The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 495, titled:
July Astrology Forecast 2025
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on June 30, 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 June 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, astrologer Austin Coppock is joining me, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for July of 2025. Hey Austin. Welcome back!
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. How you doing?
CB: Good! It’s been a slow news month since I last saw you a couple months ago. But we’ll see if we can find something to talk about at some point in the first part of this episode where we’re gonna spend the first hour talking about news and events since our last forecast episode a month ago in the first hour or so of this episode. Then the second half, we’re gonna jump forward and do a deep-dive into the astrology of July.
So before we get there, I wanna do a quick overview of the month, the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about, and of course as always there’s gonna be timestamps in the description below this video on YouTube or on TheAstrologyPodcast.com website if you wanna jump forward to the deep-dive forecast section right from the beginning.
All right, so let’s jump right into looking at a quick preview of the astrology of July. So here’s the Planetary Aspects Calendar, which shows different alignments and when they peak during the course of this month. This was designed by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co, and it really helps to illustrate some of the different aspects and when they go exact during the course of the month.
This month, we get our first closest pass within a degree of Saturn conjunct Neptune, which is really gonna peak in July especially with both planets stationing in the sign of Aries less than a degree from each other. We also have Uranus returning to Gemini for the first time in 80 years since the 1940s, which has big implications, especially for the United States since the US was born with Uranus in Gemini, and we’ll talk about that, especially since Uranus goes into Gemini on July 7th. We also have Uranus once it goes into Gemini very closely trining Pluto and moving within one degree of completing that trine this year. And that starts getting very close this month when Uranus goes into Gemini. Finally, the most important aspect out of all of those is probably the Mercury retrograde, which stations retrograde on July 17th and will be retrograde for three weeks. So we’ll be talking about that a bit in this episode later on. And finally, here’s the Planetary Alignments Calendar which shows some of the different ingresses and lunations and other things this month.
So very briefly, on July 4th we have Neptune stationing retrograde in the sign of Aries, and Venus ingressing into the sign of Gemini. A few days later, Uranus moves into Gemini on the 7th. There’s a Full Moon in Capricorn on the 10th. Saturn stations retrograde in Aries for the first time on the 13th. That week, Saturn and Neptune get within less than a degree and their closest pass that they’re gonna get this year. Then Mercury stations retrograde on the 17th and 18th. The Sun goes into Leo on the 22nd. Venus squares Mars the next day on the 23rd. There’s a New Moon in Leo that’s kind of tough because it’s opposite Pluto on the 24th. Venus enters Cancer, where it starts heading towards Jupiter on the 30th. And then Mercury reaches the halfway point in its retrograde cycle at the cazimi on the very last day of the month on July 31st. So that is some of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about later in the second half of this episode.
So Austin, welcome back. You decided to take last month off to work on writing your book, but thanks for coming back and joining me today.
AC: Oh, my pleasure. And thank you to everyone who was so kind about my absence. Several chapters got done because I didn’t have to pivot to thinking about history and the present or the unfolding history of the present. You’d agreed that not only world events but figuring out what to say about them as well as their trajectory eats up a lot of time and energy! And so I was able to direct those savings to the book, which is not done yet, but huge progress got made and we got some good momentum. It’s getting there.
CB: Good. Good. Well, yeah, I don’t know about this correlation yet, but a year ago you took a month off and that was the first time that Iran shot missiles at Israel. And then this month, there were also some exchanges, so I don’t wanna say that you’re causing this to happen, but you’re not not causing it to happen at the same time.
AC: What you’re saying, Chris, is that my presence on this podcast is a potent power for world peace. That I might be just holding everything together by being on the internet.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That’s the theory.
CB: It’s like that piece of like, gum somewhere in the very complex machine that’s like, holding together some very crucial part that nobody knows about. Yeah. All right, so it was a big crazy month, especially particularly just the week or two that the Mars-Uranus square came into alignment. And a bunch of stuff happened. So this month there was a lot of news stuff happen at different points in the month, but I’m really gonna focus on what happened during that one or two week period when Mars was square Uranus, because the most consequential stuff largely took place around the time of that alignment. So here’s a diagram that Madeline from Honeycomb.co designed for me to demonstrate the Mars-Uranus square with a three-degree orb. And last month in the forecast that Leisa and I did, we talked about this aspect and how it went exact on the 14th and 15th, but in terms of the ranges of intensity, there was the one-degree range which happened from June 13th through the 17th. There was also this three-degree range, which is the most ancient orb that was used in Hellenistic astrology, and that expanded it to June 9th through the 21st, and that really did seem to be the broader range for when this aspect was very intense. It was also conjunct the fixed star Regulus at the same time, which brought an additional factor that we’ll talk about here in just a little bit, but in the forecast last month, we talked about and described the Mars-Uranus square, and some of the things that we said to describe it was “a tense, combative, disruptive and even potentially violent energy.” Later we said, “a violent act that comes out of left field unexpectedly.” We also used the words “combustive, explosive, and explosions,” and “unexpected disruptions.” So things just went crazy in multiple different ways throughout that period, but especially around the weekend that it went exact. And we talked a bit in the last forecast a month ago about how noting it was also hitting Trump’s chart in a very important way because it would be conjoining his Mars and especially his Ascendant around that time. But one of the things that we didn’t realize when we gave our forecast and mentioned that it would be important to him personally is I didn’t realize that his birthday was happening that weekend, and we didn’t realize that the military parade was scheduled for that weekend along with the protests. So it’s kind of funny looking at that forecast and the things that we actually said and predicted realizing that we weren’t just saying some of those things because we knew some of that stuff was already scheduled, but just purely based on the astrology.
So here’s a short list of the stuff that happened really close to the Mars-Uranus square that weekend. So the first thing was that Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran on June 12th/13th. It was late on the 12th here in like, the US when we heard about it, but it was already June 13th when the attack was actually launched. Then the next day, we all woke up to early in the morning of June 14th that there had been some political assassinations that had taken place where Democratic politicians had been murdered by this masked guy that was wearing this bizarre mask in this really violent killing. Then later that day, most of the news was dominated by the No Kings protests on June 14th, which were protests against Donald Trump and against the military parade that then he ended up holding later that day starting in the evening when he had a military parade in Washington, DC, with like, tanks rolling down the street in DC, supposedly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the army, but also because it was his birthday and he’d been trying to hold a military parade for quite some time for several years now.
So then after that, there was this tension about whether the US would bomb Iran and fully join what Israel was doing for days, and that eventually culminated on June 21st when the US did bomb Iran and especially some of the nuclear sites there. And then bizarrely, just two days later, right on the Jupiter cazimi when the Sun conjoined Jupiter, Trump announced a ceasefire, and there was some sort of limited currently theoretically holding ceasefire, although we’ll see how that goes. So it was truly an insane weekend just with those events alone, and it was all centered on this Mars-Uranus square, which was pretty crazy. Were you tracking all of this at the time, Austin?
AC: Yeah. I was actually – so I was working on the decans book, and I took the opportunity during that period to take another look at the third decan of Leo, which in both the primary systems is ruled by Mars. And so Mars in the third decan of Leo, where all of this happened, was like, you should see that decan’s full power unlocked by that planet being there. And so I was tripping out. And Trump also has that natally. As I wrote in the first edition and am expanding on the second, that decan is about literally gathering either predatory animals or gathering armies together – gathering together, rousing the aggressive animal spirits, either within animals or within humans, but gathering together a force and making a display. The symbol I abbreviate it with in the first edition was the banner. It’s like, the power to gather and mobilize through the use of emblems, right? And it’s a very morally ambivalent decan, because it’s usually gathering together a large and destructive force and then motivating them. So there’s more to that, but I was tripping out on how literal all of the Mars in Leo three stuff was. It’s something I’d noted in 2015 when Trump was running for the presidency and we saw the natal chart with that Mars in its own decan on the Ascendant. And with the power to gather together beasts to destroy the town, I thought that was kind of a hot take on his ability to gather people together for rallies, which were, you know, much talked about and very large at the time. So yeah, I was tripping out on Mars in Leo three.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And I wanna talk more about that and talk about Regulus. Let’s get into the first story, because I wanted to drill down on each of these stories individually.
AC: Yeah. They each deserve their own space.
CB: Yeah. So the first one I wanted to talk about primarily is Iran, where on —
AC: Good job, by the way. Good job with Iran.
CB: Thank you —
AC: Talking about —
CB: The prediction?
AC: — Iran. We’ve been – but you’ve been, you’ve held fast to that for, I don’t know, a year? Or at least nine months?
CB: Yeah. The predictions about Iran is something that I was abnormally like, certain about over the past year and got increasingly certain about and that you also very strongly started feeling last year as well, so that it was something that we were abnormally… Usually we like to be a little bit more careful, especially about things that big and that like, weighty predictions. But with that one, we were both pretty adamant and repeated it a bunch, so let me set up the premise first.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran on June 13th, and they called it Operation Rising Lion. And I thought this was really striking, because we’ve seen lion symbolism come up at least three different places over the past month. In the last forecast, we talked about how with Mars transiting Leo, the Pope chose the name “Leo,” which means the lion, just last month. Also that Minnesota assassin had a company that was called the Red Lion Group. And then the same exact weekend, this Operation Rising Lion was like, the code name for Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, and this seemed connected also with how Mars was not just in late Leo but it was also conjoining the fixed star Regulus in the sky, which is the heart of the lion in the constellation Leo. And it was actually something where Mars wasn’t just aligning by longitude, but also by latitude, and it was very visually stunning. So that was one of the other major astronomical events that was happening in alignment with all of this; it wasn’t just the Mars-Uranus square or other things like that, but it was also this close alignment of Mars and Regulus that was happening that weekend. And I wanted to share this one image from an astronomer of this alignment. And this is kind of what it looked like. This is more zoomed in and a little bit brighter because it was taken using the telescope. But you could actually see in the sky that Mars was like, this reddish planet and Regulus was this blueish twinkling star, and that they were just lined up over a several day period just after sunset. And you could go out and visually like, see them each night. And this photo was taken June 16th by Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project. So shoutout to them. But this was incredibly visually striking also because, you know, Trump himself was born with Mars conjunct Regulus, and it would have looked something very close to this the day he was born exactly 79 years ago that weekend. And I’ll talk about more in just a little bit why that was significant, but that was a huge sort of fixed star event.
Okay, so setting up the thing and the premise, Israel did several things. It attacked the nuclear sites in Iran. It also assassinated several high level officials, and it also shot down a lot of defenses among a bunch of other things. So after that immediately Iran retaliated by shooting missiles at Israel. Then there were questions all week about whether the US would join, and it eventually did on the 21st. And then things were weirdly concluded right on the Sun-Jupiter conjunction on the 23rd and 24th. So yeah, one of the things for us that was important about this as astrologers and especially with respect to this podcast is just we’d been talking about and predicting an attack on Iran and escalation in the conflict between Iran and Israel for over a year now, and this represented the fulfillment of that. And it actually originally – you know, I was joking about that earlier in this episode, but that prediction originated with the eclipses that happened one year ago around March and April of 2024, because when those eclipses happened, Israel assassinated some high-ranking Iranians. And then Iran for the very first time launched missiles directly at Israel. And if you go back and listen to the forecast episode I did in April of 2024 after that, I said like, this is one of those things that seems minor right now, but I think this is an omen of something that could become more significant in the future, and we’ll look back on this in retrospect and realize that this was the starting point. And then I said we’ll have to check in in six months in the next set of eclipses, and if there’s an escalation, then it could be, you know, indicating it’s going somewhere. So then we checked in again six months later; there was another eclipse season. And right on one of those eclipses, that’s when Israel did the Lebanon page attack and like, right on one of those eclipses, but also on the other eclipse, Iran launched missiles at Israel again in retaliation for some recent assassinations. So there was another continuation of this like, open conflict on that eclipse season. And that’s the point where I started thinking this was gonna escalate even further in 2025, especially six months later when we had the next eclipses. So around that time, you discovered the Aries ingress chart, right?
AC: Yeah, because – yeah, we were looking – I believe it was when we were prepping to do the episode which included those eclipses, and we thought there would be more. And I was just looking for other angles that could confirm or deny whether, you know, there would be more military action with Iran. So I looked at the Aries ingress for 2025, and Mars was on the very degree of the rising, which was such a strong confirmation. And the only other time that that had happened, or anything near that had happened, was in the 1980 Aries ingress chart for Iran where Mars and the North Node were both very close to the Ascendant, and that’s when Iran was invaded by Iraq. So I was like, all right, this sure seems like… You know, it was in Cancer, so I didn’t know if there would be something funny. Like, something a little irregular about the type of martial action. But that didn’t – there’s nothing about that that could be justified as peace. So that was a big thing for me.
CB: Yeah. So and then we continued talking about it on several forecast episodes, including the year ahead forecast. And then eventually when I started doing all of the planetary period research earlier this year, especially with the retrogrades, I started noticing additional ones like that. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction that we’re having right now is a recurrence of the 1953 Saturn-Neptune conjunction when the US and Britain staged a coup and like, overthrew the government of Iran and installed the shah. And then I also noticed on I believe it was the Mars retrograde episode and the forecast that came out after that, I mentioned that this year we were having a bunch of recurrences from 1978, which is when the Iranian Revolution actually first started. And the recurrences was a Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo, Jupiter moving from Gemini into Cancer, and an eclipse having just taken place in Aries and then starting to move into the subsequent signs of Pisces and Virgo. So it’s an exact repetition which just further emphasized to me that this was gonna be a really important year and potentially an important turning point in the history of Iran, which then confirmed some of the things we were seeing with the eclipses.
So then we got to March and April, because that was our target timeframe that we thought that the escalation was gonna happen. And what was crazy is starting at the very beginning of that month, things started escalating like, super fast because Trump wrote a letter at the beginning of March saying that Iran had to negotiate about nuclear weapons otherwise he was setting a deadline and he would attack militarily. And then he actually started moving bombers into place like, all month and moving equipment into the Middle East, including carriers, so that it looked like he was about to strike. And at the beginning of the month, Iran was saying they would not negotiate in any way and they wouldn’t do direct negotiations. But then at the very end of the month, it culminated around the time of the Aries eclipse where it seemed like Iran realized that Trump was getting ready to strike, and they suddenly relented and wrote him a letter back saying they were open to negotiations. And then a period of negotiations began in April. And what’s a little interesting is you and I were a little surprised that the escalation didn’t happen that we were expecting in March and April, but then at that point, we gave some other target timeframes. And one of the last statements I made about it was I was really gonna be paying close attention to the Saturn ingress into Aries because we had already established that Aries was really important for Iran, both because its leader was born around a solar eclipse in Aries, as well as the country itself has Aries in its sort of country signature as well as the —
AC: Well, it’s – yeah, and it’s the chart for the government of Iran since 1979 once it was established after the Revolution. Has the Sun in Aries, and it has Leo rising, so that Sun in Aries is also the Ascendant ruler. So that the —
CB: Right.
AC: — the Aries was doubly important as a signature for Iran.
CB: Yeah. So that was the last statement that I made about Iran was I was waiting for that ingress in late May and early June and expecting that to be one of the next triggers. And then the Mars-Saturn opposition later this summer was also mentioned as a possibility that you were really concerned about as well, and that’s one that’s still coming up.
AC: Yeah. And so part of my thinking on timeframes was one, like you, you know, I think we both thought – I certainly thought – things would get going a little bit earlier because the Aries ingress chart could, which occurred what, March 21st, is theoretically valid for a year, or if you use a particular subrule, at least the first three months of that year starting on the equinox if it’s a cardinal rising. And so that has time to play out, and the solar eclipse very near Iran’s Sun also theoretically has six months to play out. But I thought that with all of the chaos underway that it would get sparked sooner rather than later. And so once we were fully out of April, I was like, oh, I guess it’s just gonna be a while. And so my mistake was certainly not looking at the Mars square to Uranus, which, you know, is when this all played out and is in Iran’s first house and is near Regulus, and in retrospect was exactly the next date to look at. And I’ll stand by the Mars-Saturn opposition in August as a shit pops off day, but we didn’t need to get there for a serious escalation with Iran, both from Israel and you know, more ominously with the United States.
CB: Yeah. Well, one of the things about March that I realized in retrospect is that probably was the point when Trump made the decision to attack Iran and set the things in motion to do that, because that’s when he started moving the bombers to like, Diego Garcia, the B2 bombers —
AC: Yeah.
CB: But also, that was on the first eclipse, on the Virgo eclipse I think within 24 hours of it in the middle of March. That’s when the US bombed the Houthis in Yemen. And so now in retrospect, we realize that was actually a precursor to attacking Iran is they basically wanted to take out the last proxy so that the Houthis wouldn’t immediately also be sending missiles at Israel once the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran a few months later.
So that, but also, you know, a funny thing about that – remember that Mercury retrograde that happened and the Signal chats were leaked about the Houthi —
AC: Oh yeah.
CB: — about the Houthi attack. That was something I was thinking at the time whereas immediately when that was leaked, I was wondering if any references to an Iran attack were in that. And I think they just lucked out basically that they were probably already planning it at that point and there were probably other discussions, but only the ones related to the Houthis and to Yemen – that operation – leaked.
Another interesting thing now that we can see in retrospect is you and I had pointed out how rough that Mars-Pluto opposition looked when it hit its final exact aspect later in April, and then there ended up being this huge explosion in Iran at that time in a port city that killed a lot of people. And we can now probably guess or infer, I think, in retrospect what we already suspected, which is that that was probably some sort of like, covert operation that was like, a precursor to this.
AC: Yeah. Because there was some ambivalence at the time where it looked shady but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict.
CB: Right. Yeah. So anyway, so that ended up coming together for this just in terms of the astrology being pretty striking. And then, you know, on top of this, this also layers together a lot of predictions that astrologers – that we’ve been talking about for years now, which is this is also we’re right on the cusp of the Uranus return of the United States with Uranus going into Gemini soon. And this Mars-Uranus square just before a Uranus ingress almost seems like it could act as sort of like, a precursor to some of what that’s gonna be about. And I did full episodes on that back in 2013, and I went back and listened to it, and it ends with like, Nick Dagan Best talking about a war starting in 2025 when this ingress takes place. And then we also had a larger discussion in 2022. So that’s something we’ll talk about more later this episode, because that ingress is starting on July 7th.
But in terms of future target dates with respect to this, I do think the Uranus ingress into Gemini is really important because it’s setting up, you know, the precedent for the earlier Uranus stuff is that the US is always involved in some major huge defining conflict and turning point in its history, which the last three times have been the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War Two. So we’ve been saying for several years then that that’s the precedent then is either for a major external conflict or a major internal conflict. And at this point, like, both seem very plausible and likely.
AC: It’s the “why not both” meme.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. So the Uranus return is something that we have to process into this, that this may be part of a larger conflict that may evolve over the next several years – the next seven years, basically. I know you still have your eye very closely on that Mars-Saturn opposition that goes exact in August, right?
AC: Yeah, that is… I think that’s about as hot as it gets this year. And it’s not just that it’s a Mars-Saturn opposition, which is quite meaningful in and of itself. It’s that – it’s Mars opposite the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, right, which is very close at that point. And it’s Mars in an almost perfect trine with our newly ingressed Uranus in Gemini. Right? So it’s a very harmonious, mutually enforcing aspect; it’s the first aspect that Mars – the perfect aspect – that Mars will make with that Uranus, right? So it’s the first Mars-Uranus contact, and as we know, Mars-Uranus is quite explosive and often violent. And it also puts Mars in an almost perfect trine with Pluto at the same time. And so that’s an awful lot. You know, and it looks like – if you look at the chart, it looks like a bow and arrow with Mars-Saturn being the arrow. And so fortunately, things move out of alignment in September and we get back to Saturn-Neptune in Pisces problems rather than Saturn and Neptune in Aries problems. But yeah. Looking for that sort of – been looking hard at that first half of August configuration with Mars-Saturn.
CB: Yeah. And for me, one of the next things I’m looking at also – besides the Uranus ingress – is eclipse season in September when we get our next set of eclipses, which are gonna be fully in Pisces and Virgo. And even though we understood how the Aries-Libra eclipse series was super tied in with Israel and Iran especially, because for various reasons, there had been already some precedent where escalations have been happening in this new series that’s shifted to Pisces and Virgo. And so I do have a question of whether there’s not a continuation, escalation of some of those pieces, because for example, like I said almost a year ago last fall, the Lebanon pager attack – the Hezbollah pager attack – happened right on an eclipse in Virgo. Or sorry, it was in Pisces, actually. And then in March, the US bombing Yemen and the Houthis was right on the eclipse in Virgo. So some sort of continuation and escalation of some of those themes to me seems likely in the September timeframe also.
AC: Yeah. And maybe it will be – like with those, it’ll be back to conflict with Iran’s proxies or allied forces rather than direct conflict with Iran, which might need to wait for 2026. Yeah.
CB: We’ll see. All right, so that is the core thing I wanted to do talking about Iran. I wanted to move on and talk about some of the other crazy stuff that happened that weekend, and sort of group them all together, which is like, the No Kings protest, the military parade, and the assassinations.
So June 14th was Trump’s birthday where he turned 79 years old, and he scheduled a military parade for that day. And like I said, it was ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the creation of the army, which I looked up the date, and the creation date was supposed to be June 14th, 1775. And what was interesting about that is that Mars was in Virgo at that time just coming off a retrograde where it had stationed direct in late Leo.
AC: Oh really?
CB: Yeah, so this actually was an interesting recurrence of that just coming off a retrograde in Leo 250 years later.
So for Trump’s birthday, 79 years old is actually the Babylonian goal year period for Mars. And so this is an extremely close recurrence of Mars coming off a retrograde in Leo and Cancer and being very late in the sign and conjunct Regulus in late Leo that happened in June of 1946 when he was born. So what’s crazy about this is this was like, the fruition of an aspect and a recurrence that I first stumbled upon the night before we recorded the 2024 year ahead forecast in December of 2023 when I was asking Nick about this upcoming Mars retrograde – Nick Dagan Best – and he pointed out the 79 year recurrence to me. And when I saw how that lined up with Trump’s chart, you can actually see me be like, visibly sort of shook up about it in that forecast episode for the year ahead for 2024, because I got a understanding of the implication of what that meant in terms of like, the presidential election and everything else in the coming year. And you can still go back and watch that in the 2024 year ahead forecast.
So this recurrence, though, on that very day of his birthday represented the full activation of the natal potential of that Mars placement. I think that’s really fascinating, because Mars has always at its core traditionally been associated with both the military as well as war. And you have like, a military parade, and Trump getting involved in launching potentially a major conflict with Iran that same weekend, which was pretty striking astrologically.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, as I said before when I was watching that, I was just tripping out on Mars in Leo three stuff. Because that gathering together of forces – the gathering together and like, rousing the aggressive forces theme that you see with Leo three was just everywhere. Right? Like, you had protests against, which is – you know, if you wanna protest things, you have to gather together your aggressive forces against something… For him sending in the National Guard. Right? Like, the gathering together, and then you had literally the gathering together and showing off the forces for the military parade, and it was just like, a fractal of what Mars in that decan is supposed to be able to do along with some of the sort of random news stories that you’d gathered together where animals came together to do violence.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But yeah, anyway, I guess just to cap that off, and we were discussing this and you were emphasizing to me the Babylonian goal year period of Mars for him, it made more sense that you would have that natal position not just very evident during the return, but like, fractally evident all over the place against him and for him and in five other places. It was like, a hyper activation of a natal position. Right? Like, literally a once in a lifetime level strength of activation.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Because that – you know, that fixed star itself traditionally in Hellenistic astrology, Regulus is associated with Mars and Jupiter, and the star is said to be a blend of Mars and Jupiter. And some of the delineations of it are often martial. Like, generals, commanders, and other things like that are some of the delineations that are given in some of the ancient texts. And in this, we’re seeing this impulse on some level that Trump has always had with that Mars on the Ascendant, but now coming into it in this more full way of somebody that is military-minded and also willing to unleash some of that now, especially having almost unchecked power to a certain extent and like, what the impulse will be in some instances then when presented with like, the opportunity. So this was a really striking example of that, and just striking that the day he was born, there was also a similar alignment between Mars and Regulus in the sky, and that sometimes the seeds for things are laid very far in the past. But when you have that recurrence, the fruition takes place.
AC: Yeah. A good example of that. It’s a good example of the activation of the natal promise, writ extremely large and loud.
CB: Yeah. So another part of the natal promise that I found very fascinating is Regulus – I just did the Mesopotamian astrology episode a month ago, and in that, I got a translation of this text from 1000 BCE. So from 3,000 years ago in the Mesopotamian tradition. And it talks about the fixed stars; it’s called the MUL.APIN, and it’s an astronomical/astrological text, and when it gets to Regulus, several times it actually calls – it gives a name to Regulus – is it calls it “the king.” And what I found fascinating about that is then that weekend while that Mars alignment with Regulus is happening on Trump’s birthday, there’s also these widescale protests across the United States, and they actually called them the No Kings protests. And these ended up being estimated – some of the analysis was that these were estimated to be among the largest protests in US history. And I thought that was an interesting additional manifestation of the Mars-Regulus alignment as well as squaring Uranus. Because you know, with malefics, one of the things you get sometimes is a negation of something – that it says “no” to something, Mars and Saturn do. And having it aligned with Regulus while squaring Uranus and you have these huge protests that are called the No Kings protest – like, that just seems very perfect to me. I can’t think of a more perfect and literal alignment.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and even the name Regulus – which we should be pronouncing “Reh-jeh-lus,” because it’s the same “Reg” as in “regent.” Like, it’s literally – Regulus is just a rephrasing of the king. It’s “Reg” as in “regent.” I can’t bring myself to say “Reh-jeh-lus.” But know, dear viewer, that I know I’m supposed to. And so Mars attacking the star named the king, I agree is pretty stark. And it also has Pluto in Aquarius vibes, as far as what supports that in the slower moving background. You know, one of our big Pluto in Aquarius events from the last iteration was the French Revolution, which was very much a No Kings protest that got a little out of hand.
CB: Right. Good call. So the protests were largely peaceful, but I noticed a number of fights and occasional violence broke out, especially with counterprotestors. There was somebody that was killed in Salt Lake City, supposedly in the process of stopping a mass shooter – an innocent bystander got killed by somebody that was like, trying to stop the guy that pulled out a gun.
Additionally, that morning, like, some of the protests were – there was this cloud over them because that morning everybody woke up to the news that in Minnesota, there had been these politically motivated assassinations of politicians that had taken place where the assassin went to the homes of two separate politicians with – he was dressed as a police officer, and he also had this creepy, fake latex mask on. And he murdered two people and wounded two others. And then there was a shootout with the police, and somehow he escaped. And then he was on the run for like, the next day or two. But he ended up – when he was apprehended finally, I think 24 or so hours later, he had a hit list of 45 Democrats that he planned to target. So it ended up being this really chilling thing that was happening, especially because he was on the run for most of that subsequent weekend when all this other crazy stuff was happening, especially when it was combined with the military parade and like, the war with Iran breaking out at the same time.
AC: Yeah. And another repetition of that – of Mars coming up on Regulus with like, attacking those who are holding office. So it wasn’t a list of people who had no power or position.
CB: Yeah, exactly. He was attacking… Yeah. So —
AC: Those who had a station in the governance of a nation.
CB: Right. Absolutely.
AC: And held office.
CB: Yeah. So that’s chilling. And then also just in whatever the era is that we’re entering into where things like that are happening and increasing, it seems, with frequency in terms of targeted political killings. So we’ll see how that evolves in the future.
All right, so in addition to those major stories, there was also just – I was occasionally seeing in my news feed or in social media, like, this string of other freak accidents and like, bizarre, often violent tragedies that were all clustered around the Mars-Uranus square. And I wanted to quickly mention a group of them, just because I wanna have those in our database for the future when we’re talking about what sometimes happens under Mars-Uranus alignments. And in some of the texts from like, a century ago, like the cosmobiology texts, I think they have delineations like this where they’re just like, you know, Mars-Uranus is freak accidents and things like that so that we have some knowledge of that. But actually seeing it happen in real time and being able to articulate that is something I’m very interested in right now.
So here’s some of the stories that I wrote down, and this is not a comprehensive list. But June 11th, a 15-year-old girl was killed by a pack of dogs that she was trying to feed. June 12th, Air India flight 171 crashed and killed everybody on board except for a single guy who like, miraculously survived. June 12th, there was a billionaire who was playing polo, and he swallowed a bee and he died while playing polo. And this guy was like, a billionaire and was like, a friend of Prince William who he played polo with. June 13th, more than 30,000 lightning strikes recorded overnight in part of the UK. June 13th also, a woman who was gifted a skydiving trip by her husband died when the parachute failed to open. June 14th, a streamer was suddenly killed by her husband during a livestream. June 15th, a two-year-old girl dies after being electrocuted at a fairground in Spain, and several other children were also injured. June 17th, a volcano in Indonesia erupts and spews this huge ash cloud six miles into the sky – and that one, when I saw it on social media, was incredibly visually stunning, and I’ll see if I can put an image of that in in post later on. And what was fascinating about that is the very next day on June 18th, this huge SpaceX rocket exploded into this massive fireball. So there was another just visually stunning example of another explanation like, right on this alignment. Also the same day on June 18th, 16 billion login credentials leaked in the world’s largest data breach. June 21st, a Brazilian tourist died by falling into an active volcano crater in Indonesia. And then finally also on June 21st, when Mars was still squaring Uranus about three degrees away but it was now in Virgo, there was this news story where 146 people were stabbed by syringes in a coordinated attack at a French music festival, which was like, extremely Mars in Virgo square Uranus.
So I just wanted to mention those, because this isn’t even a comprehensive list, but there’s some underlying theme of just these weird and bizarre violent events and explosive events that were like, taking place all in alignment with that square. And I think that’s really important to understand in terms of the potential of why we describe these alignments sometimes the way that we do.
AC: Yeah. It really is with Uranus and Mars you get the unexpected or we say like, the low percentage chance violent unpleasant thing. And so this doesn’t quite make the list, but my dad – my parents have been staying with us. My dad somehow stepped on a toothpick in the middle of the night – like, a piece of a toothpick had fallen down and somehow fallen so that it was point up. And so my dad’s foot got impaled by a toothpick in the middle of the night, and he had to – it got infected, and he had to go to the ER, and it’s been a whole thing. But like, if you tried – if you dropped 30 toothpicks on the ground and then you walked across them, you would not have any of them go directly up into your foot. But like, super low percent chance, but like, there you go. And that hits natal stuff – that Mars hit natal stuff perfectly for papa.
CB: Yeah, because that – that’s really perfect, just because Virgo – and when I did the zodiac series, that was one of the core things I established for Virgo is it rules very small things. And much of the core symbolism with Virgo is like, small things, whereas Mars is that which is sharp or pokey or cuts. And yeah, this syringe attack was a crazy literal manifestation of that, and then that’s a nice additional one with the toothpick story.
Yeah, so I wanted to mention this because one of the things about this Mars-Uranus alignment is it suddenly made me remember the last time we had a really striking Mars-Uranus alignment was the conjunction that occurred last summer in like, July of 2024 where there was also this string of wild stories that happened very close together in time, all very close to the Mars-Uranus conjunction that was happening in Taurus. And these are just a few that I wrote down. I know there was more, but I couldn’t find the longer list, but what I wrote down was that was the week that Trump was nearly assassinated. It was the week that Trump picked his vice president, and then he had a huge court case suddenly dismissed which had been hanging over him and could have prevented him from like, running in the presidential election suddenly just got dismissed out of nowhere. That was the week also that Biden suddenly got covid and then started facing a revolt in his own party, which eventually culminated in Biden dropping out of the race unexpectedly or somewhat suddenly at the very tail end of that alignment. And then finally, that week there was the largest tech outage in history when there was this like, Windows update that got pushed to millions and millions of computers that crashed, all of them all over the world, which is a very interesting comparison with one of the stories I just mentioned about the 16 billion login credentials leaked in the world’s largest data breach that just occurred here.
So yeah, those Mars-Uranus alignments, those hard aspects, you really gotta keep an eye on them.
AC: And so, you know, we can all look forward to the next exact conjunction of Mars and Uranus – the first one in Gemini – which will be on July 4th of 2026.
CB: Wow.
AC: I’m sure nothing will happen. I’m sure it’ll be a slow news week.
CB: Yeah, that’s crazy. Okay. Yeah. So we’re gonna have to talk about that a lot in our year ahead forecast —
AC: Yeah.
CB: And that’ll probably partially be a recurrence of the US’s natal signature, which is Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And that’s one of the reasons why these are so important and why the Uranus return is so important for the US especially is because it has that Mars-Uranus signature like, built into its very birth chart and like, DNA.
AC: Yeah. Uranus in Gemini isn’t inherently peaceful, but the reason – the chart reason – that the US is always doing a big conflict whenever Uranus comes back to Gemini is because the United States has Mars with Uranus. Right? And so whenever it’s Uranus return, it’s Mars with Uranus return.
CB: Yeah. Okay. I don’t really have any other major news stories; do you have anything?
AC: No, I think that’s the big stuff.
CB: Okay cool. Well, do you wanna do any other reflection about the prediction stuff, or shall we move on?
AC: I guess on reflection, we got it – it was interesting, because we both, there were different factors that made us, how should we say, moved us from suspicion to certainty. And we both got it almost exactly right, but kind of missed that last piece of timing. We got really close with the big escalation with Iran, but we didn’t pick the Mars-Uranus square in the middle of June, which kind of seems like a gimme in retrospect. I honestly think I was just tired of talking about Mars with the Mars – you know, with Mars in Leo and in Cancer for, god, like, eight months? And I was like, if it hasn’t happened then, it’s just not gonna happen. But in retrospect, like, that square with Uranus at the end of the sign was absolutely a good place to further finetune the prediction. So close but —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — half a cigar? I don’t know. No cigar; maybe half a pack of cigarettes?
CB: Yeah. I feel really good about it, and that… I put together a list of clips, because I went back afterwards to put together the clips to see what we did say and see the evolution of that. And I was thinking about putting that out as a superclip with commentary in between to explain the evolution of our thinking. I just didn’t because when I did the cut, it ended up being like, an hour or like, an hour and a half long with just the clips because of how many episodes we had talked about it on. So I’m still gonna decide if I’m gonna go back and do that, but I kind of wanna do it just to show the evolution of our thinking and how we came to – how the prediction was grounded in things that we were thinking and seeing and observing and making inferences from as we saw them and was actually really impressive when you see it all put together in the many different episodes. Yeah. But how it’s nice to be able to say we called something but then also have the humility to say like, we didn’t have the exact like, date of the Mars-Uranus thing, which yeah. If I had also like, been thinking more about Trump’s birthday and some of that other stuff – although, even that, like, it’s kind of wild that they ended up scheduling it for the attack to happen the day before like, Trump’s birthday and military parade is pretty wild in and of itself.
AC: Yeah. Well, I mean, it points towards that manner of thinking where once someone is installed as having a high or highest position in a country, their natal chart can tell you about the country in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise.
CB: Yeah. And that you have to pay attention to that chart because it starts representing the chart of everybody.
AC: Yeah. Or yeah, the actions of the country. A chief executive, right, is the one who executes or decides what the organs and limbs of the country will do. So their mental state, actions, et cetera, et cetera, as described by the natal chart’s activation matter in a way they didn’t used to.
CB: Yeah. Well, and that was also relevant because you know, there were multiple overlapping ways where that was true because Israel has Mars at 28 Leo in its birth chart. So that was also getting —
AC: Right.
CB: — perfectly activated at that time.
AC: Oh, that’s a great point. With Saturn and Pluto in the same sign.
CB: Right. Yeah. So yeah, it’s a really good example also of how, like, a prediction becomes more certain when you see multiple different things indicating something similar from different perspectives. And I think that’s why it’s useful also to take into account the different angles that are possible to you for predictive things where, for example, in this prediction we took into account eclipses and like, seeing the repeated repetition with eclipses. We took into account the Aries ingress chart for in this instance Tehran and how Mars was exactly on the degree of the Ascendant as well as your research into when the last time was that that happened and that —
AC: Right.
CB: — a major war was initiated. We took into account recurrences of other planetary things that are happening this year that happened at other important turning points in Iranian history, like the 1953 coup with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the 1978 revolution that coincided with the Mars retrograde in Leo as well as eclipses in Aries. So that’s like, multiple different predictive angles.
AC: Yeah, and the natal chart of the post-revolution 1979 chart for Iran and the way that was getting lit up by those eclipses and by Mars, et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Right. And then finally, we also had in the back of our mind the Uranus return of the United States and the precedent of a major war often coinciding with those transits, as well as… Yeah. And then the very last piece – you know, I think if we had thought more – because the Mars-Uranus conjunction, because it was so prominent in Trump’s 10th house last year was so prominent last summer, if we had like, remembered and reviewed that a little bit more, I think we would have been even more —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — focused on that this month.
AC: I think if we didn’t have 75 other things to think really hard about, we would have gotten there.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But we did! That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. It’s a good one.
CB: All right. Well I feel good. So yeah. I think that’s good then for our review and for our news section, so why don’t we take a little break?
I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor this month, which is the United Astrology Conference. So the United Astrology Conference is happening September 3rd through the 9th in Chicago in 2026. The United Astrology Conference, which is also known as UAC, is the biggest astrological conference in the world, and it’s typically held every four years since the 1980s. But this time, it’s back for the first time in eight years with the last one being in 2018. Join thousands of astrologers for an unforgettable experience of discovery, collaboration, and expansion. UAC is the place to be to sharpen your skills, connect with other astrologers, deepen your insights, and grow your astrological business. It’s the world’s biggest astrology conference, and here are some stats. So there’s five astrology-packed days. They’re expecting more than 1,500 people from all around the world of all different levels and astrological interests. There’s gonna be 186 speakers giving lectures with over 270 lectures plus 200 informal lunchtime lectures. 15 different tracks, including the Essentials of Astrology, Health and Wellness, Relationships, Finance, Economics, Vedic Astrology, Traditional Astrology, Mundane, Horary, and more. There are six pre-conference workshops and six post-conference workshops. And there’s an opening ceremony keynote lecture given by Chani Nicholas. It’s also happening in the vibrant city of Chicago, and there’s gonna be nightly entertainment and many other events.
The United Astrology Conference is brought to you by the AFA, ISAR, NCGR, and OPA, along with ACVA and AYA. These organizations are holding exams and also hosting member events all week. Early registration starts on August 18th, 2025, and note that members of the sponsoring organizations receive a registration discount. For more information about the conference and accommodations, visit UACAstrology.com. And I’ll put a link to that in the description for this episode below the video on YouTube or on the podcast website.
So this is super exciting. This is the big conference where all of the big astrological organizations in the US pool their resources and host one big mega conference which used to take place every four years, but due to the pandemic and everything, this is the first time one has happened since 2018 – so eight years. And it’s gonna be magnificent. Like, every UAC I’ve been to since 2008 has been just this huge experience because of just the sheer amount of astrologers there is really hard to explain having more than a thousand astrologers in one place for a week doing all these lectures and workshops and meeting and talking; it’s really a great experience.
AC: Yeah, it’s magnificent – yeah, it’s being in like, in a good way drowned in a sea of astrology. Like, I’ve only – I made it to 2018 and 2012; I didn’t make it to 2008. But both of those were so memorable. And I’ll be there; I’ve got two lectures and a workshop, so I will be one of the 286 – 76 – speakers? Whatever that was!
CB: Right.
AC: But yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. There was – you know, we fretted behind closed doors about when and if it would happen again, because covid was such an interruption, and it’s such a monumental feat of organization to get it all together. You know, it’s very reassuring that it’s actually happening again.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. It was such a staple of the community, and many of the older astrologers – I would always hear them talking about how they would tell time by UACs because it was this regular thing ever since the 1980s when the first UAC happened in I think 1987. I have a documentary up on the podcast website, actually, that was filmed from the first UAC in 1987 in California. And every four years, it would happen like clockwork. So having that sort of interruption due to, you know, the covid pandemic and everything really threw things off community-wise in a way that I think is visible. And I’m glad that things are starting to get back on track.
AC: Yeah. Because I mean, it is by far the largest gathering of astrologers that happens. And there’s something – yeah, there’s something very special and catalytic about getting as many astrologers together in one place and at one time. And it’s not, you know, it’s not… Many conferences, accidentally or otherwise, end up sort of being more towards this style of astrology or that style or this collection, but UAC is an everybody. And it is also, in the past at least, I’m sure next year as well, is the most international. You know, you will meet people who have come from very far away. And so yeah, it’s just, it’s the biggest tent, and it contains the most astrology you’ve ever seen under one roof.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So definitely check it out. Ticket prices will go up eventually, so it’s always good to register early once registration opens. And like we said, if you’re a member of one of the sponsoring organizations, then you actually get a discount on your registration ticket, so it kind of pays to sign up for membership. So you can find out more information about the United Astrology Conference and the different sponsoring organizations at UACAstrology.com.
All right. So shoutout to them. I also wanted to mention here in this announcement section that I’m doing a summer sale on the Hellenistic astrology course where I’m doing a 15% off sale, only for two weeks from now until July 14th. And if you wanna get that 15% discount, just use the promo code ‘JUPITER’ during checkout, and it will give you 15% off the price of the course. We’ve been doing some great monthly webinars recently where we’ve been focused on the reading charts and doing the retrograde cycle of like, Venus and Mars and learning some really deep things in some of those course webinars. But this month, I think I’m gonna move more into also doing some like, chart reading ones about what are your first steps when you sit down and wanna read a birth chart and start synthesizing the techniques and using it in practice in terms of like, what are the first things you should look at when you’re reading a birth chart, and doing some live demonstrations with that starting probably at the first webinar here in July on one of the first weekends. So if you wanna sign up, that’s where I teach all of my predictive techniques for natal astrology and how to read a birth chart. So I’d recommend taking advantage of this sale, because it’s very rare that I do one.
AC: Sounds good.
CB: Yeah. So you can find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
All right, I think that’s good for news and announcements. Why don’t we transition now into talking about the forecast for July, yeah?
AC: Let’s do it.
CB: All right. So this is really tricky, because there’s a lot of stuff happening this month. It’s kind of a tough month. Like, especially for electional astrology. It’s not the toughest month; it’s just not a particularly good month for electional astrology as I’ll explain later. But it’s a little hard to prioritize what to start with because there’s so much stuff happening this month. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction is coming extremely close, and that energy is gonna be extremely intense this month, especially with both planets stationing retrograde for the first time. Because the first time a planet stations retrograde in a sign is always a great initial preview and like, exclamation mark or statement about what that entire transit through that sign is gonna be about. There’s always something really loud that happens right on the station. Like, for example, you know, when Saturn first moved into Pisces in 2023, the first time it stationed was like, the week that that submarine disaster happened and all —
AC: Yeah, the Titanic submarine implosion.
CB: Yeah. So all of a sudden, everybody was like, talking about this like, horror story scenario of like, what if you’re trapped a mile under the ocean in this little thing and all of a sudden you’re stuck there or something like that. Because at first —
AC: Right.
CB: — for the first week, we thought those people were like, trapped. And so it was this hypothetical like, horror story scenario.
AC: It’s literally, you know, got everyone thinking about the tremendous weight of water. Which it’s Saturn, right, which is being trapped, which is weight. It’s in Pisces; it was water. It was the ocean. So yeah, we’ll see what the far too literal manifestation of Saturn’s first station in Aries looks like.
CB: Yeah. So those stationary dates are going to be, interestingly, July 4th for Neptune and then July 13th for Saturn. But also this month, they come within a degree of each other in their closest pass this year in 2025 without going exact. And so we’re gonna see a peak intensity of that energy of Saturn-Neptune, which has to do with these dissolving boundaries between what’s real and what’s not real, between fantasy versus reality, between what’s true and like, grounded in something real versus what’s imaginary and like, grounded in a lack of facts. I think, you know, the most stunning example of that, obviously, has been we’ve watched over the past few years is how artificially generated video has sort of culminated and gotten better and better until it’s almost perfect at this point as we get nearer this conjunction. And I’ve been impressed astrologically about how it’s literally being perfected around the time of these two perfect aspects between these two planets.
AC: Yeah. And it really speaks to the Saturn-Neptune theme that we see historically around the – in this case, the solidification of an illusion where like, the seams start disappearing. But then historically, we also have the collapse of an illusion at a sort of macro, power scale as well as on a smaller scale, where what seemed invincible is revealed to have no staying power whatsoever. Where we get instead of things – instead of the walls needing to be stormed, you just have a touch, and things kind of turn to mush like a rotten pumpkin. Where it’s the end of an illusion. When Saturn both confirms the longevity of something, right, by that solidification. Like, no, this is near flawless. And it reveals internal rot. And so we’ll be expecting to see that, and as we see that, we will be – that will inform our thinking about the one perfect conjunction between the two which occurs in a little more than six months later. Right? This is as close as they get, and it’s a station. We get one perfect conjunction, which is in the middle of February next year. And so this will be, you know, this will be an excellent status update on what Saturn-Neptune in Aries is planning.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. I was reading this – there was a Washington Post article on June 20th, and it was titled, “The US Helped Oust Iran’s Government in 1953: Here’s what happened.” And my ears picked up, because I knew from doing the Saturn-Neptune episode earlier this year that 1953 was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And it was just talking about how the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow the Iranian government and install the shah in 1953. But there was this one paragraph in it that was really interesting where they talked about the rebels that were backed by the CIA taking over the main radio broadcast system in Tehran in Iran, and they declared that the government had been overthrown when it wasn’t. But then as a result of declaring that and everybody believing that the government fell, it actually caused it to fall and it caused the revolution – that coup – to actually take place. And the historian who was being interviewed in the piece, whose name was Randjbar-Daemi, said, “After that radio broadcast, it was over. It was one of the most effective pieces of fake news in recent history in the world.” And I thought that was an amazing quote, because of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction going exact in 1953. And now we have some parallel thing happening today. And what’s additionally funny about that is in 1953, the US installed the shah at that time after overthrowing the government. And right now, the son of the shah who was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution has now suddenly like, resurfaced over the past month and is doing interviews and putting out press statements and is like, trying to say that he’s gonna come back. So it’s clear that there’s some sort of attempt to perhaps like, bring him back somehow.
AC: Yeah, and that’s such an interesting point to look back on in reference to these paired stations of Saturn and Neptune so close to perfectly conjunct. Because not only, right, is Iran in the news for important reasons, and that was when that coup took place, but we also have the current leaders of both Russia and China who were born with that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And there was another Saturn-Neptune conjunction between now and then, but the one that took place in the early ‘50s was in Libra exactly opposite the one that we have/will be perfect in about seven months. Right? So there’s such a relationship between the one that is ongoing/upcoming and the early ‘50s one. We, of course, had the rather famous one in 1989 through ‘91, which saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that early ‘50s one is, yeah, is interesting, and it would be very interesting to see what the – again – like, what the almost Saturn-Neptune conjunction this month does as both station. Like, what does it say about Xi Jinping? What does it say about the trajectory of contemporary Russia? What is it – do we see the newfangled, AI version of fake news in a way that has a meaningful political impact that parallels the broadcast in Iran in 1953 that you were talking about? So —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — eyes on that.
CB: Yeah, there has been – I was surprised at the amount of deception that took place that Trump pulled off over the past several months in order to do like, fake outs and different things prior to this attack. And so that was one element that I actually noticed is that there was a heavy use of deception, including just like, the bombers. Like, for example, remember on the eclipses in March, they started moving the B2 bombers into place in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, but those were open to view and could easily be tracked. But then in the actual attack itself, what they ended up doing is they flew bombers straight from Missouri like, overnight, all the way over to Iran as part of the like, deception in order to have things take place. So there’s some element of like, deception being used for military purposes right now that could be part of what we’re seeing as an evolving thing that’s also a repetition from that 1953 thing.
AC: Yeah. And that casts an interesting light over August, Mars opposite Saturn and Neptune, which brings Mars fully into relationship with Saturn-Neptune. And you make a great point with the deception being explicitly used for military purposes, because this is Saturn-Neptune – which is always capable of deception and speaks to the longevity or lack thereof of illusions – but it’s in Aries. It’s in the sign of Mars. Right? So the manifestations are going to be skewed towards the martial consistently.
CB: Right. And this almost kind of ties in with, you know, the Uranus-Pluto trine is getting so close and gets so close this summer. But we’ve seen this massive ramping up over the past month in very unique drone attacks – first with Ukraine attacking Russia with this like, historic drone attack where they had all these trucks moved into Russia close to like, air bases, and then all of a sudden, they activated them and the drones like, flew out and started bombing the planes and destroyed a bunch of planes in this unprecedented attack. But then also there was something similar where Israel apparently also had drones in place in Iran which they then activated at the time as well. So there’s some element to that as well that we’re gonna see.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. Should we get to Uranus into Gemini so that we can talk about all the things it’s gonna do?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Because it’s gonna trine Pluto, which is that. It’s gonna…
CB: Let me just say one last thing about Saturn-Neptune, which is just I have been impressed by with the AI stuff, although there’s this term that’s become common, like, AI slop where now there’s just this huge amount of like, AI-generated stuff that’s like, everywhere at this point in connection with Saturn-Neptune. I have been impressed by the creativity of some of the videos occasionally where people are like, imagining things and then bringing those into reality that are previously things that you would only see happen in somebody’s imagination, and that nobody would like, take the time to film or like, you would not see things that creative that often. So some of them that are happening, one theme I’ve seen over the past month is like, vlogs of – video logs of historical or other events. Like, one of them was like, a vlog of like, the Virgin Mary, and she’s like, vlogging her pregnancy as if she’s like, a young woman in her like, 20s or a teenager or something who’s like, doing a normal vlog, except it’s like, the Virgin Mary. And at the end, the Three Wise Men show up and give her gifts and stuff like that. Or there’s another that is like, Stormtroopers that are vlogging about how they just got an order to go to the Forest Moon of Endor for what should be a pretty easy job. And like, little things like that, or elsewhere there were these ASMR videos of like, glass fruit being cut. And just like the sound, because now it’s sound, but also the imagery of that – that you’re seeing something that previously could only be imagined, but all of a sudden, somebody’s like, bringing it into life in some way. And the level of creativity involved in that, I think, there’s some element of that that I’m kind of impressed by, how closely it’s coinciding with the Saturn and Neptune.
AC: Yeah. It’s like, the maturation or a further maturation of that set of tools. And when you put those tools in the right hands, you get works that you probably wouldn’t have otherwise seen, or that would have taken, you know, scores of hours more time. A friend of mine, on that tip, the only thing I think I’ve enjoyed about AI is that I was corresponding with an old friend of mine; I sent him some pictures of Lucian. And then he sent them back to me with a filter that made Lucian a cute little kung-fu toddler, and I appreciated that.
CB: Nice. I like that. That’s good.
Another one I saw on June 16th was AI celebrities that were teaching math and educational content where it was like, a video where like, an AI-generated Sydney Sweeney and an AI-generated Drake were teaching geometry and specifically like, Euclid’s Elements. But it was completely AI-generated, but also it looked completely – and sounded completely – real. Like, you couldn’t tell that it was AI-generated. And obviously you get into all sorts of like, other ethical issues surrounding that, because they didn’t consent to that and other things like that. But that’s kind of where we’re at and where some of this technology’s going.
At the same time, we also have a lot of deception and weird negative things that are happening at the same time where there was a story this month about this guy who like, proposed to his AI girlfriend. But at the same time, he was like, married and had a two-year-old, and it was kind of like, a disturbing story, or there’s lots of other stories like that have been coming out about some negative impacts of some of this AI-generated content and the sort of like, delusional aspect of some of it.
AC: Yeah. And there have also been some sort of early studies about the impact on cognitive skills of asking ChatGPT everything, rather than thinking or doing research, and how quite unsurprisingly, it makes you dumber in a measurable way, you know, when you don’t exercise your brain.
CB: Yeah. And just the past couple of years that we’ve had Pluto going into Aquarius, I think AI has penetrated more levels of society than we realize because you hear stories of that with like, teachers are saying like, students are constantly trying to turn in AI homework and stuff. Or there’s people using like, AI therapists or so many different things. Like, so many different levels of society are being impacted by it, and this is still just the beginning of this transit as well as this phenomenon.
AC: Yeah. When you try to get – when you’re, you know, on a website of some sort and you’re trying to ask questions, you know, you’re trying to troubleshoot, very often you get an AI assistant. I know you and I have both found people trying to use AI to pass the exams in our astrological courses. Yeah, it’s just around like, the YouTube feed occasionally gets clogged with AI slop. Like, it’s just kind of around in various forms at various levels.
CB: Yeah. I see on Reddit often there’s a disturbing amount of like, younger people that use AI for astrology to read their birth chart or something, but the AI is just like, constantly wrong about things. But because they’re newer students, they don’t realize that it’s wrong about those things. So it’s probably having some negative, detrimental effect to those that are trying to take too many shortcuts like that, not realizing that it’s not – hasn’t been perfected.
AC: Yeah. And maybe they’re – even if the AI could do something for you, like it can do math very well, there’s still value in learning how to do it yourself.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So I wanna talk about Uranus in Gemini, but I also wanna talk about this aspect connected with that, which I think is gonna accelerate that, which is Uranus trine Pluto. I think this Uranus-Pluto trine, which is moving into less than a degree of orb – last year, it came within three degrees while Uranus is still going through Taurus. This year, Uranus is going into Gemini this month, but then it’s also gonna be very, very closely trine Pluto, which is still in early Aquarius. And to the extent that Pluto in Aquarius has been coinciding with the explosion of these AI technologies over the past few years, I think Uranus going into Gemini is going to massively accelerate that and indicate some sort of turning point with respect to that. And this year, it comes within a degree without going exact over the next several months where we’re gonna have an intensification of that, but then it’ll go exact five times, I discovered, over the next few years. And the dates are July 2026, November 2026, June 2027, January 2028, and finally May 2028, before it starts moving away, although it has one more very close pass of less than a degree in 2029 that’s functionally probably gonna be very important as well. But that’s what we’re looking at for the completion of some of these aspects over the next several years.
AC: Yeah. I was looking at this period of trines years ago as the – like, this is when we get, this is when the cyberpunk layer arrives. Like, we could see it poking through and starting up right around the first ingress of Pluto into Aquarius. But this is such a profound harmony between two planets that have such a shared agenda, because everything about the history of Uranus in Gemini outside of like, US stuff is pro-technology, and we have all these burgeoning technologies. And with Pluto in Aquarius and the, you know, that simulation of human agency or decision-making or function that seems to be best represented by the AI, it’s like, how many things can you put an AI in? Like, how many Uranus in Gemini things? How many drones? Oh, all of them. Right? How many vehicles, et cetera, et cetera? And so that coming together of those two forces which we are currently nine days away from the beginning of – eight and a half days away from – like, it’s just going, it’s gonna be every six months the two will have been joined by new planets. And yeah, I expect exactly the same. And then Neptune in Aries, I think, is going to help as well. But we would get all this, I think, without any other help. It’s gonna be very rapid. And it’s gonna be stuff that’s been almost ready, but then you plug it together with this other thing that’s been almost ready, and you get a pretty dramatic set of practical, real transfigurations.
CB: Yeah. Because one of the things Uranus – go ahead.
AC: No. Continue.
CB: One of the things Uranus does is it quickens and it speeds up and accelerates the pace of things. And so if Pluto in Aquarius was already doing a bunch of these massive transformations to our society in all these different levels based on AI, having Uranus come into this close, close trine – and a trine is like, a helpful supportive aspect, but also with Uranus it can just move things quicker and pick up the pace. And that seems like, unlikely right now as we’re on the verge of this, because it’s like, things have already been moving so fast that my initial reaction is sort of like, well, things can’t really move faster than they already are. But the astrology to me is implying that very quickly, especially over the next few months, there’s something that changes that does accelerate things suddenly, and then things start moving even faster than they already have been in this direction. And I don’t know – I mean, with Uranus, it’s implied that that’s some sort of technological advancement that’s discovered or unrolled at this time. And it’s possible that part of what we’re seeing is the acceleration of the move towards AGI or like, artificial general intelligence that could be completed by the time Uranus gets to the end of its transit through Gemini, for example, in the early to mid-2030s. It’s possible that that’s part of what we’re seeing, but we might just be seeing something about the technology being improved in a way that makes it, I don’t know, spread through society even more, even faster than it already is.
AC: Yeah. I think one vector for acceleration is – that can be seen historically with Uranus in Gemini – is a lot of times, things were invented before Uranus went into Gemini, but Uranus going into Gemini sees their broad-scale application where they change the way things work for the first time, even though somebody figured it out 10 years before or five years before. But they get used, right? Like, in the Civil War, railroads had been invented before the Civil War, but it was the first large-scale conflict where they were used for logistics, and it completely changes logistics. Same for – there are 10 other things that were not technically invented during the US’s civil war, but were used for the first time in a large-scale conflict, and so they mattered in a practical way in a situational way in a physical way for the first time. Like, they might as well have not existed before. And so all these things that could happen but haven’t really happened probably will.
CB: Yeah. It makes me think of how a lot of the technologies that existed before World War Two existed already, but that —
AC: Right.
CB: — there was just this massive acceleration of all those technologies that was completed during World War Two when Uranus was in Gemini. Like, you know, that truly becoming – like, airplanes truly becoming like, hugely decisive in terms of winning that war. Or atomic technology that was developing, but then all of a sudden was massively accelerated through secret government programs to research it that eventually then produced not just the bombs, but also nuclear energy so that we entered into the era of nuclear energy after that as well.
AC: Yeah. And World War Two’s another great example, because there were tanks and planes at the beginning. But five years later, the tanks and planes that were being produced made the ones from, again, just a half-decade earlier completely obsolete. Right? And they mattered for the first time. They were decisive on, in that case, a global scale.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It wasn’t just like, oh yeah, we’ve got some of these; these will probably be helpful. Right? Oh, we can make tanks. We can make drones now, right? But check in in 2033 about drones.
CB: Yeah. So in connection with this, let’s talk about Uranus in Gemini. First I wanna show the chart of that ingress date, which is July 7th, Uranus goes into the sign of Gemini. And we can see it here at zero degrees of Gemini and we see Pluto is at two degrees of Aquarius. So already as soon as like, Uranus goes in, it’s already within like, three degrees of trining Pluto. And then we also see that Uranus has a sextile with Saturn at one Aries, and Neptune at two Aries. So all of this is intertwined, but especially what we’re focused on is that Uranus-Pluto trine and how that’s gonna accelerate Pluto. But we also have to talk about Uranus in Gemini as a seven-year long transit between now and the early 2030s and, you know, what we mentioned earlier partially, which is how that’s always closely tied in with US history. So let me share that graphic one more time from Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co that she made for me about Uranus in Gemini periods. And here, you know, just the lineup of that is it’s always been startling to astrologers over the past century. As long as I’ve been in astrology, this has been like, a widely known correlation because it’s been such a stunning one in US history, which is Uranus was in Gemini 1774 through 1782, which very closely encompasses the Revolutionary War and the foundation of the United States. Then Uranus comes back around to the same sign every 84 years, and the next time it did that was 1858 through 1866, which very closely coincides with the Civil War. Then 84 years later, Uranus went into Gemini 1941 through 1949, which very interestingly encompasses when the US entered into World War Two, which had already been happening for a year or two up to that point at least, depending on —
AC: It started in ‘37 in some places.
CB: Right, yeah. But so it timed not World War Two itself, but it timed the US’s entry into the war, which is really fascinating, especially in, you know, current times thinking about other conflicts that have already been happening for a few years up to this point and what that might look like – the US getting involved. Like, for example, what just happened this month. And then here, Uranus goes into Gemini July 7th, 2025, all the way until 2033 is what we’re looking at in terms of this transit.
So one of the things about Uranus in Gemini is talking about Gemini itself, and Gemini – two things that come to mind for me is it has to do with communication, and it also has to do with travel and especially like, short-distance travel to some extent. And one of the things that I noticed that just happened in the past week as we’re on the cusp of Uranus going into Gemini is Elon Musk launched his robo-taxi service in Austin, and now he’s competing head-to-head with Google that has their own robo-taxi service that they’ve already rolled out in several major US cities. And one of the things which is an obvious prediction at this point, but it’s one that’ll be very stunning by the time we get to 2033 and look back on it, I think that’s gonna happen is just us watching during the course of this transit the complete transformation of the local transport systems where automated cars become not just commonplace, but potentially like, the predominant form of travel, both potentially with the taxi industry but also potentially even moving into, you know, cars themselves in terms of whether people continue to choose to drive their own cars or whether they’re always automated as a matter of choice.
AC: Right. That becoming a normal thing rather than an exotic option being tested somewhere I think is a great call.
CB: Yeah. So that’s gonna have – you know, the other thing about Uranus is Uranus is disruptive, and we have to think about it in terms of disruptive technologies and how new innovations and new technologies sometimes hugely disrupt pre-existing ones, and how different people’s lives can be disrupted as a result of that. And one of the ones I’m already thinking about is like, the – what is it? It’s not drive share industry, but like, Lyft and Uber and all those companies over the past 10 years that have come out, which themselves were disruptive technologies 10 years ago when they started that disrupted the existing taxi industry when suddenly you could pull up an app on your phone and order a car from somebody that wasn’t associated with one of the official taxi services and how that’s just completely taken over over the past 10 years. But now, you’re potentially gonna see a huge disruption of that industry once these robo-taxi services become commonplace and become popular, because then people aren’t gonna need to pay humans to like, drive cars anymore because the cheaper and potentially more efficient – or even potentially safer – option is gonna be a robo-taxi.
AC: Yeah, and it’s interesting because some of them, I know at least Uber had plans to have automated cars a long time ago. And they’re not in the running, but they publicly foresaw this and wanted to be there for the next disruption. But you raise an interesting point that I wonder if this might be part of this upcoming period of time where the last round of disruptors themselves get disrupted. Because one of the general but important things about Uranus in Gemini that I’m focused on is that Uranus is historically and logically very strong in Gemini. It’s very capable of doing all of its disrupt-y and innovative things. And this is a little, you know, this is sort of essential dignity thinking which we don’t have Uranus and Neptune and Pluto as part of the Thema Mundi, as part of traditional structures. But it is relatively easy to observe that they seem to have a natural alliance; they seem to work much better in signs of a certain quality. And whether that’s phrased in terms of an essential dignity scheme or not, we can still observe that quality. And by all observations, historically and also sort of in terms of the fundamental rationale, Uranus – the sky-born disruptor – is not a perfect match for the fixed earth sign Taurus. Right? And if we look at that last round of disruptors, right, like Facebook, Apple, Uber, et cetera, et cetera – during this Uranus in Taurus period which we’re at the very end of, they just sort of stayed strong at the top of the market. They were, you know, they became arguably monopolies or near monopolies. But you have like, that accumulative, solid Taurean quality. They themselves were not subject to disruption. And that times very nicely with Uranus’s entry into Taurus where it’s harder for Uranus to do its disruption thing. But this is, you know, it’s Uranus is going back into a real sign, and I think part of it – especially… You know, I’ve started to kind of feel some twinkles and suggestions internally, because I have my Uranus – the position of my Uranus is crucial in my chart. I’ve started to feel like that sort of revving up again. And I think that part of this is just that it’s Uranus time again. Uranus has been a little bit stifled. It’s as if it’s been in a sign of exile or fall, like, a position of low efficacy where it’s moving into a sign of position of extremely high efficacy. What do you think about that, Chris?
CB: I wouldn’t go so far as to say, to bring in talk of like, essential dignity into it, but I will say that because Uranus and Mercury have some similar overlapping significations, that it’s experienced as a doubling up and complementary significations that therefore exacerbate each other’s natural significations in Gemini. Like, especially Mercury having to do with speed, Uranus having to do with speed, both of them having to do with like, disruptions. Both of them having to do with like, technologies. I think that’s part of why we’re seeing such an interesting combination with Uranus in Gemini, just because of the dual overlapping things, and that’s just a regular thing in astrology that when you see two things that indicate the same thing, it tends to confirm the primary signification that they share between them.
AC: Yeah. We could also – another traditional piece that’s used in Vedic astrology is, well, are the two planets friends? Are you friends or enemies or neutral with the owner of the sign? And I think that Uranus and Mercury are probably friends. And so Uranus has a pretty good time when staying at Mercury’s house.
CB: Right. Absolutely. So travel – the other thing that’s important that’s tied in with Gemini and Mercury that’s such a core thing is like, communication, language, and just communication technologies in general.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And there’s something disruptive and innovative and new about the way that we communicate and the technologies that we use to communicate that I think is going to emerge from this. And some of that we can already see because the advancements in AI technology that have happened over the past few years were due to an innovation in language learning models and realizing that language itself was part of the key to creating more lifelike artificial intelligence than what we had had up to this point. But there’s something either about that and the notion of large language models that is gonna get expanded or reach a turning point, or something about communication technologies and language itself that’s gonna have an important turning point when Uranus goes into Gemini that I’m excited to see what that is. Because I don’t think we can predict precisely what that is ahead of time, but there’s something that’s gonna fit that archetype that’s gonna be surprising to us and is gonna potentially be revolutionary during the next seven years.
AC: Yeah, and that’s so well supported historically. Right? During the Uranus in Gemini in the 1860s, we see the telegraph take off in usage. Right? Kind of important. And then during World War Two, so many communication technologies. Among the many, the first modern television set was created in – not just created, but produced – during that Uranus in Gemini timeframe, which is for, in the case of the television, the one-way distribution of information. But two-way is also important, like the telegraph. And so these are pretty landmark technologies that ended up structuring the way people communicate, right, and the way that information is distributed. They weren’t niche prototypes. And that’s one thing I would add to Mercury and especially the Gemini version of Mercury is that Mercury’s interested in application. Like, oh, you know how to do a thing? You figured that out in a lab? What if we made a thing that does a thing, and everybody had it? Right? Mercury in Gemini loves to actually get it to application and see what it looks like in action.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. So disruptive technologies that take over and become commonplace really quickly is what I’m looking for in both communication, communication technologies, and also in terms of travel. So I’m looking forward to seeing what that is and how that will be accelerated with this Uranus-Pluto trine especially.
So let’s back up and let’s start doing more of a chronological breakdown of the month now that we’ve covered like, the big picture things of those outer planet shifts. Because I wanna talk about our very first set of things this month all happen on July 4th where I notice that there’s like, four kind of important transits. One of them is that Neptune stations retrograde that day in Aries, and it’s its very first station in Aries, which again I said was important because that’s usually like, an exclamation mark where something related to the transit speaks very loudly that day, and suddenly you have a very explicit insight into what that transit’s gonna be about on the very first station day. But we have —
AC: Yeah, it’s like it puts its stamp on the sign for the first time. Yeah, in a way that’s recognizable. Like, it’s the Z slash for Zorro; it’s whatever Neptune glyph it’s gonna leave there as an event or a series of events.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like, we have that happening on July 4th. Venus conjoins Uranus on July 4th in the very last degree at 29 degrees of Taurus, and then Venus enters Gemini later that same day on July 4th. And interestingly, Mercury reaches its greatest evening star elongation on July 4th as well, which means on this day – like, on or around this day – Mercury’s gonna be at its most bright and visible in terms of being an evening star before eventually later in the month it slows down and turns retrograde and starts moving backwards, at which point it will go under the beams of the Sun and disappear. And I noticed this evening star and maximum elongation being very important for Venus earlier this year where, for example, on January 10th, Nick and I accidentally recorded the Venus in Aries in history episode that day, and I didn’t realize that Venus was at its greatest elongation and we did this like, massive deep dive into what Venus retrograde in Aries was all about on the day of its greatest elongation. So I’ll be paying attention to something with Mercury being particularly loud on July 4th as well.
AC: And it’s worth noting that Mercury as we begin the month has just entered the shadow of its retrograde. And so —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — I believe it’s on the very last day of June it enters the shadow. So by the time July begins, we’re already in the shadow of the retrograde to come, which starts at about four degrees of Leo.
CB: Good point. Let me show… Madeline also – shoutout to Madeline. Madeline’s made us a lot of great graphics, because I’ve been wanting to illustrate a lot of things, and she has been hard at work making these beautiful illustrations for us. And check out her website at Honeycomb.co where she has other great graphics and almanacs that you can buy connected to your natal chart. But this is the Mercury retrograde in Leo graphic that she made for us this month where, Austin, as you noted, Mercury has already moved into Leo on June 26th. It’s actually opposing Pluto very soon here in the next day or two, which we should pay attention to because that could be important. But Mercury enters its shadow at four degrees of Leo on June 29th. It slows down mid-month and stations retrograde on July 17th at 15 degrees of Leo, and then for three weeks it retrogrades back until it eventually stations direct at four degrees of Leo on August 11th. And I don’t like that direct station because Mercury actually stations direct opposite to Pluto, whereas when it stations retrograde it’s actually closely sextiling Venus that same day, which I think is interesting that the Mercury retrograde somehow almost starts off smoother than it ends, which is —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — sort of counterintuitive.
AC: Yeah, I think it’s really important to not come into this Mercury retrograde thinking, well, things are gonna be a little crazy, but things will really settle in and calm down by the time we get to the direct station. Because not only is the direct station a rougher situation for Mercury; it just happens to coincide with Mars’s ingress into Libra and opposition with Saturn-Neptune and trine with Uranus and trine with Pluto. So like, Mercury comes to rest just as shit pops off. And so yeah, apply the opposite thinking. Be like, actually, this bit of confusion or potential disorganization in the middle of the month is – this is the good part. And then when Mercury gets sure about things it happens to be a much more disruptive period.
CB: Yeah. So let me show what that looks like to those watching the video version where here’s July 17th. We see Mercury slowing down to station at 15 degrees of Leo and Venus is at 14 degrees of Gemini. But Venus is moving very fast, and by the next day on the 18th, Mercury’s now fully stationary and Venus hits 15 degrees of Gemini and exactly sextiles Mercury.
So I wanted to talk on that and sort of doing a meditation on that, of what does it mean to have a Mercury retrograde station where it’s starting to move backwards and it has that backwards-looking orientation where it’s focused on the past and redoing things and all the classic Mercury retrograde scenarios, but that there’s something sort of mildly pleasant about it with Venus being in Gemini sextiling Mercury at the same time with reception. So it’s like, some of the scenarios I was thinking about was like, having a pleasant trip down memory lane or like, you know, some sort of relationship or circumstances from the past come back, but in a way that’s pleasant and is like, enjoyable or favorable in some way rather than being completely unwanted or like, chaotic or negative or something like that. There’s something about the first part of this retrograde and the backwards orientation of it that seems a little bit more pleasant to me than a normal retrograde.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s that looking back – like, that positive reminiscence, right? Like, oh, you know, those were good times. Like, that was really a special time. And so looking at that, I was like, so hold on. The last Sun-Venus conjunction – there was a Sun-Venus conjunction about 13 months ago at 14 Gemini. Right? The direct cazimi. And that’s almost exactly where Venus will be when it’s the sextile with the stationing retrograde Mercury. And the first thing I thought of when you said, oh, like, looking back to good times or looking back positively, I thought about last June when, I don’t know, I like, clicked into being a dad on a deeper level. You know, I fell in love with being a dad. And that was what I first thought of; I was like, wasn’t that – yeah, it was when Venus was at 14 degrees of Gemini. So there might be some flashing back to literally early June of 2024 as like, that’s exactly where Venus was, and there was a Venus-Sun conjunction there. But it doesn’t have to be that. That was just the first thing I thought of, which just happens to have been a place where Venus and the Sun conjoined recently. But that can be – you know, and I think it’s important to differentiate the looking back at something positive with a sense of loss versus looking back at something positive with a sense of appreciation and a sort of making space for that so that you can carry it with you. Sometimes when we look back at something positive, we’re like, yeah, that was great, and it’s over now, and it’s never gonna happen again. Versus like, you know, making space within yourself so that you can keep that and carry that moment with you in a way that makes you stronger and more fulfilled rather than emptier than before because you’re acutely aware of what is no longer the case.
CB: I mean, speaking of – that’s actually something, a great reminder – we’re actually celebrating, you and I, our 10th anniversary of —
AC: Oh yeah!
CB: — doing these forecast episodes together almost to the day like, on this very episode where we did our first forecast together when you were here on a random trip to Denver where you were giving a presentation at a tarot conference in late June of 2015. And Leisa actually just found the flyer for that conference the other day, and I wanted to show it to you. Here’s the flyer for that conference. The conference was originally put on by —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — Joy Vernon, our friend Joy Vernon, who organized the local tarot group in Denver for years. And here it is with your name on the front – June 26th to 28th – and on the back, it actually has your lecture where you actually gave a talk on the 36 Faces: The History, Astrology, and Magic of the Decans.
AC: Yeah. Because there was a real intersection between the decans and some of the cards in the Rider Waite Smith deck. Yeah. That’s so cool that you found that. And that was just like, gathering dust at the bottom of a drawer somewhere?
CB: Yeah, it was like, in a drawer or something and Leisa was cleaning out like, a drawer or closet or something and it was just sitting there for years, for like, 10 years! So yeah. That’s a nice memory, and then yeah, we’ve done hundreds of episodes together of this forecast over the past 10 years. And it’s funny looking back on how that happened as just a fluke because you were just like, happened to be there that month.
AC: Yeah. What is it – serendipity I believe they call it.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, I was thinking about 10 years; I was like, okay, what cycles – are there any cycles that are 10 years? Right? Because I remember when we had our sort of Venus synodic return of doing the podcast a couple years ago. But I was thinking, I was like, okay, so nothing is exactly 10 years. It’s – 10 years is exactly half of Mercury’s greater cycle. So it’s half of a Mercury. And 20 years is also the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle, so we’ve done exactly half of one of those as well. But I don’t think anything is exactly 10 years, unless I forgot how planets move. Which happens!
CB: Yeah. I’m just looking at the chart right now, and the only thing – you know, I remember that was the summer of a Venus retrograde in Leo, and there was that great Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Leo that was happening at the time, and I remember that aspect because it was so visually striking that summer. Because that conjunction came out as a evening star each night, and you could see it shortly after sunset. And that was also the conjunction I always associated with the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the US that summer. But it was also the summer that we started doing those forecasts together.
AC: Yeah, and I remember while I was there you were also racing to launch your Patreon at your chosen election.
CB: Yeah, I was getting really serious about doing the podcast, and my friend Kent Bye told me about Patreon and it was like, still a very new website. But I realized immediately how that could help me to expand the educational thing I was already doing with the podcast and make that – because it was still just a side thing at that point, and it was still supposed to just be a side thing. But that allowed it to be something where I could do these big episodes and put the content out for free instead of behind a paywall, yet still have the community support that work. And it ended up working out well.
AC: Yeah. Good election!
CB: Yeah. Good election. So yeah, happy anniversary, buddy. Thanks for doing this for —
AC: Happy anniversary! We should clink drinks.
CB: Yeah.
AC: We can’t really do that and finish the podcast effectively, so.
CB: No. But sometime soon.
All right, so that’s a good example of what we’re talking about and what we’re looking at this month. With Mercury already in Leo, it means that Mercury retrograde and that process of like, looking back favorably on things from the past has already begun. So —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — the Mercury retrograde will be at its most intense July 17th through August 11th, but the broader retrograde period is when Mercury is traveling through that sign of Leo, which is June 26th all the way until September 2nd. And —
AC: It’s a lot of Mercury in Leo.
CB: It is. It’s a lot of Mercury in Leo, and like I said, the station for some reason looks more favorable. The retrograde station looks more favorable than the direct station because here is the… So we see Mercury slow down and station retrograde in mid-Leo. Venus comes up and sextiles it. But then it retrogrades. We have the cazimi at the very end of July in Leo, and then Mercury slows down and it stations direct at four degrees of Leo around August 10th and 11th. But four degrees Leo is like, two degrees off of an opposition from Pluto at two degrees of Aquarius. And at the same time in early August, we have one of our most difficult aspects of the year, which is this Mars-Saturn opposition that’s going exact around the 8th and 9th. So it’s gonna be tense. There’s one positive aspect happening at the same time in early August, which is the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer, weirdly happening simultaneously, but —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — a lot of oppositions happening.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So people should pay attention to because actually we’re recording this today on – what is it? Saturday, June 28th, 2025. We started with Libra rising, I believe. But tomorrow, Mercury is going to exactly oppose Pluto from three degrees of Leo to three degrees of Aquarius. And Leisa had identified this as one of our most difficult aspects that we weren’t super stoked about of June. So I would pay attention to anything that happens around the time of that opposition just because the fact that Mercury’s gonna retrograde and come back to almost that same degree and almost that same opposition, there could be some foreshadowing of something that happens and you think it’s finished, but then you find yourself having to return back to dealing with a difficult situation later on towards the end of July and early August.
AC: Yeah, for sure.
CB: Yeah. All right, so back to our chronological breakdown. We got to July 4th and all that stuff happening. The Uranus ingress happens on the 7th of July, of course, and everybody should pay attention to what whole sign house Uranus is moving into in your chart and think about it in terms of both some of the major changes, potential disruptions, but also innovations and the drive for freedom that you might have having Uranus going into a new house in your chart over the next seven years. But also thinking about it closing up an almost seven-year long transit of Uranus going through Taurus, which started back in, in what? Like, 2018?
AC: 2018. Yeah, think about what has happened in the Taurus life area. Right? Whatever house that is. Since 2018, like, how has it changed? And then, you know, consider also the 2011 to 2018 – what was the Uranus in Aries like? If you just look at those seven-year periods, you can usually see pretty clearly how that area is very different going in than going out. And is Uranus going into a more or less influential part of your chart? Right? Like, so for me, I have my Moon in Gemini, and that is the ruler of my Ascendant. So Uranus in Gemini probably has a lot in store for me. It will be going over the – it will be copresent with and then going over the ruler of my Ascendant. It’s hard to under-sell a transit like that. Or was it in your 12th for the last seven years, but now it’s about to go into your first, and it will hit your Ascendant at some point. Or has it been in a really important part and it’s going to a less influential zone? Right? Like, just those like, those basic categorizations of like, oh, am I getting more or less, and yeah, is this gonna be more intense or less intense? And like, what area of life is this? It’s going from here to there. And you can start getting, you can start drawing a pretty accurate thumbnail of what to expect.
CB: Yeah. It was – there was some pretty radical changes I noticed for a lot of the Taurus rising people over the past seven years when it went into their rising sign. So if Uranus is moving into your rising sign or one of the four angular houses in your chart, especially the four angular whole sign houses, I think it’s gonna be even more prominent for you, this ingress. But then, you know, there’s other generational things too. Like, a lot of the millennials like me, this will be the beginning of the Uranus opposition who those of us who were born with like, Uranus in Sagittarius. You know, Uranus going into Gemini is the beginning of that transit, so there’s —
AC: Yeah, it’ll be the end of that for me, thank god.
CB: Nice.
AC: Very interesting. Learned a lot. I could talk at length about it. But I’m quite done with it. I’m very happy to be on the way out of that period.
CB: Yeah. I mean, honestly, so much of that – and I think encapsulate that, there’s been so much of you and I doing these monthly forecasts which really accelerated certainly by – we started in 2015, but certainly it got much more serious when Uranus went into Taurus to some extent.
AC: Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the like, easy observations for me is Taurus is my 11th house. If you do something, if you produce something publicly, the 11th house will tell you a lot about your audience. And it was literally beginning in 2018 that the audience count started like, doubling and then doubling and then doubling. You know, it went from like, a successful small project to something much larger literally beginning with the ingress in 2018. And by the time we were a year or two in, it was at a different scale. And so it was just a lot more 11th – a very quick and jarring expansion of my 11th.
CB: Right. I forgot because the peak in astrology – like, the sudden explosion in the popularity of astrology – started happening 2017, 2018 as well. And then that was a precursor also, and then the covid pandemic happened and doing the forecasts got more serious after that when we were dealing with like, major world events that were life-changing for millions of people.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So —
AC: Well, and Uranus opposed all of your Scorpio stuff.
CB: Right.
AC: With like that —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — and your, I mean, yeah, like, and maybe you’ll get to Uranus conjoining all of those planets, but that’s 40-something years away as far as your prime, right? Your vigorous middle of life here. Like, those are probably the most intense Uranus transits you’re ever gonna get. Like, Uranus opposing Pluto, Sun, Saturn, Mercury, Midheaven – that’s so much Uranus.
CB: Yeah. For sure. Well, it’s been a fun ride so far. Yeah, so everyone should think about what house Uranus is going into in your chart, and especially pay attention to any themes that start coming up around this time because little themes that might not seem super important at first could end up becoming much bigger themes later on. Because especially if you have planets like, later in the sign, sometimes you get an early preview of what the transit’s gonna be about once it moves into the same house as the other planets.
All right, so that’s starting July 7th. Then we get to our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in Capricorn on July 10th. And let’s take a look at what that actually looks like in the chart. All right, so here is July 10th. It is a Full Moon in the sign of Capricorn around 18 degrees of that sign. It’s ruled by Saturn, which interestingly is stationing retrograde just two days later. So what’s interesting about this lunation is we get a Full Moon in Capricorn ruled by Saturn while Saturn is slowing down and making a super loud statement about what it’s all about transiting through Aries.
AC: Yeah, and I think that this makes the Full Moon in Capricorn much more difficult than it otherwise would be. Right? Because with the Full Moon in Capricorn every year, we have this light shown on an area of life that needs to be organized and well built, that like, thrives on order or depends on order to some degree, because it’s Capricorn – it’s ruled by Saturn. But the ordering planet, Saturn, is in a very difficult situation, being in its fall, being conjoined Neptune, which is very confusing to say the least, and as you just pointed out also about to station retrograde. And so that kind of reordering things or making sure that things are on track – that is very often the theme of the Full Moon in Capricorn – is significantly impeded by Saturn’s position and condition and attitude right now.
CB: Yeah. That Saturn-Neptune conjunction is so close, and things are hitting peak intensity in terms of the nebulousness of Saturn and Neptune while we have the Moon hitting a peak of an intensity in terms of its brightness right here in the middle of the month. And I think while Capricorn’s being emphasized by the Full Moon, I think everyone should be paying attention to what house – especially what whole sign house – Aries coincides with in your chart and focusing on what is the area in which you’re having both greater clarity sometimes with Saturn stationing there in Aries, but also greater tendencies towards illusions and deceptions. And what is the tension between what’s real and what’s not real that you’re starting to see emerge in your life at this time in this new sector of your chart that’s being activated by the Saturn-Neptune conjunction?
AC: Yeah. Well, you know, Chris, that Neptune-Saturn almost conjunction is right on my Mercury. And so I’ve really – what I’ve felt since Saturn’s ingress – I got a little bit of this during the Neptune ingress but it really locked in after Saturn moved in at the end of May – is I’ve been desperate for clarity because every time, as I think around, as I look around and try to use my Mercury to know what to think or say to myself or others about the world, I am overwhelmed by the thick, heavy chaos. And so the need for clarity is triply underscored. But what I’ve found is that it takes much more effort and like, specifically, you know, positioning, conditioning, working with my mind to get to that sought after clarity because it’s trying to push through the Neptune-Saturn conjunction.
CB: That makes sense. Yeah, that’s all over your Mercury. I mean, you’re also working on this book where you’re revising these delineations of these very poetic metaphors and interpretations of the decans so that you’re kind of like, writing sort of poetry in some sense and interpretations and trying to draw symbolism and imagery and make it come alive. And I think it’s funny that you’re doing that right now.
AC: Yeah. Well, and it’s very Neptune-Saturn, because half of it is, as you said, like, the metaphorical. But then there’s also lots of work with source texts and, you know, adding —
CB: Right.
AC: — these sources and then making sure that there’s a concrete delineation as well as the like, containing poetic and imagistic structure. And so, yes, the Neptune – that’s a great point. The labor for my Mercury right now is equal parts Neptune and Saturn.
CB: Yeah.
AC: But yeah, that’s – anyway, so that’s my version of it. But like, that area where like, order is called for but difficult to find. But it’s difficult to find order sufficient to what is called for and what would be nice in that area. This Full Moon is asking, you know, how are you doing with that? How are you going to find that clarity? Clarity and order even in these set of circumstances. Or what’s the best you can do given the circumstances? Because the Saturn-Neptune is giving a lot more fast-moving chaos than like, glacial ice sculpture which holds its form, which is a much more traditional Saturnian output.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I found myself with Saturn and Neptune going into my 3rd house much more interested in articulating my philosophy of astrology and especially going back to finish some work that I put off years ago about reviving some of the ancient Hellenistic orientations towards like, Stoicism and especially their views of fate and how astrology is a system that studies and articulates fate. But like, defining like, what fate is and how astrology studies it and what that means for us and giving a spiritual and philosophical grounding underlying the techniques of astrology is part of what I find myself being drawn to.
AC: Yeah. And that’s perfect, right? Just the 3rd house like, day to day seriousness. Like, the mind being drawn on an even more regular schedule to the serious, the historical, you know, what is inflexible in the life story of human beings.
CB: Yeah. What is fixed – what is a structure that’s underlying reality that you can’t see, that you can only see the effects off when it’s tying together events in our life that seem unconnected but in fact is a hidden structure that connects everything in our world and gives it meaning and purpose.
AC: Yeah. Perfect.
CB: Yeah. So that Full Moon is happening; Saturn stations retrograde around the 12th and 13th. One thing that’s really positive and interesting I’m looking forward to this month is Jupiter is going to make its heliacal rising as a morning star on July 15th. And this is a really important piece of observational astronomy that’s happening around the middle of July, because Jupiter’s been in Cancer for a little bit now up to this point, but it’s been hidden under the beams of the Sun because Jupiter has been too close to the Sun in order to actually be able to witness it. But what happens in July is that Jupiter suddenly will become visible in the mornings. If you get up early enough and if you go out before sunrise, you’ll see Jupiter as this brilliant, white star that will rise just before the Sun a little bit before it becomes light out. And in that way, Jupiter is going to be sort of stepping forth back into view and making itself known in Cancer and by extension making some of what it’s doing in Cancer in each of our charts as well as in world events probably more visible and more pronounced at this time.
AC: Yeah. And I know you and I have both been waiting for this, because upon Jupiter’s first entry into Cancer coming up on a month ago, it immediately had to do a square with Saturn and Neptune. Like, well, once we get through the square with Saturn and Neptune, then we’ll get that Jupiter in Cancer. It’s like, well, no. Now Jupiter in Cancer is super combust and you can’t see it, and it has to, you know, it’s getting burnt and dommed by the Sun. And so it’s almost as if we have to wait until the middle of July – we’ll see a little bit of it earlier in July, but – to bear witness to its full benefic power. It’s got to rise independently of the Sun. It’s gotta illuminate the earth with its own light, right? Like, unmixed with that of the Sun. And so if you’ve been waiting, if you’ve been looking at the house that Jupiter just entered and being like, well, I’m not seeing any improvements; I’m not seeing this exalted benefic that just entered here yet – you probably shouldn’t. Like, you will start to see it just as we start to see Jupiter. And I am very much looking forward to it, because we could use a little exalted peacebringing benefic in the skies. It may not be enough, but I’ll take whatever we can get.
CB: Yeah. It really – a lot of the predictions about Jupiter in Cancer being good, I think we were definitely offsetting them knowing that Jupiter would run into that square with Saturn as soon as it ingressed. But it was actually striking seeing how much Jupiter was getting hammered as soon as it went into Cancer so that its attempts to do benefic things were significantly restricted or much more hampered than they might have been otherwise. Although it was fascinating – and I’m still surprised – how the ceasefire happened like, right on the cazimi on June 23rd and 24th and that there was just this like, very sudden cessation of violence which seemed like it had been just getting crazily out of control for over a week up to that point and escalating further and further and further. And then all of a sudden, things just like, ground to a halt on that Sun-Jupiter conjunction was kind of incredible.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, you know, a friend of mine had texted me the day before Jupiter ingressed into Cancer, and was like, “Aw, I bet you’re so excited for tomorrow.” And I just didn’t have the heart to text him back and be like, “It’s gonna be like, a month.”
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: I’m excited about where that’s going, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him and be like, eh, it’s actually gonna not – it’s gonna be kind of shit for a while. Rest of the month. But —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — we’re almost there. And again, Jupiter in Cancer doesn’t fix everything, but it tries to fix a lot, and some of that help actually makes a difference.
CB: Yeah. The primary thing it’s gonna fix and then it’s going to have an ingressed power to begin fixing once it makes this heliacal rising in mid-July is the area of our chart that that Mars retrograde was just like, grinding over from the fall of last year from the third quarter of 2024 all the way through the late first quarter and early second quarter of 2025 when Mars was just causing havoc in the Cancer sector of our chart and whatever house that coincides with. I do think we’ll start seeing improvements; in some instances, we already have. We’ve already started to see improvements in that sector of our lives. But I think that’s gonna become much more pronounced when Jupiter becomes visible in that sign.
AC: Yeah. Looking forward to it. I can see what those improvements are going to be, but they have not yet arrived. But they are most certain to. Yeah, and what’s nice is Jupiter’s gonna spend as much time or more in that sector of the chart than Mars did.
CB: Exactly. Yeah.
AC: But yeah, it is important to not overpromise with Jupiter or —
CB: Right.
AC: — expect it to like, fix world affairs. You know, one thing that’s interesting is it is the Jupiter return of the Untied States. And Kait and I were sitting around the other day, and we were reflecting on the fact that Jupiter was in Cancer during 9/11. And I was like, huh – I was like, I was making the point like, see? It doesn’t fix everything; it doesn’t prevent all the other planets from doing anything naughty. She was like, well, you know, she’s like, America sure got a lot of sympathy after that. And I was like, oh, that is such a good point. Right? Like, America has not been – the United States has not been as internationally sympathetic as it was in 2001 after 9/11. Which —
CB: Right.
AC: — again, didn’t prevent it from happening. Didn’t prevent the United States from launching disastrous wars later. But it was still a Jupiter return and so the United States still benefited from that. It just didn’t keep the other things from happening.
CB: Yeah. Well, and that makes me think of how in the Sibley chart, Jupiter is in the 8th house in Cancer, and that the event that coincided with that you were mentioning was a huge amount of deaths in like, a terrorist attack and that a lot of people died. And then that did generate sympathy for like, a year or two, and then that dried up pretty quick when the US then invaded Iraq for no reason at all under false premises.
AC: Yeah. Exactly. I just thought that, it was interesting. Because you know, you gotta figure out what is this – like, this is – you know, Jupiter is helpful, but what is it going to help? And Jupiter will in some cases prevent negative things from happening or help bring them to a close. But we can’t rely on a strong Jupiter position to prevent all evils and heal all wounds.
CB: Yeah. Something I was thinking over the past couple of weeks with what was happening with Iran was it was interesting that the premise – in the year ahead forecast, I had talked about how Uranus going back into Gemini, one of the things that made me nervous is that it would reactivate the period 84 years ago that coincided with the creation of the atomic bomb as well as the only two times that it’s ever been used in war, which was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the last time Uranus was in Gemini. And that just logically sometimes the return of something can coincide with that coming back up again in some way or the dynamics surrounding it coming back up again. And it was – I was interested then that the premise of this war, supposedly, was Israel and the US striking primarily the nuclear sites in order – at least, Trump was claiming for Iran to not develop a nuclear bomb, and that was like, their justification. Although, you know, a lot of it sounded a lot also like the 2003 time period when the US invaded Iraq and the premise was weapons of mass destruction, but then in the end, none were actually found.
AC: I agree. I think it’s quite relevant to consider the use of nuclear weapons during this second run of Uranus through Gemini, or this repetition of Uranus’s run through Gemini.
CB: Yeah. I guess that’s what I’m saying —
AC: I think that is not off the table for this next seven years.
CB: Yeah. I guess that’s what I’m saying is I’m both nervous about that potential and also my ears had perked up that already discussion of that as a premise for war is already happening now on the cusp of Uranus going back into Gemini.
AC: Right. And I don’t think the trine with Pluto makes that less likely.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right, I wanna mention our auspicious election for this month, and it’s kind of a difficult month for elections because there’s a lot of different astrology going on and there’s not a lot of great standalone charts from an electional standpoint that are very clean.
So the best that I could come up for with this month is the following chart, which takes place on July 14th, at about six AM just after sunrise. So you wanna set the chart initially for six AM, and you wanna adjust the Ascendant in your location until the Ascendant is at about 24 degrees of Cancer. What you’ll end up with is a chart that has Cancer rising, and Jupiter which is making that heliacal rising around this timeframe in the middle of July will be in the first house in the rising sign in this chart. And that’s really primarily what this chart is about is capturing that exalted Jupiter in Cancer energy and putting it right there in the rising sign.
So Cancer rising, Jupiter in Cancer, the ruler of the Ascendant is the Moon, which is in Pisces, which is applying to a trine with Jupiter in a mutual reception because the Moon is in Pisces, which is Jupiter’s sign, and Jupiter is in Cancer, which is the Moon’s sign. The Moon is also applying to a square with Venus, which is somewhat helpful. So this is happening very close to Mercury stationing retrograde, but that’s something that’s very hard to avoid this month. So this is one of those charts where while I wouldn’t recommend starting any major things this month or like, using this chart for something that’s like, hugely crucial and life-changing, it could be a chart that’s a decent date to attempt to do some things, especially knowing some of the keywords we were talking about and the dynamics we discussed about the Mercury retrograde sextile Venus that were about like, looking back into the past and having favorable reflections about things from the past could still be okay to do around this timeframe around the middle of July, just knowing that there could also be some Mercury retrograde related things like delays or technological snafus or other sort of standard stuff like that.
So the area that it could be very tricky for is Mars in the 3rd house of communication and short-distance travel as well as neighbors and siblings. So it would not be a good chart for those topics. But otherwise, it’s a relatively decent chart that has some protective function with Jupiter in the first house in a day chart in the sign of its exaltation. And this is one of my first attempts to sort of take advantage of that planet now that it’s making that heliacal rising.
AC: That’s kind of the move. Right? When Jupiter is good, put Jupiter in the first, and there is the complication that we’re facing for a lot but not all of the time that Jupiter’s in Cancer where Saturn’s in Aries, and so when we do a cardinal rising, we’re placing both of them angular. And so the trick, just as you’ve done, is to emphasize Jupiter and try to minimize Saturn, whether it’s by making it a day chart, trying to make sure that the degree of the Midheaven isn’t exactly on Saturn, giving it more room than it otherwise would. But yeah. Compromises must be made.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So just make sure it’s a day chart, because that’ll really help to emphasize the positive aspects of Jupiter in the sign of its exaltation. And it was just a good reminder that one of the things about exaltation is it just indicates the ability to do the highest form of something in some instances. Like, whatever it is that you’re doing and thinking about what it would be to do the best version of that and to stand out above other people as a result of excelling or doing a very high quality like, superb version of whatever it is that you’re trying to do. And that’s part of what we’re gonna be learning over the course of this year of having Jupiter in its exaltation is, yeah, like, what it looks like to do that and what it looks like to stand out from your peers as a result of putting the extra effort to do high quality work.
AC: Yeah. And that kind of vertical metaphor thinking is really helpful for kind of sounding out the various meanings of a planet’s exaltation, especially with Jupiter, right, to like, to stand out because, you know, you would stand out if you were 10 feet taller than everyone. You would be noticeable. And then as far as mitigating negative things, what do we do? We don’t take the bait; we rise above it. Right? When a situation is really hard and there’s, you know, no reasonable person could be asked to deal with this, nonetheless we rise to the occasion. Right? We rise to the level of what’s being demanded of us, and so this – yeah, this kind of rising vertical metaphor is really helpful for thinking about Jupiter in Cancer.
CB: I like that. That’s good. That’s like, a “when they go low, we go high” type —
AC: Yeah, yeah, exactly! Taking the high road!
CB: Right. Nice. I like that. Which is especially relevant with Saturn squaring by sign still and overcoming is there’s still something that’s like, attempting to pull Jupiter down and having some negative impact on it, but the ability to rise up to overcome that nonetheless.
AC: Right. To hold your head high despite the fact that there are seagulls trying to shit on it.
CB: Right. Yeah. You’re a master of the poetic metaphors; I love it.
So that is the best chart we could find this month. Leisa Schaim and I just recorded our electional astrology podcast for July where we have 10 other charts that we shared for different parts of the month that are not as good as that chart, but try to squeeze in among difficult transits when you can still get some of the best out of what’s available. So we’re gonna release that I think tomorrow as part of the electional astrology podcast episode for July, only available to patrons of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon. So you can sign up there to get access to that or for more information.
All right, so let’s move on. Where are we at? By the third quarter of July, we start moving into some difficult combinations where Mars starts coming up to conjoin the South Node, which goes exact around July 20th. And Venus also starts coming up to a square with Mars, which goes exact around July 23rd. So you know, this is kind of a tricky combination because one of the things it immediately made me think of was last year when Mars conjoined the North Node and the Moon conjoined the South Node on the same day and opposed Mars; that was the day that the president of Iran died in this mysterious like, helicopter accident that day. And there was this very like, dramatic event associated with that. This is an alignment that’s a little bit different, but one of the things about that event is it sort of like, called back to the eclipse that had just happened in that same sign a few months earlier. And I’m wondering in this instance if something about this conjunction won’t call back to the Virgo eclipse that occurred in March.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s definitely worth worrying about, or making note of being open to. And the Mars-South Node or the Mars-tail of the dragon combination can be very destructive. You know, this very intense round of hostilities which began with Israel and Palestine began with a Mars-South Node combination in Libra right around the time of an eclipse. We had an eclipse, and we also had Mars there; it was Mars and the South Node together.
Mars and the South Node give a meaning or an energy that is not entirely unlike Mars-Pluto in that with the South Node, we’re often looking at something – you think of the tail of the dragon like, just sweeping things away entirely. There’s a very strong negating ability with Ketu or the tail of the dragon. And that Mars-Ketu combination, when it’s in Virgo, is quite capable of being very destructive.
On a like, non-global, historical scale, just on a personal transit scale, one of the things I would just look out for with the Mars-Ketu is going too far with trying to diet or clean up something, whether it’s cleaning the house, cleaning up your diet, like, trying to clean or purify things and accidentally going too far to the point where you’re damaging what you were just attempting to clean up or sweep away. That’s something I see very commonly with Mars-Ketu. And I remember as I was developing that angle on it more than a decade ago and watching an upcoming Mars-Ketu conjunction, there was a news story about a number of people who were in a sweat lodge, right, like, doing purification. And they got too intense about it, and people had heart attacks and died. Right? It’s like —
CB: Wow.
AC: — going too far in that purifying direction.
CB: Yeah. Of like, the purging effect of the South Node and having a damaging impact on you.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Nice. Okay. So it’s kind of tied in for me with on the one hand, ever since the first eclipse that happened in March when there was an eclipse in Virgo and it opened up this series of major beginnings and major endings in the Virgo sector of our chart, whatever house that is, Mars moving through Virgo but especially coming up on the South Node seems like it could be causing some severing and separating in this part of our life that’s already been opened up for major changes as a result of the beginning of that eclipse series. And it’s due for another major installment of that in September, but at this point, there’s something about Mars that’s calling back to those changes that began in March and that is either opening up a period of like, severing and separation with respect to that area of our life, or in some instances, it may be pushing us in order to expend extra energy and work in that area of our life in some way that’s really important as a sort of like, turning point with respect to those topics as well. Because sometimes the Mars transits can be constructive. But one thing I’d like, if we can try to delineate it, is the Venus square being tied in with this at the same time.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And because that seems really crucial, and when it comes to like, Venus square Mars, I think of, you know, a few different things. But one of the ones that came up last summer was like, the battle of the sexes. And when gender does come up in astrology, sometimes it comes up very strongly with Mars and Venus. And I remember during Kamala Harris’s – the DNC and during her acceptance speech, I think, like, the Venus-Mars square went exact at that time. And it was like, this notable example of like, a woman candidate like, accepting the nomination for the presidency at that time, and it being notable that she was a woman after centuries of like, men being the only ones in that role. So there could be something about gender dynamics that are coming up and reaching a critical turning point during this square, as well as sometimes dynamics having to do with sex and sexuality and sometimes like, negative things associated with that could be something coming up as well under this square in a way that causes tensions or strife or discord in some way.
AC: Yeah, it’s certainly, like, the square between the two certainly puts the Venusian and the martial in as difficult a situation as possible to reconcile. Actually and so – one thing that connects them, though, is that they’re both Mercury-ruled, and this square like, gets going immediately after Mercury stations retrograde, which is really interesting now that I think about it. And so it’s almost like the subtext or like, the optional side quest for this Mercury retrograde is figure out how to reconcile Venus and Mars at this point. Because they’re in a position that’s naturally at odds, right? And so Venus, you know, Venus and Mars certainly gender harder than most planets in astrology and certainly show up that way. But it’s also, you know, Mars is the, you know, like, the part of your life, the part of yourself that needs to work hard and to not give a shit about how something looks because it just needs to get done. And Venus is the part that wants life to feel livable and wants good relations between the people that are part of the life. And with these planets in the positions that they’re at, it’s very difficult to reconcile those.
CB: Right. Yeah. Like, difficult. Being in a difficult position that’s hard to reconcile I think is a really good keyword for that. And it’s interesting, because you mentioned Mercury stationing retrograde, but it’s like, Mars is in a Mercury-ruled sign; Uranus has just moved into —
AC: Right!
CB: — a Mercury-ruled sign, and then Mercury is stationing retrograde. So especially that axis of the mutable axis is receiving a lot of disruptions at this time with Mars and the South Node in Virgo, and then Uranus just having moved into Gemini, so that whatever those two houses are are receiving maybe the most disruptive energy right now.
AC: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, no, that’s a great point that on a very simple level, this is rough on the mutable signs.
CB: Right.
AC: He says, with the majority of his chart in mutable signs.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that kind of brings us into our second lunation of the month, which is my least favorite lunation out of the two, which is this New Moon that happens in Leo on July 24th. And this lunation very, very closely opposes Pluto and looks rough. It looks rougher than the Full Moon does by comparison. So let me animate the chart to show those watching the video version what I mean when I say a New Moon in Leo opposite the Pluto. I mean, a New Moon at two degrees of Leo opposite to Pluto at two degrees of Aquarius. So very, very closely opposite to that planet, which is gonna bring up many of the Pluto-related difficult keywords, which are like, power struggles, manipulation, control, coercive acts, but also we’ve seen a lot with Pluto over the past two years about – what is it? Like, secret, behind the scenes covert actions and things like that has been a major one as well.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Power, especially the hidden. The exercise or action of power being concealed or like, those hidden forces. There’s also, you know, it kind of interferes with the New Moon in Leo, which, you know, it’s the New Moon – Sun and Moon together in the Sun’s home base. Like, in the solar palace. Which is supposed to be when it’s not fucked with by any other planets, it’s a moment of like, coming back to the eternal flame. Like the hearth that never burnt out. Like, oh, there’s, you know, within me and within all of us, there’s this light of spirit which can be obscured but never extinguished. Like, the New Moon in Leo is oftentimes like a wholesome and pleasant re-embrace of the solar. But that particular coming back to the hearth this year has a long and particularly sticky sort of shadow hovering over it and surrounding it. And so it’s like, oh, it’s just me! But like, something’s lurking out in the darkness. And there are those who would extinguish the eternal flame, if we’re doing sort of fantasy plotline.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, the king comes into his home, but there is this outside energy. Because oppositions usually manifest externally as like, a person or an external tension that’s drawing you in a different direction or that’s trying to negate or oppose what you want to do and what your initial like, intention is.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Go ahead.
AC: Oh, I was just gonna say and often even if the problem is wholly internal, it feels like it’s somebody else. You’re like, oh, actually it’s just been me the whole time, like, shitting on myself, right? But it’s like, you know, the opposition will present itself to you as like, it’s other people that have been doing this, and very often it is others. But even when it isn’t, it still feels that way. I was just reinforcing that point you were making.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So you know, this New Moon at two Leo does have harmonious configurations with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction at one and two Aries and a sextile with Uranus in early Gemini, so there may be like, an outlet for some of that energy to manifest in creative ways or in innovative ways. But the basic tension is still there then that has to be – you have to create the tension first that then gets like, expressed through some of those other planets, but hopefully in a positive or constructive fashion.
AC: Yeah, and it’s an interesting, I was just gonna say an echo. It’s an echo that comes before – a pre-echo. It resonates with some of the things that happen in August in the sense that it’s a planet that’s aspecting Uranus and Neptune and Saturn and Pluto more or less all at the same time, and that’s part of what we’re gonna need to get used to, especially in August. But then we get a break and then from 2026 for the next seven years is what happens when a planet hits Uranus and Neptune and Saturn and Pluto, which at least for the next couple years will be the case. Because we’re going to get aspects from kind of all of them at once, which is a function of them all being in harmonious aspect with each other. So it’s kind of a first taste of that power and tension and, yeah, like, that particularly charged scenario. But it will not be the last.
CB: Yeah. What a crazy generational sort of like, aspect pattern to be built into all the birth charts right now with Saturn-Neptune conjunction in early Aries sextile Uranus in early Gemini and Pluto in early Aquarius and all the just like, babies being born right now with such a notable world-changing alignment of outer planets in these signs having recently moved into these signs. But then to have, you know, new generations be ushered into the world at this time as well.
AC: Yeah. And maybe we won’t see the full impact of those natal configurations until they’re, you know, in their 60s or 70s. Right? Like, what’s —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — being, you know, like, just to call back to what we were saying during the first part of the podcast, like, it takes a whole life for that seed to bear fruit. And strange —
CB: Right.
AC: — fruit it might be.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right, so that’s the New Moon; it’s kind of tough. It’s also a little bit of a prelude to the Mercury station direct opposite Pluto and some of the other stuff early in August. But the main thing that happens once we get towards the end of the month is we get the Mercury cazimi, which happens around July 31st, which is when Mercury is halfway through its retrograde cycle and it conjoins the Sun. And usually there’s like, a problem that’s set up at the beginning of the retrograde in the middle of July that starts to head towards resolution at this point during the halfway point in the cycle. And things are not gonna be fully fixed at this point, especially because they’re heading towards that opposition with Pluto again at the end. But there’s usually at least a turning point where something that was set up that was problematic starts to get fixed at this point.
AC: And yeah, and I would also say that the day of the cazimi is also very often a day of unusual clarity, especially if you make some time for it.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. So the other thing that happens at the very end of the month is that Venus moves into Cancer on the 30th and 31st where it starts heading towards this auspicious conjunction with Jupiter that will happen in August. But Venus has to get through the square with Saturn and Neptune first, which is what it immediately experiences as soon as it goes into Cancer. So it’s kind of like dumping cold water on Venus as soon as she moves into what otherwise should be a more favorable approaching aspect between Venus and Jupiter.
AC: Yeah. Or with Venus in water sign Cancer dumping Saturn in Aries hot mess on Venus.
CB: Right. Yeah. So there can be a little bit of like, restrictiveness in relationships or a feeling of coldness in relationships with this note of Venus as soon as it goes into Cancer on the last day of July and the first day of August. But then by like, the 2nd, it clears those. And even though August otherwise looks like it’s gonna be rough with the Mars-Saturn opposition especially, there will be this more positive aspect that we do get to experience, which is the Venus-Jupiter conjunction coming up around August 11th.
AC: Yeah. And we have – August gives us both Venus and Jupiter in Cancer, but also the Saturn-Mars opposition, and it’s all in cardinal. And so it’s very difficult to separate, as much as I gazed at the charts and did my very best to separate them. Yeah, it’s kind of… We get both. We get double; we basically get double malefics and double benefics all configured to each other in August, and it’s very frustrating.
CB: Yeah. To have what otherwise would be one of the most favorable and one of the least favorable aspects of the entire year like, culminating at the same time.
AC: Yeah. But that’s what we get.
CB: And that is a problem for another time that Future Us will have to deal with —
AC: Yeah, specifically —
CB: — next month!
AC: — one month from now, we will try to —
CB: Right.
AC: — pick that apart.
CB: Yeah. In the meantime, we’re gonna kick that can down the road and leave this on a cliffhanger, because that basically brings us to the end of July in terms of the major aspects that we had to discuss this month.
AC: Yeah. And July, there’s plenty to deal with in July. Leave August for August.
CB: Yeah. So that is it. That’s a month of some major, major shifts. There’s so much outer planet stuff going on, but just to summarize, it’s Uranus in Gemini and our first taste of that. It’s Saturn-Neptune peaking, and it’s the Mercury retrograde getting going in the first half of that are really the three major things this month. Oh yeah, and Uranus trine Pluto, but that’s kind of tied in with Uranus in Gemini.
AC: Yeah. And you’ll actually get to meet Jupiter in Cancer. He’s been hanging around but hiding behind the Sun.
CB: Yeah. Here’s the new boss; he’s different than the old boss who was Mars retrograde in Cancer.
AC: Yeah. He’s actually pretty nice.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Not perfect, but you know. Could do a lot worse.
CB: He is constrained by some upper management that’s still breathing down his neck with Saturn and Neptune in Aries, but nonetheless attempting to do some good things.
AC: Jupiter as middle management?
CB: Right. Yeah. All right, my friend. Thank you for coming back and only taking a month-long break. It’s good to have you back and good to talk. Sorry for talking so long; we talked for like, three hours today, but we had a lot to talk about, and it was good to catch up. What do you have going on? What are you gonna be working on this month during July and all this astrology going on?
AC: Okay, well, I’m gonna be teaching classes and rewriting books. I actually have an intake for my Year One program, or the first year of my three year program, some time in the second half of July. I haven’t decided exactly when yet. If you would like to be part of that, join the mailing list. I’ll have it locked down within a couple days, and I’ll send out a mailer. So yeah, I’ll be teaching some classes. Sphere and Sundry has a bunch of fun stuff happening. Some of the classics have been rebottled and are available for the first time in 2025. Venus in Libra is back. Regulus is back, and I will note that I was very careful to make sure that during the Regulus election, Jupiter was configured perfectly to Regulus but Mars was not, to emphasize one side of the nature of that star, not the other. So yeah, Regulus is back. And then in the first week of July, the series we made while Jupiter was in Sagittarius and in Pisces are both back. So as Jupiter reemerges, so will Jupiter’s finest moments from the last eight years. And then finally, towards the end of the month, we are going to unveil some Mars in Capricorn items that we created coming up on a year and a half ago back when Mars in Capricorn was in a nice trine with Jupiter in Taurus. And —
CB: Wow.
AC: Yeah, we were thinking about what’s the right time for that? And Kait pointed out to me that, you know, we have right now this really difficult combination of Saturn in a Mars-ruled sign, which results in Saturn’s fall. And that Mars in Capricorn is the same combination of forces, but reversed where it’s Mars in Saturn’s sign in a way that results in exalted – you know, the planet being exalted, and the results being really excellent. So we’re thinking maybe it’s a good time to let loose the Mars in Capricorn stuff that’s been incubating.
CB: Nice.
AC: Right? Because it’s —
CB: I can’t believe you can keep a lid on stuff like that for that long.
AC: Yeah, it’s like, it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of fun. You know when you have it in a can, and it’s like, what is the right time? When should this be introduced to the world?
CB: Right. That’s a very well developed sense of patience.
AC: Thank you. Well, you know, there’s no good timing without patience, right?
CB: That’s true. That is the first thing we learn about electional astrology is —
AC: Yeah. Gotta —
CB: — huge meditation in patience. Yeah, absolutely. All right. What are your websites?
AC: So you can sign up for mailing list as well as purchase classes and workshops I have taught at AustinCoppock.com. It’s my name dot com. And then all of the astromagickal wares are available at SphereAndSundry.com.
CB: Awesome. Cool. I’ll put links to that, to your website, in the description.
AC: Thank you kindly.
CB: Yeah. As for myself, like I said earlier, I’m doing that Hellenistic course sale which is 15 percent off for only the next two weeks, ending on July 14th. If you just use the promo code ‘JUPITER’ you’ll get that 15 percent discount on my course. And my Hellenistic astrology course is the main course I teach when I teach people how to read birth charts and how to do predictive astrology, and I have been pouring so much of what I know and so much of what I’ve learned over the past two decades into that course continuously because I keep updating it and expanding it and adding new lectures and making it better and better basically every month. So I’m excited to start a new group of students with that this summer, because last summer we started a large group, and it ended up working out really well doing all the workshops we’ve done over the past year. So I’m gonna start a new group now, and then also do a series of one major webinar for students each month to continue to expand some of the teachings that I already have in the course.
So if you’d like to sign up for that, just go to TheAstrologySchool.com and use that promo code ‘JUPITER’ some time in the next two weeks to get that discount.
Other than that, I’m gonna keep doing the podcast. I am working on the episode on fate and like, Stoicism and developing more of an intricate philosophy for astrology and reviving some of those ancient philosophies surrounding fate. Working on a Babylonian goal years episode with my friend Patrick since we’ve been researching that together for the past year and a half. Working on the 5th house episode, which is getting there and is in good shape. And yeah, lots of other good stuff coming up on the podcast over the next month. So it should be fun!
AC: Yeah, that’s awesome.
CB: Yeah. All right, buddy, well, happy anniversary once again. And thanks for doing the —
AC: Yeah!
CB: — forecast with me for 10 years. That was what I meant to mention. I’m about to hit episode 500 soon. I’m thinking about doing an episode on like, what I learned over the past several years of doing the podcast, especially on the forecast episodes, of different things I learned in doing mundane astrology and doing some sort of retrospective. But yeah, thanks for doing these episodes for me, and it’s been fun learning and growing with you as astrologers and as friends over the past 10 years.
AC: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ve both learned so much and kind of had to learn so much as history picked up the pace in the middle of our little podcasting sessions.
CB: Right. Yeah. I realized this month we have to have a new tag, new hashtag, because like, hashtag “astrologer good” is no longer sufficient. And we really do have to have like, I think it’s hashtag “live in interesting times” or hashtag “may you live in interesting times” when terrible, terrible world events are happening but the astrology is lining up very well so that you’re at least abstractly like, impressed with how well the astrology is aligning despite living in huge world events that will be in history books for many, many years.
AC: Yeah, I think hashtag “interesting times” is the best candidate.
CB: Definitely. All right, cool. All right, well, thanks for joining me today. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. And we’ll see you again next time!
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