and now let’s jump into the year 1809 when we had a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in that singular year. So by degree, we only have one conjunction, which happens on December 1st, 1809, in early Sagittarius at six degrees of Sagittarius. By orb, it comes into the 15-degree range by the fourth quarter of 1807, and it’s in that range all the way until the fourth quarter of 1811. By sign, the first ingress takes place on January 2nd, 1809, into Sagittarius, and then the last ingress or egress takes place on December 29th, 1811, because it’s entirely in the sign of Sagittarius. This conjunction is squaring Pluto in Pisces, and that gives it an additional dimension in terms of things that are taking place at this time.
Here’s a graph that shows the singular, exact conjunction, but how it comes into close orb in early 1809 as well as later in 1810. And here are some of the most significant events that we’re gonna talk about that took place in 1809.
So the first one and the most stunning one is all of the Spanish-American colonies that declare independence at this time. And this one is stunning. Orla, our researcher Orla worked on this – Orla Connoly – and in terms of the dates, like, listen to this list of independence dates. So first you have the Bolivian War of Independence begins May of 1809. La Paz, Bolivia – July 1809. Ecuador – August 10th, 1809. Argentina – May 1810. Columbia – July 1810. Mexico – September of 1810. Chile – September of 1810. Paraguay – May of 1811. And Venezuela – July of 1811. So in terms of like, we’ve seen uprisings in other instances, this was a major one that occurred at this time.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s, of course what leads up to this is something that I mentioned earlier. The reason that all these countries, which are not in touch with each other, the reason they all have their uprising now is because Napoleon has just invaded Spain, their mother country. And like I said, that was where we got the term guerillas, the way the Spanish fought back against Napoleon’s army. But with that happening, the colonies now felt cut off from Spain because it was, the king was forced to abdicate, so they no longer have a king. They’re across the ocean and they’re no longer serving a king, which to people in that age is sort of unfathomable.
CB: Right. Napoleon deposed the king, and then all of a sudden —
NDB: Put his brother —
CB: — all of the people – put his brother, and all of the people in the colonies then rebelled, saying, you know, “If you’ve gotten rid of our king, then we have no reason to continue to not be independent.”
NDB: Yeah. It’s not unlike what happens like, with the First and Second World Wars. You know, India and African countries see that, you know, England can be beaten. That Germany can nearly defeat them in a war. And so oh, these people aren’t invincible; they can be beaten if you fight them. And so, you know, that sort of comes up, and I think there’s a similar train of thought here.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s a major just wave of people declaring independence like, all over the Americas basically at this point. And this is one of the most striking things that takes place during the course of this conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. And think about like, Mexico in particular. Mexico’s declaring independence here. We know at the next Saturn-Neptune, they’re gonna lose all that territory to the United States, and we know two Saturn-Neptunes after that, there’s gonna be the Mexico Revolution, which results in a new constitution, the names of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa and inspiring the work of Frida Kahlo who’s still only a young kid at that point, but a lot of everything she does as an artist is inspired by that period. There’s this Saturn-Neptune thread that certainly runs through Mexico, if not a lot of Latin American history. I guess another one is, of course, I mentioned Guatemala in 1954 being overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. You know, you’re getting other threads like that that go back to this period as well.
CB: Right. Yeah.
NDB: And if I remember correctly, Guatemala in the 1500s is one of the territories that actually is taken by the Spanish during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. They don’t take the whole continent at once, but that sort of like, it’s Honduras and Guatemala as I recall that they actually do take during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the 1500s.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s a stunning throughline then in terms of, you know, especially the history of Mexico at this point and then how that follows through with subsequent conjunctions all the way into the present.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on. Other major stories that happened is this conjunction falls pretty close to way ends up being the beginning of the abolition of the slave trade at this point, especially in the United Kingdom where 1807 to 1811, the United Kingdom and the United States took significant steps towards abolishing the slave trade. And they did not outlaw slavery itself, like the actual institution of slavery, but this became the turning point where the slave trade itself started being abolished.
NDB: Yeah. In England, I mean, you did have a faction of abolitionists who were campaigning for it. Reverend Wilberforce, whose descendant would wind up arguing against Darwin’s evolution theory much later. But also just even the British government strategically felt that if they could stop the slave trade, they could cut off the economic edge that say the Ottoman Empire had on them, for instance, you know? You’re hurting the Ottoman Empire more by cutting off the slave trade than, you know, you are hurting yourself. Your trade might flourish; theirs might suffer. So there were strategic, you know, it wasn’t all just because people felt guilty of what have you. It kind of made good economic sense, at least in a predatory sense, to cut off other – you know, cut off the financial resources or labor resources of your enemies. So yeah, with that in mind, that’s what the British Navy was sailing around, boarding slave ships, freeing slaves. They did establish the colony of Sierra Leone, which unlike Liberia wasn’t just like, a free republic run by Africans or former African Americans. It was still a British colony. But it was intended as a place where, you know, former slaves could go to live free. And indeed it was – I looked it up on the break. In 1882, the governor of Sierra Leone, the British governor, did invade Liberia to take some territory. So there’s this ongoing Saturn-Neptune thing between Liberia and Sierra Leone that also surfaced in the civil war in 1989, 1990.
So yeah. You know, here in South Africa, the British were, you know, interfering with the slave trade with the Afrikaners, which inspired the Afrikaners to move further into the interior of South Afirca. And certainly like, right up to the civil war like we were talking about, you know, the fact that when Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, it was signalling to Great Britain that the war was now officially about slavery, and so that they were sort of now bound with regard to their own laws and policy to not get involved right at a time where maybe, just maybe, if Robert E. Lee had been more successful at Antietam that the British might have decided to come in on their side.
CB: Right. In addition to as we talked about in that last episode, the longstanding ideological fights against slavery that were a major point of contention for like, moral and ethical reasons as well as religious reasons on both sides, actually – especially in the United States, but also in the UK – during the course of the 1800s. And one of the things that I think is interesting about this conjunction and about this that I found notable is like, the conjunction happens in 1809 – the exact conjunction – but on either side of this, you get these two important acts in the UK related to it. And the first one is in 1807, so that’s two years before the exact conjunction. In the UK, you get the Slave Trade Act, where they passed this act outlawing it, but they basically just give people a fine if they’re caught doing it. But then that doesn’t work, because people just like, keep doing it and pay the fine. So then a few years later, two years after the actual conjunction, in 1811 they pass the Slave Trade Felony Act, where the British make it an actual felony to engage in the slave trade, which then has a much more serious consequences and therefore becomes much more effective in outlawing the slave trade in the UK and related places.
NDB: Yeah. Well, anywhere. Because remember, they also don’t want the Ottoman Empire having a slave trade. They don’t want anyone having it, especially anyone who isn’t them.
CB: Yeah. Like, and you’ve emphasized that practical and strategic component before, but there’s also an ideological component that I think is also relevant throughout the 1800s with some of the ongoing debates surrounding this.
NDB: Oh yeah. The first anti-slavery society in London, like I said, under Wilberforce met in the 1780s. Like, there was a campaign that built up to this. A good 20 years if not more. Oh, there absolutely were abolitionists who were agitating for this.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s really important. Like, tied in with that and I think is actually truly stunning, that same year in 1809, both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day on February 12th, 1809, the year of this conjunction with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction very close in their birth charts in Sagittarius. And then Lincoln, of course, would be the US president later in the century who’d grow up and later go on to free the slaves in the United States. And there’s something incredibly compelling about that, about him being born on this conjunction, about the US passing this initial act in 1807 and going into effect in 1808 prohibiting the slave trade, and then Lincoln being born then and then going on to do that later. And it’s a good example of something that’s actually come up several times, but we haven’t dwelled on it much, but where there’s a dual action that happens with these major alignments, which is that there’s an outer planet alignment like Saturn-Neptune. And there’s some things that are visible that happen at the time that are important turning points with respect to the topics of that archetype and those two planets that happen in the world at that time. But then also you have people that are born at that time that have that alignment baked into their birth chart, and they eventually grow up and then carry out and enact some things in their life and their destiny that is also exemplifies that alignment and the archetypes behind it at the same time, so that there’s always this dual thing in astrology in terms of the timing, which is that there’s a direct manifestation at the time of the alignment, but also it lays the seeds for future manifestations down the line as well.
NDB: Absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, it does strike me as kind of ironic. Like, yeah, Lincoln and Darwin born the same day. Lincoln, of course, the president who will sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and Darwin’s major like, critic, when Origin of Species comes out is the son of the British abolitionist who, you know, started to agitate in the 1780s – Wilberforce is the surname. So yeah, there’s almost a crisscross in that regard as well. But yeah —
CB: Right.
NDB: — those are powerful nativities. I don’t – he might be the only president born with Saturn-Neptune, if I remember correctly.
CB: Lincoln?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, and we actually – I was surprised to find out in the past year that we had a relatively possible time for Lincoln that made sense where it’s reported that he was born around sunrise. And since his Sun was in Aquarius, that actually gives us a rough Ascendant, potentially, for Lincoln. And if that was true, let’s just say hypothetically for the sake of argument, then he would have Aquarius rising and his Midheaven would be over potentially —
NDB: Right.
CB: — in Sagittarius, not too far from that Saturn-Neptune conjunction where for the audio listeners his Saturn’s at three degrees of Sagittarius. His Neptune’s at six Sagittarius. And his Midheaven might be hovering somewhere around seven degrees of Sagittarius, give or take. And it’s in the 11th whole sign house if he does have Aquarius rising. And that Saturn would actually be ruling his Ascendant, if he was Aquarius rising, making it even more important about his destiny and his overall life direction, which is there in the 11th house – yeah, the place of friends and groups and alliances, and —
NDB: Right.
CB: Yeah. A lot of interesting things.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, I also think this chart is really credible. At the same time, the quote that he was born at sunrise, as far as I know, it comes from a biography written in the 20th century, 1920 or so. Carl Sandburg. So I just don’t know where that, you know, where the quote comes from, but it’s not contemporary, so as a historian I have to question it. As an astrologer, I find it entirely credible.
CB: I had looked into it and thought that I felt like it was credible enough, so I think that’s sufficient because I’d gone further than that and felt like it had better origins. And I don’t remember —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — what that was off the top of my head. But it’s aside from the point right now.
NDB: Okay. I just wanted to correct something I said. Lincoln was not the only president born with Saturn-Neptune conjunct. William Henry Harrison. Andrew Johnson, who was born very close to Lincoln. But also Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. I knew Roosevelt, and of course Kennedy. So they’re both – yeah, that’s an interesting group of presidents born with Saturn and Neptune.
CB: And then Darwin – this is actually the one, because Tarnas is the one that originally points this out because it’s one of the few things that he does get into with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is he mentions Lincoln and Darwin were born the same day. And he spends some time drawing that out and talking about it. And one of his points about Darwin is that Darwin after publishing The Origins of Species where he introduces the theory of evolution and as like, a scientific concept, that it caused huge, huge religious debates in the late 1800s going into the 20th century, especially when it was still relatively early as like, a premise or as a hypothesis or theory or whatever you wanna call it. And that it caused, yeah, these huge religious debates between science versus religion. And one of Tarnas’s points is that sometimes that tension between those two things is something he sees as being like, endemic to Saturn-Neptune conjunctions.
NDB: That makes perfect sense.
CB: Yeah. It makes sense to me too. All right. Moving on. 1809 – Russia defeats Sweden and annexes Finland.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: You and I have discussed the wording on that. You’re not sure if it should be characterized as an annexation; I’m seeing mixed things about that, but the important thing is just that there’s a, yeah, Russia basically —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — gets some territory.
NDB: Yeah. They basically take it from Sweden. They grant Finland some degree of independence, which is not something they usually do with places that they actually annex like Crimea or what have you, so that’s the only reason I quibble with the wording. But you know, I only quibble so much. They definitely they have it now. You know, like, it’s not like, Finland can do just anything it wants, but it does have independence that no other annexed territory would have in Russia.
CB: Okay. Another major story at this conjunction is the Luddite uprising begins in England around this time, which is like, this protest movement against industrialization and the loss of jobs to machines. And textile workers start destroying machinery at this time, so there’s like, again, this like, working class – that’s one of the keywords I’ve been searching for is like, working class uprising that’s sort of taking place.
NDB: Yeah. Popular uprising.
CB: Popular uprising. One that happened shortly before this but I think the after effects were being felt, and I think it’s relevant because of the keywords, which is that the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in August of 1806 officially when the Emperor Francis the 2nd was essentially forced to abdicate his title as a result of Napoleon. And one of the things I thought interesting was even though this happens a bit before the conjunction, I think the after effects of it were being experienced still during the conjunction over the next few years.
NDB: Well, because what happens – if I may interject – in 1809, Austria goes to war with Napoleon again. You know, hopefully to win it back. And Napoleon soundly defeats them then. Like, even more than he had at Austerlitz. And he even marries Francis’s daughter – she’s his second wife – and has a child with her. So it’s like, yeah, the Hapsburg empire is dissolved in 1806. But in like, 1809 to 1811, when he marries the daughter, is when he’s really like, really, really put the kibosh on it. So yeah.
CB: Okay. So I had this quote on Wikipedia that I thought was important just because it gives you some idea of like, feelings that lots of people were having in the aftermath of this event, of – again, it’s a dissolving of the Holy Roman Empire, which is very similar to like, the Soviet Union and its dissolution is like, one of the main keywords that’s often used for that in 1989. But on Wikipedia it says,
“Reaction to the empire’s dissolution ranged from indifference to despair. The populace of Vienna, capital of the Habsburg monarchy, were horrified at the loss of the empire. Many of Francis the 2nd’s former subjects questioned the legality of his actions; though his abdication was agreed to be perfectly legal, the dissolution of the empire and the release of all its vassals were seen as beyond the emperor’s authority. As such, many of the empire’s princes and subjects refused to accept that the empire was gone” – they were in denial, parenthetically – “with some commoners going so far as to believe that the news of the dissolution was a plot by their local authorities. In Germany, the dissolution was widely compared to the ancient and semi-legendary Fall of Troy, and some associated the end of what they perceived to be the Roman Empire with the end times and the apocalypse.”
So it’s like, I wanted to mention that because this is something Tarnas mentions in his brief statements where he’s talking about like, different things. Like, sometimes this feeling of like, despair or like, hopelessness or disillusionment that sometimes accompanies Saturn-Neptune alignments. But this is something I – especially with the conjunctions – that I’ve seen come up at different points. Because for example, you know, here they’re talking about like, the fall of the Roman Empire. They’re having feelings like, harkening back to that. And that was one of the things that happened was both at the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and at the sack of Rome in 410 there was a conjunction. And historians like, constantly talk about the psychological impact of the sack of Rome in 410 CE and how this city that was supposed to be eternal suddenly was destroyed and what a like, major impact that had on like, the western psyche. And I think that’s something that we need to keep in mind with Saturn-Neptune alignments is that sometimes, you know, in this instance, it’s like, people are almost like, going through the stages of grief where they’re going through like, denial, they’re going through, you know, whatever the other stages are, because it’s not just a physical destruction, but sometimes there’s like emotional or ideological or like, spiritual element sometimes to the loss of an existing structure that everyone has taken for granted for a long, long time. And when that disappears suddenly, it creates this psychological vacuum at the same time.
NDB: Yeah. And you can certainly see that same thing happening at the end of the First World War and at the dissolution of the Soviet Union. You do have people standing around wondering what the hell happened to everything they knew about the world. You know, I think the First World War was especially tough on people, because things changed so quickly. You know, before the First World War, people were riding horse carriages; women were wearing the big hoop skirts and the parasols and all that, and then in four, five years, you know, it’s down to like, modern clothes as we know them. Comfortable clothes for women. Women are driving, smoking, listening to the radio. Just like, things just like, on a dime go very, very quickly to another age, and there’s all kinds of people who just feel completely left behind – have no idea where the hell they are or what, you know, what happened to the world they knew. I think —
CB: Right.
NDB: — the other thing that’s interesting about —
CB: Especially if there was like, either an ideology or like, a religious belief that was attached to the previous structures. But the problem is when those physical structures collapse, all of a sudden people then are also, you know, having this loss of like, faith in the ideological or religious structures that were attached to those things. In this instance, we’re talking about the Holy Roman Empire and the Christian connotations that were attached to, you know, the physical empires and dynasties at that time, or in 1989, you have the collapse of the Soviet Union but also the collapse of the Communist ideal state that that was supposed to originally be a part of at the time of the Revolution. Suddenly that ideal collapses at the same time.
NDB: Yeah. There’s also, I mean, what’s interesting is – you know, you go from the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and then like I said, Napoleon defeats Austria in 1809. But then Napoleon is defeated. And at the Congress of Vienna, the major voice at the Congress of Vienna is the Austrian Foreign Minister, Klemens von Metternich, who was born May 15th, 1773, with Saturn at six Virgo and Neptune at 15 Virgo. And even though, you know, Austria was one of the people defeated by Napoleon, he’s got a seat at the table at Vienna, you know, alongside the other big powers. And he really kind of calls the shots and helps set the new order. And really, right up until ironically until 1848 is when Metternich is driven out of Vienna, and his age ends. But you call like, from 1815 and the Congress of Vienna until the revolutions of 1848, people often call that the Age of Metternich where he sort of designed the new order that was gonna follow Napoleon, that was to some degree a restoration to monarchy, but also something updated for the new century. So it’s also kind of interesting that – I mean, he was the Foreign Minister for the Holy Roman Empire and for Austria, and you know, so he’s there through this whole thing. He’s having a Saturn-Neptune recurrence when the Holy Roman Empire is dissolved, and he’s Foreign Minister, and then he has another recurrence later in 1848 when his reign ends completely and he has to, you know, leave the country or at least leave the city. He has to get out of dodge, that’s for sure.
CB: Okay. Amazing.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right, well, I think that brings that conjunction to a close then. And we have one more to cover. So shall we – you already mentioned it, so shall we segue into it?
NDB: Yeah, let’s do that.
CB: All right. Our final major one that we’re gonna touch on in detail here is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1773. So here is my title card for 1773, and here is the data. So there was just one conjunction that occurred on September 27th, 1773, at 18 degrees of Virgo with this Saturn-Neptune conjunction. By orb, it came into the 15-degree range around the third quarter of 1772, and it lasted until around the third quarter of 1775. By sign, the first ingress of Saturn into Virgo took place July 31st, 1772, and then it didn’t leave Virgo until September 27th of 1774. So that gives you sort of like, a rough timeline where we’re talking about like, the second half of 1772 until all the way until the second half essentially of 1774. I can’t think of any major historical events that took place during this era; do you know of any?
NDB: No, it’s a very, very quiet time in history; it’s known as the time of peace and prosperity.
CB: Right.
NDB: And love of king and country.
CB: King of country. That is – yeah.
NDB: Yes. That’s how this period is known. Well, actually it strikes me – this isn’t something I put in the notes, but in 1772, Poland was partitioned for the first time by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Prussia and Russia agreed to it earlier in 1772, before the quarter that —
CB: Wait, wait, wait. No, we’re not going into that. That’s not the main… We can add that in a second, but let me, let’s not bury the lede here.
NDB: Oh, is there another country? Around this time?
CB: Not to be —
NDB: Refresh my memory!
CB: Not to be a —
NDB: What could be more important than the partition of Poland, Chris? What are you thinking?
CB: Not to be a chauvinistic like, American or whatever the term for – oh, yeah, nationalistic or something like that, but – this conjunction of Saturn-Neptune actually happened at the time of the American Revolution so that the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is actually built into the Declaration of Independence and the birth chart for the United States. So —
NDB: And in keeping with what we’ve been saying, it’s very much the popular uprising part of the Revolutionary War, if you will.
CB: Right. And I accidently didn’t make like, a title slide for this one, so I’m just gonna share. So here’s a short list of the main topics that we’re gonna talk about for this one. All right, so the first thing that happens and one of the biggest things that happens that right in this timeframe is that the Boston Tea Party takes place in 1773. And there’s a popular uprising. What’s interesting about the Boston Tea Party to me is that it was partially carried out by a secret society, essentially, called the Sons of Liberty who disguised themselves as Mohawk Native Americans and then got onto an English ship and threw overboard millions of dollars of tea into the harbor in order to protest British taxation and things like that that were happening on the colonies. And the popular uprising that started happening at this time eventually culminated in the American Revolution, which then happens towards the tail end of our Saturn-Neptune conjunction period here, so that the US Sibley chart has Saturn and Neptune in Libra.
NDB: Yeah. And yeah, the tea even with the taxes was less expensive than the bootleg tea that Sameul Adams was importing, but he managed to get everyone riled up over the less expensive albeit taxed tea than the more expensive bootlegged tea, but that’s a whole other thing.
CB: And I misspoke because it was actually later for the Sibley chart, so Sibley chart was a little bit later.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: But it’s the Boston Tea Party is the crucial thing is that the uprising like, starts to take place, especially with the Boston Tea Party but also other things surrounding it, including Benjamin Franklin in 1773 publishes this funny little pamphlet titled Rules By Which A Great Empire May Be Reduced To A Small One. And it’s this funny —
NDB: Very in keeping for that title.
CB: Yeah, exactly! That’s what I was thinking is like, literally he summarizes in a title one of the major themes that we’ve been talking about with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, which is that a great empire is like, reduced to a small one.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So —
NDB: Sharp guy, that Franklin.
CB: Yeah, it’s like, a satirical commentary on like, things that the British are doing that if they want to lose the colonies they should keep doing, but is obviously saying like, you shouldn’t keep doing some of these things. So some of the things he lists is he says, one, if you wanna reduce yourself to a small empire from a big one, you could assume your colonies are distinct entities and don’t treat them as integral parts of your empire. Two, don’t let the colonies have any say in their own governments. Three, quarter troops in the colonies, even in peacetime, and make the colonists pay for it. Four, ignore colonial petitions and grievances. And he just goes on and it’s funny because it’s like, he kind of outlines in these 20 things like, many of the basic things that in other instances and eras and centuries that we’ve looked at over the past 2,500 years are things that lead to the downfall of empires.
NDB: Yeah. And I believe he’s called to answer for this in some British official office not long after that. And it’s because he’s dressed down for writing this that, you know, that kind of radicalizes him towards independence. Because none of the founding fathers like, were born revolutionaries; none of these guys, you know, grew up thinking that someday they’d want America to be independent. It’s something, it’s a conclusion they arrive at around this time.
CB: Right. Yeah. For sure. What else is going on during this timeframe in terms of that? Because it leads us into the American Revolution gets set off in like, 1774, ‘75.
NDB: Yeah. Largely ‘75. In ‘74, what you do get are what they call the Intolerable Acts. You know, there’s the Port Act. The Quebec Act, which guarantees freedom of religion to those Catholics living just north of us; you can’t be – you know, you must be kidding! There’s a series of them. You know, I think there’s a Stamp Act. Yeah, a Port Act, a Quebec Act. Probably another act. The Tea Act, of course! There was a Tea Act; that’s what they’re responding to.
And so basically all these different, you know, British government maneuvers, these different new laws that are being enacted, that one after the other, the colonists object to. And these are all coming out in ‘73, ‘74 during the Saturn-Neptune part that, like, precedes the Revolutionary War, but everything that is making them, you know, driving them towards revolution is happening in the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, I think —
CB: Right.
NDB: — is the interesting part.
CB: These things, like the Intolerables Act, and the coercive acts are punitive acts that are happening like, in response to the Boston Tea Party. The British start like, cracking down on the colonies and trying to squeeze them harder. But instead it makes them like, rebel more.
NDB: Yeah. The Tea Act was initially, it was just thought to be a tax to pay for – like, the British had made an agreement with the First Nations people that there wouldn’t be any immigration beyond I think the Appalachians. But then of course settlers kept moving out there, and then, you know, different tribes would attack these settlers, and then the British would have to send soldiers out there to protect the new settlers and fight the First Nations people. So the British put a tax on tea that was fairly modest to pay for these soldiers that they had to send to protect these settlers, and Samuel Adams – I think it was Samuel Adams – was like, a bootlegger. He imported, you know, bootlegged tea and he got people riled up about this tea tax, and yeah —
CB: Well, he was one of the Sons of – he was part of the Sons of Liberty.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So I misspoke earlier. It’s not the Sibley chart because the Sibley chart’s much later – the Declaration of Independence in 1776 – but the First Continental Congress —
NDB: Yeah. That’s – I understood you meant that too, but I should have corrected you.
CB: So here’s the chart for that. It was September 5th, 1774. This is not a timed chart; I’m just using the date to show you how close the Saturn-Neptune conjunction was where Saturn was at 27 Virgo and Neptune was at 20 Virgo, so that conjunction is still very, very close.
NDB: Yeah. And you can see that Uranus just went into Gemini in the last few weeks.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Maybe a month earlier or so.
CB: Right, which is the other thing. And it’s like, we’re focusing on the Saturn-Neptune component, but it’s like, there’s other overlapping stuff of course that is very important, like Uranus in Gemini and then eventually…
NDB: Pluto in Aquarius later.
CB: Yeah, like Pluto in Capricorn during the Sibley chart but then by 12 years later when they set up the government as we’ve talked about recently, Pluto was already in Aquarius so that we’re experiencing the Pluto return of that now, as well as eventually later this summer the Uranus return when it goes back into Gemini.
NDB: Yeah. Pluto went into Aquarius in 1778 just as the French came in, agreed to come in and help the Americans. So yeah, in some way, it begins the French Revolution in the sense that the French are spending all that money on the American Revolutionary War.
CB: Right. So the First Continental Congress is September 5th, 1776, and then the battles —
NDB: ‘74.
CB: ‘74. And then the battles of Lexington and Concord are already in April of 1775, and Saturn and Neptune are still within orb at that point.
NDB: Yeah. But I mean, not for much longer, but yeah, it does see that sort of like, you know, the initial fight. And Lexington and Concord – like, at that point, there’s still some hope that, you know, that’s just a skirmish and not a war-war yet. So we’re still in the popular uprising thing, right? This is Paul Revere, you know, sounding the alarm and what have you. But it’s really in the summer of 1775 that war becomes inevitable, by which time the Saturn-Neptune has worn off. But yeah, it does strike me – the Saturn-Neptune to this part is really just like, everything that gets people riled up, and by the time Saturn-Neptune wanders off, we’re in a proper war.
CB: Right. This is what I was —
NDB: And there’s no turning back.
CB: This is what I was thinking earlier. This is like, here’s a chart for like, the middle of April 1775 —
NDB: Right.
CB: And that month is the battles of Lexignton and Concord. And we see Saturn retrograde at three degrees of Libra, and Neptune at 20 degrees of Virgo, so they’re still within 15 degrees when the actual Revolutionary War gets kicked off. So there’s something incredibly important about that in terms of just as we said popular uprisings as well as sometimes like, the dissolution of an empire. So to the extent that the British, you know, lost the American colonies as a result of this uprising, that seems very, very relevant.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Just like what was it? One cycle later, you know, 1809 we have all of the Spanish colonies breaking away.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that is incredible in terms of that. Other minor things. So that’s incredible. To bring it full circle though, now we have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction coming back at such a pivotal moment in American history in addition to Pluto returning to where it was when the system of government with checks and balances was set up, and in addition to Uranus returning to Gemini where it was during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War Two. So this is a very overlooked and yet still subtly very important alignment that I don’t think people have talked about before, which is that the Saturn-Neptune alignment, the conjunction that’s happening right now, is also very important because it ties right back into the founding of the United States.
NDB: Yeah. Particularly the things that, you know, the grievances that sparked the whole thing. If I may pivot, because that thing about Poland – the partition of Poland – is totally in keeping with this, the idea of drawing invisible borders —
CB: Now you may talk about Poland.
NDB: Well, you know, Poland Lithuania winds up writing the second ever constitution. You know, of the modern age, after the —
CB: I mean, I’m not knocking Poland. I’m very pro-Poland.
NDB: Don’t forget the Lithuanians!
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah, but what happens is prior to all this, in 1772, PRussia, Austria, and Russia partition Poland. And they will do it twice more in the 1790s, but that first one is during the Saturn-Neptune of 1772, which is interesting because of course – like, I mean, Poland winds up becoming like, not a country until 1918 at the end of the First World War when the Hapsburg – the Austria-Hungary empire is broken up and Poland gets independence. They fight a civil war with Russia, which they do well at. It’s, you know, effectively they’re not taken over by Russia at that point, until 20 years later in 1939, of course, Hitler and Stalin agree to invade Poland. And Poland ceases to become a country for another few years until the Second World War happens. So there’s also a Saturn-Neptune thing occurring with Poland. Of course, Poland is very central to what’s happening in 1989, 1990, because in many ways, Poland was the canary in the coal mine for the breakdown of the Soviet Union – the whole solidarity movement that erupted in Poland in the late ‘70s. Well, really, starting 1980 and going through the ‘80s is the leading train for any of those Eastern Bloc countries breaking away from the Soviet Union. So it plays a huge role, even before Gorbachev comes in and does what he does.
CB: Yeah. So Poland ends up being one of the major ones also around the 1989 conjunction that goes through major transformation, so that’s cool then as you’re pointing out that that goes all the way back in their history back to this conjunction around 1773.
NDB: Yeah. And they do share a border with Ukraine, so you know, there’s that.
CB: Right. All right. There were some other – there were two other like, funny smaller and yet still weirdly symbolically relevant things that happened on this conjunction. One of them that Orla pointed out is that in the US, America’s first insane asylum opens on October 12th, 1773, in Williamsburg, Virginia. And this was very striking, as again like, Neptune which can sometimes be like, imagining things that aren’t there, and Saturn can sometimes be like, a place or an organization or a building, and this is a very striking manifestation of that, of literally like, the first insane asylum in the United States.
And then you found one other that relates to the history of Russia.
NDB: Yeah. Well, this ties into an earlier entry as well, but what I found was that the very first two ballet schools opened in Russia were opened during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. So the one in 1773 is actually the second one; that’s the one that’s opened in Moscow. It’s called the Moscow School of Choreography, but it’s a ballet school in Moscow. And then in an earlier conjunction, in 1738, the Russian Imperial Ballet School is founded in Saint Petersburg. And yeah, the whole relationship of Russia with ballet is interesting. Of course, Saint Petersburg was founded in 1703, so just like, 35 years before this first ballet school is founded. And it is founded as Peter the Great wanted Russia to become more European; that’s why Saint Petersburg was the architecture is sort of Venetian. It’s like a Venice of the North. And so like, yeah, bringing in ballet like a French, European cultural item, but Russia really sort of took it and made it their own, so much so that by the earliest 20th century, by far the most successful ballet company is Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. So even though Paris is like, the center where all these great ballet performances are happening, they’re being done by Russian performers. So yeah, there’s some – and of course, this is also a period when Russia has a series of women tsarinas. Catherine the Great is in power by the time the second school is opened in 1773, but even her predecessor, Elizabeth, was – or it might even been the predecessor before her, Catherine – no, I think it was Elizabeth – opened the first ballet school. One of the – there were several empresses leading up a lot of the 18th century Russia was run by empresses. So you’re also getting the thing you were saying about women leaders, that there are these – yeah, the way that impacts the culture and right up to the end of even going through the Soviet Union. Like, you know, ballet and Russia have this very strong relationship.
CB: Yeah. All the way through to this day. And that’s so incredible to me. So it’s like, we have the second school for ballet founded in Moscow on this conjunction in 1773, and it was exactly one cycle earlier during the 1738 conjunction that the first school for ballet was founded in Russia. And just like, symbolically, that’s such a perfect manifestation, thinking about ballet as a Saturn-Neptune archetype, because it’s like, you have this extremely controlled motion and extreme discipline, but it’s also being channeled into this very fluid motion at the same time. And I can’t think of a better like, physical representation of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction than that image of like, an extremely controlled yet fluid motion on the part of these dancers that have these really intense like, training regimes.
NDB: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Later on we have a section on arts that we might get to, and there’s quite a few ballet entries in that as well. Because yeah, it’s a very Saturn-Neptune art form; I fully agree. And yeah, it’s just interesting like – you know, again, Russia is this place that it’s sort of European, it’s sort of not, and ballet is sort of their way of taking something European and just making it a little more Russian. Yeah, it’s really, really interesting. When I went to Russia, I got to see a performance of The Nutcracker in July, actually – that’s how popular ballet is.
CB: Nice.
NDB: It’s supposed to be a Christmas show; that’s the joke. I saw one in July. Never mind.
CB: Gotcha. All right, my friend. Well, that actually brings us to the end of 1773 and all the major ones that I wanted to cover for that conjunction, and it also completes our entire series in terms of the main thing that we wanted to cover, which is just to go back chronologically in order, you know, 36 years each time through each of the seven most recent conjunctions, which takes us all the way back to 1773 and the founding of the United States and the beginning of the Revolutionary War. And then obviously brings us back to the present and the current conjunction and gives us a lot of context for understanding not just the current state of things when it comes to the United States, but also lots of other parts of the world and how this conjunction is relevant for them as well.
Yeah, so this is great. I think that so we were gonna do a separate section on repetitions. Originally, this first section where we did this chronological thing was just supposed to take four hours, and then we were gonna have another two-hour section. So I think I still wanna do repetitions if you’re up for it, and then we’ll like, squeeze it —
NDB: I’m up for it.
CB: — into this. You’re up for it? Squeeze it into this episode. We’re gonna make – this is gonna be a new record for us, then, my friend.
NDB: Amen. But this is two planets. Usually – I mean, give me a break! We’ve given six to eight hours for like, one planet, you know!
CB: Right.
NDB: This is two planets!
CB: Yeah.
NDB: And you know, we’ve only covered a couple hundred years, and our timeline goes back a few thousand, so you know, there’s more to say.
CB: I know! That’s the funny thing is —
NDB: We won’t get to everything. Obviously.
CB: That’s the funny thing is that this is only like, seven conjunctions, but we actually covered something like 60 conjunctions in the research. So I found a way to summarise that, which we will do in the next and final section, and then like the empires at the end of a, you know, of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, we will collapse into oblivion at the end of this recording.
NDB: Yeah, we will dissolve. Yeah.
CB: Exactly.
NDB: We will totally dissolve. Yeah.
CB: All right.
NDB: All right. Can’t wait!
CB: On that note —
NDB: This is great, though.
CB: Yeah, this is amazing. Thank you. Let’s take a little break, and we’ll be right back.
NDB: All right.
CB: The astrology software we use here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.
For Mac users, I recommend the software Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer made by the creators of Solar Fire for the PC. You can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ through their website at AstroGold.io.
All right, we are back for the final segment of this where I created a section in our document where I went ahead and summarized a phrase, basically, to describe a certain aspect of Saturn-Neptune where we saw recurrences or repetitions in different periods which then clues us into many of those recurrences that that’s gonna be a repeating theme that can potentially come up in future Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. So I wanna quickly run through a bunch of those. I have a few pages of them, so I’m gonna try to do it somewhat quickly. But this was my attempt to – because what we did is like, we went backwards chronologically with those seven ones, and those we did the most detailed treatments and research of what happened during those time periods. But then I went ahead and just like, outlined all of the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions going back to 500 BCE. And then we went through and tried to find – because I often, I found in the end that there was at least one major like, world event that showed up in a very significant way in the history books on every single conjunction. So I wanted to find what that at least singular thing was, if not multiple things under all conjunctions, and I essentially found that. I had help from Orla as well as Lindsey as well as Sam as well as Nick and our whole like, research team over the past two weeks that we did that intensive research. And instead of like, continuing to go backwards chronologically in order, we’re gonna summarize all of those by grouping a bunch of the ones we found into these subsections. So that’s the plan. Does that sound like a plan?
NDB: Sounds like a plan.
CB: All right, let’s do it. All right, very first recurring theme that I think should be clear right now is we kept seeing over history the collapse or dissolution of empires. So that includes the Soviet Union in 1989 and forward. The empires of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary fell after World War One in 1918. We had the collapse and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that was divided up after losing World War One in 1918. But I also saw going further back in history the end of the Byzantine Empire, which was one of the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, came to an end abruptly in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. And even further back in the year 410 CE saw the sack of Rome, which is one of the things that led to the collapse of the western Roman Empire even earlier. So this is a major, major theme that keeps coming up over and over again, which is the collapse or dissolution of empires. Statement?
NDB: Oh, yeah! Sorry to catch me off guard! Yeah, absolutely. That’s consistent. I think, you know, you also get all kinds of things in between. You know, if they’re not like, the total dissolution of empires, things like Spain losing its entire or most of its American colonies, I think it still kept Cuba until the 20th century, but you know in 1809, all those Spanish colonial countries breaking away, getting independence. I’m thinking —
CB: Right.
NDB: — of the —
CB: That’s a good point. Like, the British in 1733 – no, 1773. Like, the colonies breaking away but the British still having a large empire at that point. But that’s being a significant chunk of it like, breaking off at that time.
NDB: Yeah. And even like, you know, Russia taking Finland from Sweden in 1809, or in 1703 taking, you know, this chunk next to the Baltics where Saint Petersburg is now. Like, Narva and all that. You know, this whole thing about redrawing borders I think ties into the collapse of empires, because sometimes it’s done, you know, piecemeal, and sometimes like in World War One it just all happens at once.
CB: Right.
NDB: So yeah, there’s the end result like these big examples that you’re citing. But there’s also sort of these smaller things, you know. Yeah, break up of Poland —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: — Lithuania and et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Yeah. And we’ll get to some of the smaller ones also in the next section. But sometimes there’s just this feeling – and I think I reiterated this later, but sometimes like, this feeling of like, something very old that’s already falling apart, and then finally it gets that last push and it just like, collapses and reaches the very end of its life cycle. But it’s something that’s like, limping along to a certain extent at that point – at least that’s the way I would characterise the Byzantine Empire by 1453. And then it’s —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — finally collapses with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. So —
NDB: Yeah. And that really is the thing you were talking about earlier when, you know, the Hapsburg empire broke up, the Holy Roman Empire broke up. You really get, I mean, that’s what’s really struck me in the last few years as I’ve been studying this period more closely is the fall of Constnatniople, you know, is in itself a major instigator for things like the Inquisition, the other religious wars. Like, even like, the respond to Lutheranism. Lutheranism itself is, you know, like, the fact that with Byzantine having fallen, so many things come into question. So someone like Luther might be that much more emboldened to, you know, post his theses, or yeah, you know, the Spanish authorities might be that much more determined to root out heretics and whatnot in an inquisition. It’s really amazing to me how much these big events in history sort of are more intertwined than I really understood until more recently.
CB: Sure. Yeah, definitely. All right, next section that I noticed as a recurring theme is the fall of a great city. So for example, the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Rome being sacked in 410. But also I found that Athens was sacked by a Germanic tribe in the year 267 CE right on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And this, like with some of those other instances, had a profound impact on the Western psyche because Athens for hundreds of years had been like, the center of philosophy where the schools of like, Plato and Aristotle were founded. And then to have it sacked was just one of those examples of the decline of Europe and the western Roman Empire especially heading into the 5th century and the decline of the West that was accelerating at that time. So those are three examples of the fall of a great city that ends up having, like I said, like, an important psychological impact on people obviously in that area and that city, but also around the world to a certain extent that are impacted by it in some way.
NDB: Right.
CB: All right. Another section, another recurring theme seems to be both the setting up by also the breaking down of walls, borders, and boundaries. So for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Korean War setting up the demilitarized zone in 1953. The trench warfare and those moving, shifting lines during World War One, as well as the dividing up of land after the war ended in 1918. But much earlier you still had this theme coming up over and over again. One striking one was in 122 BCE, the Roman emperor Hadrian traveled to Britain, basically, to the modern day United Kingdom, the island, and he authorized the beginning of construction of what became known as Hadrian’s Wall, which is a major wall fortification construction that lasted for like, hundreds of years there.
Elsewhere, the walls of Constantinople being breached by the Ottomans in 1453 was the major thing that precipitated the fall of Constantinople is that for hundreds of years, Constantinople originally was deliberately constructed by the Roman Empire. Because originally their capital was in Rome in Italy, but then eventually the Emperor Constantine decided to move the capital to Constantinople for a variety of reasons, including its strategic location being better. And they very deliberately designed the city, and one of the things they did is they designed these very elaborate, huge fortification walls that were just like, not breached for centuries even though a number of different attackers tried to. But one of the major things that finally happened by the time you get to 1453 is the Ottomans developed these huge cannons, and they just start laying waste to the walls of this city and the fall of the walls is one of the things that leads to the fall of the city. So that was major.
The Oregon Treaty of 1846 establishing the border between the US and Canada. The World Wide Web being created in 1989 as breaking down borders, especially international ones. Adjacent stuff – an adjacent theme is like, ambiguity surrounding boundaries and borders. So I mentioned like, house division coming up at the Saturn-Neptune square in 2017. And we also mentioned standard time zones being established by the US and Canada in 1883, and this notion of invisible boundaries or borders as a major theme.
Next section is – go ahead.
NDB: Oh, I was just gonna – I already brought it up before – the partition of Poland, 1772. Similar thing. You know, just breaking up a country by dividing it in three.
CB: That’s good. All right. Another recurring theme is the unification or reunification of things that are separate. So for example, the reunification of East and West Germany from 1989 forwards. The unification of North and South Yemen from 1989 to 1990. But also there’s some religious schisms that we’ll get to later on in another list that also represent sometimes there’s religious schisms that break two religions apart, but other times they find a common ground, and the schism is healed occasionally. And then there’s like, a reunification.
NDB: Right.
CB: All right.
NDB: I also think Spain and Portugal, I think, had a reunion close to Saturn-Neptune. I can look that up real quick. Yeah, Portugal, Spain – Restoration Treaty of Lisbon signed 1668, which I think, like, they had been united and then Portugal agitated to be free. And this was what restored their respective countries and empires.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s interesting.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Another major recurring theme that I noticed is popular uprisings, ideological struggles, political instability but also repression. So for example, you have on the one hand the revolutions of 1989, especially in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Bloc countries that are like, breaking away from the Soviet Union. But then you also have Tiananmen Square and that massacre in 1989 in China and the suppression of a popular uprising. We also saw the Spanish-American colonies declare independence, a bunch of them, between 1809 and 1811. We saw the First Intifada happening in Palestine in 1987. We saw the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Even going further back, I found the Maccabean Revolt in Judea happening around 165 BCE right on a conjunction. So that gives you some idea of like, how far back that theme goes.
NDB: Yeah. There’s also, of course, all the uprisings of 1848, including most specifically the February uprising in Paris which prompted the abdication of King Louis Philippe the 1st, who was born with a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So he was born under one and he was compelled to abdicate under one. So yeah, double whammy there.
CB: Double whammy. That’s good. All right. Another theme that came up as a recurring theme is peasant and working class revolts. So one of the earlier ones I found was something called the Social War from the year 91 through 87 BCE, which is when there were these Italian allies of the city of Rome that worked with Rome, but they didn’t have citizenship. So they revolted and then eventually the result was that other people on the peninsula of Italy gained Roman citizenship by the end of that war, basically. So it was like, a popular uprising that interestingly involved citizenship, and I thought that was interesting because there’s a lot of things happening in the US right now about citizenship —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — coming up on this conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Elsewhere, there was also a peasant rebellion in England in 1381, and there was a peasant revolt in Germany in 1525 on a conjunction as well. Do you have any to add?
NDB: Well, I mean, again, I think it kind of bleeds into popular uprisings, and I think a lot of 1848 were, you know, in many ways working class revolts. But yeah, I think we’ve seen a number of them. I mean, even let’s say in during the Saturn-Neptune of the First World War in 1916, ‘17, this is when Lawrence of Arabia is leading these uprisings against the Ottomans. Okay, it’s sort of orchestrated by the British and with some false promises thrown in, but there is definitely like, a strong sense of a popular uprising happening around then up against the Ottoman Empire. And yeah, I feel like we’ve touched on a number of things that are certainly adjacent to this over the course of the conversation.
CB: Yeah. For sure. I think it’s something about Saturn and like, the nature of Saturn especially in representing like, the underprivileged classes in society, I think is part of what we’re seeing through this activation here at these times in these conjunctions with Neptune. So all right. So moving on.
A major, major section that we just weaves throughout this and is inescapable is just that these Saturn-Neptune conjunctions have coincided with important major turning points in Russian history for more than a thousand years now, probably even longer, honestly, but here’s a partial list that I put together that I’m gonna read real quick for the audio listeners. I’m gonna read through it real quick. So bam:
1989 – dissolution of the Soviet Union.
1953 – Stalin dies; Vladimir Putin is born.
1917 – Russian Revolution.
1881 – Tsar Alexander II is assassinated.
1885 – Tsar Alexander III is born —
NDB: 1845.
CB: Sorry, 1845. Thank you. Who is the son of the one that’s assassinated in 1881 and would take over from his father when he dies in 1881.
1809 – Russia annexes Finland from Sweden and it becomes somewhat autonomous.
1774 – the Russia-Ottoman War ends, and Russia takes the Crimea.
1703 – Saint Petersburg is founded.
1667 – the end of the Russian-Polish War, which was 1654 to 1667 —
NDB: 1667.
CB: 1654 to 1667. And at this time, Kyiv is ceded to Russia, so that’s very important.
1666 – Great Moscow Synod declares that Patriarch Nikon is guilty during the course of a schism that’s taking place in Russia, a very important schism at that time.
NDB: Yeah, the Orthodox Church had these old believers and then another faction, and there was repression of the old believers, and yeah. It went on for a very long time and nearly broke the country in half.
CB: Okay. We’ll come back to that when we talk about schisms especially.
1595 – Russia-Sweden Treaty of Teusina returns lands to Russia.
1830 – Russia defeats the Mongol —
NDB: Sorry, 1380. 1380.
CB: Sorry, my brain is starting to like, mix up letters at this point in the day.
NDB: THat’s okay.
CB: Due to some of the cognitive issues and tiredness. So 1380, Russia defeats the Mongol Empire at the Battle of Kulikovo, and this also represents the rise of Moscow as a major force and a major city.
1286 – the Mongol invasion of Russia begins, and the sack of Kyiv takes place just a few years later in 1240.
And then finally, going all the way back 482 CE, that is said to be the legendary founding of Kyiv at this time that the government today recognizes as the official founding. Apparently there’s some like, debate over whether that’s actually like, a historically fully accurate thing, but I think it’s interesting whether it is or is not, it’s absolutely fascinating to me that that year —
NDB: That that would be the year chosen, yeah.
CB: Exactly! And that it coincides with a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Every single year I’ve just mentioned were all years of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions or within our orb of one, and they were all just like, huge turning points in Russian history.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that one – the Battle of Kulikovo when the Russians are against the Mongols, which is the beginning of the turning of the tide – when Putin was interviewed by Tucker Carlson last year and Carlson asked him like, why the Ukraine war? Putin started talking about the battle of Kulikovo. Like, that’s, you know, the root or the reason why they’re fighting the war in Ukraine today even though it’s —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — really a millennium ago.
CB: Okay. So there’s some early base charts in like, Russian history that must have like, a Saturn-Neptune conjunction at the foundation. And we may not have whatever chart that is; it’s somewhere probably lost to history at this point just in the same way that like, the chart for the founding of the city of Rome is lost to city and to legend. But we can see that at subsequent re-foundations of Rome – or of Russia – periodically that the Saturn-Neptune conjunction keeps coming back again over and over again throughout its history, so that we know that it will continue to be important in the future, including this current Saturn-Neptune conjunction then being an incredibly important turning point in Russian history and by, you know, additionally in Ukrainian history as well because we can see the history of Russia and Ukraine being intertwined and overlapping at different points throughout this chronology as well.
NDB: Yeah. And very likely we’re also talking about Poland, the Baltic states, and Sweden as well, that they all seem to be intertwined. Because – excuse me – because they’ve all been interacting with each other, fighting each other, joining each other, for a very long time, and they all seem to be mixed into that story. Russia being the big bear in the room, of course. You know, they attract the most attention in that timeline is the most sort of the one that’s easiest to follow, but I think we’re also seeing all those other countries in the area being a part of whatever’s going on there with that very, very consistent Saturn-Neptune recurrence.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I feel comfortable saying that about Russia. I don’t know – obviously we’ve seen crossovers with others for many different reasons as well, but certainly Russia history is just tied into the DNA —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — of it with these Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. Even, you know, one other section that was funny that we mentioned as a separate subsection, which is ballet and Russia where the first ballet school was founded in Russia in 1738 on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and then the second ballet school was founded one cycle later in Russia in 1773 on a conjunction. So even like, other things that are happening in the arts are also showing up tied in with the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in their history.
NDB: Oh yeah. I’ve got a small little timeline of arts somewhere in the document, too. Very interesting stuff.
CB: Nice. All right. So moving onto broader things. Another major theme sort of getting away from geopolitics briefly for a brief like, digression – one of the major recurring themes that I kept seeing was as a recurring theme was establishing the rules of hidden forces that you cannot see. So this came up with Newton first starting to develop his theory of gravity, especially potentially if the apple falling from the tree incident happened, then it would have happened in the summer of 1666, which was very close to a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Later we have Einstein and both the publication but also especially the confirmation of his general theory of relativity in 1919 very near that conjunction in 1917. We have Louis Pasteur confirming the germ theory and microorganisms around 1881. And we even have the chemical structure of DNA being discovered in 1953 as another example of like, hidden things that are doing things that you can’t see. So this is some sort of like, recurring phenomenon, and I’m sure there’s like, many other examples of this that we didn’t come across, but it obviously points to a really great archetype that you can use to think about Saturn-Neptune sometimes, especially in the sciences.
all right. So similar and adjacent one that I found fascinating once we started finding it was a recurring theme of secret pacts. So it’s like, an agreement that’s made in secret between two or more parties. So for example, the First Triumvirate in Rome was formed in 59 BCE where Caesar and Pompey and basically some of the most powerful men in Rome got together and formed a secret pact in order to essentially eventually take over the Empire, and this is what leads to eventually the Roman Empire and the decline of the Republic or the democracy as it moves into becoming an imperial state. It starts out with this secret pact with the First Triumvirate.
Elsewhere we also talked about the triple alliance that was secretly formed in 1882 between, what was it, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy? And that’s what eventually leads to World War One.
We have the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, which is when there’s an agreement about dividing up the Ottoman lands after the Ottoman Empire after World War One.
There’s the Amboise Conspiracy of 1560, which I’m space out – do you know?
NDB: Amboise. Yeah, yeah. That’s when after King Henry the 2nd is killed accidentally in this friendly joust, his 11-year-old son, Francis the 2nd becomes king of France, and there’s factions behind the throne who are angling for the sort of the regency, the actual control of, you know, day to day politics in France. And because some of these conspirators are Protestant, the plot is unfolded and it becomes a broader Catholic-Protestant, you know, grievance. And this deteriorates into the French Wars of Religion; there were at least seven between 1562 and 1594. And it all started with the Amboise, you know, Conspiracy of 1560.
CB: Nice. Okay. And then the last one was one that you found was the secret founding of the Standard Oil Trust in 1882.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So I thought that was fascinating just like, literally there’s a signature for like, people behind the scenes making secret agreements that end up changing the history of the world, and we found that alignment so that we know that sometimes when that alignment is happening, sometimes there’s stuff going on behind the scenes that’s changing the structure of like, governments and societies and nations. But again, it’s something you can’t see visibly from the surface.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: So along those lines, another recurring theme that I found was secret societies and attempts to suppress them. So one of the first one of this that Orla found, actually, was that the Knights Templar were destroyed in the year 1307. And this is like, a major like, legendary thing that is especially very popular in like, conspiracy theory circles. It’s also tied in with like, Dan Brown and the others —
NDB: Right.
CB: — which we talked about like, The Da Vinci Code, they like, trace stuff back to the Knights Templar. So that was one major group that was suppressed at that time, a sort of secret society. But there were others.
So in 1738, the Pope banned Freemasonry and said that if you’re a Catholic, you can’t be a Freemason. And then what’s crazy – so that was at a Saturn-Neptune conjunction – but it keeps coming up at subsequent conjunctions because in 1917, when the Catholic Church finally published this big code of canon law, in the law it reaffirmed the ban explicitly against Freemasonry. And then if that wasn’t enough, a couple years ago in 2023, the topic came up again and the current pope reaffirmed the Catholic ban on Freemasonry because there was like, in the Philippines it was becoming popular or something like that, and they asked the Pope, “Is that still,” you know, “is this still against the law?” And he was like, “Yeah, it’s still a thing.”
NDB: Wow.
CB: So that was amazing. And then other ones sort of adjacent is the Sons of Liberty carrying out the Boston Tea Party in 1773 was also like, a secretive society where they met at night under the Liberty Tree in Boston, I think, and ended up, you know, initiating and sort of like, setting off this popular uprising with this legendary thing with the Boston Tea Party.
Elsewhere we also saw the secretive group called the People’s Will that assassinated Tsar Alexander the 2nd of Russia in 1881 that was led by the woman who we mentioned earlier. So sometimes they’re like, carrying out specific things in those two instances that are actually like, changing the world.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Another adjacent recurring theme that I found is people who are working behind the scenes to overthrow a ruler. So I found an example of this in the year 54 CE. There was a woman named Agrippina the Younger who may have poisoned her husband who was the Emperor Claudius, and she was also arranging things behind the scenes at the time with like, the guards or the secret service at the time, which is the Praetorian prefects, and she arranged things behind the scenes. She may have poisoned the Emperor Claudius, and it was all in order to install her son as emperor, who became the young Emperor Nero who became emperor, basically, at the age of like, 16 or something like that.
Another one was the assassination of the Roman Emperor Severus Alexander by his own army in a conspiracy after the 232 CE conjunction.
Another one was Roman Emperor Gallienus was assassinated in 268 during the siege in Milan as part of a conspiracy involving his own officers.
There’s a subtheme, possibly, or a variation, which may be like, religious or ideologically motivated assassination of rulers. One was, as we’ve already said, the Russian assassination of Tsar Alexander the 2nd of Russia in 1881, but I found another one, which is the assassination of the 4th caliph Ali by a religious extremist in a mosque in 1661. So he was actually assassinated or murdered in a church or in a mosque at that time.
NDB: Right. Weren’t the Romanovs in 1918? That was still close to the Saturn-Neptune, wasn’t it?
CB: Oh right, that’s a good point. Yeah. Well, that was – yeah, the revolution where they —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — took the royal family and like, murdered the entire family.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. For sure. All right. So another adjacent one is the death of a ruler under mysterious circumstances. So I mentioned Agrippina the Younger already possibly poisoning the Emperor Claudius. But there was another, there’s a couple others that I found. One of them was the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah disappears mysteriously on the night of 1021. He like, he was known to like, go out riding on his horse, and he went out riding one night, and he just like, disappears in history. And it’s like, this mysterious presumed death, basically, of the Caliph, the king at the time.
Another example is the death of Malik-Shah the 1st, the Seljuk Sultan, likely by poisoning in 1092. But again, under weird, mysterious circumstances. But especially poisoning as like, a chemical, you know, gets into some adjacent Neptune and Saturn things.
All right. So before I move onto the next section, do you have any to wrap up after those few that you want to throw in?
NDB: Did you – like, you mentioned a few sultans. Did you cover the Ottoman sultan who died in 1703? Mustafa Il Ghazi? I didn’t – if you said his name, I missed him.
CB: I don’t know. Unless I have it later, I don’t think I got that one. What happened with him?
NDB: Okay, no, no, you’ve got his deposition but not his death later that year; that’s what happens. You‘ve got the deposition in August 23rd, Edirne, but he actually died later that year, so that’s why – yeah, he’s not in, I was just wondering.
CB: All right. Another major, major theme that ran all throughout history with these Saturn-Neptune conjunctions was the death of a ruler which throws the kingdom into disarray and creates a power vacuum, as Lindsey said, which is a great way of summarizing it.
So the earliest example – I went all the way back to 500 BCE, and I found Darius the 1st of the Achaemenid Persian Empire dies in 486 BCE. And as a result of that, Egypt revolts from the Persians. And so it sort of like, throws the empire into disarray with revolts.
Elsewhere, the Seleucid king Antiochus the 7th was killed in battle against the Parthians in 129 BCE, and this was a major blow to the already declining Seleucid empire leading to further territorial losses as well as internal strife. So the death of a leader and then a bunch of like, internal strife is a really common Saturn-Neptune theme.
Elsewhere in China, Emperor An Han dies on a journey in the year 125 CE leading to a period of political instability and court intrigue in China.
Later, the Sasanian monarch Kavad the 2nd dies from the Plague of Sheroe in 628 CE just months into his reign, which causes this entire succession crisis and more importantly, it contributed to the decline and the fall of the Sasanian empire shortly after that because all of the internal fighting and intrigue and succession crisis had made the Sasanians incredibly weak. And then what happens is like, not long after that, the Muslim armies emerge from the Arabian peninsula and then invade Persia not long after. And then they’re able to just completely destroy the Persian empire because it was severely weakened at that time, partially due to the monarch having just died from plague. And what’s ironic about him just dying from plague is he had just overthrown his own father and become king just like, months earlier. And then all of a sudden, this plague hits and he dies from plague, so.
NDB: Don’t you hate it when that happens?
CB: Yeah! It’s like, we’ve all been there, but it’s just embarrassing what that happens.
NDB: So cringe.
CB: All right. Moving on. Emperor Louis the Pious dies, and there’s a succession crisis and civil war among his sons in 840 CE.
Later, the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the 2nd sparks a succession crisis in the year 983.
Later, the death of Sultan Malik-Shah the 1st causes chaos, political confusion, and fragmentation of the Seljuk empire in 1092.
Later the same century – or actually, earlier, a previous conjunction in the same century, the death of Empress Theodora in the year 1056 sets off a succession crisis and a civil war in the Byzantine Empire in 1057 that then takes place over the next few years.
Severus Alexander’s assassination in 232 at that conjunction, Rome is thrown into the Crisis of the Third Century, which is just they go into this huge period of like, strife and confusion and upset.
So that was the last one, but this actually brings us into an adjacent section which is very similar, which is that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions sometimes coinciding with periods in which internal divisions hamper the ability of the kingdom to respond to external threats. So I mentioned, for example, the Sasanian monarch Kavad the 2nd who died of the plague in 628 and how this was just months into his reign and it caused a succession crisis and political instability. But then it left the Persian empire completely weak and unable to defend itself, essentially, effectively, when the Muslim armies showed up like, a decade or so later and invaded and took over everything.
There’s several other examples of that, but one of the things it reminds me of is it reminds me – it’s like an empire that’s old and sick and confused and disoriented and weakened and therefore unable to like, fight off foreign adversaries. And it kind of reminded me how last year I think it was like the – it was the day. It was the very day that Saturn stationed in Pisces, which meant that that was when it got as close to Neptune as it was gonna get last year as it was building up to the conjunction in like, June of 2024. They decided to move the presidential debates to much earlier than they usually are, because they usually take place in the fall like, around September. But instead —
NDB: Right.
CB: — they moved them earlier to right on the Saturn station in Pisces with Saturn widely conjunct Neptune. And President Biden and Trump debated at that time, but it became really clear that Biden’s age was so advanced that he was struggling to debate like, coherently and effectively against Trump. And as a result of that, it ended up being this huge debacle which not long after that forced him to have to drop out of the race as a result of even his own party turning against him and asking him to step down. And there’s something – because that happened on the Saturn station when Saturn stationed retrograde close to Neptune. And then what was crazy is many months later in November, when Saturn stationed direct in Pisces, that was the day that Trump had just won the election and he came to the White House to meet with Biden after the election for the first time. And it was the first time that Trump reentered the White House after having left the White House back in 2020 and 2021. So there was something about that where these themes of like, age were coming up a lot under this Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and that’s actually the adjacent thing is the same day in November I believe, or within a day or two of it, of that Saturn station in November, there was also this boxing match where Mike Tyson comes back and fights this much younger guy who’s like, in his 20s. But it ended up being like, this sham thing that was, you know, obviously not good because Mike Tyson was very old for a boxer, and he was really struggling against this much younger fighter. And —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — people ended up like, thinking that it was not good and it shouldn’t have happened. And there was just something symbolically similar that I think now I’m starting to understand was tied in even more with that Saturn-Neptune conjunction than I realized at the time. Because we can see something similar under these conjunctions in some instances when it comes to empires that are towards the end of their lifespan, and then eventually are pushed over and collapse.
NDB: Yeah, and just to add to that, Mike Tyson, you know, was World Heavyweight Champion. He made his boxing debut in ‘85 during the Venus retrograde in Aries. He won his first title in November of ‘86 during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio. He won a bunch more in June of ‘88 during the Venus retrograde in Gemini. But then when Venus went retrograde in Aquarius to Capricorn in 1990, on February 11th, 1990, during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, the same day Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Mike Tyson lost his title to James Douglas. This was his great sort of downfall after being this like, serious fighter for the past four, five years. It was a major – and you know, everything else from then on was sort of downhill for a long, long time for him. So there’s, it also reminds me that the fight he had last year also had a Saturn-Neptune resonance with the fight he lost in 1990 when he first lost his title.
CB: Interesting.
NDB: At the tender age of 23. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Yeah, because there’s something about… Saturn has these themes of like, age and slowness and tiredness. But Neptune also, when it’s connected in like, medical astrology with sensitive points related to vitality, is commonly interpreted as like, a feeling of a lacking of vitality or like, a sucking away of vitality or something like that; I’m having trouble describing it at the moment. But it creates – it’s one of those things in astrology where sometimes if you get two things that roughly indicate the same thing, you’ll get an intensification of the effect when you put them together. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re seeing here with Saturn and Neptune is they both have some feelings of loss or decrease sometimes of vital energy.
NDB: Yeah. I also think conversely, though, it also can be sort of, you know, like we’ve been saying, like some sort of obstacle is removed and one can suddenly see the truth on the other side of it. And the experience, the public experience, of watching that debate when anyone, whether they were, you know, no matter where they stood politically, everyone could see very obviously, very clearly, what the reality of the situation was. It wasn’t the kind of thing – like, your opinion didn’t really matter in this instance. One way or the other, it was clear that no one had, you know, publicly been really made aware of how things really were with the president, so. I think there’s also —
CB: That’s a good point.
NDB: — something to that as well, yeah, that there’s, you know, the experience, the collective experience of watching that debate was very Saturn-Neptune in the other sense – in the sense that you suddenly really get what’s going on. You suddenly clue into – it might have been in front of your face the whole time, but you know the truth.
CB: That’s a really good point. I will definitely give you that, because that does circle around to something that you said very early on, but that is a great example of that. It’s like, sometimes the Neptunian principle wins out, and something is hidden like in some of those other like, secret society, secret pacts ones. But in other instances, sometimes the Saturnian principle wins out, and the cold, hard reality becomes inescapable. And sometimes it clears the cloud of confusion or of deception that had been present up to that point.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, even if like, say you’re an Austrian in 1809, you know? You’re either going like, “What the hell’s going on?” Or you’re like, “Oh, this is what my country really is. This is what the Holy Roman Empire really is.” You know, like, some of it just might be, yeah, two sides of this same issue. You know, either you’re caught off guard, or maybe you are caught off guard but suddenly you see the truth whether you like it or not.
CB: Yeah. Good point. All right. The next section I have is like, adjacent, but one of the things that comes up is just that even though I focused a lot on like, the collapse or dissolution or fall of empires, oftentimes the decline of one empire or dynasty is also the rise of another empire or dynasty. And there were just lots of instances of those.
A lot of these, though, in terms of dynasties, thinking of like, family dynasties or sort of like, traditions that are passed on of inheritance and other things like that and of rulership, I found a bunch of these in different cultures, especially in like, the Chinese histories, there were a bunch of these. So for example, the Han dynasty started collapsing into chaos around the conjunction around 196 CE in China. The end of the Second Punic War around 201 BCE was Carthage being defeated and declining in the Mediterranean while the Roman Empire from that point forward started to rise dramatically.
Elsewhere, Rome decisively defeated Macedonia in the Third Macedonian War in the year 167 BCE. And this marked the end of Macedonia as a major power.
Later, the Battle of Mons Lactarius ended the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy in 553 CE. In China, under the same conjunction, the Northern Zhou dynasty falls, and it’s replaced by the Northern Qi in China in 557 CE.
One cycle later in China, the Sui dynasty unifies China together, and it ends the Southern and Northern dynasties in the year 589 CE.
In the year 947 CE, the later Han dynasty falls. In the year 1127, we have the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty in China. And then, of course, in 1917, we have World War One and many different dynasties and empires rising and falling all at once.
All right. One last geopolitical one I found very early in the histories. At the founding of the Roman Empire that was a striking but also startling one that ties into some previous themes that I summarized as establishing a framework for authoritarian control while maintaining the facade of a democratic government. And this happened under the conjunction around 23 BCE with the Emperor Augustus and what’s called the Second Settlement. And with the Second Settlement, Augustus basically found a way to make it look like there was still a democratic process in charge and that there were still senators and that the Roman Republic and some of its inherited traditions of democracy still existed. But in reality, he had become the central ruler that controlled everything and had the ultimate power behind the entire empire.
And then one cycle later in the year 14 CE on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, he dies, and he hands over the empire to his successor who he’s chosen, which is Tiberius. And from that point forward, the rest of the Roman Empire is just like, a succession of autocratic emperors who are essentially kings that have the ultimate power behind everything even though there’s still this like, facade of like, having senators and other things like that. Ultimately, they’re the ones in control. And the reason why the imperial period of the Roman Empire lasts then for centuries under these singular authoritarian rulers is because of the framework that Augustus set up with this external facade back in the year 23 BCE with the Second Settlement on that Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and I think there’s something incredibly important and striking about that that, you know, potentially may be relevant today under our current Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah, there’s a few beats that sound very familiar.
CB: They do. All right, so moving forward into the next section. To go into some other areas that are completely different but that we’ve studied, we’ve talked about at this point, one of them is attempts to study and document the paranormal. So we saw this for example with the establishment or the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 in the UK. Or we saw this to some extent with Project MKUltra in 1953, which didn’t just involve like, LSD and mind control experiments, but also involved eventually things like remote viewing and other stuff like that. Because they were just like, trying anything they could, leaving no stone unturned in order to attempt to develop like, you know, intelligence capabilities at that point.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So adjacent and this leads into another section we’ve talked about extensively, which is that sometimes there’s at Saturn-Neptune conjunctions there can be these periods where there’s a climate of paranoia, fear, and even witch hunts – sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically.
So for example, we talked about how McCarthyism was at its peak in the early 1950s during that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Or the First Red Scare in 1917. The Satanic Panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But also I had mentioned this in passing – I found that there was this book called The Malleus Maleficarum that was published in the year 1486. And this was a book about like, witchcraft and how – not like, doing witchcraft, but like, hunting witches. It’s literally like, a book about how to identify witches, and it has a bunch of crazy stuff in it. And it ended up being the book that was used as a reference text during the Salem Witch Trials over the next couple of centuries when they actually like, religious people or other people went out and did actual witch hunts and killed people or tortured women and other people based on trumped up charges of witchcraft. And it all goes back to this book which a lot of it seems like paranoia-induced like, fear and things like that.
Interestingly, though, I found all the way going back even in other cultures outside of Europe that in the year 91 BCE, there was a witchcraft scandal in the Han dynasty that led to a bunch of court intrigue and paranoia and some other pretty nasty things and deaths and things like that. So it’s a recurring theme sometimes under these Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, because Saturn’s basic principle, one of its basic principles is fear. And Neptune’s basic principle, or one of them, is like, deception. And sometimes when you put those two together, you have somebody becoming increasingly fearful or scared about things that may not be real, or things that may be imaginary. And they start like, inventing really elaborate scenarios and kind of like, freaking out about something that may or may not actually be a thing that exists or something smaller that may exist that they blow up to be something that’s much larger in their mind.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Another topic that we’ve talked about, another recurring theme, is a religious group that flees persecution and establishes a new community. So one of these that Lindsey found was the early Christian thinker Origen founds a school of theology in Palestine around the year 232 AD after being expelled by the Christian community from Alexandria, and this ends up being very influential when he founds this school.
Elsewhere I mentioned the prophet Muhammad setting up the first Muslim community in Medina, which started in 620, which was a little bit before our conjunction during the flight. But they were still setting up that community in different ways through 622 through 624, which is closer to the actual conjunction, including doing some basic things like establishing or changing the orientation of prayer where it was switched around the time of that conjunction from praying towards Jerusalem to praying towards Mecca, basically, at that time. So that goes back to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And to this day, Muslims still pray to the direction of Mecca going back to that Saturn-Neptune conjunction and that precedent that was set up then.
NDB: It’s funny how that also sort of resembles other facets that we found with Saturn-Neptune. Like, you know, a conversion of some kind, or you know, changing a boundary or in this case changing a destination, I suppose, or a direction.
CB: Yeah, I mean, because it’s like, Saturn is especially like the physical and the tangible world and the three-dimensional world. And something that’s so fundamental to the material world is directionality of like, north, south, east, west, you know, left, right, up, and down. But then what happens when you combine that with Neptune, which is something like transcendent and spiritual and like, religious, essentially, is you get, you know, “This is the direction to point in order to prayer, in order to say your prayers.” Like, I thought that was an incredible manifestation of that symbolism.
NDB: And global, too. No matter where you are in the world, you’re looking at Mecca.
CB: Right. Exactly. All right, another one – this was, again, this incredible one that Orla found originally where she pointed out that Puritans immigrated and established Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and they were actually like, escaping religious persecution in the UK in order to come into North America basically. But that one ends up being amazing, because I didn’t mention this earlier, but there’s a throughline from them setting up Massachusetts Bay Colony and founding Boston, all the way to more than a century later when you hit the 1773 Saturn-Neptune conjunction and you get in Massachusetts —
NDB: The Boston Tea Party.
CB: — in Boston, the Boston Tea Party! So there’s like, a direct throughline there of the Puritans immigrating to escape religious persecution, founding Boston, and then eventually, you know, this Boston being part of the center of the early American Revolution.
Elsewhere you had pointed out that Brigham Young and the Mormons arrived in Salt Lake City in 1847 and founded what became and is still like, the center of Mormonism and the… What’s the full name? It’s like, the Church of LD – of Latter Day Saints? LDS?
NDB: Latter Day Saints. Yeah. LDS, yeah.
CB: So there’s like, an alternative angle, which is also sometimes like, the establishment of a theocratic society or state or like, government. There’s some elements of that with some of these stories as well. So that could be relevant.
NDB: Yeah. It also occurred to me, like, when we brought up Scientology. Although Scientology, you know, started off seemingly stable, at one point L. Ron Hubbard was basically sailing around the world on this ship looking for a place to live. Like, at one point he wound up in today’s Zimbabwe in Rhodesia and tried to like, settle there, and they kicked him out. Greece I think he tried. So there was this point when Scientology was also sort of, you know, looking for a home, so to speak.
CB: Right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I wonder if there was an important turning point then in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s at that subsequent conjunction. I bet you there probably was.
All right. We don’t have to go into it. Let’s leave it there.
NDB: Yeah, sure.
CB: All right. One of the things I mentioned earlier that seemed to be a theme was exploring unknown lands or like, settling unknown lands. And I found some really early examples of that. Like, the beginning of Norse settlement in Greenland dates the year 985 and that conjunction. The earliest European presence in North America has been identified as this Viking settlement from the year 1021, which happened to be like, a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And then even Marco Polo from Italy departing for this long and like, what became this mythical trip to Asia where he travels all around China and like, has all these crazy adventures and then eventually comes back and writes a book about his travels, he departed on that journey in the year 1271.
NDB: Fantastic.
CB: Yeah. So I thought that was an interesting recurring theme that I didn’t initially expect, but it seems to be there. And I’m still working on articulating that one.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, think about it – some of the things I brought up in 1848. Think of all those Europeans and the Irish going across, you know, to the New World as it were. You know, I mean, okay, they’re not exploring unknown lands, but I mean, just, you know, it might as well be, relative to where they come from. They’re entering an entirely new world, and there is definitely an element for each one of these immigrants a sense of having stepped into some great unknown. You know? Not unlike Marco Polo. They might as well be Marco Polo, I suppose, you know, from their perspective.
CB: Right. Yeah. That’s a great point. All right. Going into a similar area, one of the things that came up is religious schisms. So for example, there’s the Acacian Schism in the year 484, which interestingly was resolved exactly one Saturn-Neptune cycle later in the year 519. So it’s like, you have the setting up of a schism, which is like, a break within a singular religion where it breaks and you get like, two different religious parties becoming separate. And then one cycle later, you get those two parties being put back together again to some extent, or that rift being healed.
Elsewhere, Justinian the 1st convenes the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553, and they were dealing with some issues related to schisms. A really important one – this is actually the biggest one of this that I was absolutely shocked to find – was in the year 661 CE, the assassination of the 4th caliph Ali essentially leads to the Suni-Shia divide in Islam that continues to be a huge schism and divide between Msulims to this very day. It’s one of the most important like, historical events. And while it was already developing before this, the assassination, the death of this caliph and the way that it was handled – the succession was handled after that – caused this religious divide that still divides the Muslim world to this day, even to the extent of some of the different like, geopolitical issues in the world today are partially connected to this divide with different countries favoring one side or the other. So that’s the biggest example of that, but there were other ones in terms of schisms.
In the year 880 CE, the Ecclesiastical Council held in Constantinople resolved the Photian Schism in that year, or there was one other that you found with the Russian one —
NDB: Yeah —
CB: — in 1666.
NDB: Yeah. That was a huge sort of, you know, political one. I mean, it was a religious schism, but virtually created a kind of civil war in Russia in terms of how it divided people. And until Peter the Great came in and sort of put things together, yeah, it was very destabilizing.
CB: Okay. So that’s schisms. Another adjacent thing that comes up is religious repression. So it’s like, you get Neptune and like, religious belief, but with Saturn sometimes you get repression or the attempt to repress people based on their religious beliefs. So one of the most famous examples of this that Lindsey found, I believe, was Diocletian’s persecution of Christians in the year 302 CE, which was right on that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And this was a very famous early in the history of Christianity instance of extreme persecutions of Chrsitians in the Roman Empire for their religious beliefs.
Elsewhere in the year 445, the Emperor Valentinian the 3rd issues an edict against Manichaeism, which is like, a religious sect.
1415 was a big one that you had researched, right?
NDB: I also researched this, yeah. This is coming up… I think it was someone else who put it in there, but I do have it in my file as well.
CB: So in 1455, Jan Hus was burned at the stake, right?
NDB: Jan Hus was burned at the stake, yeah. The early martyrs – I thought it was a different date, though. I’m thrown off by that.
CB: I mean, my notes don’t say anything; it just says “Jan Hus burned at the stake,” and I think that’s all important, but I want to keep moving —
NDB: Okay.
CB: We gotta get through this.
NDB: Yeah yeah.
CB: So —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — there was an important religious person who was burned at the stake; it was 1415. Moving on. Martin Luther is excommunicated in the year 1521. And then later The Malleus Maleficarum that witch hunting book is published in 1486, which then becomes its own source of religious persecution as both imaginary – like, people that are not witches are accused of witchcraft in subsequent centuries and burned or tortured or killed, but also probably actual witches are also burned and tortured and killed as a result of that, which is additionally a form of religious repression.
All right, so that’s a major recurring theme. Moving on. Another theme that I saw a couple of times come up was the codification of religious doctrines as well as secular laws in some instances. So one of them was the Decemvirate codify the law of Rome around the year 450 BCE, and this was a critical turning point in early Roman history in terms of the establishment of some of the fundamental laws of Rome when it was still in the era before it became the Roman Empire itself, before the imperial period where the autocrats or dictators took over in the period where it was still, like, a republic. So that was 450 BCE.
Also one of the ones I mentioned is in the year 1917, the Code of Canon Law was published by the Catholics, so that was codifying religious law, which is just very literal Saturn-Neptune.
I have a long section here that has a bunch of like, miscellaneous ones, and I wasn’t sure how to categorize these, but the broad things that I sort of tried to put in this category is I called it “Establishing New Religious Foundations, Churches, and Other Religious Turning Points.” So for example, Lindsey pointed out that the apostle Paul establishes the Church in Ephesus around the year 53 CE very close to a conjunction, which became very critical in spreading the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire in the first few decades of its existence.
Later in the year 587, Reccared the 1st, King of the Visigoths, converts from Arian Christainity and becomes Catholic in that year in 587. So a major turning point in terms of the Visigoths converting from one form of Christianity to the more standard one of Catholicism, essentially.
Elsewhere in Japan, Asuka-dera, one of Japan’s oldest temples, began construction in the year 588 CE shortly after Buddhism had been introduced from the Korean peninsula. And this marked the start of the Asuka period and the spread of Buddhism in Japan. And I thought it was incredible that one of the oldest temples was right on this like, Saturn-Neptune —
NDB: Right.
CB: — conjunction in that year.
NDB: That’s wild. Some of these old ones you find are just mind blowing.
CB: Yeah, no, I found so much – and that’s why we’re like, summarizing all of this, because I found so much. I was like, there is no way I’m gonna have done all this research and we’re not gonna cram it into this episode, so that is why we’re going long and I’m gonna accomplish this and sharing everything I found by just summarizing it real quick here before our empires collapse.
NDB: Okay.
CB: All right. I mentioned the Muslim direction of prayer already being changed from Jerusalem to Mecca; that happened in the year 624 CE, which is very close to I think the conjunction was like, 625.
Elsewhere in Japan, Saicho officially establishes Tendai Buddhism in Japan in the year 806, which was actually very huge and influential in terms of Buddhism in Japan.
You had found this one, which is amazing, of just like, the construction of Notre-Dame Cathedral beginning in the year 1163, and then two major restorations taking place under subsequent Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, one in 1844 and another in 2024.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: A really funny one is I found in the year 1164, there were these relics that were supposed to be relics of the Three Magi, the Three Wise Men that traveled to see —
NDB: The three astrologers, excuse me!
CB: The three astrologer wise men.
NDB: Excuse me!
CB: Yeah yeah. Well, they can be wise men and then also astrologers. I mean, I wanted to – we don’t wanna leave the “wise” part out.
NDB: I say keep that King James stuff out of the astrology conversation; that’s what I say. Three astrologers!
CB: I’m just saying they had to be pretty good astrologers to like, you know, see an astrology alignment and then follow it all the way to like, geolocate a manger in like, the first century, you know?
NDB: They brought it! They brought their game. They brought their top game; it made the most famous work of literature. More literature should have astrological success stories and so, yeah. Three astrologers.
CB: I agree. So apparently, relics supposedly of the Three Magi were brought to the German city of Cologne in the year 1164 to this church, and they ended up creating this like, golden thing to house them. And this was on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and as a result of those relics being brought there, it became a major sight that attracted a lot of visitors and like, religious pilgrimage and other things like that for many centuries afterwards to this day.
Elsewhere, there were two great, like, conversions of churches to mosques or mosques to churches. The first one was the Great Mosque of Cordoba was converted to a cathedral during the Reconquista in the year 1236 when basically like, the Europeans took over the Muslim city of Cordoba and one of the first things they did is they converted the mosque into a Christian church. So what’s funny about that is then on another conjunction about 200 years later, when Constantinople was taken over by the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople where the Ottoman Empire basically won the war and took over the city, the first thing that the ruler did is he walked into the Hagia Sophia Church and immediately converted it to a mosque. So that was, again, right on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So I thought it was incredible, those two examples of that on those two conjunctions.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So and then I didn’t have a place for this, but it was incredibly important, which is that Martin Luther published his German translation of the New Testament in 1522 on a conjunction, which as we talked about earlier made it so that the common people could read the Bible for the first time, which is really important. And then —
NDB: Wasn’t it Wittenberg? Isn’t that where it was?
CB: I don’t know.
NDB: Okay.
CB: And then finally we’ve already mentioned that Scientology was founded in 1953 on that conjunction. So you know, this is kind of a grab-bag of like, religious founding and turning points and other things like that, but there were some very important ones in there that are very illustrative.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. The next section is adjacent. It’s the ascension of powerful rulers who end up impacting the course of religions in some way. So this is interesting; the first one is Pope Pelagius the 2nd dies during a plague outbreak in Rome in the year 590 CE. And after he dies, Gregory the 1st who’s also known as Gregory the Great is elected pope. And this is important because Gregory the 1st is one of the most important popes in Catholic history who is said to have significantly increased the power and influence of the papacy. He reformed the liturgy; he promoted missionary work, and he wrote extensively so that his papacy is said to have marked a significant turning point in the development of the medieval church.
So that’s like, obviously that’s, you know, a direct ascension of a religious figure in a religious – like, a pope. But there was a few other instances that I thought were really interesting that are adjacent. One of them is that in the year 163 on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, Marcus Aurelius became emperor. And he was one of the most famous Roman emperors, because he famously was also somebody that was very interested in Stoic philosophy. And he ended up writing and leaving behind a booklet of essential Stoic philosophy and reflections that ended up becoming incredibly influential so that it’s been passed down and translated into hundreds of languages and still continues to be like, a bestseller book to this day that’s read even by presidents and leaders of countries and other things like that. So the philosopher-king becomes emperor in that year on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
Elsewhere, two interesting examples are Charlemagne is crowned King of the Franks in the year 768. So this is when he originally becomes, he achieves his first role of kingship. And then later he would eventually, around the year 800, become the Holy Roman Emperor when he’s famously crowned by the Pope. And then —
NDB: Right.
CB: — there’s this like, merging of religious and political, I don’t know, influence or kingship. But his first kingship when he first ascends is on this Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 768, and it sort of like, telegraphs his later merging of political and religious influences. And this is striking, because I have another example of that, which is that Clovis became the leader of the Salian Franks in the year 481, and he would later convert to Christniaty and found the Merovingian dynasty. So again, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is marking his ascension, but then later, like, the marking of that at the beginning of his ascension of political power is somehow marking and telegraphing his later merging or involvement in both religion as well as politics.
NDB: I have one to add to those. It is King Louis – I think the 10th – who was called Louis the Saint, because he died of dysentery while out on crusade. I don’t know if maybe that doesn’t impact religion. Just thinking, you know, okay. I’m improvising.
CB: All right. So that – go ahead.
NDB: I was just gonna say, I mean, he died while out on crusade and they call him a saint. But I can’t say that impacted religion, so I’m gonna retract it. Sorry.
CB: Okay. There are a bunch of like, crusade-ish things that were happening with some of them, but it was like, it got kind of messy and wasn’t as clean as I would like. One of the final crusades, I did notice, started on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction and it was like, the last major crusade, which I thought was interesting. But —
NDB: Right.
CB: — I hadn’t tracked enough with like, the first Crusades to see if that worked out with the other conjunctions.
NDB: Okay. I’m sorry – it was Louis the 9th; he died in 1270 at the conjunction. And yeah, he died in Tunis. But he does, like, he’s sainted; he’s the only French king who was canonized. But yeah, that’s not making an impact on religion, so that’s why I retract it. Sorry I interjected.
CB: All right. So that completes the religious section of this. So moving into other areas – one of the major ones as we’ve talked about is Saturn-Neptune conjunctions can coincide with recurring themes having to do with immigration, migrations of people, and issues with borders.
So an early example of that, I believe Lindsey found this one, was the Gothic-Herulian invasion of the Roman Empire in the year 267 CE. And this was interesting because this ended up being a precursor to the later Gothic migration and invasion of the Roman Empire that ended up really impacting it in the fourth and fifth centuries. Which actually then brings me to the next one, which is the year 376 AD when there was this huge migration of the Visigoths into the Roman Empire at that time right on that conjunction around 376. And they were fleeing from I think it was like, the Huns in other areas, so they ended up trying to resettle on the edges of the Roman Empire. But then they ended up being mistreated by the Romans, and eventually there ends up being a lot of bad blood. And the Visigoths one cycle later in 410 CE sack Rome. So that was a very notable early example of like, immigration and borders and like, that affecting geopolitics and stuff like that.
Another one we’ve talked about in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States. And then finally even 1630 when the Puritans immigrated and established Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Anything from you?
NDB: Oh… Well, you mentioned issues with borders, so I mean, there’s a lot of those that we’ve talked about already, I suppose.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: And like, yeah. You know, the migrations —
CB: This is more of like, an immigration one.
NDB: Yeah, the immigration one, I think, you know, everything we were saying about 1848 particularly with regard to the United States and how that sort of changed the makeup of the country. The country becoming at once, you know, introducing a Latin American character because of the new conquest but also all these different immigrants and refugees, I suppose, coming from Europe, coming from the revolutions happening all across Europe in 1848.
CB: Okay. Definitely. All right. One major topic as I talked about that I researched because of some contemporary concerns was pandemics. I did see a number of pandemics come up during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. To run through a list of some of the biggest ones, there was a bubonic plague outbreak in Constantinople, Syria, and Mesopotamia in the year 698 on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. The Plague of Sheroe hits Mesopotamia in 627 through 628 on a conjunction, and that kills the Persian emperor at the time and throws the kingdom into disarray. The biggest one, though, in terms of plague is the Black Death plague begins ravaging Europe and Asia around the year 1346, and this is like, right on a conjunction. This is a conjunction that’s happening around this time, and this one’s important because this is actually the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history that lasts for, comes and goes for like, centuries. For like, a few centuries after that point. In fact, so much so that the last major resurgence of it was three centuries later under the Great Plague of Milan that happened 1629 through 1631 on a conjunction, and that’s the last great resurgence of the same plague as the Black Death that started around 1346.
NDB: Okay.
CB: Elsewhere, the Great Plague of London from 1665 to 1666, which was a major outbreak of the bubonic plague, and that was one you were particularly interested in and we had noted that Isaac Newton, for example, had to leave Cambridge and like —
NDB: Right.
CB: — went out to the country to get away from it. And there possibly, as long as it’s not like, a made-up story, an apple like, may have fallen on his head and he, you know, develops gravity and so on and so forth.
NDB: Right. I mean, you know, the apple story may or may not be real, but it’s real in theme. Like, something made him realize gravity was something to pay attention to around this time.
CB: Right.
NDB: So yeah. One way or the other. There were also there was a number of European wars going on, so the plague was, you know, another volatile thing at that time because it could move around Europe.
CB: Yeah. All right. And then the big one that we focused on a lot that was crucial in more recent times was the so-called Spanish flu, which was a flu pandemic from 1918 to 1920, and this was an especially deadly H1N1 influenza pandemic. And that’s the one that makes me the most nervous, because it was influenza, which is very similar to the avian or like, bird flu influenza that’s developing right now in chickens especially but also issues of it potentially crossing over to other livestock where the current bird flu is a H5N1 bird flu. And while the current risk to the general human population remains low, health organizations are monitoring it because what they’re worried about is if it starts showing signs of increased human-to-human transmission or adaptation, because they don’t want it to jump boundaries between species. And that’s what makes me nervous about a Saturn-Neptune conjunction forming is we keep talking about like, borders and like, you know, other things becoming more porous. And having a Saturn-Neptune alignment at this time doesn’t sound great if we’re hoping that something doesn’t jump species or doesn’t not jump a boundary.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. It’s the funniest thing – well, funny in the wrong sense of the word. You know, for a country so obsessed with self-defense, I guess from people, you know, it’s good to have the right weapons in case the wrong people try to come in. But you know, microbes, germs, things like that? You know, different weapons are needed, and yeah. Very different approach, I guess.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s like, one of the issues is it’s also running into the current like, political things. Like, you know, the price of eggs has been high over the past few months because they’ve been killing the chickens or culling the chickens in order to try to —
NDB: Right.
CB: — manage and make it so that this doesn’t become a pandemic and a huge outbreak. But as a result of killing all the chickens, it’s making the price of eggs go up. But because the price of eggs is going up, Trump and the Republicans look bad because they criticized Biden for egg prices being high last year. So therefore, you know, if they stop – they might stop culling the chickens so that the egg prices go down. But if you stop culling the chickens, then like —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — you could inadvertently lead to this turning into a full-blown pandemic, so there’s lots of funny like, little weird things —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — that are sort of like, storm clouds that could be not great.
NDB: Sure. I mean, you know, remember during covid, you know, Trump would say, “Well, I don’t wanna do more testing because then we’ll get higher numbers!” It’s like, you know, like, better to not know – like, there’s this idea like, if you don’t introduce the information, you don’t have to deal with the reality somehow.
CB: Right. Well, unfortunately, that’s actually one of the things I think that Trump and the Republicans learned from the covid pandemic was not we need more testing; it was that if you have testing be public, then people will see that you’re failing to combat this. So their response now is like, a bunch of the medical and testing apparatus from like, the CDC and other things are being dismantled to a certain extent, which ironically then like those instances where other empires, their internal strife and like, dumb political maneuvering left them weakened and vulnerable to external adversaries. You know, this could be setting things up for like, this weird, perfect storm in terms of this, which I hope it doesn’t go that way, but I’m just seeing some possibilities from some of these past recurrences that seem troubling.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So along those lines, like, one of the recurrences also that was coming up from past conjunctions was things having to do with vaccines. So 1881, Louis Pasteur develops an anthrax vaccine, which is a huge turning point, especially in developing a certain type of vaccines that became commonplace after that point.
In 1952, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, which is a huge turning point because polio had just like, ravaged people for such a long time up to that point, and debilitated people. Even President Roosevelt, you know, wasn’t really able to walk as a result of a bout with polio, basically, right? Actually, wasn’t that on —
NDB: It may have been —
CB: — the Saturn-Neptune conjunction?
NDB: Well, he had a Saturn-Neptune conjunction natally. He got it a little later in August of ‘21. It may have been Huntington-Barre and not polio, although he certainly went to his grave thinking he had polio. I think, like, there has been subsequent, you know, conversation about whether it really was, but either way.
CB: Yeah. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988, and that was, you know, largely vaccinating people against polio. There was a measles resurgence and a response to it in 1989 under that conjunction. And then in 2025 as we have a conjunction forming, Robert F. Kennedy, Junior, has become US Health Secretary, and he has started instituting anti-vaccine policies. So we’re clearly at some sort of like, turning point with respect to that, and we’ll see what long term implications that ends up having.
Moving into another section – chemical and biological warfare appear to be a recurring theme with Saturn and Neptune, especially World War One and the use of chemical weapons around the 1917 conjunction. But also Saddam Hussein famously using chemical weapons late in the Iran-Iraq War, especially on the Kurds, around 1988.
Even other experimentations like Project MKUltra using LSD for mind control experiments is something like, adjacent in 1953. And you actually found this —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — example from 1344.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s one of these things, there is someone who was there who reports this. Some people question whether it happened; it’s a great story. Leading up to the bubonic plague, the big outbreak of 1346, in 1344 to 1347 – something like that, or 1344 to 1346, around that time – the Mongols are, they’ve rented this part of the Crimea. I think they’re Venetians, or yeah, to Venetian merchants. And they wanna take it back, and there’s some kind of property dispute, so they’re fighting. And the Venetians are in a fort, and they’re firing back at the Mongols. The Mongols are outside the fort. But the plague has set in, and so the Mongols start using their – what do you call those things?
CB: Catapults?
NDB: That throw projectiles – catapults! They start catapulting plague-ridden corpses into the Venetian fort and spreading the plague, and then the Venetians flee and get in their boat, go back to Europe, and that’s ostensibly legend has it how the plague spread to Europe. Either way, the story, you know, even if it’s like, true on a smaller level or whatever the case, there is an element of biological warfare. For someone to suggest that it happened at all, you know, puts that in place, whether it was the thing that brought the plague to Europe or not.
CB: Yeah. For sure. I think that’s definitely an early example of biological warfare.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: All right. Other topics, transitioning into other areas. One of the major ones was Prohibition and drug control. So we had, you know, Prohibition of alcohol in the United States around the 1917 conjunction, and then in the late 1980s you had the US anti-drug campaigns where they went so far as creating the role of a government “Drug Tsar” in 1988 on that conjunction. I only started really realizing this and uncovering this symbolic connection late in our research project, and I’m sure there’s a bunch of other instances of this, so it would be interesting to track more extensively at some point. But those are two major examples.
all right. One major recurring theme that we’ve talked about a lot but I was just impressed by the more and more I saw it was for some reason on these conjunctions, women in leadership roles. And for some reason, it’s like, sometimes it’s women ascending into leadership roles, but also there’s a bunch of notable instances of women passing away on these conjunctions and leaving leadership roles as well. So for example, the powerful Empress Dowager Deng Sui of the Han dynasty in China dies in the year 121 CE on a conjunction.
Elsewhere, Empress Suiko ascends to the throne of Japan in the year 592 CE, and her reign is actually really important because it’s significant for the promotion of Buddhism. And she becomes both the country’s first as well as the longest reigning Empress Regent. And then she ended up actually dying a little bit after the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
Later on in Japan, interestingly, Empress Shotoku dies in Japan in the year 770, and this was actually really important historically because she was the last of six female rulers of Japan. And no more women would hold the throne until the 18th century due to some of the controversies that happened late in her reign where there was like, a controversy with a monk that she like, elevated, and there was a lot of drama, so they were like, “No more women rulers” for a long time after this point.
You’re shaking your head; you’ve had that experience.
NDB: Oh! I’m just saying spoil sports. Yeah.
CB: If I had a nickel.
NDB: Right.
CB: All right. So 1056, the death of Empress Theodora sets off this huge succession crisis and civil war in the Byzantine Empire in 1057. In 1236, Razia Sultana ascends the throne. And she becomes the first and only woman sultan of India.
This one is just more of a weird one, but The Malleus Maleficarum which I keep mentioning – that witch hunting book – in 1486 claims that more women are witches than men. So it sets up this weird like, gender dynamic with witches and witch hunting and some of the paranoia surrounding that, which leads to like, a lot of women being falsely accused and murdered, basically, of witchcraft during like, the witch trials.
We talked about Queen Elizbeth where Queen Elizabeth the 1st ascended to the English throne in the year 1558 on a conjunction. And then weirdly, centuries later, Queen Elizabeth the 2nd ascended to the English throne in the year 1952. And then she becomes the longest reigning British monarch in history.
Here’s her name – Vera Figner and Sophia Perovskaya lead the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander the 2nd in 1881. And there may be a whole other subtopic of like, women working behind the scenes as well as like, people in general working behind the scenes as we talked about earlier. But I think it’s partially as a side effect of through much of history, women have had to work behind the scenes in order to wield power. So for example, I mentioned Agrippina the Younger possibly poisoning her husband, the Emperor Claudius, in the year 54 CE in order to advance her son who became the Emperor Nero.
NDB: Yeah. You’ve just reminded me, of course, there is the Tsarina, the wife of Nicholas the 2nd, the Tsarina Alexandra, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, although she’s from Hessadarmstadt, so she’s known as “the German woman,” which is not a good idea when Russia is at war with Germany. And then in 1916, the Tsar decides to take charge of the military operation because it hasn’t been going well. This proves to be his downfall, because now the Tsar can be blamed when things go wrong, which is indeed what happens. But while he’s managing the war on the front, the Tsarina is running day-to-day affairs in Russia with her one advisor, Rasputin. And that gets tongues wagging across Russia and really turns a lot of people against the regime altogether. Number one, she’s a German woman running Russia while they’re at war with Germany. And things are going badly, and so it’s easy to blame not only the Tsar at the front, but also to blame her for sabotaging the war effort on behalf of her cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm the 2nd. Because the Kaiser’s, you know, mother and her mother were sisters. And the whole Rasputin thing goes over everyone’s head, because no one knows that he’s really in the royal household because their hemophiliac son seems to respond well to him, and he helps calm the boy down when his condition is really bad. And so —
CB: Right.
NDB: — you know —
CB: Because otherwise he seems like this weird wizard shadowy figure.
NDB: Exactly! You know, one of the funny things that happens is because, you know, hemophilia, of course, is blood that doesn’t clot. And the boy would be in a lot of pain. You bruise easily. And they would give him aspirin, which of course is a blood thinner. And Rasputin was the kind of guy who would say, “Don’t take any more aspirin,” and so they would stop giving him aspirin and oh! You know, the blood isn’t as thin as before! So things like that would happen. But yeah, basically, I mean, talk about Saturn-Neptune – the whole perception of Rasputin, the whole perception of the Tsarina, who really at the end of the day is just like, a really devoted mother worried about her boy. You know, it just like, everything comes apart. Rasputin is murdered in December of 1916, and the Revolution erupts in March of 1917 while the Tsar is still at the front. You know, that’s the thing – you know, Saint Petersburg goes to the dogs, and he’s not in town! He’s managing this losing war effort. So there’s all kinds of Saturn-Neptune stuff involved there, and she is easily, you know, not deliberately but de facto responsible for how badly things go.
CB: Right. That reminds me of like, the witchcraft controversy during the Han dynasty in like, the Chinese empire in like, the first century BCE that I mentioned.
NDB: Right. She was, yeah —
CB: I don’t know, though. Look at this guy. I don’t know. Like, looking at this guy, he looks a little suspicious. I’m not gonna lie.
NDB: Well, now, he —
CB: You’re telling me this guy’s fine? Like, you know?
NDB: No, I’m not gonna say he’s fine, but he wasn’t like, a German agent. And you know, I think he was taking advantage of the Romanovs to some degree. But they were in a pickle, you know, because their son is their only son. They had four daughters, and I mean, it’s just crazy because —
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. I think I’ve told the story before here. They can’t tell the Russian people that their son is a hemophiliac, because that in itself would be threatening to the monarchy, so they have to keep it secret even from close family members. So like, even the Tsar’s mother doesn’t really understand what’s going on, and she becomes part of like, the whole counter offensive against Alexandra. So it’s very, very, very Saturn-Neptune the way it all sort of, yeah, unravels for them.
CB: Yeah. So and he ends up being – Rasputin ends up being murdered in like, 1916 by a group of like, conservative Russian noblemen who —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — didn’t like his influence on the Russian royal family. So that’s tied up in that whole Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
NDB: Yeah. And you know, whenever you watch a movie and it says, “Any relation to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” And the reason every movie or most movies have that disclaimer is because a movie was made about Rasputin starring the three Barrymores – Drew Barrymore’s grandfather and the two siblings, famous actors in the ‘30s – and the movie was ostensibly the Rasputin story. But one of the killers was gay, and the movie like, advanced that part of the story, and he sued the movie studio for this portrayal. And so then they had to like, have this caveat where like, you know, because they had already changed his name; they had tried to disguise it, but it wasn’t disguised well enough. So that lawsuit triggered that whole sort of phenomenon; that’s just a little trivia. A little more into Saturn-Neptune for you, if you will – movie law.
CB: All right. That is your – we’ve met the quota of like, entertaining anecdotes for this episode. In addition —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — to just that we’ve almost reached the end of the list. I’m saying that humorously; I enjoy —
NDB: Okay.
CB: — your anecdotes.
NDB: Very good.
CB: All right. To round out the section, though, that we were talking about women and women rulers, one of the reasons why I don’t think that’s just like, a fluke, some of those instances of women rulers becoming prominent when it comes to the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, is because of this recurrence, which is women voting. And this one was really striking where like I said, the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 on that Saturn-Neptune conjunction becomes the start in the United States of the women’s suffrage movement. And then eventually that culminates, you know, in the 1917 through 1920s time period on a subsequent conjunction when women get the right to vote in Canada, the UK, Germany, and the US all around the same time just following that conjunction. So there’s something there that seems very important, and —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — it’s also tied together by one of those middle instances where in 1882 you have that Married Women’s Property Act in the UK, which kind of like —
NDB: Right.
CB: — ties them together a little bit. I’m sure there’s other things, but those are the ones I found, and I think it’s pointing to some larger theme.
NDB: I think you’re probably right. One thing that occurs to me is like, when you think about it, like, you know, people, you know, chauvinists really would convince themselves, like, women can’t drive. Like, not like that they shouldn’t, but they’re actually like, physically incapable. Like, those kinds of silly —
CB: Delusions.
NDB: — delusional things, you know, like, yeah, you know, women shouldn’t vote because they’ll faint at the ballot box. You know, just like, whatever it is people think, and then, you know —
CB: Right. “Women can’t be president because they’re too emotional.” And I’m like —
NDB: Right, you know?
CB: — meanwhile!
NDB: Right! Thank you. Well done. One for Chris.
CB: Yeah, thanks.
NDB: But yeah, you know, long story short is like, you know, the case that’s made at Seneca Falls or the ultimate reality of women getting the vote, which like I said, was not unrelated to the war and the participation women had in the First World War that suddenly made them eligible. That’s the thing about the World Wars is it did put women in the workforce, which did a lot to – I mean, the Second World War even more than the first, but it happened in the first as well. It was interesting —
CB: Right.
NDB: — when we lived – I know I’m supposed to be done with anecdotes, but this is a good one! When I lived in —
CB: I cannot keep you down! I cannot stop you.
NDB: — the Netherlands, I was stunned to realize – because we tend to think the Netherlands being a fairly liberal country. But someone there told me that in fact it’s the least emancipated country in western Europe, but the reason why is perfectly logical. Because the Netherlands were neutral in the First World War and occupied in the Second World War, and therefore the men were never leaving the country, leaving the factories, et cetera, et cetera, leaving jobs open for women to fill as they were in Germany, France, England, America, Canada, et cetera. So you know, that phenomenon really made a huge difference, and if it didn’t happen in your country, you know, any kind of feminist agenda would not go as far as quick.
CB: Right. Okay. That makes sense, and that actually brings it around to something which is my next and final point about that, which is that there’s something about gender norms and like, defying or transgressing gender norms. And that could be the core like, seed of this archetype that’s really the core thing. Because this really came up when I was learning about this figure, Razia Sultana, who in 1236 like, ascended the throne in India. And one of the things they were talking about is just how she defied gender norms and through the way that she dressed but also through leading as a woman like, leading her army into battle and doing things that transgressed the traditional like, gender norms that had been assigned to women at that point.
And here may lie the crux of the issue and may be why the Saturn-Neptune comes up, because sometimes it has to do with the transgression of gender norms and these invisible arbitrary like, boundaries that we have set up in society, and what happens occasionally when those get smashed or those get transgressed in different ways. And I think this is actually how it’s already coming up again today, which is that at least in the United States, one of the things that’s happening is as soon as Trump came into office, he issued an executive order proclaiming that there’s only two genders in 2025. And I think this is important because it’s an example of trying to do something that we see come up over and over again with Saturn-Neptune, which is officially attempting to define there only being two genders and to create like, a black-and-white issue where there may be instances of like, outliers or ambiguity. And it’s another instance of like, struggles over something that people think should be just this either-or thing and that that should obvious that there should be a clear boundary or demarcation when in some instances it may be more complicated than that, where there may be blurred lines, there may be ambiguities to the boundaries in different ways for different reasons so that it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s just simply black or white or yes or no or what have you. But right now we’re seeing like, attempts to like, define it as such in this timeframe. And you know, we’ll see where that goes in the future. I mena, there’s gonna be things where some of the things happening now will eventually be revised in the future. Like, that’s inevitable. So it’ll be interesting to see how we come out of that, but I think it’s interesting that that ultimately is probably one of the current things that’s happening under the current conjunction, but ultimately it may go back centuries into other instances where people have defied gender norms in different ways, and many of them have been like, women that have risen into traditionally male roles at different points in history. But now that happens so often to this day that it’s almost like, ceased to become a useful societal distinction anymore to say that like, men can do this, and women can only do this, because those boundaries have been blurred or obliterated in different ways for most people.
NDB: Yeah. It strikes me, you know, we were talking about the Gulf War in 1991. And one of the consequences of that, I mean, this is kind of what got, you know, what’s-his-name, Mr. 9/11 all angry was that the US military was now had a presence in Saudi Arabia that was a, you know, a base to fight Iraq from. And suddenly you had women military officers driving themselves around in Jeeps. So suddenly, you know, people in Saudi Arabia, particularly women in Saudi Arabia, saw women driving around, which really was sort of like, you know, like we were saying earlier, just the stories that they tell themselves to justify not allowing women to drive. And suddenly – you know, it’s like telling people, yeah, no, people can’t flap their arms and fly! And then you’re walking down the street one day and you see someone flapping their arms and flying – you’re like, “Wait a minute! I was told you can’t do that!” Now, of course, we can’t really do that, but it’s almost like that kind of —
CB: Yet.
NDB: — experience, I imagine, for people. Yet! Yeah, thank you. Keep dreaming, Chris! But you know —
CB: Never say never!
NDB: — I’m positing that, you know, for people in Saudi Arabia, in particular women in Saudi Arabia, seeing women drive for the first time – you know, the metaphor isn’t that far off in terms of like, the impact it could make.
CB: Yeah. Well, so circle it back, but therein lies the point, which is that ultimately because this is like, a new area of research, a new understanding frankly I’ve only been realizing over the past couple of weeks with these conjunctions, I don’t know – like I said towards the beginning of talking about this – whether it’s because there’s some sort of like, inherent feminine quality to Saturn and Neptune and that’s why women have come up over and over again on this conjunction historically and because it’s pointing to women in particular or femmes or female figures. Or alternatively, if what it is is that’s just a side effect of the conjunction indicating people transgressing gender norms, in which case the archetype could be much broader, and it could include other types of issues that relate to transgressions of traditional roles that have been assigned to people but that in some instances are somewhat arbitrary when it comes to where society draws some occasionally like, invisible borders that ultimately can change over time.
NDB: Yeah. I guess my view is slightly different in that, you know, I think in terms of gender relationships, the planets – like, it’s there, but only so much. And then to some degree they really do apply to everyone in some kind of, you know, if not blanket way, some sort of more even way. For instance, you know, Venus retrograde transits can very often involve situations involving women. But then again, sometimes it can just be three men sitting in the Oval Office and someone says, “Hey, why aren’t you wearing a suit?” You know, sometimes it can be that. And I think similarly, you know, the way Saturn-Neptune seems to reflect the relationship between what we imagine to be true and what is actually true and the way they collide sometimes, sometimes in a fusion, sometimes in a separation – either way, you know, some of those are gonna involve the kind of things we tell ourselves are possible and not possible with regard to what women can or can’t do along with a whole bunch of other things.
CB: Yeah. I mean, you know, we’ve done a lot of work on these retrogrades, and we’ve seen a lot of stuff with the most recent like, Venus and Mars retrogrades. And on the one hand, for sure we in our two recent extensive episodes where we did one on like, Venus retrograde in history over the past century and then we did one on Mars retrograde over the past three centuries, we’ve seen instances where obviously those are just like, timing markers that can apply to either gender. But then on the other hand, there are instances where, you know, Venus goes retrograde, and things related to women and femmes do become more prominent. Like, for example, a year ago – no, two years ago in the summer of 2023 when Venus slowed down and stationed retrograde in Leo, and that day the Barbie movie came out. And you had this at least in like, popular culture, like something that was appealing more to women and to femmes that was coinciding with this Venusian transit of Venus retrograde, versus like more recently we had Mars slow down and station retrograde towards the end of 2024, and then all of a sudden we’ve seen this bizarre like, macho sort of masculine energy become more prominent with the election of Trump, basically, at the end of the year around the time of that Mars station in Leo, which was an interesting like, comparison between like, Venus retrograde in Leo the previous summer versus Mars —
NDB: Oh, sure.
CB: — retrograde in Leo. So there was something there that’s still relevant about something broadly defined as gender —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — and those traditional astrological gender assignments. So I’m still of two minds of it, but I understand and agree and recognize with what you’re saying.
NDB: Yeah. And similarly, me to you. I’m not saying it’s an either-or type of situation. Just like, it does – it certainly does apply, you know, to some level. But then you do see the instances that, you know, don’t conform to that particular criteria but still are clearly relevant and related to the transit.
CB: Yeah. Well, my straight male friend, this has been a good discussion that we’re having, but I’m sure, you know, other people will have different discussions and different conclusions and whatever, so we’re obviously —
NDB: Sure!
CB: — not settling on anything final here, but it’s nice —
NDB: No.
CB: — to think out loud with you, and I think that’s a good place to leave that particular topic.
NDB: Okay.
CB: There’s only a couple of other very brief ones. Really quickly – Saturn-Neptune conjunctions and video technologies. You found the phantaskop premiere in 1847, an early video technology. I found the —
NDB: Yeah, moving picture technology. We wouldn’t say it’s video —
CB: Heading in that direction, yeah.
NDB: Yeah, moving picture.
CB: Moving picture. I found the Society of Motion Picture Engineers being founded in 1916, which set many important industry standards for video, videography, for cinematography. TV was popularized in the 1953 conjunction.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: 24 hour new —
NDB: Can I add something to ‘53? Because TV was popularized, but it also, we just barely touched on this. Because TV became a thing, movies had to change. So you also – first of all, you get things like 3D movies come out. You know, you start going to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon with 3D glasses. They need to have these different like, sort of gimmicks or what have you to get people into theaters. You’re getting like, the full color, you know, big screen epic movies and things of that nature. So it also changes the technology in that way and changes the way people consume cinema media as well as television. Sorry. Please continue.
CB: Right. For sure. We have the 24-hour news cycle really taking off and accelerating around the 1989 conjunction, and then finally in 2025, we have the pretty much accomplishment of lifelike, indistinguishable from reality artificially generated video, artificial intelligence generated video, that’s happening right now. There’s probably many other things that we’ve like, left out or other connections or even like, precursors. Like, there’s probably some instances of this that go before the 1800s and are just like, earlier, more technologically basic versions of the underlying principle —
NDB: Right.
CB: — here, but part of the principle is like, a blurring of what’s real and what’s not real, and the ability to be immersed in a artificial, I don’t know, like, presentation of some sort. So that would be an interesting thread to try to pick up and study further in history.
NDB: Yeah. Indeed.
CB: Indeed. All right. The last two things I’ll mention is just there’s a recurring theme of either a problem that is set up under one conjunction that is then resolved one cycle later – so for example, that schism that happened in the year 484 which is then resolved exactly one cycle later in the year 519. Or alternatively, you have sometimes an issue that is set up under one conjunction that reaches its conclusion in some sense and takes the next step one cycle later, such as for example the Visigoth migration to Roman lands in 376, and then eventually the Visigoths sacking Rome one cycle after that in 410. So —
NDB: Right.
CB: — those are just two instances of that, but it’s part of a broader theme that people should think about where sometimes a conjunction just sets up a sequence of events that will play out at either the next conjunction or at subsequent conjunctions over the long ages in the future.
NDB: Yeah. Another great example, of course, is Bolshevik Revolution, death of Stalin, end of Soviet Union – those kinds of things that we covered. It occurs to me —
CB: Right.
NDB: — I opened my Portugal file and realized there were a couple of entries that I really should have mentioned that I just wanna say very quickly.
In 1917 in the middle of the war, of course, Portugal wasn’t in the war. But there was what was called the Apparition at Fatima. These children said they saw an angel, and there were like, I think five or six sightings of this angel by these children, and it became this big sort of story and people would make pilgrimages to Fatima. And it became this kind of, you know, religious media event, so that would have been really good to throw in with some of the things we were talking about. I’m sorry I left that out.
And the other thing – when you were talking about explorers, I forgot of course, Bartolomeu Dias first sailed just by me here in the – he was the first European to sail by the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 close to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction around that time. So yeah. Just, you know, a couple of little straggling additions that I wish I’d made. I guess we’re not gonna get to the kings of France, but there’s a whole lot of kings of France who died or were crowned during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. We kept those out, but I think we don’t have time for them, do we?
CB: My friend, I have reached the limits of my abilities.
NDB: Fair enough.
CB: I appreciate your dedication to the science, to the art, of astrology and to research.
NDB: Always!
CB: I think I need to pause for just a minute, and then we’ll —
NDB: Okay!
CB: — come back and do conclusions.
All right, my friend. This is it. We have done it. We have reached the end of this incredible research project. It has been an intense two weeks of research that we’ve been working on this, and somehow we’ve done it. We’ve reached the end of our journey of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. How are you feeling?
NDB: I’m feeling pretty good! Yeah, there’s a lot we’re leaving on the cutting room floor, but of course your patrons can enjoy that for their well-spent money supporting your show when they read the document. But yeah, I mean, that’s always gonna be the case. We did a lot of work so that we could at least, you know, offer some of it in a brief eight-hour summary of this two weeks extensive bit of research we’ve done. So yeah —
CB: Yeah. This has officially become the longest episode of The Astrology Podcast, I believe, because I think this is gonna be something like, eight hours unless —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — my brain is off and I’m off base. It’s like, nine o’clock here at night in Denver, and we started at, what? Like, 10:30? 11?
NDB: Yeah, we started…
CB: We were supposed to start originally at, we were supposed to start the call at 10:15 and record at 10:30, but we started late and I think we started at like, 10:45 or —
NDB: Quarter to 11?
CB: 11?
NDB: Yeah. Something like that.
CB: All right. So it’s been a long day, but it’s been fun, because it’s two… You know, us two friends after doing this intense period of research getting to share this with everybody and establish this new foundation of research for the astrological community. And I think it was worth it. I think we’ve seen once again this is like, something we keep seeing over and over again that history rhymes and echoes and repeats. And that’s something that’s really core to astrology that I am so incredibly fascinated by, that I love doing this and I love researching this. Because one of the things is like, two weeks ago, I had some general ideas I knew about like, a few earlier correlations, but I didn’t fully know what we were gonna find. And every time we do these historical episodes where we go back and we start researching stuff, I initially go into it sometimes with this sense of trepidation because I’m like, I don’t know what we’re gonna find. I don’t know if we’re gonna find enough correlations or if this is gonna be compelling enough. Because it’s like, this unexplored territory, but then we start finding stuff, and it starts getting really interesting and really exciting the further and further we go, because we start uncovering and realizing and finding through this empirical research what the astrological alignments actually mean, and seeing that this is not just like, something people are making up. That these things happen in history over and over again, and you can discover it through this type of empirical research, and I think that’s incredibly fascinating and incredibly interesting and fun to do.
NDB: Yeah. And yeah, I’ve been studying all this stuff for ages, and you know, a lot of it I knew. But of course, whenever I work on one of these episodes with you, I mean, we always just get to this other level of discovery that I could never arrive at on my own. And so I’m very grateful to you for that and to the other researchers and what they contributed. Yeah —
CB: Yeah, shout out to them. So —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — again to reiterate, like, shout out to Orla Connoly at OCAstrology on Twitter, who will soon have a website and I’ll link to that when that’s up. Shout out to Lindsey Turner; Lindsey did a bunch of amazing work, especially on the early Christian history and early Roman history that was great. Orla did a bunch of great work on like, the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, especially the discovery about the Boston settlement in 1630 was amazing. Orla’s also the one who discovered the 1809, all of the revolutions across the Americas and across the Spanish colonies. And then Sam Ogden did some amazing work on some of the different early Roman eras and helped me to understand and contextualize and remind me of certain things, like the year of the five emperors and the Roman civil war that took place as a result of that around that conjunction as well as a number of other things. So shout out to Lindsey at BadPastor.me, and shout out to Sam Ogden at BrotherMoonHealing.com. All three of them are amazing astrologers and great researchers, so thanks to them. And thanks to you, Nick. You are also an amazing astrologer and great researcher who is at NickDaganBestAstrologer.com. This one has been like, you were saying at one point as we were researching that you think this is one of our best, our greatest like, works, and I think you’re right that this one’s definitely ranking up there in terms of the past, you know, couple of years of these historical research episodes that we’ve done. Like, this one’s a new level.
NDB: Yeah. I hope we did the research justice. I’m so, you know, I think we did such a good job putting so much together. Yeah, this podcast is really just a sort of a good representation, a good summary of some of what we came up with, but obviously it’s such a vast subject that, yeah, you know, it’s worthy of further discussion.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s like, we did, we pushed it as far as we could in a relatively short period of time, of literally about two weeks or less, and just an intense burst of as much research as I could possibly do – that we could do – during that time where I just like, 24/7 eat, slept, and drank Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. And the huge like, output that you can get as a result of that sort of like, intense deep dive into a subject, I really love that. And I’m able to do that, once again to reiterate, because another shout out is to all the patrons that support this work. Because without them crowdfunding this, we literally would not be able to be able to do this type of research. So thank you to all the patrons that support my work through my page on Patreon.com. I really appreciate it, and yeah, I think it’s creating a new foundation in terms of astrological research in our community by being able to do episodes like this and dive so deeply into a subject.
NDB: Yeah. The PDF that, you know, you’ve compiled of all our research that we put together for this episode, all the stuff we did get a chance to talk about, all the stuff that I’m opining we didn’t, all of that is in that document. So anyone who isn’t a patron who enjoyed the episode and would like to have more information, yeah, you can support the podcast and have all of that at your fingertips. It’s a huge bonus. I mean, these PDFs that you offer your patrons have so much more than what we cover in the episodes. This time around it’s true, but it’s been true of the other ones as well. We never get to cover everything, even when we do eight hours.
CB: Right. Yeah. And it’s something you get access to at the very basic tier, basically, that I release to all patrons for I think it’s for like, yeah, for the lowest price. So you can get access to that by just signing up through my page on Patreon.com and finding the entry for this episode where you’ll find the PDF of this booklet that I’m gonna clean up and release when I release it to patrons.
So some other things to bring things full circle in terms of what we’ve come up with. We already did all of the review stuff, so that’s all evident; we don’t need to like, recapitulate like, the meaning of this at this point because it’s been summarized. But you know, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is now incoming this summer, and in the middle part of this year in 2025, and then again in early 2026. And it’s coming in really fast, and we’re gonna see the emergence – we’re gonna see the repetition – of a lot of themes that we’ve talked about today. That’s been a theme that’s come up a lot in resent episodes, especially on some of the retrogrades, where we’ve looked at like, Venus retrograde in history in January and we mentioned a bunch of things in passing that we’d noticed under previous Venus retrogrades in Aries. But then all of a sudden after we released that episode, some of those topics that we mentioned started coming up again, and we couldn’t have known that those were gonna come up again in the news, but because of the repetition of that planetary alignment, those things started happening in the news again. And then people were pointing them out to us and showing us and telling us about different stories that we had mentioned from history becoming relevant again in modern times. And that’s gonna happen and become especially prominent over the course of the next year, I believe, with this Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s forming in the sky right now.
NDB: Yeah. I’m expecting it.
CB: Yeah. So that’s gonna be one of the themes that we’re gonna need to do here and that we’d like some help with, actually, from the audience and from people watching this right now is we need help with two things. One of them is we did the best that we could in the past two weeks with intensely researching this subject, but I’m sure there’s a bunch of very interesting correlations of things that have happened in history under past Saturn-Neptune conjunctions that we overlooked or we missed or we didn’t get time to talk about or cover. So if you notice one of those, let us know especially in the comments below this video on YouTube, because that’s the best place to compile some of those where we can see them and where other people can see what’s been observed at this point as well. And then we can build up more of a library or database of interesting observations about past Saturn-Neptune conjunctions from history, and then perhaps we’ll do a followup based on some of those at some point in the future to continue to add to that research. So if you see an interesting thing that we missed, then you don’t have to like, yell at us, but like, respectfully let us know in the comments. We always appreciate that. So that’s part one of what we need help with, and then part two of what we need help with is if you notice an interesting thing happening in contemporary times in the news today over the course of the next year especially, but even over the course of the next I think two to three years between now and when this Saturn-Neptune conjunction ends when Saturn moves out of Aries, if you notice an interesting story, especially one we may have not seen yet, then also let us know in the comments below this video on YouTube. And that’ll help us to document the emergence and manifestation of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction archetype in the present time, and that’ll be another good thing that we can do so that at some point once it’s over maybe we can do an episode to look back and talk about like, how it ended up manifesting in retrospect.
NDB: Yeah. Maybe eventually we do like, DVD commentary style things on old episodes where we watch the episode but comment on the things we said; I don’t know.
CB: That would be hilarious. I would love that, because that’s already like, something I want to do going back and talking about previous ones. Like, even in our Venus retrograde episode from January, remember we recorded that on the day of Venus’s maximum elongation on like, January 10th. But like, already as soon as we recorded that, Venus retrograde stuff started happening that we couldn’t have anticipated practically speaking, and yet we had talked about in that episode. Like, you know, for example, I don’t think I knew that Conan O’Brien was gonna host the Oscars yet when we recorded that episode. But I happened to notice that he became really famous the first time in 1993 under that Venus retrograde in Aries, and I mentioned that because it was just a notable story that I happened to notice in the 1993 retrograde. And then all of a sudden, you know, we released the episode, and then it turns out that he’s hosting the Oscars, and then it turns out that the Oscars is actually taking place within 24 hours of Venus stationing retrograde in Aries. So that happened, and now he’s also, his Oscar hosting was so successful this year that they’ve just invited him back, so he’s gonna host the Oscars next year now as well. And he’s also being given the Mark Twain Award for like, comedy, I think later this month. So —
NDB: Good!
CB: — it was something that we happened to talk about because we noticed it as a historical repetition from 1993, but then after we released it when the Venus retrograde actually repeated again, he started coming up in the news. There’s gonna be similar things like that with Saturn-Neptune and things that we mentioned here that will come up again over the course of the next year especially, but even the next two to three years more broadly.
NDB: Yeah. No doubt about it.
CB: Yeah. So everyone —
NDB: Team Coco!
CB: Team Coco. So everyone in the audience can help us document that. There’s gonna be a vibe shift very soon, because at the end of this month, Neptune’s about to move into Aries, and then in two month’s time, it’s in May, I believe, Saturn moves into Aries.
NDB: Yeah, the last week of May. I think May 24th or so, Saturn moves into Aries. And that’s gonna be a big vibe shift when Saturn joins Neptune in Aries; that’s gonna be a big one.
CB: Right.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: I mean, I think – I mean, the Neptune ingress will also be a vibe shift because it happens within 24 hours of the solar eclipse in Aries as well. There’s just like —
NDB: Right.
CB: — a lot of Aries energy that’s building up right now.
NDB: Oh yeah. And the solar eclipse in Aries is at the degree where Venus and Mercury just stationed retrograde.
CB: In Aries, right. Yeah.
NDB: Yeah. Same degree! So it’s, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So stuff is building up. It’s gonna be interesting to follow and document. I mean, interesting hashtag astrologer good – there’s gonna be some interesting things from an astrological like, objective, intellectual standpoint. There’s gonna be some truly not great things from an experiential like, you know, we’re living in the middle of some crazy times type things from that vantage point of actually experiencing as humans what this is like. And there’s gonna be some very disheartening stuff at the same time as there have been for many people in the past who lived through these times when there was so much political instability as one of the very obvious recurring keywords throughout history. So we’re going into another one of those times. This is gonna be part of it. There’s other things that are also part of it, like the Uranus return to Gemini, the Pluto return to Aquarius, and so on and so forth. So lots of things coming up, and also lots of future research projects for us.
NDB: Yeah. The Saturn-Neptune, when you think about it, are at the midpoint of the Uranus-Pluto. You know, the Uranus-Pluto are in a trine, and then Saturn-Neptune are right in the middle. So it’s —
CB: Can you do that motion again with the hat? Hat motion? Yes. That is the Neptune hat; I like that.
NDB: There you go. All right. This mirror behind me looks like I’m already wearing a crown, so —
CB: That’s true.
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, it does. Yeah, I think the Saturn-Neptune’s sort of like, this fulcrum of all the outer planet activity happening this year. So all the more reason to be —
CB: I wanted to pull that up. We’re like, talking about it, but I could actually be showing it, and don’t they say in cinematography like, in movies like, “Show, don’t tell?”
NDB: That’s right.
CB: That’s what they say. All right, so this is now, but what we’re talking about is especially this summer when Saturn and Neptune —
NDB: The end of May. Yeah. Go to the end of – well, actually, but when Uranus goes in in June, then —
CB: When Saturn goes in especially. Well, yeah, when Uranus goes in, that’s why I was saying this summer – July.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. There we go. Let me put, see the Saturn-Neptune at the top. There we go. All right, so we have this is like, August. So July, August, though. Saturn and Neptune meet up at the beginning of Aries at like, zero and one degree of Aries, and like you were saying, they’re sextile Pluto, which is at like, one, two degrees of Aquarius. But they’re also sextile Uranus, which is at like, one-ish degrees of Gemini. So it forms this very interesting pattern with Saturn and Neptune at the midpoint between the Uranus-Pluto trine.
NDB: Yeah. And then Mars is gonna be opposite the Saturn-Neptune like, a week earlier than that or so, first or second week of August. So you’re also gonna have Mars temporarily —
CB: That’s fun.
NDB: — in that mix as well. Yeah, that looks like fun.
CB: Yeah —
NDB: That’s pretty close to my solar return. Happy birthday, Nick!
CB: Well, that’s a fun…
NDB: And yeah, as I enter what is historically always been the worst years of my life in profection years for some reason!
CB: What is – what profection?
NDB: It’s the 10th house, Taurus profection. For some reason —
CB: Okay.
NDB: — when I take stock, I’m like, oh yeah, yeah, those are the three worst years of my life, the three times I’ve had that so far.
CB: Right.
NDB: I’m hoping to break the cycle now, but who knows.
CB: Well, and you’re Saturn in Aries. You’re gonna be Saturn returning as well, right?
NDB: Yeah. That’s a little ways away, because my Saturn’s in late Aries. I’m still —
CB: My friend, when that goes into Aries, you are Saturn returning.
NDB: No, I get it! I mean, yes. In the big picture, yes I am. Yes. This is true.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: But hey, but you know, this year has been the Saturn return of when I first started reading astrology books, so – which wasn’t too long before Saturn went into Aries last time either.
CB: Nice. Your 9th house. Good times.
NDB: Good times.
CB: So yeah, August 9th, that looks rough. We’ll pay close attention to that, especially as it gets closer when that Mars opposition at one degree of Libra hits the Saturn-Neptune conjunction at one Aries, and everything else going in at the time. Lots of stuff coming up. Let me just show one more time really quickly our graph for Saturn-Neptune, designed by Madeline DeCotes who – again, shout out to her from Honeycomb.co. So this just shows some of the dates involved and just that wave of like, Saturn-Neptune coming in right in the middle of this year and especially around the time of this station. Like, the station of those two planets this summer is gonna be super crucial and important because planetary stations always act as exclamation marks next to planets and heighten whatever alignments they’re involved in. So Neptune’s gonna station on the 4th of July in Aries, and then Saturn will station right after that on July 13th. And that’s gonna be around the point that they get the closest that they’re gonna get to each other, and that’s gonna be a crucial turning point for whatever that conjunction is about this year.
Then they’re gonna retrograde out and go back into Pisces for a brief period in the fall, and then they’re gonna come roaring back early next year into Aries in late January and early to mid February, and then eventually complete their exact conjunction, which is gonna be the most intense part around February 20th of 2026. So that is what we are looking at is the two most intense periods are ahead of us over the course of the next 12 months. And that is the reason why I wanted to do this episode with you today over the past two weeks, because I wanted to understand and anticipate better some of the things, some of the themes that we can anticipate. And I think now we have a much better idea of some of those things that are coming up. I will say that one area – you know, we ended up focusing more on geopolitical issues pertaining to like, nations and dynasties and countries and things like that because those were some of the most obvious and striking things that have happened over the past few centuries, and they’re one of the things that you can also track the easiest in terms of the long term going back 2,000 years where dates start to get a lot more sketchy, but you can still kind of like, time the rise and fall of empires. And this alignment keeps coming up in that context. So there are some areas that we didn’t get into as much as we could have that bear further research and in which there’s probably tons of stuff that we didn’t get to, like especially in the arts. I think we touched on a little bit and I know you did a bunch of research that we didn’t quite get to, but that’s one area that bears a lot more exploration.
NDB: Can I just say one arts one? Because this is hilarious —
CB: Sure.
NDB: In 1952, John Cage premiered his composition Four Minutes and 33 Seconds. Do you know what that composition is?
CB: No.
NDB: It’s a composition – there’s – it’s just four minutes and 33 seconds of whatever sounds happen to happen in that four minutes and 33 seconds. So like, people will go into an auditorium to hear this piece, and the pianist will sit at the piano, perhaps, but won’t play. And everyone will just sit there for four minutes and 33 seconds, and if someone sneezes or if you hear a car going by outside, that’s the piece of music. I just, you know, when I realized, oh yeah, that’s the year he premiered that one. Patrick and I have often joked about that piece of music, and of course just knowing it’s a Saturn-Neptune piece of music is just – yeah, it’s the piece of music that isn’t a piece of music. It’s kind of notorious in those circles. Yeah, and he —
CB: I like that.
NDB: Yeah, yeah. We had other interesting things like the Dada soirees at Cabaret Voltaire during the First World War.
CB: Yeah. I think that’s really important that the Dada movement really centered around the 1917 conjunction seemed really striking.
NDB: Yeah. And it was – I mean, it was an arts movement, but it was absolutely a protest against the war. It was artists from both sides of the warring countries meeting up in Zurich and creating this wonderfully absurd artform. You know, you wouldn’t have things like Monty Python had it not been for these Dadaists. That’s a pretty easy statement to make, I think. You know. I mean, they really are sort of like, just the idea of being that absurd. You know, it’s not like they invented absurdity in art, but going to that level. Because what the war was such a senseless war going on, there was no point in making art that had meaning, because everything was so meaningless – that was kind of the impetus and therefore like, go full, you know, really lean into the meaninglessness of it all and make something that’s completely absurd and makes no sense, because that’s a reflection of the times. But this kind of philosophy would lead into other artistic movements after the war, like surrealism, you know? Just the idea of subverting truth or reality to that extent. You know, these ideas perpetuate and snowball and become other things, so, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: There’s all kinds of —
CB: One of my favorites that you pointed out to me is that Picasso was born on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1881, and especially his exploration and like, innovation with cubism in the 20th century is like, an interesting example of a Saturn-Neptune type artist.
NDB: Yeah. And Georges Braque who was called the founder of cubism also had the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Da Vinci had the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. At least like, copresent in the sign, less than 15 degrees apart in Libra. So yeah, there are —
CB: That’s a really interesting one, because of his merging of like, arts and sciences —
NDB: Science, yeah.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too. So yeah, there’s all kinds of things relating to the arts that are worth exploring. And who knows, maybe would be a whole episode in and of themselves. And then yeah, there were, you know, we certainly covered Russia. And I think when I was trying to convince you to do this episode, my mind was largely on Russia. And obviously it’s just like, one fraction of this, because in researching this program, I’ve really come to understand how Saturn-Neptune impacts the thousand-plus year history of France, you know, certainly the history of Mexico, not to mention the rest of Latin America. And you know, even like the material, like I said, that you were introducing about the Visigoths. And I’m thinking, well, you know, those are the ancestors of the Spaniards who were the ancestors of, you know, at least in part of Latin Americans, and I’m seeing, you know, like, in some way it’s like the same people over centuries to some degree.
So there’s also just interesting ways that we’ve linked this all up that I’m gonna be thinking about for quite some time to come.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we’ve laid a good foundation for future research, and hopefully both you and I will continue that research and continue to expand it and others will also be inspired to like, take up the baton and pursue this research as well at the same time and eventually, you know, stand on our shoulders and exceed what we’ve done here as well.
you know, one of the things is my – we got into a thing like, earlier in this episode where about the what The Communist Manifesto and I was asking you to describe it, because like, my area of specialty is ancient history, and I spent most of my adult life studying ancient Roman and Egyptian and other Mediterranean histories from 2,000 years ago to specialise in Hellenistic astrology, which is my like, chosen field that I chose to really, you know, develop and write a book about and everything else. So I’ve been catching up over the course of the past, I don’t know what it is, like, five to 10 years on modern history and some of these things. And in doing so, I’ve been really glad that I’m able oftentimes to lean on you for that, because that’s your area of speciality is more recent history especially over the past few centuries. So in instances like that, I’m truly grateful that I’ve been able to lean on you for episodes like this where, you know, I can ask you questions about that or lean on your specialities more in my aras of like, weakness.
NDB: Yeah, that’s the wonderful thing about our friendship. We’ve known each other for 20 years this month! It was 20 years ago this month that we first met, Chris – it just —
CB: Oh wow.
NDB: — occurred to me.
CB: Yeah. Well, like —
NDB: It was some time in March of 2005. Well, at NORWAC we met in person. That was in May. But we —
CB: In person, yeah.
NDB: — first became aware of each other and started talking online in March of 2005.
CB: Yeah, on MySpace.
NDB: Yeah. And I mean, that’s what’s funny over the course of these 20 years of friendship, because yeah, you were the ancient history guy; I’m the modern history guy. But I’ve certainly, I’ve also gone further and further towards your area of expertise. Your —
CB: Right.
NDB: — you know, you’re occupying mine, and even in terms of the astrology we do, that’s also merging in this really interesting way.
CB: Right. We’ve met in the middle.
NDB: Yeah, we’re a lot more like each other today than we were when we met 20 years ago when we were, you know, had these very sort of distinct areas that we occupied quite strictly, so. Yeah. Here’s to another 20 years, Chris!
CB: Yeah, all right! I love it. Yeah. I wonder if this is like, the exact day of an anniversary or something; it’s pretty close. Like, we’re pretty…
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Close to something.
NDB: Within a week or two.
CB: All right. I love it.
NDB: Fantastic. It looks like my dog is just ready to go – okay. She’s being let out; I don’t need to worry about her. But all the same, thank you, Chris.
CB: Yeah. Thank you, Nick. This has been amazing. It’s been great collaborating on this research. Great work. I definitely wanna encourage people to check out your website, which is NickDaganBestAstrologer.com. You offer consultations. You have some of your databases for sale, which are incredible databases which you can plug into Solar Fire in order to study and search for charts related to like, American history, Canadian history, UK history, and many other things.
NDB: Yeah. And of course, there’s Nechepso software which will be going out for sale May 28th, and this is our new astrology software I’ve made with John Streaker and Patrick Watson. And my database is gonna be included in that as well. And we’ll be adding features to it all the time, but it’s already really incredible and I hope people check it out when it comes out.
CB: Nice. Awesome. Cool. All right, buddy. Thank you for joining me.
NDB: Thank you.
CB: All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
[END CREDITS]
Special thanks to the patrons on my Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, and Berlynn West.
People often ask me if I’m available for consultations, but unfortunately I’m not right now because the podcast takes up so much of my time. However, I did create a consultations page on The Astrology Podcast website that has a list of astrologers that I recommend for astrological consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
Finally, shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening May 22nd through the 26th, 2025. Their in-person conference is sold out, but you can still register to get a virtual ticket where they’re gonna stream the conference simultaneously online in May, and you can register for that now through their website at NORWAC.net.