The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 488, titled:
May Astrology Forecast 2025
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on April 29, 2025
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released May 15th, 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 looking at the astrology of May 2025. Hey Austin. Welcome back. You’re looking especially prophetic today.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: It’s the haircut. Thank you.
CB: The haircut. I do appreciate a good haircut. So we have got a great show lined up today. We’re gonna spend the first hour of this episode talking about news and events and how it coincided with the astrology over the past month since our last forecast episode. Then in the second half of the episode, we’re gonna do a deep dive into the astrology of May and give our forecasts about some of the planetary alignments coming up over the next month. So as always, you can use the timestamps in the description below this episode on YouTube or on the podcast website if you wanna skip forward to the forecast episode. But otherwise, before we start the news section, I wanted to first give you a quick overview and preview of some of the transits we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode.
So first things first, here is the planetary alignments calendar which shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they will get by the end of the month. Here is the planetary aspects calendar, designed by Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co where they make some lovely almanacs and personalized reports, and this shows you some of the different aspects and things that peak during the course of the month. One that I’m particularly interested and curious about happens later in the month where the Sun will conjoin Uranus on the 17th and Mercury will square Mars the same day around the same time period, so we’ll be paying attention to and talking about that later in the episode.
Here’s the planetary alignments calendar. So in terms of major aspects and ingresses and other alignments this month, we open the month with Venus conjoining Neptune right at the beginning of Aries on May 2nd. Then a couple days later on the 4th, Pluto stations retrograde and there’s an intensification of that transit on the 4th of May. Then later that week, Mercury moves into Taurus on the 10th. There’s a Full Moon in Scorpio on the 12th. Sun conjoins Uranus on the 17th, followed by Mercury squaring Mars within 24 hours. The Sun enters Gemini on the 20th, and then we get a big outer planet shift, which is Saturn moving into the sign of Aries on the 24th. Then Mercury goes into Gemini the next day, then there’s a New Moon in Gemini – our second lunation – on the 26h. And finally, there’s a Mercury cazimi in Gemini on the 30th of May.
So those are some of the alignments, and the big one this month that we’re gonna be spending a lot of time talking about is Saturn moving into Aries on the 24th because that is the start of a three-year long transit of Saturn through that sign, but it’s also the buildup to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction which becomes extremely close this summer, especially around July. And Saturn joining Neptune in Aries is a really important turning point.
All right. So those are some of the transits that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode. But first things first, let’s talk about some news and other things since our last episode. So first things first – how you doing, Austin? Checking in. You as a Cancer rising, I’d like to congratulate you for surviving Mars retrograde in Cancer. Good job.
AC: Thank you. I didn’t get tetanus!
CB: That’s a plus.
AC: I almost got tetanus! It was funny. I was teaching class right as Mars was creeping back up on my Ascendant for the 3rd time. And I told a story about how I gave myself tetanus by accidentally impaling myself on a rusty nail about like, three-quarters of an inch deep, maybe 22 years ago. And I was like, oh, hahaha, and my knee swoll up like a grapefruit; I had to get a tetanus shot, etcetera etcetera. And then two days later, I was helping a friend tear apart like, an old deck; I was doing like, some light demolition. And I felt a little scratch, but I looked down and it didn’t – like, there was a little screw, but it didn’t even go through my sweatpants, and so I wasn’t worried about it. And then I look at my leg later, and it was a shallow but very long and completely ragged wound. And so that took two weeks to heal, and so I was just looking at it; I was like, did I get tetanus? Is Mars gonna give me tetanus again? Tetanus, of course, is like, the disease – it is the bacteria that lives on iron, so it’s a very martial disease, right? It makes your muscles lock up like crazy; it’s called lockjaw. Right? You couldn’t imagine a more martial bacteria that thrives on rust. So I just barely didn’t get tetanus again! And so for that I am grateful.
CB: Nice. Good job. Yeah, other… You know, that’s interesting just because like, well, for one, one of the things we’ll talk about is other Cancer risings didn’t fare as well – the Pope being the most notable example who was born with Cancer rising and that Mars retrograde put him in the hospital for over a month and then eventually culminated, you know, weakened him significantly and then just after Mars departed from Cancer is when he passed away. And we’ll talk about that more in just a little bit, but it was a good reminder that sometimes when we have difficult transits through our rising sign, like, it can take a chunk out of you and sometimes that can leave you with a lasting scar or sometimes physical impression that you either carry through your life or, you know, and have literal scars from, or other times it can leave some other types of lasting impressions on you.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I still have a little scar on my right knee from where I got stabbed with a rusty nail.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So good job to everybody that made it through Mars in Cancer. So I guess let’s talk about some of our early news stories, which really centered on Mars in Cancer at the very beginning of the month, because at the beginning of April, we were still coming out of eclipse season. Eclipse season was still in effect, essentially, for at least the first week or so of April. Mars was still coming off of its recent station and it was passing through the later degrees of Cancer and wrapping up that very long retrograde period which initially started last September when Mars first went into Cancer, but then really intensified at the beginning of the year in January when Mars retrograded and returned back to Cancer and then stationed direct in February.
So the biggest news stories – because, you know, there were a ton of news stories this month, so I’m only gonna focus on like, a handful of them that we actually have something astrological to say about. But the early stories at the beginning of April were all dominated by Trump and tariffs and the economy and immigration, which were all Mars in Cancer things that we’ve already been talking about a lot over the past few months. But it seemed like they hit a major culmination and turning point in both of those areas.
So the first one is that Trump at the beginning of April launched on something he was calling Liberation Day an extreme round of tariffs against virtually every country in the world. And this started to – it was so extreme that it started to destabilize the global economy, but also the US economy. And after several days of things really getting out of control, the US bond market started getting really bad and showing really negative signs that would have negative repercussions for the US. And then Trump was forced to backtrack and like, walk out of that to some extent in order to reverse some of the damage.
So he still then proceeded to escalate a trade war with China, which hit a fever pitch over the course of the next few weeks. But I think you and – Austin, you and I both noticed that after Mercury stationed direct and Venus stationed direct by the middle of the month that things started to temporarily stabilize a bit as he was forced to walk back some of those extreme tariffs and sort of take the country and the world back from the brink of something much more like, devastating and problematic.
AC: Yeah. And just to go – yeah, to look back at the beginning of April, right, we’re still within the shadow of the eclipses. Mercury and Venus were both still retrograde; Mars was still in Cancer. And as you just said, it was shortly after the Mercury direct station on the 6th and right at the edge of Venus’s direct station that we got the suspension of the majority of the tariffs. And as I was saying to you yesterday, you know, I looked at the suspension; it was like, 90 days from today is right when Uranus moves into Gemini. And so we will be looking at that for July, but the delayed until date is within 48 hours of Uranus’s historic movement into Gemini, which has never been a stabilizing factor. And so that story is not over, but is at least for now stabilized. And it also made me think about the initial – so the initial numbers with the retaliatory tariffs, which if we’re talking about Mars in Cancer and protectionism and wanting to protect even if one is not doing so effectively and also retaliate against perceived slights, you know, these were retaliatory tariffs. But it reminds me —
CB: Supposedly.
AC: Yeah. Well, that was how they were built, right? And what’s interesting is that the math and the calculations on that initial round of tariffs were basically universally criticized, would be a gentle way to put it. And I remembered us talking about what a terrible position Mercury was in for the first part of the month being in its sign of fall and retrograde and conjunct Saturn and conjunct the eclipse point of the North Node. Like, you’d be hard pressed to find a Mercury that was technically in a worse position, and you know, we had all of that math on was it Liberation Day? Immolation Day? Whatever. And so that was —
CB: Right.
AC: — that stood out to me, the terrible Mercury, in addition to the general like, protectionist and retaliatory Mars in Cancer quality.
CB: That’s an amazing point. I didn’t – you hadn’t mentioned that yesterday when we talked, but that’s a really brilliant point because the parallel later in the month was like, Venus stationed direct conjunct Saturn and then you got like, the spaceship with Katy Perry with the women that traveled to space but then came back and were heavily criticized for it, whereas the parallel you’re talking about is earlier in the month, like, Mercury stationing direct conjunct Saturn in its fall, and Mercury’s – since ancient times and like, Vettius Valens, is associated with mercantile things and the markets. So yeah, that was pretty crazy, because the numbers were just like, wildly high and not without much basis. But even after lowering them, he still left a 10 percent tariff in place on almost all countries, I think, so the tariffs were not fully removed, and the damage was already done significantly to a lot of supply lines and other things like that so that the true impact of some of these tariffs may not be felt fully; we may not see the full impact until later this year – later in the summer or early in the fall is what some of the economists are saying. And I thought that was interesting, because then if a lot of this was launched under this eclipse season, then the next key turning point could be the eclipse season that’s coming up in September especially when we get the next set of eclipses in Virgo and Pisces.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think that ties into the fact that both Mercury and Venus stationed direct with Saturn. You know, Saturn, which is the planet of things that are long, slow, and lasting. And our next set of eclipses is magnificently configured to Saturn. And so like, the slower consequences being promised under this configuration and yeah, I think that’s very smart and likely delivered under the next set, which is also Saturnian.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that makes sense. And then both you and I are looking at parallels with the past, especially past Venus retrograde cycles since this is still coinciding with and overlapping with that. I’m very nervous about this current period we’ve been in with Venus retrograde in Aries and Mars retrograde in Cancer is actually a repetition of the same exact configuration that happened early in 1929. And what happened then if this was any sort of repeat this year is that the markets did get destabilized around this time of the year in the first half of 1929 and showed early warnings of what was to come. But then the actual market crash happened later in the year in like, October. So if we were to have a repetition of any sort of that, then we would be looking at this initial period of setbacks that we’ve just gone through, but then things coming back and being worse after like, a temporary reprieve for the next few months running into really difficult weather later in the year in the fall.
AC: Yeah. And so the parallels there were the in 1929 were the Mars cycle and the Venus cycle, right?
CB: Yeah. Like, in the exact same signs and retrograde in Aries and retrograde in Cancer, because those two repeat every 32 years. So the other repetitions are like, 1993, 1961, and then 1929; over the past century that’s happened three times, and it connects all of those years.
AC: Yeah, that’s really nice. And so you’d mentioned that to me the other day, and I thought about – I was like, oh, what’s eight years later for the next Venus repetition? And it was 1937, and I was like, wasn’t there, like, a very meaningful secondary recession, like, in the middle of the Great Depression that extended it? And lo and behold, there was. And so the secondary recession, which took things about halfway back to the very worst numbers of the Great Depression, it basically jumped things back basically sort of erased three or four years of good progress out of the Great Depression. And so that was spring of 1937, and it was Venus retrograde in Aries again. The Mars cycle is not synced up, but it was at exactly the same point with Saturn. It was Saturn at the end of Pisces entering Aries, and so yeah, you have a two point parallel there. And so that was – that return to Depression in ‘37 lasted about 13 months and was a very serious setback when things had started to go well. And what’s interesting to note is that a number of economists look back at that recession and it’s sometimes called the Roosevelt Recession, and they attribute as a cause rapid and sloppy cost-cutting measures by the government, which is certainly not the cause of the recent financial chaos that has been happening. It’s the, you know, the tariffs that have set all this in motion. But it is really interesting to see that that was also happening during the 1937 parallel. People were like, oh, you cut too much too quick and it caused problems.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that is interesting. And then elsewhere I’m seeing a lot of discussion about something called the Vix Index, which tries to track fear or uncertainty that people have about the market. And all the analysts are saying that this index is currently the highest that it’s been in terms of fear and uncertainty since the covid pandemic in 2020. Let me see if I can actually share that for the video viewers. Yeah. So here it is just for those watching the video version. This is this like, “fear index,” and you can just see it like, spiking right now in 2025, becoming the highest that it’s been since 2020. And prior to that, the highest spikes was, of course, like, the great financial crash and recession of like, 2008, 2009.
So this is important because a large part of the economy is based on like, people invest money when they feel like there’s stability and certainty and they can like, anticipate what’s coming up next. But part of what’s happening is that the erraticness of Trump and the tariffs and the, you know, they’re on again, they’re off again, they’re on again, they’re off again is creating so much uncertainty that it’s causing people to start becoming much more conservative financially in terms of not spending and not investing, because people are worried about the future and things getting more unstable with the economy. And what’s interesting is from an astrological perspective, of course, Uranus has been passing over Trump’s Midheaven, which is at 24 degrees of Taurus, but it’s like, when Uranus goes into Gemini in July, like, that’s his Uranus return as well as Uranus moving into his Sun sign, which is the ruler of his Leo Ascendant. So we would only – we could only expect like, an increase of that sort of like, erratic quality with Uranus going into an even more prominent place in his chart starting in July. So that’s one of the things that you and I have been talking about just in terms of like, if uncertainty is part of the issue right now or erraticness, Uranus going into Gemini seems like it would not be helpful in terms of that.
AC: Yeah, and historically the Uranus return of the United States – Uranus in Gemini – has so far never been a terribly stable time. It’s always been a big scary destabilizing deal.
CB: Yeah, of like, a major war and conflict either internally or externally.
AC: Yeah. And again —
CB: Last thing —
AC: And just to reiterate, like, and so Uranus moves into Gemini about 48 hours before the 90 day suspension of – yeah, 90 day suspension of some of the tariffs expires. So the tariffs expire right after Uranus moves into Gemini.
CB: Right. Although it’s like, that’s one of the questions I have is we’ve seen the tariffs coincide with Mars in Cancer. That’s something I had found historically as well, because the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the early 1930s were also like, Mars retrograde in Cancer. So I’m very curious like, do we see further escalations of that, or does Mars moving out of Cancer remove some of the impulse that was there to put some of those in place is just an abstract question I have just for the future as an astrologer at this point.
AC: Yeah, it’s a great question. Well, and we talked about the time frame of that. Like, to what degree are the tariffs, the retaliatory tariffs, particularly Mars in Cancer, and to what degree are we looking at part of the battleground for Neptune in Aries? Because in the past whenever Neptune has been in Aries, there has been a lot of conflict. And I joked last episode that we were – the United States was – doing better than the historical norm because we had not entered into a hot civil war within one day of the ingress, which is what happened during the previous time that Neptune went into Aries for the United States. The Civil War went hot and officially began about a day after the ingress. But this time, we did get within three days the beginning of what was largely billed as a trade war. And so if we’re looking at what dream of war and conflict and contention Neptune in Aries brings, the fact that a trade war was sparked within three days of the ingress seems hard to ignore as a warning, a sizzle reel, a trailer even if it cooled off meaningfully since then. But and then the way that ties into the Mars in Cancer, of course, is that Neptune in Aries is in Mars’s sign, and so what’s happening in Aries is very sensitive to whatever Mars is doing, so.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you and I had the same thought about that, because I was thinking seeing the language that both Trump and the US and China were using in early April as this trade war was like, escalating rapidly really made me wonder if we weren’t gonna look back on this in retrospect and realize that a more open conflict in the future ended up – that this ended up being the precursor. That the precursor had all started with like, a trade war between the US and China that started in like, basically April of 2025.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that is unfortunate. One last thing to mention about the economy I just wanna mention in passing is now people are talking about stagflation being an issue potentially coming up in the future, and I thought this was funny because I actually first mentioned this last summer as a concern that I had when Jupiter and Saturn were gonna square each other while Jupiter was also squaring Neptune because we had seen inflation be a huge issue back when Jupiter conjoined Neptune several years ago in like, the 2022-2023 time frame. So I think it would be really interesting if – because that didn’t end up happening last summer on the first or the second Jupiter-Saturn square that happened in like, August or December. But it would be interesting if it did hit on the third and final square that’s coming up here pretty soon like, over the course of the next few months – I think like, June, July time frame – when Jupiter squares Saturn and Neptune. So that’s something I’ll be paying attention to, that possibility for stagflation or for inflation to start becoming an issue again.
AC: Right. And stagflation is high inflation with stagnant wage growth, just to define that. So things keep getting more expensive, but you don’t make any more money.
CB: Right. Basically. Which things are gonna get more expensive because of the tariffs, and that’s one of the things that’s coming down the pipeline like, really soon due to this 10 percent tax, basically, being put on everybody which is gonna be passed onto consumers.
All right. So that was one huge part of Mars in Cancer and finishing up that transit. The other major part of Mars in Cancer that dominated the news, especially in the United States which is our primary audience, was the continued intense focus on immigration, and in particular the plight of some men who had been sent to this really extreme prison in El Salvador. And I watched this like, YouTube video that was like, this 20-minute documentary that was made – it was released earlier this year, so I think it was made before Trump came into office. But it was about this prison in El Salvador called CECOT that all these guys are being sent to. The YouTube video was titled, “The World’s Highest Security Prison: CECOT,” by Ruhi Cenet. And I would really recommend people watch it, because I was actually like, shocked and honestly kind of sickened after I watched this, like, seeing what this place was actually like because it was – I’ve seen like, high security prisons and like, the status of prisoners and stuff in different places. But this was much more extreme than anything I expected. Did you end up watching that, Austin?
AC: I did, yeah.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s basically the most maximum security prison in the world. And it was —
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, it was built to house the most murderous people possible. And so the idea of somebody who’s like, you know, violated an immigration visa going to like, literally the highest security prison in the world with the most dangerous people possible is both absurd and horrifying. Yeah. One of the standout features is that the cells house between like, 60 and 70 people.
CB: 60 and 70 people like, they’re all packed on top of each other; they’re sleeping on slabs. The light’s on constantly, which in like, other contexts is actually how you torture people is to like, keep the lights on and encourage sleep deprivation. It’s just really extreme. Like, I’d really recommend people watching it, because I didn’t understand the full context of like… Most of the discussion is about the lack of due process and how the rights are being stripped from people that aren’t getting their day in court to fight charges which ultimately in some instances were false and were mistakes, and the Trump administration itself acknowledged that it was a mistake that one of the people was deported in the way that he was, but then subsequently refused to bring him back. But there’s this whole other element to it just in the extreme – the fact that they’re being sent to one of the most extreme prisons in the world, that’s a dimension I don’t think most people are realizing or able to see until you’ve like, seen inside it.
AC: Yeah. It’s – I mean, I didn’t know prisons like that existed.
CB: Yeah. So I bring that up just because of a sort of continuation of our discussion last month when we were talking about how in ancient astrology the depression or the fall of a planet is sometimes referred to as its prison, and that’s opposite to the sign of its exaltation, which is referred to as its throne. And in this instance with Mars in Cancer, we had this focus on what becomes one of the world’s now most famous and most extreme maximum security prisons in El Salvador. So I thought that was interesting astrologically, and then also a lot of the drama this month was Trump defied a Supreme Court order to help facilitate the return of one of the people that was mistakenly sent there, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. And both Trump and the president of El Salvador refused, and there’s just continued to be drama surrounding that. But I thought that was just a continued expression of Mars in Cancer, not just with prisons but also obviously with the broader things that have been unleashed during this Mars retrograde in Cancer with the US and Trump and its immigration policy and the way immigrants are being handled.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. And speaking of that, actually, and relevant – because you know, I also had the reaction that it was the most… I couldn’t think of a analogy to the prison without thinking, going back to like, the concentration camps and stuff from World War Two. And obviously, it’s not as bad or extreme of that, but I was having a hard time thinking of something that was like, comparable. And I did see a tweet by that was interesting by George Takei, who said that this was the 83-year anniversary of when the Japanese internment camps were opened up in the US during World War Two. And that was actually really striking, because 83 years is one of the longest term planetary periods of Jupiter known as the Babylonian goal year periods. So this was a perfect repetition of that, of a very long-term 83 Jupiter year period, and we have a similar issue taking place in terms of the US and its courts and how groups of people are being treated. So I just thought that was striking in terms of a recurrence of Jupiter and some of the themes having to do with like, the law and the courts and the treatment of people from other countries in the US and having a recurrence of this sort of mistreatment that gets sort of quasi allowed by the courts and things like that.
AC: Yeah. That’s a striking parallel. I mean, because Jupiter of course is about how justice gets done or the attempt to make things fair and just and benefic. And this particular cycle doesn’t seem to be a particularly bright and shining moment for the United States in regard to those Jupiterian topics.
CB: Yeah, justice – that’s the word I was looking for. Thank you.
All right, so only other thing in this section is a quick ZR sidenote. Like, we had always wondered for years, you know, that Trump’s 19-year peak period in zodiacal releasing was gonna start on April 20th, 2024, and we always wondered what that would be going back to like, the 2016 election because it was so weird that that was so far in the future. And then even in the run-up to this current election, there was a curious question about like, why that started a few months later. And so I was paying attention to what happened, and something I noticed just a few days after he began it is that on April 24th, Trump’s official website started selling a Trump 2028 hat in like, run-up to basically saying that they’re gonna start warming people up to the idea of him removing the term limit and running for another term. And his son Eric posted a photo of him wearing that hat that day, which Elon Musk then tweeted and promoted. So I talked about this a little last month, but I thought it was very striking, it coinciding with the zodiacal releasing peak period beginning, that they’re basically slow-launching him having two terms. And this of course makes me nervous, because something similar happened in Russia and China over the past few decades where it essentially resulted in a single person taking over and becoming the leader of the country indefinitely and effectively removing term limits that were previously in place as part of those governments. So I think we may be seeing something similar happening here since otherwise the two term limit is something built into the US Constitution ever since almost a century ago.
AC: Right? Well, and it’s striking because the last time America did its Uranus return, we had FDR who I believe won four elections, and it was subsequently – it was after FDR’s last, well, after his death, that what had always been agreed upon as two terms was then written into law. Right? And so coming into the Uranus return once again, we see that at least symbolically being challenged already.
CB: Yeah. And it’s like, with FDR, he was in the middle of World War Two when he then got into that third term. But then with Trump here, we’re seeing this before, you know, there’s even a conflict or anything like that; it’s just a desire to continue having power or control. But then with Uranus return coming up, then the issue is gonna become what happens if a major conflict does break out, and then there is a greater excuse to attempt to extend the term limits or what have you.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, so moving onto other news. The other probably biggest piece of news that happened this month under the biggest alignment or one of the biggest alignments that we really focused on for the end of April was there was that Mars-Pluto opposition that happened late in April. And the pope – Pope Francis ended up dying under that Mars-Pluto opposition when it was triggered by the Moon which exactly conjoined Pluto, reportedly at the time that he passed away.
So he passed away on April 21st, 2025, reportedly at 7:36 AM. And I ended up casting the chart for that, and was very struck by the not just of course the Mars-Pluto opposition with Mars at one degree of Leo and Pluto at three degrees of Aquarius, and the Sun had just moved into a T-square with them at one degrees of Taurus. But the Moon was exactly at three degrees of Aquarius triggering everything and conjoining Pluto at three Aquarius when it happened with that Moon-Pluto conjunction right at the Midheaven. So I thought that was a really good example of just something we’ve seen a lot over the past few years where sometimes we’ll see a difficult configuration of planets of either outer planets or middle inner planets. But then it’s when the Moon swoops in and like, conjoins or makes a hard aspect to those that it acts as a trigger that shows the full timing of the event. And in that instance, it was very dramatic. So he passed away on the 21st, and then what was additionally striking was his funeral happened several days later on April 26th. And that was the very day of the Mars-Pluto opposition. And I’ve been reading about Mesopotamian astrology more recently, and one of the things I was reading about was how Mars was originally associated with the god Nergal, which was the god of the underworld. And it was really striking then that we had like, the ancient Mesopotamian god of the underworld, Mars, exactly opposing the, you know, Roman god of the underworld, Pluto. And then we have this very famous person and world leader, essentially, and religious leader who passed away and who world leaders all flew into Europe to mourn on the day of that opposition.
AC: Yeah. The death symbolism is very strong with both Mars and Pluto together, unfortunately. And that was not the only death that that configuration brought us, sadly.
CB: Yeah. We’ll talk about that in just a second. One last point – I already mentioned this in passing, but we do have a timed chart roughly for Pope Francis, and he had he was born with Cancer rising, reportedly at nine PM, so maybe about 10 Cancer rising give or take. And so we can see how the Mars retrograde, which retrograded back into Cancer and then stationed there in February, and then he got sick with pneumonia and he was in the hospital for over the month. And you could tell when he returned from that he was in really rough shape. Like, he was not in good shape coming back from that. But as I said earlier, in that you can kind of see sometime how retrogrades can really impact you, especially in terms of your physical vitality and your body when they happen especially in the rising sign or the first house.
AC: Yeah. I gotta tell you, just the last couple days now that we’re starting to get away from the Mars-Pluto and we’re done with the Mars in Cancer, I’ve just been like, feeling so amazing physically. I’m like, I don’t feel like shit! Because I’ve been working really hard to not feel like shit and to like, keep up, but I started feeling like I could do more. Like, you know, it was the first time in eight months where I was like, maybe you should push yourself a little harder! You’ve got this extra energy. And I was like, what the fuck is this? I was like, oh, we’re finally out of all of the Mars afflictions. It was, yeah, it was notable to not have that affliction from Mars in the first or right out of there and opposed Pluto as it has been since the beginning of September.
CB: Nice. Nice. Yeah. So other than that, it’s like, Pope Francis was also in his third Saturn return in Pisces with his natal Saturn at like, 16 degrees of Pisces. And there were other things going on there, but that really fell right on that opposition and it was a very striking manifestation of that in different ways.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Moving on. Other things related to that, so we had talked a lot in the past few months about the US and Iran, and it seems like the outcome of the Aries eclipse was that that was right when Iran agreed to start having talks with the US after like, weeks and months of saying that they wouldn’t have talks with the US for a while, especially direct talks. But then the US started positioning itself for an attack on Iran, and then it seemed like right on that Aries eclipse Iran realized what was coming, essentially, and relented. And talks have still been ongoing, but it’s still not clear where they’re gonna go or how successful they’re gonna be. There’s been reporting saying that Israel still wants to strike Iran soon, but that Trump supposedly wants to see how the talks will go first. And one thing that happened that I noted is the very day of the Mars-Pluto opposition on April 26th, there was this huge explosion suddenly in the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas. And it was a major port city and there was a number of people that were killed or injured, and there’s videos of just this huge explosion and shockwave. And it was very mysterious having that happen exactly on the Mars-Pluto opposition. And we had been talking about how we were paying attention to Iran and that opposition as being the next thing, so you know, it’s curious in terms of like, was that an accident? Was it some sort of deliberate espionage or attack or something like that, or what?
AC: Yeah. And it was – it looks like the death toll is I think around 70 right now, but like, a thousand people got injured. Like, it was a huge – it wasn’t just, you know, one little building had a fire and then it got put out. It’s also being reported under the AP News that it has been purportedly linked to a shipment of ingredients used to make missile propellant, which would suggest that it is not a random explosion, but nothing as far as I know has been confirmed. But it is pretty suspicious timing.
CB: Yeah. It is suspicious. So in terms of Iran and the US, our next target dates I feel like to look at are the Saturn ingress into Aries in late May, because we’ve established that Aries seems to be especially important for Iran and secondarily also for Israel because of the Libra stellium and just the Aries-Libra eclipses over the past two or three years seem like they keep activating that relationship between Iran and Israel. And then especially the next set of eclipses in September is also one of my next targets to really pay attention to, because you know, even though it was the Aries-Libra eclipse series that seemed like it coincided with so much of the stuff that’s been happening in the Middle East over the past few years, recently as things have started to shift to Virgo-Pisces, we’ve still seen some continuation of and some new threads opening up. So we’re really gonna have to pay attention and see if that next set of eclipses represents another important turning point in terms of Iran as well, or if something was somehow completed under that last Aries eclipse.
AC: Yeah. That’s a great point about the eclipses. I would also add to points in the calendar to check in with Iran and relationships the March-Saturn opposition during the first half and in the middle of August, because that Saturn ingress as you said is meaningful because it’s Saturn ingressing into Aries. And then Mars’s ingress into Libra on I think the 7th of August opposes that and also ties in with the recently ingressed Uranus in Gemini and Pluto in Aquarius and should be pretty lively.
CB: Yeah. That’s a good call. That Mars-Saturn opposition does look tough this summer.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right. In other like, gruesome Mars-Pluto opposition news in terms of there was just a series of things that happened sometimes on the same day, but on the same day of the opposition, there was this like, terrorist attack where some guy drove a car through a crowd of people in Vancouver that were at a festival that was taking place and killed and injured like, a bunch of people. And this was on the exact day of the Mars-Pluto opposition on the 26th, and what was so striking about it from an astrological perspective, aside from just it happening on the Mars-Pluto opposition which already back last fall I had gone back and done historical research and identified that that had been associated with terrorist attacks in the past, but we had seen the exact same thing happen just months earlier on New Year’s Eve, which was the last time that Mars opposed Pluto exactly. That night, there was a similar terrorist attack where this guy drove a car through a crowd of people in New Orleans and killed and injured a bunch of people. So as astrologers, all of us immediately like, realized and recognized when this attack happened on the day of the Mars-Pluto opposition that we had just seen an exact – it was an exact repetition in some ways of something that happened on New Year’s Eve at the last opposition.
AC: Yeah. Just beat for beat repetition – same configuration. Not only a terrorist act, but using the same instrument, like, driving a car. And then in that same band of time – so the day after the pope died – there was a brutal terrorist attack in Kashmir where gunmen opened up on tourists and 26 people were killed and 17 wounded. And this is part of – there’s a history of dispute in that region, but this was the worst assault in many years targeting citizens.
CB: Yeah. And that’s now possibly escalating. I saw in the news today there has been continued escalations of that now between reigniting tensions between like, India and Pakistan.
AC: Yeah, they’ve been like, withdrawing ambassadors and representatives and like, they’ve been untying relations, friendly relations or neutral relationships.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. So anyway, I realize that’s all very negative and gruesome, but unfortunately we had a pretty negative planetary alignment last month, so we’ve been holding our breaths to see what would happen and those are some of the things that happened. And you know, it’s important that we document these things, because that gives us then some ability to anticipate what some of those energies might be in the future when they come up for better or worse.
In other news, I have two slightly more positive stories in a different vein based on other things. One of them was around the Venus direct station, on April 14th, Katy Perry – the singer Katy Perry – and a group of women went into space in an all-woman crew on a Blue Origin rocket where it shot into space. And this was apparently the first all-female crew to be launched into space since 1963. And I thought it was really interesting, because when they got back, it wasn’t really well received. Like, it seemed like it was very roundly like, criticized on social media for being like, a waste of money, for being like, out of touch, for all sorts of things. And I ended up thinking that was interesting and funny, because you know, I’d been trying to delineate that configuration of Venus retrograding and stationing direct in Pisces, the sign of its exaltation where the planet is like, raised up to its highest, but it was also conjunct Saturn. So if you listen back to like, the forecasts or like, the year ahead forecast, you’ll hear me like, continually trying to delineate it as like, a woman who’s like, raised up in status but who runs into difficulties that have to do with like, health or age or criticism or different things like that. And actually I have the transcript from the year ahead forecast; I said – this was just one of them – that I said that Venus stations retrograde conjunct Saturn, and I said,
“And that’s some of the energy that would be interesting to attempt to describe, which is some sort of metaphor of a woman who was exalted in status or at the highest point in society, like a queen or a celebrity or somebody that’s a noble and rich and powerful socially, but still has the burden of responsibility of age, or of something Saturnian that’s kind of either putting a blemish on things or holding things back from being their most glamorous, let’s say.”
So that was my attempt to delineate the like, symbolism back then, and so when that happened and then they came back from space – literally, like, a group of women going as high into the atmosphere as you can possibly go and then coming back, but then being roundly like, criticised or even mocked for it. I just thought that was such a perfect manifestation of those placements and those alignments.
AC: Yeah. Well, and especially because the Venus direct station was right next to the single degree of utmost exaltation for Venus, right? And so you have – the symbolism is to be basically to be raised up as high as anyone can be, right, but still to be subject to Saturn. Right? To end up getting, you know, to be raised up as high as anyone literally has ever been, to be up above it all and then to get dunked on, right? So I guess Saturn was in Venus’s degree of exaltation there, because it’s the 26th, 27, and so and Venus was trying to return to the degree of utmost exaltation only to, yeah, get dunked on by the internet.
CB: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. I was very nervous like, leading up to it, because Katy Perry was born like, a week before me, so she’s like, almost like a time twin, and I was just like, “Please, Katy Perry,” like, “Don’t blow up on this rocket,” because if something happened, like, then I would become like, very nervous that I was next.
AC: I mean, maybe – if it’s an omen of anything, maybe we’ll get dunked on for this podcast, although we didn’t record it back then, so that’s something.
CB: No, well, something that did happen actually shortly after that is there was this day when Venus and Saturn and the Moon all conjoined at Venus’s exaltation degree at 27 Pisces, and I’d been working on the Mesopotamian material recently and I think I figured out the exaltations finally. And I told you about that, but I was just struck by the fact that it happened when Venus was exactly at the degree of her exaltation. And yeah, I’m looking forward to talking about that and presenting what I think I figured out here sometime soon.
AC: Yeah, I think you figured it out. Or you figured out a super important piece. It’s great.
CB: Yeah. All right. So one last piece of news, perhaps – actually, no. One last thing about the spaceship thing before we move on is I went back and looked, because – and it turns out the first woman in space was born under this same Venus retrograde in Aries. So I thought that was an amazing repetition and like, call back with this, you know, group of women that were launched into space under this Venus retrograde right after it had stationed direct is that that was tied back into the earlier history, including I think the first person in space was launched under this Venus retrograde in Aries as well.
AC: Right. This one has such a firm historical connection to big firsts.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, big firsts, but also travel – both air travel and space travel – and I think that’s part of the reason we were seeing some of the air crashes earlier this year, but it’s also why there ended up being this major space story not just now but also historically. And I’m pretty sure it’s because of Venus being in Aries, which is the furthest from its sign in Libra, so there’s a notion of like, being away from home and traveling also by extension. It’s something that I talk about in my Hellenistic book when I was trying to understand what the original conceptualization of detriment was. But it’s something I’ve come out of this retrograde understanding much better why I kept seeing traveling significations under this Venus retrograde in Aries, and I think it’s because of that notion of detriment and being away from home.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah, and wandering, right? Wandering far from home. That makes sense. And that ties —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — in with other things as well. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Good things to learn. All right, moving onto possibly our most important – our biggest piece of astrological news that happened this month for some people in the astrological community is like, a week or two ago, Beyonce published her birth certificate in a book, and it contained her birth time. And it showed that she was actually born with Aries rising.
So this is a big deal, especially amongst different astrologers in the community, especially some of the younger Gen Z astrologers have been debating for years what Beyonce’s rising sign is, essentially, and a lot of them were arguing for either like, Scorpio rising or Libra rising. And then all of a sudden, it came out that she was Aries rising, which because that was so different from how some of the people had rectified, there was actually initially some like, skepticism or pushback about whether that was true. But what was funny from my perspective is that it immediately made sense, because in the Venus retrograde in history episode that Nick and I recorded on January 10th, we had talked about how this Venus retrograde in Aries had come up as being really important for Beyonce in the past every time Venus goes retrograde in the sign, which wasn’t otherwise a sign that she had planets in in her birth chart. But all of a sudden realizing that this is her rising sign, we suddenly know why, and it suddenly made sense. So going back to like, Destiny’s Child and the single “Survivor” became a huge hit under this Venus retrograde back in 2001. But then under this retrograde, she finally won a Grammy for Album of the Year, which eight years ago she had actually lost, and it had been widely perceived that she was kind of like, snubbed for what arguably was her best album, which was like, Lemonade eight years ago under that Venus retrograde. And so it’s interesting now under this one in Aries that she finally got Album of the Year and got that sort of recognition for the first time in her career, and it makes sense that it was happening in her rising sign.
Yeah. So here is – for those watching the video version – the birth chart. So the birth time is 9:47 PM in Houston on September 4th, 1981. It gives 29 Aries rising. So the Venus retrograde would be in her first whole sign house, which again is good demonstration of whole sign houses because it’s only in her first house, making it very prominent if that entire sign is like, marked with the significations of the first house. But some of the interesting features of the chart is it gives Aries rising with Mars in Leo at one degree of Leo in the 5th house in a night chart. And one of the things that made me think about is that she has Aries rising, Mars in Leo in the 5th house, and then this huge Libra stellium in the 7th house. And there were these like, stories in like, the 2000s about how in order to psych herself up for these huge performances that she invented this like, alternative personality called Sasha Fierce. And I think that’s really funny, like, example of the thing that sometimes modern astrologers say about the rising sign, about it being like, the mask you wear as opposed to let’s say some of your internal feelings or dispositions or other things that are represented by other planets, and just like, the persona that one projects, especially in this case with the ruler of the Ascendant in the 5th for the purpose of creativity or performance, to be something that might be a little contrasting with how she might feel internally with that like, Sun in Virgo or that stellium in Libra.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. You also see with the ruler of the Ascendant conjoined one of the nodes, you see masking or taking on another persona intentionally with the nodes a lot of the time.
CB: Okay.
AC: That’s partially where the clown delineations of the last two months came from for me is like, you see like, putting on a mask. Like, clown face paint is obviously a mask. But you see that with people who take on like, a stage persona or a pseudonym, et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Yeah. So and it was interesting, of course, because Mars was in late Cancer and then Mars moved into Leo shortly after this was released. And that provided a really interesting parallel with Dua Lipa, who we remember her birth certificate and time was released a few years ago when Mercury was retrograde in Virgo, which was the sign of her ruler of the Ascendant which was Mercury in Virgo, and she actually discovered that the birth time that she thought she had for many years was wrong, and then like, discovered the actual birth time under that retrograde transit. So there was a weird parallel here with Beyonce having this ruler of the first house transit and then all of a sudden her true birth time becoming known or becoming unmasked in some way.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So and then finally, the Libra stellium falls in her 7th house, including Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Pluto. And that makes so much sense just in terms of her relationship with her husband – with Jay-Z – who was, you know, a very famous rapper and like, media mogul before they even got together. And then they became like, this huge power couple. But then so much of their marriage and their ups and downs over the years has become the focus of both of their creative outputs at different points, especially in the past decade. And it makes a lot of sense seeing that huge stellium there in her 7th house, indicating that the sphere of marriage and partnership and relationships would be very important for her, which we understand now is not just because it’s in Libra, but also because it’s in the 7th whole sign house.
AC: Yeah. Crucial, but also complicated with both Pluto and Saturn there. It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely necessary with so much of the chart there.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, all of the most positive as well as the most challenging planets are there, so it’s like, some of the greatest – the most generic delineation you would give for this chart is that, if you didn’t know who the person was, is that some of the greatest positive things as well as some of the greatest challenges will come in the sphere of relationships.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, you think of being part of a big group as well as, like, one-on-one, marriage-style partnership as well.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that is Beyonce’s chart, and it’s always cool when we get a chart. You know, what’s funny is this – we were recording – I just released a couple days – yesterday – the Venus retrograde in the news part two episode that I did with Lindsey Turner and Nick Dagan Best. And I got a text like, in the middle of recording that episode from Camille Michelle Gray that like, told me this birth time had dropped, because that was huge news in the astrological community. And you can see our live reactions to this news in the middle of that episode, so you can watch that for funny little like, tidbit about astrologers like, getting this news for the first time.
AC: That’s great.
CB: All right. I think that’s it for the news section. Do you got anything else?
AC: Oh, I did wanna mention that the South Korean president who – or former South Korean president – who declared martial law right on the Mars retrograde station and then had it undeclared was removed from office at the very end of Mars in Cancer. And so that story of the person who declared martial law and had it undeclared is now removed from office, and South Korea is scheduled to have another presidential election on June 3rd. But just —
CB: Wow.
AC: — you know, it’s part of that like, wrapping up the Mars business, right?
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So that ties in really well with just something we’ve said, which is that the Mars retrograde – which we said before the Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo, but now has become more clear – that it’s rarely just a singular event, but usually it’s like, the unfolding of a sequence of events over an extended period of time. And so that one is very, very clear then.
AC: Yeah. Really easy. Like, he did the thing, it got undone immediately, and then it was unclear as to what repercussions he would face, and then as Mars was wrapping up in Cancer, the repercussions are clearer. Moving on.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Okay, that’s pretty good. There were two other positive stories I noticed – one, a new color. Scientists announced that they discovered or created a new color by like, hijacking the eye somehow, and it’s a color that you normally can’t see with the human eye. But somehow they’ve created it. And I thought this was a weird manifestation of like, Neptune going into Aries possibly, because there was a second color story in the news within days, which was talking about RFK saying he was gonna move artificial dyes from food. And I noticed the overlap of two stories about color, like, in the news at the same time, and the Neptune ingress was the only thing I could kind of like, connect that with, although maybe it’s like, Venus in her exaltation in Pisces as well. There could be other factors involved.
AC: Yeah. I feel like there – I think the Neptune ingress is likely, and I feel like I have some precedent for that buried somewhere in my hundreds of years of Neptune in Aries notes, but I don’t have that handy.
CB: Well, actually then makes me – it does remind me of in the 1950s during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction then, like, color television started being rolled out or something like that. So we do have some precedent in terms of Neptune. And the only other thing is in April also, scientists announced that they discovered organic life possibly on a distant planet that’s in a solar system over a hundred lightyears away. And they said that they detected gases in the atmosphere of that planet visually, which on earth they only know that those can be created by algae like, on earth. So I had a hard time figuring out what exactly that was connected with. Like, it was the same day of the Mercury-Neptune conjunction at zero degrees of Aries. But that could end up in the long term, if that’s true, could end up becoming one of the most historically important things that happened this month.
AC: That would be wild.
CB: Yeah. We’ll find out.
All right, I think that’s it for the news section, so why don’t we take a little break?
All right, let’s transition at this point to talking about the forecast for May and really getting in deep into some of the planetary alignments that are coming up this month. So let’s do some big picture stuff. For me, the big picture stuff is that at the beginning of the month, we have Venus returning back to Aries and spending most of the month traveling through that sign, wrapping up the tail end of the broader Venus retrograde period.
We unfortunately open the month still coming off of the Mars-Pluto opposition, which is still pretty close and tight. And it gets reactivated by Pluto stationing retrograde in Aquarius early in the month.
There’s this unexpectedly explosive configuration around the 17th and 18th with a Sun-Uranus conjunction and Mercury-Mars conjunction, which normally on their own wouldn’t be anything huge to write home about. But it’s just weird that they happen within 24 hours of each other.
And then finally, the big, big thing is Saturn entering Aries on the 24th, marking a huge shift both globally in terms of like, mundare or world astrology, but also especially in people’s personal lives, because this is gonna be the first time Saturn departs from one whole sign house in each of our charts and moves into another. So I think that’s gonna be a big deal.
And we luckily close the month for the very auspicious-looking Gemini stellium that actually looks kind of nice and gives us something of a break compared to the past several months.
All right, those are my impressions. What are you feeling about May, Austin? Do we get —
AC: Yeah —
CB: — a breather?
AC: — I largely agree with all of that. Saturn in Aries is a huge deal. Saturn ingresses are a big deal in and of themselves, and this one is an even bigger deal for a variety of reasons. I guess one of the things about May that’s important to me is that we’re basically done with the two month like, shitshow. Like, we’re wrapping up the last part of the Venus retrograde; we’re totally wrapped up with Mercury retrograde. We’re well out of the eclipse season now. And we’re finally basically out of the Mars retrograde cycle. So a little bit of Mars, little bit of Venus. Like, the cleaning up – you know, it’s like the circus cleaning up the morning after the big show to like, leave town. Like, there’s still, you know, some, I don’t know, grease paint and needles like, in the fairgrounds, but it’s not the Big Top show. And so —
CB: When you say that —
AC: — for that I am —
CB: — it makes me —
AC: — grateful.
CB: That makes me laugh, because it makes me think of – I feel like the analogy is like, the movie theaters that are getting trashed recently, the Minecraft theater and the like, chicken jockey thing. But we’re at this stage still where you come in just afterwards and like, all of the popcorn is like, strewn about everywhere, and there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do because Venus still has to pass through Aries and Mars still has to pass through Leo again. So it’s like, the aftermath of those planets grinding over those degrees is still there, but you know, we’re starting to move away from it finally.
AC: Yeah. Well, and we’re sort of, several of those cycles were sort of initiating us into or beginning an era or a period of time, and so we’re now in this period of time, but it’s not the, like, dramatic, psychotic, surprising initiation period where everything is changing. It’s sort of like, okay, it’s kind of like this now, but we can start to adapt to it. And so, you know, subjectively, I like that. Like, it’s not a bunch of – like, there is, you know, Saturn moves into Aries, and that’s an important new thing. But all of this focus on early Aries and chaos in early Aries made me feel at several points over the last couple months like Saturn had already entered Aries. Like, there’s a lot of – a lot of that is already primed and I think people are already primed for a lot of that. And I think some of what Saturn in Aries brings will be in no way surprising, but perhaps unfortunately just what you expected. But we’ll get into that.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So the full Venus and Mars retrogrades are not complete until June in the sense that it’s in June when Venus goes into Taurus at the beginning of the month, and that’s on June 6th. And then it’s on the 17th that Mars goes into Virgo, so that it like, finally departs from Leo, which was one of its retrograde signs. But the good thing at this point is that with both of those planets moving forward again, there’s more of a sense of events moving at a normal pace where we start experiencing transits of those planets as relatively like, quick things again, instead of this like, extended grind of those planets either hitting planets in the sky like Venus stationing on top of Saturn, or those planets hitting certain planets in our birth charts for extended periods of time like, you know, Mars stationing in the middle of Cancer and just like, sitting there for a month.
AC: Yeah. It’s the difference between like, having a weird day and then the next day comes, versus having a weird day and at the end of it, your astrologer is like, “And you are destined to return to this day twice more. Thrice shall be the sum of this day.” It’s like, that’s unfortunate and annoying and kind of creepy, and ominous, right? Because it’s like, oh, this isn’t over yet! Whereas as you said, with fresh degrees, like, there’ll be good days and bad days, but they don’t have this ominous prophecy of being destined to repeat twice more hanging over them.
CB: Right. I like that. We should do a whole episode where we just speak in those riddling tones for our entire forecast.
AC: I think that’s how people hear us sometimes, Chris.
CB: Yeah, that’s true. We’re already doing that. All right. Well, maybe we should tone it down.
Well, something that’s not toning it down, though, is that Mars-Pluto opposition. We are not out of the woods for that yet. That is not the opposition; that’s Beyonce’s chart. Here is the Mars-Pluto opposition. So we’re recording this on the 28th, and by the 1st, we can see that Mars is at like, six Leo, and Pluto is at three Aquarius, and the Sun is moving out of a T-square because it’s at 11 Taurus. But the thing that’s annoying is that on the 4th, like, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th, basically, Pluto stations at three degrees of Aquarius. And that’s always like, an intensification of an outer planet transit whenever it stations. We’ve seen that really intensely with, you know, Saturn over the past few years stationing in Pisces and these water themes coming up. We also seen it with the inner planet stations, but one of the things it’s gonna do when it stations is it’s gonna reactivate some of the planets that it’s still closely configured to, and one of those things is gonna be that Mars-Pluto opposition. So even though there’s a slackening of that, there’s a sudden, temporary intensification of that opposition. And you know, some of the themes that we’ve seen obviously are instances of like, extreme instances of violence, for example, where it’s like, a Mars transit is like, some short instance of violence. Like, somebody’s injured or hurt or something like that, or even killed. But with some of these last two oppositions, we’ve seen instances where like, a group of people are murdered all of a sudden so that Pluto takes Mars’s principle and blows it up into something that’s much broader or much more like, splash damage almost in a sense. What kind of keywords do you associate with that?
AC: Yeah, well, as we’ve seen the last couple Mars-Pluto oppositions in a row, we get terrorism. With Pluto, there’s – with, you know, Mars you get force and sometimes violence. But with Pluto, you get this sort of like, seeming meaninglessness. Like, why? So that’s your motivation, but why kill innocent civilians? There’s sort of a like, pointless violence or purposelessness which Pluto brings which makes it more horrible. And then you also get for lack of a better term mysterious violence. Like the recent explosion in the port in Iran. It’s like, what was that part of? Was that like, the hidden hand part of a negotiation strategy? Was it a different party? Was it actually coincidence? Like, why did this happen? It has all these shady implications, and so like, shady, mysterious violence as well as like, sort of nihilistic or seemingly purposeless violence like driving a car into a crowd are both things that you see in the news.
On a personal level, right, you don’t – your life is unlikely to explode into either of those overnight. On a like, super-scaled down level, during the most intense part of that Mars-Pluto, Lucian had the most brutal teething nights that we’ve seen. Just like, just baby agony. Just us doing everything but him being up for an hour or two in the middle of the night just in baby pain. And so, you know, very unpleasant for him, very unpleasant for the parents – also not lethal, nihilistic violence. But meaningfully unpleasant, you know, as far as the days go.
CB: Yeah. It’s like a primordial, painful transition sometimes that one has to go through and sometimes it can raise questions about like, the like, existential questions about one’s existence or the existence of people around you, depending on the axis that it’s falling in your chart. But also sometimes in that instance you’re talking about like, a painful metamorphosis that a person is going through that is intense but then ultimately, you know, can be productive even though it’s difficult to have to like, get through.
AC: For sure. He’s gonna need teeth!
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: But the experience of the teeth literally pressing through your sensitive gum flesh is not something anyone enjoys, even if they fortunately don’t remember it.
CB: Right. So it’s like the broader them for some people on the Mars retrograde, depending on where it’s been and that axis of whatever houses Leo and Aquarius are in your chart is like, what is the painful metamorphosis that you’ve been going through or that life in some instances can be like, brutally pushing you to go through that’s been painful but necessary in some way in order to fulfill your – in the most positive sense in some instances – your growth as an individual and as a human going through life. But more broadly also sometimes in terms of the experience of your fate and sometimes the experience of necessity and those things that are outside of your control that you have to, in some instances, suffer, but more broadly learn how to cope with as part of the difficult area of existence.
AC: Yeah. And so – yeah, the Moon’s conjunction to Mars on the 3rd and then the subsequent station like, 3rd to 5th – even though it felt like that was over, there’s a little, as you point out, there’s an aftershock. Because the planets are done opposing, but Pluto pipes up and the Moon joins and connects them. And technically, Venus is connecting them as well. And so —
CB: Right.
AC: — yeah, like, looking back to the end of April and the, you know, whatever kind of irritation, unpleasantness. And some people might just experience it as like, a couple days of like, kind of being irritable for reasons you don’t understand. You know, being more likely to be pissed off and have a bad reaction. We just get another quick round of that at the beginning of the month. But we do get that after the 1st and 2nd are kind of lovely, and then that comes back. But then it goes away again.
CB: You’re saying the 1st and 2nd are lovely because of the Venus-Neptune conjunction at the beginning of the month?
AC: That too. I was just saying because of the Moon-Jupiter. We get a nice —
CB: Oh, right. Right.
AC: — Moon-Jupiter and Venus-Neptune. It’s like, oh, May’s gonna be great! And there’s a little bit of like, the revenge of late April. But then the Mars-Pluto will be done after that Pluto station and after the Moon’s done with Leo.
CB: I mean, that’s actually an interesting point that Venus now has just returned to Aries, but the situation has changed because there it runs into Neptune. And there’s almost like, a more positive idealistic or sort of like, romantic air to Venus reentering Aries and moving back through that part of our charts again because of the presence of Neptune, which even though it often can be deceptive, the actual experience of Neptunian deceptiveness is usually actually quite positive at first because it gives you a window into a different world that can sometimes be experienced as much more enjoyable than the more Saturnian like, realm of like, cold, hard reality.
AC: Yeah, for sure. And sometimes – so with Neptune, you get a vision, a fantasy, a dream, an ideal that you might fuck yourself up with if you believe that it’s real rather than a star to guide yourself by. But getting excited about like, a vision of how things could be can be exciting and motivating. You know, again, the Neptunian dreams – like, having a dream can be a great thing. The dream is never quite as satisfying as you would imagine it to be once you have literally enacted it, because you can’t because it’s a dream. But, you know, Neptune’s not a benefic! It’s not a malefic. It’s something to be that’s useful but that you need to be careful around. But I do think, you know, with Venus hitting Neptune having just ingressed into Aries, there’s sort of an excitement about potential empowerment, right? Like, Neptune in Aries is dreaming of being capable of doing things you’ve never been able to do before. Maybe I can do this thing that I thought was impossible for me. Like, maybe I can be, you know, maybe I can possess a strength that I never thought could be mine. And again, that might be… It’s a perilous thing to embrace uncritically. But a little motivation can be a nice thing. And, you know, now that we’re talking about it, with Mars having basically just clearing, just starting to clear, the last degrees of its retrograde, Mars is doing something fresh in Leo and in a trine with Venus and Venus is ruled by Mars. Like, the sense of greater, the glory of greater martial capability – like, that kind of dream seems like it will be relatively widespread during this first part of the month.
CB: That’s a great point, because yeah, after it gets triggered on the 3rd, Mars clears I believe its shadow degree, the degree that it retrograded at at like, six Leo. So by May 4th, it moves to seven, so it’s finally treading new ground and it’s broken the range of degrees that it’s been trapped in since December – since November and December basically.
AC: Yeah. You know what? And that gives me a new thought on this last retriggering the Mars-Pluto, right. The Mars-Pluto opposition, Pluto as something that’s like, holding Mars back like some shadowy force or subconscious conflict or fear or whatever. But Mars like, finally being able to break free of that. Like, I’m not gonna let the past define me! I’m not gonna let my fear hold me back. I’m going to actually get to go to new degrees, because I haven’t gotten to do that for more than half a year.
So that might – it might feel good.
CB: Yeah. Treading new ground does feel good instead of being stuck in place. Some of the stuff you were saying about Venus-Neptune being conjunct there at the first degrees of Aries, it makes me think of that like, title of the final George Martin Game of Thrones book – A Dream of Spring. Like, this notion that he’s done this entire series of like, the cold winter – what it’s called? It’s like the —
AC: Winds of winter?
CB: The winds of winter, but also just like, the long night and this like, huge, you know, century-long period of people being born in darkness and then all of a sudden at the end of all of that breaking free of it and coming out the other side and having the dream or the vision of like, a future and being able to emerge from a dark period. That Venus-Neptune conjunction in Aries literally the sign of the spring, the first day of the spring at zero Aries, makes me think of that.
AC: Yeah, that’s nice. It’s also worth noting that most wars throughout most of history have been fought in the spring. It’s a vigorous time.
CB: That’s true. All right. So let’s go back to the charts and whether it’s time to move onto our first lunation or if there’s any other early month stuff. So the Moon clears Mars… Well, yeah, that was one of the things is Venus in Aries, you had mentioned that it’s like, it’s sextiling Pluto when Pluto is stationing which is a nice, offsetting thing where even though that opposition between Mars and Pluto’s being reactivated, Venus is actually trying to lend a hand to on that day balance out Pluto. But then most of the month is Venus headed towards and trying to balance out Mars by applying to it with this trine with reception, because Venus is in Aries, and it eventually completes that later in the month around the 21st, 22nd when it trines Mars at 15, 16 degrees of Leo. And that’s part of the energy of the month as well, not just coming off of the Mars retrograde and Mars breaking new ground and not just it breaking free from the troubling opposition with Pluto, the intense opposition, but also having this lovely benefic configuration with Venus in the dominant position sort of forcing Mars to moderate itself and to be on better behavior than it’s been up until this point.
AC: Yeah. Venus is in a nice position to kind of take the edge off Mars, to remind Mars that you can be confident without being cocky. Right? Like, you know, Venus lends Mars some grace rather than just force and assertiveness. And it’s interesting to have the two, both Venus and Mars, coming into a harmonious configuration for really several weeks, because both are still a little slow. So they don’t usually hold a trine for this long. But to have them in harmony right after they both did a rather serious reset and retrograde, after both of those spheres were both so troubled and kind of turned inside out and reconfigured, to have them in harmony after their respective journeys is rather nice.
CB: Yeah. That’s probably, that’s one of my two top most positive aspects of the month is that trine that completes on the 21st and 22nd. The other most positive aspect is one that normally wouldn’t be super positive, but I actually like it, and it’s this Mercury-Jupiter sextile that completes on the 5th. Even though that’s happening, you know, just after we’ve dealt with that Pluto station in the few days before that, this Mercury at 22 degrees of Aries sextiling Jupiter in Gemini at 22 degrees with reception is a nice bit of optimistic, affirming communication or communication that ends up helping somebody to achieve their goal or their end in some respect.
AC: Yeah. It’s a nice thing. Whenever I see Mercury-Jupiter, I always think of Dorotheus’s book of elections where he says that when you want to ask anyone for a favor, your first criteria that you should look at is the configuration of Mercury to Jupiter if you would like that favor to be granted. And you just think of the yes saying and beneficence of Mercury-Jupiter. Mercury’s like, what about, what if we do this? Sure. Can I borrow the lawnmower? No problem. Et cetera, et cetera. That like —
CB: Right.
AC: — positive, the affirmation and granting of requests is something that we like.
CB: Especially after we’re coming out of a period in April where Mercury was like, retrograde stationing in the sign of its depression while conjoining Saturn, and so much of the energy of that was like, “no,” of Mercury being negated and things that were proposed having to be walked back. Like, for example, the tariffs —
AC: Right.
CB: But here, all of a sudden, Mercury now is direct; it’s cleared its shadow degrees. It’s moving swiftly again and breaking new ground. And then it gets the positive help and affirmation from Jupiter.
AC: Yeah. There’ll probably be a fair amount of straightening out confusions and untangling cords which got knotted up.
CB: Yeah. All right. So moving forward, I think it’s like, Mercury goes into Taurus by like, the 9th and 10th is one of our ingresses, and it really takes us into the first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Scorpio which occurs on May 12th.
So for those watching the video version, here is that where we have the Moon reaching the opposition with the Sun at 22 Scorpio for the Moon and 22 Taurus for the Sun. It looks like the closest configuration that that has after it completes is that the Moon then applies to an opposition with Uranus. So there is a little bit of a surprising or innovative or potentially disruptive quality to this Full Moon in Scorpio.
AC: Yeah. The Full Moon in Scorpio is always a lot of feelings. And you know, we have the Sun’s moving through Taurus every year, which is always punctuated by the Full Moon in Scorpio. And you know, the Sun’s moving through Taurus is, you know, trying to – is about stabilizing things. Stabilizing things so that they continue in a fruitful direction. You know, it’s the middle of the season; et cetera, et cetera. And the Full Moon in Scorpio is always a potential counterpoint to that, right, where we look at the Scorpionic things which aren’t Venus-ruled like Taurus but which can, you know, potentially disrupt or interfere with the management of our Taurean fields. And so, yeah, there are feelings there; there are potentially disruptive things. The potential disruption is certainly there with the opposition to Uranus, but we also have a trine to Saturn that occurs immediately afterwards. Although Saturn is not always positive – not always – Saturn is often not positive. It is, nonetheless, order-making. It is stabilizing even if you don’t particularly love the stability Saturn provides. And it —
CB: Yeah.
AC: The two are square by sign to Mars, but the like, average level of martial disruption that we’ve been living under is much higher than this by-sign square. I don’t know. It’s not the most peaceful Full Moon, but it’s also, I don’t know, kind of not a big deal compared to March and April. I don’t know; what are you thinking?
CB: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned the trine with Saturn, because I think that helps balance out the two indications that are lacking in stability or the opposite of that, which is the opposition with Uranus but also even just the Moon being in Scorpio hitting the Full Moon point, because the Moon in Scorpio traditionally is in the sign of its depression. And with the Moon in Scorpio, there can just be this deep, this depth of emotion and feeling emotions very deeply and very intensely. And sometimes that can be if they’re negative emotions like, leading you to a very dark place, and if they’re positive emotions, it can be leading you to a very intensely positive place. But especially with it being a Full Moon, it’s taking you like, one direction or another in an extreme fashion. And that’s some of the reason why the Moon struggles a little bit in Scorpio as opposed to Taurus where there’s a little bit more of the solid foundation of emotional stability. So that emotional depth of emotion, but also instability is being emphasized not just by Scorpio but also by the opposition with Uranus, but your point about it also applying to a trine with Saturn is really good because that’s gonna lend more stability than we would have for this Full Moon otherwise. And I think that will help put a nice counterbalance where even though there might be a tendency to move rapidly to extremes, there’ll also be a possibility for having someone or something that you can kind of lean on emotionally to provide stability as you’re going through the intense emotions of this Full Moon.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a bit of a speed bump in what is sort of at this point is shaping up to be a pretty decent month where like, okay, Mars and Venus are configured. We got through the Mars-Pluto thing. Mercury did the sextile to Jupiter. And it’s not easy, but it is manageable. About the Scorpio Moon and with the Moon being in its depression or fall there and getting caught in extreme states of emotion, it reminds me of – and you know, I apologize for the baby anecdotes, but it’s going to be happening a lot. It’s a very large part of my experience.
CB: Right.
AC: Like, when Lucian is upset about something, but then sometimes that reaction will spiral and I can tell he’s upset about being upset, and you need to calm the baby back down to like, what are you actually upset about? Oh, you’re hungry. We can solve that. But you get this like, I’m upset that I’m upset that I’m upset. And the larger and older humans do that too. And sometimes you can get that sort of that spiraling, that emotional spiraling, from the Scorpio Moon, especially a Full Scorpio Moon. So it’s something to note and be aware of.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. But otherwise it’s not too bad and just having the courage to be passionate about something I think is one of the keywords for this Full Moon in Scorpio and to, if that takes you in unexpected directions sometimes to go with that and, you know, work on your feet to be flexible with things as opposed to being completely inflexible which is kind of some of the fixed sign energy that we’re otherwise getting from having all of these planets in Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, and Scorpio.
So after this Full Moon, though, one of the downsides of like, Mercury moving into Taurus is after this point, after this Full Moon, it very quickly picks up speed and starts heading into this square with Mars. And that’s one of my least favorite aspects of the month that eventually culminates on the 17th and 18th, which is Mercury gets to about 14 degrees of Taurus, and it squares Mars at 14 degrees of Leo. And Mercury-Mars squares are always this very verbally combative energy where it can be about like, getting in an argument with somebody, saying something in the heat of the moment, saying something hurtful because you’re angry about something. And this is kind of exacerbated by the fact that we have a Sun-Uranus conjunction that’s happening at the same time at 27 degrees of Taurus. So there’s this unexpected disruptions and like, a curveball or something that comes from left field. And I’m not sure, you know, what the order will be. It’s like, for some people, there’ll be an unexpected disruption from Sun and Uranus that then causes like, a verbal argument with Mercury square Mars. Or the sequence could be reversed. So there’s like, a verbal argument or something like that, something said impulsively which then leads to an unexpected disruption or a break in something, a break in one’s routine with Sun-Uranus.
AC: Yeah. There’s a lot of like, frictive dispute-oriented stuff going on here. Right? Because it’s like, yeah, with it beginning with the Moon-Pluto, which, you know, Mars has been done with Pluto for a while but the Moon hitting that and then moving into Mars and hitting the Mars-Mercury square right as it’s perfecting while the Sun and Uranus are there right next to Algol – it’s just like, a lot of difficult stuff all in a T-square not for that long, but enough that, you know, that it’s a couple of days worth kind of giving the side-eye. It’s a not particularly harmonious configuration.
CB: For sure. Let me give a positive delineation, though, because I wanna start giving more positive delineations even for the challenging ones. Maybe Sun-Uranus happening at the same time as Mercury-Mars is like, breaking out of one’s comfort and having the audacity to say what you actually think and say what’s on your mind to somebody, even if saying that is divisive or upsetting to the people around you. I mean, there’s always a problem with that on Mercury-Mars configurations that sometimes, you know, there’s a very fine line between like, the person who is honest and forthright and says what’s on their mind versus like, the person who’s an asshole and just like, says what they think no matter who it hurts or what sort of negative repercussions that has on the lives of the people around them. But for the sake of let’s say it was a positive manifestation, that there can be something liberating or freeing sometimes about being brutally honest in certain situations.
AC: There certainly can be.
CB: Yeah. So that is the configuration that I talked about earlier that happens there around the 17th and 18th. Mercury then breaks the square with Mars after that and then very soon after that we start getting the Venus-Mars trine, which is very positive, that we talked about afterwards, which again is a nice counterbalance coming off of the Mercury-Mars square where you have that combative verbal energy. And then all of a sudden, a few days later, Venus swoops in and starts sort of soothing and counterbalancing the fiery energy of Mars and like, bringing the temperature level down a bit and hopefully helping to ease things a little bit in the days following that.
AC: Yeah. And it’s a trine between planets in fire signs, so it’s not Venus… Venus cools it down so it’s not overheating, but it’s like, fun fire. Like, fireworks are fun. Flamethrowers – well, I guess flamethrowers could be fun. But it’s not the engine overheating and being stranded in the middle of a desert with 105 degree temperature. It’s like, ooh, it’s 85 degrees out and we’re playing with water guns! Right? Or we’re chasing each other around and playing games —
CB: Yeah.
AC: Like —
CB: Let’s go for a drive.
AC: Yeah. It’s not cold, but it keeps Mars from overheating things. Right? Like, let’s have a friendly competition rather than like, a rancorous, bitter feeling competition.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about like, which we’re about to get to Saturn in Aries, but the connection with Aries and like, driving fast and going fast and like, cars and stuff like that. And it made me think about that just now, just like, Venus in Aries trining Mars and like, going out for like, a nice night drive that’s like, feeling the cold air with the windows down and stuff like that but still like, driving fast down a highway or something like that is a way that one could incorporate those energies of like, fastness and yet still the temperature being brought down.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, that’s nice. Literally the cooling effect of the wind in your hair.
CB: Exactly. Or your scalp, in my case.
So all right. After that we get our most important aspect of the month, I believe, which is Saturn finally departs from Pisces and moves into Aries on the 24th of May. This is just before the New Moon. But this is a big shift. So this is Saturn in Aries beginning a several month period where it’s gonna be copresent and conjoining Neptune but transiting through the early degrees of that sign. And it’s gonna station retrograde in July, and then eventually retrograde out and come back into Pisces later this year to finish out its last trip through the final degrees of that sign. But this is a hugely important shift because the next few months, starting on May 24th, are gonna be our first preview of what this energy is gonna be like for the next three years that Saturn is gonna be transiting through this sign and through this sector of our chart, and especially through whatever whole sign house it’s going through in your chart because that’s gonna activate an entirely new area of your life.
Now this is not gonna be a new area in the sense that we’ve had so many important transits through Aries over the past few months that this area has already been primed for this transit by other events that have led up to it and will feed into it. But there’s a definite tone shift where the tone and the course of events in this sector of your life is going to change dramatically at this time starting on May 24th. Obviously for some people, more dramatic than others, given your chart layout. But nonetheless, this is a huge shift.
AC: Yeah, it’s a decisive shift. Right? It brings a responsibility, a burden. It brings weight to that area. It places a weight there that won’t be gone in a month.
CB: A decisive and tangible shift. Whereas it’s like, with Neptune, I’ve been seeing some stuff but it’s hard because it’s Neptune. It’s a little bit more like illusory and like, hard to grasp, like, what the changes are that have been happening in those sectors. But with Saturn, it’s like, something visibly and tangibly starts changing at this time.
AC: Yeah. And so, right, we have about three months and a week of Saturn in Aries. It moves back into Pisces on the 1st of September, and then we finish up Saturn in Pisces until February 13th. And so on Valentine’s Day eve of 2026, we will get Saturn’s return to Aries. But this first three months and a week is not just a teaser trailer. It’s the pilot episode. Right? And there will be a delay after the pilot episode drops before the rest of the season or seasons, as it were, are delivered. But as you said, Chris, it’s a tangible, weighty delivery. It’s a drop. Right? Because Neptune possessing fantasies, visions, dreams, ideals, hopes has no weight, whereas Saturn brings responsibilities and burdens and all manner of weighty and tangible things.
So where do we start with Saturn in Aries? Because I could go for a couple of hours.
CB: I wanna start with your meme, because that made me laugh out loud —
AC: Okay!
CB: — when you mentioned it yesterday, and I think that’s a really great image for Saturn in Aries.
AC: The… Which – I’ve got memes for Saturn in Aries.
CB: The Steve meme is really the highlight for me.
AC: Okay. Yeah, so in trying to quickly communicate some of the issues with Saturn in Aries, it’s the classic Steve Buscemi meme where he’s saying, “Hello, fellow kids,” and he’s got the baseball cap on backwards, he’s got a skateboard, he’s obviously a man of age – late 50s, early 60s – and it is not believable at all. And this encapsulates one of the problems with or one of the difficulties of Saturn’s time in Aries. Aries is the sign – it’s the sign of the – yes, how do you do, fellow kids? Thank you.
CB: Right. And it’s just like, for the audio viewers, it’s like, an older guy but he’s like, dressed up as if he’s like, a young skater kid with a skateboard over his back. And he’s just like, “How do you do, fellow kids?” And it’s just like, the classic, I don’t know, old guy person out of place who’s older pretending to be something that he’s not.
AC: Yeah. And this juxtaposition of the youthful with the aged and experienced is really crucial for understanding Saturn in Aries. The flipside of that would be several – four cycles ago when Saturn was in Aries, China’s last emperor took the throne at two years old. Right? And so you have a two-year-old who’s placed in the position that a venerable and wise elder of careful and excellent judgment should be placed in. And so you have the old guy, you know, with the skateboard, right – hello, fellow kids – and then you have the two-year-old who everyone has to obey in the emperor’s throne. Like, and it’s the same thing. It’s just the reverse image. Right? It’s the youth and experience being combined awkwardly and often ineffectively.
CB: One of the things I like about the “Hello, fellow kids” one, though, is that it actually matches nicely with that it’s not just Saturn in Aries, but it’s a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Because in the meme, there’s like, an element of deceptiveness where it’s like, somebody pretending to be something they’re not and obviously being something else quite visibly but trying to go under the cloak of this other thing in order to fit in or in order to attempt to like, ingratiate themselves to a group that they don’t belong to.
AC: Yeah, that’s increasingly us talking to Gen Z astrologers.
CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah, we’re old men now.
AC: I’m closer to 50 than 40.
CB: That’s true. I am exactly 40.
So Saturn in Aries, there’s other themes having to do – when I did like, the Aries episode with Rick Levine a few years ago – maybe it was a couple years ago now – other themes with Saturn in Aries had to do with like, speed and like, driving and other things like that. Like, one of my favorite examples was Evel Knievel who had like, Aquarius rising and Saturn in Aries, and he literally was like, a daredevil who did these bold, dangerous, and like, reckless things as part of his living. And I think that was like, one of the keywords that came out it last year when I watched that movie, that new Francis Ford Coppola movie who – he also has the ruler of the Ascendant in Aries. And he kept saying something like that you know you’re alive or free by taking risks or taking chances. And I realized he was really like, speaking through his Saturn in Aries and that that was part of his ultimate experience. Now, sometimes you fail miserably. Like, for example, that movie did not, was not received well and did not go over well. But for him, taking the risk to demonstrate and to have freedom and to be his own boss and be in charge of things was so much more important than actual like, material success of the actual film that it seems like he was willing to make that sacrifice just for the sake of being free.
AC: Yeah. And you see a lot of disregarding consequences and going forward with action with Saturn in Aries. Another example of someone who liked to go fast and take risks was I believe Tony Hawk, the famous skateboarder, was a Saturn in Aries person. And if we look back at the last time Saturn was in Aries, we’re looking at the late ‘90s, right? When extreme sports and like, Jackass and like, just doing things without getting weighed down by thinking about the consequences becomes cool. And if you – yeah, and that theme holds historically as well. There’s this like, you know, damn the torpedoes, like, full speed ahead. And so you can see why —
CB: Here’s the – I just found the quote. Sorry to interject. But he said, “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”
AC: That’s interesting. And so yeah, you can see why this is considered to be a difficult place for Saturn, which is the planet we look to for careful planning, good organization, good governance, good governments and governance and structuring of systems so that they are sustainable and reliable. Like, this energy creates a lot of problems for what are supposed to be stable systems.
CB: Right. So once again, we’re talking about a planet being in its fall or depression for like, the third or fourth time this year. You know, previously talking about Mars being there in the sign of its depression in Cancer, and then more recently Mercury being in the sign of its fall and stationing there in Virgo or even Venus retrograde in the sign of its detriment in Aries. And now all of a sudden we have this weighty outer planet, Saturn, that likes to move slowly and deliberately and to build age and maturity, and you’re putting it in a sign that values like, youth and speed and impulsiveness and brashness and all of these other qualities that are so alien to Saturn that its initial reaction sometimes is to execute those functions poorly because it’s not used to working in those circumstances.
AC: Yeah, or simply can’t achieve its ends which are things that take time, which are processes that need time and therefore are inherently and naturally slow. There’s just not enough time to do it. Right? And so things, you know, you can have a person who is supremely competent, but if you only give them half the amount of time they need to do something right, it ends up fucked up.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely.
AC: And this – yeah, I’ve been thinking about this. You know, because there’s all this action in Aries, or there’s been all this action in Aries. And in this house, we have planets in Aries; everybody has important planets in Aries. And Kait and I, we were trying to figure out how to solve a couple different problems, and we realized that after a lot of thinking through them that the answer in a multitude of cases was just give it more time, which felt very much like a sort of echo from the very near future of this Saturn in Aries time period that we’ve been entering where it’s like, a problem seems insolvable because you’re trying to do it too quickly. And so I would recommend people just keep that in mind. Like, maybe the answer is it’s just going to take longer than you would like it to.
Another —
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And also before this episode, we were talking with our live audience of patrons, and there was a patron asking us about their second Saturn return. And one of the things both you and I said was that the second Saturn return is typically experienced as more constructive or positive, especially for the things that are within your control because usually it’s the first Saturn return that’s more challenging, because sometimes it’s bringing up issues or shortcomings or setbacks that you haven’t fully dealt with before or that you haven’t fully recognized. Whereas by the time you get to your second Saturn return, usually it’s things that you’ve dealt with before and you’re like, revisiting how effective your strategies and ways of managing those issues or like, shortcomings in your life or in terms of your actions how effective that’s been up to this point and whether you need a recalibration. So that’s one of the ways where Saturn with age gets better. And even Saturn in Aries can become more effective depending on how much time you’ve had to work with it.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. As I was saying earlier in response to the question, the first Saturn return can feel like getting graded on things that you didn’t even know were questions, or being criticized for things or held accountable for things that you didn’t know were weaknesses, because you just haven’t had enough time. Whereas with the second Saturn return, a lot has been presented to you. You’ve got a lot of feedback from life. And so it’s a little bit – it feels a little bit more fair and tends to go much more constructively on average. I do like that term – constructive – for Saturn.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about with Saturn in Aries especially – and this coincides with the tight partnership with Neptune which it’s going to have – around time frames and just sort of around mindset, is I think that a lot – I think that it’s going to prompt people to sort of start hallucinating Gordian knots everywhere. You know the Gordian knot, right, Chris?
CB: I wrote a book on ancient astrology; I know what the Gordian knot is.
AC: Yeah, yeah, I thought so. I’m just checking.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Sometimes you don’t know how obscure or not your thoughts are if you’re me. Need to check in with people —
CB: Quiz me on one of the most famous aspects of like, Hellenistic —
AC: I thought so!
CB: — mythology, yeah.
AC: I didn’t think you didn’t know. Please don’t take offense. But anyway —
CB: Alexander the Great famously when he met the Gordian knot, he decided to like, cut it in half with like, a sword, is like, a famous example —
AC: Yeah, it’s like this —
CB: — in history.
AC: For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, yeah, it was like, this super complicated knot. And it was said that whoever could solve this knot would be, you know, king or emperor of whatever. And all these people tried to do it, and Alexander was like, “I’ll just cut it in half. That solves it.”
CB: That’s – were you gonna say that before I said that? Because that’s an amazing like, image for Saturn in Aries.
AC: Yeah! That’s why I brought it up!
CB: That was the point? Okay. Well, that’s a wonderful analogy. I didn’t even know you were gonna – I like, I preempted you by mentioning Alexander.
AC: Yeah, well, this is a story about Alexander. But I was saying, I was like, oh, like, there will both be the recognition of Gordian knots where actually this one time Saturn in Aries is right. Like, I’ve made this too complicated; this doesn’t have to be slow. Instead of like, wrestling with all these ropes and cables, I can just cut through this and get to the next thing.
CB: Well, not just you, but like, everyone else has made this more – something – more complicated than it needs to be, and then you walk up, encountering this problem for the first time and you see that it doesn’t have to be as difficult as it is for everyone else.
AC: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But unfortunately, I think a lot of people are going to imagine that things are Gordian knots that actually are complicated and you can’t just cut through it because it’s living tissue, right? You actually have to do the long, frustrating work. But that Gordian knot situation, whether as Alexander or as a fake Alexander, I think is gonna be one of the situations people will find themselves in. And unfortunately, I think we will see people in leadership positions and with authority in this country and many others deciding things are Gordian knots that are in fact living tissue.
CB: Yeah. And the consequences of cutting through or cutting out things that were more crucial than they may have realized at first by impulsively coming in and thinking that they knew the solution to everything was simple and why didn’t all the —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — idiots that came before them like, figure it out.
AC: Yeah. People having Alexanderitis.
CB: Right. So yeah, well, and then, you know, in some contexts, though, it’s like, it’s a funny story. But like, in most contexts it’s like, if you cut the knot, that’s not actually the solution. You just failed the test because you decided not to follow the rules and you think that that’s impressive, but in reality the test was like, could you unravel this knot that’s otherwise impossibly complicated, and by like, sidestepping the framework of everything you don’t necessarily pass the test. It’s just that you’ve destroyed the framework that everything was set upon.
AC: Right. Like, if you’re… When I look for Gordian knots, I only have to look about three feet away to all the cords coming off my computer and all that. And if instead of untangling them, I hefted a machete, held it skyward, and then brought it down with a sundering blow, I would not have solved any of my problems.
CB: Yeah. You would have disconnected yourself from your work and our podcast would be cut much shorter. Although that could help us to, with you know, time – stick to time better. If you just like, did that at the end of each episode at two hours.
AC: That would – yeah, that would be good. Put up cam two; it’s, you know, time to go – I’ll pull the machete off the wall. But anyway, I feel like —
CB: Right.
AC: — that like, is it a real Gordian knot, or am I just being inpatient, right? And kind of arrogant thinking nobody else saw how simple it was. I feel like that’s a very Saturn-Neptune in Aries, especially in the first decan. The first decan is very much about that straightforward cleaving symbolism. It’s an important thing to keep in mind.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I like that. And getting the Neptune component in as well in terms of the delusion sometimes involved in that.
All right. Before we move on, we need to move onto our second lunation and essentially the end of the month. On the day of the ingress, actually, there’s an interesting configuration the day of the Saturn ingress, which is that Mercury conjoins Uranus like, virtually simultaneously on the 24th. So I’m actually gonna be paying close attention to what news happens on the 24th, not only because it’ll be an omen or will be foreshadowing of things to come for the next three years of Saturn going through Aries potentially, but this Mercury-Uranus conjunction at 27 degrees of Taurus could also bring some unexpected news, some sort of communication that comes out of left field that you don’t anticipate either personally or in terms of world events. There’s some interesting like, surprise that happens that day that I’m really curious about.
AC: It’s interesting. And I believe it will be Mercury’s last conjunction with Uranus in Taurus.
CB: Oh wow. Okay. Yeah, because it’s fully in Gemini by the time Mercury comes around next year. Nice. So that brings us to the last part of the month where we get this New Moon that takes place in Gemini on the 26th – yeah, 26th – at six degrees of Gemini. Mercury has moved into Gemini by then; it’s at two degrees of Gemini, and this whole stellium is like, meeting up with Jupiter, which is still in the last few degrees of Gemini. And this is such a lovely combination that this is actually – I ended up using this for the most auspicious electional chart for this month, which I set for the day after the New Moon on May 27th at approximately you can set your chart for I think it’s like, approximately just before one PM. So let’s say like, 12:40 PM local time. So just set it to 12:40 local time. You should roughly end up with a chart where you want Virgo rising, and you want the Midheaven around two degrees of Gemini. So adjust the chart until the Midheaven’s at two Gemini in your location, and Virgo is rising. And if you do that, you’ll end up with a chart where the ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury, which is at three degrees of Gemini. It’s in the 10th house, the place of career and reputation and social standing. Mercury is under the beams of the Sun, heading into a cazimi, but it’s mitigated by having that placement in its own domicile in the sign of Gemini. It’s right after the New Moon, and the Moon is applying to a sextile with Venus at 20 degrees of Aries but more importantly, a conjunction with Jupiter in the 10th house in a day chart. So this is an excellent chart for like, communication and all things related to Mercury and especially Gemini. But especially 10th house things related to career, actions, accomplishment, but also visibility and reputation. And it’s just a highly visible chart, because so much stuff is in the 10th house. The downside of the chart is Mars is in the 12th, so it could be problematic for people that you don’t get along with or people that are working against you in some way. But otherwise, this is my best electional chart of the month on May 27th, the day after the New Moon. And this is actually one of the best electional charts of the year that we identified in our Electional Astrology Report back in December when we released that. So I’m excited to be able to finally highlight it here and release it for free to everybody to use.
AC: Yeah, I’m excited to get to the end of the month and get to use it.
CB: Yeah. It’ll be nice having this, you know, just after everything’s been stuck in like, retrograde and in the signs of its fall and everything else for months, to have Mercury and the other inner planets like, in Gemini having Mercury move direct and swiftly, and having this kind of light, Gemini energy seems nice, especially because when Mercury moves through those early degrees of Gemini, it’s like, trining Pluto, so it’s bringing in some of the technological innovations that are happening there with Pluto in Aquarius. It’s sextiling the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, so it’s taking some of the structure from Saturn and the inspiration and creativity from Neptune and channeling that in a positive direction when it comes to Mercury. Yeah, I just, I think it’s a great chart. And as long as it matches your natal chart, then it should be a good election to use for a number of especially mercurial or 10th house things, so take advantage of it.
AC: Yeah, it’s light, bright, fast, fun, and effective.
CB: Absolutely.
All right, so this is one of the charts that we found this month, and if you want other charts for May, we have a bunch of other auspicious dates that we found during different parts of the month. So you can get ahold of that by checking out the electional astrology podcast, which is the podcast that’s available to patrons of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com. So if you need other charts for May, you can get those there. Or because we’re almost halfway through the month, I’ve now discounted and cut the price in half for our year ahead Electional Astrology Report. So if you’re looking for lucky dates further in the future over the course of the rest of this year, then you can get that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2025Report at that discounted price.
All right. So that brings us to the very end of the month. And are there any other – just that shift into all the planets moving through – inner planets moving through Gemini is very lovely and light. Is there anything else going on at this point in the month that we need to mention or highlight or… I mean, we have that New Moon in Gemini itself, which is what we were talking about, but most of what we were just saying is the energy of that. It looks like a very lovely New Moon, like, in many respects. I mean, we do – we have just shifted into Saturn in Aries, so we’re still gonna be getting adjusted to that and there’s gonna be some new challenges that arise as a result of that. But otherwise, it seems like a nice little bubble, this early part of May and beginning part of June, where there’s some nice configurations going on. So I’m actually excited for some like, optimistic alignments coming up at this point.
AC: Yeah. And I would add to that that not only do we have the end of May being nice with this New Moon and with Mercury in Gemini, but that extends well into June. If we’re looking, we’re kind of just judging months as a whole, May is better than April or March. And then June is better than May. June is one of my favorite months of 2025. Note that I did have to pick from the months of 2025. But grading on the 2025 scale, like, June is about as good as it gets. It’s top two of months for 2025. And so yeah, not only do we have like, a nice – like, yes, Saturn in Aries is serious business that maybe refuses to acknowledge how serious it is, but the other planets are in a better place than they’ve been in a while and will continue to be so for weeks afterwards. And so it’s nice to get a little reprieve. But you know, and not reprieve in the sense of like, now it’s time to relax. It’s more now things can move and we can have some fun. It’s a much more active form of the good rather than a retiring, restorative form of the good.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this is a really lovely spot in the year and like, late May and early June is also my favorite part of the year, especially for elections. And with all those planets in Gemini and Saturn and Neptune having just changed signs, we’re in transitional phase especially will all those planets in Gemini, which is a mutable sign which has that notion of like, a mutation of something. Like, things are transforming and you’re moving from one season to another season when the Sun is moving through those mutable signs. So there’s this sense of transition but I think it’s good to use this period of transition in order to squeeze in and especially those electional dates, the auspicious dates, to squeeze in starting the new or the major things that you want to start or that you have to start this year, because it’s one of the rare parts of this year that is unencumbered by some of the harsher configurations that we’ve been dealing with over the past few months or that we will be dealing with later in the year. Like when Uranus goes into Gemini and the pace of things starts becoming much more erratic and unstable, or when the Saturn-Neptune conjunction becomes much closer in July, especially when both of those station and we have that destabilizing energy where the foundation of things is sort of like, melting into the sand. I would really recommend people take advantage of this little space in late May and early June in order to squeeze in the important things that you need to begin if you wanna have a solid foundation for those this year, just because it’s such a lovely reprieve from everything else that’s going on.
AC: And to get back to your use of the word “mutation,” another thing that mutable signs are good at is adaptation. A lot has changed in the last six months. And having planets in a mobile, mutational, adaptive place is a good time to make the quick changes. You know, make changes that need to be made more quickly rather than like, trying desperately to make a change when there’s a bunch of other shit happening. Right? Which is really difficult at even on a very like, simple level, and is also equally true on more like, subtle psychological and spiritual levels. Right? Like, you know, try eating better when you’re in the midst of a really stressful period. Like, the time to start a new habit, right, to make a change is when you have a little breathing room and it’s easier to make that change. And then, you know, that’ll just be in place for the next time things get stressful as they inevitably do.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. It’s easier to like, make a major change in your habits – like, starting to go to the gym – during the period in which there’s like, a low point in terms of major destabilizing things or events going on. And it’s harder to make major positive changes when there’s a lot of difficult things happening or a lot of events and the pace of events is happening so quickly. So this is a nice part of the year just to squeeze in some of the more important things in order to set a solid foundation for whatever you wanna see projected into the rest of this year or beyond.
AC: Yeah, exactly. Because with all the retrogrades and us like, just at the end of or having just passed the end of or just getting to the end of Mercury, Venus, and Mercury cycles, there are probably a number of things that you’ve been meaning to change but haven’t had the time because shit’s been crazy.
CB: Right. Yeah. Good. Well, I love that, because then it allows us to end our forecast on a very positive note, which is just this amazing set of days at the end of the month that people should be able to use to good effect. So I’ll take any month that we can end on a high note. How about you?
AC: Sure. Well, we have to take them all, Chris. We don’t get to reject any of them. Yeah. And then we have to talk about them for hours.
CB: That’s very stoic of you.
Well, all right, my friend. I think that’s it. Thanks a lot for joining me for this forecast today; this was good.
AC: My pleasure.
CB: What do you have coming up? What are you doing in May? What are you gonna use these amazing charts for, especially later in the month?
AC: I am going to continue finishing the book that I wrote 10 years ago.
CB: Nice. That’s a good use.
AC: That is my spring project. I’m making good progress. I’ll let people know when things are tangibly at the next stage. I will be teaching classes, as I always am. My website will still exist and have, I don’t know, 50 hours worth of stuff that you can purchase. Different workshops and lectures that I’ve given. A series that I elected for Sphere and Sundry last year is coming out on Wednesday, the 30th of April. It is a Sun in Leo series, but it has a bunch – it actually has a bunch of Gemini stuff boosting it. And so it is – I believe we code-named it “Golden Titan,” which is an appellation of Helios, right? The titan of the Sun. And it’s very winged lion energy. It’s like, fast, mobile, a little fierce, effective. We’ve been testing it the last week or so – well, last couple weeks – and are very pleased with the results, very pleased to offer it to you. So that’s on Wednesday, the 30th of April, that’ll be available.
CB: Brilliant. That sounds amazing. What are your – what’s the URL again?
AC: So for the Golden Titan series, that is Sphere A-N-D and Sundry dot com, and then you can find all my stuff at AustinCoppock.com.
CB: I like your code words for things; I need to start coming up putting code words on things myself for little projects.
AC: I’d be happy to help you code name things. That’s like, my brain thinks in like, evocative code names that I think are cool. Like, that’s what every text document on my computer is named, and it’s a nightmare for finding anything.
CB: Right.
AC: But…
CB: I like that. All right. Good times.
As for myself, I’m gonna be – for some reason, in the spring, like, I have this recurring thing where I sometimes get back into ancient philosophy and like, reading about the history of astrology and doing things, and I’ve gotten back into that vibe recently. So I think I’m gonna do a series with my Hellenistic course where I’m developing… Sometimes I’ve seen, like, I feel like there’s an impression sometimes that my astrology is so technically oriented about the prediction of events that that’s the only focus, and that it lacks a philosophical or spiritual dimension. But in fact, my personal views on astrology have a deeply philosophical and spiritual aspect to them; it’s just not something that I talk about a lot. But I’m interested in exploring and developing that more, especially in terms of some of the ancient views on Stoicism and fate and the way that fate is tied into in interesting ways our destiny.
So I’m gonna start doing some series of like, talks on that as part of my Hellenistic astrology course, because once a month I always do a webinar with students of my Hellenistic course usually where we do chart readings or read through ancient texts like Valens or things like that. But I’m gonna start doing a series going into again some of those deeper, philosophical realms of like, what does astrology imply? Like, what does this mean about our fate and about our place in the cosmos and our relationship to things like providence and other things like that? I’m very excited about that; I’m gonna get into that. I’m also gonna do some episodes on Mesopotamian astrology which I’m getting very deep into, especially goal year periods – those long term planetary periods which originate in the Babylonian tradition. I’m planning to do an episode on with Patrick Watson who’s actually gonna give a talk on that at NORWAC. And then we’re gonna do an episode on it together right afterwards.
Leisa Schaim, I wanted to give a shout out – she’s doing this amazing zodiacal releasing workshop at NORWAC that I’m excited about and that people can sign up for online because the in-person conference is sold out. I would recommend checking that out because she’s got some really great stuff about using that technique in that workshop that should be really brilliant.
And then the last thing is I’m trying to hype myself up right now to possibly use that electional chart to start recording an audio version of my book, which people have been asking for for years and I’ve been putting off. But I’m thinking about doing it as not just an audio version, but also a commentary where I add some things that I’ve discovered or other reflections that I’ve had since then, so it’ll also be like, not just a recreation of the printed form but something that’s actually new a little bit and expanded and more interesting than it could be otherwise. And that’s gonna be my possible like, Venus repeating its retrograde in Aries in my 3rd house from when I released the book eight years ago as well as Saturn and Neptune going into my 3rd house in addition to just like, feeling more poetic and philosophical and everything else. So we’ll see how it goes. But I’m excited about that. You can sign up for my Hellenistic course at TheAstrologySchool.com if you wanna get access to some of those monthly webinars I’m gonna be doing over the next few months.
And otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode. So thanks to the patrons that joined us live in the live chat for the recording of this episode. Thank you, Austin, as always, for your brilliant insights and for doing these monthly forecasts with me; I really, really appreciate it.
AC: Oh, why, thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me on.
CB: Yeah. And all right, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks everyone for watching or for listening. Good luck next month, and we’ll see you again next time.
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If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
Finally, shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening May 22nd through the 26th, 2025. Their in-person conference is sold out, but you can still register to get a virtual ticket where they’re gonna stream the conference simultaneously online in May, and you can register for that now through their website at NORWAC.net.