Ep. 497 Transcript: Analysis of a Prediction: Iran

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 497, titled:

Analysis of a Prediction: Iran

With Chris Brennan

Episode originally released on July 16, 2025

—

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

—

Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released August 4th, 2025

—

CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna do a retroactive or retrospective analysis of some predictions that I made about Iran and the conflict with the United States and the strikes that occurred last month in June of 2025.

So I’m recording this today on, what is it? Saturday, July 5th, 2025, starting at 8:25 PM in Denver, Colorado, just before sunset. And I’ve done episodes like this from time to time where I go back and I look at clips from past episodes of The Astrology Podcast where we made a prediction about some specific event, and then we go back and see how it turned out. And in this instance, one of the reasons I wanted to do this one – and the majority of this video is gonna be playing clips from past episodes of The Astrology Podcast where we made some of these predictions about Iran and the possibility of a conflict over the course of the past year going back to April of 2024. Part of the reason I wanted to do this one is because we had, I had been especially sort of open with my predictions that we were expecting a conflict this year, especially between the US and Iran, and between Iran and Israel. And usually, we’re a little bit more careful about that. But the further and further we went, the more we got different indications that seemed to indicate that something big was about to take place.

So part of the purpose of this is I wanna go back and look at the progression of our thinking on that topic and how it evolved over the course of about a year long time period and do an analysis of what we were thinking at different stages and how the prediction developed in order to analyze it from a technical standpoint, partially because I like going back and looking at things like that in order to not just assess how we did, but also to learn from it and to try to take some of the best pieces of what I learned from it personally and put those together for others to potentially use in the future. So that’s the main thing that we’re gonna be doing here today.

So I’m gonna go through and play clips, because when I went through – after the strike on Iran took place last month, it was on the – let’s see – the 12th. It began on the 12th of June or it was already the 13th, I believe, in Iran. And then about a week later, the US bombed Iran as well. So once that happened, I went back and started looking at what some of the statements were and what some of the predictions were that we made over the course of the past year. And I realized that sometimes when things like that happen, that I know all of the statements that we made, and I know the different predictions at different points that I made across multiple episodes. But most people don’t watch every episode of The Astrology Podcast or don’t watch it all the way through, and so they may have only seen a piece of that or heard a piece of that in passing. But it was actually something that we felt – that I felt – sort of abnormally confident about, so that it was mentioned on something like 10 different episodes, as we’re about to see in the clips that I play during the course of this analysis. And I wanna play each of these clips, and then after each clip do a little bit of a commentary in order to point out the significance of what was said or expand on some of the things we were thinking at the time or other circumstantial things like that.

So I think things like this are just helpful in terms of even my own learning process as an astrologer and how I’ve grown and learned different things in the course of doing mundane astrology over the past decade or so of especially doing the forecast episodes of The Astrology Podcast. And I think I learned quite a bit from this, and I think the audience and listeners will learn quite a bit watching these clips and some of my commentary as well.

So I’m trying to think of any other preliminary things, but maybe we should just jump into it and I’ll add additional comments and stuff as we go after each clip and as we progress through this.

So the context of the first clip is that there were famously eclipses that happened in October of 2023 when the violence erupted between Israel and Palestine. And usually, eclipses connect events in six month increments. So six months after those eclipses occurred in October of 2023 when everything began, we were expecting an additional development to take place with that situation in the next set of eclipses six months later around March and April of 2024. But then what happened is there was something else that took place that surprised me at that time, when there was this direct exchange that happened between Iran and Israel at that time that fell exactly on the eclipses. And I took note of that, because it seemed really significant that the first open exchange – especially with Iran firing missiles directly at Israel – took place very clearly next to one of the Aries eclipses at that point in March and April of 2024. And I took it to be an omen and something significant that could develop and progress and escalate, which in fact it did six months later at the next set of eclipses.

So let’s take a look at that first clip that kind of sets the stage for how my initial prediction about there being an escalating conflict involving Iran and see how that seed was first laid when I made this observation back in April of 2024. All right. So for the audio listeners, this is a clip from The Astrology Podcast episode 446, which is the Astrology Forecast for May of 2024. It was released on April 30th, 2024, and cohosting that month was Diana Rose Harper, because Austin was away.

[BEGIN CLIP]

Let’s move onto major news stories. So there was a lot of big stuff that happened. One of the major stories that started happening like, right in the middle of eclipse season was between Israel and Iran.

So we were expecting major developments with Israel because of the eclipses that occurred back in October. We were expecting something to come up in terms of that, and then what happened is that eclipse season started on March 25th with the Libra eclipse and continued a couple weeks later with the April 8th solar eclipse. So right in the middle of that once eclipse season was open and at its most intense, on April 1st, Israel killed several Iranian military officers at an embassy in Syria. And this was viewed as a serious escalation in a long-standing shadow or proxy war between the two countries and was viewed as more provocative due to it happening on an embassy, which is usually off-limits.

So Iran responded on April 13th by launching 300 missiles and drones at Israel, and the attack was highly telegraphed with lots of advance warnings so that 99 percent of the missiles were shot down. So as a result of that, it was viewed largely as political theater or as a warning. But it seemed intended to make a point without starting a full-fledged war, and still ended up being symbolically significant because it marked the first time that Iran had directly attacked Israel using like, missiles from their own country directly. So previously it had just been through proxies.

So that was one of the like, major stories that was happening at the time, and initially as I was watching this happen because it was one of the primary pieces of like, international drama that was really visible happening for like, the entire first half of the month or most of April, and initially it seemed like a disconnect to me in terms of events that we were expected with Palestine. However, as I was thinking about it and watching it more and reading the news, I realized that to the extent that Iran has backed HAMAS and Hezbollah and the Houthis in the past, there was already kind of an ongoing proxy or shadow war between Iran and Israel, and this was just the first time it became an open and direct conflict. So that kind of matched the symbolism of the eclipse. And as I looked into it more, I found out that the Supreme Leader of Iran was actually born the day of a solar eclipse in Aries, which is just stunning because we already know that the leader of Israel was born the day of a solar eclipse in Libra. So both of their charts have been activated by this series of eclipses that keeps bouncing back and forth between Libra and Aries over the past year. So all of this —

DIANA ROSE HARPER: One —

CB: — makes me – oh, go ahead.

DRH: I was just gonna say that just, it brings up something that I think has been discussed in the past, which is the way that the birth charts of leaders of nations in a way become a sort of proxy chart for the nation while they are in leadership positions.

CB: Right.

DRH: It’s just really striking to see how that is showing up in this particular instance.

CB: Exactly. That it’s like, if the leader of the country was born during an eclipse in a certain sign, that when an eclipse happens in that sign, something really important will happen with the country.

DRH: Yeah, exactly.

CB: Yeah. So all this makes me nervous, though, because sometimes eclipses represent momentous beginnings that have humble origins. And I’ve talked about this in previous episodes where it’s like, sometimes there’s a new beginning, but it’s something that doesn’t seem super important at first, but sometimes it acts as like, a sign or an omen of more important events to come. And sometimes eclipses are like starting points that develop into something more significant in the long term. So if that’s true, we would then expect significant developments at the next set of eclipses in Libra and Aries, such as the Libra eclipse in late September/early October of 2024 or the Aries eclipse in late March and early April of 2025. So we’ll have to see if that continues and what the next development is in terms of that story during those two next sets of eclipses.

[END CLIP]

All right, so that was the genesis of everything because I noticed that right on those eclipses that Israel assassinated some Iranian officials and that Iran in retaliation launched missiles at Israel directly for the first time so that even though Iran gave a lot of warning about the missiles and they didn’t really do any damage and it was viewed as kind of like, political theater at the time, I realized it was really important and symbolically significant because it was the first time that Iran had openly or directly shot missiles at Israel. And that sometimes one of the things I have learned over the years is that sometimes when something happens on an eclipse, it may look small at first or look insignificant or not that momentous, but if it’s the first time that that’s happened, it can sometimes be an omen that something has started at that time which will take much greater significance in retrospect. And that when you look back on it, you’ll realize that that was the moment that something very important began.

So that did end up being the case, and as we’ll see as we get into some of the other clips, especially six months later. But it already set up that I had noticed that that exchange took place on the eclipses, and I mentioned the next two target timeframes to pay attention to as a sort of prediction to confirm if that was true that there could be further escalations or developments. So and the two other timeframes I gave were the next two sets of eclipses over the next year, which would take place first in, what, September and October of 2024 and then again six months later in March and April of 2025.

So let’s jump forward to the next clip, then, which is months later when the next set of eclipses started to happen and had partially happened and what happened at that point.

All right, so this clip is from episode 464, the Astrology Forecast for October 2024, released on September 30, 2024.

[BEGIN CLIP]

In other news, Israel and Lebanon – there was another major eclipse story where for months now, we’d been anticipating that the next chapter in the ongoing saga of what’s happening with Israel would take place under this eclipse season because everything started a year ago around the time of the first Libra eclipse in October of 2023. Then the next stage was the next set of eclipses in March and April, and that’s when Iran and Israel started having open direct conflict for the first time with missiles being shot from Iran into Israel. And then now, what happened is the very day of the Pisces eclipse on September 17th, Israel set off explosives that were hidden in pagers and other devices that injured something around 3,000 people in Lebanon. And this seemed to be the opening sort of like, attack in what’s like, turning into a full war now between Israel and Lebanon, which has heated up since then and now they’re saying that they may be preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon, which may… It’s almost looking like may coincide around the time of that Libra eclipse that’s about to take place in early October. So we’re seeing the conflict there widening and becoming bigger, and there’s a lot of nervousness about this turning into an even bigger regional war than it already was.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Yeah. One of the – yeah, it was pretty striking to see that happening on the day of the eclipse, and then on the next day and the next day. One of the things that I thought was sort of interesting was that… So I’d been looking at Iran’s chart for a while, thinking about the difficulties in the region and the future. And so when that eclipse, or leading up to that eclipse, I was curious about how the fact that the eclipse in late Pisces being right on top of Iran’s natal Mercury and Mars – if we’re using the April 1st, 1979 chart – would manifest. And so it was interesting that the event, like the pager attack, did not occur in Iran but on Iran’s Mercury. And this was in that we’re looking at communication devices, we’re certainly looking at Mercury being the vector for the attack. So it was interesting to me that the astrology seemed to point towards the connections between Hezbollah and Iran, just in the chart, and that it also suggests that, you know, it plays into – that eclipse playing into Iran’s chart plays into the escalation of hostilities, which I’m sure all would prefer to not happen but looks like, it seems in large part inevitable at this point.

CB: Yeah. Well, that was one of the things that really came up earlier this year, especially around the time of the Aries eclipse when there started being that direct and open conflict between Iran and Israel. And that’ll be something we’ll have to look towards for the next set of eclipses, because this is gonna be the final Libra eclipse here in October. But then there will be one last eclipse as part of this series, which will take place early next year in Aries. Although with this new conflict with Lebanon really accelerating on the Pisces eclipse, it’s tricky because since that’s the first eclipse in that series, it could be opening up a window of another series of eclipses that’s gonna follow through in the subsequent ones in that axis of like, Pisces and Virgo. One of the —

AC: Yeah.

CB: One of the things that I noticed that was notable is that on September 27th, Israel killed the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and that was not too long after the Pisces eclipse. And I pulled up his chart, and it turns out that he was born just before a Pisces lunar eclipse. So it was like, he was – it was another instance that we’ve seen so many of over the past year, especially with this conflict, of people that are born under eclipses having sometimes really important turning points in their life happen subsequently under eclipses like in that instance.

AC: Yeah. And it’s important to note that that eclipse literally foreshadows another two years of eclipses. I don’t think we’ll be done with the Virgo-Pisces eclipses for – I think the last one’s occurring almost exactly two years – and so the nodes, the head and the tail of the dragon, haven’t moved into Virgo and Pisces yet, but we get a taste. You know, a quite literal foreshadowing with this eclipse that occurred in mid-September. And then for the one that occurs in early October, we’ll be in the process of finishing up what we’ve been doing for the last year and a half, but our next set in the spring will feature an eclipse in Virgo and then we’ll be in that cycle. So yeah, some rather dire foreshadowing.

CB: Yeah. So we’ll be paying close attention to what happens on the Libra eclipse that happens on October 2nd, because we’ve been tracking that all along because we know it’s tied in with very closely not just with the sequence of events, but also specifically with the birth chart of Israel, which has Libra rising, and with Netanyahu, who has a stellium in Libra and was born the day of a solar eclipse in Libra. So we’ll have to see what happens there in terms of what this final Libra eclipse is all about and how that marks an ending for things, but also a new beginning, which is always our keyword for eclipses, like major endings and major beginnings. So we’ll see how that plays out over the course of the next couple of weeks.

[END CLIP]

All right, so that clip is tricky with the timing, because that was at the end of September, and so it was during eclipse season but it was right in the middle of it. And the first eclipse had just taken place, which was the Virgo eclipse [Pisces eclipse]. But the next eclipse which would happen two weeks after the Virgo eclipse hadn’t happened yet; it was still, like, days away happening in early October. But because we have to record the monthly forecast episodes at the end of each month, we can’t wait sometimes to see what’ll happen on the eclipse even if it’s just like, days away.

So let’s see, so the important things about this eclipse were that we noted that right on that eclipse was when Israel did the pager attack on Hezbollah, and that ended up being like, opening up another conflict there. But now in retrospect, we can see that was like, one of the stepping stones essentially towards building up to eventually the attack on Iran, which is essentially like, attacking and taking out some of their proxies, starting with Hezbollah in September of 2024. And then what we’ll see in the next clip is that when the Libra eclipse took place just days after we recorded this forecast, there was a couple of really crucial things that happened. The main one that happened that was important was that Israel did invade Lebanon and started a ground war with Hezbollah. And then the most important thing was the same day, Iran launched missiles directly at Israel again for only the second time. But it was happening right on the next eclipse, so it ended up fulfilling what we’d been waiting to see for six months at that point, which is that if there would be another step in the conflict between Israel and Iran on that set of eclipses, which there were.

So one of the important takeaways from this, though, now it retrospect is that I noted towards the end was what was weird about the first eclipse is that it was switching to a new series, which is up to this point, the eclipses had been taking place in Aries and Libra. And we understood how that affected Israel, because Israel has planets in Libra, or its like, rising in Libra, and especially Netanyahu was born the day of a Libra eclipse. So he has that signature in his birth chart, and so all those eclipses had been important to him and by extension, because he’s the leader of the country, important for the state as a whole. And then we started to understand how the Aries eclipses were important to Iran because as I had already noted, I had discovered that the Supreme Leader of Iran was born on a solar eclipse in Aries.

But one of the questions at this point was that the eclipses were starting to shift out of the Aries-Libra axis and to move into the Virgo-Pisces axis. And so there was a question about whether there would be… Whether the sequence of events would somehow come to an end once eclipses started taking place in new signs, or whether there would be some sort of continuation. And what we saw on this eclipse really dramatically is that there was kind of a continuation even though it’s shifting into new signs. And this first eclipse occurred in Pisces, and then Israel attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon. So that’ll come up again six months later when we have the next eclipse in that same series where the next eclipse would take place in Virgo in March of 2025. And that ends up being when the US strikes Yemen and strikes the Houthis in Yemen along with support from Israel. So we’ll circle back around to that, but that’s one of the takeaways from that. So let’s go forward to the next clip now, which will then occur after the Libra eclipse happens and we sort of assess what just took place on that eclipse.

So this clip is from ep 466, titled Astrology Forecast for November 2024, released October 30th, 2024.

[BEGIN CLIP]

There’s been a ton of stuff, because of course early last month in the first half of the month, we had the second leg of eclipse season where we had an eclipse that occurred in Pisces in the previous month at the end of September, and then there was an eclipse that occurred in the sign of Libra at the very beginning of October, and there were many different news stories that really focused on that eclipse around that time.

So the first news story, of course, was there were some major events that happened between Israel, Lebanon, and Iran. And we had anticipated that this eclipse season, especially the Libra eclipse, would be the next phase or the next installment of the continuing saga between especially those countries in the Middle East, and indeed right on pretty much on the eclipse within 24 hours on October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon and began a ground war. And this occurred right before the eclipse occurred in Libra on October 2nd.

So this had been preceded exactly two weeks earlier on the previous eclipse, which occurred on September 17th, by the pager attack, which occurred when hundreds or thousands of pagers were exploded in Lebanon, which then acted as a precursor. So again, we’ve seen events lining up extremely closely in terms of different things that’s happening there, especially in terms of Israel and some of the different steps that have been taken and different turning points.

Also the same day on October 1st, Iran launched missiles at Israel, reportedly in retaliation for some assassinations that had occurred over the previous few months. So it ended up being like, a major day when a bunch of stuff was happening all centered right on that Libra eclipse. So that made a lot, I mean, sense in terms of us having expected a continuation and an important turning point, and then really seeing some major developments happening, I think, right?

AC: Yeah. Well, we saw this set of situations emerge last October when we had a Libra solar eclipse, and that’s when this round of hostilities got going, and then we saw things – you know, we saw for lack of better language the next episode or installment six months later during that set of eclipses. And shortly after the attacks and retaliations last year, we both looked into the history, and we found that every time there were eclipses, especially the South Node – every time there were eclipses in Libra and Aries, especially with the Node Node in Aries and the South Node in Libra, there was another round of deadly hostilities between Israel and neighbors. And so based on the history, we’d expect at every round of these eclipses beginning with the ones this spring and then continuing with the set of eclipses we just experienced over the last month to bring more of this and to tell that terrible story.

CB: Yeah, for sure. Especially with the birth chart of Israel having Libra rising and with the current leader of Israel, Netanyahu, having a Libra stellium and being born on the day of a Libra eclipse. And earlier this year, we had noted that on one of these two eclipses, I think it was – was it the Aries eclipse that ended up being the first time that Iran directly launched missiles at Israel. So this second set of eclipses where again there was this open launching of missiles between the two countries ended up being a striking connection astrologically between those dates six months ago earlier this year that coincided with eclipses, and then the ones this month that also coincided with eclipses.

AC: Yeah. There’s been too much stuff to go over here right now. The solar eclipse in April also set the stage for the sudden disappearance of several members of top level Iranian leadership in the helicopter crash, which has not been linked directly to the hostilities but still plays into the story regardless.

CB: Yeah, for sure. And so speaking of that, then this month on the Full Moon – very close to the Full Moon that was like, a really difficult Full Moon in Aries that we talked about in the middle of October – Israel killed the leader of Hamas at that time. And he was said to have been the architect of the October 7th attacks, and it was striking because this was the first Full Moon that was not an eclipse in the sign of Aries in over a year now. And it wasn’t just that Full Moon, but also there was the appearance of a comet at that time, and I had talked about this – a comet – in the year ahead forecast, because in ancient astrology, a lot of the texts that talk about comets are very foreboding because they talk about like, world leaders dying and important people dying and things like that. And I thought there was a striking coincidence between the greatest visibility of this comet and then the leader of Hamas being killed or being assassinated at that time, in terms of just like, world events and prominent people and some of those ancient astrological principles or concepts still being relevant today.

AC: Yeah, for sure. And we also sort of muddying the waters or sort of densifying the omens. We also had a comet during eclipse season in the spring as well.

CB: Right, yeah. That’s true. All right, so other things that happened in terms of that. On the 25th of this month of October, just a few days ago, Israel struck back at Iran, and there just keeps being this tit for tat that keeps going back and forth and seems to be like, escalating every time we go into one of these new periods.

So the next set of eclipses is gonna occur in about six months in March and early April, and we’d expect another major turning point and continuation of some of these events at that point. And actually, it continues to escalate so much, especially when Aries keeps getting activated – not just the Libra sign, but also Aries – that there’s a ton of stuff happening in Aries next month [next year], which is actually starting to make me very nervous because it seems to heighten the possibility of further escalation where we’re gonna have Venus going retrograde next spring early next year, we’re gonna have Saturn and Neptune moving into Aries, we’re gonna have one last Aries eclipse take place around that time. And it seems like especially Israel keeps responding to Libra transits and Iran keeps responding sometimes to Aries transits. So that’s one of the things we’ll be paying attention to early next year.

AC: Yeah. Well, one of the charts that’s used for modern Iran has the Sun in Aries and a Leo rising. And so all the Aries stuff would be on Iran’s Aries Sun, which is also the ruler of the rising, which is… That things in Aries keep triggering events for Iran suggests that that chart’s pretty useful. And then I guess to add to concerns about, yeah, March, April of next year, the Aries ingress chart, which is, you know – which is a tool used for mundane calculation like what will happen to this nation – for Iran next year has Mars conjunct the degree of the rising, which is a very strong indicator of not peace. I couldn’t find too many precedents, because modern Iran – like, post-revolution Iran – is only, it’s literally about… I think it’s three weeks older or three weeks younger than I am. It’s ‘79, it’s spring of ‘79. But the year that Iraq invaded Iran, Mars was also on the rising – that time in Leo – the rising of the Aries ingress chart. And so, yeah, there are a number, there are two eyebrows, and they’re mine, and they’re permanently raised about that region, especially Iran, coming into next spring.

[END CLIP]

CB: All right, so that was important because there were two major takeaways that we realized at that point in time. One of them was that there continued to be – there was this continuing escalation that did happen on the second set of eclipses that took things even further than six months earlier when there was the first set of missiles and this direct exchange between Iran and Israel. So one of the things is that we could see that on the eclipses, things between Iran and Israel were continuing to escalate. And so that then made us much more nervous about knowing that six months later in March and April, there would be another set of eclipses which then we expected would be another escalation, and the questions of like, what does another escalation look like then if they’re already starting to shoot missiles at each other and are assassinating each other’s leaders or attempting to?

So that was one thing that we learned is that the eclipses were tied in with this exchange between Iran and Israel, and it was escalating and that there was another set that was coming up six months from that time.

The second thing that was a new piece of information that Austin discovered and introduces for the first time in that clip was that in the Aries ingress chart for essentially like, the chart of the year set for the capital of Iran – for Tehran – for starting in March of 2025 when the Sun goes into Aries for the first time and sort of creates the birth chart or the inception chart for the year in some sense, which has been used in mundane astrology for over a thousand years now, that Austin discovered that in that chart, the moment that the Sun moves into Aries, that Mars would be exactly on the degree of the Ascendant at 20 degrees of Cancer. And in researching other years in which that took place – because that just in and of itself is an ominous sign, Mars on the Ascendant in the solar return chart, essentially, or the Aries ingress chart for the year, is an omen of war and conflict essentially is what he was pointing out there. And then when he went back and researched other years or when was the last time that that happened where there was an Aries ingress chart for the start of the year that had Mars on the Ascendant, and Austin found out that it was at the beginning of the war between Iran and Iraq, which was this major war in the 1980s that cost a lot of lives on both sides basically. So that was like, a major ominous find that starting in March of the following year – like, six months from when we were talking at that point – that this chart would kick in, and it seemed to indicate major conflict and war based on the prominence of Mars. And that then added to the concern that we already had based on the repeating theme of escalations every six months on eclipses. So now all of a sudden, we had two very strong reasons to think that there would be a further major escalation, especially in the March-April timeframe of 2025. But also just extending then to the rest of the year of 2025 and early 2026, because Austin had found that that Aries ingress chart, which is then relevant for the entire next year.

So that was sort of the next installment, and you can see that we’re kind of like, processing that information and getting increasingly alarmed and increasingly convinced then that there would be an escalation coming in 2025.

All right, so let’s go to the next clip, which is from episode 472, which is our year ahead forecast for 2025, which we released on December 23rd, 2024.

[BEGIN CLIP]

The Venus retrograde is connected with and takes us into – as we already talked about – the Aries eclipse, which takes place on March 29th, 2025. This is the final eclipse in this series. I think this eclipse is gonna be really important for geopolitical events, because every other eclipse that’s occurred in Aries over the past year and a half, all of it started in October of 2023 with the first set of eclipses in Libra and then eventually Aries. And each installment has then, every six month, been a further escalation between Israel and other countries – with Palestine, with Iran, with Lebanon, and so on and so forth. So we would expect it then to coincide with another major turning point in terms of that sequence of events in that whole saga.

AC: And being the last one, we would expect it to be something decisive that either finishes an arc or takes things into their final phase.

CB: Yeah. And it seems like it keeps escalating each time, though, so I’m concerned that it’s gonna represent a significant escalation. Eclipses can sometimes represent major endings of things, but they can also represent a new beginning of something. And the fact that it occurs and then we all of a sudden get a bunch of other planets moving into Aries just makes me think that it’s some sort of event that sets off another series of events.

AC: Yeah. It’s gonna make things messier. And one of the things that I hypothesized before the eclipse that has ended up being confirmed several times by events as well as by historical research is for whatever reasons, the North Node in Aries and then its subsequent eclipses – solar eclipses in Aries – are correlated extremely strongly with assassinations, or the sudden removal of heads of state. The death of Iran’s head of state as well as several other high-ranking officials happened very shortly after the solar eclipse in Aries in 2024. And then I was led through research, I stumbled upon the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., was also assassinated right after a solar eclipse in Aries on the North Node. And we’ve seen just during this period of time while the North Node is in Aries an unusual number of assassinations in a number of different theatres.

CB: Yeah. And not just – there’s definitely assassinations, but also sometimes the eclipsing of a world leader like when Biden stepped down last year —

AC: Yeah.

CB: — and how that was a repetition of 1968 when Lyndon Johnson stepped down. That idea of Aries also represents, as we were saying earlier, like, the head of the body physically, but also can represent the head and like, leadership of countries, perhaps also of like, companies, like major companies and other things —

AC: Absolutely.

CB: — like that. Yeah.

AC: Any like, leader of an organization or a military or… You know, Aries is the place where the Sun is supposed to be maximally exalted. Right? Where we have like, the height of leadership. And so this is yet another thing – how many have we mentioned now – that has leadership in its sights. You know, we talked about Saturn and Neptune in Aries doing that; Pluto does that. Like, this is watching the status of leaders. Like, one – who gets to be a leader? Because we get – some of our factors give us bad leaders. Some of them don’t necessarily give us bad leaders, but embattle or kill existing leaders. There’s so much that, you know… I think you did a nice job, Chris, by just pointing out that Aries is the head. There are so many different guns and hammers and pepper spray cans pointed at the head this year and next year as well.

CB: Yeah. For sure. So while eclipse season centers on March because the Aries eclipse occurs at the very end of March, it’s gonna bleed into early April. Major beginnings and major endings, escalation of some things but wrapping up others. And then also there’s the first Virgo eclipse two weeks earlier like I said in the middle of March, and this is the first time that we’ve seen an eclipse occur in this sign in many years. And it’s like, the second foot in the door of the sequence of eclipses that just began last year in September when we had the first eclipse in Pisces. So we’re gonna get the first initial like, preview of that, especially whatever house that’s falling in in your chart, and then we’re gonna revisit that again six months later in September when we get an eclipse fully in Pisces and fully in Virgo.

And guess when Neptune makes its first station? July 4th, 2025. So right on the birthday of the United States, we get Neptune making its very first station in the sign of Aries since the time frame of like, the mid-1800s and the Civil War era on our solar return that year. And then if that wasn’t enough, then Uranus goes into Gemini three days later on July 7th, and then Saturn makes its first station in Aries on July 13th, 2025. So July also becomes a big month in the year.

AC: Absolutely. There’s a lot of fun over the summer.

[END CLIP]

All right, so the main thing from the year ahead clip is just that it was what was stated towards the beginning of that clip, which is just that we were expecting a decisive escalation then, especially in terms of things between Iran and Israel, in the March-April timeframe around eclipse season as a result of the eclipses, but also as a result of some of the other things that we were starting to pay attention to, such as Austin’s pointing out the Aries ingress chart that would kick in in mid-March. But also because in doing the year ahead forecast, we realized that it wasn’t just this Aries eclipse that was gonna take place in March of 2025, but that once that happened, a bunch of other stuff would start taking place in Aries as well, including the Venus retrograde in Aries, the Mercury retrograde in Aries, Neptune moving into Aries and then Saturn moving into Aries later in May. So we had already established that Aries is important for Iran and Libra is important for Israel, so that was part of the reason that we started getting even more concerned, because we start seeing that there’s gonna be not just the eclipses but also this cascade of a bunch of other transits that are also happening around and not long after that time. So that’s what we said in the year ahead forecast.

All right, so let’s jump to the next clip, which is from episode 475, which was actually from a non-forecast episode because that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to put together some of this compilation, because even though a lot of our predictions and statements about Iran were made on the forecast episodes, I actually in early 2025 I was doing a lot of other research projects on other repetitions of different planetary cycles that were happening this year in 2025. And Iran kept coming up, so I would mention when I found new things, but it also sort of continued to like, raise my alarm and concern that some major conflict was coming up, essentially. And so I would actually either repeat or reiterate some of those predictions about Iran on some of the non-forecast episodes earlier this year.

So this one’s from episode 475, titled Venus Retrograde in Aries in History, that I did with Nick Dagan Best. And we released that on January 25th, 2025, although it was recorded on January 10th.

[BEGIN CLIP]

We do know that some major geopolitical stuff’s gonna happen in March and April. Austin and I talked about it in the year ahead forecast, so people can go and listen to that for more. You know, the Neptune ingress into Aries, the last time that happened was the beginning of the US Civil War in the 1800s. The Uranus return of the US is also happening, which you and I have talked about, Nick. And we have the final Aries eclipse in March. And all of those have coincided with things with Israel and Iran especially over the past year. So that’s likely to be the focal point, so that’s one thing that we’ll pay attention to, because I noticed this Venus retrograde does show up a few times in the history of Israel. So —

NICK DAGAN BEST: Oh yeah.

[END CLIP]

Okay, so I mentioned just in passing that the Venus retrograde in Aries shows up in the history of Israel, and the important thing about that clip though is just that I was reiterating and emphasizing further that we were expecting something important coming up. And I also mentioned something there that we also talked about extensively. It was a little bit in the clip from the year ahead forecast, but we actually had a more extensive segment on another piece that ties into this somewhat, which is our awareness that Uranus would enter Gemini on July 7th, 2025, and that this would be the beginning of the Uranus return of the United States. And this is something I’ve talked about, I’ve dedicated entire episodes to in the past. There was one I did with Nick Dagan Best in 2013, and there was one I did with Nick Dagan Best in 2022, which you can just search like, the Uranus return of the United States, and you’ll find those episodes. But the main thing that was important is just that we’ve been aware – astrologers have been aware – for a number of years about this repetition that happens, which is that Uranus has gone through Gemini three times in US history, starting with the US Revolutionary War. Uranus was in Gemini during that war from 1774 to 1782. And then Uranus returned back to that sign 84 years later, and that happened to coincide with the Civil War from 1858 to 1866. Then Uranus came back 84 years later, and that coincided with the US’s entry into World War Two from 1941 to 1949. And then finally, Uranus would return to Gemini in 2025 all the way until 2033.

So that repetition we’ve talked about in many other contexts, but sort of plays a background role because going all the way back to the 2013 episode I did with Nick Dagan Best, we were talking about if that pattern holds up, then it implies that the US could get into a major war starting in the 2025-2026 timeframe as Uranus goes back into Gemini, repeating this transit and this repetition that the US has had that coincided with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War Two, which were all huge wars and huge turning points in US history. Although part of the pattern is mixed, because in the Civil War, it was an internal conflict where the country turned on each other, essentially, or inward on itself, whereas in World War Two and the Revolutionary War, it was an external conflict. So as we talked about, there had been different scenarios about whether it would be an internal conflict or an external conflict or both, but that was also part of the background in terms of looking at the transits this year that ended up being relevant even though we’re sort of treating it as like, separate from the reason why we became so concerned and focused on Iran, which was because of initially the eclipses and then the Aries ingress chart, and then as we’ll see, some other repetitions that I started to find early in the year.

So that’s an important piece of background info that we’ll come back to I think a little bit later on, but I wanted to mention it here since it’s already come up a couple of times.

All right, so let’s move onto the next clip, which is from episode 479, which I did with Nick Dagan Best where we did a research project on Mars retrograde periods in Cancer in US history. And this was released on February 25th, 2025.

[BEGIN CLIP]

So the part that is nervous [nervous making], of course, about that, is that period is coming up then over the next few months in terms of Trump’s presidency and just in terms of the potential for like, a military debacle. I have been anticipating a major geopolitical event that happens in March and April largely related to the eclipses, because over the past year every time there’s an eclipse, Iran and Israel have started firing missiles at each other openly for the first time. And so the next set of eclipses we’ve anticipated could potentially be an escalation of that, which if true could be a major thing that happens if that’s what all of the crazy astrology is about over the next two months that comes up in March and April, especially around that Aries eclipse. But we’ll have to just see what happens.

[END CLIP]

Okay, so I showed that clip just because I wanted to have every reference that I made to Iran and the potential for a war and a conflict and just to reiterate that I was like, abnormally concerned and certain that a conflict was coming up and that an escalation would take place because the more I looked at it, the more it seemed likely that that would happen and that we were really focused on March and April and especially those eclipses coming up among other things. So I’m mentioning it on a bunch of different episodes during the early part of the year.

All right, so the next clip is from episode 480, and this is the Astrology Forecast for March of 2025, which was released on February 27th, 2025. So this is just the forecast basically that preceded the month of March.

[BEGIN CLIP]

We need to talk about the culmination and arguably potentially the most important event of the month, which is the solar eclipse that occurs in Aries at the very end of March on the 29th of the month. And this is the big one. Like, this is a pretty notable eclipse that we’ve been looking forward to and has been on my radar for quite a while, because every other eclipse in this series over the past year or year and a half has coincided with major geopolitical events in the world especially. And the one that has made me the most nervous is that a year ago, when Iran and Israel started shooting missiles at each other for the first time with the first direct missiles shot at each other, that was under the eclipse season that was occurring in Aries a year ago. And then six months after that, when they started again openly shooting missiles at each other again, that was during the next eclipse series. So one of the things we talked about in the year ahead forecast is anticipating some sort of continuation or potentially even an escalation of that conflict that occurs around the time of this eclipse. So that’s one of the major things that I wanted to talk about right from the start just because that’s been such a reliable thing over the past year or two.

AC: Yeah, no, it’s definitely worrying. And you know, after some of those events and in addition to the missiles flying, we also had a lot of the senior leadership in Iran die in a plane crash. There have been assassinations. And this cycle of eclipses in Aries and Libra – which this is the culmination of, this is the final episode of this – is historically correlated very strongly not only with wars for Israel, but also assassinations in general. Like, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed under this nodal cycle, and we’ve seen a lot of assassinations and other decapitations where an organization becomes leaderless – not necessarily through a physical decapitation, although that seems not off the menu for this cycle. So yeah, if we’re talking about big endings or big finales to a series, here we are. This one so far has proved quite violent. And you and I are both quite concerned that more is to come.

CB: Yeah. And even just sometimes the mysterious like, disappearance of like, a head of state or people in a leadership role. And when some of this was happening last year, we were theorizing about it and the fact that you could kind of approach that in two different angles in terms of the symbolism where on the one hand, it’s Aries, which in the body parts assigned to different signs of the zodiac, Aries is always the head. So it’s like, the head or literally like the leader of something. But then on the other hand, Aries is also the sign of the exaltation of the Sun, so the Sun – which represents like, the centralized authority figure – being in the sign of its throne or being raised up to its most prominent point. But then suddenly when you have eclipses there, suddenly you have the disappearance of something, of that leadership person, or the extinguishing of a light that’s otherwise leading. And sometimes that can happen very dramatically and as you said violently in the case with the leader of Iran last year. And I think that happened when like, Mars was on the node or something like that.

But then you also had last year with the eclipses, like, Biden for example stepping aside during the presidential race was historic. And one of the things that we noted was that the last time that that had happened was in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson stepped aside similarly and didn’t seek re-election, which was also solar eclipses happening in Aries. So sometimes this notion of like, a leader disappearing or stepping down more broadly is also very relevant.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s see, what else is there to say? Yeah, this is the – so this sequence began – when was our very first eclipse on the Libra-Aries axis? It’s been at least —

CB: I mean, that was —

AC: — a year and a half.

CB: That was October 7th.

AC: Was that the very first one?

CB: That was Libra – I think that was the first solar eclipse in Libra happened like a week – it started a week after October 7th when everything just went crazy between Iran and Palestine – or between Israel and Palestine.

AC: Yeah, you’re right, because that was – the one was in Taurus, so we were finished up the Scorpio-Taurus series. Right. So —

CB: Right.

AC: — October of 2023 is when the Libra-Aries sequence began.

CB: Yeah. So then that also means that Aries didn’t begin in full until the first solar eclipse in Aries which occurred one year ago in the spring of 2024, and that was the one that I really took note of, because that was the first time that Iran launched missiles directly at Israel. That up to that point, a lot of it had been done through proxy wars and like, indirect and covert stuff like that. But then all of a sudden for the first time, the news was pointing out that this was the first time that they had openly shot missiles at each other. And even though it was done partially for show and not much damage happened either time, symbolically we still took great note of that because we knew it was happening under eclipses, and that sometimes when stuff happens under eclipses, it’s things that look small at first, but you look back and realize the significance in retrospect, that it was a much more momentous beginning than you realized at the time.

AC: Yeah. And I think a flight of missiles is not that subtle. But yeah, and you know, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know, some time last year in thinking about this I went and looked at the Aries ingress chart. What does the chart look like for Iran at the moment of the equinox, which is again used historically to predict events. And Mars is conjunct the degree of the rising in Iran’s Aries ingress, which is a strong predictor of intensified hostilities if not outright war. There was one other year where Iran had Mars conjunct the Ascendant in the Aries ingress chart since the revolution, and that was the year that Iraq invaded Iran and began a destructive and bloody war. So —

CB: Wow.

AC: — there are lot of – yeah. And if you look at the chart for post-revolution Iran, then you also have an Aries Sun. Right? Which of course overlaps with the area where these eclipses have happened. And the rising is Leo, which is ruled by the Sun, which makes sense of the like, chunk of leadership dying shortly after the last eclipse last year as well as the, you know, the other issues. So very, a lot of fingers pointing to Iran during this period.

[END CLIP]

All right, so there’s one important correction there where Austin asked me at one point when that eclipse series started, and it actually – and I said that it started with the Libra eclipse which happened in October 2023, and it’s true that the first eclipse in Libra took place then. However, the entire series actually began in April of 2023 six months earlier when there was the first eclipse in Aries. So that was something I overlooked at the time that this entire series goes back then, and in the news, there was actually a major escalation of a conflict between Israel and Iran at that time around the time of the eclipse that took place on April 19th, 2023. Yeah, April 19th, 2023. So there was a development that took place between Iran and Israel in April of 2023 that sort of foreshadowed a lot of what would develop later, and there was also a major flareup according to the news between Israel and Palestine especially due to conflict surrounding the Al-Aqsa mosque and some things that were happening in the news around that time. So that eclipse in April of 2023 ended up foreshadowing what would happen and everything that would begin first in October of 2023 at the next set of eclipses six months later, and then again six months after that in April of 2024, and then six months after that in September and October of 2024, and then again finally culminating with the most recent set of eclipses in March and April of 2025. So that’s one additional piece of information and just a correction right there about the sequence of everything and just tracing all of this back to where it began closer, actually, to April of 2023.

All right. So the next clip is from episode 483, which is from an episode titled Saturn-Neptune Conjunctions in History that I did with Nick Dagan Best, which was released on March 25th, 2025. So this is important because this is happening like, later in March of 2025 just before the Aries eclipse, and there’s been stuff taking place. But one of the most important things is in doing this research episode with Nick on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, I noticed that these conjunctions had come up a couple of times in the history of Iran recently, especially in 1953 in association with the coup that took place at that time when the US and the British overthrew the ruler at the time in Iran and installed the Shah. And then later, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that took place in the late 1980s. So that’s the context of this clip and why I wanna show it, so let’s take a look.

[BEGIN CLIP]

Yeah. So and that was also is worth mentioning just in and of itself that the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War was taking place in like, 1987 and 1988, so that was winding down at that time. So that’s somewhat important, because it brings up Iran, and Iran does come up in some of the earlier ones, like in the conjunction in the early 1950s, right?

NDB: Yeah. It was in 1953 that there was this CIA-backed coup to oust, you know, a leader – Mosaddegh – who the Americans would have considered socialist or something like that, but really all he wanted to do was nationalize the country’s oil reserves. You know, countries owning their own resources – a similar thing happened in Guatemala and the United Fruit Company the following year in ‘54. But yeah, there was a coup to oust a leader who was not as friendly to the US as the US thought he should be, and they introduced this coup to really keep the existing Shah, the royal leader that they had installed in 1941 when they were fighting the Nazis and the Nazis wanted Iranian oil, and so the Brits and the Russians went out and took out the existing Shah, put in his son, and now the Americans had inherited that whole situation. And with Eisenhower now in the White House, and the people he chose to run the CIA, there was now this new sort of level of interference in countries. And this would be something that would come back to bite everyone when the Iranian Revolution happened a quarter century later.

CB: Right. That – the CIA engaging in that coup on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the early 1950s – became the core wound, basically, between the US and Iran, because then eventually later the Iranians would overthrow that leader who’d been —

NDB: The Shah.

CB: — put into, the Shah who’d been put into place by the CIA. And it would lead to subsequent decades of tensions between Iran and the United States, all the way up and to this day. And then now we’re seeing the recurrence of that with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction right now, and there’s, yeah. Trump has been telegraphing that there’s gonna be an attack on Iran a lot recently, and we’ve basically just been waiting to see if that’s gonna happen and what it’s gonna look like and how bad it’s gonna be. Especially on this conjunction I’ve been paying attention to that comes up at the end of the month I’ve been very nervous about and have talked about several times on the podcast recently. But the recurrence of that conjunction, again, potentially could bring into focus the relationship and antipathy between Iran and Israel that goes all the way back to that conjunction in the early 1950s.

NDB: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. All right. So moving onto other ones. I wanna start hitting some other ones really fast. One that I noticed that was really striking was under the 1989 conjunction, just after it, Yemen was unified where Yemen used to be divided into two parts – like a North Yemen and South Yemen – and in 1990, they were unified and became like, a single state or a single republic. And that’s, you know, relevant right now because Yemen is in the news because Trump just recently on the eclipse that just happened in Virgo launched what has been said in the news was his biggest military operation in the Middle East since he was inaugurated in January when they started launching strikes on Yemen. So I thought it was interesting that Yemen came up under this last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the late 1980s.

NDB: Yeah. That was a sort of a brief respite for Yemen. They endured a lot of bombing by the British in the ‘60s, and you know, in this instance, Trump is not the first US president to have bombed them even in the 21st century. I think they’ve all done it. So yeah, it’s been going on for a while, but certainly it seems to be going to another level now, particularly because, like you said, if Trump’s taking on Iran, then Yemen is seen as their client state, and so yeah, you wouldn’t fight one without fighting the other. Or you are sort of fighting one by fighting the other, even.

CB: Right. Yeah. Oh, right, that’s a good point – the connection between Iran and Yemen.

All right. So that is the last major thing. There’s a bunch of other like, miscellaneous things, like even really interesting ones. Like, one of them is like, Ayatollah Khomeini issuing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for a book that he published at that time, which was an interesting like, religious edict calling for the —

NDB: Yeah. And he also —

CB: — death of a novelist.

NDB: Yeah, and then Khomeini himself died in 1989 during the conjunction as well. And as I recall, they were carrying his coffin through the crowd, and somehow his corpse slipped out of the coffin.

CB: Wow.

NDB: You know, there on TV news. Yeah. And you know, given what we were talking about, you know, the coup in 1953 in Iran at the previous Saturn-Neptune, the death of Khomeini, you know, really put Iran in a whole new situation because the guy who had spearheaded the revolution in ‘78, ‘79 was gone, and now you had, you know, a movement without its leader.

CB: Okay. That’s really important. That seems really relevant then.

[END CLIP]

All right, so one of the pieces that’s important about that that I only learned recently after that episode that provides some additional interesting context – and I mentioned this in the July forecast episode, the forecast that we recorded at the end of June for July, which I forgot to mention is kind of like, a precursor to watching this episode because I summarized a bunch of stuff about what had just happened with the US and Israeli strike on Iran that took place in June that I’m not gonna completely go into here all of that exactly. But this clip’s piece kind of goes together with that, so make sure you check that out for additional context of some of the astrology of things that happened over the past month.

But one of the things that was important that I learned recently that I mentioned in that forecast was that about the 1953 coup that occurred under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction is there was a particular piece of that that really fit the Saturn-Neptune conjunction which is that part of the process of the coup happening was that the group that was backed by the CIA took over the primary radio station in Iran at the time during the early phases of the coup. And they took it over and they announced that the government had fallen, but the government hadn’t fallen at that time, so it was just a piece of fake news basically. But as a result of them announcing that, it set off this chain of events that actually did cause the government to fall once people were sort of like, mislead into believing that that had happened. And one historian that I was reading an interview by said that this was like, one of the most significant like, pieces of fake news that had occurred in recent history or something like that. And I thought that was amazing in terms of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction piece where you have the disintegration of an established structure, but also you have something that happens as a result of deception or misdirection or confusion, which are all Neptunian things. And Nick and I actually in that very episode when we were talking about the 1989 conjunction, we noted that something similar happened in Germany with the Berlin Wall when it fell under that Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn, which is that there was some sort of like, miscommunication between the higher ups – the people that were like, running the Wall at that point, the Berlin Wall – and there was a miscommunication. And something was like, conveyed to like, the lower down people saying that they could like, start crossing or something like that. But that wasn’t the case at all, and they just got like, an order that wasn’t true. But as a result of that, it snowballed and then turned into this thing very quickly where the Wall actually was brought down as a result of this like, almost like, miscommunication that took place.

So there’s some interesting parallel there between those two Saturn-Neptune conjunctions and the toppling of something essentially involving a Neptunian element of miscommunication or deception or other things like that. And so that’s one of the alignments that’s recurring right now, so it’s one of the like, archetypal pieces to kind of pay attention to and look out for as we continue to see the unfoldment of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s getting very close and coming within a degree for the first time this month in July of 2025. And then it’ll eventually go exact early next year, especially around February of 2026.

All right, so I think that’s the main thing from there, so let’s look at the next clip. And this next clip is from episode 484, which is the Astrology Forecast for April of 2025 that we released on April 1st, 2025. So a bunch of stuff has just taken place; everything has like, escalated significantly. The final eclipse in Aries has just taken place, but it’s just happened like, a day or two earlier before that, so we’re still anticipating things and things are still playing out. But we finally reached the important month and some really critical stuff is happening that really did escalate between involving Iran. So let’s take a look at that clip.

[BEGIN CLIP]

Also on the eclipse, on March 15th, the US began a large-scale set of strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, and this was like, right after the Virgo eclipse within 24 hours of it. So this was purportedly due to attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea that the Houthis have been carrying out over the past year or two, so much so that many ships had been recently having to go all the way around Africa and avoiding the Red Sea altogether due to being boarded or being shot at. So but Trump also said that it was supposed to issue or send a message to Iran, which is one of the main supporters and backers of the Houthis. And these airstrikes are still ongoing now two weeks later.

The biggest story this month, honestly, and the one that was the most overlooked but is starting to become more recognized and which I had been focused on for months now and anticipating was that the likelihood of a US strike on Iran has been steadily increasing and intensifying all month. And that was been the main story I’ve been tracking, because I both expected this to happen, but it’s also been scary to see it actually start to unfold where – just to give a very brief synopsis of part of the sequence – at the beginning of the month, there was reporting that Trump had sent a letter to Iran with a two-month deadline in early March, and he threatened that either they negotiate a nuclear deal, or there will be military action. And you know, what was ironic about that is Trump famously pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal agreement in 2018 which had already been negotiated by the previous administration.

And something I had forgotten about and I was surprised to like, realize and remember this month is like, we were already heading towards a war with Iran during Trump’s first term in 2020 when on January 3rd, 2020, he assassinated that famous prominent Iran general, Soleimani, on January 3rd. And that was actually right in between eclipses; it was right after one eclipse and right before another, and he assassinated that Iranian general who was in Iraq for like, a funeral or something. But then covid happened, and it completely interrupted everything, and then Trump was voted out of office later that year, and it sort of like, averted stuff. But now that he’s back in office, we have things escalating again.

So he wrote that letter, giving a two-month deadline at the beginning of March, and then all month, Trump keeps telegraphing that there would be an attack and like, referring to it constantly with not very veiled language. And at first, Iran responds and says it will not be threatened. But then later in the month, Iran released a video of these vast underground bases with missiles and missile-launching trucks that were ready to go into use. And then late in the month, a bunch of B-2 stealth bombers started gathering from the US at Diego Garcia Base, which is in the Indian Ocean and is within striking distance of Iran. And there’s no reason for all of those bombers to be gathering there if not, at the very least, to intimidate and put pressure on Iran, but potentially in preparation for an actual strike.

So then Iran sees this, and they eventually respond to the letter really close to the Aries eclipse. And I think that’s one of the things that happened on the Aries eclipse is that Iran responded to Trump’s letter finally. And then later, there’s one carrier that’s already in the Middle East which is part of what’s striking the Houthis, but now there’s a second carrier strike group from the US that’s on its way to the Middle East as well, which is gonna put two carriers in the same region, which again heightens the potential for a strike. So just yesterday on March 30th, right after the eclipse, Trump said, “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing, and it will be a bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”

So it’s like, statements like this where he just keeps telegraphing this attack, and the whole situation is becoming incredibly intense, and it looks like it’s heading in that direction. So what’s weird is that it seems to be happening a little later than I expected after the eclipse, because I thought the Aries eclipse would be the turning point and yet it’s still clearly building up and seems to be heading in that direction. So the eclipse itself may have been the bombers like, constellating at that base at Diego Garcia, as well as whatever Iran’s response to the letter was, because I’m not sure if it was fully clear. I think the main thing they said is that they weren’t gonna negotiate with Trump directly, but they would negotiate indirectly. And I don’t know if part of what happens on the eclipse is that he takes that as his final provocation or justification to do whatever he’s gonna do.

So the immediate eclipse range is still active through the first week of April, and there’s some other stuff going on. But this is, yeah, one of the major things that’s formulating that people are starting to notice and become aware of, but I’m more alarmed about than I think even the general public is because we’ve been anticipating a major exchange with Iran for a while now due to these eclipses.

AC: Yeah. And a couple other things that support that. I remember it was before the last set of eclipses when I was thinking about Iran that I found a number of things around this time that, some of which you described and some of which I’ll describe shortly, that raised my eyebrows.

So in addition to what you mentioned, there’s also the Aries ingress chart – the chart used for predicting the events for a nation for the coming year for Iran, which came into effect on March 20th, but will be in effect all year, especially the first three months, has Mars directly on the Ascendant, which is according to the older texts is an almost sure indication of war, and which was present the last time that Iran was part of a war, which was when Iraq invaded shortly after the Iranian Revolution. And then if you look at the chart for this regime in Iran, it’s about – we’re about the same age. It’s from April 1st, and so that Sun, that solar eclipse was right next to the Sun in Iran’s chart, which also has a Sun-ruled rising; it has a Leo rising, which also brings up what about when Mars goes back into Leo? And that regime chart for Iran also has Mars at 25 Pisces, where Saturn and the North Node and Venus and Mercury will all spend the whole first half of April. So yeah, we’ve been talking about this for a while, and so for me it was a question – does it happen in March, or does it need the April part of the same period of time? Right? Because we’ve talked about like, it’s basically a six weeks-ish period of time – we’re talking about the clownmaggedon or the gathering of the juggalos. The thing, right, that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t end on March 31st, right? Minimum size would be to put it at least into the middle of April, so yeah.

CB: Right.

AC: I’m, yeah, we’re, I think, of one mind on this, and there are a number of indicators. And that’s – when you start seeing indicators wherever you look – when you use a different technique and you get indicators, then you look at cycles and you get another indicator. I will be very surprised if there aren’t overt military exchanges with Iran quite soon.

CB: Yeah. I hope that it’s averted, but I think it’s heading in that direction. I just pulled up the Aries ingress this year for Tehran that you mentioned, and like, you weren’t exaggerating. So this is the Sun, the moment that it moved into Aries, was this chart, which sets up a chart for the year. And the Ascendant ends up being at 20 Cancer and Mars was at 20 Cancer when that occurred on March 20th, so you were not exaggerating.

AC: No, dude, my eyebrows shot up about halfway up my skull. I was like, “Oh really? Same degree, huh?” So yeah.

CB: Right. I found something like that as well. There was a patron named Stephanie C who helped me to see this, but I always thought of the Iranian Revolution as happening in 1979, but the protests that led into it actually started in early 1978. And I looked up what the chart, what was going on astrologically at that time, and listen to this – Mars was coming off of a retrograde in Cancer. It stationed direct in Cancer and then started moving forward again. A solar eclipse happened in Aries. Jupiter stationed direct in Gemini and then started moving through the later degrees of Gemini. So that’s like, three really striking and unique recurrences that were all happening at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, which was such a huge turning point for Iran as a country. And so these recurrences happening again now – because these same conditions are all happening right now in early 2025 – really implies that there’s an important turning point happening for Iran this year. And I really hope that I’m wrong, but it’s really not looking good.

AC: No, it’s looking… Yeah, it’s looking like quite meaningful military exchanges with consequences.

CB: Right. And then, you know, I had talked about how it seemed like some of the stuff that happened in March – because it was all activating Aries – would have a cascade effect over the course of the next several months, and potentially over the next several years, because then Neptune would go into Aries and then Saturn would go into Aries in May. And you know, if a huge conflict like that breaks out, then that’s part of what we’re looking at, because this would not be, like, what happened with the US and Iraq in 2003, for example. Like, this would be a much bigger, more difficult and more tragic and huger than Iraq already was, but multiplied by a lot more.

AC: Hopefully not. But yeah, it’s… Yeah, very big in its implications and potentially quite awful.

CB: Yeah.

[END CLIP]

All right. So the importance of that is basically March finally hits. Starting at the beginning of the month, everything starts escalating between the US and Iran, and Trump sends that letter and says basically if they don’t negotiate on the nuclear program, that he’s gonna attack militarily. And he sets supposedly a 60-day deadline or a two-month deadline at that point. It ended up being three months. He ended up striking like, three months later, although I’m a little unclear when the deadline exactly started. So I’m not sure how that ended up working out precisely. Because he later would claim that he struck just after the deadline elapsed after he said 60 days, but when I was counting it out, it seemed more like 90 days, so there’s some ambiguity there about what happened there or what the truth was. But he sends that letter at the beginning of the month; Iran says at first it won’t negotiate all month. And then Trump starts moving bombers and equipment into place, basically, including sending carriers, sending B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia within striking distance and moving around other military equipment. And it builds up and builds up and builds up as you get closer and closer to the eclipse, and then it seemed like Iran realized that Trump was about to strike and then around the time of the eclipse responded to his letter and sent back a letter saying that they would negotiate. And then negotiations started a week or two later, basically in April.

But in retrospect now, I realize that part of what happened is I think the choice, the decision to strike Iran was made in March of 2025 in that month during that eclipse season. And one of the precursors to it was actually occurred on the Virgo eclipse that happened around the middle of March, which is the US struck the Houthis and started the bombing the Houthis in Yemen. And this was probably a precursor to the strike on Iran, because it was basically knocking out a country that would have shot missiles at Israel as soon as the US started attacking Iran. So knocking out the Houthis was partially like, a precursor basically to the attack on Iran, and that started on that first eclipse in Virgo right in the middle of March. And then the deadline and the clock, essentially, started ticking in March as well for the strike through that letter that Trump sent and especially in setting some sort of specific deadline of when if the negotiations didn’t happen when he would strike militarily, which he did end up doing a few months later.

So yeah, so those are some of the things. But Austin and I are a little surprised that the full strike hadn’t happened yet, although we were still in the eclipse range of Aries, which would last through the first week of April. So we’re not sure still if something else is gonna happen. The other thing that happened that’s important as a development in this episode is I found additional repetitions that indicated that it would be an incredibly important year for Iran, because I discovered that the Iranian Revolution had – some of the protests that fueled it – really began earlier in 1978 and during the course of 1978 eventually culminating in the Revolution in 1979. But what I discovered was that there were three separate important planetary things happening in 1978 that were also happening again this year in 2025. And that was a Mars retrograde in Leo and Cancer, a eclipse in the sign of Aries, and then Jupiter stationing direct in late Gemini and moving into Cancer, basically, during the course of 1978. And so basically in this episode, I was mentioning that because now we already had two previous things that were the things that were indicating to us that there would be a strike on Iran in 2025, which was the eclipses and the escalation of the eclipses that we were seeing in six-month increments, and then the Aries ingress chart with Mars on the Ascendant. But now all of a sudden, I had some additional things, which were the discovery of all these repetitions from 1978, which were important because that was such an important turning point in Iranian history in 1978 and 1979. And so the implication was that 2025 similarly could be another important turning point in Iranian history, and then the question is like, why is that? And then it sort of acts as a confluence with the other indications, as well as – actually there’s a fourth repetition which I had discovered on the Saturn-Neptune episode, which is the repetition from 1953 when the government was overthrown and the Shah was installed under that Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and then our knowledge that the Saturn-Neptune conjunction would be taking place again this year in the sign of Aries this year and next year.

All right, so that’s where we left things at the very end of March and the beginning of April. So now we jump forward to the next forecast episode several weeks later, which was this is a clip from episode 488, the Astrology Forecast for May of 2025, which was released on April 29th, 2025.

[BEGIN CLIP]

We had talked a lot in the past few months about the US and Iran, and it seems like the outcome of the Aries eclipse was that that was right when Iran agreed to start having talks with the US after like, weeks and months of saying that they wouldn’t have talks with the US for a while, especially direct talks. But then the US started positioning itself for an attack on Iran, and then it seemed like right on that Aries eclipse Iran realized what was coming, essentially, and relented. And talks have still been ongoing, but it’s still not clear where they’re gonna go or how successful they’re gonna be. There’s been reporting saying that Israel still wants to strike Iran soon, but that Trump supposedly wants to see how the talks will go first. And one thing that happened that I noted is the very day of the Mars-Pluto opposition on April 26th, there was this huge explosion suddenly in the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas. And it was a major port city, and there was a number of people that were killed or injured, and there’s videos of just this huge explosion and shockwave. And it was very mysterious having that happen exactly on the Mars-Pluto opposition. And we had been talking about how we were paying attention to Iran and that opposition as being the next thing, so you know, it’s curious in terms of like, was that an accident? Was it some sort of deliberate espionage or attack or something like that, or what?

AC: Yeah. And it was – it looks like the death toll is, I think, around 70 right now, but like, a thousand people got injured. Like, it was a huge – it wasn’t just, you know, one little building had a fire and then it got put out. It’s also being reported under the AP News that it has been purportedly linked to a shipment of ingredients used to make missile propellant, which would suggest that it is not a random explosion, but nothing as far as I know has been confirmed. But it is pretty suspicious timing.

CB: Yeah. It is suspicious. So in terms of Iran and the US, our next target dates I feel like to look at are the Saturn ingress into Aries in late May, because we’ve established that Aries seems to be especially important for Iran and secondarily also for Israel because of the Libra stellium and just the Aries-Libra eclipses over the past two or three years seem like they keep activating that relationship between Iran and Israel. And then especially the next set of eclipses in September is also one of my next targets to really pay attention to, because you know, even though it was the Aries-Libra eclipse series that seemed like it coincided with so much of the stuff that’s been happening in the Middle East over the past few years, recently as things have started to shift to Virgo-Pisces, we’ve still seen some continuation of and some new threads opening up. So we’re really gonna have to pay attention and see if that next set of eclipses represents another important turning point in terms of Iran as well, or if something was somehow completed under that last Aries eclipse.

AC: Yeah. That’s a great point about the eclipses. I would also add two points in the calendar to check in with Iran and relationships. The March-Saturn opposition during the first half and in the middle of August, because that Saturn ingress as you said is meaningful because it’s Saturn ingressing into Aries. And then Mars’s ingress into Libra on I think the 7th of August opposes that and also ties in with the recently ingressed Uranus in Gemini and Pluto in Aquarius and should be pretty lively.

CB: Yeah. That’s a good call. That Mars-Saturn opposition does look tough this summer.

[END CLIP]

All right, so this is basically like, a month after the Aries eclipse; we’ve finally gotten out of eclipse season. We’re a little surprised that the attacks didn’t take place around the time of the eclipse because it seemed like it was building up and all of a sudden things did escalate, and Trump had said basically that he was – he kept like, telegraphing that there would be an attack on Iran. So we get a month outside of eclipse season, and we’re kind of wondering then since it didn’t happen and since the threat of it is still hanging over, because we know for example that the deadline has been put out by Trump at the beginning of March and it’s supposed to be 60 days, so we kind of then start thinking about like, what some of the next target dates are. And the two that I identified is one, the Saturn ingress into Aries because we had already established that Aries kept coming up over and over again for different reasons in the chart for Iran, both in the chart for Iran but also for the leader of Iran, and through the repetition of the eclipses in Aries which kept coinciding with things with Iran, as well as through the opposition things in Libra for Israel.

So I thought one of my targets was Saturn moving into Aries, which would happen in late May and early June. And that did end up being one of the triggers, because then in mid-June is when the attack takes place, and Saturn was only at like, one degree of Aries or something like that I think at that point. So that did end up being one of the timing sort of mechanisms, although there was another one that was even more important, which was the Mars-Uranus square that we’ll talk about here soon. But the Saturn ingress did end up being part of the decisive thing. And then the other two timing things, which are still in the future, that we were talking about is obviously the next eclipse season which is gonna be in September, and that’s gonna be fully Pisces-Virgo eclipses. So it’s gonna shift out of the Aries-Libra axis entirely. So there’s still some open questions about that, but that was one of our next target times. And then Austin also points out the Mars-Saturn opposition which is gonna take place in August, basically, and that’s something that we’re still looking towards at this point later this summer.

So that’s kind of where we left things. We had also noticed the Mars-Pluto opposition, and there was that huge explosion in the Iranian port city which, you know, in retrospect now, probably does seem like a precursor to everything. And that happened right on the Mars-Pluto opposition.

So let’s see, so let’s jump forward to I think this is the last clip, basically, because this is the – it’s the last forecast clip before everything happened. And this is the forecast for June of 2025. Austin was away for the month because he wanted to work on writing his book, and I had been sort of checking out from news and not paying attention to news very much because I was kind of overwhelmed due to some news about needing to take care of a sick family member. So Leisa stepped in to help me do that forecast episode, and this is a clip from episode 491 for the forecast for June of 2025, released on May 30th, 2025. And the main thing is we could see as one of the worst aspects of the month that was coming up was the Mars-Uranus square. So the last statement, basically, we make about Iran was in that last clip that I just showed where I talked about the Saturn ingress into Aries being my next sort of target potential trigger in the late May timeframe starting in late May and then going into June. So at this point in the forecast for June, we ended up focusing on this Mars-Uranus square which just looked really rough, and these are some of the things that we said about it in describing it.

[BEGIN CLIP]

Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, astrologer Leisa Schaim is joining me, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for June of 2025.

Before we get to the news section, I wanted to give a quick overview of the astrology of the month just to give you a preview of what we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode.

And here’s the Planetary Aspects Calendar that was put together by Madeline DeCotes of Honeycomb.co where they do beautiful almanacs and other illustrations like this one. So this shows the peak of some of the different aspects that we’re gonna be looking at this month, including the Mars-Uranus square around the 15th or some other positive aspects like the Venus-Jupiter sextile that takes place around June 4th and June 5th.

In terms of the most challenging aspects this month, my least favorite aspects are one, especially the Mars-Uranus square that takes place on June 15th could be unexpected disruptions and sometimes it can be an unexpected challenge or even a violent sort of act that takes place that comes out of left field unexpectedly. Then the other aspect which weirdly goes exact the same day is a Jupiter-Saturn square also on June 15th, which feels to me like a contraction or a struggle between moving forward versus being held backwards, and perhaps the being held back forces having the upper hand.

And I wanna talk about the Mars retrograde, but it’s like, we can’t get to that. It has to get through the one last aspect in Leo. It looks tough. And it’s this square with Uranus, which is our for sure most difficult aspect of the month. It takes place on June 14th and especially June 15th. Yeah, it goes exact on the 15th, but it’s so close already on the 14th, it may already be operative. And there’ll be like, some news story that happens at like, 11 o’clock on the 14th, so that’s why I sometimes —

LEISA SCHAIM: Right? Yeah.

CB: — mention the day before. So 14th, 15th especially, Mars hits late 28 Leo and squares Uranus at 28 degrees of Taurus. So we’ve seen this aspect happen before or different variations of it. Sometimes there’s like, an unexpected event that happens that’s kind of like, wrenching. Last summer, we famously saw – what was it? It was like, the conjunction of Mars and Uranus in Taurus, and that happened around the time of that like, assassination attempt that happened during the political campaign. And it was this unexpectedly, like, violent event that happened and came out of nowhere. So we have to be aware of like, the potential for things like that to happen. Mars is also the planet that has to do with like, accidents and injuries. So it’s a good date, I think, to be especially careful and cautious and like, not to take unexpected risks just because the potential for an unexpected accident that’s like, sudden and disruptive is heightened during this transit.

LS: For sure. My word for Mars-Uranus hard aspects is always “combustible.” Like, I think that’s a really good characterization of it. You know, things can easily spark very suddenly and unexpectedly in a Mars-related fashion. So there can be literal explosions. But you know, there can also be metaphorical explosions. And what I really noted is, you know, both of those two major tense aspects of this month happen at the exact same time, right? Mars-Uranus happens at the same time as Jupiter-Saturn square. And of course the Mars-Uranus is more overtly noticeable I think, but it’s interesting that they’re both happening at the same time. Because in terms of metaphorical explosions and not the literal ones, you could see how the frustration of Jupiter-Saturn feeling held back in some way, whether that’s yourself or other people around you, feeling held back from what you’re trying to, you know, move towards and expand around – frustration is not good for Mars-Uranus hard aspects, because then someone blows up. So I could easily see that happening on a social level, too.

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, 29 degrees is Trump’s Ascendant, and so Mars will be right on that. So we’ll for sure be paying attention to what he’s doing around that time, because that’s a potentially problematic transit for him, as we’ve seen in like, past instances over the past decade.

LS: Right.

CB: This also happens to be the day of our first lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Sagittarius.

LS: That’s such an interesting Full Moon. Because on the one hand, I do really like that Jupiter has already ingressed into Cancer and it’s ruling the Full Moon, and the Mercury-Venus is lovely. It’s also two days right after the Moon goes through late Scorpio and sets off potentially the Mars-Uranus square. And so I’m curious about that interplay. There’s some really nice things going on, and then there’s some little jangly things potentially as well.

CB: Yeah. Well, it’s also just a few days before the Mars-Uranus square itself comes into —

LS: Right.

CB: — alignment. It goes exact on the 15th. So —

LS: Exactly.

CB: That is hard, because it’s already functionally like, operative at the Full Moon, which is then Mars is at 26 Leo and Uranus is at 28 Leo. So it’s like, we get these two competing energies of a very optimistic, smooth-talking and poetic Mercury-Venus sextile that’s happening the day of the Full Moon. But then we also have this much more tense, combative, disruptive and even potentially violent energy of Mars-Uranus coming into alignment right after that Full Moon just a few days later.

[END CLIP]

All right, so you know, that is the last forecast and like, predictions that we make before the strike on Iran actually happens. And then what happens is that it was already on the 13th of June that Israel launches a surprise attack on Iran, attacking the nuclear facilities and assassinating different high-ranking officials and generals and also attacking air defenses and other things like that. And it really took place pretty much on this Mars-Uranus square. So this is a graphic that Madeline DeCotes made for me from Honeycomb.co, and it just shows the Mars-Uranus square going exact on the 15th. But it’s heading up towards the peak. This was giving it a three-degree orb, which is the ancient orb that was used in Hellenistic astrology for the most intense aspect for planets. And the strike on Iran starts on the 13th, but then over the next week, like, Israel continues to strike Iran and Iran shoots missiles at Israel. And there’s this entire conflict breaking out. And then eventually it culminates towards the end of this range with Trump launching a strike on the nuclear sites on the I believe it was around the 21st [22nd].

So he launches it – he sends the B-2 bombers to drop these huge bombs on the nuclear sites in Iran, and then it looks like there’s gonna be this explosion of a huge war. But then a couple of days later, right on the Sun-Jupiter conjunction that occurred just a couple of days later or two or three days later in Cancer, when the Sun conjoins Jupiter, somehow there’s like, a ceasefire and things become quiet for a period of time. And there continues to be some sporadic stuff, but that’s kind of where we’re at today as of June 5th [July 5th], 2025.

So the important point is a lot of stuff happened that week really centered on that Mars-Uranus square, and I’m not gonna do whole rundown in this video because I did in the July forecast episode, which you should check out for many different events that were taking place around this time, not necessarily just related to this. But the final trigger for the attack – which interestingly was a surprise attack – ended up being the Mars-Uranus square. And the Saturn ingress into Aries was still relevant, because Saturn was still only at like, one degree of Aries or something like that – still very early in the sign and acting as the beginning of that transit that’s gonna last for the next few years, for the next three years. But ultimately, the final trigger ended up being the Mars-Uranus square.

So on the one hand, and you know, in that forecast, Leisa and I are rightfully talking about it being explosive and like, unexpected and violent and just, the standard keywords that from experience of past hard aspects with Mars-Uranus we’ve grown to understand as just like, common things that happen when those two planets meet up in a difficult aspect like a conjunction or a square or an opposition. But we’re really delineating it primarily archetypally at that point just in terms of what we are used to experiencing that aspect like and not because we have any particular thing in mind. And what’s funny is I even note – because I could see visually that Mars would be at like, 28 degrees of Leo, and I knew that that was around Trump’s Ascendant, so I knew that it would be personally important for him. And it also called back to and made me think of the Mars-Uranus conjunction that occurred last summer in Taurus. And that wasn’t just the week where there was like, an attempt on his life, but it was also a week in which a bunch of other crazy stuff happened where a court case that threatened Trump’s ability to run for the presidency was just suddenly and unexpectedly dismissed. And then Joe Biden got covid and got sick and then announced shortly after that that he was dropping out of the race, and then he endorsed Kamala Harris who became the Democratic nominee for the presidential election. And also that week, the largest tech outage in world history took place. So there was like, a bunch of crazy stuff that happened on that last Mars-Uranus conjunction which you can see in that clip, I’m kind of like, vaguely remembering that a lot of crazy stuff happened on that. But I wasn’t fully remembering and taking into account everything that was happening.

There were a few additional pieces that if we had spent more time preparing for that forecast or if I had thought about it, I wish that I had took into account, which is one – I didn’t realize that that weekend was also Trump’s birthday and that the military parade that he scheduled for his birthday was also scheduled for that weekend. And then by extension, the huge protests against the military parade all around the United States – the No Kings protests – also then took place the same day on the 14th of June, all clustering up around that hard aspect – that square between Mars and Uranus. So it was truly just this crazy sequence of events of like, on June – let me put the diagram up again. So here’s the square on June 13th, Israel strikes Iran. And then on June 14th, there’s like, the No Kings protests and Trump’s military parade and his birthday. And then over the course of the next week, there’s continued like, attacks and exchanges between Iran and Israel. And then eventually, it culminates with Trump bombing Iran around the 21st and I think 22nd.

So the Mars-Uranus ended up being the final trigger, and part of the reason for that – there’s many different reasons for that, but part of it is that it was tied in with Trump’s chart in significant ways because he has late Leo rising. It was tied in with Israel’s chart, I believe, if I’m remembering correctly that has Mars in late Leo, and a few other things like that.

So that ended up being the final trigger. I do think that Austin and I, we could have mentioned that in like, the previous forecast that him and I did together when we were looking at other potential targets for the exchange between Israel and Iran and further escalations. And I do think that was a bit of an oversight on our part, so that’s something that Austin and I reflected on a little bit in the July forecast episode, how that in retrospect is like, an obvious alignment that we could have mentioned and could have taken into account more. But just sort of like, didn’t put as much emphasis on it as we could have. But we were a little bit more focused on – I was focused on the Aries ingress, which did end up being relevant, and then also the eclipses that are still coming up in September. And Austin was focused on that Mars-Saturn opposition which is still coming up in August. So we’ll end up seeing, you know, how some of those things go in the future because it seems unlikely that things are completely finished at this point and that some of this will probably still continue to develop in the future almost, you know, inevitably or almost certainly. So there’s still more to unfold in terms of some of this saga and everything else, which we’ll see in the coming months.

So let’s see, the last thing that was really important about this and the fact that that strike happened basically almost on Trump’s birthday and around the time of his solar return, which is that Mars was returning… Trump turned 79 years old, and that is the Babylonian planetary period for Mars where Mars and the Sun will return every 79 years almost exactly to the degree and almost to the same day to where they were 79 years earlier. So there was something about that that was really important for Trump that was unlocking something, and what was interesting about that is I first discovered that that would be a significant activation for Trump the night before I recorded the 2024 year ahead forecast episode where we predicted the year ahead and looked at transits and stuff for the year ahead for 2024, which would include the US presidential election at the end of 2024. And the night before I recorded that episode, Nick Dagan Best – I was talking with him, and he clued me in on that important 79-year repetition of Mars. And in that episode, I mention it, and you can kind of see that I’m visibly shaken up a little bit, because I realize the implications of what that means potentially for the outcome of the US presidential election later in 2024, and then some events that would follow subsequent to that. But what’s interesting is that all of that culminates especially on that weekend when Trump had his solar return, which ends up coinciding not just with the military parade and the protests, but also with the strike on Iran. So I’m gonna play that clip, because it’s the last piece here that’s just kind of interesting in terms of the final timing of how things turned out and some of the things that I learned from it in terms of all of this.

So this clip is from – this is jumping way back in time before any of the other clips. This is jumping back to episode 430 of The Astrology Podcast to the 2024 Year Ahead Astrology Forecast that I did with Austin, which was released on December 26th, 2023.

[BEGIN CLIP]

And that Mars retrograde is serious, and that’s what we end the year with is this crazy kind of cliffhanger where Mars stations retrograde in December in the sign of Leo, and then it’s gonna retrograde over the next month or two back through early Leo, opposing Pluto, and it’s gonna retrograde back into the sign of Cancer early the following year of 2025. But what’s crazy about it is not just that it has – because it stations opposite Pluto, so it has this extended Mars-Pluto opposition during the entire last two months of the year or the last few months of the year and early parts of the following year. But also, Pluto [Mars] first ingresses into Leo – the sign that it will retrograde in – just like, two days before the US presidential election. So that retrograde is gonna be very much tied in with the high drama of the US presidential election and the aftermath of that in the months and weeks following it. So that’s something that’s actually really important in terms of that is it’s gonna be personally relevant of course, and everyone should pay attention to where Mars is gonna go retrograde in Leo and Cancer in their personal charts, but also very important on a more national and global scale as well.

AC: But, yeah, those were the two – just the crazy stelliums during the first half of the year, all of the Mars conjunctions during the first half of the year, and then the beginning of that retrograde at the end.

CB: Yeah, for sure.

AC: Do we have any other overarching pieces?

CB: No. Those are actually all of our overarching pieces, as long as we come back to that Mars piece, because it’s super crucial for things. And there’s a historical cycle actually I need to mention. I should mention it now so I make sure I get it in. So I was talking with my friend Nick Dagan Best who is the retrograde Mars and Venus specialist, and one of the things he pointed out is that Mars goes retrograde in this same cycle every 79 years, and then it just shifts by about 4 degrees each time. So one of the things that’s really important about this that we discovered is that Mars did this retrograde in this same cycle back in the late 1700s when the United States – when most of the states – were ratifying the Constitution. So after the Revolutionary War, when they were like, setting up their system of government in the US and they were creating the three branches of government with different checks and balances, Mars went retrograde around that time, and it partially had to do with a conflict about some states not wanting to ratify the Constitution, like New York, or taking longer than it should. But it’s very important because it means there’s something about that Mars retrograde and the foundation of the US that’s very important in terms of the creation of the Constitution. So then —

AC: And that was, of course, during a Pluto in Aquarius period, right?

CB: Yes, that was also during Pluto in Aquarius. And there’s actually a couple other placements that are actually a recurrence as well, but I will skip that for now.

So that retrograde, it recurs every 79 years. The next time it recurred was in the 1800s right after the Civil War, and one of the things that was happening around that time is they were trying to pass the 14th Amendment in the aftermath of the Civil War. And the 14th amendment has actually been in the news recently because the 14th Amendment contained an ‘insurrection clause’, where it said that if a person had sworn an oath to the country, but then later had gone against it and led an insurrection, that they wouldn’t be able to run for a governmental office after that point or hold a governmental position, I think basically because it was in order to punish or make it so people who had fought on the other side of the Civil War, who had tried to break up the Union, couldn’t then like, take major governmental positions after that point, after leading an insurrection, essentially. So the —

AC: No, Jefferson Davis, you can’t be the senator for Virginia, or whatever.

CB: Right, which kind of makes sense. So that was, again, in the 79-year cycle, that was when that happened. So jump forward to 79 more years, and you get to this period between 1945 and 1946 when Mars again went retrograde in the same cycle. And just after that retrograde was completed, but when Mars was still in Leo – which is the sign that it went retrograde in – that was when Donald Trump was born, with Mars in Leo at that time. And then what’s gonna happen if you jump forward 79 years later is, right as this presidential election is taking place and in the immediate aftermath of it this year, Mars is again gonna go retrograde in the same spot in the zodiac for some weird reason. And it ties together a theme that runs through US history, for the entirety of its history at this point. So that’s kind of crazy, yeah?

AC: That’s interesting. Yeah. No, it’s good. The thread is very clear. It makes me wanna do the 79-year thing with all of the Mars retrogrades and see what pops up.

CB: Yeah. Well, it just brings into play – I just discovered that last night, by the way. There was like, so much research I know you and I both did in the run-up to this and so many amazing things we found in preparing for this. But one of the ones, of course, that I tried to focus on and pay attention to was what’s going to happen in the presidential election, and that was one of the things that really jumped out.

[END CLIP]

All right, so that’s the last clip, and I play that because that was the final thing that actually also culminated that week was Trump turning 79 years old and therefore having an exact recurrence of, you know, when he was born, Mars was coming off of a retrograde in Cancer and Leo. And it was just getting ready to move out of Leo, and Mars was at the end of the sign, and he was born with 29 degrees of Leo rising with Mars conjunct the Ascendant and also with the fixed star Regulus conjunct the Ascendant.

So that means one of the things that it means is that exactly 79 years ago, Trump was born with a Mars-Regulus conjunction when Mars lined up with the fixed star Regulus in the sky. And then what happened is exactly 79 years later, it’s that week there’s also again a Mars-Regulus conjunction in the sky, and it was just this really visibly striking alignment. So here’s an image of that. And this is – an astronomer took this image from the Virtual Telescope Project. So on the top is Mars, which is this like, reddish planet – looks like a reddish star – and it lined up with Regulus, which is like, this bluish star in the sky, and it made for this really striking alignment. But my point there is that I originally stumbled across that 79-year Mars recurrence the night before the 2024 year ahead forecast back in December of 2023. I realized that that actually made a strong argument. It became one factor that made a strong argument for Trump actually winning the presidential election that he was gonna be having a recurrence of the same Mars retrograde in Leo that he was born just after. But then the final fulfilment of that happened on his birthday on his solar return that weekend when Mars again lined up with Regulus. But this time, there was an additional aspect, which was that Uranus was like, exactly squaring that from late Taurus at the same time. So in some ways, it fulfilled this like, natal condition in his chart, and that coincided with a bunch of things that week, but one of those things that I think it also coincided with was the strike on Iran and this like, military strike since Mars has always traditionally been the planet of war.

So yeah, that’s it for the clips. That Babylonian planetary period recurrence was like, an additional factor that could have been factored into things, but I wasn’t really like, thinking about the fact that June 13th [June 14] was gonna be his birthday and if I’d thought about that more, that would have been an additional factor that probably would have pointed me to think that that week was gonna be more important right in the middle of the month than I already did just by knowing that Mars would be going over his Ascendant if I’d thought back to and remembered that the 79-year period would really be fully activated that weekend of the solar return. It’s active for the entire year, though, that 79-year period of Mars – so that’s something that’s still relevant going forward in terms of whatever that unlocked or activated in terms of the natal potential of that placement. And, you know, clearly this is not over. Even though there’s been a lull over the past week or two in terms of what’s going on with Iran, because we’re starting the Uranus return of the United States and Uranus going into Gemini, and because that activates a natal Mars-Uranus conjunction that’s in the birth chart of the United States from 1776, it really implies that the US is heading into potentially a larger period of conflict. And that’s a pretty sort of generic statement you can make, a pretty easy statement to make just based on these repetitions and based on if the repetitions from the past continue to hold up, which is that the first time Uranus was in Gemini was the founding of the country with the Revolutionary War in the 1700s. The second time Uranus was in Gemini was the Civil War. The 3rd time was World War Two. And now the upcoming time is 2025 through 2033.

So one of my concerns is that that does imply that some of the different things that are happening in the world today and some of the different pieces that have come together over the past year especially could snowball or get out of control and sort of like, escalate into a larger conflict than people might realize or might anticipate, and even that some of the players involved might anticipate, and that’s a real danger as we move into this time and as we’re seeing some of these different military actions taking place. And in some ways, I almost felt like the Mars-Uranus square, which was one of the final really hard Mars-Uranus aspects before Uranus goes into Gemini for the first time almost was acting as like, a precursor in some sense and a build-up for the Uranus return of the United States.

So you know, I don’t think this is the place for further analysis of that, and Austin and I talked about this a little bit on the last forecast episode as well as the year ahead forecast. And Nick Dagan Best and I talked about it, you know, three years ago in 2022 in that Uranus Return of the United States episode as well as going all the way back to in 2013 when we did the first Uranus return of the United States episode and Nick pointed to that and actually mentions – you can go back and listen to it or look at the transcript at the very end talking about the potential for a major war starting in 2025.

So obviously I hope some of that doesn’t take place, or I hope that some of the different people involved end up erring on the side of caution or restraint or other things like that. But obviously, a lot of this isn’t looking good, and probably in retrospect we’ll look at some of these pieces and see how they fed into and acted as the precursor for a larger conflict that eventually developed. But that’s kind of outside of the scope of what I wanna get into for the purpose of this episode, because here I really just wanted to do an analysis so you could see the progression of our predictions, basically, about a conflict or a war with Iran and how it started from a very simple observation, which is that an eclipse took place and then there was a military exchange for the first time where Iran shot missiles directly at Israel for the first time in retaliation for some assassinations that had just taken place.

So that was the starting point, and then it got reinforced in six-month increments every time another set of eclipses took place and we could see additional escalations. So it was easy then to kind of infer from that and to call that there would be a further escalation on the next set of eclipses in early 2025, which there was. And I do think that that was probably the point where the choice was made to initiate and to begin preparing for the strikes on Iran, both on the part of Israel and the US, which eventually culminated in June with those strikes.

So the predictions started with the eclipses, and you can understand and see why we drew those conclusions and how you have to pay attention to things that develop and are connected by the eclipses in six-month increments because sometimes they represent the unfolding of a sequence of events that sometimes can escalate further in six-month increments, which clearly it did there. So that was one lesson to learn from this analysis.

The other one is the brilliant observation that Austin made about the Aries ingress chart and how the Aries ingress chart for Iran for this year had Mars directly on the degree of the Ascendant. And it was not just interpreting that symbolically, but he also did the empirical work and the historical work to go back and see when the last time was that that happened, and that the last time that happened coincided with the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, which was a major conflict that Iran was involved in. So that was a brilliant thing that we can take from this, just in terms of looking at that classical factor of the Aries ingress chart for different nations, and that chart of course stays in effect for the full year. And that’s also one of the interesting things about some of these timing things is while we’re looking at things especially that happen around the time of the eclipses, which they did, some of these factors – like, eclipses are in effect for like, a full six-month period after the eclipse takes place. And so that’s one factor in terms of why that Aries eclipse is still in effect at this point. And similarly, the Aries ingress chart that Austin was looking at is the chart for the year, so that’s something that stays in effect all the way until March of 2026. So that’s gonna continue to be relevant and it’s one of the reasons why things are probably not over yet, almost certainly.

Other factors to take from this – I had discovered some of the repetitions of different planetary cycles. So it was clear that it’s not just important to look at repetitions of like, eclipses or repetitions of Aries ingress charts, but also repetitions of other planets, especially retrogrades. So I had discovered that this year was a repetition of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction from 1953 when the government of Iran was overthrown through a coup and the Shah was installed. And then I also discovered that there were repetitions from 1978 when there was a Mars retrograde in Leo and Cancer, Jupiter stationed in Gemini and moved into Cancer, and there was an eclipse in Aries. So those were repetitions dating back to a very important turning point in the history of Iran as the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and 1979 really got going. So the recurrence of those transits again this year again implied that this would be a very important year in the history of Iran. And some of those continue to be operative in terms of in the same way that those transits coincided with the start of the Revolution in Iran in early to mid-1978 going forward and eventually culminating in 1979. That kind of implies that there are still some things that may be ongoing over the course of the next year. So that’s another piece that’s important in terms of paying attention to recurrences of, you know, things happening in the sky or things that happened in the past. And when you see a major correlation that happened in the past that you can sometimes project that out into the future and anticipate similar events will happen in the future when there’s a recurrence of the same planetary or celestial alignment. I guess that’s really the main thing that we can learn from all of this. And the final thing is just that predictions about mundane matters become more certain the more of those repetitions and the more indications there are that are pointing in the same direction. That’s when you can start to become more and more confident about a prediction when you start to see multiple different things from different angles that are all kind of pointing in the same direction. And that was the other thing that we found, I think that the clips demonstrate, is that it was like, this evolving process of finding more and more stuff and therefore growing more and more certain that something would happen, that a conflict would happen, even during the point when we ran into this lull after the Aries eclipse in March and kind of wondered why it hadn’t happened yet. We were still kind of certain that something was gonna happen, so we started thinking about what the next potential timeframes were, and that was when I mentioned the Aries ingress [Saturn in Aries ingress] which went in in late May and early June, which did end up being one of the timing factors, although ultimately the final trigger of the Mars-Uranus square ended up being the final thing, and that was something we could have called better. So that’s one of the things that I learned in terms of, you know, shortcoming or something where I could have done better and that I will factor that in now, of course, in the future in terms of making future predictions. Because now we’re always gonna remember that crazy week when the Mars-Uranus-Regulus alignment took place and then there was a surprise attack on Iran first by Israel and then by the US. Trump’s birthday happened; he did the military parade. There were huge protests. And then a bunch of other stuff happened that week as well. So the memory of that, hopefully, will sort of be passed forward as sort of our collective memory now as astrologers, and that’s one of the reasons why when we do the forecasts episodes, we always issue predictions in the second half about the month ahead, but we also do usually about an hour-long segment where I talk about news and events that happened since our last forecast episode, and we talk about what astrological alignments coincided with those news events and also sort of like, check in about some of the predictions we made and kind of assess if things turned out like we expected or if there was something new that we didn’t expect, because it’s always part of this learning process of both, you know, trying to predict the future but also assessing your predictions and assessing and documenting what did happen. Because then that documentation becomes part of your database going forward into the future that you can draw on in order to make future predictions by remembering, you know, the last time there was a Mars-Uranus square or a Mars-Uranus conjunction or what have you.

So I think that’s it. Those are some of the things I learned from this. I hope this has been educational. I mentioned that I might do this on the last forecast episode, and there was a couple of people that requested it, so thanks to those of you who requested it. I think Kirah Tabourn was one of them, so shoutout Kirah.

Yeah. Thanks to Austin, shoutout to Austin, shoutout to all the other people that appeared in these different clips at different points which are all great astrologers that make great observations and different interpretations and calls at different points. So shoutout Nick Dagan Best, of course – shoutout Leisa Schaim. Shoutout Diana Rose Harper. If there’s anyone else I’m forgetting, forgive me. But of course, mainly shoutout to, you know, my friend Austin Coppock since this has been a journey that him and I have been on together in terms of doing these forecast episodes and learning and growing over the course of the past 10 years as astrologers and learning how to do mundane astrology and learning things in the process while also constantly applying our skills and trying to improve.

So I’ve learned a lot from this, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this assessment just to share with you what I learned. So I hope you learned a lot and got a lot from it. So thanks a lot for watching this episode and this commentary. Thanks to all the patrons that support my work and support this research; I appreciate you. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode. So thanks a lot for watching and we’ll see you again next time!

[END CREDITS]

If you’re a fan of the podcast and you’d like to find a way to help support my research, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to subscriber benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, the monthly electional astrology podcast, an exclusive podcast series called The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. For more information, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.

Special thanks to the patrons on my Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, Berlynn West, and Nicki Crawford.

People often ask me if I’m available for consultations, but unfortunately I’m not right now because the podcast takes up so much of my time. However, I did create a consultations page on The Astrology Podcast website that has a list of astrologers that I recommend for astrological consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.

The astrology software we use here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.

For Mac users, I recommend the software Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer made by the creators of Solar Fire for the PC. You can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ through their website at AstroGold.io.

If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.