The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 501, titled:
August Astrology Forecast 2025
With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on July 30, 2025
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released August 4th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, Austin Coppock is joining me, and we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for August of 2025. Hey Austin – welcome back.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris.
CB: Hey. All right. It’s been a long, busy month. We got a lot to talk about, both in the news section and the forecast section. We’re gonna spend the first hour of this episode catching up and talking about news stories that we have a pretty striking astrological connection to make and talking about the astrology of things in the news. And then in the second half of this episode, probably around the second hour, we’re gonna jump into looking at the forecast for August and doing a deep dive into the astrological alignments over the next four weeks.
So as always, there’ll be timestamps either on the podcast website entry for this episode or on the YouTube video so you can jump ahead if you wanna skip the news section. But other than that, before we get started, let me jump into doing a quick overview and preview of the astrology of August to give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about later in this episode.
All right, so here is the Planetary Movements Calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the month. We’ve got several important alignments this month. So the Mercury retrograde is about halfway through, and we’re gonna be finishing up that Mercury retrograde for the first week or so of this month with Mercury eventually stationing direct on August 11th and then starting to move forward again and eventually finishing its shadow degree by August 25th.
This month, our primary aspect and most important and also most difficult aspect is this very tense Mars-Saturn opposition that’s really gonna be peaking around August 8th and in the days leading up to that and the days following it. So we’re gonna be spending a lot of time talking about that aspect this month. There’s also conversely a very positive aspect that’s happening shortly after that, which is a Venus-Jupiter conjunction that’s taking place in the sign of Cancer on August 11th. And it will be building up in intensity in the days leading up to that and then starting to move away in intensity in the days following it.
We also by the very end of the month start moving into the very beginning of eclipse season by August 30th and 31st, by the last couple of days of the month, which isn’t gonna peak until September, but it will give us a nice preview and segue as we move into the very end of the month.
So here’s the Planetary Alignments Calendar which shows the ingresses and lunations and other things this month. Our first major aspect of the month is Mars is moving into Libra on the 6th of August. Then the Mars-Saturn opposition on the 8th. There’s a Full Moon in Aquarius on the 9th of August, and the same day, there’s a Mars-Neptune opposition that goes exact. Then two days later on the 11th, Mercury stations direct and Saturn sextiles Uranus the same day. That auspicious Venus-Jupiter conjunction takes place on the 12th. Then the following week, the Sun enters Aries, or enters Virgo, I should say. The following week, the Sun enters Virgo on the 22nd, and the very next day there’s a New Moon in Virgo that’s square Uranus on the 23rd. Then the following week, Venus moves into Leo on the 25th, and Uranus sextiles Neptune on the 28th.
So those are some of the things that we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode in the forecast section. But first I wanted to check in and catch up and talk about some astrological news. But first let’s just check in and see how things have been going.
I wanted to mention today actually – so we’re recording this forecast on Tuesday, July 29th, 2025. It’s 11:23 PM in Denver, Colorado right now, and later today I’m about to release the 500th episode of the podcast where I recorded like, a 90-minute monologue just reflecting on how the podcast got started and some of the things I learned in the past hundred episodes. But I’m gonna release that later today, and then this forecast will be episode 501. So I just wanted to say thanks to all the listeners and all the patrons and everybody that’s listened and watched and supported the podcast over the years, because that’s the reason why, you know, they’re still going after 500 episodes. And especially shoutout to you, Austin. Thanks for doing these forecast episodes with me. We talked about last month how we just celebrated 10 years of doing the forecast together, but it’s like, 10 years of doing forecasts and 500 episodes, and a pretty sizable chunk of those 500 episodes is me and you talking each month, buddy, about the news and the forecasts. And it’s been a really wild ride over the course of that 10-year period.
AC: It absolutely has. And what a 10 years. It’s not that never ever happened before those 10 years, but I don’t know! I think the 2005 to 2015 10 year run would have been a lot less dramatic.
CB: Yeah, totally. Like, we could have been – imagine that. Like, we were just doing astrology forecasts in the like, late 2000s and early 2010s and we could just be talking about like, pop culture and stuff like that. But instead, we decided to start like, a monthly forecast episode in 2015. And then the world just like, went crazy and things took on a much more serious tone certainly by 2020 forward in terms of the forecast episodes, which has created this interesting pressure on us to do our best and to talk about, you know, more serious things sometimes in addition to the more frivolous things. But it’s been really fruitful, and I wouldn’t have done it with anybody else, so I’m glad, you know, to have done that with you.
AC: Thank you. And yeah, it’s been a crazy set of experiences. It’s been a crucible, both in the negative and positive sense in that I think it’s changed the way that we approach astrology, especially the way that we present astrology publicly. You know, there’s the pressure of history happening and at least some small portion of history watching is a different environment than, you know, sort of again like, that late aughts where things were happening, but you know, like, especially here in the United States it was sort of – some people were still holding onto the idea that the end of history had happened a decade before. Whereas history’s gotten moving. Yeah, and I think it’s changed and in some cases refined our astrology because of the pressure on it. There hasn’t been as much room for, I don’t know, flippant remarks or thoughts – not that I haven’t made thousands. But yeah. What is that song? What a long, strange trip it’s been, or something?
CB: Yeah.
AC: And continues to be.
CB: Something like that. I love that. Yeah.
AC: But yeah, it is – I was just gonna say, it is interesting. It was like, almost exactly at the halfway point of our 10 years so far that we hit 2020.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s like, thank god we had those five years to like, warm up to things before things got serious, because we got a lot of practice. And it was interesting, because starting the forecast episodes – my speciality had always been natal astrology and electional and some horary. So doing mundane was really new for me, and I had to learn a lot in the process of those over the past 10 years just in the sense that prior to that time, when looking at transits, like, I always needed a base chart or a natal chart or a reference chart to refer it back to. And something I was always uncomfortable with is just the idea of just talking about transits that are happening in the sky that month without relating it back to a specific natal chart. But over the years, that’s one of the major things I’ve learned in doing mundane astrology is you really just need to describe sometimes in their essence like, the exact aspects that are happening that month. And in the world, you will see different manifestations of that energy in very literal ways. And just like, trusting that process has been part of my learning process over the past 10 years.
AC: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You know, I’d written about a bajillion weekly columns and monthly columns before I started this project. But the angle was always talking to people about how to navigate a period of time, and so mapping that and then, you know, giving suggestions as to how to move through that pattern. And then that would occasionally bump into mundane – like, the larger world and its shape. But I was never focused before on, you know, what was going to happen. You know, what was the timeline of events for an ongoing war or trade war or plague or whatever? And so that shift towards the more explicitly mundane and having to do that in front of people has been a fruitful pressure.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And talking about – it’s funny now that we’ve been doing it so long that sometimes you can go back and see how we were talking about very long-term transits before they started. Like, you know, Uranus going into Taurus back in 2018 and 2019, and now we can look back as we’re like, wrapping that transit up and how some of those statements and predictions worked out. I actually have one news story this month about that, which maybe I’ll just mention now, which is just I saw a news story on Reddit in late June, and it was from like, a French newspaper, but it said that like, paper currencies had almost all by disappeared in China because everything’s moved to like, digital currencies and transactions. And I thought that was such an amazing manifestation of like, Uranus going through Taurus and some of the things we talked about and anticipated way back then but almost seemed far-fetched or unlikely on some level back at that point.
AC: Yeah. The intersection of Uranus and Taurus with currency stuff has proved to be not only true the last several times that Uranus was in Taurus, but very much this one.
Another one that I was reflecting on is just how volatile food prices have been if we look back at the last seven years. Like, on a very simple level, the price of beef is meaningfully different here at the end of Uranus in Taurus than it was at the beginning of Uranus in Taurus. And it wasn’t simply like, a slow but steady increase, right? There were a lot of the big world events just so happened to hit food prices and cause them to spike and drop, et cetera et cetera.
CB: Right. Yeah. And learned lots of other stuff. You know, eclipses and our checking in every six month about eclipses and those sometimes indicating a sequence of events that evolve, which is something I knew already from natal astrology and had done workshops on in the 2010s. But seeing that work out in the context of mundane astrology – like, I just released a supercut episode this month that was like, all the statements and predictions we made about Iran over the past year and a half about there being an escalation of a conflict and a war, and how that originally developed out of an observation that was made about missiles being shot directly from Iran into Israel right on eclipses in mid-2014, and then realizing that that was part of like, an evolving thing. So there’s just like, things that we’ve learned by watching the news and looking at the astrology and what’s happening and realizing there was a connection there and being able to infer or project that out into the future.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And yeah, seeing the things that are connected to an eclipse cycle and then checking back during the previous eclipse cycle and seeing the same types of things in the same places, yeah. It’s been fascinating.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Not particularly heart-warming, but fascinating.
CB: Yeah. Like, intellectually astrologer good. May you live in interesting times. Whatever our current like, hashtag is for this current era of history that we’re moving into.
All right, so speaking of that and speaking of news sections and other things, there was a lot of news that happened this month. I’m not gonna even attempt to cover all of it, because there’s both too much and I don’t always have like, an astrological take for each news story. But there are some that I did have an astrological take on that we are gonna mention briefly. I wanted to mention really quickly some of the things that happened were Uranus went into Gemini early in July, Saturn and Neptune – that conjunction came close within a degree and both stationed retrograde. There was the Venus-Mars square with Mars conjoining the South Node. And then finally there was also the Mercury retrograde in Leo. And I know that you – I saw some people really getting nailed by this Mercury retrograde in a very interesting and straightforward way, and I know you were having some stuff not just related to Mercury retrograde but also Uranus going into Gemini, right?
AC: Oh yeah. It’s been absolutely nonstop. So like any good astrologer, I was very curious about what Uranus’s ingress into Gemini would bring me. Like, you know, waiting for like, a psychotic, morally ambivalent Santa Claus to come down the chimney. And you know, the ingress was in the middle of the night. It was a Sunday night. And I was like, okay. Oh boy, I wonder what’s gonna be under the tree the next morning. And so the next day, it starts off – I have a morning shift with Lucian. So it starts off with the babysitter canceling. And I’m like, oh, well, that’s Uranus. You know, what you think’s gonna happen is not going to happen. Not a big deal; I can live with that. And then as we’re having morning fun, Lucian’s running around with his bottle, which is very normal. Even when he is not interested in drinking from it, he likes to place it in both hands and sort of hold it slightly aloft as if to show the gods what treasure he has obtained. And so he does that, and ends up dropping it on the floor from maybe a foot up. And these bottles are very sturdy. And yet somehow this time it shatters into a million pieces, and milk goes everywhere, and so I have screaming baby – because I have to put him down and in a safe place in order to deal with the glass that would slice his feet and mine, and get the milk up. And so at this point, he’s very attached to Kait and I. And so he does not like not being able to be part of things and with me. And so he’s screaming at me while I’m like, trying to get up the like, lethal to his feet glass that’s gone everywhere. And there’s milk everywhere. And I grab what I think is a wet/dry vac, but is not a wet vac. And so I have this little dustbuster thing, and I’m trying to get up the little pieces of glass and some of the milk, and the dustbuster is shaped somewhat like a shark. It has like, gill vents on the side, and it just starts spraying milk out about two feet in both directions while the motor makes weird noises and the baby is screaming. Nonetheless, I eventually get through this, and I was like, well, that’s some Uranus shit. Lucian and I both have Mars in the first decan of Pisces, and so Uranus is square that, and I was like, okay. Well, I guess that’s shattering things. I reflect on the fact that I have the Moon in Gemini and that I’m doing a very lunar thing; I’m taking care of a child, and what was the substance that went everywhere? Oh, that was milk, which is as lunar a foodstuff as possible. And then Kait gets home, and I’m like, wow, what a morning. What a Uranus in Gemini morning. And then she gets a call with like, a huge potential change to work stuff that I can’t get into, and it might happen and it might happen, but it throws like, the next four months into a pit of question marks where previously there were, you know, periods and statements. So it’s like, a lot to think about. And we’re like, god, this is a lot! And fast forward a few more hours, and we’re ending the day; we’re putting Lucian down. Takes 45 minutes to an hour to like, get him to fully power down, and we’re almost there, and then the power goes out. And so that means all the calming things – it means the air conditioning goes out during a very hot month. It means the noise machine’s out. So he ends up – it breaks his “I’m almost asleep” chance. He’s up for another two hours. We have to kind of completely rethink how we’re going to do bedtime. And the power’s out until middle of the next day. And so that was the first 24 hours of Uranus in Gemini for me.
Since then, we’ve had three other power outages. The next weekend, our AC wasn’t quite working. It was like, almost keeping up, but with the heat it wasn’t. Long story short, AC repair guy comes out, and then after he’s gone, we realize that the system turns itself off after about a minute. So during the hottest weekend here, we have no AC the whole time. You know, it’s pushing a hundred every day. And then when we finally get another repair guy to come out on Monday, he’s like, “Listen, these new air conditioners have all the computers in them, and we don’t know how to work them. We’re gonna get somebody from the manufacturer to come out. In the meantime, I’m just putting it on emergency override.” He’s like, “So it’s just going to go full blast until you literally cut the power to it.” So we went from no AC to arctic wonderland, which is —
CB: Right.
AC: — much like, that’s Uranus’s volatility. It’s not just power goes out. It’s like, power goes out, and now power won’t stop. And then there have been a dozen other little things. And so this started with Uranus’s ingress, but certainly Mercury’s retrograde has had a happy hand in this. And it underscored to me something very simple, which is that with Uranus in Mercury-ruled Gemini, every Mercury retrograde now gets to fax orders over to Uranus. Every Mercury retrograde is going to ship what chaos has been produced over to Uranus to have fun with it.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And that does seem relevant. And it’s funny, because it’s like, sometimes – I was telling this to somebody. You know, sometimes you – a Mercury retrograde will come and go and it won’t be like, a big deal or it won’t be like, the disaster that sometimes people hype it up to be. But in everyone’s life, like, everybody has this experience where at some point in your life, there will be a Mercury retrograde that’s hitting your chart in a particular way, and you’ll just get hit really hard by it and really like, a series of snafus and like, unfortunate events and delays and setbacks and technical issues like, one after another. And you’ll be marked by that experience because it will be so obviously tied in with the Mercury retrograde or some other transits that you’re having that combine with that in your life at that time to really leave an impression. I had one of those from a friend. So here’s the series. I summarized – so Mercury stationed retrograde on Friday the 18th, right, in Leo? So that very day, Friday the 18th, this person is driving, and their alternator went out so that they needed to jump their car every time they needed to start it suddenly.
Then they are just jumping their car and driving around and continuing to go to work. Then the very next day, July 19th, they’re driving down the highway at 70 miles an hour, and their tire blows out as they’re coming back from a work event. And they like, barely get the car back under control and then are stuck on the highway where they eventually have to get towed after several hours. So that’s bad. And then a couple days later, they go out to the car for work, and their car has been broken into by somebody, and somebody slept in the back of it and left trash and other goods, like, all around the back of the car. So —
AC: Were they really goods?
CB: Well, they were —
AC: Maybe they were bads.
CB: They were like, stolen goods from like, other people, which was interesting.
AC: That’s better than what I was imagining.
CB: Yeah. So get this – so that’s Monday the 21st. Tuesday the 22nd, they go in to do their taxes and they find out that their database that contains all their transactions has been deleted, and they only have like, a month or two of data, and it’s missing all of the rest that’s been mysteriously deleted. But after calling and haggling with this company, they’re eventually able to get the company to retrieve a cloud version after like, nine hours of talking with them.
So it seems like everything’s fine and I’m like, telling them, I’m like, that’s bad! Maybe now that we’re moving away from the station, it’ll calm down. No. It did not calm down.
Friday July 25th, their battery on their car dies, and it breaks down in the middle of a road during rush hour, blocking traffic on a two-lane road, and it takes five hours to get it fixed and return back home. And then if that wasn’t enough, the next day on Saturday the 26th, their alternator which they’d gotten replaced – they got a used one – and it died like, the very next day.
So this was just an example of like, one person, and this doesn’t happen to everyone. It was hitting the person’s chart in a particularly hard way, and there were timelord things involved. But every once in a while, everybody has that experience of a retrograde like that where if things can go wrong, then they do, and like, everything goes wrong for a while.
AC: Yeah, they need to ritually sacrifice that car to Mercury.
CB: Right.
AC: Slit its throat and be like, this is… Let the lubricant and cooling fluid drain out. Offer it to the wrathful god of transportation.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So anyway, at least we’re heading towards the cazimi. And usually at the cazimi, the conjunction between the Sun and Mercury, there’s some sort of like, turning point where things start to head towards a resolution. So for those of you that are getting hit hard by this one, hopefully that, you know, starts bringing us into better territory here eventually.
AC: Fingers crossed.
CB: Including you. All right, so —
AC: It’s mellowed down to like, a steady stream of inconveniences. It was really that – like, the first 24 hours and then the first week of Uranus in Gemini was the peak of it. And just for astro transparency, I have Mercury at two Aries, which Saturn and Neptune are sitting on top of, and which Uranus is aspecting. And so my Mercury was already getting shat upon, and so Uranus was the lightning bolt that broke the camel’s back and set it on fire.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. And it’s usually something like that of a few different things like, going on.
AC: Yeah.
CB: All right. So in terms of major news stories, one of the biggest news stories this month really clustered around that when Uranus went into Gemini, it went into Donald Trump’s 11th house of friends and alliances and groups because he has Leo rising. And what was interesting about that is like, I knew that was gonna be big for him, because he has a Sun-Uranus conjunction in the middle of Gemini in his 11th house, and the Sun is the ruler of his Ascendant. But you sort of would think that it would take a little bit longer for that to get closer to that set of planets, that conjunction, before really getting intense. But nope! Like, as soon as Uranus went into Gemini, like, stuff started popping off in his 11th house all month.
The first part of that was Elon Musk announcing on July 5th that he was gonna start a new political party in the United States. And Musk was a major backer of Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and you know, normally I wouldn’t like, put too emphasis on that, but like, the proximity of Elon announcing this to the birthday of the United States just a day after the solar return in the Sibley chart where Americans commonly celebrate Independence Day as well as the proximity to the ingress of Uranus just two or three days later on the 7th sort of implies that something’s going on there. Although the closest thing it was to, actually, was that Neptune stationed retrograde for the first time in Aries on July 4th. And to me, that implies that there may be something that’s not quite what it seems about it that’s an important element in addition to those other two things. But that was a major piece.
AC: Well, and —
CB: There was another major piece; I don’t know if you want me to mention that, or if you wanna say something about this piece.
AC: Oh, I just wanted to say – yeah, like, just to recap. Like, the 11th house being the place of friends and allies, and Uranus often – especially in Gemini – like, separating or creating rifts or distance. Elon was very much an effective ally to Trump for much of the last year. And then the relationship had been seeming to fray, but then to see that rift cemented into the creation of a rival party right next to the ingress is like, picture perfect Uranus coming into the 11th. Right? Alienating former friends and allies, creating like, distance where there was connection, et cetera, et cetera. Like, that’s picture perfect.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Because Uranus is like, unexpected disruptions. And my primary delineation of this is just that Trump’s alliances started to become fractured with Uranus entering his 11th house of friends and alliances and groups. So that was very clear at the beginning of the month with —
AC: Well, and —
CB: Go ahead.
AC: I was just gonna say, and what I hear from the internet is that there are increasing issues with the sort of Trump coalition. That there are some fractures there that weren’t there a few months ago.
CB: Yeah. That’s what I’m about to transition into since that was —
AC: Okay.
CB: — the other bigger, ongoing news story this month was related to the Jeffrey Epstein stuff and the cover-up and rebellion surrounding that where there were – to make a long story short – like, increased calls to release files related to the Jeffrey Epstein cases. And this is something that Trump and many of his associates had campaigned on, saying that they would do. But then all of a sudden, it came time to do that and there were greater calls for that this month, and suddenly they were saying that they weren’t going to release anything. And this outraged his base more than anybody else, due to him putting a lot of emphasis on this in terms of originally over the past several years. And it was a campaign promise, essentially.
There was also other stuff where there was like, a video released of the jail from when Epstein died, the night he died. But there appeared to be footage that was edited out of it supposedly. There was also a letter that surfaced supposedly from Trump written to Jeffrey Epstein on his birthday. And it was just this weird, unique moment where suddenly like, many Republicans and many Democrats seemed to be on the same side of an issue all of a sudden about this particular issue. And it was a unique moment where my primary take – because there was actually many takes on it, but one of them was just it was striking how quickly Uranus moving into Trump’s 11th house of friends and alliances suddenly saw a real unexpected shakeup of his alliances and his base, even with a lot of like, the podcasters and the like, bro-casters who supported him last year in the presidential election suddenly calling Trump out or saying things that were not, you know, to his liking about this.
AC: Yeah. That point about people who are usually in complete disagreement publicly about everything suddenly being on the same side with Uranus in Gemini – like, a sudden and surprising and likely temporary moment of depolarization is something I kind of almost dared to hope for from Uranus in Gemini. Just as it can create polarization out of what were a moment ago happy alliances, you know, Uranus always goes both ways with everything, right? Locks the air conditioner on; turns it off. Anyway, and so I’m hoping we would see some moments like this in the world and in American politics over the next seven years where like, suddenly weirdly people are in agreement whereas that was not the case before and will likely not be the case after.
CB: Right.
AC: Like, playing with that same dynamic of polarization, but turning it on its head.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So yeah, there was a lot going on with that in terms of… You know, it also brought into question like, in the supposed letter – the birthday letter – it’s signed referring to him as a pal, basically, and so there was a question about whether this was also Uranus in the 11th house as referring to it as like, a former friendship. And that was one of the reasons why it was coming up, which is an interesting side point. But I looked into this for the first time, because I’ve always like, reluctantly… Yeah, I looked into it, and one of the things I looked into was Epstein’s chart, which we don’t have a timed chart for. But one thing that’s interesting right now is that he was born in 1953, which was the year of a Venus retrograde in Aries, but it was also the year of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. So what’s happening right now is there’s a double recurrence of those two things that’s happening. And this ended up being one of the major Saturn-Neptune things that happened all throughout July that we were waiting to see what would happen with Saturn and Neptune stationing and intensifying that close degree-based aspect between them. So on the one hand, that was like, evocative of some of the coverup and the murkiness but also like, the conspiracy theories and everything else and the ambiguity between that of like, what’s real versus what’s not. And even many people who were formerly skeptical it felt like starting saying maybe there is something there because the attempts to say that this was a hoax or other things like that started seeming kind of desperate. So it created an interesting situation.
AC: Yeah. Chris, I think that’s a really nice example of Saturn and Neptune overlapping where you definitely have this layer of nightmares and narratives – like, the Neptunian side – but then you also have a Saturnian layer of like, oh, there’s definitely some stuff there. Right? There is some stuff that you can see; there’s some stuff you can half see. And it makes you wonder about what you can’t see, right, which is where the Neptunian layer sort of begins – the edge of the shore, right? The sea and the sand. But like, the whole Epstein thing is… I’m just struck by what a good example that is of Saturn and Neptune cohabitating in the same space where there is something Saturn there and there’s definitely something Neptune, but the exact intersection is very tricky. Not just tricky, but perhaps impossible to fully pull apart at this point in time.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s like, compounded with a lot of crazy, like, extreme conspiracy theories because a lot of this is also – the reason why this became so important for like, his base was that it was partially a continuation of some of the bizarre, absurd stuff from like, Pizzagate and stuff like that from back around the 2017 like, Saturn-Neptune square timeframe. And in that sense, like, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction – a piece of it – was evocative of something I talked about in the Saturn-Neptune episode, which was like, the Satanic panic scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s when Saturn and Neptune were conjunct in Capricorn. But then obviously, you have these other elements as well, and one of them that relates back to something I said in the last forecast that I was really struck by was how a lot of the stories built up to and seemed to peak in intensity around the time of the Venus-Mars square this month with Mars adjoining the South Node. And I had actually mentioned this as delicately as I could, because I always wanna be careful about how I phrase things not to like, unexpectedly like, trigger people, but what I said when I was delineating that aspect in our last forecast is I said that it would probably bring up “dynamics having to do with sex and sexuality, and sometimes like, negative things associated with that that could be something coming up as well under this square in a way that causes tensions or strife or discord in some way.”
AC: Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear you were very politely pointing towards the potential for fucked up relationships and grosteque or abuseive things and that, you know, you pointed out that that would be on people’s mind and probably be something that was talked about quite a bit this month I think qualifies as a direct hit.
CB: Yeah. So that was part of it.
AC: I mean, all this Epstein stuff doesn’t matter – excuse me. It only matters because there was absolutely real abuse, and the extent of that is unclear. But it was absolutely fucked up Mars-Venus stuff, and you see that in his chart, too. He has a Mars-Venus-Saturn copresence. Right? Both malefics with Venus. Or is it – it might just —
CB: Yeah, it’s —
AC: — it’s just Mars-Venus. Sorry, I’m thinking of somebody else who was part of – I’m thinking of Prince Andrew who has Mars-Saturn-Venus. But yeah. Epstein has the Mars-Venus, which in every Hellenistic delineation that I’ve found in the old books brings up sex scandal stuff, brings up improper sexual behavior, et cetera, et cetera. And so yeah, you were politely, respectfully trying to point out that that was a big feature this month and would be much discussed, which it has been.
CB: Yeah. For sure. And he had that Venus-Mars conjunction at 16 degrees of Pisces, so that was also being activated by some of these transits this month, like Mars moving through Virgo. But importantly for the future, one of the things I noticed is that the lunar eclipse that’s coming up on September 7th will be at 15 degrees of Pisces. So that’s gonna be conjoining that conjunction in his chart that was obviously so prominent as part of his life and terrible legacy. So undoubtedly, there will be another important turning point with respect to him and this case probably around the time of that eclipse.
AC: Yeah, that’s a really good call.
CB: Yeah.
AC: You know, it’s interesting, right, because the eclipses – they bring a tremendous amount of energy, but they also very often cast a tremendous shadow over things. Sometimes they reveal, but a lot of like, it is their job to literally conceal or to cast a shadow over things so it’s hard to see. And so what combination of revelation and concealment we’ll get remains to be seen, but that’s a really good call in terms of timing a turning point and a moment of further focus on that person’s actions.
CB: Yeah. And that’s in September, but there’ll be a more immediate one. Actually what you just said reminded me of that has to be mentioned, which is part of this has been tied up with the Mercury retrograde in Leo in Trump’s rising sign, but one of the aspects that we talked about in the last forecast episode that we’re gonna have to – we will be reemphasizing in this one is that when Mercury stations direct here coming up in the next few weeks. In the first and second week of August when Mercury stations direct, it’s gonna station direct opposite to Pluto. And so sometimes when we see Mercury stations in a hard aspect with Pluto, there can be disclosures about things that have been hidden, but also sometimes attempts to manipulate things through disclosures or other things like that. So I’m kind of expecting that Mercury station in early August to be the disclosures of some things, but you know, one of the things people have been anticipating right now is just to what extent those will be actual full disclosures versus like, selectively disclosing things for the purpose of manipulating or controlling public opinion.
AC: Yeah. All valid. The first thing I thought of when I saw the like, Trump-Epstein headlines was Mercury on its way back to opposition with Pluto and the fact that as we discussed last month, Mercury doesn’t quite get back to make a perfect aspect with Pluto. And so when we have what looks like two planets are gonna form a relationship or form an aspect to each other and then it’s going to trigger a thing, but it’s not going to complete, you get this things look like they’re going in one direction and then it just doesn’t quite happen. And I was like, oh, everybody’s gonna wanna see these disclosures, and it’s just not gonna quite happen. There’ll be, no doubt, something or some things, but that not-quite-gonna-get-there planetary pattern, which involve Mercury and Pluto which gives disclosures and hunting secret information or what has been concealed, just, you know, was the first thing I thought about and I think will, unfortunately, end up describing this pretty perfectly.
CB: Yeah. And just for reference, the Pandora Papers were released in October of 2021 when Mercury stationed retrograde square Pluto, and those documents exposed offshore financial dealings with a number of powerful people, including politicians and celebrities and business leaders. So if some stuff ends up getting disclosed, whatever that is, or even if it’s manipulated, it’ll be an interesting repetition of that in terms of Mercury-Pluto aspects.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: All right, so I think that’s good for that. So moving on. I don’t have a lot to mention about this, but I just wanted to mention it briefly. The Neptune station that was on July 4th in Aries ended up coinciding with Trump signing that massive bill that gives tax cuts to rich people and raises the deficit and cuts Medicaid and takes away health insurance from millions on July 3rd and 4th, so that seemed like a major thing. But then also there was Musk announcing the new party, and then also there were these terrible, terrible floods in Texas that killed a lot of people right around that Neptune station. And a lot of astrologers were mentioning that in connection with that as well.
AC: Tragic.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So speaking of other tragedies and in terms of other major news stories this month, another one that came up that was happening throughout the month that seemed connected with the Mars-South Node conjunction which went exact around July 20th, and that’s when I started noticing the news stories peaking. But there were all of these images that started pouring out of Gaza of people and especially of children who were starving. And these pictures of children who were so thin that you could see their bones, and the Gazans were literally being starved. So for example, here’s a headline from July 20th, the day of the Mars-South Node conjunction, from PBS. It was titled, “Palestinians Describe Choice Between Starvation and Risking Death to Get Food Aid in Gaza.” Or The Washington Post, July 24th – “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza as Deaths from Hunger Rise.” And then it says, “Israel has severely limited the amount of food entering Gaza where society is on the brink of collapse.”
So I thought this was terrible; like, the world was witnessing all of these pictures coming up. But you, Austin, actually had mentioned something related to this last month when you were talking about the Mars-South Node conjunction. And I just wanted to read that, but you said, quote from the transcript, it says, “On a like, non-global, historical scale, just on a personal transit scale, one of the things I would just look out for with the Mars-South Node is going too far when trying to diet or clean up something, whether it’s cleaning the house or cleaning up your diet. Like, trying to clean or purify things and accidentally going too far to the point where you’re damaging what you were just attempting to clean up or sweep away. That’s something I see very commonly with Mars-Ketu.”
So I was amazed that, you know, in the same way that my Mars square Venus with Mars conjunct the South Node comments ended up being prescient for the other terrible story, you had picked up on something that was actually very prescient for this other terrible tragic story as well.
AC: Yeah. And what a terrible thing to be like, you know, in the right zone about. Yeah, I was talking about on a personal and volitional scale, because Mars-Ketu will damage through deprivation. And so I was, you know, I was trying to give what to do with it as a person. Like, don’t go too intense with your diets or whatever. It was terrible to see that as a non-volitional thing and to see the images of the children. You know, as sappy or as cliche as it might be, having become a parent over the last year and four month, like, seeing those images and then imagining the last year and how already like, terrified and always super concerned about my child I’d been, but adding watching them starve or the potential for starvation looming near by is just, you know, it just seems like such a bottomless hell for people.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So there’s been a huge obviously, like, international outcry and international pressure so that supposedly some things might start to be opened up, but it remains to be seen how much. And this is still an ongoing crisis. And then people are also talking about when it comes to starvation like, when it gets to that point how that can do just like, permanent damage to the body. Like, even if people do start getting food again. So yeah, we’ll see how that goes in the future as we move into August.
AC: Yeah. Hopefully with the separation of Mars and Ketu, the further relief efforts will be successful.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And Mars moves into Libra right at the beginning of August, so —
AC: Right, which will cause problems but not Mars-Ketu problems.
CB: Right. Definitely. Other things – there was a string of celebrity deaths that people noticed that was happening around the Mercury retrograde, especially around the station. Just to list a few, it was like, Ozzy Osbourne, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Chuck Mangione, Hulk Hogan. And the only one I really had something astrological is – a guy on Twitter pointed out that Hulk Hogan had died on the 10-year anniversary of when he made a apology for this like, racist tirade that came out in the news in 2015. And that made me glance at his chart, and he had a stellium of planets in Leo. We don’t actually know his birth time, because the birth time that’s floating out there is from AstroTheme, but AstroTheme has been known to make up fake times. So no one should trust a birth time that is sourced from AstroTheme, even if it’s on AstroDataback, because it actually really annoys me that that time is on AstroDatabank being cited from AstroTheme with AstroTheme not listing a source. So even AstroDatabank is like, complicit in putting fake times out there at this point from AstroTheme. But all that to be said, we don’t know what his rising sign is for sure, but Hulk Hogan had a Leo stellium that included Mars and Saturn and possibly Pluto, I think. And the repetition I noticed is that in 2015, when Venus went retrograde in Leo, this recording came out of the racist rant that he made about his daughter dating a Black man, and he had to do an apology and all sorts of other stuff. And that was during the Venus retrograde in Leo, but it was based on a recording from eight years earlier in 2007 which was the last time Venus went retrograde in Leo. And then of course, he just ended up in 2025 he died under a Mercury retrograde in Leo. So I simply noticed those three correlations in Leo on his stellium, and I thought that was kind of striking astrologically.
AC: Oh yeah, and there was stuff actually that goes back further with that. When we did our Venus retrograde in Leo episode, he was one of the people that I focused on. That Venus retrograde in Leo is huge for him.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So anyway, so that was it, and I don’t have much else astrologically about those. And just couple of other news stories – so like I said, before Uranus departed from Taurus on June 29th, there was that headline on Reddit that said, “In China, coins and banknotes have all but disappeared because digital transactions and currencies have taken over.” And I thought that was just wild, because we were expecting that and I think we’d been predicting stuff like that as one of our main things when Uranus went into Taurus. But while we’ve seen a huge like, leaps and bounds in terms of cryptocurrency in the US and now that even influencing like, the politics and the election and other things like that, I think – and we’ve also seen I think the penny was just phased out, for example, in the US by the Trump administration. It’s been slower and like, paper currency is still obviously a thing here. But to realize that maybe some of that process has moved faster in other countries has been kind of interesting.
AC: Right. Contrary to popular opinion, Uranus also affects other countries. It’s not just the United States!
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. And finally, the last news story I noticed was on July 15th, not long – just a week after Uranus went into Gemini – there was a headline on Space.com that said, “Scientists Find Uranus is Surprisingly Warm, Heating Up the Case for a New Planetary Mission.” And what they found is something about it like, emitting more internal heat than they were expecting based on past readings. And that’s kind of a subtle otherwise unnoteworthy news story, but the reason why it’s important and actually very striking and impressive from an astrological standpoint is that when Uranus was discovered in the late 1700s, it was discovered in the sign of Gemini. So Uranus moving back into Gemini this month means it was also a Uranus return of the discovery of the planet. And I just thought that was incredibly fascinating that within a week after Uranus returning back to the sign of its discovery, something new was discovered about the properties of the planet Uranus, and that was like, a major headline that was in the news.
AC: Yeah, that’s perfect. Because whenever we see returns to natal positions, you know, with a person’s birth chart, like, you learn more about the nature of that position. Right? During your Saturn return, you’re like, oh, this is the nature of what’s expected of me and what I will be judged for and like, the very essence of what does it mean to take responsibility for things. What am I responsible for? What am I truly not responsible for? Like, you have that understanding it better having done a cycle. So that makes a lot of sense.
So there was one —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — more thing that happened this month that, of course, not only happened in the sky and to other people, but happened to me, because all of the planets are very interested in harassing me. And that was on the New Moon in Leo, which was almost perfectly opposite Pluto. Right? Pluto, whose nature and meaning is very much the negation of the light. Right? It’s the invisible, dark, prowling – the tenebrous periphery of the planetary system. There was a Starlink outage. Elon Musk’s satellite-provided internet, Starlink, just went out across the entire world for several hours. And this was obnoxious for me, because I was about to teach a class. But probably far more disastrous for lots of people. Probably one of the groups most affected was probably the entire Ukrainian military, which has relied on Starlink to provide, you know, the exchange of tactical and strategic information for a lot of the Russo-Ukrainian war. So it was actually kind of a big deal that it just blanked out for several hours, and very much in line with the ideas that we might have had about a Sun and Moon conjunction exactly opposite Pluto. And of course, the Sun and Moon sharing the sign with none other than a retrograde Mercury. So it was pretty striking.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. That Sun-Pluto conjunction was intense, and the Mercury retrograde and just the technical outages and snafus was wild. And I mean, that gives an example, though, of just like, how much power is in the hand of like, this one company that’s ultimately under the control of one guy in terms of Starlink and how many places now it provides internet to, which also then links back to another story I was gonna skip this month but is worth mentioning, which is just like, Elon rolling out the artificial intelligence stuff and his artificial intelligence like… Did it declare that it was like, mecha-Hitler? Or it basically started spouting off like —
AC: I think it said, “Call me Mecha Hitler” after a little screed.
CB: Yeah. Because basically they’d been having issues with it for months where it was like, giving facts and stuff, and it wasn’t supporting their particular like, political opinions, and so he kept tweaking it and tweaking it to make it more suitable to his political views, until eventually it became like, spouting off extremist rhetoric basically and went crazy. And it was like, this whole fiasco earlier this month.
AC: Yeah, it seemed to have gone kind of like, right-wing edgelord seemed to be the new parameters.
CB: Right. Or extremist, and yeah. So again, just thinking about the Pluto in Aquarius and where we find ourself at this point where it’s like, you have the richest guy in the world that is in control of like, one of the largest internet companies – or it’s becoming one of the largest internet companies – with Starlink where it had a single point of failure this month and took down the internet for like, all sorts of people all around the world. You have what’s becoming – it’s gonna be competing as one of the largest AI companies that he’s building with some of the largest AI data centers. But it’s being, you know, encouraged, it’s being manipulated in order to give certain types of information. And then finally, the same dude also just started his own political party this month to do whatever he’s gonna do with that. So we’re entering into a really weird and not good-sounding – not to be like, an overly like, bummer, but – this Pluto in Aquarius is shaping up to be kind of rough in terms of centralized control over so many different technologies in the hands of very few people that may or may not be using them for good things.
AC: Yeah. It’s interesting. I wonder if that’ll be part of a larger story of more power being centralized outside of nation-states in corporations or those who own corporations. That would certainly be very par for the cyberpunk trajectory that we’re on is that set of near future visions always has corporations having either replaced nation-states or at least having a much greater level of power than they do now with nation-states having a diminished level relative to now. And that’s fiction, of course, but there are strains of prophecy to be found in good fiction. Sorry —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — a spider just crawled right in front of me; that’s why I was looking off to the side.
CB: Okay. That’s ominous. Yeah, well, there’s that scenario, certainly, but then there’s also the question of how far can, of running up to a limit that we’re gonna see of what happens when some of the oligarchs amass power to themselves, but if they run contrary to the government powers and the people that are in control of things, like, what happens to them, and are they able to maintain their power or do they get checked? Because we saw a notable version of that two years ago with Prigozhin, you know, and that whole attempted rebellion in Russia. Yeah, so we’ll see. And certainly Trump and Elon, as Uranus has moved into Trump’s 11th house and his alliances have frayed, he’s done allusions of talking about like, nationalizing Space X or stuff like that if Elon didn’t get in line. So that’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in the coming years with Uranus moving further into Trump’s 11th house and some of the unexpected ways that his friendships and alliances change in different and sometimes dramatic ways.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And the mention of Prigozhin reminds me of something we’re going to touch on briefly, which is just that over July, we’ve seen Saturn and Neptune about as close as they’re going to get before they’re conjunct. We saw the double station where they both spoke up loudly while standing right next to each other. And it’s about as loud as they’re gonna get as a chorus of two before their actual precise conjunction in about six-and-a-half months. And since, you know, we’ve noted and discussed many times that Russian history seems to use Saturn-Neptune conjunctions as a fulcrum or a pivot point, it’s interesting to glance at what happened to Russia during July just as a checking in six months before the actual conjunction. And one notable thing is that the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin seems to have at least publicly decayed significantly. Trump said a lot of hostile things. It looks like what neutrality… Excuse me, my thing just pulled out. What neutrality or positivity there was has evaporated or is in the process of evaporating. Again, it will be interesting to check the status of the US-Russia relationship now and then again in six months. And I haven’t gotten into investigating it, but I’ve seen a number of different reports that have as their subject concern with the financial state of the Russian economy at this point several years into a conflict.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. That was a major thing that actually happened on the Neptune station, which occurred on July 4th. Like, the day before that, Trump and Putin had a phone call, and then after that time, something must have happened in that phone call because Trump suddenly started saying negative things about Putin, which was weird because I had always remarked over the years how he would often go out of his way not to. And even though Trump would lambast like, just about anybody, Putin was like, the one guy that he never seemed to say negative things about. But something happened, and he started publicly making negative remarks about Putin and about Russia. And now there’s some sort of deadline that he’s just issued for Russia to stop aggression or something like that, otherwise he’s gonna initiate more sanctions. So that’s really important, because when I was looking at the Epstein stuff and then remembered that he was born on the 1953 conjunction and that’s recurring now, and making this an important turning point for him even though it’s post-mortem astrology, it reminded me that there were two figures that we meant to emphasize, which is that both the leader of Russia and the leader of China were both born under the same conjunction. And therefore this recurrence especially over the next year should be an important turning point for both leaders and by extension both countries.
AC: Absolutely. And I’m really glad you brought up the deadline that Trump gave Russia, because it was 10 or 12 days from the 28th of July, which is either the 7th or 9th of August. The 7th being the first full day that Mars is in Libra and opposing Saturn and Neptune and trining Uranus and trining Pluto. Or it’s the 3rd day where it’s still doing all of exactly the same thing. It’s literally one of our like, peak potentially “oh shit” moments in August. So I was like, of course that deadline. And of course the trade talk deadline that Trump gave back in the spring was up right within a day or two of Uranus ingressing into Gemini in July. So these like, these deadlines ending —
CB: Right.
AC: — seem to rather consistently at this point correlate with a chaotic or an “oh shit” configuration.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a really great point. So yeah, we’ll see what happens with that. And then the only question mark is then what’s going on with China under this Saturn-Neptune conjunction? And the only thing I think of with that and especially the Uranus ingress recently is just the rumor, supposedly, that there might be like, a 2027 deadline about invading Taiwan if they were gonna do it, and whether that’s true. Because if that was true, that would kind of fit the bill for the larger tensions and conflicts that we’re seeing with some of the Uranus return stuff and the Saturn-Neptune as an important turning point and other things like that. And I hope that’s not where it’s headed, but that’s the only question mark that I have is like, we know what’s going on in Russia to some extent. Between the US and Russia, relations are breaking down further surprisingly. But what’s going on with the other piece of that, I guess, is the question.
AC: Yeah, and the other world leader who has that conjunction. As I was —
CB: Right.
AC: — telling you earlier, I know some people who were born with the Saturn-Neptune in Libra, and they have not been enjoying this Saturn-Neptune in Aries period.
CB: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Well. We’ll see what happens.
All right, I think that’s good for the news section, so let’s take a little break.
All right, before we move on, I wanted to give a shoutout to our sponsor, which is the United Astrology Conference which is happening September 3rd through the 9th, 2026, in Chicago. So this is the biggest astrological conference that takes place in the west. It used to happen every four years when all of the major astrological organizations in the United States would pool their resources and host one big mega-conference. But the last time a UAC happened was in 2018 before the pandemic. So this is the first time in eight years that all of the organizations have gotten together to sponsor one of these huge mega-conferences, and it’s gonna be pretty amazing. There’s gonna be 180 speakers, 270 different lectures, 16 different topic tracks. They’re expecting potential attendees of over 1,500 astrologers, and a ton of pre- and post-conference workshops, and it’s just gonna be an amazing, amazing event.
So the United Astrology Conference, the tickets are actually gonna go on sale this month in August starting on August 18th, 2025. And the earlier you sign up when you sign up for early registration, it actually gives you a much lower price for the tickets because then in the months following that leading up to the conference, the ticket prices jump up periodically the closer and closer you get to the conference. So if you have any interest in attending or you’d like to look into it, you can look at UACAstrology.com – U A C Astrology dot com. And if you’re a member of one of the sponsoring organizations, then you actually get a discount on the tickets. So the sponsoring organizations are the American Federation of Astrologers, the International Society for Astrological Research, the National Council for Geocosmic Research, the Organization for Professional Astrologers, the American Council of Vedic Astrology, and the Association for Young Astrologers. So those are all the organizations, just to give you an idea, that are pooling their resources to host this conference, which is one of the reasons it’s gonna be such an amazing thing. So you can get more information or get your tickets at U A C Astrology dot com.
And Austin, in the 500th episode that I just recorded the other day, I was looking at the outline for the original episode and what’s funny is there was an announcement – I was recording that right after, I did it the month after UAC 2012 had taken place in New Orleans. And one of the pieces of like, astrology news that I mentioned is that you had just become the president of the Association for Young Astrologers way back in 2012 when we were still baby astrologers.
AC: Yeah! Yeah, we did the handoff of the presidency from you to me at UAC.
CB: Yeah. I think it was in like, Michael Lutin’s suite or something at like, a party, and it was like, this nice official moment.
AC: Yeah. It was really nice. Jupiter was in my 9th house – or excuse me, in my 11th house at the time. Like, you know, groups. And it was exactly to degree sextile my natal Jupiter and Ascendant. I remember being like, oh! That’s Jupiter in the 11th! Like, you configured to natal Jupiter and the Ascendant; you take over leadership of a group of like-minded individuals.
CB: I love that. That’s perfect. Yeah. And I was just getting ready to start my Saturn return. Saturn was like, in my 9th house and getting ready to go into my 10th. And you know, I was gearing up to do some of the stuff to finish writing my book. But then ironically, one of the things that that became was starting the podcast and doing the early phases of the podcast during my Saturn return.
AC: That’s interesting. I met Kelly Surtees for the first time at that UAC, as well as a bunch of other people.
CB: Nice. Yeah. So UAC is always important, because there’s just so many astrologers there. You put that many astrologers in one place together; stuff starts happening, and there can be all these unexpected things that come out of that that you don’t expect going into it. But then it can change your trajectory on the other side. So yeah, people should check it out and take advantage of it if you can, especially the early discount. So shoutout to UAC at U A C Astrology dot com.
All right. So let’s move on and let’s talk about the astrological forecast for August. And we’ve got quite a bit to talk about, because there are some pretty notable alignments that are happening this month. To give people an overview, it’s really four, I believe, like, main things. It’s three things earlier in the month and then one cliffhanger towards the end of the month. And the three things at the beginning of the month are Mercury slowing down and stationing direct opposite to Pluto. Then there is the Mars-Saturn opposition that’s happening around the 8th and 9th of August. And then just after that, the auspicious Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer is happening around August 11th. So that’s all clustering up in the first like, week or two basically of the month and is gonna be in some instances some pretty tense combinations and other instances some pretty awesome ones, some positive ones. And then by the end of the month, like I was saying, by the time we do the next forecast episode basically, we’re gonna be right on the cusp of some major changes because the first eclipse takes place early in September. And the eclipse window of eclipse season starts to bleed over a little bit into the very end of August. So I’m anticipating that some major beginnings and major endings and some events are gonna start moving very quickly by the very, very end of August. So that’s a little bit looking forward ahead, and we should concentrate more on those combinations in the first half of the month. But that’s kind of the overview of what I’m getting from this month.
AC: Yeah. I see it very similarly. One way I might summarize it, or what’s striking to me, is that we have both malefics – Mars and Saturn – opposed one another, like, configured to one another. You know, talking very loudly. And we have both benefics conjoined. We have both Jupiter and Venus in Cancer. And all four of those planets – double malefics and double benefics – are in cardinal signs. Right? And so there’s just, it’s all the good and all the bad, all at once.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So the cardinal signs are just getting activated so much this month. And one of the things I’m hoping for is that – let me show the graphs to give you an idea.
So shoutout to Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co that designed a bunch of these graphs for me this month to help visualize and illustrate some of these aspects. And this is giving them a three-degree orb so that we can see the Mars-Saturn conjunction is going exact on August 8th, but there’s gonna be this buildup in orb at least from August 4th, which is also when Mars goes into Libra and begins the sign-based opposition. And then this buildup, and then this sort of separation and cooldown phase that lasts for at least three degrees after that in terms of the most intense period through the 13th. Although realistically, the sign-based opposition between those two is gonna leave that active, especially for those with heavy cardinal placements.
So that aspect is going exact on the 8th, and that peaks in intensity at that time. And then the Venus-Jupiter conjunction swoops in and goes exact on August 11th, and that’s also right around when Mercury is stationing direct opposite Pluto. So that aspect is building up from at least the 8th of August with a three-degree orb, and it’s still in some effect all the way through until the 14th of August with that three-degree orb. I’m kind of hopeful – I wanna be a little hopeful and optimistic here that one of the scenarios is like, there’s a major tension that culminates around August 8th and the early part of August where the rubber band is pulled as far as it can go, and in some instances it kind of like, snaps. But then there’s this other positive energy that comes in in the coming days to help soothe and like, clean things up a little bit is one of my hopeful takes about how this sequence of events will go for some people when it comes to this like, difficult alignment that’s then followed by an extremely positive one.
AC: Yeah, and I think that there’s certainly gonna be some truth to that, which is also testified to by the fact that the Venus-Jupiter configuration is later in cardinal signs. Right? Like, you have the peak of Mars-Saturn and Mars configured with Uranus and Pluto and Neptune is in the first couple degrees. And then literally as degrees keep ascending, then we’ll hit Jupiter and Venus. And although Mars will slowly march through Libra until I think the 21st of September, like, Saturn’s not marching all the way through Aries, nor are these other planets getting further in the signs. It’s an early degrees thing for the malefics, and then we hit the benefics in the middle, and then there are no malefics after that. So even just on a daily motion, planets arising, or the Moon going through each sign over two-and-a-half days, we’re gonna have that sequencing.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. That’s a really good point.
I wanted to mention some observational astronomy this month also in order to set the stage for some of the configurations that we’re gonna be witnessing this month astrologically and how to tie them into something tangible. But this Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer this month, especially towards the middle of the month, is gonna be visible before dawn. So a little bit before sunrise each day, if you’re up early, you’ll see these two brilliant white stars moving closer and closer together towards the very end of the night basically or in the early morning sky. And that’s Venus and Jupiter. So it’s a really good opportunity to actually witness what an auspicious conjunction like this looks like, because they’re not always visible. Like, sometimes you can’t see them when they happen if the conjunction is happening during the day. But this one just happens to be visible to us before sunrise.
I think in particular on August 20th, I was looking there was gonna be a day where the Moon swoops through Cancer, and it will conjoin both Venus and Jupiter. And that’s gonna be a particularly brilliant alignment because you’ll be able to visibly see what a conjunction – a triple conjunction – looks like between the Moon and these two little stars which are gonna be Venus and Jupiter.
Mercury is gonna make its greatest elongation on August 19th, which is when it reaches its furthest point away from the Sun, which also happens to be the point where Mercury is the most visible. And you’ll be able to see it before dawn, just a little bit before dawn, just like Venus and Jupiter, which is gonna add to that visual kind of excitement of being able to visibly see all these planets very early in the morning or very late at night, depending on your perspective.
Mars is still gonna be visible at night, just after the Sun sets but not for a lot longer because the Sun is moving towards it. So it’s gonna start getting too close so that Mars isn’t gonna be visible anymore. But at this point, you should still be able to see Mars low on the horizon in the west just after sunset. And Saturn, on the other hand, is gonna be visible at night. Especially around midnight you’ll probably be able to see Saturn up in the middle of the sky more or less.
AC: Yeah, that late in the month trio of planets that’s going to rise before the Sun every day is pretty exciting. Because you’re gonna get Jupiter, then Venus, then Mercury every day for a little while. And for those couple days, the Moon will also be in there. That’s quite a few planets announcing the day.
CB: Absolutely. Well, and it just will add to Mercury stationing direct and starting to move forward again. And it’s one of the reasons why the stations are so important, whether it’s stationing retrograde or stationing direct, because those are also generally speaking the only times or near the only times when you can actually see Mercury, because most of the time it’s too close to the Sun to be visibly witnessed as a morning or an evening star. So I think that’s gonna be one of the things as we come out of the Mercury retrograde, especially for those people that have had kind of a tough or a tricky Mercury retrograde, is Mercury emerging on the other side of that and starting to move forward again and starting to get out of it finally, and just being able to breathe this sigh of relief that some of those sort of like, trials and tribulations are sort of over and are moving into the past.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So why don’t I animate the chart here in order to ground this in what we’re looking at just to get us to orient us at the beginning of the month.
So here’s the chart for August 1st. We can see Venus has already entered into Cancer, so it’s building up to that conjunction with Jupiter, although it has to move through the square with Saturn and Neptune first on the very first day of the month, which can be like a bucket of cold water being thrown on Venus and Venus’s relational aspect when you have a hard aspect between Venus and Saturn like that.
We see Mars in late Virgo at 26 degrees finishing up its time in that sign over the first few days of August. And pretty soon after that, like, starting to move into that three-degree opposition with Saturn once it gets towards the end of Virgo. So we’re gonna start feeling that opposition between Mars and Saturn only a few days into August.
Mercury’s already past the cazimi by the time August opens. We can see the Sun is at nine degrees of Leo and Mercury’s at eight degrees of Leo. So that means some of the issues that began when Mercury stationed retrograde usually at this point once Mercury conjoins the Sun will start to head towards some sort of resolution and will start to taper off a bit. So you’re not fully out of the clear if you’ve been dealing with Mercury retrograde stuff over the past couple of weeks, but it will start heading in the direction of resolving some of those issues for good as we move into the second half of the Mercury retrograde cycle basically from the last day of July and the first day of August forward until the station around August 11th and 12th.
What do you think, Austin?
AC: Oh, there’s so much to say that occurs just after this.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I’m preoccupied with what is to come.
CB: Okay. Will give me —
AC: Can we talk about Mars yet? Mars, Saturn —
CB: Yeah —
AC: — Pluto?
CB: Okay, before we get there, let me give the electional chart for the month, because what Leisa Schaim and I did this month in picking out the best, trying to identify the best, electional chart of this month is we found one basically at the very, very beginning of the month in order to avoid a lot of the tense stuff that’s gonna happen later, especially the Mars-Saturn opposition.
So let me give you our best electional chart for the month, which takes place on August 3rd, 2025, at about 11 o’clock in the morning with Libra rising. So this is our recommended electional chart for the month if you have to do something, if you have to launch something and you need an auspicious chart to try to put things in your favor as much as possible, this is the best we can come up with for this month. And the trick with this electional chart is we really wanted to be able to use that Mars-Jupiter conjunction that goes exact later in the month around the 12th or so. But the problem is that the Mars-Saturn opposition is very close still around that time, around the time that Venus-Jupiter is going exact. So this is best we could do is giving you a chart where it’s at the beginning of the month so that Mars is still in late Virgo and it hasn’t fully moved into that sign-based opposition or the close degree-based opposition with Saturn quite yet. So that’s part of what we’re trying to do here is avoid that exact opposition of Mars and Saturn and making it as intense as it could be, and also still making Venus and Jupiter the focal point.
So this chart has Libra rising. Venus is ruling the Ascendant; it’s at four degrees of Cancer. It’s separating from that square with Saturn and Neptune, and it’s headed towards the conjunction with Jupiter in Cancer. And we place that conjunction in the 10th whole sign house, and the ruler of the 10th house is the Moon, which is in Sagittarius in the 3rd house of communication and short-distance travel and neighbors and neighborhoods and siblings. And there’s a nice exchange of signs where Jupiter’s actually in the sign of the Moon, and the Moon is in the sign of Jupiter, creating a very strong connection between the 10th and 3rd house.
So this is a good chart for 10th house things related to career, reputation, public standing, and overall life direction. It’s also not a bad chart for communication and short-distance travel due to the 3rd house emphasis. We do still have Mercury retrograde, which is not super great normally for communication and could indicate some delays or uniqueness or quirkiness in the way that you express yourself, especially in the context of the 11th house and friends and groups. But because Mercury’s at least on the other side of the cazimi, it’s not as bad as if Mercury was just stationing retrograde. And additionally, it’s also not as close to Pluto as it will be when it does station.
The area of the chart that has the greatest difficulties is Mars is in the 12th house of enemies and self-undoing, so that’s one area there could be problems with. But otherwise, it’s a pretty solid election. And Austin, I think you said you also settled on this election for something —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — as well, yeah?
AC: I think it was about six weeks ago, Kait was like, “I wanna throw a pool party this summer. When am I throwing the pool party?” And so, yeah, I scanned everything, and I was like, oh, it’s gotta be August 3rd. And then I later almost regretted that, because I had a thing to schedule. Like, two weeks after that, I was like, oh, when do I do this or that? And I was like, fuck! I can’t do August 3rd. We’re doing pool party that day. But yeah —
CB: Right.
AC: This was exactly the day I found. Yeah. I’ll just say that —
CB: I love that one of the fringe benefits of being married to you is you’re using your knowledge to elect pool parties is a great like, fringe benefit.
AC: Yeah. And nothing says “pool party” like Venus-Jupiter in a water sign, right?
CB: Absolutely.
AC: Like, up there at the top of the chart. And there’s a nice friendly emotional maybe sort of warmth, good spirits, with just Sun and the Moon both in fire signs, and that Moon in Sagittarius as you pointed out is ruled by – looks to – that Jupiter in Cancer and vice versa. Right? Like, nice double linkage between the Moon and Jupiter. It just looked like a nice time. And it was on a weekend. Right? Because the —
CB: Nice.
AC: — rules for pool party elections is it can’t be 3:30 in the morning on a Tuesday.
CB: Right. That’s one of Guido Bonatti’s rules I think as well, I think he mentions.
AC: Yeah. When electing a pool – when ascertaining the figure —
CB: For the king.
AC: — to throw a pool party. Yeah, for the king. Or the queen —
CB: Right.
AC: — in this case.
CB: It was one of his like, considerations before judgment.
AC: And yeah, and it’s nice. This is just sort of right before all the bullshit starts. So nobody’s —
CB: Yeah, exactly.
AC: — got the bullshit on their mind yet.
CB: Exactly. So take advantage of it while you can at the very beginning of the month using that electional chart. Leisa and I just released our electional astrology podcast episode for August where we found other charts later in the month that are also decent as well if you need to do major things this month. So you can get access to that by becoming a patron of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com and signing up for the Electional Astrology Podcast tier, and then you get immediate access to all those other charts that we just released.
All right. So I guess I can’t put it off any longer, so now we have to get into talking about the serious stuff, which is you really wanna talk about the Mars-Saturn opposition as the focal point and one of the most – potentially the most – important aspect this month. But it’s a tough one that you’ve actually been talking about for several months now, even potentially I think in the year ahead forecast —
AC: Yeah.
CB: You’d zeroed in on this one.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And so the bones of it is it’s a Mars-Saturn opposition. Mars-Saturn conjunctions and oppositions are always rough. They’re rough and tough; they ask us to be enduring and relentless and push forward, but not too fast, but don’t you dare stop. Like, they’re subjectively and objectively often tough. And they call out that in us. You know, on a mundane level historically, they’re usually peaks of, they usually see a spike in whatever is dangerous or deadly, whether that is a plague such as in 2020 and ‘21 and ‘22, or it’s an ongoing war. Like, I was really struck years ago when in the vedic program I was in, the two planet combination for Mars and Saturn – when they’re opposed or conjoined – was just sort of abbreviated as a yama yoga, or death god combination. Because they do – they just bring up like, whatever is dangerous and potentially deadly. And so that’s the heart of it. They’re always tough. And certainly it’s not that every one of those, we all die. Right? Or else everybody would be dead every year. But they bring that stuff up.
What got me focused on this one is that although that forms the core of the configuration, it’s also Mars opposing Neptune, trining Pluto and trining Uranus, because we have this structure of planets in their new places which has just formed up, which is Neptune in Aries, Uranus in Gemini, and Pluto in Aquarius. And not only do those describe the outer planet conditions that we’re going to see until 2033 with a little brief break this fall, but it’s Mars’s very first configuration with Uranus in Gemini. There has been no aspect between Mars and Uranus. And so it’s this whole – I was trying to come up with a name for it, like the flying wedge, the plow of chaos, whatever, these three in alignment. And so it’s Mars activating all of them at once. And the, you know, basically —
CB: The plow of chaos? That’s a good one; I like that.
AC: Yeah, that got mentioned like, at I think the end of the yearly when I was just kind of spitballing. The flying plow of chaos, right? And so just in general, I was looking at it from a like, oh, it’s Mars activating all of this. Like, activating this chaotic —
CB: I’ll show the chart while you talk.
AC: Yeah, that would be great. This chaotic near future configuration. And I assumed that it would spark whatever tinder was nearby; whatever is already like, hot or kind of burning. It’s certainly not going to downgrade conflicts or ongoing dangers. But again, we also have Mars hitting all of these – it’s the first time Mars has aspected Saturn since it’s been in Aries. Right? It’s the first aspect between Mars and Uranus in Gemini. And so yeah, in addition to just sort of sparking up all the dangerous shit that’s already happening, I’ve really been thinking recently if with Mars being in an air sign, Pluto being in an air sign, Uranus being in an air sign, if we aren’t gonna see some sort of significant cyber attack, hack, some sort of like, digital violence or danger that we haven’t seen before. The recent outage of Starlink and the fact that Starlink is used by a military in an ongoing war just brought me back to the fact that a lot of these digital systems are part of the battlefield of the near future. And so it’s just, like, it seems like a configuration that’s well-suited to give us a taste of that.
CB: Yeah. I would expect that it would be something pertaining to Iran and Israel because of the prominence of like, Libra and Aries in both countries’ charts as well as the leaders’ charts. And I know we had looked at that as a possible flashpoint months ago in some of the forecast —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — episodes because of the potential for adding additional tensions on top of the charts of both of those countries.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: So Mars and Saturn – so why this is important is because it’s like, you take what are traditionally the two most negative or malefic or challenging planets in ancient astrology, which is Mars and Saturn, and you put them in what is traditionally the most difficult aspect, which is the opposition. And that’s when you get these tensions that pull you in completely opposite directions, because of traditionally the fiery nature of Mars where Mars is seen as malefic because it’s excessively hot and aggressive and fiery, whereas Saturn is seen as malefic because it’s aggressively cold and restrictive and slow. And when you put those two opposing tendencies together, they pull you in opposite directions. And sometimes that leads to situations like you said where you have to exert just a huge amount of endurance in order to push through something that’s incredibly hard and long-lasting so that just the endurance and the need to expend a huge amount of energy over an extended period of time is part of the experience of that transit, just in and of itself. But sometimes it can also mean going right up to the point of like, your breaking point and seeing in some instances if you know your limits and if that really is your limit, or if your limits in some instances have to go beyond what you thought they were previously due to the circumstances of the moment. And sometimes finding out that you can actually rise to the occasion when you have to do something, and there’s just no other way to do it.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. That’s very true. One of the analogies that you’ve used to describe Mars-Saturn stuff to people in the past that I think is simple and clear and good and useful is the – I think this is yours – is that Mars and Saturn, conjunctions and oppositions, these like, tight configurations like this stomp on both the gas and the brakes at the same time. Or it’s somebody screaming – you know, one scary planet screaming, “Go!” The other screaming, “Stop!” At the same time. And if you are the vehicle that has both the gas and the brakes being stomped on, that’s a lot of systemic stress. Like, that is not good for your car. And if you are the car, there’s a lot of wear and tear during that period. To your point about the – I’m sorry, I was flashing on the last time Mars and Saturn conjoined in my experience. The conjoined right on top of my Sun in my chart like, two weeks after Lucian was born. And I was just thinking about how completely exhausted and scared and intense that period was, but I had literally the experience that you just described. Like, oh, I don’t need that much sleep. Right? Like, taking care of the child, taking care of Kait, and vice versa – like, I can do this even though I’ve never done this before and it seems very unreasonable to ask of a person. But yeah, like, the emotional and physical intensity of that period – just us alone being parents for the first time was the Mars-Saturn conjunction on my Sun. So yeah —
CB: That makes sense. Yeah.
AC: Real life testifying to the delineation you just gave.
CB: Nice. Yeah, that makes sense. And I always remember one of the much earlier conjunction, the 2020 one, when Mars and Saturn lined up in like, March and April of 2020 and the lockdowns happened in the west. And all of a sudden, you had all these people that wanted to go out but then they were stuck at home, and just everyone’s life ground to a halt. And that was a really literal manifestation of Mars wanting to have that forward movement, but Saturn putting something there saying like, “No, you can’t for this reason.” In addition to one of the other Mars-Saturn oppositions I looked up from our transcripts from past episodes is I was talking about, you know, Mars-Saturn conjunctions are always traditionally associated with plagues in ancient astrology and pandemics. And I noticed that one of the oppositions was like, the delta wave kicked off. Because remember there was that period in like, 2020, 2021, 2022 when it kept responding to like, the Mars-Saturn cycle in addition to other things in terms of some of the different variants at that time.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And so one thing that’s interesting about this one is that both Saturn and Mars are in unusual places. Places where they are not comfortable to express their essential nature clearly. Like, Saturn has a hard time being cold in Aries. And Mars has a hard time being a, doing the like, fiery and bold in Libra. Right? Like, they’re a little off. But what’s interesting is that Saturn here is in Mars’s place, right? And so extra responsive to Mars. And then Mars is in the place of – is in Libra, which is Saturn’s exaltation. And so we have a pretty meaningful reception between the two receiving each other through domicile and exaltation, which strengthens what’s happening here but also will give sometimes unusual events where you get the planet accomplishing its thing, but in a manner that’s unorthodox. Like, this Saturn – much to my frustration – does not give much cold. It gives like, hot mess immediacy rather than like, the coldness of an upcoming deadline. And so I’m interested to see how that works out.
CB: Yeah, because coldness – you know, what is coldness? Coldness is sometimes like, restraint or putting structure or holding things back, like, putting some order into things. And I like what you’re saying there about the signs that they’re in, because Saturn’s also in the sign of its fall, and we were talking a lot earlier this year – or the sign of its depression. We were talking a lot earlier this year when Mars was in Cancer in its fall how one of the traditional delineations of that was like, prisons, and some of that energy of Mars at that time and how that was actually coming up in some of the news at the time as well. But then Mars is in Libra, which is the sign of its exile, and it’s the furthest it can get from its domicile possible, which can sometimes have to do with like, being away from home or traveling or being a foreigner in a place that you don’t live or that you don’t have familiarization with. So I’m wondering if that imagery comes back in some way in a striking way around the time of this opposition with some of the things happening in the country, of course, as well just harkening back to some of the things that started earlier this year.
AC: Yeah. And another thing I’ve seen with Mars in Libra in world events – and on a personal level – is it’s Mars pretending it’s not doing Mars because it’s in Venus’s place. Like, “I’m not starting a war; you’re starting a war.” Right? Or like, the annexation of the Crimean peninsula happened when Mars was retrograde in Libra back in 2014, and it was like, oh, it’s not – we’re just taking this territory, but it’s like, not military at all. Like, we promise! You get this sort of like —
CB: Right.
AC: — a thing that would normally be interpreted as a military action or an aggressive action that is at least presented as if it were not.
CB: Yeah. And it was claimed that it was like, somebody else was doing it or it’s not us or something like that.
AC: Yeah, exactly. You get that like, Mars acting – or the planet acting – like it’s not itself, but it’s actually just doing itself.
CB: Yeah, acting aggressively while pretending that you’re not, let’s say, as one of the themes for Mars in Libra.
AC: Right. Like, somebody who keeps needling you and is like, “I don’t know why you’re so upset. Like, you really have a problem with your temper.” Like, between just like, poking you to bring that out. They’re like, “You know, you really need to look into your anger issues.” Poke, poke, poke, poke, poke.
CB: Yeah. And I like that you mentioned the reception, though, that Saturn is in Mars’s sign, so that does bring a little bit of a possibility of resolution or a somewhat softening of the opposition that’s still gonna be really hard compared to if there was no reception between the two planets, then there’s no way to resolve that conflict between them. And one of the things about oppositions is that they usually manifest or very commonly manifest through other people in our lives. And that’s usually whenever you have a transiting opposition or an opposition in your natal chart, you’ll often find that the event doesn’t necessarily come from within, but sometimes it manifests in an external person or situation that comes into your life that causes the conflict that’s coming about or the tensions.
AC: Yeah. Very often. And you know, if you were to read one of those as being the Ascendant, the other would be in the 7th house from it, so you get that like, the self and other dynamic. And no matter where it is in the chart, it’s going to be in an opposing pair of houses. And so there will be a pull or an intersecting set of issues in an opposite parts of the life, right? If it’s 4th and 10th and it’s like, oh, there’s this big pain-in-the-ass thing at work; oh no, now there’s this thing at home. Like, how do I deal with both of these at once? Or 3rd and 9th, right? Like, I’ve gotta do all this stuff locally, but then I have this big travel thing coming up; I don’t know how I’m gonna get it all done. But yeah, that tension. I will say that the reception between the two I find less comforting, because their agreement doesn’t necessarily mean good things for us. It might be that they’re not so mad at each other, but when Mars and Saturn both agree – such as in 2020, and you get Mars and Saturn together in Capricorn where they’re both very happy and in reception and agreement – you know, they did a cool team-up then. It wasn’t great for the humans.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, that was complicated by the Saturn-Pluto conjunction and Mars-Pluto that was happening at the same time, but —
AC: Yeah, hundred percent.
CB: — point taken. So and this is the first hard aspect that Saturn’s received from Mars since it’s entered Aries, and I think that’s really important because especially those that are like, having their Saturn returns, you know, there’s some group of those people – like, let’s say people with night charts – that are already having a hard time with that. There’s people with let’s say day charts that are navigating it more constructively. But it’s usually when like, Mars comes in and throws something else on top of that that you get both groups then that are finally having some issues with it. So that’s gonna be one of the interesting things about this is watching some of the like, especially first Saturn return people that have Saturn in Aries dealing with some of the first major challenges or crises of the Saturn return that force them to dig deep and push for a greater sense of maturity and responsibility that Saturn’s sort of requiring of them at this time.
AC: Yeah, that’s a great point. This is absolutely like, the first boss of the Saturn return for people who have Saturn in Aries. And yeah, like, Mars has literally not made an exact aspect with Saturn since it entered Aries. Like, zero – no sextiles, no trines. Like, trine by sign but not exact. This is the first exact aspect. And for a Mars-ruled Saturn, that’s really significant.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s like, we had Mars-Uranus last month in June, and that was that crazy week or two when the US and Israel attacked Iran, and there was the military parade, and there was just like, all this other stuff that all happened under that Mars aspect. This is gonna be a different but similar energy, at least in terms of creating a flashpoint that’s really focused on especially the few days leading up to August 8th and the few days after August 8th. And one of the points you made is just it’s hitting different people’s charts in different ways, but it’s gonna be fully activating whatever that Saturn transit is about for you in the house that it’s located in. And you mentioned some of the other axes, but other ones are like, the 6th house and the 12th house, which can sometimes be the tensions between physical health versus mental health is one of the things that can come up in that axis or the 5th house and the 11th house and sometimes tensions between like, children versus friend groups or fun and enjoyment and leisurely activities versus like, friends and groups and alliances or something like that.
AC: Yeah. Also with the 5th-11th, like, 5th is what you create or make, and 11th is the people who can see it.
CB: Nice. That’s perfect. Okay. Yeah. So there’s a lot of people – you know, you don’t have to be going through your Saturn return for this one to be significant for you, because it’s the first time for all of us that we’re gonna learn a little bit about what some of the tensions are that are gonna be arising over the next three years and what structures are gonna be in some instances having challenges to them, or in some instances crumbling, while in other instances, structures that are gonna have challenges to them – like, stress tests – but that will survive in that part of our chart, even if we need to shore them up. So it’ll be important for all of us to pay attention to, you know, what house Saturn is in and what house Mars is moving into and understanding the dynamic and tension between those two houses as what’s being highlighted this month.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And —
CB: So – go ahead.
AC: In the middle of this, like, basically this long week where that Mars-Saturn is active, we have our first lunation of the month.
CB: Right. Yeah. So let me pull up the chart for that, because that lunation is just gonna imprint these three configurations from the beginning of the month. So this is a Full Moon in the sign of Aquarius, which takes place it looks like, yeah, early on August 9th or for some timezones towards the middle of the day. So it’s a Full Moon at 16 and 17 degrees of Aquarius, and it’s right on August 9th, so the Mars-Saturn opposition is still extremely close. Like, Mars is at one minute and 29 seconds of Libra, and it’s still opposing Saturn at one degree and 19 minutes of Aries. And Mars is still applying to the opposition with Neptune at one degree and 51 minutes of Aries. So that’s part of the energy. Maybe we should delineate that a little bit – Mars-Neptune – but to wrap this up, Venus is at 10 degrees of Cancer moving towards Jupiter at 13. And Mercury is one point nine days away from stationing direct at four degrees of Leo, opposing Pluto at two degrees of Aquarius. So our three main signatures for the month are all built into this lunation, which already itself represents like, a culmination and a heightening of activity when the Moon hits its brightest phase and even on a normal month would usually indicate like, a very busy and sometimes stressful period.
AC: Yeah. And the lunation is – it’s more fire and air. Sun in a fire sign; Moon in an air sign. We’ve got this over-abundance of fire and more than enough oxygen to feed it. And as you said, we also have Mercury stationing direct. That Mercury stationing direct as close to Pluto as it’s going to get, right? Like, as close to uncovering whatever underworld secrets as it’s going to get. And like, Mercury being what people are thinking about and talking about occupied with what’s hidden within the infinite well of Pluto and what can be seen and what can’t. So yeah, it’s a real —
CB: Yeah, earlier this year we were talking about that a lot with like, you told me to watch the first season of True Detective when we were talking about Mercury-Pluto aspects, and that was a great one, because Mercury-Pluto can be like, the investigator who doggedly like, sticks to a case and wants to get to the bottom of things and like, burrows in deep in order to find and reveal the truth. But then the other part of that can also be the person that becomes obsessed about something, like overly obsessed in a negative way that could be destructive or not helpful. Or in other instances, themes of control and manipulation surrounding people and surrounding communication and technologies. And that’s more likely, especially with the opposition, where sometimes you’re in a situation where you’re trying to like, convince somebody of something, and there’s tensions between you as a result of that.
AC: Yeah. Hundred percent. Yeah, you very much have that “stare long enough into the abyss and the abyss stares back into you,” and then you are changed often not for the better by it. And yeah, even with the way the first season of True Detective ends, much has been uncovered, but then there’s – the characters have to just say, “We did our part. There’s definitely more to this, but that can’t be on us.”
CB: Yeah. Well, and sometimes with Mercury stationing direct, it’s like, sometimes the uncovering of something or the exposure of something also can reveal old wounds and, you know, can reveal things that are kind of like, lurid and dark in terms of the details, which is not necessarily fun once it happens.
AC: Yeah. Hundred percent. Right, and so the mind is just – like, the thoughts, the Mercury level of things just full with this sort of like, formerly concealed or disgorged Plutonian truths. And so that’s happening while we have this Mars, Saturn, and friends things while the Moon is bright silver and probably too loud in Aquarius. It’s a really overstuffed second week of August. And this is the reason why we both came to the conclusion that it would be sure nice to do a pleasant thing on August 3rd. Right?
CB: Right.
AC: It’s a good configuration, and like —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — you know, once all this stuff gets going, it’s not like you’ll be able to just set it to the side. Right? Pool party before this, not pool party like, immediately after.
CB: Right. No pool parties around August 8th. Well, it reminds me of —
AC: Yeah, triage centers.
CB: Yeah. I don’t know if this is like, statistically true or how that works out, but it’s like, you always hear those reports from like, nurses and doctors about hospitals being busier during Full Moons. And this Full Moon reminds me of that especially because the Mars-Saturn opposition is happening at the same time, and sometimes there’s that imagery of like, breaking a bone can be like, a Mars-Saturn thing. So I would just encourage people around the time of this Full Moon to take extra caution and not to do things that are unnecessarily risky or could put yourself in a difficult situation just because the energy at this time is so intense in pushing things beyond their boundaries or their breaking points.
AC: Yeah, it’s hot and crazy. Like, you don’t need to add… Assume a low-risk profile if you can, to what degree you can.
CB: I love that. That’s brilliant. That’s a great way of putting it.
All right, so I wanna talk about something positive, because there’s also this extremely positive, auspicious Venus-Jupiter conjunction that’s happening right after that, and I wanna focus on that to balance things out because it’s not all bad stuff this month. And in fact, there’s a quite beautiful, brilliant aspect that’s gonna be happening in the sky. Like I said, you’ll be able to see it if you get up early in the morning just before sunrise every day this month, but especially around the middle of the month when it goes exact on the 11th, which interestingly is like, right after the Mars-Saturn conjunction has started to separate. And one of the things that’s important about this conjunction is it’s taking place in the sign of Cancer, which is the sign that Mars went retrograde for such a long time earlier this year for like, the first several months of 2025. And that Mars retrograde was really tough because it was like, breaking things in a certain sector of different people’s lives, depending on what house Mars went retrograde in from like, the fall of 2024 starting in September all the way through I think at least April, Mars was in Cancer at different points. And there were a lot of things that got messed up in that area of our lives, but then Jupiter came in recently over the past month or so and moved into Cancer and began the process of clean up. But this month with Venus moving into Cancer, I think Venus is coming in to lend a second helping hand in order to further accelerate and bring to completion the cleanup of that specific area of our life that Cancer coincides with in our chart. So that to me is something very exciting to look forward to about this month.
AC: Yeah. That’s nice. I hope that’s true. Mars did a series of pirouettes on my face, you know, right on my rising sign. But yeah. Like, the potential for the restoration of the part of the life that was damaged during the Mars retrograde in Cancer is a very real and very nice piece of this. And on a really simple level, it’s an exalted benefic with another benefic that’s quite happy – Venus is quite happy to be in Cancer. It’s not like, rulership or exaltation, but it’s a great place for Venus. As I said, it’s big pool party energy, right? It’s benefics, Jupiter and Venus in Cancer, you know, it’s pleasant. It’s wholesome. It’s like, whole-making. Like, making you whole. Like, restoring connection. It’s good emotionally, you know, between people; it’s good within oneself. Like, Venus and Jupiter, especially in a water sign like this, together can restore a sense of inner harmony or peace, which one can maintain sometimes even when the external world does not agree with that. There are a lot of nice things about it, even outside of repair. Like, it has nice experiences to offer. And it is a very meaningful consolation prize coming right after. Like, we have plenty of tough configurations that aren’t followed by really like, sweet and fortuitous ones. But we get one this time. And we keep Venus and Jupiter both in Cancer for most of the month. It isn’t until, what, the 24th, 25th that Venus leaves Cancer.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So this is – you know, I have the diagram, which I’ll show again, which shows the three-degree range where this aspect goes exact on the 11th. And three-degree range starts already on the 8th and then lasts already to the 14th at least. So this is the peak of intensity, but like you said, it’s gonna be going through that sign for most of the month, like, already at the opening of the month. And here’s the chart showing the actual conjunction itself taking place on the 11th and the 12th, and at one point the Moon swoops through Pisces and like, trines both of them, which is also a little helpful in emphasizing that aspect. But Jupiter has been bringing like, fixing things from Mars and bringing a sense of like, stability and like, peace to that area of our chart after this sense of like, war and conflict and expenditure of energy and other things that have been happening in Cancer late last year and early this year. But with Venus joining Jupiter in Cancer, I like the sense of like, fun and merriment and artistic expression and harmony that Venus is gonna be bringing to that area of our life, because I think that’s gonna be a much different vibe, and I think it’s gonna be very obvious once Venus goes into Cancer and for the entirety of its transit through that sign what a different energy that is to have those two transiting that sector of our chart compared to what we were experiencing earlier this year, especially when Mars stationed in Cancer. It’s gonna be like, sort of like night and day.
AC: Yeah. A hundred percent. And to add another facet to that, for virtually all of July, Venus was in Gemini square Mars. Right? And we’re not even done with that as we’re recording. And so we had Venus in a hard aspect with a malefic that was also doing a conjunction with one of the eclipse points, and so that Venus-Mars square was harsh. You know, it made it harder to get along. You must overcome the square with Mars in order to maintain Venusian harmony, whereas Venus’s time in Cancer, other than that square just at the very beginning to Saturn, is a time where Venus will be aided in creating harmony and joy and good times and creativity rather than having to work terribly hard just to maintain what harmony you can hold onto. So it’s a huge improvement for Venus, even relative to recently in addition to being like, I don’t know, like a nice, salve-y massage therapy session for whatever Cancer is in your chart generally. Like, little crab rub-down.
CB: Absolutely. That’s such a great point, because yeah, with the Venus-Mars square last month in July, we had – of course there was some of the like, lurid sex scandal type things, but there was even like, even though it was partially more of a Mercury retrograde thing, there was like, the kiss cam scandal of like, an adultery scandal —
AC: Oh right! Right.
CB: — that happened that was also partially because like, Venus is the traditional planet of love and union and relationships, whereas Mars is the shattering of that and other things of that nature. But here we’re getting this huge contrast with Venus meeting up with Jupiter and the solidifying of unions and like, the confirmation of the good things that come from those in many ways and the benefits you get from having a solid like, partnership with someone, let’s say, either romantically or business-wise or what have you.
AC: Yeah. You can’t say enough good things. We might be nearing that limit. But it’s as wholesome and restorative and fun as the Mars-Saturn thing is a real challenging pain-in-the-ass ordeal. And so one, having both in the same month is a little wild. And then they’re all in cardinal signs, right? So they’re all like, it’s a little bit of everything at once, and also with cardinal signs, cardinal signs create a situation, or they throw a situation in front of you. It’s not fixed signs, which are checking in with an ongoing thing or mutable signs where something’s come up and so we’re gonna alter the plan somewhat in order to account for it. Cardinal signs get things moving. They initiate trajectories. And so having these positive and negative things initiated all in this initiatory mode is pretty striking, especially if you have a cardinal sign rising, which is one out of three people.
CB: Right. Definitely.
All right. So yeah, that’s the biggest – just this whole cluster of stuff happening around that first and second week of August. And then we start to move on after that point. Should we jump like, to the second lunation?
AC: I think we should. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Keep this thing moving. Yeah, that’s basically it, because there’s like, a gap afterwards. So here’s the alignments calendar. You get like, the Venus-Jupiter on the 12th, and then yeah, really getting to the Sun’s ingress on the 22nd, and the New Moon in Virgo on the 23rd is kind of the next big thing.
So let’s take a look at that lunation, because you found something interesting and obvious about it, which stands out in a surprising or even shocking way.
AC: Even shocking! So we were looking at this, and I was looking at this; I was like, you know, thank god. That looks like a pretty boring New Moon in Virgo. Oh, hold on. It’s square Uranus really tightly. Now that Uranus is in Gemini, every time you enter Virgo, you do a square with Uranus. And so this otherwise unassuming New Moon at zero Virgo exists in a shocking, rather surprising square. I was surprised to see it, as were you, right? Because we’re not used to thinking of – we’re not fully in the habit yet of thinking about Uranus is in Gemini, beginning of every mutable sign has a hard aspect to Uranus. And so we were shocked to see this shocking configuration which occurs.
CB: Yeah. It’s gonna take – because it’s just been in Taurus for so long, Uranus has, for like, seven or eight years. It’s gonna take some getting used to to realize that Uranus is gonna be aspecting stuff in the mutable signs now for a good long seven or eight years. And this lunation’s interesting, because it’s almost an eclipse. Like, the South Node is right there at 18 degrees of Virgo, but it’s just like, barely outside of that range of an eclipse. And it’s a precursor to another eclipse that we will have actually in the Virgo-Pisces axis in September that will be important. But this lunation is primarily the closest aspect to it is that square with Uranus that does give it this unexpected component of like, something coming out of left field, something surprising. Something a little bit – it could be exciting. Like, sometimes Uranus activations can be really exciting and like, liberatory. Like, having this feeling of greater freedom that is helpful or useful in some way. But it will definitely bring some surprises.
AC: Yeah. Absolutely. And it bakes those surprises into the lunar cycle, because it’s there at the New Moon like, seeding and setting the tone of the weeks to come. And another thing that’s interesting about this New Moon is that it is – we can call it like, an astrological Blue Moon in the sense that we have two New Moons in Virgo. We’re gonna have one at the very, very end just as we had one at the very, very beginning, but our one at the very, very end right at the doorstep of the equinox is a gnarly, gnarly, gnarly solar eclipse. And so this is the first of two New Moons in Virgo, and it is the last lunation that goes uneclipsed until we get into the fourth quarter of the year.
CB: Yeah. So that is interesting energy to bring into the very tail end of the month, because then like I said, it’s like, after this New Moon, seven days after that we enter into eclipse season basically, which is like, once the Moon gets into Sagittarius basically – which is the square sign with the Sun – and it’s square to the sign where the Full Moon lunar eclipse will take place in Pisces a week later, that eclipse window is really gonna begin, because that was something I’ve really established over the past few years is at least seven days before an eclipse takes place the operative window for eclipses opens up. So we’re talking about like, August 30th and 31st already heading into eclipse season, and it starting to build up rapidly after that point. So it’s wild —
AC: We cross the event horizon.
CB: Yeah. I like that – the event horizon. But it’s wild that the like, precursor before we even get there is like, a New Moon square Uranus that has some sort of surprises. And that’s also important because that’s one of the crazy things that happens at the beginning of September is Uranus is gonna make its first station in Gemini, which is usually when there’s like, an exclamation next to the stationary planet and it tells you a lot about what that entire seven-year transit is gonna be about the first time it stations in that sign and becomes very loud. And this New Moon square Uranus is almost like a precursor to that in some ways.
AC: Yeah it is, because Uranus in its new place gets both the Sun and Moon’s attention when they’re having a very important meeting about what is to come. It’s —
CB: Right.
AC: — a lot, that’s a lot of very important attention given to Uranus here.
CB: Yeah, especially if you have like, let’s say a mutable placement in the first degree or two of one of the mutable signs of like, one degree of Virgo or Sagittarius or Pisces or Gemini, then it’s really getting lit up by both Uranus and that New Moon.
AC: Yeah. Yep. And it’s difficult to say, because it’s really – it’s not configured with a bunch of other stuff to say what variety of surprise Uranus has in store. Because it’s not like, tilted towards the benefic or the malefic over far. You know, if there were a bunch of pleasant and tasty things nearby, I’d be like, oh, maybe it’ll be nice surprises. Like, it’s gonna tend towards that. Or if there were, you know, skulls and bowls of blood around it, then we would assume it would be more malefic. But it’s very indeterminate. It’s very like, Uranus on its own terms in Gemini.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, we get the tail end of the Venus-Jupiter copresence, but it’s like, Venus has already just moved out of the 10-degree range of the conjunction with Jupiter, so that conjunction’s really starting to dissipate and wind down. And Venus is just kind of on the border of starting to move into the opposition with Pluto, which is gonna be one of its next aspects, although I guess it will also sextile Uranus and trine Saturn. But I’m looking at that Venus-Pluto opposition which is one of the main things that happens as soon as Venus ingresses into Leo on the 25th and 26th is that it just like, immediately runs into this tricky opposition with Pluto on August 26th and 27th.
AC: Yeah. And that’s really our next and probably last event of the month is Venus hits the same barrage of aspects that Mars did, but from a different angle. Right? It hits Pluto, it hits Saturn, it hits Neptune, and it hits Uranus. But opposing Pluto, trining Saturn and Neptune, and sextiling Uranus – but it’s the same, all four of those, nailing this early degree of Leo, which is where the Sun was when Starlink went out. It’s where that New Moon was when Starlink went out in July.
CB: Yeah. That was a pretty intense weekend for me. I think, yeah, Venus opposing Pluto can bring in a pretty intense relational dynamic with other people, and that can sometimes be good in the sense of like, diving really deep with someone into really deeply held emotions and sorting through that, if that’s your kind of thing. But also sometimes it can be like, power plays and issues surrounding like, control and manipulation and things like that that can cause tense relational dynamics as two people are pulling in different directions and having to sort through that. Although hopefully, the sextile with Uranus and the trine with Saturn can bring some innovations or some ways of resolving some of those tensions and conflicts in innovative ways that might not seem like, apparent at first when you initially run into the issue.
AC: Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. But yeah, the core of that, as you said, is the Venus-Saturn. Or excuse me, Venus-Pluto, right, which can be those very “let’s get to the heart of.” instead of with Mercury – we talked about Mercury-Pluto, and that’s the like, “let’s get to the truth; we’ve gotta know what actually happened, reconstruct the scenario.” With Venus-Pluto, it’s getting to the core of relational truths. But just as we can get lost with Mercury-Pluto on our quest for, you know, the truth, we can also get lost with Venus-Pluto in our quest for the relational core or like, emotional truths or relational truths.
CB: One thing I will say I just noticed is that Mercury exits its post-retrograde shadow on August 25th, which is at 15 degrees of Leo because that was the degree it went retrograde at. So it’ll be passing that degree on the 25th, and then right after that or around that time, Venus moves into Leo. It has to go through that initial barrier of getting through Pluto at first, which is probably not gonna be pleasant in that day or two. But then after that, Venus will be moving through some of the same degrees that Mercury was retrograde and kind of coming in and sweeping up a little bit some of the mess that was left over by Mercury retrograde. So especially for people that were getting hit with that Mercury retrograde in intense ways that have things in the first 15 degrees of fixed signs, I think that energy once Venus clears Pluto will be experienced as a positive energy that’s like, helping to fix up and beautify and improve some things.
AC: Yeah, totally. And there’s – yeah, like, the good news about having such a barrage of aspects early in the sign is that once Venus clears just a couple degrees of Leo, it’s pretty chill. Right? It’s pretty uneventful, relative to the tight aspects to four planets more or less all at once, the chief one being an opposition to Pluto. Like, there will be a sextile to Mars later on, which is not a big deal. I will say that as we get towards the end of the month, Mars —
CB: For Venus. Although everything else goes crazy in early September.
AC: Oh, well, yeah. For Venus.
CB: Yeah. Okay.
AC: Even though Mars has sort of quieted down for the most part by the end of the month because it’s separated quite a bit from Saturn, it is creeping very close to a square with Jupiter. And so Mars by the end of the month and certainly early next month will be in a position to undercut and irritate and problematize what pleasant Jupiterian things have been underway. You know, it may bring into question some of the perfect harmony and peace that Jupiter and Venus were able to seed. And so it’s irritating, or it’s like, undercutting our one consistently helpful planet. And it doesn’t do that, you know, for weeks on end, but it will do that end of the month, beginning of the month.
CB: Yeah. There’s just so much stuff set up for the first week of September that it’s gonna be a really interesting month to talk about. So here’s the chart for September 1st, and here we can see the aspect you were talking about, which is that September opens with Mars at 16 Libra squaring Jupiter already at 17 Cancer. And that goes exact already it looks like around the 4th or the 5th. We also have Uranus around the same time in the first week of September slowing down and stationing retrograde for the very first time in Gemini. So Uranus is gonna get incredibly loud at the beginning of September in whatever house of our chart that it’s transiting. And then we also get like, our first eclipse of the month taking place already on like, the 7th and 8th, which is a lunar eclipse in Pisces. So eclipse season starts and is already operative by the time September opens, so we’re gonna be experiencing these major beginnings and major endings in different parts of our life, especially depending on where Pisces falls in the chart.
AC: Well, and burying the lede, Saturn goes back into Pisces on September 1st.
CB: Yes! Okay, yeah. So Saturn goes back —
AC: Which I’m cheering for, frankly.
CB: As a Pisces?
AC: I was much better at Saturn in Pisces than I’ve been so far at Saturn in Aries.
CB: Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, we are towards the end of that, and it’s interesting that many people do have a handle on that energy or think they do at this point, but there’s something coming in for that final pass where there’s something that’s not finished about Saturn’s transit for the past three years through that sign every since March of 2023 that we have to go back and revisit and bring to completion. And that’s the other energy that’s gonna come in extremely strong starting in September, not just with Saturn retrograding back into that sign for several months, but also because an eclipse in Pisces then takes place immediately after that heightening that energy and putting the spotlight on the Pisces sector of all of our charts.
AC: Yep. And then our New Moon/eclipse in the very last degree of Virgo takes place almost exactly opposite Saturn in Pisces. So that Virgo – you know, September is also a lot of trouble. But it’s a different kind of trouble than August. It’s all Pisces-Virgo trouble, whereas August is this fire, air extravaganza. Different flavors of drama, hardship, joy, and catastrophe.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. August is about the cardinal signs and they’re all getting their moment in different ways of focus with some getting major tensions peaking with the Mars-Saturn opposition, and others getting some very positive things happening with the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer. But then next month, September, yeah. The focus really shifts to the mutable signs very rapidly with Uranus in Gemini, with eclipses in Pisces, Saturn in Pisces, and then eclipses in Virgo. So it will be interesting to see and to witness, and by the time we check in again next month and record our next forecast episode, we will just be starting to head into that. So it’ll be really fun to check in at that point and yeah, give people a more detailed breakdown of what’s to come next month in September. But for now, I think we’ve exhaustedly touched on and talked about as much as we can talk about for the astrology of August, yeah?
AC: Yeah. I think we’d be crowding our own words or overdoing it if we went back and had another pass!
CB: Absolutely. All right, buddy. Well, good job. Thanks a lot for joining me for this; this was fun. This was a great discussion this month. And yeah, once again, for not only 10 years of doing the podcast but 500 episodes going back to 2012, and you were one of my earliest guests as well. So it’s funny —
AC: I think I might have been your first guest.
CB: Let me check, because Nick did one —
AC: I know it was super early. I remember —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — I think it was like, yeah, anyway.
CB: So Ben was guest one on episode two; Nick was episode three, but then you were very early on in there as well.
AC: Okay.
CB: Yeah yeah. So and you were also just like – it’s funny that you were mentioned in the first episode of the podcast. So the seeds of what was to come were laid there even though none of us knew at the time.
AC: Yeah. That’s funny. Yeah, what a… You know, I would say, “What a journey,” but it’s not something that we can really effectively fully look back on, because the story’s not over. Right? Like, we’re back on again next month. And the next month. And the next month. You know? It’s hard to draw final conclusions and to say charming and wise things about something that’s still in process.
CB: Yeah. Well, that’s what’s been fun about it, though, is checking in every month literally at the end of each month and checking in about the news and astrology and then also our own personal progressions through life, and doing that on such a monthly basis so that the future keeps being revealed to us in these little increments as we try to predict and look into it. And the sort of I don’t wanna say joy, because it’s not always joyful, but the interesting and fascinating uncovering of time and of the future that we do together each month has really been something. So yeah, thanks a lot for doing that with me.
AC: Yeah. Well, and thank you. What a long, strange trip it is.
CB: Exactly. I like it.
All right, what do you got going on this month? Anything you wanna mention or plug or promote?
AC: Let’s see. So I’m teaching my classes. I’m trying desperately to find book time. The main thing which comes out on the 31st of July is through Sphere and Sundry, a super cool Mars in Capricorn thing I made a year and a half ago will be released to the public! And so this is only the second Mars in Capricorn series that Sphere and Sundry has done. There was this really excellent time to snag Mars in Capricorn stuff at the very beginning of 2024, and so we made a bunch of different things then. This is just a straight-up Mars series. I’ve titled it Ferrum Noctis, or the Iron or Edge of Night, because it’s an extraordinarily nocturnal chart. Almost everything is in nocturnal signs; the operation took place at night; Mars’s exaltation is at night. And it’s super motherfucking good. I’ve been my own guinea pig for the last couple weeks, and I’ve been very much enjoying it. It is quiet and calm and very effective. My mind has been lead to ponder apex predators and how chill the apex predators are. They’re not little yappy dogs. You know, like, the great horned owl just kind of cruises through the night, mostly just being chill and at peace, and then occasionally devastating a rabbit. You know, the great white shark is super chill most of the time. The enormous saltwater crocodile spends 99 percent of its life in perfect peace. But then when action is called for, they’re all there and perfect in the moment, and then back to relaxation. And it was really interesting for me, because that wasn’t the plan was like, do Mars, link it to the idea of apex predators. That was just like, something that came in as I was working with what was produced. And it occurred to me that it was sort of a Homer Simpson like, “D’oh” moment. Of course Mars in its exaltation right near the heighth of its power would resonate really clearly with animals that are at the top of their respective ecosystems. Like, literally that’s what “apex” and “exaltation” are almost identical in meaning. And as with exaltations in general, you don’t have this sort of like, desperate, loud sort of struggling behavior. You have like, confidence and excellence, right? Anyway.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So that’s coming out in two days. And it was fun to make, and it’s been really interesting to write about and get to know. And it’s taken me to some interesting places and made me think about things that it seems like I should have already known, but it took making and working with that series to connect me to.
CB: I love that. That’s a brilliant insight about the apex predator, because that does make sense. Because that’s something I’ve come to understand about exaltations over the past few years is they just do the best version it is or the highest version of whatever it is that they do, so that makes complete sense mapping that idea onto that to be the highest, you know, in the food chain or what have you.
AC: Yeah, and again, that wasn’t the plan. I just started thinking about like, you know, sharks and alligators and like, you know, the top predators. And I was like, oh! Like, why didn’t I think of that? Because it maps really easily. So anyway, so that’s coming out. It’s fun. Check it out.
CB: Cool. What are your website links?
AC: So that’ll be coming out, you’ll see that on SphereAndSundry.com. And then my website where you can always buy the many recordings of many classes, lectures, workshops, et cetera that I’ve done is AustinCoppock.com. I don’t have anything new coming out for me this month, except for Ferrum Noctis, which is gonna be through Sphere and Sundry. And there’s – I’m happy with my little writeup. There’s a lot of talking about that quality of exaltation and animals and such that I think is a pretty fun article on the exaltation of Mars, even outside of the magical concoction produced and available.
CB: Nice. Brilliant. All right. Well, cool, I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video or on the podcast website where people can get more information.
As for myself, I’ve got some personal stuff going on this month that I’m gonna be focused on, but I’ve got a bunch of episodes I recorded ahead of time – a lot of good episodes – that I’ll be releasing slowly throughout the month. And then I’m also sort of experimenting with this new phase as we move past episode 500 of doing like, shorter, more pointed, sort of interesting episodes about a specific astrological topic. Like, I did a great one this month on Mercury retrograde and the famous filming of the movie Back to the Future and how it started under a Mercury retrograde and they ended up firing the lead actor after six weeks of filming and then bringing in Michael J. Fox while Mercury retrograded back and conjoined Uranus when it stationed direct conjunct the degree of his Midheaven. So that was a fun little thing to do, and people seemed to like it, so I’m thinking about doing more little videos like that in the future that are not like, huge dissertations on an astrological topic but something more fun and light and approachable. I’m working on one right now potentially on like, directors who had their Saturn return while they were releasing a major movie. So like, David Fincher filming Alien 3 is a famous like, challenging example of that that’s kind of fun to look at how the astrology of that worked out. So I’ll be working on some episodes like that. I already have I think one or two episodes available for early access to patrons of The Astrology Podcast through my page on Patreon.com. And I’ll continue releasing those for early access to those patrons. And then, yeah, I’ll be doing a workshop with my Hellenistic astrology students as I do each month on something – either first steps in reading a birth chart, or possibly something related to Mercury retrograde experiences in an ongoing series on transits.
But other than that, people can find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com or on Patreon or you can sign up for my Hellenistic astrology course at TheAstrologySchool.com. But otherwise, I think that’s it for this episode, so thanks everyone for watching or listening, and we’ll see you again next month!
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