The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 89, titled:
Astrology Forecast Discussion for October 2016
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on September 28, 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, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This episode is recorded on Monday, September 26, 2016, starting at 4:25 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 89th episode of the show. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and help support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees about the forecast for the month of October 2016, as well as talking about a few auspicious electional charts for different dates in October. So, Austin and Kelly, welcome back to the show.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey, thanks, Chris.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, there.
CB: Long time since I talked to you guys.
KS: It’s been ages.
AC: Minutes even.
CB: Right. All right, so let’s jump right into the forecast. Let’s do this. We’ve got a good hour to talk today. I mean, usually we catch up. So first thing’s first, just very briefly, any major news in your world?
KS: I survived September. I hope everyone else did.
CB: “I survived September.” That’s a good slogan, I like that.
AC: Yeah. I will just say that I’ve been seeing September as the bookend for a lot of the configurations that define this year—and it very definitely was. A lot of storylines came to an end and then a number of new ones have been introduced—not all of them I like. I’ll just say that and not go into any more detail.
CB: Right.
KS: How very cryptic of you, Austin.
AC: Indeed.
KS: The one thing I forgot to mention, or I should say, is I did record a Jupiter in Libra MP3 download. I guess to pick up on Austin’s thread, I’m starting to do a little bit more multimedia stuff myself, on my own site. So that’s something that’s been on sale, and we’ve had some really good feedback about it over the last few weeks. So that’s something new for me.
AC: Nice.
CB: Awesome.
AC: I sell things, too.
KS: Yes, you do, Austin.
AC: My eight-week class on the decans—which I taught last fall—has finally been edited and is going to be available for purchase, I don’t know, probably by the time this podcast comes out. I’m excited about that. And I’m gonna be teaching a class in October, a four-week class, about synodic cycles, getting to know retrograde motion, direct motion, stations, planets moving fast, planets moving slow, etc., etc. It’s sort of your four-week introduction to synodic cycles and what they tell you about the planets.
CB: Excellent. And we can check out both of your websites for that. I think it’s kellysurtees.com and austincoppock.com, correct?
KS: Perfect.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay. And I’m doing the same thing, I guess since we’re all talking about that. This month—as we already know—I’m giving away a free pass to my online course on Hellenistic astrology on what should be Episode 90. So I think that’s the next episode after this one, which I may or may not record either later this week or early next month. For that course, I’ve actually released separate, standalone lectures for a few parts of that course that I’m sort of selling privately on the side, including a lecture on the conditions of bonification and maltreatment—which basically tells you how to determine planetary condition and when planets are extremely well-placed or extremely poorly-placed—and then another lecture on the Arabic parts or the lots. So I don’t have these listed on my website yet, but I’ve been giving some people access when they feel like signing up for those topics. So just contact me separately for that. And then if you want to enter into the drawing for a chance to win free access to that course—which I give away through hellenisticastrology.com—then just become a patron on the $10 tier and you’ll automatically be entered into the drawing. Let’s see, so back to our topic that we started talking about. So September—which we’re finishing up right now—as a sort of bookend to a large part of the year makes a lot of sense, because we finally finished the Mars retrograde in September, and it finally got out of its shadow and passed the point that it originally went retrograde at. We had the second set of eclipses. This set was in Virgo and Pisces, which kind of bookended or complemented the earlier set of eclipses in March, which were in Pisces and Libra.
AC: This was actually our last eclipse that we’re gonna have in Virgo for quite some time, if I’m not incorrect. I think it’s gonna be another nine years.
KS: Yeah, it’ll be nine years. We’ve still got a Pisces eclipse, though.
AC: Yes, one more eclipse in Pisces, and then the Virgo/Pisces series is done for almost a decade.
CB: Wow. Okay, so that’ll be early next year in February?
KS: February 26, I think it is.
AC: Oh, yeah. I know so many February 26th and 27th nativities.
KS: Yes. So we’ll all be able to give you a good debrief about that when it happens.
CB: So that’s interesting just in terms of closing down one six-month period that began back in March in terms of the eclipses and opening up another six-month period, basically starting from September, going all the way through February. And then of course as we started to talk about—as you two both mentioned before we started recording—finally having Mars go into a completely new sign. Cuz it’s basically been in the—I think you said, Kelly—same zodiacal signs for the entirety of this year, right?
KS: Yeah. I mean, we’re coming up month number 10, October, and Mars has only been in Scorpio and Sag. And October-November-December, Mars is gonna whip through Capricorn and Aquarius, and then even dive into the early part of Pisces. So in two months, Mars is gonna cover the same amount of ground that it covered in the first 10 months of the year. So as Austin was saying, Mars is back up to normal speed now. Things are moving.
AC: Yeah. And I don’t think there’s any other planet whose speed is as variable from our perspective as Mars. You know, Mercury will slow down, but then in a week he’ll be fast again. Venus will slow down and then go fast again. Mars takes forever to go through these retrograde cycles. You know, it’s a really different face of the planet than the one that we normally get. So we’re kind of getting back into ‘normal’ Mars, which is not always necessarily favorable or pleasurable, but it’s very different from the ‘slow, grindy, back-and-forth, retrograde shadow’ Mars.
KS: Yes—oh, sorry. Go, Chris.
CB: No, go ahead.
KS: I was gonna say the only other thing of course that I like—and maybe you guys feel about this, too—is Mars is in Capricorn. So we’re getting the exalted version of Mars, or one of the more productive versions of Mars, which I think is fantastic.
CB: Yeah, definitely. It’s a nice, interesting change from that previous one. Also, Mars going into Capricorn and going into an earth sign compared to the past little while where it’s been in Sagittarius, and where it stationed in Sagittarius with that hard aspect with Neptune on top of that. So it was like a mutable sign with a hard aspect with Neptune, and now suddenly we’ve got Mars in Capricorn. That’s a pretty big shift.
KS: Yeah. We’ve gone from a slightly sort of ‘dazed and confused’ or ‘unfocused’ Mars to a ‘very practical, very focused, very determined, very driven’ Mars.
CB: Right.
AC: So it’s worth noting that Mars will be in Capricorn for all of October.
KS: Yes, the entire calendar month.
CB: Which is hilarious just in and of itself how quickly it moves through. You know, it goes into Capricorn on September 27, and then it’s already in Aquarius by November 9. Strangely, just after the US Election Day, Mars makes that sign ingress. Did anybody notice? That Mercury retrograde that we just had in Virgo had a much different, much more earthy feel—for me, personally—than some of the other ones that we’ve seen this year. How did you guys enjoy that? Or did you guys notice anything this past month, in September, while Mercury was retrograde in Virgo?
KS: Look, I didn’t have any super-classical Mercury retrograde moments until this past weekend, where I had a couple of tech glitches. But I would describe it—for me, personally—as a much more mild version of Mercury retrograde, if that’s an appropriate way to describe it.
CB: Sure.
AC: I wouldn’t say that I observed the same thing. Listening to people and knowing some people’s stories, it seemed like there was a lot of super-classical Mercury retrograde. Actually I got a lot of emails from people who were like, “Yeah, usually they don’t bother me. It’s not so big a deal. This one was much more significant.” I generally treat Mercury retrogrades in signs that Mercury rules as being more significant. And the fact that this Mercury retrograde occurred entirely—not quite entirely, but almost entirely between two eclipses, on the same axis of signs that Mercury was retrograde in—brought some additional intensity to it. I think that Mercury’s retrograde was pretty inseparable from the eclipse cycle. You know, Mercury’s inferior conjunction with the Sun happened right between the eclipses, right in that bardo. And so, I think a lot of that was all rolled up into one.
CB: For me, I ended up spending that entire month focused intensely on writing what turned into this entire chapter on the origins of the house division issue in the Hellenistic tradition, which, you pointed out, Austin, and I kept coming back to. You pointed out how my original talk on the whole sign houses for the Nightlight Astrology Group happened last November, and then the debate about house division happened with Deb right at the time of the first exact Saturn-Neptune square.
AC: Yeah, you guys picked the exact day.
CB: Yeah, it was really close, and it was tied in with this whole other T-square of mutable planets. But then Robert Schmidt released a recording that was ostensibly in reaction to that debate—talking about the house division issue in the Hellenistic tradition—in June, on the second Saturn-Neptune square, which you pointed out. You were the one that pointed out that that was weird. And so, it ended up working out that this summer, I finally got to and needed to deal with the house division issue by early September. And so, I ended up writing what was originally just a 5- or 10-page treatment at the end of the ‘houses’ chapter, and then it turned into a 57-page entire chapter on its own right around the same time as that third and final Saturn-Neptune square that wen exact around September 10. So—go ahead.
AC: Oh, I was gonna say, just to bookend it, you ended up giving another Nightlight Astrology talk on your findings, right?
CB: Right. Yeah, which just came about randomly. Adam asked me that morning if I wanted to give a talk on something, and I was like, “Well, I’ve been working on house division for the past month-and-a-half, and that’s literally all I’m thinking about right now. So I can talk about that. But it’d be a not-great lecture cuz I have only four hours to prepare it.” So he said, “Do it,” and so I put it together and did it. Still debating on whether or not to release that, cuz I don’t know if I want to deal with the reactions to that. But it was really amazing seeing that, because it was a combination of the Saturn-Neptune square, which ultimately became a very good metaphor for the house division issue itself and some of the issues related to it. Also, even the Mercury retrograde in Virgo was very descriptive of what I ended up doing for most of September, cuz I ended up ‘Virgo-ing’ the hell out of that chapter in my book, basically doing an overly-detailed and overly-nuanced account of the first thousand years of the use of houses and how every single astrologer used them, and it turned into 57 pages. So I think I have a better understanding now of some of those archetypes in terms of what happens when you get a really intense Mercury retrograde-type review phase. Especially when you’re like me, and you’re in a Virgo profection year, where that sign and that planet are actually specifically activated this year. Then you have an eclipse there, and then you have Saturn and Neptune squaring it at the same time to close down a phase that it’s been tied into.
AC: Yeah, that’s interesting. I also went into a ‘research’ hole. You know, it’s funny. When I was thinking about the Mercury retrograde—before Mercury was retrograde—I got really strong images of being guided down into a sort of underworld library. And so, I built up this sort of tiny mythology of the ‘lost library’—the ‘ghost of Alexandria’, the ‘ghost of the Library of Alexandria’—hunting for lost sources and forgotten facts and getting tricked by sneaky librarians or getting lost among the stacks, and it ended up being more literal for a lot of people than I assumed it would be.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that was all very interesting. And October—one of the things that me and Kelly both noted—is comparatively kind of boring compared to September it seems, right?
KS: There’s a lot less high-level ‘astro’ activity, shall we say.
CB: Sure. So no eclipses. No major stations, as far as I’m aware.
KS: No major ingresses either. We’ve had our only big sign change for the year, which was Jupiter in Libra.
CB: Right. All we have is some inner planet ingresses. Mercury goes into Libra on the 7th of October and then Venus goes into Sagittarius on the 18th. The Sun goes into Scorpio on the 22nd and then Mercury goes into Scorpio on the 24th.
AC: What we do have is a very exciting Full Moon.
KS: That is true. That is probably the highlight of the month, the mid-month Aries Full Moon, which is precisely conjunct Uranus.
CB: Oh, okay. At 23 Aries?
KS: Yeah. Let’s grab some data on that.
CB: So that is, otherwise, what I would I not think would be a very exciting Full Moon, but it’s exactly conjunct or very closely-conjunct Uranus.
KS: Yes, very tight.
AC: And we also have a loose T-square from Mars and Pluto, which is made more relevant by the fact that it’s a Full Moon in Aries, which is ruled by Mars. And so, it’ll look to Mars, and there we have Mars in Capricorn in an applying conjunction with Pluto. It’s only about 2° off.
KS: Yes.
AC: That’s pretty intense.
KS: It’s like the middle of the month.
AC: Yes, pretty much dead-center. It’s the—what is it? It’s gonna be the evening of Saturday, the 15th.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I believe all of us will be at the ISAR conference.
KS: We will. That is true. So it’ll be Saturday—sorry, Sunday morning in Australia.
CB: Oh, really?
KS: Yes, it’s the ISAR weekend.
CB: Oh, no. That’s the day of this panel, or it’s pretty close to that panel.
KS: Oh, yeah, the presidential panel.
CB: Oh, my God.
AC: I think the presidential panel’s on Sunday, isn’t it?
CB: What day are we talking about? Are we talking about Saturday?
KS: Saturday night’s the Full Moon.
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah, you’ll get a more stable, stabilizing Taurus Moon for the panel.
KS: It’ll perhaps be helpful, cuz this Full Moon-Uranus—as you pointed out, Austin, with Mars ruling the Full Moon but conjunct Pluto—is a little bit contentious.
AC: It’s kind of ‘explode-y’.
KS: ‘Explode-y’, that’s a nice word.
AC: One of my favorite pairings of words to describe what Uranus does in both a positive and negative way is ‘breakthroughs and breakdowns’.
KS: Oh, yeah, I use those words.
AC: Whenever Uranus is really strongly activated—especially when it’s activated in a way that pairs it with an emotional planet, such as the Moon or Venus—you always have some people lose their shit. You also have really amazing breakthroughs and what not, but Uranus likes to throw a monkey wrench in things. One of the metaphors I’ve used for a long time is you’re going along and let’s say you’re playing Monopoly or any board game. Uranus is not necessarily the unexpected move in the game, it’s somebody knocking the gaming table over. You’re like, “Oh, okay. And now for something different.” So there will be some surprises on that Full Moon. Hopefully, they’re of the ‘revelatory breakthrough’ variety for people, at least in the majority.
CB: There is one surprise that I’m actually not looking forward to that weekend. ISAR made a big announcement on Facebook saying that one of the panelists discovered Hillary’s birth time and that it’s been confirmed. And what’s bullshit about this is they’re not gonna release it until the day of the second panel, cuz there’s gonna be two presidential panels at the ISAR conference. There’s gonna be one at the beginning of the conference by international astrologers, and then one at the end of the conference by US astrologers that is the culmination and the closing of the entire conference. And the guy who’s claiming—or who ISAR is claiming—to have gotten the birth data or got it confirmed is gonna be on the second panel, and they’re saying they’re not gonna release it until he announces whatever he’s gonna announce on the panel. The problem is that they’ve got two full panels of other astrologers who could potentially be working with the wrong data. Cuz part of the announcement that they included is that they’re trying to claim that neither the 8:00 PM or the 8:00 AM birth time for Hillary is the correct one. So there’s some kind of strange, very ill-thought-out thing going on behind the scenes here with respect to this. And then there’s all sorts of questions about whether the data itself was made up, because it seems to be the same as another source, from a guy who’s known to be using fake times and giving out different times, and there’s all sorts of problems.
AC: Yeah, some people hunted down that time. Apparently, this person has posted it on some forums, and there’s been some discussion about it previously, and it’s a Virgo rising chart. It’s interesting. I would not reject it out of hand. It’s certainly not a ridiculous chart for Hillary, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.
KS: I do think it just doesn’t have a good feeling about it, that the data is being withheld until the live presidential panel. To me, it’s a little bit more in the spirit of collegial collaboration. If some discovery had been made about this very murky issue, why wouldn’t we share that as soon as we had that info, especially if it is as confirmed as it’s being claimed to be?
CB: Right. I mean, it’s incredibly stupid and offensive from a community standpoint. If all of us on the panel—except this one guy—prepare for the panels, we have to send in our charts ahead of time. They have to be sent in by September 28. If we all base our predictions and prepare based on the wrong birth time—let’s say hypothetically it was true, which I’m not. But let’s say hypothetically, he got the right birth time. We all prepare with the wrong birth time, and then a bunch of us get our predictions wrong because ISAR or this guy or whatever withheld the time—and could have prevented that by giving us the correct time ahead of time—that’s a huge embarrassment for the astrological community, and it’s something that could have been avoided. So, yeah, I have no idea what they’re thinking, but it’s absolutely absurd. And I’m still in the process of trying to get it worked out and see if they’ll release the data to at least the panelists ahead of time, or at least tell us what the source is, so that we can see if it’s valid or not. So far the word on the street is that the guy who’s claiming that he found it has a sort of checkered history of rectifying some times, and he evidently was criticized by Lois Rodden at one point for not-great data collection practices. So I think Patrick Watson and I might do a separate show about this later in the week. And I’m hoping that some things will be a little bit clearer by the time we record that, hopefully, Wednesday. But I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. Actually, if this episode ends up getting released after that—which is slightly possible—hopefully, we’ve already got it figured out. But that’s something that’s happening right now that people should be aware of.
AC: So this brings up a really interesting point, and that is that we have a Full Moon conjunct Uranus, which on a very simple-but-true level indicates surprises.
CB: Right.
AC: And even though that hasn’t happened yet, there’s a surprise that ended up being accidentally scheduled within 12 hours of that Moon conjunct Uranus. And so, one thing about astrology is that sometimes you’ll start reacting to what’s coming up, and this is a really obvious version of that. It’s almost like some of these celestial configurations create an event a month ahead of time, a year ahead of time or whatever, that sort of bends the space-time fabric. And you start feeling when you’re leading up to that, even though you can’t see it in the sky yet. You know, one of the things I see with clients all the time is people intuiting what things are gonna be like in a year or two. This is a much smaller version of that, but it reminded me of that. It’s a thing which seems to happen.
CB: Sure. Yeah, that sometimes even when an event that hasn’t happened yet—that has a certain signature of something associated with it—you can already see the archetype almost starting to present itself before it’s even happened in some sense, in anticipation of what that event is almost destined to be.
AC: Yeah, things start bending themselves into that shape or towards that pattern.
CB: Sure. That would be something interesting to define at some point. Like all of those different facets of astrology, I’ve always wanted to write a book attempting to define some of those things conceptually, cuz that’s really never been done before. It’s just there’s a lot of things like that that are sometimes taken for granted in practice, but nobody quite articulates it altogether in order to form a fully-coherent theory of astrology that explicitly articulates all of the conceptual and theoretical things that go into the practice.
AC: That’s an interesting idea. We’re gonna have to come up with a cool name for that phenomenon.
CB: Yeah, it’s gotta have a cool name, otherwise, nobody will ever talk about it. Like you have the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It should be the ‘Coppock something principle’. The ‘Coppock hyper-time dimensionality’—
AC: Unfortunately, ‘Coppock’ doesn’t sound very cool. So you’re gonna have to leave my name out of it.
CB: Right. All right, we’ll think about that. Oh, yeah, I did have some elections this month. Leisa, again, did the elections. Actually we’re wrapping up our electional column. We’re closing it down after four years in TMA, and somebody else is taking over the column in the future. So we just wrote the last one for December and January last week. We do have some elections that Leisa came up with for October, but they’re all actually for the later part of the month, starting on the 18th. So there’s one on the 18th, one on the 20th, then the 22nd, and then the 27th. So not a lot in the first part of the month. And then even once you get to the later part of the month—really, for a long time now, with Saturn now in Sagittarius—you get into this period of Aquarius rising elections really being the best for a long time. Because what you get with Aquarius rising is Saturn ruling the ascendant, placed in the whole sign 11th house, usually not too far from the degree of the midheaven, or the degree of the meridian. And then most of this month—especially most of October—Saturn is actually closely sextile Jupiter, which is moving around the same degrees in Libra. So you get this really nice Saturn-Jupiter sextile, with Saturn ruling the ascendant and placed in the 11th for most of the month. For the most part, for October and some subsequent months, you’re basically looking at a lot of Aquarius rising elections in terms of the most auspicious rising sign most of the time. So that’s really good for 11th house activities with some emphasis on the 9th house as well, with Jupiter placed there. I guess I should just go through those at this point, right?
KS: Totally. Yeah, let’s hear it. I can’t believe this is gonna be the last. So you guys have done it up until December-January, and then that’s the last column?
CB: Yeah. I mean, I was just getting a little tired of it, and they wanted to change things up a bit. So I think they’re gonna be trying a different format for it in the future, and I guess we’ll see who ends up doing it. I think Nina Gryphon might be taking over at this point. So she’ll probably be giving it more of a Renaissance approach, and, yeah, I think that’ll be good.
AC: Yeah, Nina’s great.
CB: Yeah, Nina is great. And I did it for four years. I’m surprised I’ve been doing it for so long at this point.
KS: I can’t believe that’s how long.
CB: Yeah, I started just after the 2012 election, so it’s gonna be literally four years by the time we wrap it up. And I sort of pioneered the format. Cuz they just asked me, “Do you want to write a column on something?” And I was like, “The only thing I could possibly write a column on is maybe I could pick out a few auspicious elections each month.” And they were like, “Sure, let’s give it a shot and see if it works.” And it went over really well. I don’t think that’s really been done before, so it was kind of a different format and a different idea. But I was glad to see that it took off and that people seemed to respond to it pretty well, but it’s really annoying. I’m not as good as you two are about meeting deadlines each month and getting stuff in on time. So for every other month, when I had to turn in the TMA column, it was just like an excruciating week of forcing myself to find four electional charts. And they asked us after the first year or so to preferably make them during the daytime, so that automatically removed 50% of my charts during the nighttime. They didn’t think it was very practical for people to be getting recommendations to get up at like 2:00 in the morning to start a business or something like that, as astrologers often do. So that made it a little bit more challenging, a little bit more of a hassle each month to try and pick out—during this very narrow time span—a diverse array of different elections each month and then attempt to explain them to novice astrologers who don’t understand terms like ‘reception’ or whatever. So it was kind of a hassle.
KS: Welcome to the world of publishing—or magazine publishing, I should say—where there’s often a little tension between, shall we say, the writer’s passion for writing about their material in the way that’s most authentic for them versus the editorial direction of the publication, which has their specific audience in mind. You know, it’s very common. It’s often this negotiation, if you like, between editor and writer.
CB: Oh, yeah.
AC: Which is exactly the reason why I used Patreon to go back to writing the weekly column and the monthly column.
CB: Sure. Just to be your own boss and set the terms.
AC: Well, I mean, it’s dialogue with my audience, right? You know, writing is always a two-player game.
CB: Sure.
AC: If you don’t have an audience, then it’s journaling, right? But it simplifies it a little bit.
KS: True.
AC: It’s auteur theory, astrological writing.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I should clarify that they were great. The issue was definitely TMA, cuz they actually, if anything, did better at encouraging me to do better and to write more clearly and improve my writing over the past four years for a more general audience, especially working with their editor, Nan Geary. Is that how you pronounce her last name?
AC: I believe so. I’ve worked with Nan.
KS: Nan’s amazing.
AC: She’s an awesome editor.
KS: Yeah.
AC: She’s fantastic. I wasn’t meaning to insult The Mountain Astrologer’s editorial policy. Every publication has to have an editorial policy or else it becomes a random bowl of slop. It’s just that that editorial policy may or may not jive or cohere with an individual author’s vision for a particular piece.
CB: Sure. And it was more just me sucking at deadlines, basically ever since the fourth grade. So that’s something that I’m not getting over anytime soon, my general hatred of deadlines. So going back to a format like this, with the podcast, where it’s like me and a few friends can just get together and record something, and I can do all of my preparations at the very last minute and still produce something halfway decent—
AC: So when is the book coming out, again?
CB: Yeah, right. I literally started the book 10 years ago this month, September 2016, with a Virgo rising and Mercury in Virgo election as a matter of fact. So that was another interesting piece of astrological trivia, you guys talking about this being the last Virgo eclipse in September, and then Mercury retrograde in Virgo and everything else.
AC: So you started it 10 years ago? So you probably started it either right before or during the last set of eclipses in Pisces and Virgo.
CB: Yeah, exactly.
KS: Very true.
CB: It was the same month as the Virgo eclipse, I believe. Anyway, speaking of the book, the book’s actually in very good shape. And I’m pushing right now—before I go out of town for the ISAR conference in a couple of weeks—to hand over the final rough draft to my editor, Aaron, and then he’s gonna spend a month doing the final edit. Then, hopefully, we’ll actually be getting really close to the final version. Unfortunately, I took what was supposed to be a 10-page treatment on house division and the origins of that and turned it into a 57-page, overly-detailed analysis of the entire issue. One of the things I did is I went through every single existing horoscope—all 300 surviving horoscopes from the first 500 years of Western astrology—and I counted up each one that had an ascendant or that had a midheaven, and all of them that calculated intermediate cusps and all of them that only used the signs as houses; and then I have a bunch of pretty graphs and a breakdown of that. Since that’s so long I’m having to cut other chapters at this point, like one chapter on the master of the nativity. Anyway, so I should be finishing that up this month.
KS: Anytime in the next decade?
CB: Yeah, it’s gonna happen this time. Definitely not waiting until the next set of Virgo eclipses 10 years from now.
KS: No. You’ve been powering through this year.
CB: Right. So back to the forecast, because we’ve got some nice things.
AC: Elections.
CB: Oh, elections, right. I completely skipped over the elections. So the first election takes place October 18, at 3:05 PM, with about 11° of Aquarius rising. Saturn is in Sagittarius in the eleventh whole sign house with Venus, which has just ingressed into Sagittarius, so they’re in a sign-based conjunction. Jupiter is over there in the ninth whole sign house in Libra, forming a sextile with Saturn, with about 5° of orb, so close enough. The Moon’s in early Gemini, separating from an opposition with Venus and applying to a trine with Jupiter. So both the ruler of the ascendant and the Moon are in excellent condition. Mars, which is the most difficult planet in the chart, is sort of hidden away in the 12th house with Pluto. So we’ve got kind of a powerful Mars, hidden away in the 12th house, that’s potentially problematic in some ways, but, otherwise, isn’t majorly afflicting any of the most significant players in the chart, which is what you look for in a general electional chart. So that’s actually our first. We gotta wait a few weeks.
AC: So before we move on, you have the Moon in early Gemini here, correct?
CB: Yeah, 4 Gemini.
AC: Right. So what this has is we have the Moon having just completed an aspect to Venus and then on its way to making a trine to Jupiter. So we have an enclosure within the rays of benefics, which is a very nice thing.
CB: Right. And it’s the best variety of that—because it’s actually separating from the less-benefic planet in this chart—since it’s a day chart. It’s separating from Venus, and it’s applying to a trine—which is the most positive aspect—with the most positive planet in the chart; it’s a day chart, it’s applying to Jupiter.
AC: Yeah. And Jupiter and the Moon—there is actually some reception there, cuz Jupiter is in a Moon-ruled decan, and the Moon is in a Jupiter-ruled decan, and I believe, also, within the Egyptian bound of Jupiter. And Jupiter has triplicity dignity there. So there’s actually a little bit more reception than you might otherwise see.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so that’s one of those fantastic conditions of bonification that I was talking about earlier. It’s one of the ones that I had to define in a chapter this month. You know, when a planet falls between the exact degree-based aspects of two benefics, in the positive version—or two malefics, in the negative version—when that happens it’s one of the most extremely-positive or auspicious placements that you have for a significator in a chart. So that’s one of the things that Leisa really zeroed in on in this one, and I think that’s one of the reasons why she waited until later in the month to start giving the elections. Especially if you can only pick out four elections in a month—which was the case with the TMA column due to length restrictions—you have this question of, do you want to recommend a mediocre chart that’s earlier in the month, just so there’s a greater distribution? Or do you want to wait and recommend the first chart really late in the month, if you can get a really spectacular one that has something that stands out, that doesn’t happen very often? And that was definitely the case here.
AC: Yeah. Although if somebody wanted to do something earlier in the month, the 10th has the Moon in Aquarius trine. It’s the other trine to Jupiter in Libra, as Mercury is conjoining Jupiter. You might be able to find something using that. It’s got decent bones. It’s not as good as the 18th, but it’s not garbage if you can’t wait a week.
CB: Yeah, and that’s usually the issue you run into. You’ve gotta start things at some point. You don’t just completely put off your entire life if you can’t find a good election, but most of the time you’re just making due with what you can. But I think she avoided the earlier ones cuz one of the issues that we ran into was Mars is much more tied in with some of the other planets earlier in the month, and that was one of the things that sort of trips up some of those early elections. On the 10th, and especially the 11th, Mars is at 9° of Capricorn and Mercury is at 7° of Libra. So Mercury’s actually applying to an exact square with Mars. Even though you’ve got the favorable ruler of the—
AC: On the 10th, you can get Mercury while it’s still applying to Jupiter. By the time the Moon makes the trine to Jupiter, Mercury’s still applying. So later on the 10th, you lose that.
CB: Sure. But then you still get both, basically. Cuz that’s one of the things that sometimes separates horary practice from natal practice. In horary, you really focus on what planets perfect first, and to some extent in electional. What planets perfect first? And if you’ve got the positive perfection first before the negative one, then that’s okay. But in a natal context, it’s much clearer most of the time that if you’ve got a Mercury-Jupiter conjunction, but then they’re both square Mars, that you end up getting both. You’ll get the extreme aspects of the ‘bad’ to some extent, as well as the extreme aspects of the ‘good’ and it’s kind of a mixed bag.
AC: Yeah, I was actually just talking about this in a class I was teaching the other day, on the different kinds of framework or perspective you need to bring to bear, depending on the type of astrology you’re doing. You know, if it’s a natal chart, you’re gonna have to live with that for 60, 70, 80, 90 years, and so you’re gonna see everything suggested by that natal chart. Whereas if you’re using an election to schedule a party, that’ll just happen, you’ll get the most obvious version of that. Many horaries work that way as well. Like if you’re ‘horarying’ who’s going to win this boxing match, just one person wins. You don’t have 80 years to explore every nuance of that moment.
CB: Sure. Although if you’re getting married, then you might have—
KS: I was just thinking of the wedding charts. I’m doing a couple for some people next year, and the enclosure by benefics is obviously ideal, but not always possible.
AC: Usually not possible.
CB: Sure. So that’s why if you want to take advantage of a really nice chart, take advantage of that one. Other than that, it actually gets better after that in some of the other charts. So there was one where she switched it up, because that’s one of the issues we always ran into in the TMA column. It looks lazy if you just give like four Aquarius rising charts cuz that’s literally the best rising sign. So sometimes we’d have to try and flip it up in order to give a better distribution in terms of different times, just in case somebody couldn’t use that specific time, four times in a month. So the other possible rising sign is Cancer, on October 20. So you get a Cancer rising chart, at about 10:15 in the evening or at night. Cancer rising, Moon in Cancer conjunct the ascendant. It’s at 7° of Cancer approximately, applying to a square with Jupiter, which is at 8° of Libra in the fourth whole sign house. I believe it’s separating from—no, it’s not. It’s completely in aversion to Venus. So it’s applying to a square with Jupiter. Mercury and the Sun are also with Jupiter in the fourth whole sign house. This chart’s a little bit tricky because it puts that Mars-Pluto conjunction—which is now separating—at 15 and 16 Capricorn in the 7th house, somewhat near the descendant. But the fact that it makes it a night chart—and the fact that Mars is also exalted on top of that—tones that Mars a little bit. So while you might get some slightly problematic ‘Mars-y’ 7th house-type things, it’s not gonna be a huge deal, I wouldn’t think. And, yeah, I think that was about it. Otherwise, the chart’s not spectacular, but this is the only other chart where we could find a decent rising sign, where the ruler of the ascendant was well-placed zodiacally by sign that month, aside from the fabulous Aquarius rising elections during the course of the second part of the month.
So that’s October 20. The 22nd, again, 2:45 PM, 10 Aquarius rising, Saturn in Sagittarius again. This time Venus is a little bit closer. It’s up at 5 Sagittarius, applying to a conjunction with Saturn at 13. Jupiter, again, has moved a little bit closer to Saturn. It’s at 9 Libra, applying to a sextile with Saturn. The Moon has, in this chart, just ingressed into Leo, into the seventh whole sign house, where it’s applying to a trine with Venus in Sagittarius, and then a sextile with Jupiter in Libra. So we’ve got the Moon applying to both benefics. It’s not applying to Mars, which is good, because it’s a day chart. And, yeah, so it’s very similar to the October 18 chart, except instead of having the Moon in the 5th house, it has the Moon in the 7th house. And the final election of the month takes place October 27, at 2:25 PM. This is also Aquarius rising, with Saturn in Sagittarius at 13° in the eleventh whole sign house. Now Venus is extremely close at 11° of Sag, so there’s a pretty tight Venus-Saturn conjunction forming in this chart. On top of that, Jupiter’s moved another degree forward, cuz Jupiter’s really cruising at this point. It seems like it’s moving about a degree or more a week. So Jupiter’s at 10° of Libra at this point, and so it’s now within 3° of a sextile with Saturn, the ruler of the ascendant, with reception, since Saturn is in the domicile with Jupiter. The Moon in this chart has recently ingressed into Libra, and into the ninth whole sign house, where it’s applying to a conjunction with Jupiter in a day chart. So this chart’s very similar to the others, except now the Moon is in the 9th house, applying to a very fortunate-looking conjunction with Jupiter. And the last part of this is that the Sun and Mercury are both very closely-conjunct. They’re actually cazimi at 4° of Scorpio in the tenth whole sign house. So it’s another nice, little facet of this election, that you have a Mercury cazimi with the Sun in Scorpio in the 10th house. So that’s the final election of the month, on October 27.
KS: Nice. Yeah, Jupiter is moving quite quickly this month, covering a full 5° throughout October and, again, in November. So any kind of Jupiter action or Jupiter aspects that people can pull in, that is positive, have got that little bit of extra pace behind them as well.
CB: Yeah, that seems like a big change, also. I don’t know, I guess it’s been a while since Jupiter’s stationed and was moving that slowly. But it just seemed like most of this year, it was moving so slowly, and I don’t know why that is. But definitely, by October—because it’s so close to the Sun—Jupiter is moving the fastest that it possibly can. So most of October, we’ll see it just zooming by.
KS: Yeah.
CB: All right, so aside from the elections, we talked about the Full Moon conjunct Uranus on the 16th. There’s a New Moon in Scorpio on the 30th, so right before Halloween. Is there anything special about that?
KS: I think it’s trine Neptune.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah, it is. The New Moon’s at 8 Scorpio, and Neptune will be at 9 Pisces retro. So in terms of the haunting and the dress-up and what’s real/what’s fantasy, it’s probably a lovely energy for the Halloween party mood, I guess.
CB: Sure. Yeah, definitely.
KS: Quite creative or fun. I mean, that sense of not being real that we could tap into with all the costumes and things at Halloween.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it sort of accentuating in a positive way rather than a negative one because it’s happening through a trine.
KS: Totally. And I think sometimes with planets or transit influences or what have you, if a planet shows up through a dynamic trigger—in whatever particular technique you use—it’s looking for expression or an outlet. And sometimes we’re not aware of it, we ignore it, and that’s how we get more of the shadow or the tricky side coming out. But sometimes when there’s an overt opportunity to express energy that’s congruent with a planet, that really kind of channels it in a positive way or a ‘functional’ way; that’s perhaps a better word. So this would be one Halloween where it would be perhaps worth the effort. I know for me, I’m going to a Halloween party for the first time in my life, and I’ll be getting a costume, which is also a first time thing for me. That’s partly being Australian. Halloween, when I was growing up in Australia, wasn’t anywhere near what it’s become today in Australia. Even in Australia today, it’s nothing like what it is in North America. But there’s something playful and creative about that, that sort of getting into the spirit.
CB: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
AC: Is that because you’re always surrounded by monstrous creatures growing up in Australia?
KS: Ha, ha, ha, Austin. I mean, we’re certainly always surrounded by lethal creatures.
CB: Right.
AC: I don’t mean your fellow citizens.
KS: No, I know.
AC: I just mean that the fauna is both exotic and dangerous.
KS: Australia has 8 of the 10 most lethal snakes and spiders and what have you. So, yeah, maybe we have no need to evoke this—I don’t even know what the word is. Like this celestial play or this comic expression, it’s right there. I don’t know, maybe. We’re just a lot further away, too. We just don’t have quite that influence of culture.
CB: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
KS: But, yeah, New Moon trine Neptune in Scorpio. I think there’ll be lots of mystery and magic perhaps.
AC: Yeah, I like how not-dramatic that New Moon is.
KS: Especially in contrast to the Full Moon.
AC: Yeah, and what was before. You know, we’ve had a lot of very dramatic lunations. So I wanted to kind of wind back to the beginning of the month and just look at some of the larger themes, as I’ve been considering them.
CB: Sure.
AC: So, one, the majority of this month is the Sun and Jupiter in Libra. And Jupiter just ingressed into Libra not very long ago, and it’s gonna be how it is for the next year. You know, Jupiter is in a much happier and more functional condition in Libra than it was for the previous year in Virgo, and so it’s like ‘Episode Six: A New Hope’. It’s like maybe things can get better. And if you look historically at what happens when Jupiter goes into Libra, people try really hard to make things better and sometimes they succeed. And so, I see Jupiter in Libra as this, okay, maybe we can dig ourselves out of this rut collectively or individually. And so, I’ve been seeing a lot of October through the lens of what’s gonna help that happen and help these potentials develop and be greatly recognized versus what’s going to interfere with that. And the way that this begins is the day before October begins, we have a New Moon in Libra, which is conjunct Jupiter. And so, the seed of the lunar cycle that we do through almost all of October begins with Sun-Moon-Jupiter, right?
But then during the first week of October—I believe it’s on the 5th—we have Mars, which is now in Capricorn, make a perfect square to Jupiter in Libra. Although I think Mars in Capricorn is great, I don’t like it all mixed up with my Jupiter in Libra. Mars has very different priorities than Jupiter does. If you think about it for a second, we have Jupiter, who’s benefic, in the sign of another benefic, and then we have Mars, who’s malefic, in the sign of another malefic. You know, Mars in Capricorn is great for the down, dirty truth of how power actually works. It’s the ugly but concrete mechanics of things, whereas Jupiter in Libra is all about trying to rise above that. And so, I think we see a real challenge to these newly-born or just-starting-to-emerge Jupiter in Libra priorities, whether that’s to balance your life, to achieve a greater level of grace and balance on a personal level, or whether it’s a collective thing. One of the areas you can see it really obviously is Jupiter in Libra likes it when people sign arms reduction treaties or do ceasefires or truces. Unfortunately, what we’re gonna get are ‘trucefires’ where you have fragile ‘peaces’ challenged or damaged, and there are a couple of those underway right now. The situation in Colombia is very iffy, and we’ve already had an attempted ceasefire, an initial ceasefire in Syria fall apart. It was one that was enacted pretty much immediately when Jupiter went into Libra and then fell apart in six days.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, I think that’s really important. You know, Jupiter in Libra is the new kid on the block who’s gonna be trying to enact his significations. And then I mentioned earlier we’ve got that Mercury conjunction to Jupiter. Mercury actually enters Libra on the 6th—which is the day after the Mars square Jupiter—and then moves to conjoin Jupiter, which is gonna help strengthen that, make it thinkable, make it plannable, etc., etc., and then Mercury will square Mars. And so, there’s a lot of back-and-forth between ‘are we cold and brutally efficient’ or ‘can we rise above that’. And the answer of course is gonna be both and in the right place and at the right time. I would also add that right now—because the Sun is so close to Jupiter for the first-half of the month—we’re not actually gonna be able to see Jupiter in the night sky. Technically, it’s under the condition of combustion and then under the beams for the first-half of the month. And so, the first time we’re really gonna get a good glimpse of this new Jupiter in Libra isn’t gonna be, ironically, until the 15th, which is the day of the Full Moon, when Jupiter is gonna start rising in the wee hours, right before the Sun does.
CB: Wow, that’s really interesting. So Jupiter makes an appearance or comes out from under the beams the same day as that Uranus-Full Moon.
AC: Yeah, isn’t that wacky? That 15° is an idealization. So depending on where you are and what the atmosphere is like, you might be able to sneak a peek earlier, but he should be bright and clear by the time we hit that Full Moon.
CB: Yeah. Well, then it might be something related to that in terms of what the surprise is. And that’s an interesting point you were talking about—those things and attempts to do some of those things—like make treaties, but having them fall apart. One of the things it always seems to me is that when you first get a planet that ingresses into a sign—especially if it’s gonna stay there for a while—you get the initial setup in that initial period before the station. And sometimes you have things like that where there’s an attempt to do something that makes sense within the context of that sign,but it doesn’t really come together or come to fruition in the way that it was idealized. But then when the planet stations retrograde—and then retraces its steps and goes back, and then eventually stations direct and goes forward through the rest of the sign, and then eventually moves out—it’s usually that final station and then direct when the things that were initially attempted sometimes are returned to and brought to completion. And especially with Jupiter—where it’s a planet that only spends a year in a specific time—it seems like that’s sort of a common theme. Sometimes, in the initial phase of Jupiter first moving into that sign, you get the attempt to do some of those new things that don’t fully come to completion, and then sometimes it’s several months later, when it retraces some of those steps, that you get the second and better attempt at those things.
AC: Yeah, totally. Just to complete the sketch of pro- and anti-Jupiter forces—
CB: Sure. I think we have to wrap up in five minutes.
AC: I know. So right after that Full Moon on October 18—or 17th, depending on which timezone you’re in—Venus moves into Sag, right? And so, in addition to hosting one of the better elections this month, that puts Venus and Jupiter in mutual reception, on the level of domicile rulership which is pretty powerful. We have Venus in Jupiter’s territory and Jupiter in Venus’ territory and that’s gonna carry us through to the end of the month. Not only that, but Venus is gonna make that conjunction with Saturn, which is usually kind of a fart noise as far as joyful things go. But in this case, Jupiter and Saturn are starting a year of mutual reception with each other, and we have Venus as being a very important part of this. And so, I think as Venus moves through Sag—especially her conjunction with Saturn—we’re gonna start seeing what Jupiter and Saturn working together really looks like. It’s gonna start anchoring the significations of those two planets to one another, and those two houses in people’s natal charts.
CB: That’s a really great point. It’s been really fascinating to me. It’s one year ago now that we did the Saturn in Sagittarius podcast, and it’s been wild over the past year just seeing so many of those themes actually manifest, and actually become crystallized and more apparent in the world at large and just in news stories at large. And I almost hope that some of that is on some level the healing of some of the more negative or more troubling aspects of some of that Saturn in Sag stuff during the course of October, when we get that first mutual reception.
AC: Yeah, I think it’s reasonable to expect some progress to be made more or less up until Venus goes retrograde in Aries next winter, which I think will complicate things significantly.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Although that’s a ways off yet.
CB: Sure.
KS: That’s a nice point, Austin, about the Venus in Sag complementing Jupiter in Libra with Saturn in Sag as well. It’s gonna be really special to watch.
AC: Yeah, who doesn’t like mutually-received benefics? C’mon.
CB: Definitely. I mean, that’s honestly something you could take advantage of more in some of the elections. You would just have to do it.
AC: You literally have an election with the Moon being enclosed by aspects to mutually-received benefics to sort of underscore that election later on the 18th.
CB: Yeah, definitely. All right, well, I think that brings us to the end of our time. We’ve gotta get going. So any final words before we sign off for the month? Kelly?
KS: Just a quick thanks to all our listeners. I’ve had some great encounters with everyone—not everyone, but a bunch of people in the last month. So I just wanted to give a shoutout to everyone who listens and connects with us after the show. We love hearing from you guys. So thanks, everyone.
CB: Totally. We’re all three gonna be at the ISAR conference.
KS: Oh, yeah.
AC: Yeah, it’s been nice to meet people who’ve been listening to the show. And I’ve ended up reading for some people or doing some classes for folks. And thank you, Chris, for making this podcast happen.
KS: Exactly.
AC: Yeah, I’ve gotten to meet/encounter some people that I wouldn’t otherwise have and vice versa. It’s very Jupiter in Libra.
CB: Yeah, it’s been really wild, and it keeps getting better and better. And with any luck at this ISAR conference that we’re all gonna be at, we’ll see who wins the best audiovisual award, which I told everyone to vote for us on like a month ago. Okay, well, I think we’ve gotta get going. So, yeah, thanks to all our listeners for listening. As usual, if you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a good rating on iTunes. Please think about becoming a patron on Patreon to support the show. We’re meeting some of our long-term goals at this point. So pretty soon I’m gonna start setting some new goals, which include starting to budget money to set aside to hopefully have more shows with Austin and Kelly. So if you’re interested in hearing the three of us talk more about different astrological topics more frequently, then please sign up and become a patron, and I’ll make that happen. And, yeah, I think that’s it. So thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
KS: Bye for now.