The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 85, titled:
Astrology Forecast and Favorable Dates for August 2016
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on July 27, 2016
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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 Andrea Johnson
Transcription released November 10th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, this is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is July 26, 2016, at 1:07 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 85th episode of the show. In this episode, I’m gonna be doing the monthly forecast for August 2016 with Austin and Kelly. So, Austin and Kelly, welcome back to the show.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey, thanks, Chris.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, there.
CB: Hey, guys. All right, so top of the show, first, announcements before we get into everything. So our two sponsors for the month, this is the software month, where we’re being promoted and sponsored by two software companies. The first is the software company Astrolabe that produces the highly popular astrology program called Solar Fire, which I was excited to be able to be sponsored by, because that’s actually the program that I use and have been using for about 10 years now on a regular basis. So do you guys use Solar Fire? Or are you guys familiar with it?
KS: I use, love, and recommend Solar Fire. And I also have to interject cuz it’s originally Australian. So I’m very proud that it’s been such a successful program coming out of Adelaide, Australia. But what about you, Austin?
AC: Oh, this is kind of embarrassing, but I actually just use free stuff. I got in the habit of using free stuff and hacking together what I could. The good thing about that is I’ve learned to do a lot of things by hand.
KS: Yes.
AC: But I’ve stopped being proud of that and started being frustrated with myself for that. And so, I’ve actually been meaning to look into things, and Solar Fire’s at the top of my list.
CB: Well, you will be happy then to hear about the full set of features that Solar Fire has in it. So Solar Fire’s one of the most popular astrology programs on the market today. It covers the full range of astrological techniques, including natal astrology, synastry, electional and horary astrology. It’s got full coverage of techniques from ancient and classical astrology to some modern traditions, like Uranian and cosmobiology. The beginners of course love the array of different interpretations that are available in the program, while professionals enjoy the ability to fully customize the layouts of charts. So you can find out more information about Solar Fire at alabe.com. And the other program that we’re being supported by or is our sponsor this month is called Archetypal Explorer. And this is one of the newer generation of programs that is an online browser-based program, which is very exciting, because then it’s compatible with any system, whether you’re using a PC or a Mac or what have you, or if you’re on a mobile phone. It’s based around the practice of archetypal astrology, which—as we just talked about in the last episode with Richard Tarnas—is the specific approach to astrology that’s sort of developed over the past 10 years out of his book, Cosmos and Psyche. So this program takes a lot of tips and specific things, specific models from that approach to astrology, and it has just this beautiful design interface. One of the primary things that it does is it will show you your transits using relatively wide orbs, but it shows them as almost like a graph, like a neon graph, where the transit builds up and sort of increases in intensity until you get to the peak moment of intensity at the exact aspect of the transit, and then it sort of drops off or sort of slops off. So it’s actually a really cool program, and I’d recommend checking it out. Have either of you guys seen it yet?
KS: Is that put out through the CIIS, or someone associated with that, out in California?
CB: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, it was created by somebody who was either a student at CIIS or was somehow connected with that group out there in San Francisco or in the Bay Area.
KS: Yeah, I just saw something about it on Facebook. It looked really interesting.
CB: Yeah, I’d say it was definitely worth checking out. I’ve been using it for the past few months, and it’s pretty cool. So my little blurb for that is Archetypal Explorer is an online program for personal development based on the practice of archetypal astrology. It uses a powerful method of transit analysis, combined with cutting-edge data visualization and cloud computing to display the ebb and flow of archetypal activity over time. It renders both personal and world transit activity and will display transits across any scale of time, from a week, to a month, to a year, to a century. You can use it to navigate backwards and forwards in time in order to inform, orient, and navigate your life in powerful ways. So you can find out more information about the program at archeyptalexplorer.com. And we are giving away a free, one-year subscription to Archetypal Explorer on the next episode of this podcast for patrons who support the show on the $5 tier, or to one lucky patron who wins the giveaway. And then we’re also giving away a full copy of the previous program we mentioned, Solar Fire, to one lucky patron on the $10 tier. So all you have to do to enter into the drawing for the giveaway is become a patron of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon at the $5 or $10 tier, and then you’ll automatically be entered in to win. So you can find out more information on the description page for this month’s raffle at theastrologypodcast.com, and just go to the giveaways page at the top of the navigation and you’ll see the description. Yeah, we’ll be doing that raffle on the next episode. So that’s the starting point, now that we got that out of the way. It’s been a really crazy, crazy month just in the world in general. Maybe we should start by just decompressing and checking in to see how you guys are doing personally and what you’ve been up to. So what’s going on in your personal lives?
KS: Well, I am gearing up for some crazy August. I’ve been at home for July, so that’s been kind of nice. I haven’t been traveling. So it’s been nice. I really enjoyed something I think Austin said in the last show about the different feeling or the different energy in July with the Cancer versus the Leo. And I really took the time with the strong Cancer energy at the start of the month just to kind of be at home, be grounded, be really nourishing. And it’s been a lot of organizing, a lot of things moving and shaking, like coming out of the Mars retrograde. The way forward is becoming clearer, and there’s a few cuts and shifts and things that are part of that. So ‘good productive’ probably is a good way of saying it.
CB: Are you teaching in San Francisco in like a day or two or something?
KS: Yes, I’m flying out tomorrow. This is the start of my crazy August, which is technically the end of July. Yeah, I’m teaching in San Francisco Thursday night. I’m giving a lecture called “Planets, Passions, and Problems,” looking at the different ways planetary strength can create a bit of a problem or a passion around some of your planets. And then, at the end of August, I’m back out on the West Coast doing my three-day Moon intensive with Laura Nalbandian and Kira Sutherland. So there’s a lot going on.
CB: Awesome. That’s exciting. Well, I was just out there a few months ago, and it’s a great group, so I’m sure you’ll have a good time.
KS: Thank you. Yeah, I’m interested to hear what you guys have been up to as well.
CB: How are you doing, Austin?
AC: I had a really nice July. I absolutely loved it.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Let’s see, the thing that was most exciting is probably hard to talk about. I do meditation and energy work practices everyday, and I had lots of very dramatic, exciting, awesome things happen on the inside.
KS: Yay!
AC: Yeah, I had some breakthroughs in my practice. Literally, one set that I had been working on for about 450 days, I’ve done everyday. So that kind of peaked, which was exciting. I went to a wedding, which was really nice. It was the first wedding since my own. I have a different perspective on them now. I only missed you by a couple of days up in the Bay Area, Kelly.
KS: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. You guys are just home from it, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, yeah, just been teaching class. I’ve been teaching a new class, one I haven’t done before that’s not quite as straightforward technical as what I usually do, my “Care & Feeding of the Birth Chart” class, which is sort of looking at planetary strength and weakness and then looking at remediation. Just sort of looking for the extremes of dignity in charts and then figuring out what to do with that, and looking at the fact that sometimes strong planets, we lean on too hard and try to replace other parts. We try to ‘Mars’ everything if we have a good Mars. We try to ‘Jupiter’ everything. So kind of looking at that with the idea of trying to be a balanced human being and have a balanced life, or at least a little closer to balanced. And that’s gone really well. It’s been really fun. My students are really engaging with the material, which is always a pleasure.
KS: It has such a cool name too, Austin, the ‘Care & Feeding of the Birth Chart’. It’s very cool.
AC: You know, I’m Cancer rising, and it was all of these planets in Cancer, and it was just the way I was thinking about it.
CB: That’s awesome. Sounds like you’ve made progress since the previous month, where you were feeling a bit overwhelmed.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I sort of course-corrected in June and then started feeling really good in July.
CB: Nice. All right, well, as for me, I did the podcast with Ian at the beginning of the month, and then that kind of bookended my writing period for this month, which has just been focused on filling in tons of citations in the book and starting to do a final go-through of that, in order to fill footnotes basically, and hundreds of books and articles and things like that, that need to be cited, but that’s going really well. And I did this whole piece on Hermeticism and the Hermetic origins of Hellenistic astrology in relation to the supposed founders, Hermes and Asclepius, and Nechepso and Petosiris. So I’m actually talking with my editor, Aaron Cheak, about doing the next episode of the podcast on that topic and exploring the Hermetic origins of Hellenistic astrology, as well as its connection with alchemy.
KS: Beautiful.
AC: Were you gonna maybe have Aaron on?
CB: Yeah.
AC: That would be great.
KS: Very cool.
AC: I chat with Aaron all the time about alchemy and East and West and all sorts of things. And his astrology’s coming along nicely.
CB: Yeah. And he’s been just amazing, helping me to edit the book and shape it up. And it’s in much better shape having gotten his feedback and gotten through that with him, and having him read some of this stuff for the first time. Cuz he’s not somebody that’s taken my course or something like that, but he has this great background in that time period, coming at it from the perspective of alchemy in the Greco-Roman tradition. And now he’s seeing the other half of that, which is the astrology, and it’s been really interesting getting his feedback. So, yeah, I think the next episode—originally that was gonna be the fourth episode of July, but I think we might move it to early August instead. I should also mention that that’s probably when I’m gonna announce the giveaway winners, since I may not be able to squeeze in a fourth episode this month, in the next few days after we do this episode. We may push that to next month. Yeah, so that should be good. And writing is coming along well, and I’m hoping to finish. Well, I don’t want to talk too much about the book. Cuz I feel like I talked a little bit too much about it earlier this year and that may have motivated some other things. So moving onto our forecast, should we start with a review? I mean, I think we did that once a few months ago and that was probably smart. It might be more appropriate in this instance because so much has happened in the world, and it’s just been such a crazy, crazy month since we last talked. I think, Austin, one of your last comments, on our last episode—I was saying something like, “Thank God we’re getting out of the Mars retrograde,” or something like that, but you were like, “It’s just stationing right now at the end of June, so we’re really not clear of it at all.” And I think you ended up saying that there was something else involving Uranus that ended up being relevant to that somehow as well.
AC: Yeah. And if you look at a lot of the most traumatic things that happened in July, if you get time into this, basically Uranus in Aries and Mars in Scorpio do not have a classical aspect, but they were within a degree. They were basically in the same degree for a long time. And so, when a planet would come along and go through that degree in Cancer, it would square Uranus and trine Mars simultaneously; and Uranus and Mars—especially a stationary Mars—are capable of great violence. And so, it was when Mercury and Venus and then the Sun all made those aspects that a lot of things went crazy. And it was just something I noticed, like you said, literally the last five minutes of the episode, and then it was something that I started watching after that. And I was like, “Oh, no, we under-emphasized that.” I think we were so happy that Mars was actually direct.
CB: Right.
AC: Actually one thing about that, the news was terrible, but usually, part of the joy of astrology is that you get this really nice reflection between the micro and the macro, right? The individual and the collective. But I didn’t see a lot of—I’m trying to figure out how to not use swear words. I didn’t see a lot of poop shows on an individual level. Everybody seemed to be doing pretty well. Whereas every time you track the news another hundred people were dead in some sort of atrocity. It seemed like there was a lot of macro ‘doo’. I don’t know, that could just be me tuned out, but I just didn’t see that sort of struggle reflected in people’s personal lives the way that I usually do.
KS: I would agree. I noticed that with my clients, too. I just started tuning out the macro level because it was just a little bit distressing. But it didn’t seem to be coming through personally with people in session.
AC: Yeah, and usually there’s just like a one-to-one. It’s like something bad happens in the world, my clients are miserable, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: It’s usually that simple.
CB: And—go ahead.
AC: You haven’t been seeing clients this month, right, Chris?
CB: I’ve been trying to basically ignore everyone and just focus on writing. So I don’t have—
KS: So no one to take it personally.
CB: Right. So I haven’t made any observations myself. But, yeah, I mean, I haven’t seen anyone that I’ve been forced to interact with over the past month having any major meltdowns, but it has been pretty brutal. Maybe we should mention just a brief recap, since we’re sort of taking it for granted. I mean, some of the different things that happened, there was the coup in Turkey, which was a major and still ongoing news story and humanitarian crisis potentially.
AC: It’s really what they’re calling the ‘counter coup’ that’s been ongoing. The actual coup had about 12 hours of life in it, but the counter coup is alive and strong and kicking.
CB: Right. Yeah, and there’s some pretty bad stories. Bariş Ilhan, from Turkey, one of the more prominent astrologers, posted this beautiful photo, where she showed the Moon, the night of the coup, was in between. It was just visibly in between Mars and Saturn, in an enclosure. Or at least you could see Mars and Saturn pretty close, even though there’s the sign boundaries, since Mars was in Scorpio and Saturn is in Sagittarius. Nonetheless, you still got the two ‘malefic’ planets right next to each other on the ecliptic. And so, it does create this situation where if a planet moves into that space—in late Scorpio or early Sagittarius—it’s separating from one malefic and then applying to another. And I thought that was a really interesting point just in terms of the live astrology of seeing that happen. And for her, of course, she’s living in Istanbul and it’s all happening around her, so it was a lot more personally relevant and clear or stark in that since.
AC: Yeah. And another thing about that day, that was when the Sun was mutually-applying, or applying both to Mars and Uranus within half-a-degree. Mars and Uranus were both at 24, and the Sun was at 23°40’.
CB: 23°40’, okay.
AC: Anyway, that dynamic that we glossed over last time. But, yeah, that was interesting. I noticed that too, and I was like, that’s really interesting that you have literally the military—well, a portion of the military—turn against the existing government with Mars, right? Basically, it starts with Moon-Mars and then it just ends with Moon-Saturn. Saturn’s just like, no, order—
KS: Order is restored.
AC: Yeah. Not necessarily a ‘friendly’ order, but order.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so that was interesting—what’s called ‘enclosure’ in the Hellenistic tradition, or ‘besiegement’ in the Medieval tradition—manifestation of that. And then, I mean, around the same time there was the truck, the incident that happened on Bastille Day in France that killed at least 80 people. What else happened this month?
KS: There was something in Germany.
AC: I mean, there were cops shooting people—
KS: Oh, in the US.
AC: —and cops getting shot.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, there’s been tons of protests, and then people getting killed and issues in terms of the use of force on the part of the police. And then there was a sort of reversal that happened, and suddenly eight police officers are killed by a guy with, not a machine gun, but an automatic rifle of some sort. Yeah, things were just really crazy this month. And that was like a weird backdrop as I was trying to tune out most of the world and just write about 1st century history and stuff like that, that there’s this sort of weird backdrop going on. And then, at the same time, there was also the political drama that’s playing out in terms of the US as well. So I don’t know if we want to necessarily—
KS: Inflamed passions.
AC: Indeed.
CB: Yeah, and that was actually something that Kirk Kahn mentioned a few days ago. He said something about Saturn in Sagittarius, he was mentioning this on Facebook. He’s the former vice president, when I was president, of the Association for Young Astrologers. He makes the program—what’s it called? I’m blanking it out on the name.
AC: Planet Watcher. I’m looking at it right now. It’s my favorite thing.
CB: Oh, that’s one of the free programs that you use.
AC: Planet Watcher is always open in a window if my computer is on.
CB: Yes. So Kirk programs that, and he also programs the calendar that we use for these monthly forecast episodes. Anyway, he said something about Saturn in Sagittarius, seeming like it’s tending more to ideological extremism in some sense, in people either seeing things in black and white, or not accepting compromise or nuance or middle-ground positions. Sort of like having this tendency to go all the way in one direction or another. And I thought that was an interesting observation, which I think we’ve probably made, or I know you’ve made at one point, Austin, in some of your Saturn in Sagittarius forecast stuff, right?
AC: Yeah. And I think we talked about it for 5 or 10 minutes when we did our preview a year-and-a-half ago, or a year ago for Saturn in Sag.
CB: Sure. And I know you wrote a whole ebook on it. Is that something you feel comes out as a natal thing, Kelly? Or is this more of a transiting thing?
KS: No, you definitely see it with people who have Saturn in Sag natally. It’s a little bit of that ‘getting on your soapbox’ and being a little bit rigid about the way that you see things. And it kind of feeds into one of the big ideas I’ve been sitting with for August, which is this really strong emphasis on the dry quality. You know, Saturn, yes, it’s a cold, dry planet, Sag is a hot, dry sign, obviously, and so we’ve got this double-dry thing. It is literally very cut-and-dry. It’s like this is the way it is, or this is the way it isn’t, so you see that natally with people with Saturn in Sag. And then of course with both the Sun coming into a fire sign already—but for most of August—and Mars coming back into a fire sign, that idea of this excessive dryness is something that I’m sort of sitting with as an underlying theme.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s perfect. That’s actually what my column this week was about.
KS: Oh, wow. Great minds.
AC: It was just like way too much fire. Way too much fire.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Way too much hot, way too much dry. I hate it, personally. I need moisture to survive.
KS: Yes. Me, too, yeah.
AC: I’m like a frog or something. Like I can leave the water, but I need to go back in or my skin will get crispy.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So you guys are associating it with the inflaming of passions and things like that that’s happening right now?
AC: Yeah. Just imagine what happens to your skin when it’s too hot and dry. It cracks and starts to separate and anything that touches it will irritate it. You know, it’s inflamed.
KS: And that idea of that separation is the theme that I keep that I keep coming back to with too much dryness. Because that’s what dry does, it separates. And that’s the theme—if we had to pick a tone for August—is separating. Are you separating from things that you need to create a healthy distance from? Or are you separating from things because you’re just reacting? I think that’s kind of the two ways that people are gonna experience it.
CB: Sure.
KS: That’s interesting.
CB: Okay.
AC: Just on an elemental and sign level, August is way too much fire and then a whole lot of Virgo.
KS: Yeah. And we can’t even say earth in general cuz it’s just Virgo.
AC: It’s just Virgo. I mean, on a simple level, as of the second day of August, we have the Sun in Leo, which is gonna be two-thirds of the month, we have Saturn in Sag all month, we have Mars in Sag all month, we have Uranus in Aries all month, and then we have a little bit of Venus in Leo, and then we have the Moon in fire signs three times, right? And then towards the end of the month—or actually pretty quick, in the beginning there, we get Mercury and Venus and Jupiter all in Virgo, and then the Sun joins them in Virgo for the last third of the month. Yeah, it’s just like fire and then Virgo. Or fire and then Virgo on fire.
KS: Totally.
CB: Yeah. So Mars, that’s right at the front of the gate. Is that the saying? The start of the gate? I don’t know what the saying is.
AC: Out of the gate.
CB: Right out of the gate.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Some horse racing. Which is perfect because this is Sag. Cuz they keep them in gates, and then they open the gates and then they all fly out.
CB: Yeah. And that’s appropriate in this instance, like you were saying, because Mars, right at the top of the month—on the 1st or 2nd in August—moves right back into Sagittarius and rejoins Saturn for the first time in several months. When was it? How long ago did Mars retrograde back into Scorpio? Like in May?
AC: Yeah, it was the end of May.
KS: End of May.
CB: So we’re returning back to the position that we left off, since the end of May. But otherwise it was there for a few months earlier this year, since early March.
AC: March 5. Yeah, March 5 to the end of May was Mars in Sag.
CB: Okay. So we’re returning back to that for the final culmination of the Mars retrograde period for the majority of August, as Mars is retracing its steps and then getting ready to finally pass over that degree that it had originally stationed retrograde at, which I think was about 9 Sag, right?
AC: It was 8.
KS: 8 Sag, yeah.
AC: And then it conjoined Saturn and Antares at 9.
CB: So Saturn’s retrograded back to 9 or 8 at this point. So that spot where Mars actually retraces and takes that final step—where it was stationed retrograde—it actually meets Saturn there, at this time in August.
KS: Yes, Saturn is at 9 Sag now, and it will stay—right up until the last two days of August—at 9 Sag, cuz it will station direct around the 12th or 13th. And that does highlight one of the more sensitive degree points for August, which is that 9°-10° of the mutable signs.
AC: Indeed.
KS: Of course we’re gonna have the Mars-Saturn conjunction there at the end of August. The Virgo solar New Moon eclipse—which is August 31-September 1—is at 9 Virgo. And of course we’ve got Saturn and Neptune kind of vibing through that. So you’ve spotted that as well, Austin?
AC: Yeah, well, before that.
KS: Well, yeah.
AC: The end of the first week, we get Mercury in Virgo. Mercury in Virgo squares Saturn and opposes Neptune 9°-10° mutable. And then, a week after that, Venus has gotten to that point in Virgo. Venus squares Saturn, opposes Neptune, while Mars is making its way there. And so, as both Mercury and Venus race ahead through Virgo, they both hit that Saturn-Neptune square. And then on the 23rd, Mars hits Saturn, which is also square Neptune, right? They’re like a degree off. And so, it’s really those degrees. Those degrees of the mutable signs are just lit up.
CB: So it’s just like a succession of inner planets hitting that Saturn-Neptune square over the course of the next month.
AC: Yeah. Oh, and then the eclipse, as Kelly said, is in that degree of Virgo, opposite Neptune and square Saturn, with Mars just a little bit beyond it.
CB: Are you talking about the September eclipse?
AC: Well, I think it’s technically the 31st of August.
KS: It might depend on timezone and location.
CB: Yeah, Kirk put it on the 1st of September.
AC: Oh, yeah. So I have it at about 2:00 in the morning, on the 1st.
KS: Yeah, that makes sense.
AC: At Pacific time.
KS: The evening, on the 1st, Sydney time.
CB: Right. And then this month is unique cuz there’s actually some ambiguity in the Planet Watcher calendar over whether there’s an eclipse on the 18th, right, Kelly?
KS: Yeah. Technically, if you use the definition of a New or Full Moon within 18° of the nodes, it’s technically just an eclipse. But it’s gonna be such a tiny eclipse that we don’t need to add eclipses into our forecasting. We could just holdover to September and there’ll be plenty of eclipse action then. What are you gonna say, Austin?
AC: Yeah, it’s not an eclipse.
KS: Solar Fire—sorry, not Solar Fire. The ephemeris doesn’t have it listed as an eclipse, but it is obviously listed elsewhere as an eclipse cuz people keep bringing it up.
AC: It’s just a whiff of penumbra on the very edge of the Moon. Like you’re not gonna be able to see it anywhere. There’s nothing to see here, folks. And that might do something a little bit..
KS: Tiny. It’s tiny.
AC: But if we have to prioritize in astrology, which we do—cuz we have a lot of data—that’s not interesting compared to all of this other stuff, which is super interesting. And also, we have two legitimate obvious eclipses as the next two lunations. That solar eclipse will be within 3° of the nodes. Totally a big deal.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And then the lunar eclipse in Pisces which follows will only be partial, but it’ll be a real eclipse.
KS: Yeah, it’s a lot closer to the nodes.
CB: So we’re talking about the Full Moon on August 18.
KS: August 18, at 25-26 Aquarius.
CB: All right. I mean, that’s in my rising sign, so you guys are kind of bumming me out, because I was gonna take that as an eclipse that would be important for me. But now you’ve kind of snatched that away from me.
AC: I don’t really think that you want a South Node solar—sorry, South Node lunar eclipse on your 1st house, Chris.
KS: Take it as a Full Moon rather than an eclipse.
CB: Okay.
AC: When people have those, at the very least, a lot of times they get sick.
KS: Physically, yeah.
AC: I remember when there was one on my ascendant one time, and I lost my voice for three weeks.
KS: Oh, no.
AC: And I was like, “Oh, this is cool, there’s gonna be an eclipse,” and I was like, “Ehh,” and I sounded like Tom Waits for weeks. It was like the longest I had ever lost my voice.
CB: All right, well, I’ll have to check in with you guys again in a month and let you know how that went.
KS: You can tell us what you think.
AC: No, it’s not an eclipse. So there’s no data to report.
CB: Okay.
AC: Wait for next year. Wait for the nodes.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah, so it’s coming one way or the other. It’s just a matter of whether it’s starting now, or whether it’s a year from now, when the South Node moves into Aquarius and the North Node moves into Leo. Basically, everything you just said that was terrible still applies, but I have to wait another year.
KS: Save that for next summer, and everything you dream about will be yours.
AC: Yeah, if you can work on building up anticipation and dread, it’ll be all the better.
CB: All right, well, thanks guys.
KS: Hopefully all the other Aquarius risings are not too depressed now.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s really not that big a deal. It’s not a wonderfully-favorable thing to have an eclipse on the South Node in your 1st house.
KS: Cuz the South Node’s a little tricky.
AC: Indeed, indeed.
KS: And we’ve all got plenty of South Node action coming up with the September eclipses.
CB: Sure, the September eclipses. And since that’s technically next month, maybe we’ll save that for next month.
KS: Yeah, there’s plenty to talk about in August. Have we talked about destruction? Now I’ve turned into Austin. Our listeners will be like, “What?”
CB: Right.
AC: Well, we should also point out that we’re gearing up for Mercury retrograde. I don’t know how much we talked about it last time, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. So we have Mercury in Virgo forever this year.
KS: We totally do.
AC: Mercury enters Virgo on the 30th of July and will not leave Virgo until the 7th of October. That’s more Mercury in Virgo than you can shake a stick at. And so, part of me is super excited about this. I really like dignified Mercury. I get a lot of writing done, a lot of things go smoothly, and so we’ve got some of that. But the reason Mercury’s gonna be there so long is he does a big old retrograde, right?
CB: Right.
AC: And so, we’re gonna be building up to a Mercury retrograde through, really, most of August, but Mercury doesn’t actually station retrograde until the 29th of August. However, I believe Mercury hits the shadow of his retrograde—which 12° is what he’s gonna retrograde back to—he hits that on the 8th, right? So it’s gonna be Mercury shadow, which is not necessarily a huge deal. My rule of thumb or my observation is that I start seeing Mercury retro high-jinks about a week before the retrograde station. So that would put us at the 22nd or 23rd. And there’s gonna be high-jinks aplenty around the 23rd anyway because of that Mars conjunct Saturn, but that’s when you’ll start getting the ‘retro’ beams firing.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and by that point, it looks like everything’s in Virgo by late August or early September.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Eventually, we get this shift to Libra in September and then everything basically moves into Libra, because we get that Jupiter ingress as well. But I guess that’s getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.
KS: It’s clear that we want to talk about September and not August.
CB: September just has so much going on. Like it’s such a big cluster of things happening. But maybe I should back up. I forgot—
KS: Oh, yeah, your elections.
CB: Most of the elections actually take place at the very beginning of the month, so I’m kind of skipping those over at this point. I should probably pull them up. As usual, I’ve still been writing, so Leisa Schaim’s been doing the electional column and finding the auspicious elections for The Mountain Astrologer article that we’ve been writing together over the past few months, and for August, she had some major problems. For one, all of the good—not all of them. All the elections are basically at the very beginning of the month or towards the end of the month. And the other issue that she ran into that we talked about is she had a hard time finding good rising signs during the daytime. Especially at the beginning of the month, the best rising sign seems to be really early in the morning. So these are some of those not-very-practical elections that are gonna have you either waking up very early or staying up very late, about 4:00-4:30 in the morning. So the first one takes place on August 1, 2016, at about 4:35-ish in the morning, with about 21 Cancer rising, and the Moon is at 21 Cancer as well. So the ruler of the ascendant is in its own sign, and it’s in the 1st house conjunct the ascendant. It’s applying to a sextile with Jupiter, which is at 22° of Virgo in the 3rd house. So the ruler of the ascendant’s applying to a benefic. It’s a night chart, cuz the Sun is in Leo, in the 2nd house, with Venus. So it’s actually a pretty decent chart for financial matters because it has Venus in a night as the most positive planet in the 2nd house, and the ruler of the 2nd house is well-placed. And then for a little bit extra juice, she threw the Lot of Fortune in there, in the 2nd house, conjunct the Sun, which is the ruler of the 2nd. And then, finally, we’ve got Mercury in Virgo in this chart. So we’ve got a pretty well-placed 3rd house on top of that, with Mercury and Jupiter both there in the 3rd.
So this is the first election of August. There’s a very similar election on August 3, at about 4:52 AM, with late Cancer rising, and now the Moon is in the 2nd house. The ruler of the ascendant itself is actually in the 2nd, putting even more emphasis on financial matters. In this chart, it’s actually applying to a conjunction with Venus, which is even more positive for 2nd house-type activities. And there’s another one on August 5, where it’s a Leo rising chart. It’s at 7:23 in the morning, with Leo rising, and the Sun in Leo in the first whole sign house, and Venus on the ascendant. Mercury and Jupiter are in the 2nd house now. The Moon is also in the 2nd, and it’s applying to a conjunction with Jupiter in the 2nd house. There’s a little bit of a problem because Mars and Saturn are now in early Sagittarius squaring those Virgo placements. I mean, for the most part, this is the best you’re gonna come up with at this time in early August. Because that Mars-Saturn conjunction really starts messing with everything, especially when all of the planets move into Virgo and there’s basically no way to avoid some of those squares. So those are my elections for early August from Leisa, who is actually doing a lot of electional consultations lately, and she’s getting quite good at it. So you can check out her services at leisaschaim.com. All right, you guys have any comments or questions about those charts?
KS: It makes sense. The end of the month is gonna be a little tricky.
AC: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s making the best of the situation.
CB: Yeah. I mean, that’s really what electional astrology often comes down to.
KS: Totally.
CB: It’s making the best out of or squeezing the best chart that you possibly can out of a given situation. And then of course there’s other factors that come into play, such as the relationship of that chart to the person’s natal chart. And that actually came up, cuz I heard a criticism from a Renaissance astrologer last year. They saw what I was doing in terms of recommending elections and said, “Well, those are mundane elections (or something like that), and you really have to also look at the relationship between the electional chart to the natal chart.” But my issue with that is, to me, that’s natal astrology. Looking at where transiting planets are gonna be at some point in the future, and how they relate to the natal chart, that’s something you have to do as part of a full electional consultation, and it certainly shouldn’t be ignored. But it’s kind of like a separate—not a completely separate process, but I put that much more in the realm of natal astrology itself in terms of looking at a person’s transits. Whereas the art of actually identifying a good standalone chart that really emphasizes certain placements in the chart, or really emphasizes certain planets by making them dignified or prominent or something else—that’s a whole thing in and of itself that is usually under the realm of ‘electional astrology’. I don’t know. Have you guys come across that sort of debate before or issue in terms of looking at elections?
AC: I have, primarily in terms of elections for planetary talismans, because all of the old astrological magic—I wouldn’t say it’s centered on, but it’s all about electing. It’s all about electing the chart to make the cool thing.
CB: Right.
AC: And it’s interesting that you got that feedback from somebody who was working from a Renaissance perspective because that’s actually the feedback I usually get from people who are working from a modern perspective where they’re like, “Oh, well, the talisman I want is when Jupiter is conjunct my Sun,” right? It’s like, no, you actually already have a natal chart. You are a talisman of all of those positions. Part of the glory is being able to step outside the parameters of your own chart. What’s important is that Jupiter is in an excellent position, not that it’s right on your nose. And part of the art of relating to transiting positions is it’s not what you were born under, and that’s part of the glory. Sometimes transits can help us step outside of our own patterns. We can kind of graft something into our garden that doesn’t naturally grow there, at least for a little bit.
CB: Yeah, it’s like a tension in the whole theory in of itself of electional astrology versus natal astrology, but it’s one that when you start dealing with both branches, you have to find some middle-ground while still giving each their proper due or proper attention.
AC: Yeah. Just to sort of balance or moderate my position, I don’t think it’s totally worthless and stupid to look at, but I think it’s of secondary importance.
CB: The transits to the natal chart?
AC: Yeah, like the way that an election, magical or otherwise, intersects with the natal chart. That’s interesting, and it’s worth looking at, but I think it’s clearly of secondary importance. I don’t think that it should be a primary factor, other than like a few deal-killers. Like if you were gonna do a talisman for Saturn, for example, don’t wait until Saturn’s on the degree of your Sun to do so, right? Like there are just a few things that are kind of gimmes, but other than that, it’s a secondary concern, it’s not primary.
KS: The one way I would kind of bring the two together is—as you said, Austin—more of in a secondary way. But if I’m doing an election for somebody’s wedding, for instance, in addition to all of the classic wedding election-type things, if it’s possible to get the rising sign in the wedding chart to fall in a more favorable house natally, I’d probably consider that rather than do a detailed ‘how are all these transits on the day triggering your chart’.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah, I think if you have options like that, if you’re like, “Okay, this is good, and I can do Leo rising or Sag rising this day,” and Sag rising is better for that person, of course you do Sag rising.
KS: Yeah. As you said, it’s secondary.
AC: Yeah.
KS: You’re not building the whole chart around it. But if you can add that in, it’s a nice little icing on the cake, I guess.
AC: Yeah, I think so, too. And I think it means that the person doesn’t have to reach as far to actualize the potentials represented by the election. Some elections require us to kind of reach outside of our natural rhythm a little bit. And you can feel that when you’re like, “Oh, I wouldn’t do this naturally now,” and that’s why you bother to elect it. It’s cuz you wanted something better than what would just probably happen. And so, there’s that kind of feeling reaching or pushing against the walls of habit that a lot of times is necessary to get good elections. And I think that you don’t have to reach as far when you can configure it to the natal.
KS: That’s beautiful. That’s a lovely way of putting it.
AC: Thank you.
CB: Yeah, I’m glad to hear that. I think we’re all on the same page about this in terms of the electional chart being primary and then the natal chart being secondary to some extent, especially at least in the process of actually doing it. I mean, there’s certainly counterarguments that could be made that I’ve explored. In certain elections—like marriage elections or some career elections—I’ve certainly brought into account things like zodiacal releasing, which can be used to, for example, section out a period of time where a person’s gonna have a career peak. And sometimes I’ll use that as the bounds through which to look for really good electional charts for when that person will also be having a career peak, in order to release their book or launch their company or something like that. But in terms of the chart itself, it’s still looking for a very good electional chart that can stand on its own to represent this new entity or this new venture that you’re bringing into the world. To the same extent as if somebody was being born at that time, it’d be nice if they had a really good birth chart, if they were trying to accomplish some specific thing in their life, let’s say. I don’t know. I guess we can move on. But that was a little something I’ve been thinking about for the past year since some of that came up. Because doing the electional column, I’m often curious how people perceive and how they respond or react to some of the elections that I’m putting forward. And that was one of the few instances where I heard a little bit of criticism, and I was curious how different astrologers approached that issue. But that might make for a good separate show at some point.
KS: Cool.
CB: All right, so moving on, what are some other major things happening?
AC: Well, actually I want to back up and get into the meat of some of the things we’ve already mentioned. We really have two pretty huge and dominant themes which are triggered in a variety of ways. One is what Kelly led with—it’s hot and dry and then cold and dry, right? We have way too much fire and then we have way too much Virgo, and just the fact that there are gonna be four planets in Virgo—or three planets in Virgo for a while—and then four planets in Virgo, and that we’ve got a minimum of four planets in fire signs until the Sun goes into Virgo. Those are not ‘friendly’ planets in fire signs. It’s both malefics and Uranus. And then the Sun’s great in Leo, but we might not need more heat.
KS: Yeah, this year we don’t need the extra heat.
AC: And so, as I’m saying this, the Sun moved into Leo just a few days ago over here, which put five planets in fire signs. And so, we had like 30,000 acres burn in LA over the weekend, like up north, I think it was. I went outside—which I do every couple of days—and I was like, “Oh, there’s a giant smoke cloud.” I was like, “Oh, I wonder if there’s a fire a couple of blocks over.” No, it was 50 miles away, but the entire sky that night was filled with ash clouds. A friend of mine said when he went outside to go somewhere in his car, his car had a thin dusting of ash, and he lives in the middle of the city. That’s part of what too much fire looks like.
CB: Sure.
AC: On a humoral level, or on a temperament level, LA’s already pretty hot and dry. And so, these transiting conditions obviously caused an excess, an inflammation of tissues.
KS: That’s a really good point though, Austin, because I think that’s how people are going to experience August, depending on their internal, I guess, individual temperament or qualities. If you tend to be a fairly ‘hot and dry’ type of person, this is gonna be like kindling in a hot bush or something, like in the forest. Whereas if you tend to be more of a ‘cooler’ type, you actually might benefit from the heat because it can be activating.
AC: So I’m a ‘cooler’ type. Well, actually I am ‘warm and moist’.
KS: Well, you could probably do with some drying out there. You’re the ‘moist’ person.
AC: No, but it’s too much. Literally, I was looking forward to the Sun going into Leo, and then I instantly felt miserable. Like literally that night, I was like, “Ughh.”
KS: So it’s a little too extreme, right? Just like the heat of summer, too hot.
AC: Yeah, it’s just too much. And so, there are coping strategies for that, like literally taking a bath.
KS: Yes, hydrating.
AC: Yeah, taking a bath, which is both moistening the body, but also that’s what you’re perceiving. You’re experiencing water. And what we experience changes our mind, which is equally important to balance. You were leading with some of the dryness on a mental and emotional level, and how dryness separates us. It makes us unable to connect to things. If our bodies were not primarily moist on the inside—if your blood dried up, it just becomes this kind of iron oxide red powder and then it darkens, right? You need rivers of liquid blood. You can’t have powder going through your veins. The tissues are unable to communicate without those rivers of water within you.
KS: Without the moisture.
AC: Yeah.
KS: So bathing and maybe oil. Coconut oil, olive oil—stuff to moisten things.
AC: Yeah. Another thing that I noticed was just with fire, fire is both active and instantly reactive. When a fire catches, it’s instant. Like something is either on fire or it’s not. We’ve probably all had the experience of trying to start a fire in the fireplace or trying to light something with a match. And you can heat things, but then the combustion occurs in a single instant, right?
KS: That’s a beautiful way of looking at it.
AC: Thanks. And so, I noticed myself I was reacting to things. I was like fire. I was like, “Oh, this person’s in my way in traffic. I hate them and want them to die.” And then I was like, “No, I really don’t want them to die,” I noticed that with all of the fire, getting more reactive. And that’s really not helpful in today’s political climate. It’s more, more, more, more of the same. More of the same rushing to extremes, like were talking about with Saturn in Sag.
CB: Sure. And the sort of quickness or impatience associated with that.
AC: Yes, impatience. Yeah, fire is not a patient element. Water is patient. Earth is nearly eternally patient. Air can fidget for a while, but fire is now.
KS: It’s like immediately, if not sooner.
AC: Fire is ‘I see it and it’s real’. I see it and instantly I’m reacting to it. I’m moving towards it. I’m moving away from it. Fire literally has no capability for stasis.
KS: Yeah, it’s gonna be interesting how everyone responds to it personally. And probably, again, what we saw in July, that difference between what happens on a macro level and what’s happening at a personal level.
AC: Yeah. So what do you think about too many things in Virgo? How does that strike y’all?
KS: Well, the cooling—sorry, you go, Chris.
CB: No, go ahead.
KS: I was gonna say the cooling is gonna be welcomed, to go from heat to cool to slow things down a little. I mean, it’s a change of pace. You were saying fire is so reactive and so quick. At least, we’ll have some of the planets maybe being a bit more thoughtful or a bit more measured. The tendency of excess Virgo is to be overly analytical.
AC: And just worry.
KS: Too much worrying, that’s the problem with mutable.
AC: Worry often takes the guise of thinking about things. But you’re not really thinking, you’re worrying.
KS: Yeah, you’re stressing yourself out, basically.
CB: And just worrying about the small things rather than the big picture.
AC: Yeah. And, also, worrying about things that you can’t change. Not an efficient allocation of energy. Towards the end of the month, we actually have a rather dramatic stellium of Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus at the end of Virgo. And it’s worth noting that Virgo is the one sign where both Venus and Jupiter are very unhappy. Mercury’s just fine there. But with Virgo you’re getting into the details. You’re looking at the actual results of things rather than what you hoped they would be. And that late in the sign speaks to outcomes rather than initiations. I mean, it’s at the very end of a mutable sign, and this is also the very end of Jupiter’s time in Virgo. And so, I think there’s gonna be a lot of looking at the results, right? Like, “Oh, this is what we got out of this.” And that emphasis on the endpoint of processes is also spoken to by the images for that last decan of Virgo, which in a lot of different texts, over quite a range of time, generally show—how do I put this without being too dark? Well, they generally show dead bodies. They show an elderly man or woman who’s become infirm. But you also see in earlier texts—where there’s some Egyptian elements still preserved—a body being prepared for mummification, which we might read as just ‘funeral’. But you gotta remember the meaning of that is moving from the temporary to the eternal. It’s a transition from the world of fragile flesh into a world where you’re clothed in a more durable spirit, but it’s nonetheless a transition. And in my work with that, I associate that decan very strongly with the idea of inheritances or legacies, like what have you left behind, what has the process of your life left behind, and looking very far to the end of processes and the consequences onto the seventh generation rather than what happens in two hours. And so, yeah, I think we’re gonna see a lot of consequences of the storylines that we’ve been living for this year, or maybe even more, highlighted. It’s like, okay, this is what we ended up with. And that might be lovely, or it might be kind of depressing, or it’s probably, as life is, a combination of both, but there’s a very endpoint. And then Mercury stations retrograde right there at the very end of Virgo. It’s like, okay, now we’re gonna think over this and sort out what this process has left us with.
CB: Right.
KS: Very much sorting the wheat from the chaff.
AC: Right. Once it’s harvest time, you don’t get to water the plants again, right? It’s done.
KS: It’s done.
AC: The growing season is over.
CB: It’s interesting, that whole lineup is the same lineup, or it’s very similar to the one that happened earlier in the summer last year, where you had a bunch of planets cluster up at the end of Leo.
AC: Yeah, it was the same three, right?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, and that was that beautiful lineup that you could see in the sky at the time that ended up coinciding in the US with the Supreme Court decision, for example, that legalized same-sex marriage.
AC: I believe that was the Venus-Jupiter thing earlier. Like two months earlier.
CB: Yeah, in June, right?
AC: Right. I don’t think they all lined up. I don’t think that triple-lineup was until August.
CB: Maybe I’m just thinking of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction.
AC: Right. Jupiter and Venus made a couple of those cuz of Venus’ retrograde.
CB: Gotcha.
AC: It was the untroubled one that was earlier where we had the decision. The thing about that last one—the Jupiter-Mercury-Venus at the end of Leo—that was all perfectly square Saturn, so that was less fussy. That’s where we saw a lot of pushback against the earlier Jupiter-Venus conjunction court ruling.
CB: Right. Yeah, which is something we had kind of anticipated. Because we had noticed the difference between how easy and not having any hard aspects that first conjunction was versus what was happening later on due to the Venus retrograde. So, anyway, it just reminded me of that, but it’s in a completely different context because now it’s taking place in Virgo rather than Leo, and what the different scenery in that instance might imply in terms of what’s going on with that. This is sort of broadly not really related, but I’ve been really entertained and found funny—one of the Saturn-Neptune square things that’s been happening over the past month—the release of Pokémon Go.
KS: Oh, my goodness.
AC: Totally.
CB: And the big thing about it is I love what it’s called. It’s called ‘augmented reality’, so that everyone’s walking around with their phones and sort of interacting with or playing this game and interacting with things that aren’t necessarily there, that you can only see through the screen of the phone, but I thought that was really great. Cuz I’ve been more focused over the past year and I keep coming back to this theme of virtual reality as part of the Saturn-Neptune square, with all of the virtual reality headsets coming out earlier this year. I didn’t really even think of this other thing that’s sort of a parallel development with augmented reality, but that’s a great keyword or good phrase for Saturn square Neptune, I felt.
AC: Yeah, it’s hallucinating all over things.
KS: It’s very weird, which makes sense.
AC: You know what’s funny to me is—I don’t play Pokémon Go, and I’m not going to—I’ve seen all of these apocalyptic reactions to it, like it’s somehow the bell ringing in the end times, which is really strange to me. Everybody was playing video games before, they were just in their house.
KS: That’s been the new, big thing. So my stepson, who’s sort of a 20-21-year-old—I think he’s 21 now—loves video games and all that stuff, and the one thing he and his girlfriend were mad for as soon as it came to Canada. But he even said that it got them out of the house, which we were happy about, cuz they’re a bit pasty like many young kids who are playing video games; even adults who play video games. You’re indoors a lot.
CB: Sure.
KS: So he said it’s got him outside. And we live in a small town outside Toronto, Ontario, and usually on a weeknight, by about 9:30, the main streets are dead. Even the restaurants are kind of shutting up. It’s not a late night kind of party town. But my husband and I were out walking—it’s summer here—beautiful sunshine, kind of late evening—and all of a sudden the streets are packed. There’s like 50 or 60 younger kids—teens, 20’s—and they’re all walking around. So they’ve all got their phones out, they’re all obviously playing Pokémon, but they are outside. So there’s something to be said for that, I guess. And maybe that’s the Sag, being on-the-go.
AC: Well, it’s literally a quest.
KS: It is, right? It’s so Saturn in Sag.
AC: It has that Saturn in Sag extremism. You’ve got to catch them all.
KS: Exactly.
AC: You won’t be happy with catching some. You catch them all, right? You take it to an extreme. Which reminds of something I was gonna say earlier when we were talking about Saturn in Sag and extremism. One thing I see with natal Saturn in Sag is they feel like they have to do something all the way.
KS: Yes.
AC: They feel really uncomfortable flirting with a subject and learning a little bit about it. They’re like, “No, I have to master it, or I’m garbage. I’m not even gonna try.”
KS: Yeah, I’m all in or I’m nothing.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And I’ve seen that be an issue for people, where it’s like, no, actually your life would be a lot easier if you just spent an hour a day doing this and then did some other things. They’re like, “No, it has to be six hours a day, and I have to be the best ever, or it’s garbage. I’m not even gonna try.”
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a real Saturn theme. In whatever area that it falls in, that can be a major theme.
AC: Yeah, Saturn—one of the things that it does in signs is it ossifies their significations, right? Where it’s like Saturn in Scorpio, no, you are stuck in ‘Scorpioland’. Like, no, we have to think negatively about this. We have to be paranoid. Saturn in Pisces is like trapped in dreamland. Saturn in Aries, no, we have to act right now. It’s almost like a little bit of a prison that Saturn creates for people in the various signs. It’s feeling like they have to do that and sometimes burying people, and they forget that these are choices that they can activate or whatever.
CB: Sure. So let’s see—I’m not sure if we’re supposed to transition at this point.
AC: Well, no, let’s talk about Saturn and Neptune, because half of the month is about things hitting Saturn and Neptune.
CB: Yeah, it’s just a huge, neverending sequence of inner planets hitting that square basically, right?
AC: Right. It never ends.
KS: Yes.
CB: Cuz I’m just looking at it. And I should state—cuz this is a good month to do this—I guess people have already seen this, if you’ve seen the video version. It’s like this is what’s awesome about having a program like Solar Fire, which I’m gonna, again, plug, because not only are they sponsoring us this month, but also because that’s literally the program that I’m using every time we’re doing these forecast episodes. It has this awesome feature where you can animate the chart and move it forward and backwards in time; so just animating it, and moving it forward one day every click in order to see when some of these planets are hitting that square. So it looks like when you start out the month that Mercury is the first planet that makes it into Virgo, in early August, and then it hits the square with Saturn first at 9°, around August 6, and then it hits the opposition with Neptune. Right around the same time, we have Venus ingress into Virgo, and then it catches up just a few days later, so that by, what is it, August 13-14-15, Venus squares Saturn and then opposes Neptune. Then later in the month, a few weeks later, we have the Sun ingress into Virgo.
AC: And the eclipse locks that in. The New Moon/solar eclipse happens as the Sun is squaring Saturn and opposing Neptune.
CB: Oh, wow. Okay, yeah.
KS: And very tight to the nodes.
AC: Yeah. And the nodes, they do a lot of things, but one thing you can say is things have more impact when they are on the nodes. They shake things up.
CB: Yeah, definitely. They can intensify things. In modern times, usually Pluto’s the planet that sort of intensifies everything for modern astrologers. But for many traditional astrologers, it was the nodes, especially the North Node, that originally had that sort of function of magnifying things or blowing things up.
AC: Mm-hmm. I think they both do that.
CB: I mean, that’s actually an interesting question just because the South Node is so close to Neptune and what it will be doing. Will it be magnifying? I know it seems like there’s different traditional approaches where one of them was that they’re both magnifying things, but one of them though was this idea that the South Node somehow decreases or draws power away from the planet. I mean, where do you see that fitting in?
AC: Generally, I would say, yes, it draws power away from that planet, but that power doesn’t disappear. In some ways, I see the North Node as stealing from the South Node. So with the South Node in Pisces and the North Node in Virgo, it’s sort of like the ‘ocean’ of Pisces is being vacuumed and then some of that potency is being given to Virgo. The dragon’s tail is like a plug that you stick into the wall, and then its head is where that power is exported.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, I think it moves power around, and it’s sort of like decrease/increase. You can see the decrease/increase in the movement of significations very clearly in natal charts.
KS: Yes.
AC: On a mundane level, I would just say that it churns, destabilizes, and magnifies the amount of change on a given axis for a period of time.
CB: Sure.
KS: I totally agree, Austin, with the idea of shifting the energy around and it sort of coming away from the South Node and being amplified around the North. The other way that I had heard the South Node explained—and this was relatively recently by a friend who’s a Vedic astrologer—is that the South Node has a spiritualizing influence. And so, in some ways I see that it sort of changes the focus of a planet that’s on the South Node from more material or mundane matters to perhaps more esoteric.
AC: Absolutely.
KS: Which in the material world can look like a drain or depletion because that’s not what the focus is for that period of time.
AC: I absolutely agree with that. And I would say that the action that spiritualizes things is usually something we can liken to a fast or a cleanse.
KS: Oh, beautiful.
AC: And another key signification of the nodes in Vedic astrology is their association with poison. And that’s literally what happens. Like if you go into a sweat lodge or you go on a fast, like all of the poison comes to the surface. The South Node is also associated strongly with the past and the North Node with the future in Vedic astrology. And so, the poisons that are in your body were of course accumulated in the past, and so it brings all this stuff up. And so, one of the simple things we can say about the co-presence of the South Node and Neptune—which has been ongoing for this whole year—is Neptune-South Node, toxic fantasies. I think toxic fantasies have been in the headlines pretty much everyday for the entire year.
KS: Yes.
AC: That’s mostly what our political landscape is here
KS: That’s what I was thinking, but I’m like, “Can I say that, or am I gonna annoy people?”
AC: No. And what’s funny is it’s like different toxic fantasies that hate each other, fighting.
KS: Yes.
CB: Right.
KS: And that Neptune-South Node, it is, as you said, co-present. It’s close. It actually doesn’t become exact until November, about the middle of the month. So it’s not going anywhere just yet.
AC: No. With the South Node and Neptune moving into perfect conjunction, it’s just an intensification of the theme that’s been present for sometime.
KS: Yes.
AC: And of course it plays in with the whole Neptune-Saturn square. You know, Chris, I do want to pat you on the back for bringing up Pokémon Go in terms of that Saturn-Neptune. That is perfect. And it’s funny because it’s literally the compromise or the halfway point between VR and ‘Normal R’.
CB: Right, exactly. It’s an interface between literally something that’s not real. It’s like a fantasy/reality that’s happening out there versus people actually walking around their streets or walking around parks and stuff and interacting with the actual world or hiking and stuff, but they’re also doing this other thing. It’s a really brilliant, concise manifestation of that square.
AC: Yeah. And it’s just sort of a brilliant metaphor for life for a lot of people right now, right? For example, there’s what’s really happening in my life, and then there’s Facebook.
KS: Yes.
AC: Which is kind of real, but is also kind of not real, especially when you take a few days off. There was all this controversy and a bunch of people I know ended up arguing with each other. And you know what? I missed it and nothing happened. It didn’t really end up mattering, but it sure seemed like it mattered. When you’re watching one of these poop shows play out, you’re like, “Oh, this is really important.”
CB: Sure. I mean, I don’t want to get too much into politics, cuz that’s so dicey. It’s so treacherous at this point. I do want to give a shoutout to Patrick Watson who’s prophetic visionary powers of data collection are now verging on the strange and eerie, because he actually got the birth certificate ahead of time for Tim Kaine, who ended up being Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick. And he had the foresight to figure out that Kaine was probably gonna be the guy and also find out that he lived in an open state and got a copy of his birth certificate before he was even announced. So he’s done that twice now in the past two elections. The last election, in 2012, he did that with Paul Ryan, who was the Republican pick. We published it about a month before he was announced on The Political Astrology Blog. So he’s kind of on a roll here.
AC: So what does Tim Kaine’s chart look like?
CB: It’s actually interesting. I didn’t look at it very closely, but one of the things that I did notice and I found very interesting—not necessarily insightful, but a really interesting parallel—is he had Aries rising, with Mars, the ruler of the ascendant, which is such an important planet in the chart for most forms of astrology. He had the ruler of the ascendant in Capricorn, in the tenth whole sign house.
AC: Wow.
CB: So that’s interesting.
KS: At 16 Cap.
AC: Oh, my. So getting nailed by Pluto.
KS: Yeah.
AC: A quick sidenote, some years ago, when the Twilight book/movie phenomena was happening, I attempted to look up that person’s chart.
KS: The author, Stephenie Meyer?
AC: Yes, because she’s not very good at writing. And I was like, that’s very strange for a person who’s not very good at writing to become an international bestselling author. And I was like, “Oh, I wonder what that looked like,” and I didn’t have a birth time, just the day. It was Pluto going over her Sun.
KS: Oh, wow.
AC: Yeah, and I’m sure that it was absolutely crazy. Cuz I doubt that she thought she was the best writer ever and would no doubt achieve international fame. She was probably just writing the things that she liked and hoping some people would like it. And so, she just gets rocketed into an entirely foreign world and has to adapt to it. And I see that sometimes with Pluto transits, where sometimes it looks like crazy success or a giant leap forward that is, nonetheless, very disorienting for the person.
KS: Well, the other piece too—I’ve just jumped on Patrick’s website. Have you got the data there, Chris?
CB: Yeah. The other thing is he was submitting his data through Nick or through me before. But Astro.com, he actually applied, and he was like, “Why don’t you guys make me a collector?” And so, Patrick’s now an official collector on Astro-Databank, which is pretty awesome, since he’s a great data collector. But they’ve already got the entry up. You can find it on Astro-Databank. It’s February 26, 1958, at 7:59 AM. So it’s a nice exact time. That would be a little lame if it was like 8:00 straight up, but it’s not. Saint Paul, Minnesota. So it’s 4 Aries rising according to Solar Fire.
KS: And so, in addition to that Pluto-Mars situation, he’s got the Sun at 7 Pisces, which I’m pretty sure is gonna get hit by a nice, juicy eclipse at the end of February 2017.
CB: Oh, I see your point.
KS: Yeah, and we’ve got the very dramatic Pisces eclipse. I think it’s at 8 Pisces.
CB: And to go back to my earlier point, what I found interesting—cuz I didn’t spend very much time looking at this chart—but I did notice that he had the ruler of the ascendant in the tenth whole sign house, cuz that’s one of the first things that I look at in any chart. And that immediately struck me as interesting because in the chart that I use for Hillary Clinton, with Scorpio rising, she has Scorpio rising and Mars, the ruler of the ascendant, in Leo, in the tenth whole sign house. So the two people on that ticket have the same placement, which I just found really interesting.
AC: Yeah. Oh, and he’s having his second Saturn return. He’s a Saturn in Sag.
KS: Saturn at 24 Sag. So that’ll be hitting in January-February, which is inauguration, isn’t it?
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah. Since Patrick has come up, can I give a quick shoutout to another blog post that he wrote?
CB: Yeah, please do.
KS: The “What Astrology Would Be Like If Millennials Invented/Ruined It?” If you want a laugh, it is hilarious. He basically looks at the different planets. It’s almost like he’s trying to explain astrology to millennials and he’s trying to say what each of the planets represent, and he does it by correlating it to things they’d be familiar with, like the selfie picture, or having to do adulting-type stuff. As much as it’s hilarious, it’s also actually quite informative, so I definitely recommend that.
CB: That was a great, great post. He actually got pushback. Some millennial got pissed off on Reddit at him.
AC: Patrick is a millennial.
KS: Well, he is. He was talking about his own generation.
AC: He’s not a cranky old man talking about the kids on his lawn.
KS: Not at all.
AC: And by the way, that’s literally been happening with Pokémon Go. It’s just hilarious. People are like, literally, “Get these kids off my lawn.”
KS: The street we live on, we’ve got friends that live five houses down, and they have a Pokémon gym at the front of their house. So there’s constantly a group of younger kids—I mean, I think they’re kids. Maybe they’re 25, I don’t know—that’s what happens when you get a bit older—just hanging out. Because they’re doing all that—I don’t know, catching things and stuff. Yeah, so the grumpy, old people and their lawns, it’s hilarious.
CB: Yeah, but that was a great article. I thought it was good, and it was very tongue-in-cheek, like most of his articles were, even though it contains actual, serious, underlying points.
KS: I think you could learn something from it, in addition to having a good laugh.
CB: Sure. It was just funny seeing what I’m interpreting as millennials misinterpreting it on Reddit, on the astrology page—so reddit.com/r/astrology—and downvoted it. He had to defend it a little bit against some random people. Such is the nature of humor.
KS: It won’t appeal to everyone, that’s true.
CB: Yeah, that often happens in the astrological community, cuz I’ve run into this before. If you write a sarcastic or satirical article, sometimes people get really up in arms about it, because they take it dead serious.
AC: Well, people don’t like to be made fun of.
CB: Right. People don’t like to be made fun of in astrology. And it’s something that people take so seriously. Obviously, the three of us take it very seriously. Sometimes they don’t always feel comfortable dropping that for the sake of making a joke or something like that.
AC: It’s true.
CB: Anyway, yeah, he’s got some other good articles as well. So patrickwatsonastrologer.com. He also got a bunch of other birth data for other politicians recently, including the Castro brothers, not from Cuba, but the two politicians in the US. Which is really interesting because they’re up-and-coming politicians whose birth data might end up being important in the future. Yeah, it’s gonna be election time very soon. So I guess we’re gonna be actually forced to start talking about that before too long, and I should probably start putting together some sort of episode where it’s time to start analyzing that stuff.
AC: Yeah, you could have Watson on for that.
KS: He’ll be great.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And so, this episode is brought to you by Patrick Watson.
KS: By Patrick Watson.
AC: His generous donations have made all the difference.
CB: Right. His generous donation of dank memes over the course of the past month has kept us going, kept us sane.
KS: Kept us sane. I really needed to know what ‘Bae’ meant, and he was able to clarify that for me.
CB: Right. All right, so are there major things that we haven’t gotten to yet? I have two more electional charts to get to. So I could throw those in right now if we’re at that point.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so end-of-the-month election. So as I said, there’s this whole gap in the middle of the month for electional charts. But then towards the end of the month, once you get that pile-up of planets in Virgo, there are some elections that you could use to take advantage of some of those placements. It’s a little bit dicey, because then that means that you’re also using electional charts right around the time that the Mars-Saturn conjunction is going exact in Sagittarius. But, nonetheless, if you have to do something in late August, these would probably be some charts to use. So one of them that Leisa found was on August 23, 2016, at about 11:04 PM. So about 11:00 PM, with 22 Taurus rising, and Venus in Virgo—which is not typically ideal, but in a night chart—and applying to a conjunction with Jupiter and Mercury in the fifth whole sign house. So the other thing that the chart has going for it is the Moon is in Taurus, in the 1st house, exalted, and applying to a trine with Venus and Jupiter. So the ruler of the ascendant, while not classically well-placed by sign-based dignity, is otherwise pretty excellently-placed by house, being in the 5th house, in terms of its configuration with both Jupiter and applying to a close conjunction with it, and in terms of also applying to Mercury, its domicile lord; or at least being co-present with it. And then the Moon is also relatively well-placed in its application to both benefics, while being exalted and in a good house.
AC: It is conjunct Algol.
CB: The Moon, at 18 Taurus?
AC: Oh, sorry, I was looking at the wrong day. I apologize.
KS: It’s not there yet.
AC: Fixed stars do not have a 7° orb.
KS: They do not.
AC: I was looking at the wrong day.
KS: You were looking at the next day.
AC: My apologies.
CB: No problem.
KS: I’m so glad this chart came up, because this is what’s happening very close to the Mars-Saturn conjunction. A little bit of the saving grace is that the Moon is in Taurus applying to Venus and Jupiter.
CB: Yeah, totally. And that Venus-Jupiter conjunction itself is in a superior sign-based square, which is overcoming Mars and Saturn. And on top of that, Jupiter also has reception with Mars and Saturn because they’re in Sagittarius. So Jupiter is aspecting them while they’re in its sign. So I do feel like, and I’m hoping, that superior configuration of both benefics helps to really mitigate some of that Mars-Saturn conjunction, either in terms of mitigating it so that whatever the events are that coincide with it—that might be experienced as subjectively negative, either in terms of world events or in terms of personal events—are sort of mitigated so that they’re less bad or not as bad as they could be. Or that you have what happens sometimes, this saving grace, where you’ll have something really bad happen, but then something really good will happen at the same time that kind of balances things out. I’m glad you brought that up, cuz that’s one of the things that is nice about that time period. You’re not just getting a Mars-Saturn conjunction happening in the sky at the end of August, but you’re also getting a Venus-Jupiter conjunction happening around the same time as well.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I think that’s very optimistic.
KS: Of course you do, Austin.
AC: Let me be clear, I think that you can totally get away with that in an election where you get to pick the rising and all that.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s Jupiter and Venus in the place where they’re both weakest, with Mercury stationing retrograde. I don’t think it’s actually that much help on a world level. You know, I think the question is, what goes down in flames under that Mars-Saturn-Antares? Hopefully, it will be people who deserve it. That’s my hope, that wrath is visited upon those who most deserve it.
KS: Who most deserve it.
AC: And Antares likes to punish the hubristic.
KS: It does. I mean, it’s one of the ‘royal’ stars. It always has that caution against seeking revenge or what have you. Acting without integrity.
AC: Yeah, and a lot of it is a rise without integrity. Pulling down those who’ve gone too far, too fast. People who’ve attained power that they do not wield wisely.
KS: I just thought it was potentially helpful that the Moon is so dignified when that conjunction is happening, that we’ve got the Taurus Moon.
AC: Yeah. But it might just delay the significations until a day or two later, when they’re still right on top of each other and the Moon’s in Gemini getting pounded.
KS: Yeah, I was hoping maybe not. Because it only heats up after that, you’re right, once the Moon moves into Gemini. Anyway, Chris, you might have had other elections you wanted to share.
CB: So there was just that one, and then there was one more, like a day later, which is, yeah, August 24, with Cancer rising, and the Moon at 20 Taurus. This is at 2:21 AM. So very early in the morning.
KS: Oh, just a few hours later.
CB: Yeah. Basically, just a few hours later, because there’s that triple-conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury. The Moon is also well-placed in Taurus, where it’s not being aspected by a hard aspect by Mars and Saturn, and it’s applying to a trine with Venus and Jupiter. So you’ve got this few-hour window, let’s take advantage of that. And the way to do that is to make either Venus or the Moon the ruler of the ascendant to really put the focal point of the chart on those positive placements. So 2:21 in the morning, August 24, Cancer rising, about 12 Cancer rising, the Moon exalted in Taurus in the eleventh whole sign house in a night chart, applying to a trine with Venus at 22° of Virgo and Jupiter at 26 Virgo.
AC: Yeah. And that’s a nice mutually-received Venus-Moon thing, too.
CB: Yes, cuz the Moon is actually in Venus’ sign, and it’s applying to it. So it’s using the strict version of reception, it’s actually in reception or being received by Venus.
AC: Yeah, exactly. The Moon is the triplicity lord of earth signs.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so that’s the other election. That’s a pretty good one for 11th house and 3rd house activities, I would say, because of the ruler of the ascendant being in the 11th, and because the Moon is applying to the ruler of the 11th by a very favorable and very flowing aspect. It’s probably better for the 11th house person in some sense. Or it’s probably better for the person initiating the action, which is the ‘1st house’ person than it is for the ‘11th house’ person, since the ‘11th house’ person is Venus in Virgo. But things are otherwise positive, so it’d be good for striking favorable alliances or connections or friendships with people that are associated with the 11th house at 2:00 in the morning. So if anybody has any alliances or things to strike, do it at 2:00 in the morning.
AC: Midnight councils.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes.
AC: So I want to jump back to Mars-Saturn, cuz I just said some things about death and destruction. So it’ll probably be some of that; it probably won’t happen to you. But what does happen with Mars-Saturn conjunctions is a lot of times you have to work really hard. Mars-Saturn will push you towards exhaustion. A lot of times I find deadlines are looming, things have to get done, this has to get locked down, which is not flaming destruction, but a lot of times it’s a stressful period and people get a little worn down or burnt out. And when we’re compressed and pushed to action like that, whatever our stress responses are will tend to be more evident. And so, just get through that period of time. Hit your deadlines, endure the stressed-out people around you, and it’ll be over. For most people, it’s just gonna be managing a period of greater stress rather than the sky falling.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that’s a pretty practical manifestation in terms of what stuff like this often usually ends up being in terms of the lives of everyday people, just in terms of periods of greater stress or tension or something like that, rather than being involved in some horrible tragedy or something like that.
AC: Right. So the last time there was a Mars-Saturn conjunction—which was in the summer of 2014—sure, Ebola spread all over Western Africa, and Robin Williams killed himself, and ISIS metastasized explosively across the Middle East—but I was really stressed out about a publication deadline. Yes, some bad things will happen in the world somewhere, and, yeah, that was really stressful for me, but I didn’t get Ebola or beheaded by ISIS, and the vast majority of people didn’t. And so, if you were gonna look at these things, yes, we can be compassionate and identify with the people who are victims of these particularly nasty periods, but we’ve gotta remember the other seven billion people mostly just had a bad week, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: ‘Catastrophizing’—which is a habit that a lot of people have and astrologers can sometimes accidentally exacerbate—doesn’t make anything better.
KS: No.
AC: The sky is not falling.
KS: The one thing I wanted to offer on that note too, Austin, is we’re hearing a lot about how this conjunction’s happening on Antares, which is this fairly intense fixed star. And one of the more practical or accessible interpretations that I’ve heard along the way around Antares is because it is the star linked to autumn in the northern hemisphere, it’s about closing down cycles. So it is about marking the transition or the ending, like the necessary endings. So there may be something in this Mars-Saturn-Antares lineup around becoming clear, becoming conscious to end something. Either getting the clarity mentally or taking the action that closes down, or separates—to go back to that ‘dry’ idea—from things that are no longer sustainable or that have outlived their usefulness, I guess.
AC: Yeah. Because it has a very fiery nature, I think it might also be like digging deep to find the fuel to bring something to its rightful end.
KS: Rightful end.
AC: And just to clarify for people, Antares is associated with fall because it culminates when the Sun sets in the fall, right? It’s gonna be in September. As soon as the Sun sets, Antares is gonna be right at the top of the sky.
KS: Overhead, in the midheaven position, for instance, for people thinking about the chart.
AC: That’s where the association comes from.
KS: Yeah. That’s August.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah. And just one final note about culminating. The dynamics that we see—especially during that last third or 10 days of August—are going to lead directly into September, and September is the conclusion of a lot of different storylines.
KS: Yes.
AC: And so, I’d say August is the climax right before the conclusion. We get our last Saturn-Neptune square in September. We get our last solar eclipse in Virgo, our last lunar eclipse in Pisces. Jupiter moves into a new sign; it’s done with Virgo. And at the very end of September, we’ll have Mars leaving Sagittarius and being totally done with that space. So there are a lot of storylines that come to an end in September. August is the on-ramp to that period of conclusions.
CB: That makes a lot of sense.
KS: So we’ll have a lot to talk about next month.
AC: Indeed.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I think that the news will be very interesting by the time that we meet to speak about September.
KS: Yes.
CB: Sure. Yeah, hopefully, slightly better than last month, but probably no promises there.
KS: No, we don’t want to oversell it.
CB: Sure.
AC: No. And the storylines that we’re already pretty far into, this season of ‘The World Show’, it’s not gonna be resolved with hand-holding.
KS: And there’s no kumbaya we’re all gonna sing at the end of this.
AC: No, no.
CB: All right, well, we’re at just over 90 minutes now. So I think we’ve covered the forecast pretty well. What are you guys doing after this? Do you have things coming up? Kelly, you’re going to San Francisco today?
KS: I have to teach a class, and then I have to pack, and then I have to get to the airport, all within about 16 hours.
CB: Wow, okay.
KS: It’s gonna be full. And, no, it’s good. I’m looking forward to it. I love the West Coast. For those of you who’ve heard me or maybe seen me on my blog, or just hearing me, obviously I’m Australian by birth, so anything that puts me near the Pacific Ocean is happy days.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. It would be a lot more similar, climate-wise.
KS: Although it’s pretty juicy and warm here. And, yeah, a lot of travel for me in August, and then I’ve got my next online class starting up in September. So that’ll be something I’m preparing for as well.
CB: What was that, again?
KS: My next online class is actually on relationships. So we’re gonna be covering a bunch of different techniques and ideas about how to do relationship compatibility. And that’s a six-week class, starting the first week of September. And as long as you’ve got some background, you already understand things like aspects and have some familiarity with things like transits or some basic predictive stuff, anyone’s welcome to join.
CB: Awesome. That sounds good.
KS: Yeah. What about you guys?
AC: Well, let’s see, I’m gonna be starting up my month-long fundamentals class on dignity. And that’s gonna be on the 20th of August. And so, if people are confused by the traditional ‘five-level layer cake’ of essential dignity, we’re gonna be going through it piece by piece. And we’ll also talk about the difference between essential and accidental dignity and what that actually looks like in charts, not just the technical structure. Cuz it can be a little confusing if you just memorize the ideas and the sign point values to them, but don’t look at what actually happens.
CB: Awesome. That sounds great as well. So is there anything outside of your work—that either of you is looking forward to—coming up?
KS: I’m going to Paris.
CB: What?
AC: Nice.
CB: When are you doing that?
KS: In August.
CB: Okay. Just sightseeing.
KS: Just for a holiday. Yeah, I’m so excited. I haven’t been to Europe in like 10 years. My husband is fluent French-speaking, so we’re gonna go and have some good wine, good food, and just enjoy whatever Paris has to offer. If anyone has any tips, feel free to let me know. I’m a very bad trip planner.
CB: That sounds amazing. Well, you should meet up with, I don’t know, Lynn Bell or somebody while you’re in town.
KS: I think we have a dinner plan actually. Another astrology friend of mine, Yasmin Boland—who’s out of Sydney, but now lives in London—we’ve got dinner planned, and I think that Lynn will be involved with that. So I’m really looking forward to catching up with those girls, too.
CB: Awesome. Cool. And, Austin, what are you doing?
AC: Oh, I’m gonna be locked in ‘writing prison’.
CB: Writing mode.
KS: The ‘writing cave’.
AC: Yes. I’ve just got a lot to get done. That Mars-Saturn is squaring my natal Saturn by a degree.
KS: It’s gonna be really interesting when we get together at the end of August. Cuz you and I basically have some very similar things in our natal charts, but we both have a very different August lined up.
AC: Yeah, we do. Well, we have a different house structure.
KS: For sure.
CB: This is the time of the year where you’d start frantically working on the almanac, if you were still publishing that yearly, right?
AC: Yeah. And I would say, Kelly, one of the differences between our charts is I have an applying Mars-Saturn opposition.
KS: Oh, yeah.
AC: And you don’t.
KS: I do not.
AC: And so, yeah, Mars-Saturn stuff always triggers me. It’s always like, okay, into the foundry.
KS: Yes. And you love it there, though. You’re very productive with it.
AC: Kind of. It’s sort of that—
KS: A love-hate thing.
AC: Yeah. You’re like, “Oh, I love going to the gym and feeling excruciating pain.” It’s that sort of masochistic joy in certain kinds of labor that people develop. Or I come home from kung fu class and my arms are covered with bruises, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s awesome,” and Kait’s like, “You’re sick.”
KS: Yes, I’m with Kait. What are you doing, Chris? What’s on for you in August? You’re gonna be in the ‘writing cave,’ too?
CB: Yeah, I will be sequestered away in the ‘writing cave’. I have a stack of about 300 papers I need to go through and review, filling in citations in the book. I’m also doing a literature review to do one last read-through of every translation of Hellenistic texts that I have in order to dot all of my ‘I’s’ and cross all of ‘T’s’. And I’m gonna try and push to bring this manuscript project to a close before too long. I’m gonna try and—not crowdsource—but I want to put out there the design I have for my book cover, if there’s any other talented artists that are good with InDesign or Photoshop—that feel like giving it a crack to do a rendition or a different version of my book cover—I think I might do that in order to get a few different options for it before I finalize and settle on one. Even though I already have a design that I feel pretty good about, I’d like to see what other people think or what other people would do with it. But I’m actually moving into that stage where I need to start seriously thinking about layout and design and some of those things, cuz it’s getting there.
KS: So exciting. I think we’re all gonna have a party and have cake when this book gets birthed.
AC: Launch parties are a thing, Chris.
CB: Oh, no, I’m gonna go crazy. You know, I’ve been lecturing on Hellenistic astrology since 2006-2007, and in some ways I’m annoyed that I’m only now coming out with a book, because I feel like I’ve already lectured on everything. I just got an invite to a conference next year, and I have to come up with two new lectures, plus two new lectures for UAC in a few years to submit, and I’m struggling a little bit to figure out what I’m gonna present that’s gonna not just a variation of something that I’ve done already. On the other hand, I’ve also learned a lot about marketing and what you have to do to put yourself out there and where you need to send stuff, like books, to get reviews so that more people see it. And I’m just gonna go nuts with the media blitz as soon as this book is out. You guys are gonna be sick of this book by the time I’m done promoting it.
KS: No, we’re gonna be so proud and happy for you.
CB: Yeah, it’s like 600 pages at this point, and I haven’t put a single chart wheel or diagram in. So we’re running into a little bit of a problem with space issues at this point, and I’m starting to look into larger formats. And it looks like it’s gonna be a larger format book, which my editor is warning me could be problematic in terms of higher shipping costs or higher production costs. But I think that I might have to do that, nonetheless, in order to make this the comprehensive treatment of Hellenistic astrology—and the history and philosophy and the techniques—that I want it to be, that includes tons of beautiful diagrams and really great chart examples. I’m gonna have to expand it beyond the usual format, but I think it’s gonna be worth it.
KS: Fantastic.
CB: We’ll see what happens.
AC: You’re gonna give birth to a beautiful baby brick.
CB: Yeah. All right, well, I’ll check in again in a month, and we’ll see where that’s at.
KS: Yeah, we’ll be able to catch up. And, Austin, you had something that made me very happy earlier in the show today, which was about how Mercury in Virgo can be really good for writing and editing, that type of thing, which is really coming in for September, because I’ve got a massive writing month planned. So if you guys are still in the ‘writing cave’ for September, I shall join you there.
AC: Indeed.
CB: Good.
AC: We’re gonna be in there for a while.
KS: Okay, good.
CB: Good. And I wanted to say also, thanks to all of the listeners, and especially all of the patrons and supporters that have been supporting this. Because my writing project was originally planned for three months earlier and I overshot that terribly. But, literally, the only way I’ve been able to continue focusing on writing and research over the past several months in order to write this book is because of the income that’s still coming in through doing the podcast each month. So the people supporting the podcast are not only helping to support the production of the podcast, but they’re literally helping me to write this major book right now, and that’s kind of a big deal to me. So I just wanted to take a minute to say thanks to everybody who’s been doing that, cuz it’s a huge deal,and I think it’s gonna really turn into something worthwhile. So thanks everyone for doing that.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and thanks, Austin and Kelly, again, for joining me, and for doing these monthly podcasts. I know everybody seems to look forward to these, and it seems to have turned into a thing, even though we put it together kind of haphazardly about a year ago now. But we’ve been doing it for a year, and it seems like it’s really turned into something worthwhile and something special.
KS: Yeah, thanks, Chris, for having me and Austin. I mean, it’s just a love to check in with you guys every month. But you reminded me, Chris, I was in Toronto, and Wade Caves and Lee Lehman were here doing some horary teaching earlier this month. And I popped in for a couple of days, and I think maybe a third of the people there are actually listeners of the podcast. And it’s so fun to meet people in real life, and I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who a) does listen, and then, b) will come up and say ‘hi’ IRL when we’re in the flesh. So it’s lovely to connect with everyone.
CB: Yeah, that’s always really awesome, because it’s tough to track the metrics on the podcast. And I know we have something like 2,000 listeners, give or take, that are regular listeners and subscribers. But it’s actually interesting to run into people in person and find out that they have actually listened to a lot of the episodes, or that they’re regular listeners. And it’s always great to get that kind of feedback and to actually connect with who our audience is out in the community. And finding out that so many people are listening to it is really fulfilling, because otherwise it’s usually just me talking to one other person or the three of us talking to each other one day. And then we release it and it gets a few likes on Facebook, and then you’re never fully sure what kind of impact it’s had. But when you start running into people in person, it’s always really nice.
KS: Yeah, it’s very cool. I think I had kind of forgotten that people actually do listen to us.
CB: Yeah.
KS: It’s not just the three of us shooting the breeze.
CB: Right. Cuz for all practical purposes, that’s what it is each month. But then, every once in a while, you realize that a thousand people have actually listened to it, and took whatever stupid joke we made earlier in the episode to heart or something like that. All right, well, let’s wrap this up. So, Kelly, what’s your website?
KS: Oh, kellysastrology.com.
CB: Austin?
AC: I am austincoppock.com. A-U-S-T-I-N C-O-P-P-O-C-K.
CB: All right, and I am at chrisbrennanastrologer.com. So thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
AC: Bye.
KS: Bye.