The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 494, titled:
Venus Retrograde Repetitions in the News Part 3
With Chris Brennan
Episode originally released on June 22, 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 July 7th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be giving my third and final installment in my series on Venus retrograde stories in the news that have been happening over the past several months.
So I did a whole episode on Venus retrograde in Aries and that repeating cycle every eight years that I recorded back on January 10th, 2025, just earlier this year about six months ago at this point, and I did that with my friend Nick Dagan Best. And in that episode, we went back and looked at a bunch of instances when Venus went retrograde in Aries just like it did this year and how every eight years going back over the past century when Venus went retrograde in Aries, we noted important news events that happened and we noted important repetitions that took place. So over the past six months, a bunch of interesting repetitions have come up again that have tied the current time period into periods in the past in eight-year increments. And ever since we recorded that episode on January 10th, I’ve done two other installments where I’ve noted important news stories that have come up, especially ones that represented repetitions of stories that we covered in the original episode. And now that Venus has finally departed from the sign it went retrograde in, which was Aries, earlier in June, the extended retrograde period is now officially complete, so I wanted to do one last instalment to talk about some Venus retrograde repetitions that came up in the news since the last time I did one of these episodes about two months ago.
So the first news episode – “Venus Retrograde Repetitions in the News” – was episode 477, and I released that on February 7th. And then the second one, the last one I did, was part two, and that was released on April 27th. It was episode 487 that was titled, “Venus Retrograde in the News Part Two.” So this is the third and final one; I’m recording this on Saturday, June 21st, 2025. I started at about 3:10 PM here in Denver, Colorado.
So I wanna share some additional stories that I found, but I also wanna give some summary explanations of some different things that I learned from studying this Venus retrograde cycle over the course of the past six months starting in December and January when Nick and I did that research. So I ended up learning a lot in the process, and I’m hoping to pass on some of that knowledge both in this episode with some of my conclusions as well as in the other episode that I just released where I interviewed some specific listeners of the podcast and heard their stories about how both the Venus retrograde and the Mars retrograde have worked out over the past several months. And I think we learned a lot in that, but we can also learn a lot from news stories and from studying historical repetitions as well. So that’s the purpose of this episode. And this will act as the final sort of like, completion of this series that I’ve done on what must be almost like, 10 episodes at this point of different aspects of Venus retrograde in Aries over the past several months.
All right, so one of the things this is gonna demonstrate is that it’s important to study these repetitions both in the lives of individuals but also in terms of historical events, because both can be incredibly important for understanding and getting to the core of what this cycle’s actually about. And even though some of the stuff I’ve focused on with the news ones has sometimes been focused on like, celebrities and has almost seemed a little tabloid-y at times, I think those instances are just as important because it can give you real insight into how to use the technique of these Venus retrograde repetitions and how to apply them both to personal charts of individuals like if you were doing a consultation, but also how you can apply them in some instances to predict world events.
So let me show the Venus retrograde graphic really quickly just to one last time show the cycle itself and the time period that we’re looking at as well as the repetition years. All right, so here is the Venus retrograde diagram that was made for me by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co, which makes beautiful almanacs and other things like that. So this is my extended Venus retrograde period, which for me includes the – it’s not just the retrograde itself when Venus was actually moving backwards in the sky from our vantage point from March 1st until April 12th, which was the most intense point. But it also includes the broader span of time when Venus first entered one of the signs that it would retrograde in, which was Pisces on January 2nd, and then finally when Venus departed the sign that it went retrograde in, which was Aries, and when it moved into Taurus on June 5th which officially closed and ended this extended Venus retrograde period that we’ve been paying attention to over the past six months.
So during this six months, we’ve been paying attention to repetitions of things from the past because we know that this Venus retrograde cycle repeats every eight years. And here’s the other diagram that we showed in the original episode that shows going back more than a century all of the times that Venus went retrograde in the sign of Aries, going all the way back to 1905. So in terms of this – I’m gonna read these out for the audio listeners, so Venus first went retrograde in Aries in 1905, and then eight years later it went retrograde in Aries again in 1913 because the cycle repeats every eight years. So 1913, then 1921, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1953, 1961, 1969, 1977, 1985, 1993, 2001, 2009, 2017, and 2025. So these dates are incredibly important because once you memorize these dates and once I had memorized these dates, I started seeing these dates coming up over and over again over the past few months in current events and in the events that were happening in people’s lives in some of these previous years. And it was showing a connection between what happened in the past and what was happening in the present when Venus had similarly done the same thing – just gone retrograde in the sign of Aries.
All right, so let me jump into my first news stories. And one of them from like, pop culture that I was really fascinated by is that in the original Venus retrograde in Aries episode we recorded on January 10th, one of the things I noticed when we studied the 1977 Venus retrograde in Aries is I noticed that the movie Star Wars was first released to great acclaim and success towards the tail end of that Venus retrograde in Aries around May of 1977. And so I thought that was really interesting, because that was such a huge turning point for cinema and for movies and especially for that series, which became such a long-running and impactful movie series with many sequels and spin-offs over the course of the past several decades.
So what I found really interesting, then, during this Venus retrograde is I noticed that Star Wars started coming up a lot in April and May this year all over the news. And one of the biggest instances that was tied in with the Venus retrograde that I noticed is that on the weekend of April 27th, they re-released the Star Wars movie The Revenge of the Sith, and it was re-released in theaters. And this movie was originally released in May of 2005, which was not Venus retrograde in Aries, but nonetheless, the re-release of a movie during this same Venus retrograde from when Star Wars itself was originally released in 1977 ended up actually being much more important than you would think because the re-release opened to huge success where it opened with a box office of like, 25 million dollars domestically. And it ended up being the second biggest opening weekend for the re-release of a movie in history. So I thought that was a fascinating theme to have a major re-release of a movie happening and coinciding, essentially, with the later part of this Venus retrograde cycle and to have it be a huge success. And that was actually a theme that I saw coming up over and over again, which is these re-releases of something, or a rehash of something, or a return back to something from the past. But in this instance, it was actually something that was successful. And I thought it was also interesting, because the re-release of this movie also helped to further cement this important turning point that seems like it’s taking place with some of the Star Wars fans in terms of a reappraisal of the prequel trilogy where they had gotten a lot of hate in like, the early 2010s because it became kind of like, trendy to hate on George Lucas’s three movies that he released in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, which is episode one, two, and three. But then after Disney started releasing its own sequel trilogy once Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas and they started releasing new movies, a whole new trilogy, in the mid-2010s, that trilogy did not go well. And it caused a lot of fans to start sort of rethinking some of the hate that was directed towards George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, which now look better in many respects in comparison. So I thought this was interesting, because it’s part of a broader almost like, reappraisal of something that’s taking place at this time it seems like to me. So part of the take-home lesson from this one was I felt like sometimes revisiting the past can actually work out well, and going back to the past is not always necessarily a mistake or is doomed to failure or something under Venus retrogrades. But sometimes it can actually be quite fruitful. And I thought that was an important take-home lesson for this.
I also noticed some other repetitions with respect to Star Wars, so it wasn’t just that movie re-release which was really big. But also on April 18th, there was a major Star Wars like, celebration or convention that took place in Tokyo, Japan, where over a hundred thousand people from 125 different countries gathered to celebrate their love for Star Wars was apparently the theme. And at the celebration, the Lucas Film producers or production company released the details of two upcoming movies, including one where Ryan Gosling was announced to be the star. So that was interesting. And then as part of this, on April 26th, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, did an interview with Turner Classic Movies, and I thought this was really striking because he doesn’t do a lot of interviews these days after he sold the company to Disney more than a decade ago. But what was interesting about this interview that I watched is that he talked about the origins of Star Wars, and one of the things that I learned from that interview is that he said that the president of Fox Studios at the time back in 1977 really went to bat for him, both in saying that he wanted to do a movie with George Lucas and do Star Wars with him in the first place, but also in the later – one of the things he said is in the later part of the process of getting Star Wars together for release in the spring of 1977 when Venus was retrograde and it was getting ready to come out is apparently the other studio heads really did not like the movie, and they were talking about like, selling it to another company and just like, shelving it or getting rid of it. But he said that the president of Fox really went to bat for him and pushed to have the movie released during this time, and that he was like, the reason why it still came to fruition as opposed to getting sold or shelved or something like that, and then became wildly successful. So I thought that was interesting because it means that what was happening during the Venus retrograde itself in the spring of 1977 is that the movie was still in the process of being finished, and it was still in jeopardy. But then once Venus had stationed direct and it was moving through Aries after the retrograde but still in the extended retrograde period, the movie was released I think in May to great success finally. So there’s something about that, because I’ve seen a few instances of that where there’s another one that we’ll talk about here in just a little bit with Nintendo where sometimes something’s being finished during the early phases of the retrograde but it still has to go through a process of retooling or sometimes there’s like, a crisis, or sometimes something that puts the whole project in jeopardy or something that necessitates a redesign. But then after pushing through and persevering and doing any necessary revisions, then by the time Venus stations direct and starts moving forward again as it goes through the tail end of the retrograde sign post-retrograde, things can be released and finished to great success still at that point in time. But that seems like an important sort of like, archetype that I’m seeing over very recently of like, a troubled roll-out of something that has delays and goes through a retooling phase, but then once it’s direct, things get worked out and smoothed out, and there’s a successful launch or release.
So those are two of the interesting things I found about – or three of the interesting things I found about Star Wars that tie into and caused it to be a major repetition right now in 2025 that connected events this year with events back to the original release of Star Wars in 1977. And the thing connecting them in time was this Venus retrograde in Aries.
All right, so that was one. Another major one that I talked about extensively is the Oscars and Conan O’Brien, because in the original episode on June 10th, we talked a lot because Nick had already identified how this particular Venus retrograde in Aries was always super important for the Oscars, and it was always a very important turning point. And I actually did an entire episode documenting some of the things that happened at the Oscars and how this particular one also ended up being very important as well, and there were a lot of firsts. So I documented that in episode 481 titled, “Oscars Astrology Recap 2025.” But there were some additional things that I noticed recently that are important. One of them is that there was a story that came out on April 21st this year that the academy is now implementing a new rule that members must now watch all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars. So this is a major change in terms of the way that the Oscars are done, then, because evidently up to this point, there’s been issues with people not necessarily watching all of the films that they were voting on and therefore the voting getting skewed as a result of that in different ways. So this is actually a pretty major like, structural change if it works out and if it’s enforced properly and everything else in terms of how the awards are actually given out eventually and which films end up winning if everybody voting on them actually has to watch them. So I thought that was a pretty striking, again, additional important turning point about how this Oscars, because it was Venus retrograde in Aries, ended up being more important again than usual because it ties all the way back into the history to the very first Oscars with the Venus retrograde in Aries.
All right. Another interesting repetition I noticed that I hadn’t noticed at the time but I just learned about recently was this year, one of the things that was noted is that Adrien Brody gave I believe it became like, the longest acceptance speech in history when he won for Best Actor. And one of the things he did is that he was already talking for like, two minutes or something like that, and they started to play him off. But then he very sort of like, forcefully told them to stop and said, you know, this isn’t my first rodeo and I’m gonna keep talking, so don’t keep playing. And it was kind of surprising, because that worked. And then the orchestra like, stopped playing and then he talked for like, this extended period of time that ended up giving him the longest speech in history.
So something I did not know or I hadn’t really remembered was that in 2001, when Venus was retrograde in Aries, Julia Roberts won for Best Actress for her role in the movie Erin Brockovich, and she gave this famous speech where she actually told the orchestra conductor to sit down. And she kind of preempted it, but one of the things about it is she was very, she was much like, more gentle and more charming about it so that it was kind of like, a lighthearted, funny moment and like, touching moment where she said,
“And sir, you’re doing a great job, but you’re so quick with that stick!” She was talking about like, the orchestra conductor’s stick. So she said, “So why don’t you sit, because I may never be here again.” And then she went on to give this very gracious and great speech, and it’s sort of remembered as this iconic moment in Oscar history due to her charm and authenticity and sort of playful defiance of the strict time limits that are put on, you know, winners giving speeches. So but she basically told like, the orchestra conductor to sit down. And so that was another repetition of events then under the same Venus retrograde where you had, you know, one of the winners for Best Actor and Actress, you know, interrupting or telling the orchestra person to like, not interrupt and then sort of asserting themself in that way in order to give their speech. So it went better for Julia Roberts and like, not as well for – it wasn’t received as well for Adrien Brody this year. But it was nonetheless an interesting repetition.
So another set of things that happened was with Conan where in the original episode on January 10th, I had noted – it stood out to me that – during the Venus retrograde in 1993, Conan was announced to be the new host of Late Night, and he was a relatively obscure like, comedy writer up to that point and then all of a sudden he became like, a household name. And I didn’t know on January 10th that he was gonna be hosting the Oscars, so it ended up being an interesting confluence where we knew that this Venus retrograde was gonna be important for Conan and it was also gonna be important for the Oscars. But it was interesting because both of those coincided, and he ended up hosting the Oscars, and it ended up being received very well. Like, he did extremely well, so much so that he’s already been invited back to host again next year.
So one of the things I noticed about Conan is he did that, and he also had this huge other – this was this huge moment for him this year because he was also awarded the Mark Twain award for comedy, which I think I talked about in the last update. But one new thing that I noticed that I wrote down is that he did an interview with the Today show in like, I think it was May. It was either April or May of 2025. And one of the things that’s striking when I watched this clip is that they said that it’s almost exactly 32 years ago to the day that he did his first interview with the Today show, and then they showed the clip, and it was from him, you know, way back then in 1993 when he was just picked to host Late Night, and he became this like, overnight sort of like, household name virtually overnight after being plucked out of obscurity. And so it was striking because it was something simple. It was just a little, singular television interview, but to see him do that interview almost exactly to the day with the same show – one at the very start of his career where there was still a lot of uncertainty, and then the second exactly 32 years later when he had reached I wanna say like, the pinnacle of his career this year – was extremely interesting as a repetition.
And then one last repetition – and Nick actually found this – Nick Dagan Best found this clip where Robin Williams was on Conan’s show in March of 2009, which was during a Venus retrograde in Aries. Venus had just stationed retrograde in Aries in March of 2009. And they actually discussed the Oscars. And in this clip at one point, Robin Williams said to Conan, he said, “You should host it,” and then Conan replies, “Yes, I’d like to someday” or something to that effect. And what’s crazy about that is that that exchange happened when Venus had just stationed retrograde in Aries, and then exactly two eight-year Venus cycles later at the beginning of March of 2025 when Venus had just stationed retrograde in Aries, Conan actually did host the Oscars at that point. So that’s an incredible, incredible repetition, and it’s so minor in the sense of like, it’s just, you know, two people that were talking – Robin Williams and Conan O’Brien talking – and having that exchange together that was very quick. But it still actually foreshadowed something that would actually come to fruition once the same planetary alignment recurred almost exactly to the day 16 years later. So there’s something extraordinary about that that I was just blown away by, and I wanted to point that out and yeah, give a shoutout to Nick for noting that one.
So I think the take-home lesson here is that sometimes when you identify that a particular Venus retrograde series has been important in separate stories, like for example with the Oscars and with Conan, that sometimes you should pay attention to the possibility of crossovers when that same Venus retrograde recurs again. And it almost like, heightens the possibility of an important crossover at some point in time in the future if you’ve noticed that that same retrograde is important to two separate things that could have a crossover at some point in the future. So if a particular retrograde has been shown to be important for two people or events in the past, then the recurrence of that transit could bring those two things together or make them cross paths again in a notable way that represents like, a defining turning point for both of them, which I think was true for both Conan and the Oscars in this instance. So that’s part of my take-home lesson from studying those two.
All right, moving onto my next story. Another major story in like, nerd news was Nintendo. And one of the major ones that I noticed in the episode that we recorded on January 10th is when Nick and I went back and did this huge research project of all of the past eight-year repetitions of Venus retrograde in Aries, one of the ones that I noticed as being like, a former, you know, like, kid that was really into like, Nintendo and stuff was that the original Nintendo Entertainment System – the NES – was released in 1985, and that was a Venus retrograde in Aries year. And one of the things I don’t think I know – I didn’t know this. I checked the transcript, but in the transcript I didn’t mention that Nintendo was actually about to release a new console this year, which is the Nintendo Switch Two in 2025, and that this console was being released as a followup to their last extremely successful console, which was called the Nintendo Switch that of course was released eight years ago in 2017.
So what ended up happening with this is Nintendo announced the specs for the Nintendo Switch Two this year, but there was a rocky and delayed rollout because right around the same time that Nintendo finally like, unveiled what the console was gonna look like and what it’s actual specifications were, Trump announced the tariffs like, right around the same time. And because Nintendo is a Japanese company, it really threw everything into jeopardy in terms of whether they would be able to release it, whether it would be too costly, whether they would lose a bunch of money on it and things like that. So they actually ended up delaying the release as a result of that. But then eventually finally, the Nintendo Switch Two was released on June 5th during the very, very late stages of Venus passing through the later part of Aries post retrograde but still in that extended range of being in the sign that it originally went retrograde in. So what’s really cool is that on June 10th, I caught a news story saying that the Nintendo Switch Two had sold over three point five million units worldwide in just its first four days, which made it the fastest selling Nintendo hardware ever globally. So apparently, it sold like, extremely well and was a big success as being this like, not just a launch of a new console, but the launch of a follow-up console to one that was released two years ago. So that in and of itself is just kind of interesting, because it reminded me like, one of the criticisms of the Nintendo Switch Two in reading reviews is that Nintendo’s kind of playing it safe, and although it’s improved the specs of the console compared to the one it released eight years ago, it’s basically kind of doing the same thing as the original Switch that it released in 2017. There’s not a lot of new innovations in really major ways, aside from just improving the technical specs of like, the memory and how fast it runs and things like that. So I thought this was interesting, because it reminds me of another story that we saw play out during this Venus retrograde, which was the Lady Gaga release of this album and this phrase that became popular on social media that I talked about previously about Lady Gaga “reheating her nachos.” And this became a phrase that even she commented on at one point in an interview like, I talked about I think in the part two news episode where, you know, on the one hand, it’s like a criticism because it’s a potential criticism because it’s a statement that instead of coming up with something completely new and innovative, you’re like, returning back to the past and you are reviving something that you did in the past that went well as a way of both reliving that but also playing it safe a little bit. But that ultimately sometimes that can be okay, and it can be a worthwhile strategy because there can be things that you did in the past that are really good that you can bring forward and update to some extent. But still by revisiting the past and bringing those things forward into the future, there’s still some element of retreading familiar ground. But sometimes it’s like, the analogy with the nachos thing was like, you know, sometimes you can heat something up and there are some foods that are, you know, not exactly as good as they were the first time you ate them but still pretty good like, the second time you eat them once you’ve heated up your leftovers. And this was one of those scenarios where both Lady Gaga as well as Nintendo were able to capture that element of the Venus retrograde energy, which is doing something you’ve already done, bringing it back from the past and updating it to some extent for the present times and then being able to experience a similar level of success as a result of revisiting the past essentially is part of the theme there.
So along those lines, even in terms of the games with Nintendo, one of their biggest selling games from the console that was released eight years ago is that the Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, was released on March 3rd, 2017, as a launch title for the original Nintendo Switch when Venus was retrograde in Aries. And then what’s interesting is eight years later, one of the launch titles for the Nintendo Switch Two that just came out is they released an updated version of the same game basically, of Breath of the Wild, with better graphics and quicker load times. But it essentially re-releasing the same game on a new system. So I thought that was, again, another element of going back to the past, reviving something from the past, updating it a little bit – like, improving it, taking the opportunity when you’re going back to the past and bringing something forward to like, update and tweak it a little bit even if functionally it’s still the same thing, but how that can still be successful. So that in and of itself was like, an amazing story for me that I’ve been watching unfold in just like, the news over the past several months. But then because Nintendo’s been all over the news due to that, and I started getting like, recommended YouTube videos on it that I would watch occasionally like, on the history of Nintendo, I learned about some other repetitions that I didn’t know about in Nintendo’s history as well.
So one of them was… One of the things I didn’t know is that the Nintendo Entertainment System that was released in 1985 was actually not their first console, but there was actually an earlier console that was released in Japan. And guess when it was released? It was released eight years earlier in 1977 when Venus was retrograde in Aries. So this console was called the Color TV Game. It was only released in Japan in 1977, and it was essentially kind of like a pong clone – like, a clone of the game pong – but it was released on June 1st, 1977, when Venus was still in late Aries like it was when they just released the Switch Two here on June 5th. So post retrograde, but Venus direct moving forward but still in the retrograde sign, so at the very tail end of the extended retrograde period.
So this console apparently was successful enough that it caused Nintendo to start focusing on this area more so that eight years later eventually they would release the Nintendo Entertainment System not only in Japan but also in the United States and abroad, which then one of the things that was interesting about that is that there had been a crash in the video game industry in 1983 due to like, an oversaturation of the market and like, low-quality games and things like that. So one of the things that was important when Nintendo released its system in 1985 is it helped spur the revival of the video game industry in general at that point, which many observers had thought, you know, might be dead because of this major crash that had just happened a couple of years earlier.
So yeah, first console was in 1977. And then interestingly, another piece of trivia that I noticed that I did not know that I learned about recently is the legendary video game designer at Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, was actually hired by Nintendo in the year 1977 originally as an artist. Apparently his father helped him get the job after impressing the president with his toys. And then he started helping design some of the artwork. But then eventually, he ended up designing the games Donkey Kong and then eventually he ended up designing the first Mario Brothers game at the 1985 repetition, which ended up becoming the main game that was released with the Nintendo Entertainment System, which really established Nintendo and became their most popular and sort of like, enduring property. So my point is that – and he became undoubtedly like, the most important and influential video game designer at Nintendo ever and perhaps even in terms of like, the history of video games in general. He’s like, one of the most iconic characters. And so the point is that he was hired in 1977, but then eventually he designed and released Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo in 1985 which became huge and set up everything else.
Interestingly and weirdly, this Venus retrograde comes up all over their history in other places. Like, so Super Mario Brothers was released in 1985, and get this – they made a Super Mario Brothers movie, which was not very well received in the 1990s. Guess when it came out – it came out in May 28th, 1993. So it came out during the Venus retrograde in Aries in 1993, exactly eight years after the original Nintendo was released with the original Super Mario Brothers game. So that was crazy. There was a bunch of other – if you read through the Wikipedia entry for Nintendo, you’ll notice a bunch of other instances in their history where this particular Venus retrograde in Aries comes up. But I’m gonna not go through all of those right now, because some of them are interesting but are more minor. But I noticed one that was just like, staggeringly impressive that I was not expecting that blew me away, which is that I was watching this like, history video, and it said that Nintendo was founded in the year 1889 originally as a playing card company for like, cards. And like, that year sounded familiar, and then I looked it up, and that was the same exact Venus retrograde cycle that keeps repeating every eight years like the one we’re in now, like 2025 when the Switch Two was released, 2017 when the Switch was released. 1985 when the original Nintendo was released. It turns out that the company itself was founded the same year as this same retrograde period that repeats every eight years. So what’s interesting about this, though, is that Venus – every eight years, Venus goes retrograde in roughly the same spot in the zodiac, but it moves backwards by two degrees. So as a result of that, over the course of a century, the retrogrades will shift through the signs. And what’s interesting is that this retrograde back in 1889, it was connected to the Venus retrograde in Aries series which started in 1905 when Venus first retrograded back to station direct in the later degrees of Aries. But in 1889, this retrograde was still entirely in Taurus. But then in 1889, so it has that retrograde in Taurus, Nintendo is founded, and then eight years after that would be what, like, 1897? And then eight years after that would be 1905, and that’s when our Venus retrograde in Aries chronology really picks up. But for the first half of the 20th century, this retrograde would start in Taurus and then it would end and station direct in Aries. So my point here and what’s important about this example is it demonstrates something Nick had said that turns out to be very true, which is that these Venus retrogrades track across the signs. If you go and look at them extending over more than a century, that while my conclusion is that while the sign that it goes retrograde in is still important and can be informative, in terms of the repetitions, once something gets started under a specific retrograde cycle, because of the eight-year repetition of Venus that we know Venus will go retrograde in the same spot every eight years, it ties together events in time in those eight-year increments going back to the very start, going back to the foundation of that thing even if the retrograde itself didn’t start in that specific sign of the zodiac. So in a way, the technique to some extent is actually independent of what sign of the zodiac the retrograde is in and can be tracked back over centuries going back as part of the same cycle.
So you know, this is interesting to me because that’s a really striking example of it. This is something that Nick Dagan Best has already done like, tons of work on and has established, and he actually developed an entire system that I think we talked about at the very tail end of the original Venus retrograde in Aries episode that we recorded on January 10th where he’s developed a system for like, naming and categorizing these retrogrades that’s independent of the zodiac. And I think that’s important. And although I’ve been using a shorthand and just saying that this is the Venus retrograde cycle in Aries because that’s the easiest way to convey it to people and to say what we’re talking about, even that’s not super precise because like, for example, the last couple of times, the last three times of this Venus retrograde cycle, it hasn’t just been in Aries, but it’s also – it started in Aries and Venus has retrograded back into Pisces. So that was true of 2025, of 2017, and 2009 that it’s been a Venus Pisces retrograde rather than just a Venus in Aries retrograde. But for the sake of like, simplicity, I’ve just been calling it the Venus retrograde in Aries because for the most part it’s touched that sign over the course of the past century from 1905 to 2025 in some way, in one way or another. But the takeaway is just that for very long term things, you can track this back more than a century, and sometimes it will still show repetitions just based on that repeating eight-year pattern. And that’s just absolutely incredible and like, stunning to me, so I wanted to share that example with everyone because I was really blown away.
So the other takeaway with this is just that obviously, that means the technique can be applied to companies as well – it’s not just people. You can also apply it to companies. You may be able to use it to anticipate the success or failure of certain product launches. So the fact that, like, Nintendo released this, the Switch in 2017, and it was very successful means that the repetition of this also indicated a very successful period for Nintendo. I guess it still remains to be seen how it goes for them overall in terms of this console cycle, but we’ll see. And then yeah, the connection shows that the connection with the founding of something if it’s born with a Venus retrograde in a specific sign, then we know that the repetition of that will always be important every eight years. And now we’ve seen that here with Nintendo. We’ve seen that with Star Wars. We’ve seen it with the Oscars. We’ve seen it with Conan, and so on and so forth. So it’s a really solid principle at this point.
All right, so another notable news story that I saw in the news recently is more minor, but I just thought it was a very interesting repetition. So there was news over the past few months that Trump was going to redesign the Rose Garden at the White House and was gonna get rid of the grass and was gonna put down concrete there. And construction has begun on that after making his announcements. He’s also installing two flag poles on the north and south lawns. So I was reading about this in the news recently, because there was news about them breaking ground and working on this construction already on the Rose Garden. And in the newspaper article, it said that the first Rose Garden was installed in 1913 by First Lady Ellen Wilson who was the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson. So 1913 was a Venus retrograde in Aries. So that means that the Rose Garden, originally installed in 1913, is now having a repetition of the same Venus retrograde, and it’s getting a major redesign and a major makeover.
One other interestingly notable time that that’s happened when there was a major redesign and expansion of the Rose Garden happened in 1961 where in that year, in the first half of that year, was when President John F. Kennedy was elected and came into office with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy. And what happened is that in May of 1961, they made their first state visit to France and England and Austria, and while they were on this trip, they noted that the White House didn’t have any sort of comparable garden or attractiveness compared to the ones that they were seeing in Europe while they were on this trip. So this trip happened, it started – the trip to France began on May 31st, 1961, when Venus was just at the very tail end of Aries coming off of the retrograde. So during that Venus retrograde trip, they were inspired seeing all these gardens in Europe, and then they came back and they started working on and asking someone to – they hired somebody to redesign the Rose Garden, basically, where they expanded it significantly.
So now Trump is paving over the grass and putting concrete down and also doing some sort of other unspecified audio and visual upgrades, and it’s supposed to be finished in August. But it was initiated during this time of the Venus retrograde. So it’ll be interesting to see how that goes and what happens and how it’s received.
All right. Another major one in the news that’s just happened and that’s unfolding of course was the war that’s currently taking place between Iran and Israel and probably soon the United States. So today’s June 21st, 2025. This situation’s been ongoing over the past week or so, and it will probably escalate, I’m guessing, based on the upcoming ingress of Uranus into the sign of Gemini.
Yeah, so quick update that I have to add in post is that later the same day that I recorded this episode, Trump bombed Iran and the open war between the US and Iran began. So I recorded this episode earlier in the afternoon on June 21st, 2025, and then I finished it and like, maybe an hour or two after I finished, the news broke that he had bombed the nuclear facilities in Iran. So yeah. I just wanted to point that out for those that were curious. I’m editing this episode later the same night, so I’ll put this update in; I’ll splice it into the middle of the video. And here’s a diagram that shows the Uranus transit that I was referring to, which is the Uranus in Gemini periods because the United States was born with Uranus in Gemini back in the 1700s. And Uranus was in Gemini during the course of the Revolutionary War. But then Uranus comes back to the same spot every 84 years, and every time it does that, the US is involved in a major war. So the first time it came back to where it was when the country was founded was the Civil War in the middle of the 1800s. Then the next time was World War Two between 1941 and 1949, and specifically the US’s involvement in World War Two, which began in 1941 even though the war had already been going on for a bit prior to that point. And then finally, the next time is Uranus is going into Gemini again in 2025 about two weeks from now on July 7th. So this is a little early, but it’s because Uranus has been getting set off by a square from Mars over the course of the past week or so that really coincided with Israel launching its initial strike against Iran a week ago. And now everything is sort of snowballing from there.
So if you wanna hear more about this concept of the Uranus return of the United States, I actually did a whole episode on it way back in 2022 with my friend Nick Dagan Best. And you can find that on the podcast website by just searching the Uranus return of the United States, and you can learn more about that episode. And then of course I’ve talked about it in some of the recent forecast episodes like the year ahead forecast and will probably talk about it again especially in the next monthly month ahead forecast episode for July of 2025 that we’re gonna record next week. So I think that’s enough for this update; I just wanted to let people know the timeline of when I recorded this episode. All right, so let’s resume from here.
But one of the things that I noticed is I was reading a news article the other day, and they were repeating just common things that are known about, but it mentioned the year and it reminded me of something I had forgotten about, which is that the US helped to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953 and installed the shah. And what’s crazy about that is 1953 was both a Venus retrograde in Aries year, and it was also a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, so that’s part of the recurrence that we’re having right now is a Saturn-Neptune conjunction and Venus retrograde in Aries. And what is crazy about that is I’ve been seeing like, interviews with like, the son of the shah who was installed in 1953 and eventually he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution, especially in 1979. But now all of a sudden, like, the son of this shah from 1953 has like, resurfaced in like, interviews over the past few weeks and it seems like there’s like, an angle – people are angling for him to like, return possibly. You know, we’ll see how that goes. But there’s some kind of weird repetition that’s happening right now that we can see – have an access point to astrologically between 1953 and 2025. And it’s partially due to this connection between Venus retrograde in Aries and Saturn-Neptune conjunction happening in the sky at the same time.
So one interesting piece of that is… It’s more connected to the Saturn-Neptune, but it’s interesting that it was playing out in 1953, is I was reading this Washington Post article, and it said – the title was, “The US Helped Oust Iran’s Government in 1953. Here’s what happened.” And at one point about halfway through the article, there’s a paragraph and it says,
“On August 19th, rebels overran the broadcast studio of Radio Tehran and prematurely declared on the radio that Mosaddegh’s government had collapsed that afternoon” – that the existing government had collapsed. However, in fact, that had not yet happened! And then it quotes a historian who says, “After that radio broadcast, it was over. This was one of the most effective pieces of fake news in recent history of the world,” this historian, Randjbar-Daemi, said.
So I thought that was incredible because that really brings in the Saturn-Neptune component where basically it’s like, the US and Britain came in and organized a coup. And part of what they did that ended up being like, an important turning point that summer in 1953 was they took over the primary radio broadcast system, and they claimed that the existing government had fallen when it hadn’t. And then people believed them, and as a result of that, that actually snowballed and led to the government actually being overthrown. So there’s some interesting crazy repetitions happening of that right now with both of those cycles repeating.
So one other really important piece of this is that I noticed that this Venus retrograde – I haven’t researched this extensively, I’m actually trying to research this more right now in preparation for our next forecast episode that we’re gonna record at the end of this month, and I’ll have more to say about it then. Here, I’m mainly just restricting myself to making a few points about the Venus retrogrades because I noticed the Venus retrograde years coming up here, and this is an obviously very important like, crucial event that’s happening right now. But one of the things I noticed is that 1977 was also a Venus retrograde year, and I was reading some things about how while the Iranian Revolution culminated in 1979, the year 1977 was actually a critical turning point when widespread, open opposition to the shah began to boil over, which sort of set the stage for the eventual overthrow of the government which was completed in 1979. So I think that’s interesting because it means it ties back then through that Venus retrograde period from 1977 that that was a repetition of, and it was tying back into the original overthrow of the government in 1953 that installed the shah in the first place.
Other interesting ones I noticed just doing some quick research is that in 1985 apparently, the Iran-Contra Affair began where the Reagan administration secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was a major political scandal that eventually blew up. And apparently the sales were originally facilitated by Israel with the US providing arms in exchange for Iran’s help in securing the release of American hostages. And then the profits from the arms sales were diverted to support the Contras in Nicaragua despite a congressional ban on such aid, and it turned into this whole debacle. But it’s kind of crazy that the Iran-Contra scandal was tied in with this Venus retrograde in 1985.
Eight years later in 1993, the Clinton administration began to intensify sanctions against Iran. 2009, which is another repetition, was when the Green Movement protests erupted in Iran following a disputed presidential election, and this was this really significant internal challenge to the Iranian government at the time and became a major international news story. Eight years after that, the next time Venus went retrograde, the Trump administration began the process of withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, which was a major turning point in relations that basically set up everything that’s happening today where this war that’s been initiated with Iran is being initiated under the premise of them not getting nuclear weapons and that deal that Trump pulled the US out of. You know, part of that process basically started in 2017. So clearly, that’s important in terms of some of the repetitions that are happening with Venus. There’s some separate side repetitions though that are happening with Mars that connect different years. For example, even though the Iranian Revolution was completed in 1979, it really began in 1978 in connection with this Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo that was taking place that year. So there was this weird repetition where in 1978, Mars went retrograde in Cancer and Leo, Jupiter was in Gemini, and there were eclipses happening in Aries. So I mentioned this earlier this year – I think it was on the April forecast, because when I noticed those repetitions among other things we had been predicting for a while in addition to this eclipse series that we thought that there was gonna be a war with Iran this year, and that did end up manifesting in a really dramatic way. But I wanted to mention that, because while the Venus retrograde repetitions are clearly important in terms of some of what’s going on, especially in terms of like, it seemed like the theme of like, outside influence like, influencing or overthrowing things, there’s also this other component with some of the other cycles that happening right now as well like the Mars retrogrades, and Jupiter, and eclipses in Aries and so on and so forth. So I’ll talk about all of that more and give a more careful and sort of nuanced discussion later this month in the forecast episode once I’ve collected my thoughts more. But I wanted to mention this now at least since it is an ongoing thing, and I mean, it was actually one of the – I was uncharacteristically strong in my belief that that war would begin this year because of some of the repetitions we were seeing, especially in the buildup with the eclipses. But then the more I started realizing there were other repetitions happening on top of that, the more sort of sure I became over the past eight months that something very significant was gonna take place. And the Venus retrograde was part of that as well as some of those other repetitions, especially the eclipses but also the Mars retrograde as well. So hopefully I’ll do a more detailed treatment of that soon, but it’s still an ongoing situation, so we’ll see what happens.
All right, so now I just have a series of miscellaneous, smaller news stories that I saw come up in the news that were connected with the Venus retrograde that I wanted to mention. Some of them are obviously connected and are not necessarily repetitions, but just symbolically interesting ones that I thought were worth taking note of in order to learn something about what Venus retrogrades are all about.
So one of the most striking ones was on May 14th, Warner Brothers Discovery announced that it’s renaming its streaming platform back to HBO Max this summer, which is reverting a change that it made two years ago where they attempted to rebrand their streaming channel to just be titled Max. So this decision reportedly is being made to emphasize the company’s premium content and its association with the HBO brand especially, according to this article I was reading from CNN. So this was a interesting one, because it was really obvious like, a couple of years ago that this was a massively bad idea to remove the name “HBO” from their streaming service and to just try to call it “Max,” because there was already like, decades of built up consumer sort of like, goodwill towards HBO as being associated with a lot of really important, really successful like, television shows and series like Game of Thrones or like The Sopranos or The Wire or other shows like that. And their attempt to just rebrand it as Max seemed really like, a dumb idea and seemed really misguided at the time. And now after two years, during the Venus retrograde itself, they actually made the decision to go back on that and to revert back to their previous name and to bring the name HBO back into the title. So that’s again it’s important, because it’s just like, reemphasizing something where something about Venus retrograde occasionally forces people to go back to the past to revise and revisit previous decisions. But sometimes, you know, I think it’s become tricky because sometimes I think in pop astrology there’s become a thing that, you know, like, if your ex comes back to you that you should stay away from them or something during Venus retrograde, or that if you go back to the past, somehow it will always turn out poorly during Venus retrogrades. And while that’s sometimes true, especially if we’re talking about like, interpersonal relationships and like, relationships from the past, it’s really not always true. It really can break down and it can go either way, because sometimes going back to the past can be important and it can actually be quite productive and useful because in some instances, you may have made a mistake. And the Venus retrograde actually presents an opportunity to go back and revise and fix something from the past and to make it better going forward once you’ve acknowledged that you’ve made some sort of mistake at some point leading up to this. And I think that’s a really important lesson here, and it’s really well encapsulated by this example with, you know, just this streaming service and the way that it had to go back on something that was a mistake that it made from a couple of years ago.
All right. Other news that I saw – the latest Mission Impossible movie came out in May, which I’m guessing is the last one based on the title. I haven’t seen it yet. And I watched this interview with Tom Cruise at one point when he was doing like, the press tour for it, and he actually said in this interview that he first went to the production studio Paramount in order to pitch the idea for doing a whole series based on the Mission Impossible movies in 1993. And that was, of course, both a Venus retrograde in Aries year, and it was also a Mars retrograde in Cancer year. So it was the 32-year repetition of both of those. So that would end up becoming the first movie that he would produce, and I thought it was interesting on the one hand that that retrograde then will essentially end up marking both the beginning of his process of doing these movies – of like, making the first pitch for this movie series – but then also of him wrapping it up and bringing that to completion with the final movie in that same series being released under this Venus retrograde in Aries. So you know, who knows if like, in eight years he’ll revisit it or whathaveyou. He’s getting older now, so maybe not; I don’t really know. But the point is to whatever extent there is some sort of sense of finality about this, it’s pretty interesting that it coincided with the same Venus retrograde in Aries. And you know, I haven’t researched it beyond that; I just wrote down that headline once I noticed it after watching that interview. But now that I think about it, actually, there’s probably a second point there, which is embedded in him going to Paramount to pitch this movie is that the first movie was based on an existing property, which was this old television show called Mission Impossible. So that in and of itself even is actually a very Venus retrograde-y thing is that when he made the original pitch in 1993 during the Venus retrograde in Aries, it was basically to revive like, an old property and make it into a modern action movie with him as the star. So that’s probably why – that’s part of the reason why even the birth of it in the first place was a Venus retrograde thing. And I bet if you researched that, there would probably be some earlier things tied into the Mission Impossible series that would be tied in with that Venus retrograde as well. So that’s something I’m learning is when you see something like that and you see a repetition, sometimes you need to go out of your way then to study, to take it back further because you can kind of intuit that there were probably earlier instances where that same Venus retrograde in that same eight-year cycle were relevant going back further. And that’s for the most part – although I mean, the universe has kind of been like, throwing some of these stories at me left and right where once I memorized all of the Venus retrograde years for Aries, now you know, over the past six months any time I’m like, reading a news article and it mentions one of those years, it really pops out to me and I take note of it. So on one hand, some of the research I’ve been doing with these news stories has been the universe just like, throwing these at me, but some of the other ones have been sometimes once you notice a repetition between two years, you know that if you just like, sit down like I did with Nintendo and just like, read the Wikipedia page, you’ll see the same repetitions coming up going back even further than you expect. Sometimes like, much further than you would expect like with Nintendo going back all the way to 1889, which is just crazy. So somebody should research that, and let me know in the comments on YouTube if there are in fact earlier Venus retrograde in Aries repetitions prior to 1993. There’s probably some in his life too; that would be another one to check.
All right. Let’s see. Another one – on May 8th, Russia held a large World War Two celebration in Russia with many foreign dignitaries, including the president of China. And this was unique, because it was one of the largest one of these that they’ve done in a while, and it was also the 80th anniversary of the one that they did in 1945 after the end of World War Two. And we had actually mentioned that one, because that was like, the biggest thing that stood out about 1945 is that marked the end – the defeat of Germany and the end of World War Two in Europe during that Venus retrograde in Aries in the first half of 1945. And then one of the things we noted in the episode recorded on January 10th was that Russia held like, this major victory parade in I think it was like, May or June of 1945 during the tail end of that Venus retrograde that year. So this was a striking repetition on May 8th to see this in the news and to see what a huge celebration it was as an exact repetition of that exactly 80 years later.
All right, other miscellaneous news stories that are just ones I noticed that are kind of Venus retrograde-y. One of them on May 24th in The Washington Post – there was a headline that said, “Two Women are Shattering a Figure Skating Taboo by Dancing Together.” So it was two, like, women as partners doing a figure skating routine, which was interesting and cool. Another one on May 22nd or thereabout, I noticed a story that said that a long lost bust of Jim Morrison that was stolen from his grave had been recovered after being gone for like, decades. That somehow they – on his like, tomb I think in like, France they had done a bust of his face and head. But somebody stole it like, decades ago. And then during this Venus retrograde, somehow they recovered it. So like, something from the past came back into the present.
There was a few – I got three or four that were sent in by listeners; I’ll mention a few of them really quickly. A listener named Charles Major sent one in about a woman named Deserae Turner who was a young Utah girl who beat the odds of death after a shooting in 2017 but now eight years later is said to be in hospice care. So that was a really sad example. Also sent in by Charles, he said, “On April 13th today at the Golf Masters was the first since 2017 to have the sudden death of a player.” So there was a player that passed away on April 13th that was in this golf tournament, and that had happened the last time that had happened was eight years earlier in 2017.
A listener named Yvonne O’Connell wrote an email, and she said, “I’ve been listening to the Venus retrograde podcasts and enjoying them. I literally just read an opinion column in The New York Times by Bret Stephens and Gail Collins. They first met and talked about doing a conversation column in April of 2017 when Venus was retrograde in Aries, but now eight years later are calling it quits to pursue their own separate books.” So there was like, a creation of something eight years ago and then a completion of something eight years later when the Venus retrograde recurred, which is kind of similar to like, for example, the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible thing where he pitches the idea for Mission Impossible in 1993 Venus retrograde, and then he has the release of the final movie potentially in the 2025 retrograde.
May 7th, I saw a headline that said, “For the First Time in Indian History, Two Women Officers Led the Official Press Briefing.” So that ties in with a theme of like, firsts for women that we saw come up in the original episode and that I’ve noted a bunch of examples in over the past several months.
Leisa Schaim found one that she mentioned in the last forecast episode that we did for May of – no, for June of 2025, and you can hear her talk about it in more detail there. But the famous race horse Secretariat has like, a 5th house stellium of planets in Aries because we have the birth time for this horse. And what was crazy was that there was this race that happened during the Venus retrograde period in the past couple of months where 19 of the descendants of the horse all ran in the same race. And I think it was like, all of the competitors were like, all descendants of the same horse. And weirdly because we know the birth time of the horse, we know that Aries is its 5th house, and Venus went retrograde across that 5th house stellium around that time. So it’s that – there’s a little bit of overlap because there was more than just Venus retrograde going on in Aries this year. There was also the Mercury retrograde in Aries, and there was also the final eclipse in Aries. So that area of everybody’s chart was getting extra activated this year, including for some horses, evidently – especially very like, prolific ones.
On June 3rd, there was a US Navy ship that was named after Harvey Milk, and they renamed it as part of this ongoing thing that’s been happening that is not great that I talked about extensively in some of the previous episodes with the removal of a lot of things that have to do with like, civil rights and recognizing past civil rights people.
On June 6th, Michaels announced this week that it had acquired the intellectual property and private label brands previously owned by JoAnn Fabrics. So I had noted this as a previous news story that one of the biggest arts and crafts and fabrics companies in the United States went under during this Venus retrograde earlier in the Venus retrograde. And then it turned out that towards the very tail end of the Venus retrograde, it turned out that one of its biggest competitors basically ended up buying up what remained of the company at this point and will be taking it over.
And finally, this last one was just a random Reddit post that I saw recently, but I realized it tied in with the same Venus retrograde cycle. And it might be worth somebody to research this one more. But there was a post on Reddit, and the title was, “Today I learned about John Doe number 24 who was a Black teenager who was found wandering the streets in 1945.” And because he was deaf and seemingly incapable of otherwise communicating, police were unable to identify him and sent him to various mental institutions until his death in 1993. So my ears immediately perked up because 1945 was a Venus retrograde in Aries year, and 1993 was a Venus retrograde in Aries year. So that means he was found during a Venus retrograde in Aries year and he eventually passed away under a Venus retrograde in Aries year as well. And they ended up giving him later the legal name, so he could get benefits later on, of John Doe Boyd. But I thought it was striking that his story was coming up this year again was Venus was retrograde in Aries. Even though it was just like, a social media post on Reddit, it was a good example of what I call postmortem astrology, which I kind of maybe need a better name for that because it sounds a little weird. But that’s my working title. But the point is that sometimes the memory of somebody can continue to echo and reverberate throughout history when certain alignments repeat in the future. And one of the ways that I found that happen is through, for example, Venus retrogrades. And so for him, especially because his story was tied in with the Venus retrograde in Aries, it’s not surprising then to see his story coming up again in the present all these years later after he passed away when that same recurrence happens. And I forgot – that’s actually one other piece I wrote as a note about this, which is that when he was found in 1945, they estimated him – because they weren’t able to communicate with him very well, but they estimated him to be about 16 years old. And if he was 16 years old, then that would mean that he was born in 1929, which was also a Venus retrograde in Aries year.
So there’s a Wikipedia page about him; it doesn’t go into much detail. But apparently, there was a book that was published about him around the year 2000 that has more detail. I haven’t been able to read the book yet, but it might be interesting if somebody wanted to research his story more. It could be a good case study about Venus retrogrades and maybe the Venus retrograde could somehow be used to help piece together some of his story even better perhaps.
All right, so I think that’s the last of the – that is the last of the stories that I wrote down. It wasn’t a lot; it wasn’t as extensive as some of the last news one but there was enough there that was compelling that I wanted to commit some of these notes to some permanent form in order to share the last bits of my research on Venus retrograde and this particular cycle and some of like, the take home lessons that I learned from that.
So I wanna take this last piece of this video since this will be like, one of my last episodes talking about this particular Venus retrograde cycle, I wanna talk a little bit about some of the things that I’ve learned from doing this research over the past six months because this is the first time that I’ve really sat down and researched ahead of time the history of a specific Venus retrograde cycle as extensively as I did in preparation for this one, because we researched it for a few weeks and then recorded that episode on January 10th shortly after Venus had just moved into Pisces. And that was the day – January 10th was the day – of Venus’s greatest elongation from the Sun. So this is the first time I had done this extensive of both research about the Venus retrograde ahead of time, which then implicitly contained some predictions about what stories would be important, but then also it’s the first time that I’ve tracked it as closest in terms of doing these like, many subsequent episodes to give updates and to sort of track and document things as they were unfolding.
So I don’t know, yeah, I think the audience is probably pretty saturated with Venus retrograde stuff, so this’ll probably be my last treatment of this. It would almost kind of be nice to go back and do something summarizing like, all of the research that happened and all of the things that worked out over the course of the past six months, but this might be sufficient and it might be time to move on, especially given that world events are starting to move so fast and we’re about to go into a much different period with Uranus going into Gemini here very soon at the beginning of July. But let me try to summarize some points that I’ve learned and some advice that I have for researching these periods in the future now that I’ve done it myself.
All right, so first things first. When a retrograde is coming up, I would recommend researching past repetitions ahead of time, because that ended up being like, hugely important and impressive that we did that. We could have done it like, a little bit earlier, like in December it almost would have been more impressive. But, you know, we released ours still pretty early on January 10th, and by then, we could already see that some stories were like, developing. Like I knew Lady Gaga was coming out with an album, I think, so when I saw this retrograde being important for her chronology, like, I knew that was gonna be a really important turning point for her, this one coming up. But if we had done it even like, a month or two earlier, it would have been more impressive, and I may try to do that in the future when some subsequent Venus retrogrades happen over the next decade.
So every time a Venus retrograde is coming up or really any retrograde for that matter including like, Mars or maybe even Mercury, research the history. Like, especially like the past century if you can is essentially what we did. And establish what happened during some of the previous retrogrades of that planet in the same sign. So when you see ones that have been important in the past, when you start to see ones that are important, check for others. Like, if you… You know, one of the things that we could have done is I’m thinking about ones like I saw when we did the original episode the Nintendo one. I saw that the Nintendo was released in 1985, but I didn’t otherwise – even though that obviously seemed important and obviously was tied in with the Venus retrograde that year in Aries – I didn’t look to research other Venus retrograde in Aries periods in eight-year increments to see if other ones came up with Nintendo. I just like, noticed that one in ‘85 and took that it was important and noted it at the time and then called it a day. But sometimes when you see one that’s really important, you can kind of infer that there may be others. So it’s a good idea to research other potential repetition time periods.
So research the entire eight-year repeating chronology up ‘til now when you’re trying to study something for a current possible repetition. Note also I would recommend when you do this research for a specific retrograde – like, for example, at some point when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio at some point in the next decade – I don’t remember when that is coming up, but probably before too long – when you go back and study it in eight-year increments over the past century, note things that come up that are important during the retrograde period even if it doesn’t seem relevant or it doesn’t seem related to Venus in any obvious way or doesn’t seem related to Venus retrograde in any obvious way, because on the one hand, sometimes there can themes that come up during the Venus retrograde that surprise you that you may not have worked into your thinking as being part of Venus retrograde even though it is. And in some instances, it can actually expand your thinking by just noting important things that happen; it can make you understand what Venus retrogrades are actually about even better.
In other instances, you wanna note the major stuff because even if it doesn’t seem relevant, just sometimes the fact that it’s happening during one Venus retrograde can tie it into that cycle based on the eight-year repetitions. So one of the ones, for example, I noted when I was doing the research for the original episode was when I was doing the Venus retrograde in Aries research, I kept noticing a bunch of like, air disasters involving airplanes. And I didn’t really know why that was the case, and I kind of dismissed it and I didn’t write down and note as many air disasters as I could have in the original episode, because I thought it wasn’t relevant or I thought that it could just be something that’s happening all the time and so I was just seeing like, by looking at one small period of time, I was looking at like, air disasters happening then but that maybe there was a distribution of those that was happening like, all the time outside of that. So for a long time when I did the original episode, I didn’t note those. But then I think eventually I did start to catch on that it was happening much more frequently than I would expect. And then eventually when the Venus retrograde actually began, there was this string of like, air and airplane disasters that happened during the course of this retrograde that really I think caught everybody off guard at how often it was happening. And I do think that ended up partially being tied in with the Venus retrograde, which was really surprising, but it was a good example that if you’re seeing a repetition of something coming up over and over again in the history, you need to take note of that, and you need to write it down, because that repetition may then come up again in the future when the same recurrence happens. So don’t rule stuff out, even if it doesn’t seem obviously related to like, the symbolism of Venus or Venus retrograde off the bat, because there may be other reasons that it relates to the symbolism. Like, one of the things that I was thinking that it could have partially related to Venus being in Aries, because Venus in Aries is the furthest it can get from one of its domiciles, which is Libra. And therefore that placement in some of the ancient traditions – like in Hellenistic or medieval astrology – would have been called the place of Venus’s exile which carries these notions of like, travel and being away from home. So one of the like, once this started happening, one of the things I was thinking is that could be part of the reason why this particular retrograde was tied in with air disasters was due to that placement of Venus in the sign of its detriment or the sign of its exile. So that was just a speculation, and there may be other reasons. Like, it could have been just a repetition of some early things potentially in the history of aviation occurring during this Venus retrograde in Aries, so therefore that’s why there were repetitions of it and it was simply due to the repetitions. I did notice some stuff like that with space travel especially. A number of very notable early instances of space travel ended up coinciding with Venus retrograde in Aries, and then this one did as well when there was like, this celebrity space flight that happened during this Venus retrograde in Aries that was like, not received well that was with like, Katy Perry and some other celebrities.
All right, so moving on. When researching a cycle, one of the first things you should do that’s really helpful is to memorize all of the past years in which that same repetition has happened. So you know, having this slide where I had all of the Venus retrograde years over the past century and knowing each of the years when Venus was retrograde in Aries, and once I had worked with that enough and done enough of these episodes, it really became committed to memory. I mean, really after the first episode. And once that is committed to memory, when you’re just hearing the news or you’re reading the news or in conversation with people or what have you, you’ll start to take note when those years come up again in conversation or when reading the news, and you’ll immediately recognize that that’s a repetition. Whereas prior to this time, like, if somebody mentioned 1977 to me or mentioned 1905 or 2017, I wouldn’t have recognized that those were all years in which Venus was retrograde in Aries. But just having memorized that simple, astronomical fact of the repetition of those years in eight-year increments suddenly unlocked this whole new world in terms of being able to track some of that stuff even just passively by, you know, watching the news during the course of this Venus retrograde and hearing news anchors like, mention like, well, you know, we just had like, an aircrash of – one of the things that happened is there was this airplane that crashed that carried some of the US figure skating team. And then the newspeople were like, the last time that happened was 1961 when there was this famous air crash that wiped out the entire US figure skating team. And you know, before, that year would have passed by without me making the connection. But then when that happened and they mentioned that year, I immediately knew that 1961 was both a Venus retrograde in Aries year as well as a Mars retrograde in Cancer year. So having the years memorized is a game changer, and to whatever extent you can, I would recommend that. I have now memorized them for the Venus retrograde in Aries series, but I don’t have them memorized for like, the other series yet for the most part. Like, I know some of the recent ones. Like, I know the Venus retrograde in Scorpio was November of 2002, so by extension I know that recurred eight years after that in November of 2010 and so on and so forth. So but in the future, like, during each of these retrogrades, that’s gonna be one of my first steps is to memorize all of these years tied in with a specific retrograde, because that then gives you an immediate access point for understanding what’s about to happen or will happen in the future once that retrograde recurs by knowing the years right off the bat in which it happened in the past.
All right. So memorize all the years. One of the things, you know, I learned from Nick is take it back a century, even if it crosses over into a different sign, because sometimes that can still stay connected due to the repetitions – like was the case with Nintendo, for example, where the company was founded under the same eight-year Venus repetition back in 1889 even though technically the Venus retrograde was happening entirely in Taurus at that point. And even though nowadays, that same retrograde repetition happens in Aries and Pisces, there’s still a connection. So you still wanna memorize it going back, you know, a century if you can, even across sign boundaries.
And certainly check out Nick’s work and his YouTube channel – Nick Dagan Best – for more about some of the studies he’s done and the specific system that he’s developed for tracking and referring to – like, categorizing – the different Venus retrograde repetitions that happen that’s independent of the zodiac, because I think that’s a great approach to have at this point. Even though I still for myself like taking the zodiac into account and still will keep referencing things largely relative to that for my purposes, but I can understand now the value of also being able to look outside of that at the same time and to sort of like, free the cycle from the zodiac. Both are relevant.
The other thing that’s hugely important that came up in this one is that it’s really important to note any other recurrences that coincide with the Venus retrograde in the current cycle. So for example, in this cycle, we had not just Venus retrograde in Aries happening, but we also had Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo happening virtually at the same time and kind of like, overlapping. We also had a Saturn-Neptune conjunction taking place and coming very close around the same time as the Venus retrograde, and that was actually even more relevant during this particular one because the Venus retrograde, once it stationed in Aries, would retrograde back and cross over the Saturn-Neptune conjunction as both before and after it was stationing in late Pisces. So the Venus retrograde itself was like, activating the Saturn-Neptune. You also have to pay attention to in this one, there was a recurrence of eclipses taking place. So for example, this one we had this important eclipse that took place at the end of March in Aries. And so that was another coincidence of something that could be looked back in terms of repetitions, because there’s these like, 19-year repetitions of eclipses for example.
So this is important because when you look at other parallel coinciding repetitions, it can help you to narrow down more specific manifestations and more specific ranges of manifestation as well as like, scenarios that might happen when you know that it’s both a Venus retrograde in Aries, and it’s also a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and it’s also a Mars retrograde in Cancer and eclipse in Aries. Because then it’s like, it starts feeding in multiple data points of possible repetitions rather than just one. So the specific thing, though, that’s important about that – that’s important about looking at dual repetitions – is that it links together certain years much more strongly. And it will tell you which years are gonna be even more important in terms of past Venus retrogrades than you might think. So for example, I mentioned in 1961, there was that plane crash that occurred with the US figure skating team. And that year was both a Venus retrograde in Aries but also Mars retrograde in Cancer, and then that recurred this year in 2025, and there was a plane crash that involved a significant number of people from the US figure skating team. Or another one that I mentioned is like, you know, 1953 and the US and British overthrow of the Iranian government and how that was both a Venus retrograde in Aries year but also a Saturn-Neptune conjunction year at the same time. So both of those help to narrow down and specify more specific years within the past like, century of Venus retrogrades by noting what other parallel repetitions are happening at the same time. So overlapping recurrences really seems key here, and that’s one of the major things that I learned in doing this research.
This also shows up in birth charts as well, interestingly, where you know a particular retrograde is important when a person was born under a dual recurrence of the same repetitions that are happening now. So for example, in the last episode, I talked to a listener who was born in I think 1961 around the time of a Venus retrograde in Aries and a Mars retrograde in Cancer. And then this year when those two transits and planetary periods essentially recurred or repeated themselves, it was a major important turning point in her life. So you’ve gotta pay attention to that, because that will tell you in some individuals – like, if a person’s born under a specific retrograde or if they’re born under two retrogrades especially, then you know that when those recur in the future, that’s gonna be a very important turning point in that person’s life. So that’s one of the take home lessons that I learned when doing this research this time.
So that point is actually tied in with other planetary periods, but also this broader, more long-term category called Babylonian goal year periods. And this is something I’ve been researching a lot over the past year and a half or so even since doing the year ahead forecast in – what was it? It was the year ahead forecast for 2024. And in trying to find out what would happen with the Mars retrograde in Leo, Nick told me that there’s a major recurrence every 79 years of Mars going retrograde almost to the same degree, and I ended up researching this and remembering that this is tied in with this broader category of periods called Babylonian goal year periods where they had found repetitions for the different planets that were very long-term. Like that one 79 years for Mars. So that’s really cool, and that one ended up being tied in with – actually, that one’s just crazy, because that was the one that I learned about the day before we did that forecast for 2024, and I was looking into it, and when I saw that repetition, I immediately understood the implications for the 2024 election because I realized that Trump was born in 1946 just after Mars was coming off of a retrograde in Leo and Cancer. And so when he turned 79 years old, that would be an exact repetition of Mars coming off of a retrograde in Leo and Cancer. So I both knew that Mars retrograde would be getting started back in November at the time of the 2024 US presidential election when Mars moved into Leo right before the presidential election before going retrograde in December. But also that when he turned 79, that would be the exact recurrence of that Mars transit, and he of course just turned 79 in the past week and then he held a military parade that weekend in Washington, DC. And at the same time, Israel – which was backed by the US – launched the war with Iran. So that was a crazy activation and repetition of something that was built into the birth chart with Mars, which is on his Ascendant in his birth chart at the end of Leo, coming to full fruition in terms of that placement right at the exact 79-year repetition of that Mars placement.
So that’s a really great example of the Babylonian goal year periods, which are just long-term planetary period repetitions. I’m gonna be doing an episode on this at some point here soon with my friend Patrick Watson, because him and I have been researching this extensively over the past year. And one of the things that’s interesting about this is that the Mesopotamian astrologers set up projects to study these long-term periods for centuries. And they were going out every single night, and they were observing the sky and where the planets and the stars were. They were writing it down. But then they were also writing down political events that were happening at the time. They were writing down the price of different commodities in the markets. They were noting like, the height of the river at the time. And they were just tracking this and compiling these records for centuries, and I believe that they were seeing and tracking similar repetitions as what we’re seeing here in these repetitions, especially with the Venus retrograde but also with Mars retrograde and other planets. And that that’s part of the reason why they were doing those long-term research projects where one of them that’s called the Astronomical Reports that program of going out and observing the sky every night and writing down what was happening in the sky and on earth became the longest running scientific program in history that lasted for something like 500 years. And I absolutely, you know, just watching how these planetary periods work, I absolutely know that they would have been noticing similar repetitions happening and would have been documenting them. And that would have been the reason why they would have developed some of the systems that we know as goal year periods, because they would have identified some repetitions as being particularly important and powerful. So I hope to expand on that more, but the eight-year period of Venus was the Babylonian goal year period, and that was the shortest one because for Venus they just had the eight-year period. But for other planets – like, Mars, it was 79, and I think Jupiter was 83 and so on and so forth.
So unfortunately, like, not all of those periods were passed off to some of the later traditions where I don’t see the Babylonian goal year periods showing up in the Hellenistic and medieval traditions, and I think there was some… Something got messed up, or some error happened in the transmission, because instead, they ended up using these other, longer term planetary periods that were based on adding up the number of bounds or terms there were in the zodiac. And those periods don’t seem as useful, as based on an actual astronomical notion, as these planetary periods. So part of the work that I’m doing and part of the reason why this is very exciting is I think we’re actually recovering something from the ancient Mesopotamian tradition that existed, you know, two or three thousand years ago that was lost, but that is actually very powerful and very useful in practice. And it’s exciting because it shows a much greater level of complexity in the basic technique of transits than was understood up until recently.
So a lot of exciting stuff there, and I hope to… You know, that was part of the reason I did all this research on Venus over the past six months and all these episodes because I wanted to do that as one piece of the broader project to study and research and explain and sort of revive the Babylonian goal year periods. And I think that I’ve completed that in terms of Venus and also did a ton of work on Mars this year with the Mars retrograde in Cancer. So now applying that to all the planets is part of the next step.
Another point that I learned from this is that the range of meanings of Venus is probably broader than western astrologers realize, that there’s a lot more complexity and depth and nuance and different significations that are possible with Venus than we might think. And I think that’s really important, because one of the things I’ve been learning about the Mesopotamian tradition is they had a much more nuanced view of Venus than we might have today where I feel like some of the significations got kind of constrained and boxed into a much more narrow range due to some of the perception of associating Venus with the Greek goddess Aphrodite or the Roman goddess Venus. But the goddess that Venus was associated with in the Mesopotamian tradition had other facets of it that are important that we’ve kind of lost. But through some of this work in researching the Venus retrograde periods, I think that we can actually recover to eventually develop a much more nuanced understanding of Venus. But starting to think in terms of that and be aware of that as a potential discrepancy I think is really important going forward. So the goddess for Venus was Ishtar in Akkadian, and if you start researching Ishtar and the related goddess from the Sumerian tradition, you’ll get a better idea of sort of what I’m talking about.
All right, so my final conclusion here is just that there are these strange repetitions that are happening underlying reality. And it’s connecting events both in time as well as in meaning. And I believe that what we’re seeing here is the ability of astrology to study and to map fate. And fate is the interweaving of a sequence of events in accordance with a divine plan or purpose; that’s how fate was originally defined according to the Stoics in like, the Hellenistic philosophical tradition as this interweaving and connecting of events according to a plan or according to a purpose. So I think one of the take-home lessons ultimately philosophically for me is that it implies that people and events have some sort of underlying sense of destiny or purpose or meaning. And that events are not random and meaningless, but instead have these overarching senses of purpose and of design. And there’s something incredibly fascinating to me about that from a philosophical and spiritual or religious standpoint that I think is there. And even though I haven’t emphasized that a lot because for my purposes, a large part of what I’ve been trying to do is just research practically speaking and empirically the way that these periods work and how these repetitions play out. But one of the takehomes for me is it’s given me… I’ve already had this, but it’s deepened my understanding of the concept of fate and the existence of fate in the universe and how astrology gives us a window into that and an access point for understanding fate. And you know, that was the subtitle of my book. The title of my book was – that I published in 2017 is – Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, because I truly believe that Hellenistic astrology and western astrology was originally designed as a system for studying fate and being able to describe it and track it and to track the unfolding of a person’s fate and destiny through the interweaving of events. And in this technique, I think I wanna say in the moment now more than any others, you can see that interweaving because of the way that the repetition of the retrogrades can connect events in the past with those in the present as well as the future. And I think the model for that is that we have to understand that we’re studying fate and how fate is a interconnection between events in our lives that otherwise on the surface might seem disconnected or might not seem connected. But through the lens of astrology, we actually have an access point for understanding that beneath the surface, there are these weird connections that are going on that are connecting everything together in this very mysterious but also very beautiful way. And to me, ultimately that’s very inspiring, and I have this like, it’s like this awe-inspiring sense of the cosmos that this works as well as it does and it can do some of the things that we’re uncovering that it’s actually capable of in terms of astrology and the study of the repetition of events across time in the past and the present and the future. And there’s so many different implications for that that I’m excited to explore and continue to attempt to articulate even more in different ways, because it’s so vast and so intricate and so beautiful. But I hope that people can look at the totality of what I’ve done in the past six months with this specific series of the Venus retrogrades and also a little bit on the Mars retrograde in Cancer, and then start to see and learn from it and be able to appreciate, you know, some of what’s been found but also hopefully to apply that to the future. Because I think I’ve found a lot of different core principles here that I’ve tried to articulate along the way as I’m noticing different things and trying to sort of like, extrapolate what the implication of that is from a technical standpoint as well as from like, a conceptual or sometimes like, even philosophical standpoint. But I hope people are able to take some lessons from this and apply it usefully in the future to study some of these repetitions in other Venus retrograde cycles or this current Venus retrograde cycle. And of course, you know, one of the cool things is this will set things up for eight years from now when we know Venus retrograde in Aries will recur again in, what? 2033. So it’ll be interesting to check in again at that point and see how some of the events and some of the stories in the news, the things happening in our personal lives and other things that have happened in the first half of this year, how somehow we’ll see an echo and a repetition of some of those things eight years from now when Venus again does the same thing in the sky, which is go retrograde in the sign of Aries. So I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that goes.
I hope this has been interesting and like, fruitful. I do wanna give a shoutout and a thanks to all my patrons who pretty much support this work and this research and make it possible for me to do this type of intense deep dives into subjects like this, and for example to have done the original episode where we went back and researched Venus retrogrades in history. So thank you to those who support my work and research and make this possible. You know, this has become part of my – doing this podcast – has become part of my life’s work where I’m doing a lot of research on a regular basis and then putting it out there for other astrologers to learn and to study from and to emulate and to hopefully make good use of, and I’m sure there will be elements of some of these things that others will be able to – now that this foundation has been established – that you’ll be able to take some of this and sort of run with it and discover even new things that I haven’t even discovered myself. So I’m very excited about that, because I think it’s taking astrology further into a new era, and there’s a lot of things to be really excited about and really hopeful for. So that’s kind of where I’m left at this point now that I’ve reached the end of this.
All right. Well, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else I meant to mention since this is the final episode, but maybe that’s good! Thanks a lot for watching and taking part in this research and like, you know, listening to me go through all of this. If you notice any interesting repetitions or anything you’d like to share, please leave a comment especially below the YouTube video, because that’s usually the best place to leave a comment. Or if you’ve noticed something in the news in a repetition or if you’ve had one personally, please post it there because that’s a good way for everybody to share their research and to sort of like, learn from it. And yeah, if you wanna support this research in the future, consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon or signing up for my Hellenistic astrology course where I also teach some of these techniques and do live workshops with people. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. So thanks a lot for watching or listening, and I’ll see you again next time.
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