The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 484, titled:
April Astrology Forecast 2025
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on April 1, 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 Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for April of 2025. Hey Austin, thanks for joining me.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. Thank you —
CB: Welcome —
AC: — for inviting – thank you for having me.
CB: Yes. For extending you this invitation to talk about the past and the present and the future. We are back again for another really exciting episode of The Astrology Podcast and our monthly forecasts episodes. We’re gonna spend the first hour of this episode approximately talking about news and events that have happened over the past four weeks since we recorded our last forecast. Then in the second half of this episode, we’re gonna jump forward to looking at the astrology of the next four weeks and talking about the planetary alignments in April of 2025 and making some statements and predictions about how things are gonna go over the course of the next month.So as always, you can if you wanna skip the news section, just look for the timestamps either below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website to jump forward to the forecast section.
Before we get started with the news segment, I wanted to do just a very quick overview of the astrology of April to give you a preview of what we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode.
All right, so first things first – we are coming off of eclipse season still as we open this episode. We are recording this on, what is it, Monday, March 31st, 2025, starting at 12:50 PM in Denver, Colorado. And a solar eclipse in Aries, the second eclipse in eclipse season, just took place on the 29th. So we’re actually still coming off of that energy for the entire first week of April, and there’s still gonna be some major beginnings and endings still as we open the month.
Here’s the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month versus how far they’ll get through the signs of the zodiac by the end of the month. Here’s the planetary aspects calendar that was designed by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.com, and this shows some of the different aspects that go exact this month, some of the different stations, and when those aspects will peak in intensity, as well as some of the sign changes.
Finally, here’s our planetary alignments calendar which shows the major ingresses and stations and lunations this month. So we open April with a big outer planet alignment, which is a Saturn-Uranus sextile which goes exact on April 4th. Then on the 6th, Mercury finally stations direct and starts to end its three-week-long retrograde period. The same day, Venus retrogrades into and conjoins Saturn in Pisces, and then Venus, which is slowing down at the beginning of the month, eventually stations direct in Pisces itself on the 12th of April, ending its 40-day-long retrograde period. The same day, there’s a Full Moon in the sign of Libra on the 12th. Then the following week, Mercury finally departs from Pisces and moves into the sign of Aries on the 16th, returning back to the sign that it originally retrograded in back in March.
The next day, Mercury conjoins Neptune at the beginning of Pisces since Neptune recently changed signs at the end of March and moved into Aries, and that takes place on the 17th. Then on the 18th, Mars finally departs from Cancer where it had stationed direct in February, and Mars finally moves into the sign of Leo. After that, the Sun moves into Taurus on the 19th. Then it squares Mars on the 20th. We get a Sun-Pluto square on the 23rd, a Venus-Saturn conjunction on the 24th, a really tough looking, intense Mars-Pluto opposition around the 26th, and that’s gonna be our most difficult aspect of the month. That’s followed the next day by a New Moon in Taurus on the 29th – or sorry, 27th – followed eventually by Venus departing from Pisces and returning to Aries on the very last day of the month on April 30th.
So that’s some of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. But first things first. Let’s do some review and let’s talk about some news and events that have happened since our last forecast episode. Austin, you and I talked a lot about how we expected ever since like, the year ahead forecast for this to be a really big and eventful month, and I feel like it did not disappoint in terms of just the amount of different events that happened around the world and some of the weightiness of some of those events. I tried to write as many notes as I could during the course of the month, but my document became like, super large in terms of trying to track everything. Were you following everything pretty closely as well this month as it was all going on?
AC: As much as I could. I, being part of the world and having my chart caught up in these, was subject to some of the chaotic, merry-go-round, rollercoaster energy. But I would check in to see if there was a sufficient degree of chaos and with a touch of lunacy, which is what I expected, and I wasn’t disappointed. You know, sometimes we have an expectation and it looks like it’s not gonna happen, and so you’re glued to it to see, you know, whether you need to learn something because you were wrong, or it just came a day later. This month did not leave me feeling very insecure. Which was nice! I had enough going on. I didn’t need that too.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. So just to refresh people, here’s the planetary alignments calendar from March. And the main things were like, you know, Venus stationed retrograde on March 1st in Aries. We had the Virgo eclipse take place on the 14th of March, and the next day, Mercury stationed retrograde in Aries. And then just more recently we had the Aries solar eclipse on the 29th, followed by Neptune moving into Aries on the 30th. So that’s like, the context of some of the news stories. And a lot of them clustered around those like, three or four major alignments this month in pretty crazy and pretty striking ways. So I think we’ll go through chronologically, roughly, in terms of news stories. I did wanna say obviously we can’t cover everything. I’m gonna cover some of the top stories here really briefly, but I actually cut a bunch of smaller news stories out, especially ones related to like, Mercury retrograde and Venus retrograde, and I put those in a separate news episode for patrons that I just released yesterday. But here we’re gonna hit some of the top stories, especially major geopolitical ones and international ones and things like that as well as ones that pertain to the US, which is our primary audience.
All right, so first news story chronologically was right after we recorded our last forecast episode towards the end of February, on February 28th, the president of Ukraine, President Zelenskyy, met with President Trump in the Oval Office. And this is like, right when Venus was slowing down and stationing retrograde. And it was this huge fiasco where Trump and especially Vice President Vance ended up like, yelling at Zelenskyy and sort of ending up ambushing him where they started insulting like, the way he dressed and it ended up being a low point in terms of American diplomacy and clearly a fraying if not a shattering of the alliance between the US and Ukraine, which had been so much of the focus of the past few years after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Subsequent to that, there was a suspension of military aid as well as intelligence on the part of the United States toward Ukraine. And this really reminded me how in 2023 when Venus went retrograde in Leo, there was a bunch of like, celebrity breakups and there was some tabloids that were calling that the summer of breakups or the summer of celebrity splits. But this Venus retrograde, what we were seeing with that motion where Venus retrogrades and then conjoins the Sun but then there’s a wrenching motion where Venus pulls away from the Sun is we were seeing the splitting apart or the breaking up of a number of alliances, both in terms of here between the US and Ukraine but then also elsewhere with like, the US and Canada, the US and Europe and other things like that. And that was one of the major things I really noticed that fell right at the beginning of this Venus retrograde.
AC: Yeah. I mean, that meeting was within I believe one day of the Venus station on the 1st, and then the official cancellation of the aid, I believe, was March 3rd. So that was right on the station. And as we’ve talked about, certainly Venus is about relationships which include the romantic and the friendship. But, you know, a big part of Venus for nationstates is diplomacy, right? And so we have Venus stationing retrograde and in an impatient and warlike sign. And so we kind of have the opposite of diplomacy. Instead of coming together to try to find – or the result of coming together and like, smoothing over differences or finding common ground, you have a worse relationship than before the meeting. Right? It’s like, the opposite. And we have, there are a number of things that happened this month that I think could be considered the opposite of diplomacy where a peace was turned into a not-peace, or a situation – a truce decayed, or you know, there was a meaningful deterioration of relationship rather than a coming together, which is very standard for Venus retrogrades.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And like I said, it just goes back to I think that astronomical motion where when Venus is direct and it conjoins the Sun at the cazimi, they’re both moving together like, in tandem, like two people that are walking in the same direction. But when Venus goes retrograde, it changes directions and conjoins the Sun, and it meets up with the Sun, but then there’s this wrenching motion where they both end up going completely separate ways. And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing here.
AC: Yeah. And so if we were to describe two people doing that, we would say they slam into each other and then rip apart, which is a pretty good description of that meeting as well as a number of other things this month.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So the implications of that are still playing out, so we’ll still see how that goes. I mean, one of the bizarre then things that relationships that it did seem to like, then reignite was some sort of more positive relationship between the US and Russia is the other thing that a lot of the reporting was about early in the month after that meeting because it seemed to be in some ways almost like, a gift to Russia in different ways. So we’ll see how that plays out. But that was one of the major things that happened at the very beginning of the month.
AC: Yeah. And another relational change that that triggered was that a lot of European nations offered much more than they had before to Ukraine to make up for the United States’ cessation of aid, and also began to talk very seriously about reversing a long-held policy of keeping the military budgets below X percent. So there’s a reversal of a very Mars-ruled thing – military budgets – that was triggered by a Venus – relational – thing, right? So a lot of —
CB: Right.
AC: — implications, all very Venus retrograde in a Mars-ruled sign. It’s all happening in Mars’s place, right? It wasn’t, the United States wasn’t sending Ukraine bundles of flowers, right, it was military aid and assistance, right. So the gift was a Mars thing, and so we have a cascade of positional reversals around these Mars-ruled things and in accord with martial matters. So yeah, really interesting, lots of implications. Very astrology.
CB: Yeah. Very astrology. All right, so we’ll come back to some of that with other geopolitical things soon. One of the only like, I don’t know, celebrity or other news stories that I’m gonna mention was that the Oscars happened on March 2nd, and this is the day after the Venus retrograde station. So I already did a whole separate episode at the beginning of the month talking about this, so I’m not gonna cover it in detail here. But I just wanted to reiterate some of the highlights because they were so very much tied in with the Venus retrograde and such good examples of it, as we anticipate, as we expected. Because one of the things when I did a Venus retrograde episode about Venus retrograde in Aries that we anticipated is that Nick Dagan Best and I found that this Venus retrograde in Aries that repeats every eight years had coincided with the very first Oscars awards ceremony as well as a number of important firsts and turning points in the history of the Oscars, like the first time it was televised, the first time it was on radio. So there was a bunch of firsts basically during this Oscars as well, which is one of the things that I was really impressed by from an astrological standpoint. But it was also, since it was Venus retrograde, sometimes there’s snafus as well. And that indeed did happen in this one where one of the firsts is that it was streamed live on Hulu for the first time on a streaming service, so that was one of their big firsts. But then like, 90 percent of the way into the streaming of the awards, I was watching it and I was streaming it through Hulu, and they were about to announce Best Actress, and then all of a sudden the stream cut out for everybody that was watching the streaming service and you didn’t end up getting to see either the Best Actress award or the final award for like, Best Movie. So it was this huge kind of like, debacle the first time they were doing a streaming service like that, which was pretty incredible.
But later I ended up, you know, having to go to like, Twitter and other places to find out what happened or who won at the end, and it turned out that the movie Anora won Best Picture, and the lead actress in Anora, Mikey Madison, won for Best Actress. And this was also really striking as a Venus retrograde thing, because it was a movie that was centered on a sex worker. And so when they all went up on stage and like, accepted the awards, one of the things they did was to give a shout out to the sex worker community which they had consulted with during the course of the film. And there had been a history of similar things like that under this Venus retrograde in Aries in previous eras where sometimes the movie that wins is a little like, risque or like, pushing boundaries or other things like that, which I think, you know, was part of that here.
AC: And so I haven’t seen Anora. From what I understand, and feel free to correct me, it’s quite literally a woman’s harrowing journey through the underworld, which is the shape of the Inanna myth which so often describes lived and narrative trajectories through Venus retrogrades.
CB: Yeah, that was definitely part of it. Like, dealing with some like, Russian sort of figures and some guys that were like, bodyguards or like, maybe connected with the mafia; it wasn’t really clear. But yeah, there was certainly an element of that during the course of this and like, her going through a journey during the course of the movie. Yeah, so it’s pretty striking, and Mikey Madison has the Sun and Jupiter, I believe, in early Aries, so Venus slowed down and stationed like, right on top of those when she got the award, which was pretty incredible.
AC: That’s nice.
CB: But there was tons of other firsts, as well, so the shortlist is, like I said, first time it was live streamed on Hulu. It was the first nomination and win for the country of Brazil. It was the first Latvian film to win an Oscar. The first time a trans actress was nominated for Best Actress. The first Black man to win the award for Best Costume. The first indigenous filmmaker from North America to be nominated for an Oscar. And then finally for the documentary, it was the first time a Palestinian had won an Oscar for a joint documentary with an Israeli. And then with that one, I noticed later in the month since that happened – the win happened – on the Venus retrograde station, there was another event at the cazimi halfway through the Venus retrograde cycle where the Palestinian who won the Oscar was later attacked by settlers in the West Bank and arrested like, right on the Venus cazimi later in the month. And the Academy and 600 members ended up issuing a statement about it around that time as well, and it’s still ongoing and playing out, but we’ll see if anything else happens closer to the direct station of Venus in relation to that as well.
AC: Okay. Is the person okay? Are they like, I mean —
CB: It looked – I saw a video just yesterday that I think he was released. He looked like he was super beat up and like —
AC: Right.
CB: He still had blood on his clothes and stuff like that, so I don’t know what kind of shape he’s in because he was like, limping and stuff, but —
AC: So not great, but like, alive and not in captivity or something.
CB: Yeah. Currently.
AC: Okay.
CB: So we’ll see how that goes. All right, so that’s all I wanted to say about the Oscars just because I had done a broader overview of that.
Other things that started happening early in the month is that in relation to like, Mars still recently stationing in Cancer, the economy started becoming increasingly unstable early in the month, largely due to the tariffs and the things like that that were happening with Mars in Cancer, as well as due to people kept, like, the news reports and the financial analysis kept also talking about just the erraticness of sometimes the tariffs were on, and then all of a sudden they were taken off, and then they were applied again, and then they were off. And a lot of it centered around not just the tariffs but also Trump’s sort of erraticness in implementation of some of those policies, which often really invoked like, his Sun-Uranus conjunction with his Sun ruling the Ascendant and just how he has that erratic like, Uranian quality. Anf stocks were basically just getting killed early in the month. They started to come back mid-month, but then they were down again by the end of the month so that it ended up being the worst month for the stock market since 2022 as of the close of March on Friday. And right now, everyone’s waiting for tomorrow for April 2nd, actually, two days from now where Trump supposedly has like, a whole range of other tariffs that are supposed to go into place that he’s calling “Liberation Day.” And a lot of stocks are already starting to be sold off last Friday in anticipation of that, because it’s anticipated that just like last month it’s gonna continue to destabilize the economy and raise fears of like, a recession or potentially something worse.
AC: Yeah. And that’s, in addition to Trump’s natal chaos signature, you know, we expected this sort of back and forth. You know, and chaos is a good word, but to be more specific, it’s, you know, we talked about what the planets are actually doing this month and for a good chunk of April, which is this back and forth. This back and forth and back and forth. And you think it’s going this way, but actually it’s going this way, and then there’s, you know, reversing reversals that are themselves maybe subject to reversal. And that sort of unpredictability unsettles markets; it makes people very nervous about doing business. And that’s different than just a bad happens and then things correct to adjust to the bad. This is a like, maybe a bad happens, maybe it didn’t, maybe it does, maybe I adjusted to a thing that’s not happening, and you know, that’s the nature of the chaos, which the markets hate. And we’re still in that, as we are podcasting now, and that continues through a lot of the next month. As we said at the end of last month, although the calendar month ended, the period of time we were describing does not end on March 31st. It’s gonna take a lot of April to actually enter what looks different in the news and out the window.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and I was watching one like, analyst talk about how he’s saying like, a recession is a loss of confidence in the economy and in the stock market. And that notion of like, a loss of confidence in something, if that’s what it takes for things to have stability or even growth as we head into some of the chaotic, you know, upcoming alignments, including like, Uranus going into Gemini and Saturn going into Aries and some of that other stuff just sounds like that we’re not going into a period of like, super stability I don’t think is something that we’ve been anticipating for like, the next little while.
AC: No. No, this is – we did talk a lot about March-April as a chaos party to kick off the year. But it’s not the, yeah, it’s not the only portion where there are laughing gremlins in full, you know, clown-style grease paint everywhere. There’s lots of little chaos parties to come.
CB: For sure. All right, so the next major astrological thing that happened that a bunch of stories clustered around was the first eclipse happened, which was a lunar eclipse in the sign of Virgo on the 14th. And this was actually visible across North America. So you had talked about, in connection with like, some of the things we saw last year sometimes about the fall of a leader or sometimes in some instances last year we saw literal assassinations of like, leaders. And there was one right away, basically, on the day of the eclipse where the head of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was killed on March 14th right on the day of the eclipse. And this is – he was evidently killed by the Iraqi security forces in partnership with the United States. So I thought that was really striking, like, right away that sometimes we see that on eclipses.
AC: Yeah. Well, that, you know, symbolically in a lot of texts and systems and thinking, like, the Sun and the Moon are the royalty of the sky because they’re much bigger and brighter, and their partial or total eclipse has been connected to the destruction of leaders for a long time. And especially this part of the eclipse cycle that we’ve been in for a little bit is especially assassinate-y.
Quick question, and this – yeah – do you know – I’m struck by do you know if the Islamic State has a Moon on its flag or heraldry?
CB: I don’t remember if they do or not.
AC: I’m just – you know, because it was a lunar eclipse; it makes me think of the quite famous lunar eclipse just before the decisive battle between Alexander and Darius where Persia had a big Moon on its flag and there was a lunar eclipse the night before the battle. And then it was the decisive defeat of Persian forces by the Macedonians. Yet there shortly like, right before that, not an assassination but also that same taking down the head, the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested and served an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, and we saw that type of symbolic decapitation during some of the previous instances in this eclipse cycle where a head of state or a former head of state was internationally condemned and arrested or issued a warrant. Oh, and the president of Somalia or maybe it’s prime minister, I apologize if I got the title wrong, survived an assassination attempt right next to the eclipse as well, the lunar eclipse.
CB: Okay. Yeah. Well and later in the month just a few days ago near the Aries eclipse, there was these videos going around on social media about one of Putin’s limos exploding near one of his headquarters. I’m having trouble like, verifying that this is actually legit, because most major news sources aren’t reporting on it, and there’s some possibility that this is actually not – that there’s something weird about it or something not legit. So don’t – I wanna be careful about reporting it too much, but it was striking because Zelenskyy just a few days earlier had surprisingly said something like that Putin would die soon, and that was already kind of like, a weird headline. But then that happened like, a few days later around the second eclipse.
AC: Yeah, or there was a lot of reporting that not just a limo but I believe it was a limo that was specifically designed for secure transportation of very important people and was a very expensive piece of machinery exploded and was on fire, and it was outside of I believe it was the FSB headquarters.
CB: I mean, that’s what —
AC: That’s what was reported. I don’t know that.
CB: That was the rumor.
AC: Right.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Well, that’s what was reported. And so that at least brings, that certainly brings up the idea of assassination, whether it is falsely bringing it up or, you know, bringing it up for some concealed purpose, I certainly don’t know. But it’s more assassination-themed things right next to eclipses.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So good call to you on that last month. Moving on —
AC: Thank you.
CB: — also on the eclipse, on March 15th, the US began a large-scale set of strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, and this was like, right after the Virgo eclipse within 24 hours of it. So this was purportedly due to attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea that the Houthis have been carrying out over the past year or two, so much so that many ships had been recently having to go all the way around Africa and avoiding the Red Sea altogether due to being boarded or being shot at. So but Trump also said that it was supposed to issue or send a message to Iran, which is one of main supporters and backers of the Houthis. And these airstrikes are still ongoing now two weeks later. One interesting like, tidbit I noticed when I did the Saturn-Neptune research this month – I did a whole research episode on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history – but I found that Yemen was actually unified under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1989 and 1990; it used to be two, like, separate countries, but they got merged into one exactly one Saturn-Neptune cycle ago. So it’s interesting that the country has become so prominent again under this current Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
AC: Yeah. Well, and they’ve been – I believe the Houthis are a separate force from the primary Yemeni government that they’re trying – there’s a lot of determination to turn them back into two countries.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s a good point; that’s really relevant. So —
AC: Right, the recurrence of the Saturn-Neptune transit is quite meaningfully testing the unity that occurred during the first – during the last – Saturn-Neptune conjunction might be a way to put it.
CB: Good way to put it. So adjacent to that, one of the biggest like, news stories and sort of fiascos of the month was connected to that whereas the leaders of the United States, several top-level leaders, were like, preparing for this strike on the Houthis in Yemen, they apparently had like, a private chat on their phones using the Signal app, which is just a texting app. And a reporter from The Atlantic was accidentally added to the chat and ended up being privy to like, their planning for this military operation for their war planning essentially. And this is the editor of The Atlantic magazine, whose name is Jeffrey Goldberg, he was added on March 11th just days before the eclipse and as Mercury was slowing down to station retrograde. And he thought it was fake, basically. Like, he thought he was being – that this was like, somebody was playing him or it was some foreign intelligence service that was trying to trick him or something like that. Except they outlined like, the exact day and time when they were going to start dropping bombs. And it wasn’t until he waited until that moment and he was looking at his phone and refreshing the news on Twitter, and then he saw that bombs started being dropped on Yemen at the exact moment that this chat had said. And then all of a sudden, he realized that it was legit and he had been added to a private discussion with top-level leaders, including like, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, like, Rubio or one of his people was there and like, basically every other top-level person besides Trump, who’s the only major person that wasn’t in the chat.
And so what was interesting about this is his realization, then, if that happened on March 15th, then he realized it the day that Mercury stationed retrograde. And it’s such a classic like, Mercury retrograde type thing where we always talk about like, miscommunication and things like that with Mercury retrograde. But on such a high level that it’s gonna become like, top 10 like, biggest times in history that Mercury went retrograde and something really goofy happened.
And so he ended up publishing the story a couple weeks later the day of the Mercury cazimi on March 24th or within 24 hours of the Mercury cazimi, and it ended up being just this huge debacle. And one of the things that I thought was funny is I kept seeing people use the word “clowns” to describe this. Like, some of the phrases I wrote down was “unbelievable clowns,” “what a bunch of clowns,” and “clown show.” And I thought this was hilarious because Austin, you kept talking about this period in March being clownmageddon or the gathering of the juggalos, and I remember this vividly because in December when we were preparing for the year ahead forecast, like, I wasn’t super on board with that. I kept wanting to like, workshop like, better – surely there’s a better way to describe this than like, clownmageddon. But then I laughed like, all month as people kept using the word “clowns” to like, describe what was happening during this Mercury retrograde. And again, I have to give it to you there.
AC: Thank you. I was getting very strong clown-based imagery! It just seemed like —
CB: I don’t know how you do it.
AC: Things pop into my head.
CB: Yeah. This is your Pisces power. It’s not just a way of words, but it’s an intuitive sense of the sometimes like, clown-like dynamics and the ability to call it like you see it, and sometimes, you know, you see clowns.
AC: You just gotta close your eyes. You know, remove all of the physical sensations from your mind. And hear the circus music, Chris.
CB: Yeah. It’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. I’m in awe.
AC: Thank you.
CB: I’m in awe. So this was like, a huge debacle, and it’s like, people are still talking about it. It was made worse because of the precedent of like, the Clinton email scandal from years ago and how much Republicans have tried to blow that up into this huge thing and make it this huge thing, and then all of a sudden, this makes that look like, tame by comparison. And then it was actually made worse because initially – and still, actually – they ended up trying to deny it. They ended up just flat out denying it or starting to like, question the political allegiances of the reporter, which didn’t make any sense because then that was even dumber if he was a Democrat or something to add him to your group chat where you’re planning a military operation. And it made it so that like, if one of the things that was concerning was like, if they lie about something that was a fuck-up that was this obvious, then what happens if something really big happens that really requires accountability? So that was one of the broader issues. And then the other big issue that was also sometimes overlooked was that the messages in the Signal chat were set to erase instead of being kept, which is illegal because they’re supposed to retain discussions like that as part of things like Freedom of Information acts and like, documentation about government things that are happening on official channels. But instead it implied that other discussions like this are not being recorded as well. And since eclipses deal with visibility and invisibility, I thought that was really relevant from an astrological standpoint because part of what was disclosed at this time is that there are some things that are being hidden and not recorded.
AC: Right. And other things that should be hidden are leaking into the public. It’s interesting that the, you know, something that we’d talked about last month and just bears reiterating here is that the Mercury retrograde, Mercury stationed retrograde like, the day after the big full eclipse in – total lunar eclipse – in Virgo, and the total lunar eclipse in Virgo has as its ruler, looks to for direction, that Mercury which was in the process of stationing retrograde. And the lunar eclipse in Virgo when mapped onto the Sibley chart of the United States is in the 10th house, meaning at the highest level of decision making and power. Right? And, you know, causing in this case a loss of – well, a loss of security, but a loss of like, the dignity that the Sun and the Moon usually have. Right? And then the information being released in the lead up and the story going public leading up to the solar eclipse, right, diminishing the Sun’s light. Diminishing the authority of the administration, right?
CB: Right. Yeah. And it was also just a good example of how sometimes something that happens at the station, the next development of it happens at the cazimi with —
AC: Yeah. Perfect illustration of that.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. So it’s like, we have that there, and then we had that with the other story with the Palestinian filmmaker who won the award on the station and then was arrested on the cazimi, so a lot of, you know, important things we’re seeing here in terms of how some of these cycles work.
So it’s just such a class Mercury retrograde thing. Because that’s one of the problems is just like, everyone’s done that or done some version of that where you accidentally send a message to somebody or you accidentally… I haven’t added somebody to a group chat accidentally, but I could see —
AC: I’ve been added to a group chat. My phone —
CB: Oh you have? Okay.
AC: — number used to belong to somebody who was part of a very active church group in the Bay Area. And for years, I would get added to group texts about like, hey, we’re all gonna meet up for like, the annual prayer group picnic for this; are you coming? Can you bring this? Yeah, I’ll bring potato salad.
CB: Nice.
AC: Et cetera, et cetera. But like, you know, so I can imagine like, that and it’s people being like, “Oh, yeah! You know, the operation’s gonna commence at 2:32 military – or 15:24 local time.” This is not really like, some of the most powerful people in the country plotting or, you know, planning a military operation. Like, that couldn’t possibly be the case!
CB: Right. Yeah. Well, and it was like, what was funny is like, the reporter – because he’s a national security reporter – he took screenshots of everything, but he ended up like, leaving the chat at some point, like, pretty soon after he realized that it was real and after the military operation had started. And he was, while he released some segments in the original article of like, quoting different things, he didn’t release the chat messages at first. But then when they started denying it and also they were denying it and denying that anything classified was said, which obviously was, and they started attacking him, it ended up forcing him to then release the actual text messages to everybody like, a few days later. So it was also an interesting thing about like, sometimes a denial of something making it worse or dragging something out more than it would have been already otherwise.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. Well, Mercury retrograde’s got jokes. Sometimes they’re cruel. But Mercury retrograde’s got jokes.
CB: Sometimes they’re embarrassing. Well, it’s like, that’s up there now with the other like, previous big one that this has dethroned is like, Obama, you know, being sworn in for the first time in 2009 under a Mercury retrograde and Roberts accidentally misspoke and didn’t give him the right line; he left something out, so they ended up having to redo the – just out of safety, out of pure caution – they redid Obama taking his oath later that same day, and that was a great like, Mercury retrograde like, do-overs and miscommunication type thing. But now I think this has dethroned that.
AC: Yeah, it’s pretty good.
CB: All right. So moving on. You know, this eclipse was crazy. Another major thing that happened on it is right after the eclipse, Israel broke the ceasefire and began bombing Gaza again on March 17th. One of the Washington Post headlines I copied from March 18th said, “More than 400 killed as Israel strikes Gaza, breaking ceasefire with Hamas.” And you know, this was important because every step of important turning points of this keep falling on eclipses, you know, going all the way back the original invasion of Gaza began the day of the Taurus eclipse in October of 2023. So it continues to be tied in with these eclipses, these important turning points, for some reason.
AC: Yeah. Sadly. Well, I guess the maybe hopeful thing is that it’s the Aries-Libra eclipses have since the beginning of the State of Israel always sparked periods of military hostility between them and neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. But those periods of violence usually – not every time, but usually – abated by the time the eclipses moved solidly into the next signs, into the Virgo-Pisces. So I’m just saying that that’s happened historically. I’m not saying, I’m not promising peace. I’m just saying.
CB: I mean, that’s the problem with this one, though, falling on this is that the last Pisces eclipse when we started this series last fall in September fell on like, the day that Israel invaded Lebanon to go after Hezbollah. So it seemed like this new eclipse series as we were moving from Libra to Aries and going into Pisces-Virgo was gonna start shifting to other countries like Lebanon and Yemen and Iran. But having this fall here implies that it might be continuing a whole new eclipse cycle of, you know, Pisces-Virgo continuing to be about like, Israel and Palestine.
AC: Yeah. So if we were gonna go for that, that rosier historical view, the soonest that would begin would be in six months. Because half of our eclipses here – like, the one towards the end or at the end of March is in Aries, so we’re not out of the Aries-Libra cycle yet. Right? We’ve got one foot out, but we still have one foot solidly in. So again, like, the rose-glasses version wouldn’t even be valid for another six months from now.
CB: Okay. Well, we will see what happens, my friend.
All right, so moving on. Also around this eclipse on March 15th, Trump invoked wartime authority to speed up mass deportations where he invoked the Alien Enemies Act, which was an act that was signed into law back in July of 1798, and the last time this act was used was during World War Two to send Japanese people to internment camps in the US, which is, you know, always a dark mark on like, US history from World War Two. So he used this and then immediately the next day on March 16th, after invoking this, he started sending immigrants to a private prison in Ecuador with the first arriving on March 16th.
Hey, quick correction – I noticed in editing that a couple times I said that the prison they were shipping people off to was in Ecuador, but the prison is actually in El Salvador. So I just wanted to correct that really quickly for the record.
And supposedly they were sending people who were gang members, which they were supposed to be identifying through tattoos, but because there’s not any due process – they’re just rounding people up and then sending them to a prison in another country – one of the guys that they arrested had an Autism Awareness tattoo that was just like, it’s just like, a ribbon. Like, a rainbow ribbon with like, his brother – I think his autistic brother’s name next to it – and he was shipped off to this prison without any due process. Another one was like, a gay makeup artist who had a tattoo that was like, a crown and it said “Mom” under it, and he was shipped off to this prison. And the lack of due process means that stuff like this isn’t getting checked. And even non-citizens are supposed to be granted a fair hearing under the laws of the country. So already that started happening and then already later in the month, Trump threatened that people who were burning Tesla cars could be sent to this prison in Ecuador. And yeah, it’s just been a whole thing that’s not good and is kind of scary.
AC: And Chris, what was the exact date of that?
CB: He invoked the Act on the 15th.
AC: Okay, so —
CB: I believe. And then he, the first prisoners were already sent off March 16th.
AC: Okay. I was just thinking about it in terms of – obviously, that’s connected to the eclipse and the Mercury retrograde. But that’s very much within the shell of the Mars in Cancer themes that we’ve been talking about, which —
CB: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: — sort of might begin with protective but often end up quite xenophobic and paranoid.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. Which was telegraphed all the way back in like, September when Mars first went into Cancer and the tone of the election shifted suddenly to immigration and there was a lot of like, racism about Haitian immigrants and everything else. And this now is like the outcome of that as Mars is direct and retracing its steps, and yeah.
AC: Third time through the same degrees in Cancer. Third visit from Mars.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it turns out it’s Mars in Cancer, but it’s also Saturn-Neptune, because —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — when I did the Saturn-Neptune research this month, I ended up finding that that was also what coincided with like, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is one of the first major pieces of like, anti-immigration legislation in the US back in the 1800s was Mars retrograde in Cancer but also Saturn conjunct Neptune. But I actually saved the picture; I forgot that I saved it from one of the news articles. Look at this tattoo of this guy. It’s a ribbon. It’s like, a rainbow ribbon with like, puzzle pieces with his brother’s name on it, and this was the supposed like, “gang tattoo” that somehow made it okay to like, strip this guy of any due process and ship him off to a prison in another country with a bunch of actual like, hardened gang members. It’s just, it’s insane.
AC: Well, it is a pretty intimidating tattoo.
CB: Yeah, by the – you’re intimidated by the rainbow colors?
AC: Yeah, the flowing cursive script. That’s in case anybody can’t tell I’m being sarcastic. Yeah, that’s some clown shit right there. Not the tattoo, but the thinking that that indicates membership in a vicious criminal organization.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s just getting very dark. And to go along with that, now they’re also starting to disappear college students who are here in green cards due to their involvement in protests last year. So the US has started revoking green cards of university students and then arresting them. And there’s been these startling like, videos of like, ICE agents who are, you know, not dressed up as officers or just wearing plainclothes like walking up and starting to talk to and then like, grabbing these people. One of them on March 8th, I wrote down, was a student named Mahmoud Khalil, and then a more recent one, which was a video that was going around that was really scary, was another Turkish like, I think PhD student called Rumeysa Ozturk on March 25th. So I mention these because this is another one of those things where we have to pay attention to anything that’s happening around eclipses, because sometimes one of the things we’ve learned about eclipses in the past 20 years – or, things I’ve learned about eclipses in the past two years – is that sometimes it plants a seed of something important at the time of the eclipse that becomes much more important later on, or can become much more widespread later on. So that’s one of the things I’m paying attention to right now.
AC: Yeah. There’s a lot of shadows of the future here.
CB: Yeah. All right, so moving on. One of the – so those were a lot of like, first eclipse ones, but a second eclipse one is we had the Aries eclipse later in the month, and within 24 hours of that on March 28th, Vice President Vance visited Greenland. And that was one of the major stories this month is that the US appears to be, based on their statements and based on Trump’s statements, posturing and preparing as if they’re gonna annex Greenland some way. And that they’re gonna try to – they keep saying that they’re gonna try to do so diplomatically, but then when pressed on it, Trump says he’s not taking like, military force off of the table. And one of the things you pointed out was that this solar eclipse was particularly visible over Greenland, right?
AC: Greenland was probably the best place to see the solar eclipse. That was the – I’d been looking at the maps, because you know, I went out and took a peak at the lunar because it was totally visible here. And so I was, you know, I was curious whether I was gonna be able to see the solar. And it’s really almost centered on Greenland, and I saw that headline a few days ago and I was like, “Oh, the shadow falls on Greenland.”
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. Well, and then I did a search while we were talking about this yesterday to confirm it, and then inadvertently came back with a result saying there’s gonna be another eclipse in 2026 that’s even more visible over Greenland next year. So that’s scary, because this really seems like the US like, returning to being an imperialist state in a way that harkens back to like, the 1800s, which we talked about before with like, you know, for example, annexing like, the Philippines or other things like that. It’s probably gonna break up and cause major tensions with NATO if the US actually does invade another NATO state; it’s gonna throw that alliance completely into disarray of what happens if another state without any good justification like, invades and annexes another NATO state. It’s gonna validate Putin taking over Ukraine and his annexation – attempt to annex Ukraine – in 2022. And it’s probably also gonna encourage China to take over and annex Taiwan if the US, you know, just starts annexing other random countries itself. It sets a justification for any other authoritarian country to do the same with other countries in their vicinity.
AC: Yeah. And we were talking about this, and maybe I’m too cynical, but you know, I kind of came to, I don’t know, start to pay attention to world events in my 20s with 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. And so I guess for people of my generation, there’s sort of a like, well, when did the United States stop doing imperialism? Not that that is a justification for future actions, but it is, you know, it is interesting. It’s certainly a change to see it without cover, right? Because the, you know, the invasion of Iraq had justifications, many of which were proven to be lies, but there was at least the decency to try to lie about it. And so this is certainly a new phase.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there was at least… You know, I wasn’t, you know, a lot of us knew that it was bullshit in 2003, and like, I was in – you know, I was still a teenager, but I was still like, in the protest marches against the Iraq War in 2003. And then it later turned out that their justification was complete bullshit and there were no weapons of mass destruction. But there was at least the premise of some sort of justification for why they said they were going to invade Iraq, and there’s none of that here. Like, there’s no premise like, for taking over Greenland that would justify like, a military invasion at this stage. Although yeah, they’re starting to try to sell that to the American public, and it’s gonna be one of those things… I mean, frankly, like we saw with Ukraine over the past few years where they’re gonna slow walk convincing conservatives into this being a good thing. And this was the start of that this year, and then we’ll see how it’s gonna go over the next couple of years.
AC: Yeah. I mean, a lot of this strikes me as Saturn in Aries themes. Which makes sense – all these planets going through Aries right before Saturn comes to residence in Aries should have some sort of foreshadowing effect. But you know, historically, with Saturn in Aries, you have might makes right. Right? Which is Saturn in its fallen or worst position, as opposed to Saturn in Libra where what is fair makes right. Right? Which is its exalted position. But that’s sort of like, power is power, right, and power exists to be power rather than trying to ally it to other principles to me is like, classic Saturn in Aries.
CB: Yeah. The potential of all the Saturn in Aries stuff to just, in its most basic form, indicate war and conflict over the next few years has become really obvious like, recently as all of this is ramping up. Like, it seems like we’re moving into a major period of world conflict in many different areas.
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: Very rapidly all of a sudden. But yeah. Okay. So that’s good for that. I need to move onto the next one to keep us going through this. The biggest story this month, honestly, and the one that was the most overlooked but is starting to become more recognized and which I had been focused on for months now and anticipating was that the likelihood of a US strike on Iran has been steadily increasing and intensifying all month. And that was been the main story I’ve been tracking, because I both expected this to happen, but it’s also been scary to see it actually start to unfold where – just to give a very brief synopsis of part of the sequence – at the beginning of the month, there was reporting that Trump had sent a letter to Iran with a two-month deadline in early March, and he threatened that either they negotiate a nuclear deal, or there will be military action. And you know, what was ironic about that is Trump famously pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal agreement in 2018 which had already been negotiated by the previous administration. And something I had forgotten about and I was surprised to like, realize and remember this month is like, we were already heading towards a war with Iran during Trump’s first term in 2020 when on January 3rd, 2020, he assassinated that famous prominent Iran general, Soleimani, on January 3rd. And that was actually right in between eclipses; it was right after one eclipse and right before another, and he assassinated that Iranian general who was in Iraq for like, a funeral or something. But then covid happened, and it completely interrupted everything, and then Trump was voted out of office later that year, and it sort of like, averted stuff. But now that he’s back in office, we have things escalating again. So he wrote that letter, giving a two-month deadline at the beginning of March, and then all month, Trump keeps telegraphing that there would be an attack and like, referring to it constantly with not very veiled language. And at first, Iran responds and says it will not be threatened. But then later in the month, Iran released a video of these vast underground bases with missiles and missile-launching trucks that were ready to go into use. And then late in the month, a bunch of B-2 stealth bombers started gathering from the US at Diego Garcia Base, which is in the Indian Ocean and is within striking distance of Iran. And there’s no reason for all of those bombers to be gathering there if not, at the very least, to intimate and put pressure on Iran, but potentially in preparation for an actual strike.
So then Iran sees this, and they eventually respond to the letter really close to the Aries eclipse. And I think that’s one of the things that happened on the Aries eclipse is that Iran responded to Trump’s letter finally. And then later, there’s one carrier that’s already in the Middle East which is part of what’s striking the Houthis, but now there’s a second carrier strike group from the US that’s on its way to the Middle East as well, which is gonna put two carriers in the same region, which again heightens the potential for a strike. So just yesterday on March 30th, right after the eclipse, Trump said, “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing, and it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” So it’s like, statements like this where he just keeps telegraphing this attack, and the whole situation is becoming incredibly intense, and it looks like it’s heading in that direction. So what’s weird is that it seems to be happening a little later than I expected after the eclipse, because I thought the Aries eclipse would be the turning point and yet it’s still clearly building up and seems to be heading in that direction. So the eclipse itself may have been the bombers like, constellating at that base at Diego Garcia, as well as whatever Iran’s response to the letter was, because I’m not sure if it was fully clear. I think the main thing they said is that they weren’t gonna negotiate with Trump directly, but they would negotiate indirectly. And I don’t know if part of what happens on the eclipse is that he takes that as his final provocation or justification to do whatever he’s gonna do.
So the immediate eclipse range is still active through the first week of April, and there’s some other stuff going on. But this is, yeah, one of the major things that’s formulating that people are starting to notice and become aware of, but I’m more alarmed about that than I think even the general public is because we’ve been anticipating a major exchange with Iran for a while now due to these eclipses.
AC: Yeah. And a couple other things that support that. I remember it was before the last set of eclipses when I was thinking about Iran that I found a number of things around this time that, some of which you described and some of which I’ll describe shortly, that raised my eyebrows. So in addition to what you mentioned, there’s also the Aries ingress chart – the chart used for predicting the events for a nation for the coming year for Iran, which came into effect on March 20th, but will be in effect all year, especially the first three months, has Mars directly on the Ascendant, which is according to the older texts is an almost sure indication of war, and which was present the last time that Iran was part of a war, which was when Iraq invaded shortly after the Iranian Revolution. And then if you look at the chart for this regime in Iran, it’s about – we’re about the same age. It’s from April 1st, and so that Sun, that solar eclipse was right next to the Sun in Iran’s chart, which also has a Sun-ruled rising; it has a Leo rising, which also brings up what about when Mars goes back into Leo? And that regime chart for Iran also has Mars at 25 Pisces, where Saturn and the North Node and Venus and Mercury will all spend the whole first half of April. So yeah, we’ve been talking about this for a while, and so for me it was a question – does it happen in March, or does it need the April part of the same period of time? Right? Because we’ve talked about like, it’s basically a six weeks-ish period of time – we’re talking about the clownmaggedon or the gathering of the juggalos. The thing, right, that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t end on March 31st, right? Minimum size would be to put it at least into the middle of April, so yeah.
CB: Right.
AC: I’m, yeah, we’re, I think, of one mind on this, and there are a number of indicators. And that’s – when you start seeing indicators wherever you look when you use a different technique and you get indicators, then you look at cycles and you get another indicator. I will be very surprised if there aren’t overt military exchanges with Iran quite soon.
CB: Yeah. I hope that it’s averted, but I think it’s heading in that direction. I just pulled up the Aries ingress this year for Tehran that you mentioned, and like, you weren’t exaggerating. So this is the Sun, the moment that it moved into Aries, was this chart, which sets up a chart for the year. And the ascendant ends up being at 20 Cancer and Mars was at 20 Cancer when that occurred on March 20th, so you were not exaggerating.
AC: No, dude, my eyebrows shot up about halfway up my skull. I was like, “Oh really? Same degree, huh?” So yeah.
CB: Right. I found something like that as well. There was a patron named Stephanie C who helped me to see this, but I always thought of the Iranian Revolution as happening in 1979, but the protests that led into it actually started in early 1978. And I looked up what the chart, what was going on astrologically at that time, and listen to this – Mars was coming off of a retrograde in Cancer. It stationed direct in Cancer and then started moving forward again. A solar eclipse happened in Aries. Jupiter stationed direct in Gemini and then started moving through the later degrees of Gemini. So that’s like, three really striking and unique recurrences that were all happening at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, which was such a huge turning point for Iran as a country. And so these recurrences happening again now – because these same conditions are all happening right now in early 2025 – really implies that there’s an important turning point happening for Iran this year. And I really hope that I’m wrong, but it’s really not looking good.
AC: No, it’s looking… Yeah, it’s looking like quite meaningful military exchanges with consequences.
CB: Right. And then, you know, I had talked about how it seemed like some of the stuff that happened in March – because it was all activating Aries – would have a cascade effect over the course of the next several months, and potentially over the next several years, because then Neptune would go into Aries and then Saturn would go into Aries in May. And you know, if a huge conflict like that breaks out, then that’s part of what we’re looking at, because this would not be, like, what happened with the US and Iraq in 2003, for example. Like, this would be a much bigger, more difficult and more tragic and huger than Iraq already was, but multiplied by a lot more.
AC: Hopefully not. But yeah, it’s… Yeah, very big in its implications and potentially quite awful.
CB: Yeah. All right. So —
AC: Speaking of Neptune moving into Aries, I think we should report the best non-occurrence that happened with Neptune’s ingress into Aries.
CB: I don’t know what that it. I have one more major news story, but I don’t know —
AC: Okay, well —
CB: — what else you’re referring to.
AC: Okay, we’ll save that for the end. Because it’s a positive thing.
CB: Okay. So the last major news story is just this is all over the headlines today where yesterday in an interview with a reporter, Trump said that he was “not joking about seeking a third term” and on March 30th, The New York Times had the headline, “Trump says he’s not joking about seeking a third term.” And now today, March 31st, all the headlines are talking about this shortly after the Aries eclipse. And this is notable because this is first time Trump has indicated that he was seriously considering the idea after other allies like Steve Bannon earlier this year in February had already started floating it and promoting it seriously at conventions and in lectures and stuff. So Trump said in the interview, “A lot of people want me to do it.” And then he said, “No, no, I’m not joking.” He said, “I’m not joking.” He added, “There were methods by which you could do it.”
And so what he’s talking about is methods to circumvent the two-term limit laid out in the Constitution. And I looked this up; it’s the 22nd Amendment was made to the Constitution after World War Two where Republicans passed it “to ensure against the overthrow of our American system of government.” And the 22nd Amendment went into effect on March 1st, 1959, and get this – it was just after a lunar eclipse in Virgo had taken place and just before a Pisces eclipse had took place, and Venus at the time was at five degrees of Aries, although it was direct. So weirdly, the first time like, a president has said this since that law went into effect – the 22nd Amendment in 1951 – we have a recurrence of those placements of like, eclipses starting to happen in Virgo and PIsces and Venus in Aries, which has just gone retrograde there. So unfortunately, this is the beginning of the Pisces-Virgo eclipse series as we noted recently, and that’s gonna last all the way through I think early 2027. So if this is, since this is the first time he’s said this publicly, this may be again one of those eclipse seed things that seem small at first but turn out to be big in retrospect.
AC: That’s interesting. And sorry, when were those statements made? What was the day?
CB: The report – I don’t know if the report, the first headline I had was from March 30th, so that reporting may have —
AC: Yesterday.
CB: — done been yesterday, basically, and then all of the major media and news outlets are talking about it in the headlines today on March 31st.
AC: Okay. Because I was, I asked because I wanted to know whether it was licit to connect it to Neptune’s ingress into Aries, because —
CB: Oh!
AC: — historically, Neptune in Aries has coincided with a lot of fantasies of supreme solar authority. And I think we can put that very clearly in that category. And people can act on fantasies; I’m not saying that it’s not a real thing because it’s a fantasy, but that like, “Oh, I could have a third term! I could have a fourth term!” You know, “I’ll rule all of Europe! I’ll rule all of” whatever, like, these sort of these dreams of solar authority are a thing that we get with Neptune in Aries.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t thought about that connection, but that’s actually a really good point, because the thing every astrologer has been mentioning this week – not in connection with this, but just it’s become the common knowledge about Neptune’s ingress into Aries is that the last time that happened was the day the Civil War broke out, so —
AC: Right! And that’s the good news is we’re right now we’re a day past the ingress of Neptune into Aries, and shots have not – literal attacks have not – we’re not actively in civil war yet as a nation. So at least, as long as today closes without some divide in the United States going to hot war as opposed to cold war, we’re good! We’re doing better —
CB: Well —
AC: — than history.
CB: No, that is not the good – that is not my takeaway from it, because the bad news is that if the day within 24 hours of Neptune going into Aries we have a president saying that he may assume like, dictatorial control, then that would create the circumstances in which if there was gonna be like, anything like what happened in the 1800s with the Civil War, that could potentially lead to a conflict like that. So I’d actually —
AC: It’s not great!
CB: — hadn’t thought about that, but that’s not a great sign.
AC: Well, I would just say that at least the guns haven’t started firing yet. Which puts us that far ahead of United States in 1861.
CB: I like that that’s the highest review we can get out of March was, “At least the guns haven’t started firing yet.”
AC: Right. At least we’re not doing Fort Sumter yet.
CB: Right. All right. Good times. I have a whole other international section; we can either try to do really quick. I don’t know what your other Neptune thing was. How —
AC: No, that was my Neptune – that was the good news, Chris.
CB: Oh, that was —
AC: I wanted to end on an uplifting note.
CB: It was literally – I interpreted that literally the opposite.
AC: Not hot civil war yet!
CB: Okay! Well, yeah.
AC: You always, you know, you’re always like, I’m so pessimistic, and I try to add something positive. And I feel like it’s not appreciated.
CB: I know; I’m sorry. But —
AC: Okay. I think that’s really funny that you didn’t accept my silver lining, not being at —
CB: Well, I just —
AC: — in an active civil war one day after Neptune’s ingress!
CB: Well, no, because it’s funny that I hadn’t thought of that until you made the connection. But every other astrologer I was looking at online now that it’s become commonplace keeps referring to the Civil War starting on that ingress. And then I didn’t make the connection until you said that of like, that is the major thing that happened is Trump said that within like, 24 hours.
AC: Well, yeah, at least it’s not a shooting war yet.
CB: Well, because that’s the difference – we were talking about this last month in the last forecast. That’s the difference is that previous presidents under Uranus in Gemini had taken quasi-dictatorial control —
AC: Yeah, like FDR is the reason that that amendment exists.
CB: Yeah. But that was during wartime. Like, they were in the middle of like, World War Two, the Civil War, whatever, and they had a reason and a precedent for it. Trump doesn’t have that, yet, but he’s already talking about doing it, and that’s the difference this time.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So yeah. So we’re only at 1:12; I bet we could do this real quick in like, 10, 15 minutes if we wanna quickly do our international section. Not that we —
AC: Okay —
CB: — didn’t do some international stories, but —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — you know.
AC: I’ll get less chatty. We can just go through it.
CB: Okay. All right. So number one, on the Virgo eclipse, like the very same day on March 14th, a story came out about extermination camps being found in Mexico by some of the cartels. The New York Time headline was, “Extermination camp found in Mexico, group searching for the missing says.” And it was discovery of the horrifying extent of cartel violence where searchers uncovered a site with a bunch of like, bones where there had been a crematoria of burnt human remains and numerous personal belongings. So this caused an outcry and outrage and calls for government action and highlighted the ongoing crisis of disappearances and the brutal reality of organized crime in Mexico.
AC: Yeah, there are – when I was researching this, there are I believe about 120,000 missing persons that are unaccounted for right now. And the most striking photographs of the site involved – piles of shoes.
CB: Right. And that, which ironically, that was like part of —
AC: Empty shoes.
CB: — the controversy around that Oscar-nominated movie that a lot of people —
AC: Right.
CB: — from Mexico were not happy about is the almost like, trivialization of that in the movie.
AC: Right. Yeah, that’s a good point.
CB: Emilia Perez; that was the movie. So the next story, you had.
AC: Oh, you know, I was just looking at what happened around the eclipses, and so during also right around our lunar eclipse, there was a shockingly lethal nightclub fire in Macedonia that injured hundreds of people and killed several dozen. And later not only was that a tragedy right on the eclipse in and of itself, but it also sparked a big series of protests later in the month, which was a thing that happened in a lot – several European nations, and in Turkey and a couple others. There were very large street protests.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So that was – oh, and also on the lunar eclipse, in the American Midwest, there were a record – I was gonna say “record-breaking,” there was a record-tying number of tornadoes. I believe there were 115 or so tornadoes that also killed dozens and injured hundreds right on the, sort of starting on the 15th and running through the 16th. So leading into the eclipse, active during the night of the eclipse, and then the day after.
CB: Wow. Yeah. That’s big. This one is more of a Mercury retrograde one, but on March 20th, in the UK, Heathrow Airport like, a energy thing connected with it caught fire. It shut down Heathrow Airport and just like, hundreds of flights from around the world because Heathrow’s such a big hub were turned around. And I saw this amazing video on Twitter of this person that was on a flight from Dallas to London, and they were like, halfway there; they were passing over like, New York and Toronto on the map. But then they had to turn around and go all the way back to Dallas, and I’ve never seen a more, a great illustration of Mercury retrograde than that image of like, getting halfway there and having to go all the way back.
AC: Right. Like, the flight path looks like Mercury through the zodiac.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. Do you wanna do this one?
AC: Oh, okay. Around the same time, there were also massive anti-corruption protests in Serbia by students. The protests started in November after a tragedy drew attention to government corruption and triggered demands for accountability. It was primarily in Belgrade. It was triggered by allegations of electoral fraud and governmental corruption. People took to the streets demanding a rerun of recent elections and an investigation into claims of manipulation. And the demonstrations were marked by clashes with police, arrests, escalating tensions. It highlighted a growing divide between the youth and the government with an emphasis on demands for transparency and accountability. So and at the same time, we also have those Macedonian protests; we also have protests in Romania, and then we also have a big protest in Turkey.
CB: Yeah. Huge protests broke out in Turkey on March 19th, so after the first eclipse happened on the 14th. This is following their arrest and detention of the mayor of Istanbul, plus more than a hundred other opposition members and authorities. So that was another like, huge one. With the Serbia protests, there was this crazy video of them using what seemed like a sound cannon or something; did you see that? Like, and shooting it into the protests of students and then all of them like, spread out like, immediately because —
AC: No!
CB: — it was hitting them, I guess, if that was real.
AC: I’ve heard of those weapons being developed and being intended for use for that kind of anti-protest, like, breaking up groups of people. But I didn’t see that they had been deployed that way. That’s some Pluto in Aquarius shit.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Like, the sci-fi weapons getting – the energy weapons being deployed against the crowd.
CB: Yeah, to like, exert power and control over the masses, uses of technology. So yeah, the Turkey protests were big. Elsewhere, Justin Trudeau stepped down and the new prime minister of Canada stepped in – Mark Carney assumed office on March 14th, literally the day of the eclipse. And he gave a speech, this Venus retrograde speech, where he said that Canada’s old relationship with the United States was essentially over. He said that the old relationship “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.” And again this gave me like, huge Venus retrograde break-up vibes —
AC: Right.
CB: You know, if 2023 was the summer of celebrity break-ups, than 2025 was the Venus retrograde of country alliance break-ups. Elsewhere very close to the Aries eclipse, there was this major earthquake in Myanmar that caused widespread devastation. It was a seven-point-seven earthquake on March 28th, so very close to the Aries eclipse. So far, the death toll has topped over 2,000, but they’re still searching for survivors at this point. And there’s a civil war in the country that’s complicating the earthquake relief efforts at this point. Some of the videos that came out of that earthquake were just insane in terms of there was one high-rise building that was under construction that started swaying and then collapsed. There were others where there were like, these pools on top of skyscrapers, and the water started falling out of the pools down the side of the skyscrapers, and there was even one security video of like, this couple that was like, lying on a floating raft in this infinity pool, and then all of a sudden, the pool starts shaking and the water starts going over the edge of the building and they just jump out barely in time. So that was really striking seeing that earthquake so close to that eclipse.
AC: Yeah. I mean, eclipses fuck shit up. And as further testimony to that, towards the very end of the month, South Korea had one of its worst wildfires in history with over 87,000 hectares of land being destroyed and killing dozens of people.
CB: Incredible. All right, so that’s it for the news. I cut a bunch of other news stories out of this that were like, more minor stories or ones that were in pop culture or other things like that. I recorded those with Leisa Schaim as an episode of The Secret Astrology Podcast yesterday; it’s like, an hour and a half long. So if people want even more news from stuff that happened this month, they can check that out through my page on Patreon.com. But otherwise, I think that’s good for the news section. And why don’t we take a little break?
I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference which is happening May 22nd through the 26th, 2025. So the in-person conference is sold out. However, they do still have tickets available for their live, virtual conference which is gonna stream simultaneously online for anybody signed up for it. So there’s gonna be 35 different speakers giving lectures with tons of lectures and workshops happening all week. There’s gonna be some big pre- and post-conference workshops with different astrologers, including a number that have appeared on the podcast such as Leisa Schaim, who’s giving a lecture or workshop on zodiacal releasing; Demetra George; Jason Holley; Anne Ortelee; Kira Sutherland; Nina Gryphon; Judith Hill; and Gemini Brett all giving workshops. There’s also a special online-only guest workshop by Richard Tarnas, so that one is not available for people that are attending in person, but if you sign up for the online one, you can get access to that workshop, which is a pretty cool exclusive.
So you can sign up for the full conference, or you can just sign up for individual days or workshops if you want. But full registration does give you two weeks of access to watch the recordings afterwards, just in case you don’t get to catch every lecture you wanna see live. And then it also gives you discounts on workshops and recording bundles after that two-week access period is over.
So they really expanded some of the livestream options for virtual attendees this year, and they’re gonna do live speaker Q&A sessions throughout the main conference so that you can ask questions to some of the speakers directly for virtual attendees after the lectures are over. Plus they’re gonna do a Saturday night Ascendant sign masquerade ball. They’re also gonna do each evening a virtual dinner and drinks with afterhours hangouts. And then finally, they’re gonna wrap up the weekend with a Sunday night virtual afterparty and final celebration. So you can find out more information or you can get tickets at NORWAC.net.
And I really appreciate that they keep expanding, you know, it’s five years – it’s five years now since covid happened, and I remember that first NORWAC after covid where they suddenly had to like, switch to an online conference within a month after everyone closed down. And I really appreciate that they’ve continued to expand their online and live streaming options for those of us who can’t go there and be there in person for me for health reasons, but also for other people maybe that can’t afford to travel or what have you. So it’s one of the positive things I really appreciate about what NORWAC is doing here.
AC: Yeah, I think there are a lot of great things about that hybrid model. And NORWAC’s, you know, I mean, this will be the 500th time we’ve talked about how NORWAC is such a nice thing, but it really is both online and in person. You know, it’s a conference both you and I have spoken at and then also attended as audience members, you know, a dozen plus times. It’s wonderful that it’s one of the few conferences that reliably happens every year, and reliably just brings a pile of great astrologers with a wide variety of expertise.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s cliche to say “there’s something for everyone,” but there usually actually is.
CB: Yeah, no, they do – the organizers do a really good job of picking out a wide variety of diverse lectures and lecturers, that way when you go to a conference, one of the benefits from an educational standpoint is you get this wide cross-section of like, what’s going on in the community with different community leaders giving presentations of their own style of astrology. And there’s something really beneficial from that from an astrological standpoint.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It remains an amazing conference.
CB: Absolutely. So people can get more information or sign up at NORWAC.net.
There’s also another conference that’s taking place actually before NORWAC this month. It’s a local conference in Los Angeles, and our other sponsor is the LA Astro Fest. So with this conference, the Art of the Zodiac presents the first annual LA Astro conference, which is happening in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park the weekend of April 25th through the 27th. LA Astro Fest welcomes everyone from the astro-curious to the professional astrologer. The weekend kicks off with a Friday night party showcasing an astro-themed set by the band Freak Nature Puppets, a performance from the alt-comedy troupe Planets, Planets, Planets, and a light panel discussion exploring the intersection of astrology and entertainment.
Then on Saturday and Sunday, they feature morning workshops from astrologers Diana Rose Harper and Samuel F. Reynolds, followed by talks from such exciting contemporary astrological voices as Clarissa Dolphin and Jonah Emerson-Bell. If you’re not in LA, tickets are available to stream Sam and Diana’s workshops from anywhere in the world. So you can secure your spot today by visiting LAAstroFest.com, and if you use the promo code ‘BRENNAN10’ for a 10 percent discount on tickets. So space is limited and tickets are selling out fast, so sign up today if you wanna join.
So yeah, shout out to LA Astro Fest for sponsoring this episode in addition to NORWAC.
AC: Yeah, and shout out to Sam and Diana, who’ve been our third chair multiple times, and who we’ve both known for a while and I think can – and whose work we can both stand behind.
CB: Yeah. And that’s why when I heard of this, you know, anything being headlined by like, Sam and Diana I definitely want to promote and endorse because I know they do quality work, as we’ve seen many times when they’ve been here on the podcast before.
All right, I wanna transition to talking now about the astrology of April and getting into our deep dive into the astrology of the next four weeks. So I wanna start by giving a little bit of synopsis of the month and some context for what we’re coming into the opening of April with. So of course, April opens with us coming in fresh off of the eclipse in Aries, and we’re still in eclipse season through the first week of April all the way until at least the 5th, which is approximately a week after the Aries eclipse. That eclipse is still gonna be very active and very potent in terms of its associations with major beginnings and major endings in people’s lives as well as world events. We also have the context, as we were just talking about, of Neptune having just moved into Aries, and so we’re still experiencing the very first days of that and getting accustomed to that energy but also needing to pay attention to what kind of world events happen because that may be a preview of some of the stuff that’s gonna become important over the course of the next decade that Neptune’s transiting through that sign.
So early on in the month, Mercury and Venus are wrapping up their retrograde cycles, and they eventually station by the second week of April, both in Pisces conjoining Saturn and the North Node. Then mid-month, Mars finally departs from Cancer and moves into the sign of Leo, where it immediately begins building up to its third and final opposition with Pluto, which is our tensest and most difficult aspect of the month, which kind of casts a shadow over the second and especially the later part of the month before that aspect goes exact on March 26th.
So those are some of the primary things happening this month, just to give you some orientation where somehow we’re going – what’s the phrase – like, out of the pan and into the fire in terms of like, going out of this like, crazy eclipse season and then you get like, a little bit of relief with the two planets stationing direct, which is somewhat positive, in the second week. But then right away, we start getting this very tense aspect later in the month of Mars opposite Pluto.
AC: Yeah, out of the fire and into the frying pan.
CB: That’s it, yeah.
AC: Or maybe it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire. But yeah. Both are really hot.
CB: Yeah. That’s the thing is like, you would think we’re getting a break here, but there’s this tense energy. And it’s like, we talked about this opposition many times in the past because it was tied in with this whole Mars retrograde cycle that’s been happening since last fall. But so this is gonna be the third and final hit, and that’s important because sometimes the third hit can be the most important when there’s three exact hits of an aspect. So even though we’ve talked about this aspect so much over the past like, six months so it feels like it’s almost overdone, it might be worth re-emphasizing again here, which is like, we had this Mars-Pluto opposition right before the US presidential election in early November. That was the first time it went exact.
AC: And right before, like, a day and a half before. Right?
CB: Yeah.
AC: There wasn’t like, leading up to it. It was like, right before.
CB: Yeah. And then we had the second pass of Mars opposite Pluto was at the beginning of January, and that’s when the new US Congress was sworn in. And we also had those three, at least three, really bizarre sort of like, violent type events where one of them was that on New Year’s Day, there was a Tesla car that was blown up in front of Trump Hotel in Vegas in like, a suicide/terrorist attack. The other was that there was this guy in New Orleans who drove into a crowd of people on New Year’s Eve in this really bloody and violent also sort of like, quasi-terrorist attack. And then we also had the LA fire. There may have been a smaller fire that was started by fireworks around Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, and then one of the early reporting – I’m not sure if this is still the case or what the final verdict was – but some of the early reporting was saying that that fire started on New Year’s Eve on the Mars-Pluto opposition may have been smoldering and then eventually been reignited later, like a week later, that eventually turned into the huge LA fires that swept through during the course of that. So that’s kind of our precedent in addition to, you know, over the past few years, other Mars-Pluto precedents where oftentimes it’s like, a really tense or sometimes violent act takes place – which is Mars – but then Pluto amplifies it and takes things way too far is sometimes some of the energy with that.
AC: Yeah. You get an over-intensification or Mars without limits or, you know, a martial or violent act without limits. You get, there’s a historical association between Mars-Pluto and, you know, what get classed as terrorist events. That’s part of it is the, there’s often a sort of like, the difference between like, Mars doing war where there may be violence and deaths, but it’s for a strategic objective. A lot of times the events that cluster around Mars-Pluto fall into the category of what we would call “senseless violence,” right? Like, which often means more civilian casualties or an act of violence that doesn’t seem to have a clear objective in mind or doesn’t seem to have anything to do with accomplishing something. That senselessness is very often part of the Mars-Pluto dynamic.
CB: Or if there is an objective, the objective is like, the annihilation of something. Like, not —
AC: Right.
CB: — just doing violence to something but to like, completely wiping something out was one of the other like, themes that we were seeing with Mars-Pluto hard aspects.
AC: Yeah. Like, the thought processes of – instead of not victory, but annihilation.
CB: Yeah. So here’s the planetary alignments calendar again for those watching the video version. Here is the Mars-Pluto opposition later in the month that we’re already jumping towards talking about because it looms so large later in the month, especially once Mars goes into Leo on the 18th. But maybe I should back it up. Let’s back it up; let’s take it back to the beginning of the month to get things more chronological again. And I want to stress and emphasize – because one of the things we’re recording this today on the very last day of the month on March 31st because the eclipse was happening at the end of the month, the Aries eclipse, and we knew there was gonna be major events happening around that eclipse. So we wanted to push this forecast as late as we possibly could so we could see what those events would be. But unfortunately, due to the constraints of it being the end of the month, we couldn’t wait any longer. But the eclipse season is still in effect, as I was saying, and here’s the eclipse graphic that Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co made me for this one, and we see putting it on a graph how eclipse season, we entered into it on the 7th of March, which was a week before the first eclipse which peaked on March 14th. And the graph peaks, and then there’s a little decline, but you get in the middle of eclipse season for most of the middle and later parts of March, and then it peaks again on March 29th. But then we’re still coming down off of that eclipse slope all the way until a week after that eclipse, which takes us all the way until at least April 5th. So that’s part of the energy of that somewhat chaotic eclipse energy, but also that energy of there being like, major endings and major beginnings happening in people’s lives is still very prominent and very potent for the first week of April.
AC: Yeah. And it’s not just that we’re still well within the eclipse’s shadow at the beginning of April. Venus is still retrograde. Mercury’s still retrograde. It’s really that trio of factors that played the circus music throughout March and created the chaos and instability. And so all of that is very much still in effect. And you know, as far as how long does the shadow of the eclipse extend, I think one week past the eclipse is a good position; I think you can also argue that you need a normal lunation. You need to get back to a normal New Moon or a Full Moon to like, get back into the normal flow of time, which would give it two weeks. And at least in this case, we’re going to kind of need those two weeks to get out of this set of questions before the Mars-Pluto kicks in. Because we need the first half of the month for Mercury to go direct and for Venus to go direct and to get us out of the eclipses. In many ways, it would be really useful to think of March as extending, I don’t know, halfway into April, because it’s kind of same-same.
One of the differences —
CB: Absolutely.
AC: I’m glad you agree. One of the differences in early April from March is that even though they are still direct, we’re able to see visibly Mercury and Venus a little tiny bit. They become visible just before the Sun rises. And so this is a reappearance after a sort of double obscuration, right? They were obscured by the Sun’s light, and the Sun’s light itself was obscured by the eclipse, which is kind of a weird optical haiku. But as they reappear, which is from an observed astrology perspective it’s like, oh, they’ve been missing! Where’s Venus, where’s Venus, where’s Venus? And then we see Venus again; we see Mercury again after this period of invisibility. But they emerge right next to Saturn. They emerge like, you’ll be able to see it if you get up before dawn. Tell me about it; I won’t be up that early. And then quite invisibly, the North Node or the head of the dragon – one of the eclipse points – is right on Saturn and right on Mercury and right on Venus. And so this reemergence heralding a new cycle has this hard, Saturnian quality to it. It’s not Venus reemerging in Pisces and getting ready to station direct; it’s that, but right next to these sort of cold, hard truths and situations that Saturn represents that themselves are under the discomforting shadow of the head of the dragon.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So it’s like, Venus and Mercury are both emerging from their underworld journey that was, you know, especially they were each at the middle of at the cazimis in late March when they conjoined the Sun. And now they reemerge on the other side back in Pisces, retreading and returning back to an area that they were at earlier this year. And so for many people, they’re gonna be revisiting some period from the past couple of months starting in January when Venus first moved into Pisces and having to revisit something that they thought was finished. But when those two planets reemerge, they’re conjoining Saturn. And I feel like Venus is doing better of the two planets in terms of the reemergence, because Venus is at least exalted in Pisces when it stations direct in the second week of April while conjoining Saturn, whereas Mercury is not doing as well because it’s in Pisces, which is the sign of its fall or depression, where Mercury struggles a little bit with its primary function which is like, to communicate things clearly. And when you have it conjoining Saturn at the same time, sometimes that can inhibit communication or make it harder to communicate for some reason even though it’s stationing direct and attempting to resume its communicative functions again. With Venus being exalted and conjunct Saturn, Venus is like, reemerging in her throne, so she’s exalted and it almost like, represents a woman or a femme-type figure who’s in a position of power or a position of being raised up societally to a prominent point of visibility. But she’s still struggling with some Saturnian issues, which can be issues pertaining to like, time, to health, or even potentially to things like appearance or other things like that while starting to move forward again.
AC: Yeah. That’s a great point about the deeply contrasting essential dignity situations of Venus and Mercury, because both of them come back into the world to find that it’s a hard situation. Right? You imagine, you know, you’re digging your way or you’re climbing your way out of the underworld. You’re like, all right, I’m gonna get back to the normal world. And you get there, and it’s kind of frozen over and depressing and there’s a bunch of weird emails in your inbox, right? But Venus emerges back, like, basically at the height of her power. Right? Doesn’t mean that the problems are any less, but Venus is almost maximally capable of trying to either take them on and solve them or rise above them. It’s worth noting that Venus crosses the single degree of greatest exaltation during this period and stations very close to that maximum degree of exaltation. Whereas Mercury is in the opposite situation. Like, fallen, hungover, confused, and so is at a weak point and therefore will likely have a much harder time with the same challenges. Just like, you know, if you imagine yourself on your same challenge but on your best day, and then same problem but on your worst day. And just from a simple, like, practical perspective, yeah, Mercury’s in wretched condition, and so Mercurial things – especially if it aspects your chart meaningfully – may be extra difficult. I got a big dose of that over the last two days just as Mercury reentered Pisces and trined my rising perfectly.
CB: Yeah. Well, it retrograded back and it hit Neptune, which is something I was seeing with both of them is when retrograding back they were immediately conjoining Neptune in the final degrees of Pisces before Neptune had changed signs. That day when Venus retrograded back and conjoined Neptune, OpenAI or one of the AI companies must have released some new thing where you could take an image and then tell it to redo the image in the style of some famous animation style. And people all over Twitter and elsewhere were posting like, famous images that had been turned into Studio Ghibli like, anime style, which on the one hand was an interesting manifestation of like, this bursting forth of like, artwork all of a sudden being reimagined all across the internet of famous pieces. But on the down side, it was also like, ripping off the style of this famous animation company from Japan which was probably not super thrilled to see their work used in that way.
AC: Yeah. It’s Neptune, right. Like, is it a benefic? No. Is it a malefic? No. It’s complicated and maybe not resolvable.
CB: Right. It’s blah. I was surprised especially early in the retrograde – I don’t know that I should have been surprised, but it was an interesting learning thing for me when Venus stationed retrograde early in March how much like, topics surrounding women seemed to be not going well for different stories I was seeing in the news related to women. Like, on the same day, the day that Venus stationed at the beginning of the month, I saw these two separate instances online of women streamers who were like, attacked basically like, on the day of the Venus retrograde station.
AC: Wow.
CB: There was one where there were these two streamers that were going around streaming and then this like, guy comes up to them and starts saying stuff to them, and he asks them out, and then one of the streamers like, turns him down and they keep walking. But then he started following and like, stalking them, and eventually at one point in the live stream that thousands of people are watching, he lunges at them and says he’s gonna kill them. And it was a really dark like, instance of some of those classic Venus themes and things that like, women have to deal with of like, men not taking rejection well, or violence on the part of men or things like that.
And then the same exact day, there was another streamer that I saw that went viral on different social places where there was a streamer named Amouranth who had previously posted a screenshot of her crypto holdings months ago, which were very a lot, and then three guys showed up at her house with guns and forced her like, into her house at gunpoint and beat her up and tried to force her to transfer her crypto to them outside. And she ended up leading them to the other side of the house where her husband was in another room, and he pulled out a gun and started shooting at these guys and shot one of them and ran off. But she was like, live tweeting some of it as it was happening, asking for help.
So it was this huge, weird debacle, and at first people were questioning why she was like, live tweeting, and it sounded fake or something like that, but then she posted the security camera footage and you see these three guys with guns like, dragging her into her house and then hitting her and then eventually running off when they start getting shot at. And that happened on the Venus station. So that was a story I was gonna cut from this, but I just wanted to mention it because I was surprised of that and other stories with the Venus retrograde where sometimes negative themes involving women in that instance, like, things like violence and other things like that.
AC: Yeah. That makes sense. Right? The Venus retrograde. Especially with the, ruled by the Mars and the Mars in Cancer brings out – it being Mars’s fall – it often brings out the worst in the Mars, many of whom embodying the Mars are men, particularly young men.
CB: Right. So now that we’re coming out the other side of that with Venus stationing direct conjunct Saturn but exalted in Pisces, I feel like especially around this lunation, the first lunation of the month which happens to be a Full Moon in the sign of Libra that’s ruled by Venus, and we get Venus stationing direct. I’m hoping that there’s some more positive stories involving women, because usually, you know, this is one of our more positive indications this month, all other things aside, is Mercury and Venus emerging from the underworld and starting to move forward again. And so therefore potentially like, some themes involving women like, moving forward again or especially prominent women taking a stand about something, or being in a better position than they were when we went into this retrograde like, 40 days ago.
AC: Yeah. I mean, you know, Venus emerges from a retrograde and the Venusian part of our lives themselves, it’s, you know, you’ve kind of been through all of the questions, all of the fears and arguments, and there’s a way to move forward, even if it’s not maybe what you wished for. It’s not necessarily the ideal circumstance, but there’s a clarity of purpose, and that clarity of purpose which we always get at the end of a Venus retrograde is, in many ways like, redoubled by the fact that Venus stations direct in such a good position for Venus. And it is striking, as you point out, that we have our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon that will not turn blood red but will instead stay —
CB: Right.
AC: — lunar silver the entire night basically at exactly the same time that Venus is stationing direct. And that Full Moon itself is also Venus-ruled, and yet, both the Sun and the Moon in this chart are T-squared or squared aspected very strongly by our old friend, Mars in Cancer, right? Who’s —
CB: Right. Yeah. Yes. Sorry, go ahead.
AC: Who is there to, you know, take rejection badly and follow you home.
CB: Right. I like what you’re saying with the clarity of purpose —
AC: Sorry.
CB: I like what you’re saying with the clarity of purpose, because that’s very positive, just with the direct station falling on the Full Moon. Just that for some people, it will be a period of like, clarity of purpose. Because you know, Venus retrograde so often, as you were saying, brings up things about like, either old relationships or current relationships, or whatever house Venus is retrograding for you, you wanting to do a makeover or like, rethinking some of the topics in that house. And sometimes that 40-day period can be very confusing, because you can have a lot of conflicting emotions as you’re like, thinking about the past and the present and the future and you’re deciding where you wanna go in the future and maybe taking a change of course or change of direction. But then by the time it stations, usually, you start having clarity of purpose about how you want to move forward again, and the future that you actually do want to manifest. And aside from the tenseness of that Full Moon, which we’ll get into, I think that’s one of our most positive things this month is just having a clarity of purpose and a forward direction again in the second week of April.
AC: Yeah, because even if something is quite difficult, if you just have a straight line where like, well, this is what there is to do. Then you can focus your energy on navigating that terrain. Whereas when you’re not sure if that’s even the right direction, even small difficulties or setbacks will kind of be magnified, because you’re like, I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t do this at all, et cetera, et cetera. Like, purpose and clarity, again, and a clarity of trajectory is an immensely powerful and useful thing. You know, we’re much more effective when we know what we’re doing, even if we don’t love that that’s what there is to do.
CB: Right. Absolutely. So I think this would be a good time to highlight my best election of the month, which is actually early in the month. Because in terms of like, auspicious dates and if you’re trying to do things during a good period of the month rather than a more challenging period of the month, when I looked through and Leisa Schaim and I picked out the auspicious electional charts for our electional astrology podcast for patrons this month, we couldn’t’ get around how tense that Mars-Pluto opposition looks that starts building in the second half of the month. And as a result of that, I think it’s a really good idea to try to get some of your more important stuff in early in the month rather than later in the month if you can, as long as you can, to avoid that Mars-Pluto opposition. So as a result of this, my best electional date for April is actually on April 2nd, 2025, around like, let’s say 2:40 PM local time in whatever your city is.
So part of the good point about this election is that we’re taking advantage of this auspicious-looking Jupiter-Moon conjunction that’s taking place that day. And in our location, the Moon will be around 14 degrees of Gemini applying to a conjunction with Jupiter around 16 degrees of Gemini. The rising sign for your location, you should set it to about the middle of Leo. And if you do that, then the Sun will be the ruler of the ascendant, and it’ll be placed up in the 9th house where it’s exalted in the sign of Aries, and it’s applying to a nice little sextile with Jupiter, which is actually one of our most positive aspects this month is that Sun sextile with Jupiter that happens around the 4th, the 5th, and the 6th that goes exact during that few day time range. And that’s really one of the primary things that this election is set to take advantage of, in addition to the Moon-Jupiter conjunction.
So it’s a decent chart for especially 11th house matters, because you have that Moon-Jupiter conjunction in the 11th house of friends and alliances and groups, and it would be helpful for some of those things. It also has some focus on 9th house activities due the Sun’s placement there, which can be about education, sometimes travel, beliefs, or other things like that. So this is my best electional chart of the month that I would recommend.
We are still pretty close to eclipse season. We’re still coming out of eclipse season, so some of the rockiness of that, tempestuousness of that, is still relevant at this time. But I feel like that’s more optimal than trying to squeeze something in later in the month when the Mars-Pluto opposition becomes much more prominent.
So that’s one of the – that’s the best electional chart this month. We found other electional charts as well which you can get access to if you listen to our electional astrology podcast, which is available through my page on Patreon.com. We have a bunch of other elections throughout the month if you need to do things during even the more un-optimal times, like around the time of the Mars-Pluto opposition – we have some elections to at least try to mitigate that as much as possible. So you can find out more information at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
All right. So that’s the best —
AC: Not an – yeah, it’s not an easy month. But even within, yeah, less than ideal periods of times, there are much better and much worse times to initiate things.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So I’m gonna highlight that, because that’s one of my more positive aspects of the month is not just that Moon-Jupiter conjunction, but the Sun-Jupiter sextile that’s going exact around April 5th and April 6th where we can see the Sun hitting about 16 degrees of Aries and then sextiling Jupiter. And even though a sextile is not usually like, you know, huge aspect to write home about, part of the reason why it’s actually positive and you wanna try to squeeze in some things while the Sun is still applying to that is because once the Sun completes that sextile with Jupiter, unfortunately it’s like, heading into a square with Mars for most of the rest of the month, which actually starts getting very close and eventually completes around April 20th, I believe, once Mars has moved into Leo and the Sun has moved into Taurus. So the Sun goes from like, a really nice condition with that sextile to Jupiter to something not as nice once it starts squaring Mars and squaring Pluto around the time of that opposition between Mars and Pluto.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So let’s bring things to that Full Moon, why don’t we.
AC: We should mention, just to be clear, just to do it chronologically because we did talk about it a little bit, right? So at the end of basically the first full week of April, we get Mercury’s direct station.
CB: Right.
AC: Right. And then our next sort of major tonal change – so six, 7th, for Mercury’s direct station, and then about five days later, so the next week, we have the near simultaneous direct station of Venus and the occurrence of the Full Moon. And so I think that’s a really meaningful boundary, because that’s for sure the end of the eclipse shadow, because we see the Moon go unshadowed that night. It’s the end of Mercury indirect motion; that was the week before. And Venus is no longer retrograde either. And so like, there are consequences and things to work out still, but Mercury and Venus are visible. No more eclipse shadow. It’s a meaningfully – it’s the next period of time where it, with the 12th, we get to the next phase. And March is finally over on the 12th.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Like, we move into the next phase of things once we hit this new lunation, and I was trying to – when you and I during our planning session this weekend, I was trying to identify like, what are the positive things happening this month? And one of the things we came to that you said was part of the most positive things this month are just the removal of some of the challenging things from last month, which is primarily these two stations of Venus and Mercury in the second week of April, which really culminates especially on this Full Moon in Libra.
AC: Yeah. Oh, and – right – getting normal Full Moons rather than like, blood-soaked Moons. And although I don’t think you’re wrong at all to underscore the scariness of the Mars-Pluto opposition, what we do get with Mars moving into Leo to oppose Pluto – which we don’t like – but it also means Mars is not in Cancer anymore. And we have, you know, there have been dozens of things which were very clearly a result of Mars being in Cancer over the last several months which I don’t think anyone will miss. Right? The first major one being the LA fires, which started within a day of – got big within a day of – Mars retrograding into Cancer. You know, onto and including a number of these American domestic policies which are less than ideal, et cetera, et cetera. Like, although we may not welcome Mars opposing Pluto in Leo, we shall not miss Mars – we will remember, but we will not miss Mars in Cancer. It’s caused a lot of trouble.
CB: Yeah. It’s been rough, the literalness of like, some of the manifestations has been startling. Like, as soon as it went in in September, like, how clear it was and what a unique and different vibe it has been that has been largely not super welcome with the retrograde and the intensity of that. I feel like we get one final like, extinction burst of that with this Full Moon, though, because the Full Moon —
AC: Oh yeah. That’s a great way to frame it.
CB: It goes exact at 23 degrees of Libra, and then immediately once the Full Moon goes exact, it then applies to a square with Mars, which is at 27 degrees of Cancer here. So it’s like, while the Mars station direct in Cancer in February was certainly a very, very intense and important turning point, I think Mars is gonna have some final parting words and parting shots as it’s making its way out of Cancer around the middle of April. And it would definitely be worth it for everybody to sort of pay attention to what house that’s transiting in your chart and what sort of events have been coming up ever since September of last year when Mars first moved into Cancer, and how some of that’s starting to wind down now and how there might be like, a final push to get Mars out of that sector of the zodiac and out of that sector of your chart.
AC: Yeah. Nice framing, Chris. And it’s funny because we have, we discussed this Full Moon in terms of Venus, because Venus is stationing direct. Venus is like, okay, I’ve been through a lot, but I’ve figured it out. It’s not gonna be easy, but I know what to do. And then the Full Moon is like, hey, I’m Venus-ruled; let’s do that. And Mars is like, throwing itself a big, red going away party in the middle of what should be Venus’s moment.
CB: Yeah. One thing that might be helping us with it is I wasn’t sure how to articulate this, but I did write it down as one of the more positive aspects of the month, which is this where Uranus is at at like, 25 degrees of Taurus and how one of our first aspects at the beginning of the month is Saturn sextiling Uranus from 25 Pisces to 25 Taurus. And some of the Pisces stuff, then, is forming trines with Mars, some flowing aspects with Mars, so it’s like, part of my hope with that is there could be some constructive ways the planets in Pisces are, you know, pushing Mars out of Cancer but also restraining or trying to make that a smoother transition than it might be otherwise as a result of those flowing aspects. How would you articulate like, a Saturn-Uranus sextile, or what keywords might we give to that which could be prominent at the beginning of the month where that aspect is going exact?
AC: Yeah, thanks for picking that out, because that’s… They’re slow moving planets. It’s background. It’s the first in the series that will be occurring throughout this year. The other sextiles I will take place in a different pair of signs, but it’s the same relationship. We’ve begun with this; we enter into the Saturn-Uranus sextiles.
So Saturn and Uranus are hard planets to get to work together in my experience. Their natures are inherently opposed. Uranus wants to play an entirely new game, whereas Saturn wants to finish the existing game, right? Saturn looks to the past and looks to solidify things. Uranus looks to the future and looks for things that haven’t even been, you know, haven’t been tried before. And so it’s difficult to get them – you know, one is experiment, one is go with the tried and true. And so it’s difficult to get them to work together. The sextile might be the perfect relationship for synergy, for what possible synergies there are, because they’re not forced into the same car; they’re not forced to like, do an awkward buddy cop movie where like, you know, it’s a conjunction. They have – they’re, you know, in a sextile relationship, the interests of experimentation for Uranus and moving more traditionally and carefully with Saturn, they’re aligned. Like, there’s something – Saturn benefits or can potentially benefit from Uranus experimenting over there, and Uranus can benefit from Saturn holding it down over there. So it’s, you know, as far as their relationships go, like, again, the traditional, the nontraditional, the experimental, the tried and the true – it’s as good as it gets, because they’re not too much in each other’s shit, but they’re in position to assist one another.
CB: Absolutely. I’m glad you used that term, like, “synergy,” because I think this is like, when there’s a lightly synergistic relationship between the forces of the old and the forces of the new, and a way to integrate those two usually competing impulses in your life that either want to keep doing the same thing and bringing you back to the past, or those forces that want to throw you lightyears into the future. And having not a full synergy between them, which would be like, a trine, but having a lightly synergistic relationship that’s allowing for greater flow of give an take between those two energies in the person’s life as well as in terms of world events than there might be otherwise. So obviously this is happening in the broader context of a lot of other crazy, intense stuff, but at least it’s nice indication that at least in some sectors, there’s gonna be some positive growth and expansion, because I think that’s part of what you get when you take these two opposing forces and force them to work together in a way that’s more flowing.
AC: Yeah. Or give them – yeah, I would say, give them an opportunity to complement one another. Right? Like, you know, if you were in one area of life experimenting with new things where you’re not sure, you know, the results cannot be guaranteed. But that can be anchored by being very by the book in another area of life where you’re taking no risks and you know exactly what you’re gonna get, and vice versa, where like, a little experimentation here, little by-the-book here, the two – excuse me – like, the two can be very complementary rather than just going all, like, throwing all your chips in and hoping the experiment works with Uranus or refusing to try anything new and, you know, just kind of building a little prison for yourself with Saturn.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And what’s cool about it is like, even though the aspect Saturn-Uranus goes exact early in the month on like, the 4th or something, the aspect gets extended and it gets reactivated and triggered continuously through the second week of the month because of Mercury and Venus stationing in late Pisces on top of Saturn. So it’s like, they’re activating Saturn and sextiling Uranus at the same time, which is just going to emphasize and intensify that sextile even more than it would be otherwise, because then it’s getting inner planets to activate it instead of it just being these slow-moving outer planets. So I think that’s gonna work together with the Venus stationing direct, and it’s gonna help many people to have a more positive forward-moving motion with the Venus after Venus stations direct than there might be otherwise because that Uranus energy is coming in and like, offsetting the more inhibitive like, Saturn energy that’s hitting Venus.
AC: Yeah. I see that.
CB: Yeah. So that’s —
AC: It’s not an easy set of problems to solve, but that’s a nice angle and a real one.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s kind of the first half of the month. After the first half of the month, we start moving into more tricky territory once we get into the middle and especially the end of the third week. So let me animate the chart so we can see where that is all taking us exactly. So there’s April 12th when we have the Full Moon and we have Venus stationing direct. And then – right – so the Sun starts very quickly moving into the square with Mars, but Mars switches signs and departs from Cancer and moves into Leo by April 18th. And this is gonna be a huge vibe shift, because we’ve been in Mars in Cancer land since, what, like, January? When did Mars go back into Cancer?
AC: Yeah, it was very early January. That’s when the second leg of Mars in Cancer began. Our first leg of Mars in Cancer was basically beginning of September to beginning of November. Then we got a break. Then beginning of January up until the middle of April. So it’s been —
CB: Right.
AC: — the most Mars in Cancer you’ll get for decades to come.
CB: And it’s like, the first ingress of Mars into Leo was right before the presidential election. And then Trump was elected, basically, immediately after Mars moved into Leo, which is also his rising sign as well as the rising sign of Vance who became vice president at that time.
AC: And the place where, the sign where Trump has Mars. So the beginning of his Mars return, or sort of a false start to the beginning of his Mars return.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it’s actually a lot of stuff for Trump. It’s like —
AC: Yeah. It should be.
CB: Uranus starts off the month at like, 24 Taurus, which is conjoining his Midheaven at 24 Taurus. But by the end of the – by mid- to late April, Uranus gets to 26 Taurus, which is squaring his Mars which is at 26 Leo. And that was, you know, some of the challenging stuff that happened last summer was Uranus squaring his Mars in the 1st house just because Mars in the 1st house natally can sometimes be tricky for bodily issues. And sometimes when that gets activated, you can have issues, you know, come up at that time.
So Uranus squaring his Mars and then Mars going back into his rising sign, and let’s talk about Mars in Leo, though —
AC: Yeah. So because that’s —
CB: — part of the vibe.
AC: — after the Full Moon, that’s by far – it’s not only the next thing that’s important, but it’s a very important thing. Right? So it’s on the 17th. Mars is finally done with Cancer. And Mars in Leo becomes very important for the rest of the month.
CB: Absolutely. So Mars in Leo – what do we have on that? Like, I remember the Venus retrograde of 2023 in Leo, and there was like, the Barbie movie and like, that sort of feminine energy hitting some sort of peak as well as like, a focus on celebrities and celebrity relationships and break-ups, and then I remember in November and December I was commenting on how Mars slowing down and stationing retrograde in Leo seemed to be like, this masculine energy suddenly coming in really loud at the end of the year. And some of it was like, a sort of like, toxic masculinity. It’s like, a showy masculine energy.
AC: There’s a lot of – sorry, go ahead.
CB: Bravado, yeah, that’s a good term.
AC: Yeah. The thing that I remember most about Mars in Leo just before the retrograde station was the massively promoted and watched and massively depressing bout between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
CB: Okay.
AC: Which was a massive promotional success. You know, it’s Mars; it’s a fight. It was promoted tremendously successfully, and it left everybody wanting to never see anything like that again their entire lives. But Mars —
CB: Yeah. I thought that was more of like, a Saturn thing, because it happened right on the Saturn station, I believe, it was like the night of the Saturn station, and it was —
AC: It was also very Mars. And I predicted not here, but I predicted exactly what it be based on the Mars. Doesn’t matter.
CB: Okay.
AC: But —
CB: Well, I was gonna mention that because this month when I did the research into Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, it reminded me – what I kept seeing is it reminded me of that station when the Tyson fight happened, but also when the Biden-Trump debate happened on the first Saturn station in June, and all of a sudden, like, Biden’s age and cognitive struggles as a result of his advanced age suddenly became undeniable to everybody and eventually forced him to drop out. But when I was research Saturn-Neptune conjunctions this year, or this month, I kept seeing a version of that, but with countries where there kept being a lot of like, countries and dynasties that were like, very old and kind of like, swaying and decrepit or sick that would like, collapse sometimes under those conjunctions of Saturn and Neptune.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And I was surprised, because like, I kept seeing that, and I kept seeing like, uprising of lower classes banding together and like, doing uprisings and things like that as another theme. And I was surprised by that, and that’s something I wanted to mention here because that we shouldn’t forget, even though it’s not going exact this month, is we’re heading very strongly into the Saturn-Neptune conjunction from this point forward.
AC: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, you get those that sort of three-month-old, Halloween pumpkin collapse, right? Where —
CB: Right.
AC: — it holds its structure until anything bumps into it, and the whole thing just turns to mush.
CB: Exactly.
AC: But back to Mars in Leo. Right? Just characterizing Mars in Leo, there’s a lot of bravado. It’s loud. As one positive thing you can see it contributing to in people’s natal charts is you see people who have a huge like, showman streak; they have a bravery about getting up in front of people and doing their thing. Right? Which can, you know, if you don’t have an artistic skill or something to show off but you still have the courage to get up and dominate everybody’s attention, can be really obnoxious. But like, that’s the quality; it’s that bravery to get up in front of everybody, which, you know, if you have something worth saying or if you have something worth holding people’s attention, it’s wonderful that you have the bravery and the skill to get people’s attention to do that. But that’s not guaranteed with the Mars. The Mars just gives you the ability to get attention, and the willingness and bravery to do that.
CB: Right. So it’s like, the courage to be aggressively attention-seeking or sometimes, which can sometimes be a good thing. It can be somebody, like you were saying, that is a good showman that has a sense for style or presentation, but then the downside can sometimes be like, a ostentatiousness or a kind of like, not being courageous but being courageous or having big words for show but maybe not following through when it comes down to it, when it comes down to needing to actually take action and be brave.
AC: Yeah. The negative side would be like, people who are like, an attention hog or a demagogue, right, who are just like, eating the attention. They’re able to get the attention, but then they don’t do anything good with it.
CB: Yeah. So from a personal standpoint, one of the things that’s interesting is that Mars – remember, Mars stationed retrograde at six degrees of Leo in December, so it’s still retracing its steps. But it finishes retracing its steps by May 1st. So we finally leave the post-retrograde shadow period at the very end of this month, but as a result of that, in the last week and a half of April, it’s gonna be directly taking us back to some events that happened from the beginning of November through December as Mars returns back to for a final time those same exact degrees in the first six degrees of Leo.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And the – it’s interesting, because not only do we have Mars finishing up those same degrees that constitute its retrograde path, but we also have the finale of the three oppositions with Pluto, because those are the two things that really define this Mars retrograde is what degrees did it cross and the three oppositions with Pluto. So we get both of those. And it’s worth noting that very shortly after Mars’s return to Leo, not only do we have the opposition with Pluto forming, but the Sun then ingresses into Taurus on the 20th, and then we have a really tense configuration – a T-square – where the Sun and Mars are square, and the Sun and Pluto are square, while Mars and Pluto are opposing each other. And so that last opposition between Mars and Pluto also draws the Sun into it, which is going to further intensify and complicate it. And so it makes like, we could say 20th through the 24th, 23rd, however you wanna phrase it, but a lot of the end of the month, like, really tense. And when we were —
CB: Yeah. It kind of culminates on the second lunation, because what I noticed was that New Moon that happens, it happens at seven degrees of Taurus on the 27th. And this is just after the Mars-Pluto opposition has gone exact, so the lunation is like, squaring the Mars-Pluto opposition in early Leo and Aquarius.
AC: Yeah. It’s certainly – I don’t think it’s gonna feel over until the end of the month.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, and there are some other – the Moon’s conjunction with Pluto on the 20th, which is an opposition with Mars and a square with the Moon, I would say bring us into this Mars-Pluto-Sun thing that we’re gonna do for a lot of the rest of the month —
CB: Right.
AC: — that gets re-emphasized several times. And so when we were talking about Mars-Pluto before, we were talking about some of the shapes that it takes in news headlines and big events. Right? But I’d like to add to that that on a personal level with the Mars-Pluto, a lot of times if there are any funny power dynamics in your life, it’ll make those really itchy where one – well, if there are any real ones, attention gets drawn to those. Those become sort of heated up. And then even if there aren’t, people get really touchy around power and power dynamics with Mars-Pluto oppositions. Mars-Pluto in general, but oppositions most definitely. And again, things turn in that direction to either imagine crazy power dynamics, to create crazy power dynamics, or to look directly at real crazy power dynamics. But that’s a very consistent thing that that transit creates.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Because that was what was actually really striking about the first exact opposition is like, the second one at the beginning of January was really overt stuff. Like, explosions were happening; like, people were driving into crowds of people in cars. Fires were happening. But the first opposition was actually much more subtle, which happened right before the election. And one of the news stories that happened like, right on that opposition or very close to it that I noted at the time was when Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post several years ago, the Washington Post editorial team was getting ready to issue an endorsement for the presidential election as they’ve done for many decades now. And they were about to endorse Kamala Harris, and then all of a sudden at the last minute, Bezos stepped in and said, “No, we’re not doing any endorsements anymore,” an there was this really bold but sort of behind-the-scenes power play thing that was happening where you could see a little bit of the peak of it in terms of the like, the iceberg above the ocean. But you could kind of tell and infer that there was a bunch of stuff happening under the ocean at the same time in terms of the type of backroom deals and power plays and pressure that was happening. And that, of course, which we noted – I remember remarking on that —
AC: Yeah, we —
CB: — at the time. We remarked on it, but then of course, that then culminates and becomes even more clear and more obvious later on inauguration day when it’s like, Bezos and this other line of billionaires suddenly is there at the inauguration standing behind Trump as he’s inaugurated in this really visible way, just in terms of —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — subsequent discussions about oligarchy and things like that.
AC: Yeah, when the Sun was directly on Pluto so we could see the invisible for a second. Yeah, and we talked about how in retrospect the Mars-Pluto oppositions, the two that we’d seen up to that point, really seemed to time very nicely, like, the shifting political allegiances of the oligarch class or tech oligarch mostly that we didn’t —
CB: Right.
AC: — see as clearly on the way in, but seemed pretty clear. And so some events of that nature that like, speak to that and maybe complete a shift or speak to the completion of those shifting alliances seem very likely with this last go-through. Especially because, again, the Sun is watching during this one. The Sun is square both, so we have that – the Sun brings visibility as well as questions of leadership and authority. But it’s —
CB: Yeah, absolutely.
AC: Yeah, but on – oh, sorry.
CB: This month there was some stuff with Pluto, and I can’t remember what it was, but there were some stories that made it really clear, and it reminded me of the underworld and sometimes like, criminal asications with Pluto as well as sometimes the attempts to hide or suppress criminal activity that sometimes comes along with Pluto. And that might be relevant. Like, oh yeah, that’s what it was – Leisa Schaim pointed out to me there was this story that it was like, an expose that was done by I’m blanking out on his name. Ronan Farrow, who has a Mars-Pluto conjunction in the 10th house ruling his 3rd house.
AC: Interesting.
CB: And he did this expose about this story that was being buried by this local police department that were covering up for these like, terrible, terrible crimes that were happening. And a prosecutor was like, fired in order to like, cover it up, and eventually a prosecutor out of desperation sent the story to Ronan Farrow, and he ended up doing an expose and blowing it wide open which finally eventually led to charges being pressed about against this guy who’s doing these terrible crimes as well as those who were covering up. So I just mention that because I had forgotten and it was a good reminder of some of the underworldly type things that sometimes come up with Pluto and Pluto aspects.
AC: Yeah.
CB: But there’s also the ability to investigate and to sometimes expose those things at the same time.
AC: Yeah. It’s both the things that are kept hidden as well as the drawn to ferret out those things that have been kept hidden. And it’s interesting because with Pluto, like, those things which are kept hidden will be sort of metaphorically down, right? Like, hidden underneath, right, like, with the underworld of criminal organizations, but then you also have the underworld above you. Right? Like, the people whose wealth is 10,000 times that of yours, right, like, live in a different world that is also completely opaque to you, right? Like, the billionaire class or the oligarch class. Like, they live in an underworld above you, right, and so that – the underworld kind of begins whenever you get far away enough from here on earth, and Pluto speaks to both of those.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I forgot to show this graphic. So here’s our classic Mars retrograde graphic. I’m having trouble finding the one that has Pluto as well; maybe I can splice it in in post. But it just shows the journey that we’ve been through with this Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo at this point and how, yeah, April is really about moving into the final phases of that, especially when it goes into Leo on April 17th and then it will exit its post-retrograde shadow at six Leo on May 1st or 2nd. And then eventually Mars will depart from Leo on June 17th, ending the cycle completely. But we are finally getting to the final phases of that. But with some of these third and final aspects, there may still be some major – like, the most notable events, basically, may still be coming rather than being in the past.
AC: Well, you know, even though it’s a little, it’s not exactly a bunch of stuff to look forward to, I am still looking forward to just getting done with this cycle. Like, this is – we need to like, do the third and final pass, Mars needs to do these degrees in Leo. Let’s see what it is, and then, you know, move onto what’s next or deal with what happens.
You know, one of the disadvantages of being able to see the shape of things reasonably well with astrology is that sometimes it becomes a little bit of a sword dangling over your head. It’s like, yeah, but, you know, April 20th through 24th, like, that’s gonna happen. So contradictorally, it’s sort of nice to get it out of the way sometimes. Because so far, none of it is ever the end of the world, no matter how unpleasant it is. And so we’re getting it out of the way during the second half of the month. I’m really trying to be positive this month, Chris; have you noticed? You appreciate it?
CB: I know you are; you are a ray of sunshine in my otherwise cloudy perspective right now. I am deeply, myself, over Mars in Cancer and I’m ready to be done with it. I had – there was some slight, you know, highlights of it like the Kendrick Lamar thing and his rise to prominence, especially with the Super Bowl, was pretty cool. But no offense to the Mars in Cancer people, but I just I feel like people with Cancer placements in general are probably over this transit at this point for the most part as well. It’s probably not just me.
AC: Yeah, oh, me and my Cancer rising can’t wait.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, I’m even done with being done with it.
CB: Yeah. It’s been a good run. Well, good news is we’ll be done with Mars retrograde in Cancer for a while. Not great news – this Mars retrograde in Leo, we’ve got another one of those that comes up again in like, a couple years because this cycle has a back-to-back repetition, this particular one, that goes back-to-back every two years roughly every like, 15 to 17 years or something like that. So we actually have to pay even closer attention to the closing down of this Mars retrograde in Leo cycle over the next two months between now and June because Mars is gonna come back and retrograde again in Leo and Virgo I think in 2027.
AC: I think that’s right.
CB: Yeah. So that’s gonna be relevant for – so for example, anybody that has like, Leo rising, whatever’s going on in this retrograde cycle may be relevant again in two years’ time when Mars does that again.
AC: Yeah. But your Cancer planets are – not only do they not have to do this again for a very, very, very long time, but you’ll get Jupiter coming to Cancer soon enough in just a couple months to soothe what has been irritated.
CB: Yeah. To put some aloe on the burns. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that Jupiter in Cancer for those Cancer placements.
All right, my friend. Let me look at the calendar. Is there anything else we need to mention about the later part of the month or the end of the month as we’re wrapping up here?
AC: Yeah, it’s not – you mentioned it earlier, but I think we should spend just a little bit of time on the lunation that comes at the very, very close to the end of the month on the 27th. We get the New Moon in Taurus, which is still close enough; it’s passed the Mars-Pluto opposition, and the Mars-Pluto opposition is just starting to weaken. But it’s close enough that the Mars-Pluto opposition events and outcomes are squarely within the view of both the Sun and the Moon. And so the resetting for the next cycle, which the New Moon is, still beholds that opposition quite clearly even though it’s starting – you know, it’s starting to be over and Mars is almost out of those degrees, or out of the degrees of its retrograde. And so we’re trying to like, restart in Taurus and like, you know, do Taurean things, be practical, stabilize things. Figure out how to make things sustainable. But we have to take into account the Mars-Pluto and, you know, what ill it has wrought in our plans to do so.
CB: Yeah, and start to pick up the pieces as it moves away. It’s funny how much I’ve been reminded over the past month or so how much as soon as an aspect gets a degree separating, like, you really do start to see this drop-off like, pretty dramatically in the intensity of the energy. So it is nice that Mars is not quite there yet by the time of the New Moon; it’s still actually within a degree, but within a few days of that, it does separate by a degree or more by the end of April, and it starts to recede somewhat.
AC: Yeah. And so, yeah, so by the last day of April, we really are able to start looking back on this Mars cycle. Right? Like, it is just entered the new – the whole thing has just entered the rearview mirror. And that’s —
CB: Definitely by the first few days of May, for sure, when it leaves —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — its shadow.
AC: Yeah, okay, that’s fair. And so, you know, it’s interesting. You know, April is really the – not only is it the final outcomes of the whole Mars cycle, but we also do the entirety of the eclipse season. We don’t have the very last – like, Venus still has a little bit of, still has some shadow left to cover by the end of April, but Venus has covered the majority of that retrograde. Mercury has made it back out of its retrograde shadow by the end of April. And so April’s like, working through all this stuff that didn’t begin in April, but we’re done with almost all of it and readying to move into what things are now that those cycles have taken place.
CB: That’s great. That’s perfect. You’re right. Yeah. Because we’re coming off of the retrograde – April really is us trying to come off of the retrograde cycles of all three of those inner planets, of Mercury, of Venus, and Mars. And then after April, like, we’ll actually start really treading new ground and moving forward again into uncharted territory. But there’s still something about unfinished business that we’re still wrapping up in April.
AC: Yeah. I mean, and that’s maybe the right phrase, right, is that April’s just full of getting through all of the unfinished business. Because there’s so much unfinished business.
CB: Right. Yeah. Absolutely. So for different people’s personal lives, you know, all of that will harken back to whatever was happening in your personal life when those planets first traced those degrees, whether it’s like, Mars in November through December tracing those early degrees of Leo, whether it’s like, Venus which was going through Pisces starting in January, February, and then it returns to Aries at the very end of the month, or Mercury, which – when did Mercury hit these degrees? I guess just in the month preceding, mainly in March.
AC: Yeah, it was in February or maybe it was early March, late February —
CB: Late February, early March. Yeah. Okay. Late February, early March – that makes sense. Yeah. So bringing those things to a close. Coming full circle. And yeah, finishing things that you thought were over and done for, but you find that you have to return back to one last time before you can make the final push to move forward.
AC: Yeah. And getting done with these big resets, right? Like, Mars’s retrograde, it’s a big reset. But you know, completing it, you don’t have to do another one for another two years, right? Venus’s retrograde’s a big reset. Completing it, not gonna have to do another one for a year and a half. Mercury? Different thing. But like, that’s two reasonable resets. And so what you get out of those is, you know, how you’re gonna do things and approach things and being oriented to the next year plus, so that you’re oriented and, you know, ready to address reality as it is now rather than before things needed to change.
CB: Yeah. I saw like, at least two or three different people just change their hairstyle during this Venus retrograde, which I thought was so funny and like, classic. Did you change your hairstyle? Is that why you’re doing that motion?
AC: Oh, I was thinking about it. I was, yeah, I don’t know if – Lucian really likes grabbing my hair.
CB: Right.
AC: Giving me clown hair. You know, I’d love to just cut all my hair off; I kind of hate having hair. But I look menacing, so —
CB: When your head is shaved?
AC: Yeah. It’s not a good look for me.
CB: Yeah. One of them was funny… What is their name? Emily – there was a famous supermodel who got like, a bad haircut last week, and people were telling her about Venus retrograde and she was saying that she was like, an astrology believer now. But I think there’s something about the boldness to try to completely redo your style that you sometimes feel empowered to attempt during a Venus retrograde that while sometimes it may not go super smooth or be as good as you hoped, the attempt to like, shake up the things that you’re used to that you’ve been doing for so long that doing a redesign or a makeover represents such a major move. I think sometimes just the process of shaking things up in your life is sometimes worth it, even if it doesn’t go super smooth. And I was kind of taking that a little lesson from that as observing that in other people recently.
AC: That’s nice. Yeah. Sometimes the internal part of you is ready to make the change, but the external circumstances haven’t quite aligned.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. Sometimes changing things is like, pushing over like, a refrigerator and you gotta rock it back and forth a few times before you get enough motion to truly change your life. Sometimes it starts with like, little steps.
AC: That’s a nice image.
CB: Absolutely. All right, my friend. Anything else we meant to mention about that? We got a lot to mention in May when Saturn goes into Aries. That’s gonna truly be like, Saturn-Neptune coming in full force and full blast at that point. I feel like we’re gonna be talking about that aspect a lot, and it’s actually gonna be more interesting than before I researched it this month I really felt like it was gonna be. Because so much of what it’s been for the past two years as it’s been building up has just been like, what’s real versus what’s not real, the boundary between them getting blurred, and you know, facts and other things like that suddenly becoming much more unclear. But there’s gonna be a lot more interesting stuff with this when we get into it next month in May when Saturn changes signs and goes into Aries, both due to the vibe shift and what Saturn in Aries is gonna be like in general, but also because it immediately then like, meets up with Neptune there.
AC: Yeah. And in a small act of kindness, the planets have decided to not put that at the beginning of May right after we finally get done with the other shit. It waits for us at the end of May, so we’ve got all of this business which we finish up in April and then early May. And there’s a few weeks before something else major changes. Saturn moves on the 24th. Again, it’s not kindness, but if it’s kindness, it’s very small. It’s at least not cruelty, which the heavens are abundantly capable of.
CB: Yeah. Well, I called it in our year ahead forecast; I called it the year that everything changed or the year that everything changes, and that has certainly been the case and has worked out well. And you also had a good phrase, which is the clownpocalypse, which also came true.
AC: It was the cyberpunk clownpocalypse.
CB: Okay. Well, that’s good too. That’s also good.
AC: The tech element is very important. Yeah, I had a couple different things. None of them – that one was at least the funniest. But yeah —
CB: Right.
AC: — it’s the lip, you know, the edge of the abyss. I mean, we have now entered what’s basically an eight years that rearranges everything all over the world. I’m gonna be Positive Austin and not elaborate on the finally falling over the edge of the cliff, which will take eight years to hit bottom.
CB: All right.
AC: That’s not the image.
CB: I appreciate this new role reversal that we’ve had in this Venus retrograde where you’re the positive one and I’m the like, not super optimistic one. But it’s good. It’s good. I like the balance of that.
AC: Yeah. Positive Austin! You know, the Venus went over all my stuff; it’s really important. I had some revelations, and I promise to be a force for optimism on the podcast every month moving forward.
CB: Okay! I’m gonna hold you to that. All right, my friend. What do you got coming up this month? What are you working on? Like, you got things in the works? Are there things you’re doing behind the scenes?
AC: Yeah, there’s a fair amount going on. So one, I don’t even wanna mention it – working on the book that I wrote 10 years ago. Working towards the second edition.
And then I’m also gonna be doing an intake for my Year One of the Fundamentals of Astrology program. I think we’re probably gonna do the intake on the 17th; I might mess with that. It’s hard to find an election I like in April. But if you haven’t joined my mailing list, please do; that’s where the invitations to join the program go out, and I’ll be sending out an update once Mercury is direct and I am no longer like, wiffle-wobbling about which day to open it up.
But yeah – open seats in the program, and then Sphere and Sundry has a bunch of things going on. One, a bunch of classic series are coming back; they’ve been coming back throughout March, and then a bunch of old favorites will be available again for the first time in a while throughout April. I believe the schedule is about one per week. There is also a new series, which is going to be available tomorrow, which I did, which is… Let’s see. It’s a Mars in Capricorn series, and it uses an Iron Palm herbal formula in combination with a mansion election in combination with Mars in Capricorn; it’s really – it’s a fun little project. It’s sort of Ficino meets Kung Fu. Check out the write-up; it’ll be out tomorrow.
And then finally, of the previously created things which are available, again, in this case for a limited amount of time, the Thema Mundi series is on sale again. And it’s worth noting that that was seven separate operations that were then unified by Kait doing a week-long hermitage where she didn’t see the outside world; I didn’t see her. And the results of that eight workings as one are literally magical, but pretty extraordinary project. So all of that. A lot going on with Sphere and Sundry. If you’d like to join my astrological education program, we’re doing an opening, and I will be otherwise hiding and trying to write.
CB: Nice. Awesome. I support that. What are your websites?
AC: So it’s AustinCoppock – my name – dot com. And SphereAndSundry.com.
CB: Nice. I love that you’re like, “literally magical,” not metaphorically magical. It’s not a metaphor.
AC: Yeah, it is – it’s also a metaphor, but the metaphor is not the important part.
CB: Right. Yeah. I like that. Cool. All right. As for myself, I’m gonna just continue working on the podcast this month. I’ve got a lot of good, big stuff coming up. Since the Venus retrograde cycle’s winding down, I think I’m gonna do some Venus retrograde episodes. I kind of wanna interview patrons to do some interviews to hear about how the Venus retrograde and the eclipses went in people’s lives. So I’m thinking about doing a live stream with patrons on that maybe next weekend. Working on another Venus retrograde episode on queer history for this Venus retrograde, which it turns out to be very closely tied into, which should be a really good episode.
AC: That makes sense.
CB: And I’ve been collecting news stories from like, Venus retrograde for a followup Venus retrograde in the news episode as well, so I may do one of those. I’m also gonna be working on the 5th house episode in the background; I don’t know yet if I’m gonna commit to it. Like, the last three months, I’ve done like, huge research episodes every month.
AC: Yeah!
CB: It’s taken a lot out of me even though it’s been really worth it, especially that Saturn-Neptune conjunction episode. But I’m gonna decide sometime around the middle of the month whether I’m gonna tackle another big episode and do the 5th house and resume that series or whether I’m gonna just keep researching it but maybe record it early the following month. I’ll see how things are going and feel that out, but there should be some good episodes this month, and I’m gonna give people early access to those episodes through my page on Patreon.com. So if you wanna get access or even join me for some of the live recordings and interviews like that Venus retrograde live stream, then you can sign up there.
All right, I think that’s it for this episode. Thanks for joining me, Austin. We had a lot to cover today, but as always it was amazing doing this with you and being on this journey with you, so thanks for doing it with me.
AC: Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure.
CB: Cool. All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
AC: All right. Take care!
[END CREDITS]
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