The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 93, titled:
Post-2016 Election Analysis and Reflections
With Chris Brennan
Episode originally released on November 15, 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 April 6, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This episode was recorded on Monday, November 14, 2016, starting just after 3:00 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 93rd 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 going to be talking about the results of the 2016 US presidential election and reflecting on what happened in terms of the astrological prediction that I made last month. So before we get started just a few quick announcements about the giveaway that we’re doing on the next episode.
Our sponsors this month are the NCGR astrology conference that’s happening in Baltimore this February, as well as the astrology software program called Delphic Oracle. So on the next episode, we’re actually giving away a free pass to the NCGR conference, as well as a free separate copy of the software program to two lucky patrons who’ve pledged their support for this show through our page on Patreon.
So the NCGR conference is titled The Many Faces of Astrology, and it’s taking place February 16-20, 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s probably going to be the biggest astrology conference of 2017, and it’s going to feature more than 60 speakers speaking on five different tracks. So you can find out more information about the conference at NCGRConference2017.com.
And as for Delphic Oracle, it’s a full-fledged astrology software suite that specializes in the techniques of traditional astrology. It can calculate every Hellenistic time-lord system, as well as several different Medieval timing techniques as well. It’s one of the go-to programs that I’ve used in my work for about 10 years now, so I certainly recommend it to people. You can find out more information about the program at Astrolgy-X-Files.com.
So if you want to be entered into the drawing for a chance to win the pass to the NCGR conference or a copy of Delphic Oracle, then all you need to do is sign up to become a patron of the show on the $5 or $10 tier. And then the winners of the drawing will be announced on Episode 94, which is the one after this one, which should at this point be the next forecast episode for December. So for more information about the giveaway and the prizes, see the description page for this episode on TheAstrologyPodcast.com. All right, so with that out of the way, let’s get started with the episode and the discussion.
So this is going to be a solo show today. This is basically going to be the third and hopefully final installment of the series that I’ve ended up doing over the past month or two on the US presidential election. So the focus of the show obviously is primarily going to be me talking about the fact that I actually got my prediction wrong about the outcome of the US presidential election last month, and basically to reflect on what happened, to analyze some of the reasons that I’ve been looking at over the past week about why I called it the way that I did, and hopefully figuring out what I can do better next time.
So I’m also going to discuss some things that I’ve seen in the community surrounding this and some of the reactions that I’ve seen and things like that, since this is also sort of a broader community issue at this point, to the extent that it seems like from everything I’ve seen, the majority of astrologers actually predicted the outcome of this election incorrectly as well.
But this is not necessarily going to be a full meta-analysis of all of the community predictions and looking at all of the trends and everything with that, just because I can only speak for myself. And what I want to do here is just sort of outline my own process and journey in terms of this presidential election in order to have some sort of accounting, and in order to explain what happened. And I can’t necessarily do that for every other astrologer. It would almost be inappropriate for me to try on some level.
So I will mention some community things later, but for the most part, I want to focus on just what happened with me, this is my podcast. We’ve heard a little bit about the election, and I think all of my listeners are familiar with some of the things that I’ve been going through with it over the past couple of months, primarily related to the birth times; so I thought it would be appropriate to have a third show here in order to close things out.
Additionally, in 2012, when I was much more into political astrology, ironically, I did a roundup of predictions that were made about the outcome of the 2012 presidential election prior to the outcome. So I collected every prediction that I could find, and I ended up with like 60 or 70 of them. And one of the things that I was surprised to see basically immediately after Election Day is that some of the people—it wasn’t a lot of people—but there were a few people I noticed afterwards who got their prediction wrong, who immediately deleted them and that caught me kind of off-guard at the time.
And now, four years later that the ‘shoe is on the other foot’ I can kind of sympathize to some extent with what they were going through and maybe the embarrassment they felt or what have you, it still surprised me at the time. And what I’d like to do here is the exact opposite by basically talking very openly and very honestly about being wrong and about what happened, and to just sort of discuss the process as I’m trying to understand myself what happened and where I went wrong.
So I think this is necessary for me as a sort of personal growth and development thing in order to continue to improve my techniques and my approach to astrology, as all of us do. But it’s also sort of important as a community to do this collectively and to sort of improve collectively and incrementally when things like this happen in the community, so I want to sort of take the first step. It’s not that other astrologers haven’t done that, but I’m going to be a little bit more extensive perhaps than some have been just in terms of fully outlining—as I did before the election—what my process was, but then looking at it after the fact to see where the problems were, or potentially where the problems were.
So in terms of my critique of myself, there’s three primary areas where things may have gone wrong and where I could have done better, or where there were legitimate issues with the approach that I took that I want to focus on in this episode—for basically the majority of this episode, these three areas. One of the general areas—and I’ll just list them very briefly now and then I’ll go into them more extensively later. So the first one is I didn’t take this election seriously enough or put enough time into it and I’ll explain that later.
The contrast is basically I devoted the entire year of 2012 to the political election and making my predictions about that and following up on it, incorporating other data, reading biographies and all sorts of other stuff, but that’s not at all where my head was for this election. And I actually announced in 2014 that I was getting out of political astrology altogether and would not be doing it anymore.
So what I ended up doing this year was accepting a spot on the Presidential Panel at the ISAR conference, but otherwise did not write any articles about this election. We didn’t record any podcasts about our actual techniques about the election itself, you’ll notice, at really any point this year. Eventually, we did talk about the birth time issues in two separate episodes and discussed some of how that changed our techniques, but that was primarily focusing on just the new controversy surrounding the birth time issue—or the ongoing controversy, I should say.
So one of my issues I’m going to talk about at the beginning is just my not taking this seriously enough or giving it as much attention as it deserved. The second issue is I based my prediction on speculative birth times, which again, is something I was very forward about and very open about. And as I said, the subject of two of the most recent non-forecast episodes on the podcast were both entirely focused on the birth time issues surrounding the candidates, and especially Hillary Clinton’s birth time and this issue of not knowing for sure because we don’t have a birth certificate for what her correct birth time definitively is.
And the fact that in order to make predictions based on the birth chart there were several different conflicting times—at least two or three had relatively decent sources, or at least ones that made them seem somewhat plausible that you had to take them into account as possibilities—the result of that is that in order to make a prediction about the outcome of the election that incorporated Hillary Clinton’s birth chart, it required you to base it on a speculative birth time. And that was problematic and that was something that I talked about as problematic.
And Patrick and I discussed some of the issues with that and how that would change our predictions in terms of the time that we ended up settling on versus what we would have predicted if it was any of the other birth times. And the funny thing about that of course, if you go back to I think the last episode I did with Patrick, we were pretty straightforward in saying the 8:00 AM time was the only time where we felt she could win the presidency, whereas if it was any of the other birth times, they did not look as good; that it looked more likely that she would lose. We ended up going with the 8:00 AM time.
And so, now one of the points of reflection of course that we’ve been on for a while is did we use the wrong birth time, or did we misinterpret the chart? Did we sort of miraculously get the right birth time, but still interpreted the chart incorrectly? And that’s a point that I’ll come back to later. Yeah, and that brings me to my third point; so that really actually is point three. If I did in fact have the correct chart for Hillary Clinton especially—and to a lesser extent actually for Donald Trump, which I’ll bring up later—did I misjudge the placements?
So those are the three areas that I want to talk about and analyze in terms of the three areas of potential weakness that I’m focusing on in my post-election analysis of my own predictions. So some of these issues will apply to other astrologers, and they might explain issues that other astrologers ran into as well. In other areas, there may be astrologers that used different techniques or didn’t use the natal charts or what have you, that may have used mundane astrology or horary astrology or something else that would not necessarily be subject to some of these issues. So while some of this may be applicable to other astrologers, for the most part, this is mainly about my private analysis of what happened here in focusing on my own prediction.
All right, so first thing’s first, in getting into these three points and unpacking the first and second one, the lingering question that I may not ever know is did I get the prediction wrong because I had the wrong birth time, especially for Hillary Clinton, because that was the one that I focused on the most because she’s been the known quantity who we’ve known for a long time now was going to run. She had already run in 2008, and I’ve been researching her birth chart and her birth time and trying to figure out what her birth time was as far back as 2006, about 10 years ago now. So as a result of that her chart also became more of the focus in this election.
So the lingering question then is did I get the prediction wrong because I based it on the wrong birth time? And since my type of astrology is so much more tied into the birth time and requires correctness in that area—compared to some other people—due to some of the techniques that I use that incorporate the Ascendant or points related to the Ascendant (such as the Lot of Fortune or the Lot of Spirit), one birth time is going to indicate eminence in a certain part of a person’s life, whereas another birth time might indicate eminence occurring much later in a person’s life, or might indicate it now. So the birth time actually did make a big difference, and that was why I’ve done two episodes about it, and that’s why I’ve been so obsessed about it over the past 10 years, since I knew that any prediction about her winning the presidency would be entirely predicated on using the correct time.
So that’s one question—did I get it wrong because I had the wrong birth time—which is something now that I have to question. Even though I went into it thinking I had a chart that I felt pretty strongly about that being the correct time, because I based my prediction on that and it turned out to be wrong, I now have to question a lot of the assumptions that I had made or a lot of the premises of the prediction; and that’s obviously the foremost one—did I get it wrong because I had the wrong.
Conversely, did I have the correct time, but I interpreted the chart incorrectly? So that’s the other half of this that I’m going to spend the later part of this episode talking about. There’s actually a way in which using the same techniques I can show you and walk you through how you could have called this election either way just looking at Hillary’s chart and what the specific issue was there. It came down to an issue of the two primary techniques I was using, both indicating a very eminent period in her career and in her life—that she would become very eminent during this time—but it also indicated that it would be a very difficult or a very subjectively difficult period.
So the interpretation that I ended up going with was essentially that it would be a repetition of something like 1992-1993, which using the profection technique—as I’ll talk about later—this actually literally was two 12-year cycles ago. So she should theoretically be having a repetition of 1992-1993, which is a period when Bill Clinton won the presidency and they both got into the White House, and then immediately after that she took on a sort of job in the White House focusing on healthcare, but then proceeded to have a very difficult year in which she encountered a lot of opposition, and in which her efforts to accomplish something were frustrated. So she had success and eminence in that they got in the White House and she became first lady, but then, conversely, she encountered great problems.
So my assumption was that because it was a repetition of that year that she was going to have a similar repetition basically, win the presidency, but then get mired in opposition and scandals and things like that was my assumption. However, we were aware there was another 12-year cycle prior to the 1992 one—which was 1980—and at that time basically what happened is she suffered a great defeat and a great embarrassment. And it turned out that ended up being the one that matched this 12-year cycle more or more fittingly. But I’m kind of jumping ahead, so maybe I should back up a little bit.
But the general point is just that this is going to be one of the most frustrating things about this in the long term since we’re still not even going to know for sure what time she was born even the post-election analysis is going to be speculative—and that goes for me, that goes for most other astrologers who based any of this on the birth charts, especially Hillary’s—because of that ambiguity, we’re still not ultimately going to know. So that’s why I’m going to try and explore both sides of this in order to see what the possibilities are whichever direction you go. So I could see it going either way basically, and I’ll outline the reason for that next.
So as per point one about not taking it seriously, I basically didn’t commit to the election in the same way that I did in 2012. So Patrick Watson and I started The Political Astrology Blog—which is still currently at PoliticalAstrologyBlog.com—in January of 2009, right after the 2008 election.
At the time, the 2008 election was pretty wild and got us pretty interested in following politics from an astrological perspective, but also doing it more publicly, trying to collect more birth data on candidates and track where we were at with bird data on candidates, and get times for when candidates launched campaigns or accepted nominations for parties and all this work that usually in the astrological community is done very haphazardly. You pick it up from different sources and different pieces, but there’s no real central place where all this information gets brought together and is documented on an ongoing basis.
So we started The Political Astrology Blog in early 2009, and it was primarily Patrick’s, because Patrick is more of the ‘political’ guy than I am. And he primarily focused on writing articles for that and it was linked to the sister blog, The Horoscopic Astrology Blog, which was primarily where I wrote. And every once in a while, I would contribute articles to The Political Astrology Blog, but Patrick wrote it for a few years primarily.
Then in 2012, we sort of came back together and partnered up in order to do a whole series of posts on the 2012 presidential election, starting in April of 2012. I mean, we’ve been writing for a few months, but we put together and published our official prediction on The Political Astrology Blog for the outcome of the 2012 presidential election in April of 2012, and then proceeded to do a whole series of other articles documenting that election from an astrological perspective and did some really cool work on that at the time. I mean, Patrick got Paul Ryan’s birth certificate during that election. I did a whole piece about the void of course Moon issue during the Democratic National Convention and the relevance of that to indicating the outcome.
Yeah, we did a lot of stuff. So I ended up focusing on that. Patrick basically fell in love and ended up meeting his marriage partner that summer, so he wasn’t as focused on the blog that summer as I was. So I basically ended up taking it over and writing for the entirety of the rest of the election for the most part and was fully immersed in and all I was doing was political astrology for a good six months, between at least April and May of 2012 and November of 2012.
So by the end of it, though, I decided to get out of politics after the 2012 election for a few different reasons. I mean, one of them was it was just too intense. To actually do it properly and to give it my full attention for the entirety of that year—or for at least six months of that year—was sort of like a full-time job and it got really tense at different points. And it wasn’t my primary thing. I was supposed to be writing my book on Hellenistic astrology at that point, which I’m only finishing now four years later. And part of my ongoing delay is that sometimes I would get tied into side projects like this, like the 2012 presidential election, and sort of do nothing but devote myself to following that the entire time and writing articles about it.
So that wasn’t my primary focus, so I decided to get out after that. I also sort of became concerned about astrologers being involved in politics and the advisability of that. And by that I mean, historically, when astrologers tend to get involved in politics, it doesn’t usually go very well for the astrologers and for the astrological community because typically during those periods, one or two things happen. One, astrology gets co-opted by the politicians or by the people in power and sort of used in order to manipulate people, and basically astrology gets used for political purposes in not great ways. Alternatively, and sometimes simultaneously, astrology ends up getting suppressed because the people in power don’t necessarily like what the astrologers are saying.
And that sort of came up very starkly at a couple of points in the 2012 presidential election for reasons I don’t want to get into, but the end result was I decided to get out of astrology and politics after the 2012 election. And we did one more article on the inauguration chart for the inauguration in January of 2013, but then that was it, and we pretty much closed down The Political Astrology Blog, and there has not been another article posted there since, even though we’d spent four-some-odd years building that up since 2009.
And then what ended up happening is that I had all this great research from the 2012 election that I wanted to summarize and hand over to the astrological community, so that’s what I did. And at the ISAR conference—I believe it was in Arizona—in 2014, in September of 2014, I gave a lecture titled What Astrologers Learned from the 2012 US Presidential Election where I basically summarized most of what I learned, and the areas where we were correct and the areas where we were incorrect about the 2012 presidential election—basically like I’m doing now—as well as gave some summaries of different things that happened in the community and the areas where astrologers did things right, or in some instances, the areas where astrologers didn’t get things right and ran into major issues, or where there were clearly issues with how astrologers were approaching things.
And I sort of summarized that in a 75-minute lecture, at the end of which I announced that I was retiring from political astrology and would not be doing it again for the 2016 presidential election, and also made the point about my concerns about astrology and politics in the future and sort of suggested that other astrologers might want to be careful about that as well.
So yeah, that was in 2014. Then about a year later, about one year ago, ISAR contacted me because they were planning their next conference, and they invited me to give a lecture at the conference; but then they also invited me to be on the next presidential panel. They were going to do a presidential panel since it was going to be an election year, and it was going to take place in October—or the conference was going to take place in October right before the election.
So I was actually really conflicted about this for about a month, and I kept putting it off and putting it off because I didn’t want to get involved in the presidential election, but then at the same time I felt like I shouldn’t turn it down. I felt kind of bad to just say no and to turn down a major speaking position like that, even though I didn’t want to write a lot of articles about the presidential election. I didn’t want to get bogged down in it and I didn’t want to get in trouble with it. The other thing is I had a good sense that this election was going to be more contentious than previous ones, and one of the things that I was concerned about is I did not want to become a target for people who didn’t like whatever prediction I ended up making about the outcome of the election.
So at the same time I was concerned about the birth time issues with Hillary, around that same time—in the summer and fall of 2015—a reporter from The Wall Street Journal named Yogita Patel—that I have talked about on the past couple of episodes—contacted me, and she was researching this whole issue surrounding Hillary Clinton’s birth time to try to see if there was a story there, and to see if the astrologers were right that potentially she could be giving out different times with the knowledge that she didn’t necessarily want astrologers to know the correct birth time.
So Yogita was researching this and she was actually making a lot of progress in terms of finding out that some of the things that we had taken for granted about some of the background surrounding that was not necessarily true. And she was also researching some interesting leads—like the hospital that Hillary was born in and whether any of those records were available—and she also found out that she couldn’t find the supposed Chicago Sun-Times article from 1992 that said that Hillary was ‘born in time for breakfast’, which was one of the only pieces of external evidence that we supposedly had which indicated that she could have been born in the morning. She seemed to find that that didn’t exist, but that instead a 1993 Chicago Sun-Times article said that Hillary’s mother went into the hospital in the morning, however Hillary was then born 12 hours later, which then implies that she was born in the evening.
So the general point was that around the same time that the ISAR panel contacted me, I was also contacted by this reporter who really seemed to be on this and seemed to be making good progress in actually finding out what Hillary Clinton’s birth time was, so that one of my big concerns about making any predictions about this election might be removed. If we were able to get a hold of the actual birth time, then you could be much more confident about whatever prediction you would subsequently make.
So I basically accepted the invitation to be on the panel, although I sort of did it with the knowledge that I could probably drop out at any time in the future if it turned out that things were looking more ambiguous, or the birth time thing didn’t end up working out, or I just didn’t feel confident enough to do it. And for a long time, most of that year, I sort of thought about doing that, or thought about dropping out at different points, but then just didn’t basically.
So what ended up happening—let’s see, so backing up to the birth time issue—I mean, I’ve talked about the birth time issue extensively. If you haven’t listened to those previous two episodes, then you probably should because I’m not going to be able to give as much background here as I did then. So I’m going to talk from this point forward largely assuming that you already have listened to those episodes and understand the issues involved.
But one of the things is that Patrick and I were contacted by a reporter from ABC in late April/early May of 2012. We were completely focused on the 2012 presidential election, but she contacted us asking if we thought Hillary would run in 2016. So it’s not really something we were focused on or thinking about, but we decided to pull up her chart. We were still using the 8:00 AM time at that point because we thought that had the best evidence for it on Astro-Databank, especially with the statement about the supposed Chicago Sun-Times article saying she was born in time for breakfast. And we ended up making a prediction about that saying, yeah, it looked like she would run in 2016.
We were very careful to say that we were using a speculative birth time that could be wrong, but we said that if it was in fact the 8:00 AM time, then it looked like she would be in a very eminent period of her life at that point. So we thought that did make sense in terms of her basically at least running for the presidency at that time. What’s funny, though, is that we were also very careful to say that she would run, but when pressed and asked if she would win, we said we don’t know because it depends on who her challenger is, because this is one of the issues that we ran into with some of our techniques.
If you look back at the 2000 election or some other elections—like 2004—sometimes you can have somebody who looks like they’re in a very good period, but if somebody else comes along that’s in a much better one or a much more eminent one, they can end up being the victor, and we were very aware of that. So if you go back and look at this weird interview I did where I was actually on Fox News, on Fox & Friends, and was interviewed by Gretchen Carlson, you’ll hear me using the 8:00 AM time, that if the chart is wrong, then our prediction could be wrong, and her pressing me and saying, “Do you think she’s going to win then?” And I said that we think that she’s going to run, but we’re not sure if she wins because it depends on who her challenger is.
And actually I’m just going to play the audio of that interview here right now. I think since it’s for the purpose of commentary and education, I can do that within the context of free use laws, and I think it would sort of make the point rather than just the synopsis that I just gave. It would make that point a little bit better. So here’s the actual audio from the Fox News interview from early May of 2012.
[start of the Fox News interview]
GRETCHEN CARLSON: As the 2012 election heats up speculation continues to stir over the future of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So what will happen with Hillary this year and beyond? Our next guest says it just might be ‘written in the stars’. Astrologer Chris Brennan is my guest now. Good morning to you, Chris.
CB: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
GC: You’re welcome. Now I understand that there’s something between Aquarius and a Leo period. Explain to me how that relates to Hillary Clinton and whether or not she’s going to run for president.
CB: Sure. So what me and my friend Patrick Watson looked for was just repetitions in Hillary’s life when she did important things career-wise or politically and a certain sign of the zodiac was often activated, and it happens to be coming up again in 2015. So we think that that means that she will run again.
GC: So you went all the way back to sixth grade when she ran for student government president—she was in the same Aquarius period. So that means since she won that she might win the presidency in 2016?
CB: Uh, no, we didn’t necessarily—we don’t know if she’s going to win the presidency because we don’t know who her challenger is, and it’s very much dependent on that. But we do know that because she’s repeating the same periods again that she always reaches during important political moments that she probably will run again.
GC: So what do you say to the people who say that they don’t believe in any of this at all? Specifically because you don’t have her exact time of birth, which is critical when you do these kinds of analysis, right?
CB: Yeah, it is. That was a big problem during the 2008 election. We didn’t have Obama’s time for a very long period, but we’re pretty sure and we have a pretty good source that this is the correct time. Now of course if Hillary’s birth certificate is released and all of a sudden we have a different time, then it certainly would invalidate the prediction, but we feel pretty good about it.
GC: Let’s go back to 2008 when we had John McCain and Barack Obama. What did you see in their signs then?
CB: In 2008, once we finally got Obama’s birth certificate in June, there was a group of astrologers at a conference who unanimously predicted that Obama would win. So most astrologers—once we actually had Obama’s certificate—were pretty sure he would win.
GC: So do you base it completely on astrology or on things like, let’s say, the economy?
CB: Uh, no, I’m an astrologer, not an economist, so I don’t really have much to say about economics.
GC: Okay. And I know that you’re predicting that President Obama will be the winner again in 2012 based on astrology. Chris Brennan, thanks so much for your time today.
CB: Thank you.
GC: Coming up next, another…
[end of the Fox News interview]
CB: So that’s part of the backdrop of the birth time issue, briefly, outside of those two other two-hour episodes that I’ve already done talking more extensively about it. When it came to this year, my plan, as my podcast listeners know is that I was going to be focused on the book, and I was planning to spend the first three or four months of year basically writing my book and not seeing any clients, and then hopefully that would be finished and I would have the book out in time for the ISAR conference; and at some point in the summer, I would pivot and turn to the presidential election and start focusing on that.
Instead what happened is I ended up focusing on the book all year and basically writing it all the way through October, when the ISAR conference took place in mid-October. So I only stopped writing about a week, maybe two weeks tops before the panel. And what happened at that point, unfortunately, is right about that time is when ISAR then released its announcement about the 2:18 birth time, and I spent basically the next couple of weeks trying to research the 2:18 birth time for Hillary, trying to figure out where it came from and how reliable the source was, trying even to just force ISAR to release it ahead time.
Because at first, they were saying they got a birth certificate time for Hillary, and they weren’t even going to release it until the day of the actual panel when we had to make our predictions. Even forcing them to release it eventually ahead of time—about a week before the conference—took a lot of work, as I talked about with Patrick in the last episode.
So basically one of the things that I’m still a little annoyed about and resentful about is that when I finally did finish the book—I finished the first full draft of the book; I put it aside and I sent it off to my editor and to a few friends to review—I sat down to pivot to the election; I then spent the next couple of weeks basically messing with what ultimately likely turned out to be a bogus time to begin with, to the extent that it was eventually retracted.
And that kind of still bothers me partially because it was a distraction from paying more attention to Trump’s chart and other related charts that I could have been looking into. But it’s also annoying because ISAR still has not informed its membership that the time was retracted; that the birth time was retracted. And so, I don’t even know if some of the panelists—I guess many of them know at this point, but I know there’s at least one or two of them that ended up using this 2:18 time.
So one of the things is that if people are starting to—I don’t know—not point fingers—there was actually a lot of finger-pointing that occurred immediately after the election took place. And I think because it was one of the most recent things and because it got the most press of many astrological predictions, a lot of people immediately were like, “What the hell, ISAR panelists? Why did two panels of ISAR astrologers make this prediction unanimously about Hillary a month before the election?”
So one of the things I do want to say in terms of learning from our mistakes and going forward from here is that I do think that ISAR and the people involved in the birth data controversy bear some responsibility for the way that they used the birth data as a PR device in order to promote the conference rather than immediately making it publicly available and being open and forthright about sharing it with everybody, so that we could immediately begin analyzing it and trying to determine its validity. And some of us would have figured out very quickly and known right away that it potentially was a false chart because of the sketchy source.
So I realize that there’s still going to be some people that defend the 2:18 time, and that’s fine. I mean, one of the ironic things about the 2:18 time is that when I looked at it, what I said about it is that it worked pretty well for showing Hillary’s career in the 1990s, especially when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 and 1996, as well as for when she got in the Senate in 2000. But the problem is I’m not sure if that matters because it never had a legitimate source to begin with. It came from somebody—in 2005, when it was originally proposed by Zayin Cohen—who originally said that he had the birth certificate and that he would make it available to people, but then later said that he wouldn’t make it available.
Then he said that he was a secret agent that worked for a spy service, and later he gave out different times and said that the time was actually this or that the time was actually this, and he ended up promoting three different times, even though he said that the original was from the birth certificate. I mean, it’s really obvious to a lot of data collectors that that’s not a reliable source to work with. Even if you feel like the chart works well to some extent, if you put that up against some of the other times that are possible and look at what sources they have, it’s better to rely on ones that at least have some sort of legitimate source rather than just some guy that seems to be kind of shady. So anyway, one of the issues with this election that I hope we learn is just the whole debacle and fiasco surrounding that was not handled very well by the people involved in it.
So returning to the birth data question or sort of focusing a lens on that, part of the issue of course that I’ve talked about extensively already is that there are multiple, possible birth times for Hillary. One of the areas I could have gotten wrong and that I need to entertain seriously at this point is that I used the birth time that was the exact opposite of what she had told me in person. It’s partially based on a rumor that she gave out false times, which, as I explained in one of the previous podcasts, Frances McEvoy had told me back in 2007 at a conference. She had tried to say that she had it on good sources supposedly that Hillary had a reading once using the 8:02 or 8:00 time and somebody told her something negative about Scorpio rising, and from that point forward she didn’t want people to know that was her rising sign.
So that rumor that I heard from Frances seemed to be almost confirmed only to the extent that it seemed that there were multiple different times floating around for Hillary, including different ones potentially from Hillary herself. Like you had the one where she told a chiropractor that she had Leo rising, which would make her born probably not long after midnight. She told me in person—when I asked her at a book signing in 2014—that she thought she was born around 8:00 PM, which would give her either late Gemini or early Cancer rising.
So the question then is was this true? Was this rumor true that Hillary was giving out different times or false times deliberately, or did I fall victim to a false rumor? As I’ve sort of lamented for years now, unfortunately, Frances McEvoy—who was one of the original people who alleged this—died in 2008, I believe in December of 2008, and so I never got a chance to follow up with that to ask her, or to sort of judge where she was coming from with that, or how reliable it was.
So this is one of the areas where I might have gone wrong, in addition to the fact that just straight out, all other times aside, if you just take the 8:00 AM and the 8:00 PM time as the two possible ones, the fact that Hillary herself told me that she was born at 8:00 PM—and I used the exact opposite time—that certainly leaves me open to criticism in terms of whether ultimately that was the wrong move to make, and whether I should have then based a prediction on something that’s so speculative. So my rationale of course for that at the time was that we felt strongly enough about the 8:00 AM chart to do that and to make that sort of prediction based on the way that it described her, and based on the way that some of the timing techniques worked with her chronology.
So the possibilities that I want to entertain here—there’s two of them. One of them is that I totally misjudged that one and used the wrong birth time, at which case I have no idea what the correct alternative birth time is. Both the 8:00 PM and the Leo rising time—which would be about 12:30 or something at night—both of those have reasonably good sources. The 2:18 time of course, it’s true that we have to then re-analyze that, but it’s also true at this point that it still doesn’t have a good source.
So it’s not one that you would otherwise look at because it’s basically just a rectification probably that some astrologer has proposed and that a number of astrologers took seriously because the guy who proposed it claimed it was from a birth certificate, but then refused to produce the birth certificate. So you could say that we should re-entertain the 2:18 time. I’ll grant that to some extent, but I still don’t think it’s super reliable as a source based on where it comes from and what we know about that source.
So the other alternative that I also still want to entertain, though, is I’m actually not fully ready to uncommit from or to drop the Scorpio rising time because the other possibility that also has to be entertained is that that still could have been the correct time, but I could have interpreted the chart incorrectly. And I mentioned very briefly something about that earlier, but I’m going to get into that with more detail later. But before I do, there’s one additional complication that I want to talk about that I don’t think is being talked about a lot, but I think this one could be potentially just as important or at least close in terms of its importance for some astrologers.
Obviously, when I’m dealing with a speculative time for Hillary, and my prediction about it turns out to be wrong, I need to analyze whether I was using the wrong time for Hillary. However, the next question, the second actual follow-up question that needs to be asked at this point that I knew immediately that night that I need to ask is was I even using the correct chart for Donald Trump. And this is a question actually that I realized is going to be a lot more controversial at this point because there’s been this community-wide assumption about Trump—not about Trump, I should rephrase that—that we’re definitely working with the correct chart for Trump based on our perceptions of him and many of the things that he’s done over the past year.
However, one of the things that I want to bring up and I want to point out at this point in this discussion and in this analysis of what went wrong from a natal standpoint primarily is that there’s actually three potential birth charts for Donald Trump. They’re all very closely-related and all very similar, but they are, for me, three distinctly different charts. So here’s what they are. The issue is this, in Astro-Databank, if you look at the source notes, the original birth time that was reported for Donald Trump was exactly 9:51 AM reportedly from Donald Trump’s mother.
Let me read you the source notes from Astro-Databank because it’s kind of important in terms of making the point that I’m trying to make. In the entry for Donald Trump, in the source notes on Astro-Databank, it says: “Previously rated as ‘A’ data from memory, and he had a birth time of 9:51 AM.” With the following source notes: “LMR [who’s one of the major data collectors on Astro-Databank or who used to be] quotes a private source who obtained the data from his mother, confirmed by another astrologer who said ‘He laughed then called his mom.’”
So that means one or two other sources prior when we started using the current birth time—at least one, if not two other sources had gotten an exact 9:51 AM birth time from Trump’s mother. And one of them evidently was somebody who actually had a conversation with Trump, where Trump laughs and then calls up his mom, and then his mom says 9:51 AM. So this is important and I’m bringing this up because then what happened was the current birth time—or the second birth time that one could use for Trump is 10:54:00 AM, which is what was recorded on the birth certificate, 10:54 AM, which is just over an hour later than the birth time that was previously used for Trump.
So the first birth time from his mother—which was 9:51 AM—gives 17 Leo rising. So it’s still a Leo rising birth chart, it’s still largely the same chart, but it’s important to note that the time that everyone’s used for the entirety of this election is an hour later than the one reported from the mother; it’s 10:54 AM, and it gives 29°54’ of Leo rising; so basically the last degree and the last few minutes of Leo rising and where this is coming from is supposedly the birth certificate.
One of the things Trump did starting in 2010 and 2011 when he started getting geared up to run for the presidency is he started reviving the ‘birther’ controversy with Obama. Because if you remember, the ‘birther’ controversy about whether Obama was born in the United States and was eligible to become president actually started in 2008, and that’s why he released a version of his birth certificate in June of 2008; it’s because the ‘birther’ controversy was already in full swing at that point.
He releases the birth certificate during the 2008 campaign in June, and while it kind of lingered for a little bit longer—like maybe another year or something—there were still lots of people for whom that was left as a talking point or whatever, or something that people who were opposed to Obama would say occasionally. It largely, I felt, was a dead issue for at least a year or two and wasn’t being talked about a whole lot, until suddenly in 2011 Donald Trump revives this issue and makes it his personal mission to get Obama to release an original copy of his birth certificate—or what’s called the ‘long form’ birth certificate.
Anyway, that’s a digression. But the point is that one of the things that Trump did during that process supposedly is that he released his own birth certificate. But what’s weird is that there were like three or four—I don’t want to misspeak here. My impression was that in looking at this last summer was that there were three different versions of Trump’s birth certificate that were floating around online. And so, one of them did list the birth time and it said what everyone’s been using over the past year, which is 10:54 AM.
So I’m bringing that up only because I got it wrong. I’m going back and looking at everything and trying not to make any assumptions. Because part of the issue that I ran into with this election is that in some instances I was making assumptions about things, but in other instances I always try to advocate—like when researching Hillary’s birth time—that you don’t make any assumptions; that you try to go back and you research all of the sources, and that you try to get to the bottom of things as much as you can.
So one of the things here just involves simply noting that while this does happen—it’s actually pretty common for the mother’s memory to be off—it’s weird that the mother remembered it as 9:51 AM, but then later, on the birth certificate that Trump released in the lead-up to the presidency, it was an hour-and-a-few-minutes later. So it still gives the same rising sign; it still looks largely the same. I mean, it does actually change some things with his zodiacal releasing periods and with exact transits to the angles and secondary progressions and things like that. So it would make some difference. I’m not going to say it makes a huge difference, but it’s something to consider as a possibility. I didn’t see any discussion about this.
Basically, a year ago was about the point that everybody started paying attention to Trump, in the summer of 2015. At that point, everyone focused on that we had a birth certificate from him supposed—even though there’s three different versions of it, and it says 10:54—and people cast the chart and it had 29 Leo rising, with Mars conjunct the Ascendant in Leo. And everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s obviously the chart,” and that was sort of the end of the discussion. And to be fair, that was my reaction as well for the most part, initially. But this is where things get complicated, and this is where I think there is a problem with that reaction.
Because everybody assumed that that was the correct reaction—that he has Leo rising, with Mars conjunct the Ascendant—due to his personality and due to his appearance, it may have been a mistake because of the third possible time that we have to take into account. And this is the one that I’m considering much more seriously or that I’m actually for the first time looking at much more honestly and wish that I had taken more seriously previously.
And here’s the third time and the third issue. If you take Donald Trump’s birth certificate and you just read the birth certificate, it says he was born at 10:54 AM, right? So that means 10:54 AM in that minute. But the problem with that—and this is something that Astro-Databank sometimes notes because it can become an issue—is that if something’s listed at 10:54, what second was the person born in? Because the Ascendant can change in some instances within a 60-second timeframe.
So if you record 10:54, then most people are going to cast the chart and assume it’s right at the beginning of that minute, and it’ll be entered into the program essentially as ‘10:54:00 AM’. And if you do that—like most astrologers have—then it gives Trump 29°54’ of Leo rising. However, the problem is that at 10:54:23 AM into that minute, the Ascendant switched into Virgo on the morning of Trump’s birth. So the problem is that in terms of the actual recorded birth time, because it says 10:54 AM and it does not say what second it was—if it was in the first-half of that minute or if it was in the second-half—using that recorded birth time, Trump could have either Leo rising or Virgo rising.
So for some people who use—well, I don’t want to downplay that. I mean, I was going to downplay that a little bit by saying for some people who use quadrant houses that’s not a huge deal, but that’s not even necessarily true. Even though it doesn’t majorly shift the chart, it does change the ruler of the Ascendant. But for somebody like me using whole sign houses—basically anybody who uses whole sign houses—that’s a huge shift whether he has Leo rising or Virgo rising because it changes not just the ruler of the Ascendant, but it changes the rulers of all of the other houses; and it also changes all of the other house placements; so this would make a major difference if he was Virgo rising.
Now I know probably 90% of you who are listening to this right now are probably having a very negative reaction to me, even suggesting that Trump has Virgo rising instead of Leo rising because it’s something that we all have taken so much for granted over the past year. Whether you’re a supporter of him or whether you’re not a supporter of him, I think a lot of people are on the same page assuming he has Leo rising.
The problem that I would raise here in defense of Virgo rising as a possibility is that I think we need to seriously entertain—I’m not saying you have to commit to this. I’m giving the devil’s advocate reasons for why we should at least entertain it in a way that I was not fully willing to over the past year. The problem is that even if he had 0° of Virgo rising, he would still have Mars in Leo pretty closely-conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, within just a few degrees; within a reasonable orb that I think most astrologers would accept.
So my point with that is that even though many people’s primary criteria for accepting the Leo rising chart is that it seems to make sense that he would be a Leo rising with Mars conjunct the Ascendant—or quasi- in the 1st house—that it’s sort of descriptive of his personality in some way, you would still get that basically with 0° of Virgo rising. You would still have somebody who has Mars in Leo conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, and thus, that would still color his character and his personality. So the point that I’m making here is that it’s actually extremely difficult, especially if you’re primarily basing that on a personality basis or on an appearance basis. It’s actually extremely hard to tell the difference between somebody that has 29 Leo rising and 0 Virgo rising if Mars is still conjunct the degree of the Ascendant either way, which it would be in terms of degrees.
So this becomes an issue for me in terms of my prediction about the outcome of the election because he actually arguably has a better chart with Virgo rising. And over the past week, as I’ve sort of looked into things more—as I’ve attempted to start looking into things—that’s one of the considerations that really struck me that I felt like I’ve had to take much more seriously. And what’s funny about this is there was a brilliant sort of omen or personal omen about this for me about a year ago—which I did not pick up on and which could have given me a heads up, but I did not pay attention to it at the time and it was this exchange I had with an astrologer back in September of 2015—right about the time that Trump started becoming more prominent.
So I want to give a shout-out to an astrologer who friended me on Facebook named Blake Gourley. He basically messaged me—I think he might be a listener of the podcast, I’m not sure, but regardless, he added me on Facebook at some point. And he messaged me on September 10, 2015, and he said, “Have you looked at the possibility that Trump has Virgo rising instead of 29 Leo rising?” and pointed out how this would change the rulers of the houses and other things like that. And this was in early September of 2015, and he had recently really become more prominent in the news, but it wasn’t necessarily for good reasons. I mean, it depends on your perspective, but there had been a bit of controversy surrounding him because of some comments that he had made and it was around the time that transiting Mars and Jupiter were making their conjunction in the later parts of Leo, which in the Leo rising chart would be around his Ascendant, or in either chart would be around his Mars.
So what I said to Blake—and I’m going to quote this because it’s really funny reading this in retrospect, and there’s a lot of things like this that are really funny in retrospect of course. But this is what I wrote back to Blake when he sent me this message asking about the Virgo rising chart and if I had considered it. I mean, he was saying: “I think this might be the right chart. People should be taking it more seriously.” And what I said was: I don’t know. I use whole sign houses, and the recent transits of Jupiter and then Mars through that sign—[through the sign of Leo]—seem to line up pretty well with what I would expect 1st house transits by those planets to look like.
So I was referring to both the positive things with Jupiter going through there and him suddenly launching a presidential campaign and having a bit of success with that and getting press, but then also the Mars transit through that sign and him getting into issues for some of the comments that he was making about Mexican immigrants and things like that around that time, or about Muslims and other things he was saying in August and September of 2015.
Yeah, so I go on and I say: “I don’t know enough about his life or chronology to say for sure, though,” because at that point I honestly didn’t. I had not researched Donald Trump’s life or chronology, and I was not really that focused on the astrology of the presidential election at that point. Right about that time, I was probably trying to decide whether I should even accept the presidential panel. And I was sort of idly following some of the stuff with the presidential election, but it was not really my focus at that point.
So I said: “I don’t know enough about his life or chronology to say for sure, though.” I continued and I said: I would say that if he drops off the face of the map in the next year, then that argues more for the Leo rising chart; while if he becomes even more prominent over the next year, then it argues for Virgo. I guess we’ll see what happens. So that was my response to Blake when he’s suggesting this Virgo rising chart.
So he writes me back and he’s a little disappointed at my response, and he says he felt like people were focusing too much on personality by focusing on the late Leo rising with Mars conjunct the Ascendant chart rather than looking at the rulers of the houses. And so, I responded to him and I said: It’s not so much his personality that I had in mind, but just the fact that he was enjoying a period of popularity while Jupiter was moving through Leo, and then that took a hit when Mars entered the same sign. And the quote keeps going, I say: “So it has more to do with recent events.” And I keep going: And like I said, if it turns out that he becomes even more popular in the next year, then I think that would be a good argument in favor of Virgo rising. But then if he doesn’t, then it would be an argument the Virgo rising chart was wrong.
So I got back to this because this was an exchange that took place, like I said, September 10, 2015, and it’s one of those exchanges that I wish that I had taken more seriously at the point when it mattered. The point when it mattered was in that two-week timeframe prior to the ISAR conference when I actually started paying attention to the astrology of this, trying to figure out what the outcome of the election would be, so I could get up on the panel and make my prediction about it.
So other miscellaneous things—this is stuff that I’ve just come up with over the past week in terms of trying to consider whether it’s possible at all that Virgo rising could be correct. There were a few other reasons I’ll just throw out there sort of randomly that the Virgo rising chart could make more sense. One of the most important is that the Virgo eclipse that just took place in September would have been in Trump’s 1st house using whole sign houses, so that makes a really big difference. And the reason that makes a big difference is because then that would be the same as what Obama had in 2008 when there was an eclipse in Aquarius in his 1st house.
We were looking back on that in 2008 and that was one of the primary indicators for Obama’s win in the presidential election of 2008 and 2012. What happened is that Obama had an eclipse in his 1st house in 2008 that indicated his win, and then he had another eclipse four years later in his 10th house, which indicated his win in 2012. So when you see that really major Virgo eclipse—it was a solar eclipse that took place on September 1, 2016, just a couple of months ago—having Trump have Virgo rising rather than Leo rising using whole sign houses changes that because it puts it in his 1st house rather than his 2nd house, and it makes a much closer analogy to, for example, what Obama had in 2008.
So I realize that some quadrant house people are going to say that it would have been in his 1st house anyway from quadrant houses and that could just be a shortcoming on my part for using whole sign houses. Nonetheless, I realize that you can make that argument, so I’ll grant that and not even argue that point. But nonetheless, from a whole sign perspective, to me, that’s at least one small argument in favor of the Virgo rising chart rather than the Leo rising chart. Part of the reason for that is that eclipse gets compounded by another point, which Patrick Watson pointed out to me in passing. We haven’t talked a lot over the past week since this happened, but we did exchange a message yesterday.
I was actually kind of—not surprised—but I was kind of heartened to hear that he might be thinking along similar lines because one of the brief things that he said to me, he said, Trump, if he had Virgo rising, then that would have changed his profections, and he would have been in a Cancer profection year. So the sign Cancer would have been activated this year, and thus, the Moon would have been activated as the ruler of the year rather than the Gemini profection year that we thought that he had been in using the Leo rising chart.
So that’s one of the other differences I need to point out in terms of why this would make such a huge difference for me. It’s not just in whole sign houses him having a different rising sign or a different Ascendant degree and why that would change all the house placements, but it would also change some of the core timing techniques that we were using, such as annual profections. Because with annual profections, you start from whatever the rising sign is—so the sign that contains the Ascendant—and then you count one sign per year for each year of the native’s life, from birthday to birthday; and whatever sign you land on gets activated that year, as well as the ruler of that sign becomes activated and becomes more potent for the entirety of that year, both in its natal placements and in its transits.
So what Patrick was pointing out—which I had also noticed—was that if Trump had Virgo rising, then it’s not just that that solar eclipse in Virgo in September would have been in his 1st house, but it also would have been activated and even more important because he was in a Cancer profection year, thus activating the Moon. So it would have been activating that eclipse even more and made it even more potent in his 1st house; it also would have activated his natal lunar eclipse, where he was born with the Sun in Gemini and the Moon in Sagittarius very close to the nodes. So he was born very close to an eclipse at the same time, and his Moon would have been much more potent this year than in other years on top of that.
I mean, the other ways in which the Virgo rising chart from my perspective makes Trump chart more eminent—using whole sign houses—that lunar eclipse that he has in his chart from the 11th house/5th house axis, it moves it up so that the Sun is in the 10th house and the Moon is in the 4th house if he had Virgo rising. So it makes his luminaries more eminent. It also brings a bunch of the 12th house planets that were in Cancer in the 12th house in the Leo rising chart—in the Virgo rising chart, it moves them up to the 11th house.
Jupiter, very interestingly—because he has a day chart, it would be the most positive planet in his chart—would move from the 3rd house to the 2nd house in the Virgo rising chart. One of the main things that people think of with him is about his wealth and about his financial success or what have you. If it was the Virgo rising chart, he would be somebody who would have Jupiter in a day chart in the 2nd house, which would be just a very blatant positive indication for financial matters, all other things aside.
Let’s see, what else? One interesting overlap is that in the Leo rising chart—with whole sign houses—he has Leo rising and the Sun in Gemini in the 11th whole sign house. In the other chart, in the Virgo rising chart, he would have Virgo rising and Mercury in Cancer in the 11th whole sign house. So one of the weird things is that either way—using either Leo rising or Virgo rising and using whole sign houses—he’s going to have the ruler of the Ascendant in the 11th house. I do think it works out a little bit better if Mercury was the ruler; I mean, I can see an argument where one could make that. And one of the interesting things is that it also becomes the ruler of his 10th house at that point.
One of the things that’s curious about that is the Mercury-Neptune square that is already very prominent in his chart, between Mercury in early Cancer and Neptune in Libra. That becomes more prominent in the chart if Mercury is both the ruler of his Ascendant and the ruler of his Midheaven; it makes him a much more mercurial-type figure. And the Mercury-Neptune square itself, while becoming more prominent, obviously, that can be both good and that can be bad, just like, for example, Obama. Obama also has a Mercury-Neptune square.
So you can sort of see both sides of that where on the one hand that can be very positive when people have that, especially politicians. Sometimes it can be inspiring, or to the people they’re speaking to it can come off as more charismatic to them and more inspiring or uplifting in terms of whatever their ideas are. And that’s actually kind of fascinating on one level because that’s one of the things that Hillary was sort of criticized for in the post-election analysis; the point of her not being as charismatic or inspiring on some level is something that she’s being sort of criticized for.
So positive end of the spectrum, of course, Mercury-Neptune can be inspiring and can put in positive feelings with people or be able to convey that through a person’s speech. Obviously, the flipside of Mercury-Neptune can have a tendency towards deception or being able to use speech in a way that conveys something that the person wants to convey, but it can be more illusory in some sense.
One of the difficulties here—I’ve tried in most of my analysis of different things—there’s this desire to stay politically neutral in my analysis. So one of the things I want to do in that process is basically any time I’m going to offer some sort of interpretive statement like that that ends up being partially a value judgment, I’ll show both the positive and the negative interpretation since usually you can have both or it can go either way. So just keep in mind that it’s something I’m going to try to do here during the course of this discussion when that comes up.
So that’s interesting in terms of Mercury becoming more prominent in his chart if he had Virgo rising. I’ve already mentioned that everything becomes more angular. Mars moves into the 12th house, which is actually kind of interesting, and that’s one of the arguments actually I have in favor of it. If he had Mars in the 1st house, it might be more focused on the body in terms of manifesting in specific health issues, whereas Mars in the 12th house often tends to manifest as more of a focus on one’s enemies and on conflicts with one’s enemies as being sort of a more dominant theme in one’s life. And that’s actually one of the arguments, additionally, to me, in favor of the 12th house Mars rather than the 1st house Mars according to whole sign houses with the caveat of course that Mars is still going to be conjunct the degree of the Ascendant. So you’re still going to be seeing some of those 1st house themes anyway.
Other points in favor of the Virgo rising chart—so a number of modern astrologers pointed out that his secondary progressed Sun has progressed up to conjunct his Ascendant over the past year. And what’s interesting about this to me is that his secondary progressed Sun moved into Virgo on August 7 of this year.
And so, you’ve got two options here—and this sort of becomes a judgment call on the part of the astrologer—either his secondary progressed Sun came up to the degree of the Ascendant and was largely in that degree during the course of the year when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015 and then eventually secured the nomination and became the official nominee at the Republican National Convention in July of 2016; and that’s right about the point that the secondary progressed Sun would have been right on his Ascendant. Or since the secondary progressed Sun moved into Virgo on August 7—from that point forward, for the next 30 years—then you’ve got an alternate thing of maybe that was the point when the Sun actually fully hit his Ascendant and is still there at this point. So it would still be in the first degree of Virgo for this entire year: from August 7 of this year, all the way through his winning the election and then eventually on inauguration day.
So again, there’s some overlap there, but that one is one where while I can see the Sun hitting that during the primaries and during receiving the nomination and becoming the victor in the primaries, I could also actually strongly see it, and I slightly lean more towards the direction of it making more sense if his secondary progressed Sun moving into Virgo was the point at which it fully hit his Ascendant, and that that would have started in August and now is still in full effect after winning the presidency. So it’s just one of those data points that you have to take into account that I wanted to note here, because it’s one of the things I’m noting as I’m going through and trying to look at this with a fresh pair of eyes, which is what I feel like is necessary at this point given what’s happened.
I mean, the secondary progressions itself—one thing I will say is I did not look at the secondary progressions for the most part. And if this election has done anything for me, it’s reignited some interest in secondary progressions that I think I had lost over the past decade in focusing on other techniques—not in the sense that I’m going to throw away other techniques or stop prioritizing them or start using secondary progressions all the time or something like that. But I do want to say that there were some very interesting things in the secondary progressions that I’m seeing now that I’m reading other people’s analyses or that I’ve seen over the past week that are curious; so that secondary progressed Sun hitting the Ascendant was interesting.
Another point that Anthony Louis made on his blog recently was that Hillary Clinton had a secondary progressed Sun-Mercury conjunction go exact this year. It went exact at different points depending on which time you used. But if you used the 8:00 AM time, it went exact in the middle of October, around the time of the debates, versus if you used the 8:00 PM time, it went exact earlier this year, around April, during or towards the end of the primaries. So that would have been a secondary progressed cazimi in her chart going exact this year, which is really fascinating to me.
Another thing I just noticed is—so Patrick Watson had pointed this out before—that Trump was born on a lunar eclipse and that would have been the prenatal eclipse prior to the birth of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But what’s additionally interesting about that that I haven’t seen anybody point out—but I’m sure somebody noticed this—that if you progressed Trump’s chart for right now—which I was doing over the past few days—one of the things that’s weird is that he was born in June, and Bill Clinton was born in August.
So because Trump is about 70-years-old, Trump’s chart actually has almost progressed to and looks very similar to Bill Clinton’s chart. If you do the progressions, it basically moves it forward a couple of months to right around the same timeframe as when Bill Clinton was born. And what’s weird about that is because Trump has the either Leo or Virgo rising, when you progress it forward by 70-something years, you end up with Libra rising. So it’s not just Bill Clinton’s similar placements in terms of all the planets being in the same sign, it’s also the same rising sign, which is kind of wild.
So I don’t think that’s relevant or would have changed a prediction or anything like that, but it’s just a weird, sort of eerie thing that I hadn’t noticed because I didn’t even run the secondary progressions, again, as part of my not really putting that much focus or effort into this this year due to focusing on other things. It’s one of the things that in the past week—now that I’ve started to look through different techniques and actually pay attention to what other astrologers are saying about what techniques they were using, it’s one of the interesting things that I stumbled on.
There was also some interesting stuff with the rulers of the houses in Trump’s chart; the ruler of the 3rd—I mean, there’s an argument that can be made. One of the things about Mars moving into the 12th if had Virgo rising is that Mars would also become the ruler of the 3rd. And so, the ruler of the 3rd would be in the 12th, contrary to the sect, so it’d be a difficult planet ruling the 3rd house of siblings in the 12th house. And one of the things in Trump’s biography is that one of his brothers died due to complications related to alcoholism and this may have actually had a big impact on Trump. And partially as a result of that he has never drank or done any drugs supposedly due to what he saw occur with his brother, where his brother really got taken down as a result of that.
So that’s not full proof because one could also make the argument that in the Leo rising chart, Trump has Neptune in the 3rd house. So maybe you could make some argument about the sibling and alcoholism and something like that, but again, it’s another one of those data points that’s worth considering and worth pursuing. So my general point there is while I’m not 100% sure on this yet, I think it’s something that has to be taken more seriously, and it’s something that I don’t feel that I did my due diligence on in making the predictions about the presidential election and fully looking into it so that I could have a stronger opinion one way or another. I had considered it at one point, for example, when that guy Blake brought it up in August of 2015—or in September—but at that point Trump was really rising, and the Leo rising chart seemed to be working out decently enough.
Part of the background of this election is that in the past few elections—especially the last one in 2012, especially in the Republican primaries the past couple of times—there’s like this weird revolving door where there will be a month where each of the candidates in the Republican primaries would become really prominent and suddenly start polling really well, and suddenly all of the media coverage would be focusing on one of the Republican primary candidates.
And this theme has been really notable to me over the past couple of years to the point where I realized after the 2012 election that you had to really stop paying attention to that because it was going to be inevitable at different points during the primaries that the media was going to focus on one candidate or another. Or one candidate would suddenly start rising in the polls and would look really good for a little while but then eventually would fall off the face of the map.
And we had this to some extent during this election as well because there were different points, remember, I think in December where suddenly Ben Carson was leading in the primaries for some reason, but it ended up being very short-lived. There was a point towards the end of 2015 when Marco Rubio was doing well. Of course, Jeb Bush was strongly favored going into the election in terms of the amount of money that he was going to have and in terms of his family legacy going into it.
So one of the issues I had is—even back then when Trump initially started making his rise the middle and in the fall of 2015—not taking it seriously enough to do the due diligence to pay attention to it, partially because I was under the mistaken presumption that I didn’t want to focus too much on something that might just end up being the temporary, sort of ‘flavor of the day’, which so often happens in the primaries where somebody will be up for a while and then they’ll disappear.
So yeah, now part of what I’m doing in retrospect is looking at all of these different things and doing it much more carefully and trying to do it with a much more open mind than I had done previously. So that’s where that leads us with Trump—there’s three possible times. I am starting to favor the Virgo rising chart, but again, it’s only been a few days now since I’ve taken a look at that more seriously. So I just put it out there as something that people need to consider as we move forward in the future.
With Hillary’s time, basically what we said—I can’t remember where the statement was made. I feel like it was in the last episode I did with Patrick, but it could have been the one before that. Basically, we said it looks possible for her to win and likely for her to win with the Scorpio rising but not with the other birth times.
The 2:18 time, for example, seemed to show the ‘90s and the early 2000s rather well because it showed her in a peak period during those times, but it didn’t seem to show her more recent career. And I think it was much more clear that if that time was hypothetically correct that the answer would be that she would lose. That was kind of the conclusion that I came to with the other times—like the two 8:00 PM times, which are either Gemini rising or Cancer rising—as well. None of the timing periods looked very positive or very eminent for this time period and then the charts themselves did not look as good.
I mean, one of the problems is that there’s this issue with how Hillary’s chart is set up, which is that because of the Mars-Saturn conjunction and the Scorpio stellium that really becomes an issue. Basically, if she has a night chart—well, let’s start with the day chart. If she has a day chart, then she has Mars in Leo squaring the entire stellium of planets in Scorpio; she has several inner planets (personal planets) in Scorpio. And if she has a day chart, then Mars is the most difficult planet in the chart, and it’s squaring all of those Scorpio planets. The thing is, though, there’s a mitigation in that instance because all of those planets are actually in Scorpio; they have a reception with Mars, which takes some of the edge off of the square.
So it still indicates difficult things. It still indicates major hardships and difficulties and oppositions. But due to that reception, it would be mitigated to some extent so that the person would still be able to accomplish a great deal of things; especially if the Scorpio rising chart itself was correct because then the ruler of the Ascendant would be Mars. Which itself is funny because then it lead back to a principle that I talked about on the podcast last fall—I think fall of 2015, in some of those episodes—where if you have day chart, the most difficult planet is going to be Mars and whatever house that’s in, that’s going to indicate one of the most difficult areas of life for you. So for example, if it’s in the 5th house, it might indicate problems with children. If it’s in the 7th house, it might indicate problems with relationships.
But one of the things I’ve seen happen—and I have a whole section on this in one of the lectures in my Hellenistic course where I show a bunch of different people and how it’s worked out for them. Sometimes if the most difficult planet is also the ruler of the Ascendant, then sometimes that can mean there’s something about that person. It basically means that the energy of the malefic, or the energy of the difficult planet somehow gets taken on or—I had a correct word for it that I used to use, but I’ve lost it at the moment.
But the person sort of takes on the energy of that planet and can sometimes become the agent of that planet in their own life, in that they create the problems in their own life that they experience in that area, or in some instances, they simply are perceived that way, so that the person has a negative perception by other people for some reason and that’s the sort of malefic quality that comes off. So that, of course, in the Scorpio rising chart becomes really fascinating with Hillary, because if she has Scorpio rising, then she has Mars in Leo in the 10th house in a day chart but ruling the Ascendant.
So the fact that it’s the ruler of the Ascendant and the 10th house would normally show somebody who’s very focused on career matters and focused on eminence and getting ahead in life. Basically, the ruler of the Ascendant and what house it’s located in is one of the things that shows you what the person can be focused on, or what can become the major focus in the person’s life. For her, it’s the 10th house, so it’s her career.
The problem, though, is she also has the most difficult planet in the chart in the 10th house, and therefore, that’s also the area of life where she would be expected to have some of the greatest difficulties and hardships and losses and setbacks. Then on top of that you have to then add on top of it the fact that it would also be the ruler of the Ascendant, so that some of those things would come about, or some of those difficulties would be brought about by the native themselves; or to some extent the native themselves would be perceived as creating some of those issues which people then would react negative to.
Obviously, that’s fascinating for anyone who’s followed this election or followed her career on a number of different levels because in some instances perhaps you could say that she created some of the issues that became issues in her career or led to part of her self-undoing or downfall. So regardless of how one feels about that politically or where you come down on it, you could say if you wanted to that the choice to do a private email server became a focal point of this campaign cycle.
And the fact that she got in trouble with that and was investigated by the FBI and all that other stuff that was the thing that came up again in the very last week or two of the election. The fact that it was a personal choice on her part to do that—whether it was right or wrong for that to become the focal point of the election, regardless of that—the fact that that was a personal choice on her part ended up inadvertently creating problems in her 10th house. And because it was the ruler of the Ascendant—because Mars was the ruler of the Ascendant and it’s the planet creating problems in that house—the fact that it was the ruler of the Ascendant meant that she had some hand in that.
So from that perspective, it’s kind of interesting. Another perspective is just the likability factor and the idea of—how do I put this? I mean, this election was unique of course because the two candidates had the highest ‘unlikability’ factor of any candidates in history. And Hillary would have had the highest ‘unlikability’ factor if not for the fact that she was running against Trump who slightly was more in that regard. And it’s fascinating to me then from that perspective how both of them had Mars in Leo, and both of them had that Mars connected with angles in some way. For Hillary, it would have been ruling the Ascendant and in the 10th whole sign house, whereas for Trump, it would have been at the very least conjunct the degree of the Ascendant within a few degrees.
Yeah, so one of the general points is it’s also fascinating—now in retrospect—the way that her life narrative has turned out; with Mars, contrary to the sect, ruling the Ascendant and the 10th house, she’s getting it from both sides. So she’s getting the hatred from the right of course—especially in this presidential election—but also she’s getting flack from the left as well; and there’s a lot of people in the immediate aftermath of the election sort of throwing around blame. And certainly, a lot of the people who voted in the primaries for Bernie are rushing to say that Bernie would have won the presidential election, and therefore, it’s Hillary’s fault for whatever she did in order to make Bernie not win and get the nomination or what have you.
Anyway, that’s going kind of far afield, but it’s one of the interesting things about some of the birth time issues, and even about the different perspective that I have even if the Scorpio rising chart is correct at this point in terms of the narrative of her life. And that’s going to come up again just in a minute when it comes to profections.
So we’ve covered all the natal placements. This is where I get into the third part of this discussion. I guess I’ve already kind of wandered into that territory, but the third part of the discussion is what if somehow I still ended up using the right birth time. What if Hillary was born around 8:00 AM, did have Scorpio rising, and therefore—despite all the odds and despite the alternative times that were floating around for her—I ended up still using the correct chart after all? Did I just miscall? Did I misinterpret the chart?
That’s one of the things I want to be clear about that while in retrospect I am acknowledging how in some ways reckless it was to base my prediction on not knowing for sure, not having ‘AA’ data; essentially basing it on the opposite time of what she told me based on the rumor that she was giving out different times, which it’s hard to validate; it may or may not have been validated at any point. Despite that I’m having to consider that as a possibility. I think the Scorpio rising chart does still make sense, and I may have miscalled it.
So now I want to explain the scenarios that I’ve figured out at this point—so far in the less than a week since this happened—where it could have still been the same time, but where I could have misinterpreted it. And the reason I want to go into this is because I want to show you why I misinterpreted it and how you, as an astrologer, could have made the same mistake; or how anybody could have made the same mistake. And hopefully, somebody will learn something from this in terms of—I don’t want to say not making the same mistake in the future because I think the same mistake still could have been made, but in order to fully illustrate what the dilemma was which led to it.
So as I said before I primarily only used two techniques: I used zodiacal releasing and annual profections, which are both Hellenistic time-lord techniques or timing techniques. And in some way my focus on only those two techniques and not really looking into other things may have been partially a mistake and partially a departure from last time as well. I don’t want to overemphasize that because those are basically the two primary techniques that I used in 2012, but one of the things I did in 2012 that I didn’t follow up with as much in this election is I did pay attention to other charts and other techniques like transits and secondary progressions a little bit more.
I also took into account things like the nomination charts much more seriously and the charts for the launch of the campaigns and other things like that. So there were all these secondary or tertiary charts that I also took into account last time, whereas in this one, I basically in that two-week period—it was really more like a one-week period prior to the ISAR conference—busted out these two techniques and threw them at the charts in order to see who seemed to come out on top, and that was my primary focus with this election.
So the gist of it, the most simple way to put it is that both techniques showed an eminent period for Hillary that would be very subjectively difficult. If I had to break it down, not using any technical terms in explaining what both techniques indicated, that’s basically it—they showed a very eminent period in her life that would be very difficult. So let’s get into how they indicated that or what that means specifically, so that I can show you what the dilemma was and where things went wrong. So we’ll start with profections because that’s a little bit easier to conceptualize even if you don’t know the technique; and if you do know the technique then it should be pretty straightforward why I’m saying what I’m saying. So I’ve talked about it a few times already a little bit, but let’s get into it in more detail.
So with annual profections, it’s a very simple but very powerful timing technique. All you do is you start from the rising sign—so whatever the sign the Ascendant is located in—and then you count one sign per year, from birthday-to-birthday for each year of the native’s life, forward in zodiacal order. So in the first year of a person’s life, if they have Scorpio rising, then Scorpio is activated that year; then when they have their first birthday, it moves to Sagittarius for one year. Then when they have their next birthday, it would move to the next sign, which would be Capricorn, for one year and so on and so forth.
So you just count one sign for each year of the native’s life starting with the rising sign, and you just keep moving forward in zodiacal order. So eventually after 12 years, it will come all the way around, it’ll complete the cycle and come back to the rising sign. Then what happens is it just repeats the cycle over again at that point, so that the rising sign, again, becomes activated at 12, and then at 13, it’s the next sign in zodiacal order, and at 14, it’s the next sign after that and so on and so forth.
So what was interesting about Hillary and what we’ve known for a little while now is that her birthday is late October. So what happened is she had a birthday just a few weeks ago, about two weeks before election day. And what happened at that point is she switched into a Leo profection year—or a 10th house profection year—using whole sign houses; and that’s using the Scorpio rising chart. So again, I’m using the Scorpio rising chart and showing you why I made the prediction that I did based on that birth time. And part of what I want to show is how that could actually still make sense, but how I could have miscalled it.
So using the Scorpio rising chart, literally two weeks before election day, she switches into a Leo/10th whole sign house profection year. So it activates her 10th house for the next 12 months starting in October of 2016, going through to October 2017; so for the entire year, and it switches to her 10th house. So usually when you have a certain house activated in a given year, it activates all of the topics associated with that house. So this is pretty striking, right? She switches into a 10th house profection year right before election day. And the 10th house of course in pretty much every Western tradition of astrology is the house that has to do with one’s career, one’s profession, one’s eminence, one’s reputation and life direction, and all these other themes that have to do with essentially a person’s public life or a person’s career.
So from that point of view, we could say that this would be a more eminent year in Hillary’s life. And one of the things is that profections—because you count one sign for each year and there’s only 12 signs—that means it repeats every 12 years; so you can actually take it back in 12-year increments.
One of the ways to use the technique to make predictions is just to take it back in 12-year increments in order to see what happened when the same house or the same sign was activated 12 years ago, and then take it 12 years before that to see what happened in that year, and then 12 years before that. And what you’ll find is you’ll actually see a lot of repetitions of very similar themes and that very similar trends come up in the person’s life every 12 years that are often tied into that specific house. So in pretty much all of these 10th house profection years, Hillary has either become more eminent or her career and life direction have become much more of the focus in that year.
One of them really early on, for example, was in 1968, she switched into a 10th house profection year; she became the president of her class in college. And she graduated from college, Wellesley College, and she gave the very first student commencement speech. So prior to that time, students didn’t give commencement speeches, but it was 1968-69 and her class wanted a student to give a commencement speech, and they pushed for it.
They pushed it through the administration, and the administration eventually agreed, and so she got up and gave this commencement speech. But what happened is that she spoke immediately after a senator—he was a Republican politician—gave a speech, and some of her student body reacted negatively to it. And so, she got up and gave a speech immediately afterwards that she quickly rewrote which kind of rebuffed or in some ways contradicted some of what the Republican senator had just said; he was the primary guest who was there to give the commencement speech as a guest speaker.
So she got covered; she basically got a lot of press for this. She ended up in LIFE Magazine and all this other stuff, but it also created a little bit of controversy that she had done that. So it was a little bit of a mixed bag in terms of suddenly she became more eminent in that year—in that 10th house profection year—but it was also partially with some controversy surrounding it, or as a result of creating some controversy on some level because she gave a sort of ‘Mars-y’-type speech—a somewhat combative-type speech that was directed at that guest speaker.
So right there you can see, on the one hand, the 10th house becoming activated, but then you also see the other part of it, which is that it doesn’t just activate the house and the sign, but it also activates the planets that are in that sign as well. And this is where we run into some problems with her chart because what she has in her chart that most astrologers know at this point is that she has a triple-conjunction of Mars and Saturn and Pluto in Leo. And if the Scorpio rising chart is correct, then Leo is her 10th whole sign house.
So she has the ruler of the Ascendant there which is Mars, which shows the focus on one’s career and ambition in that area of life. But she also has three of the most difficult planets in that house. So it shows that that’s the area where she would be expected to have some of her greatest difficulties and hardships as well. So what we get typically with these 10th house profection years that come up every 12 years is a period of greater eminence and focus on career matters, but also very often controversies and opposition and setbacks at the same time.
So in terms of the one I want to present first, one of the things was studying the different 10th house profection years that she’s had in the past—this is part of the prediction—in order to figure out what would happen in the future, and it came down to two other 10th house profection years that she had had. And the one I ended up focusing on was two, 12-year cycles ago, which started in late October of 1992. So if you take it back 12 years from now, it takes us back to 2004, and if you take it back 12 years before that it takes us to October of 1992 and the birthday that she had starting in October 1992, right before the 1992 presidential election.
So what happens is she has her birthday in October of 1992, she switches into a 10th house profection year, and then about a week or two later, her husband wins the 1992 US presidential election and president of the United States. And so, then, that January—a few months later, still in that 10th house profection year—they, together, move into the White House, and she becomes the first lady. So right there we’re seeing the 10th house again, and we’re seeing those themes of eminence and prominence coming up in her life, and then as a sort of team having great political success and hitting the height of what’s possible in that political career at that time, and that path that they had been on for a few decades at that point, since he had been governor for a while until then.
But then what happens is that he gives her the job—or she gets the job and gets set up with an office in the White House—and her job and her mission is to push healthcare reform. And right away in January or February, early in 1993, she sets out to push healthcare reform and make that her primary job. And what happens over the course of the next year is she pushes that very strongly, but then there’s huge, huge pushback against it basically from Republicans and from conservatives and from lobbyists and other people who were against healthcare reform, or against single-payer healthcare or whatever that whole issue is.
And what ended up happening is she really did not do well over the course of the next year or two in terms of the media and the press and everything else. Again, regardless of one’s political views, it was at this point that Hillary very much gets demonized in the press either rightly or wrongly partially due to some of this focus on healthcare reform in that year. And then eventually, in the following year, that ends up failing, and they have to abandon it completely.
So again, the point is that was a full 12-month period that started on her birthday in 1992, and what ended up happening is she had a great period of victory and eminence in that they won the 1992 presidential election in that 10th house profection year, but then she also suffered major opposition and hardship and loss during the course of that year and difficulties in her career at the same time when you also get the activation of Mars and Saturn in the same sign.
Basically, what I thought was going to happen is that it would be a repetition of that. And because I saw that she was repeating the same profection year as 1992, I thought it indicated that she’d have a repetition and basically she’d get into the White House, but then she would encounter major opposition and hardship and potential scandals or other things like that that would make it a very subjectively difficult year for her even though she won the presidency. But what ended up happening instead is that it seemed like it ended up being more of a repetition of the previous profection year before 1992; 12 years before 1992 of course is 1980.
So what happened is in the 1970s, she got together with Bill Clinton; she ended up leaving her career. She had a career as a lawyer in Washington, and she ended up leaving it in order to move to Arkansas to be with Bill Clinton and to pursue that relationship and that marriage with him, but also to pursue some sort of shared political goals that they had. And so, in 1978, he gets elected as the governor of Arkansas and that was a great victory and stuff, but then what happens is that she wasn’t viewed very well, and she wasn’t perceived very well and didn’t do some of the things that perhaps she could have in order to—it’s hard to put that—but subsume her own personality in order to fit the mold of whatever the perception was of what she should have been doing as a governor’s wife in Arkansas in the late 1970s.
So what ends up happening is that even though he wins and becomes governor in 1978, two years later, there’s another election and they’re basically both promptly kicked out of the governorship, and he loses the election in 1980. And a lot of the focus turned towards her and there was a lot of finger-pointing towards her as being part of the reason that he lost the 1980 election. And so, that election in November of 1980 of course took place, again, right after she moved into another 10th house profection year. So that 1980 election, then, she’s repeating that right now where she just moved into the same thing in October of 2016 for the next year.
So what happened in that profection year of 1980 is they lost the governorship and a lot of the attention turned towards her. The commentary was that she was perceived as this ‘East coast liberal’ who was in Arkansas and wasn’t doing the things that she was supposed to be doing as a governor’s wife and that she didn’t fit the mold. Yeah, there were just a lot of negative things swirling about who she was and the things that she was doing that were perceived as inappropriate. Like the fact that she kept her own last name and didn’t adopt her husband’s last name, so that she was still being called ‘Hillary Rodham’ instead of ‘Hillary Clinton’, or that she didn’t wear makeup, or that she did all these other things.
So what was interesting about that year, though, is that after they lost and were kicked out of the governor’s mansion, she basically completely reformed her personality and she took control, partially, of his political career or political campaign and reelection campaign from that point forward; and she made a point to completely remake her image in order to subsume her own identity into whatever it needed to be in order for them to get reelected. That was the point at which she started being called ‘Hillary Clinton’ or ‘Hillary Rodham Clinton’, so that she was not just keeping her maiden name anymore, and she started wearing makeup and other things like that in order to fit that role.
And it worked because then two years later, in 1982, they were reelected and got back into the governorship, but it was only a result of the fact that they had this crushing defeat in 1980, and it was put largely on her. And then she, I’m sure, went through an extremely difficult year then of both struggling with the fact that she was partially to blame for him losing the election, but then also having to completely change her image and subsume a lot of her own personal beliefs and desires in order for them to pursue this political career that they wanted to pursue together.
Anyway, so long story short is with the profections technique, it comes down to those are three events that stood out the most that we had to choose from in terms of predicting what would happen when that same profection year kicked in a few weeks ago, when she had her birthday in October. And remember, she’s born late in the month. She’s born October 26, 1947. So she literally has her birthday and these 10th house profection years right before election day each time. So it kicks in and it’s active for election day, but then also the entirety of that year following it, until the following October.
So we had those three basically to go off of primarily, which were her giving the commencement speech at Wellesley and becoming more eminent during that time, becoming the first female—not female, but first student speaker of her own class—but getting some flack for it as well as some recognition. Then you had the 1980 governorship where they basically suffered a crushing defeat, and then you had the 1992 one where they started the year with a huge victory, but then she still encountered major obstacles over the course of the next year, and major vilification in some sense either rightly or wrongly, regardless of your political views.
So what ended up happening is basically I thought it was going to be—partially due to the confluence of some of the other techniques—I thought it was going to be a repetition of 1992. And instead, it was a repetition of 1980, and you got the crushing defeat rather than the period of eminence and victory followed by a period of difficulty.
So right there I just want that to be clear and I hope that’s clear enough. It’s like I realize this is just audio, and usually this is something I would do together with charts and together with teaching the technique; and actually that’s one thing I should mention. Leisa Schaim, my partner, gave a lecture on this topic showing how you can follow these repetitions—these 12-year repetitions—using profections and how they’ll sometimes be very informative and can help you to make a prediction about the future in a client’s chart. And she showed a bunch of client charts and a few celebrity charts where you could see this 12-year repetition work out in different ways in people’s lives and how you can use it as a predictive technique.
And it’s actually my fault—I encouraged Leisa. I said when election day takes place, she’s about to start a repetition of a 10th house profection year; and because we’re in election season that would probably be really interesting for the audience to see that sort of repetition. So Leisa actually integrated that into her lecture, which I should make clear that was actually my idea rather than hers. So she showed both of them, and she pointed out how Hillary had this crushing defeat in 1980 and then she had this victory in 1992, and how we assumed then that it was going to be a repetition of 1992.
But that was definitely more my fault for her putting that in there, but she does a really good job of actually demonstrating that technique, so I’d recommend checking it out if anyone’s interested. And then if you have any hate mail, just send it towards me rather than her. So sorry about that, Leisa. Okay, so that’s the profections technique. And I hope it’s clear why that was a little bit difficult to call and why it could have gone either way in terms of you having those two different options in her history. But either way, we knew it was going to be a difficult year even if it was also a very eminent one.
Now of course in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that the eminence was that she almost became president, and she evidently won the popular vote; she’s up by almost two million votes at this point from what I’ve seen. It looks like there’s a little debate about this because on social media some sites are saying that she’s lost the popular vote as well. But I actually just checked this in order to be sure, and it seems like that’s actually some sort of weird disinformation because at this point she’s up by like one million votes in the popular vote. She lost the electoral college, though, which is what counts and what matters in terms of determining if you become president.
Anyway, so in retrospect, obviously, the very eminent time period that she’s in right now is the fact that she was the first female nominee of the Democratic party and she almost became president, but then lost the election in a very close race. So you get both of those things in terms of the eminence of the 10th house, but also the crushing—the very subjective difficulty—subjectively negative period that’s represented by Mars and Saturn and Pluto in the 10th house getting activated at the same time, so that’s part of it. So that’s one of the two primary techniques that I used, and this is the reason why I leaned more towards thinking it would be a repetition of 1992 rather than a repetition of 1980, and it’s because of the second technique that I used, which is zodiacal releasing.
So zodiacal releasing is a little bit harder to explain just sort of verbally like this in a short period without any visuals, but the gist of it is that it showed that she was in an eight-year-long career peak period that would last from 2010 until 2018. And I outlined all of this in my zodiacal releasing lecture at the ISAR conference because I knew that I wasn’t going to get that much time to talk about it on the presidential panel itself. They actually cut my time at the last minute from eight minutes to four minutes, so I actually even had to condense it down from what I thought I was going to be able to present which really was lame.
So I gave a talk separately on zodiacal releasing, and I showed how in some client charts and some celebrity charts how you could use it to time peak periods and transitions in a person’s career and life direction. And that’s part of the lecture that I’ve been selling since I got back from ISAR, which I’m going to record an addendum to. So if any of you have purchased it, I’m going to basically write an addendum to it to show what happened with the technique and do not a full recap like this, but at least show you some of the parts of it and what actually happened in retrospect. So I’ll be sending that out before too long in the next week or so. Anyway, back to explaining the technique.
So zodiacal releasing showed that she was in an eight-year career peak period from 2010 until 2018. It also showed that there was a buildup period prior to that; so again, this is all using the Scorpio rising chart. And assuming the Scorpio rising chart is correct, it showed there was a 20-year preparatory period, which should have been preparatory and should have prepared her or built up to the eight-year peak period from 2010 to 2018. So for 20 years, that means it started in 1981 and it lasted until 2010. So a 20-year preparatory period from about 1981 to 2010 with a career transition period around 2008 to 2009, which is actually when she became secretary of state.
So it actually made a lot of sense and still makes a lot of sense in terms of 1991 is when Bill Clinton launches his presidential campaign and then they are in the White House during the ‘90s, and then she becomes a senator in 2000, and all of this is taking place within the context of this 20-year preparatory period. Then she hits this thing we call the ‘loosing of the bond’—which always indicates a major career transition—between 2008 and 2009. That of course makes sense because she loses the primary to Obama, but then becomes secretary of state, which is clearly a major career transition; and it’s still all taking place within the context of the 20-year preparatory period.
Then in 2010, she goes into the peak period for eight years; she finishes out her time as secretary of state in 2012 and 2013. The highest point within this eight-year peak period was going to be this 27-month Capricorn period that lasted from October of 2013 until December of 2015 according to the technique. And of course during this time, she launched her presidential campaign. So the technique itself is indicating an eight-year peak period, and the highest point of the entire peak period was October of 2013 through December of 2015.
So this is the reason and this is actually the technique that Patrick and I used back in 2012 when we were contacted by that reporter from ABC News who was asking us if we thought—in April of 2012—that Hillary would run in 2016. And so, we pull up this technique and it says she’s in an eight-year peak period from 2010 through 2018, and that the highest point within it falls between October of 2013 and December of 2015; which we knew if she was going to run, she would have launched her presidential campaign sometime in 2015. So we were like, yeah, it looks like she’s going to run and we can say that pretty confidently as long as this is the correct time.
So that was our rationale surrounding that, which turned out to be correct in terms of that. But what happens is that the focal point of it ended in December of 2015, which was still pretty early on in the primaries. Yeah, so it ends in 2015, and then what happens is that she moves into a sub-period. So the way that this technique works is that there are general periods that last usually for a decade or two. So she was in an eight-year-long Libra period, which was a peak period that was indicating a period of heightened importance and activity in terms of her career. But then there’s also sub-periods within that, which are like shorter periods of time that activate other parts of the chart for a shorter duration.
So the high point of the entire eight-year period was partially launching the presidential campaign under that 27-month Capricorn period from October of 2013 to December of 2015, but then what happened is she switched into this Aquarius period from December of 2015 until June of 2018. And the problem with Aquarius in her chart is that that’s the sign opposite to Mars and Saturn, and in this technique, planets can aspect empty signs. And the way that you determine what the quality of a period will be like and how the native will actually experience it is that you look at what planets are aspecting the sign that’s become aspected by a hard aspect; so by a conjunction or a square or opposition.
So basically, starting in December of 2015, she moved into one of the more difficult possible configurations that would have indicated a subjectively difficult period. Then on top of that there’s further sub-periods where you can look at individual months and individual days. And what happened is on L3—on level 3—it moved to Leo from September 28 through November 15. So that was the sign that was activated during the actual time period of the election itself, and what happened is that it switched over to the sign that contained the two malefics.
And for some reason that sign—this is what I call a ‘foreshadowing’ period—that sign of Leo will repeat itself next year between June 8 and July 25 of 2017. So I don’t know what that’s all about, but that’s kind of weird. But the main point here is just that while she was in an eight-year period of eminence that should represent the high point of her career on the highest levels of the technique, on the lower levels of the technique it also showed her switching into a very subjectively difficult period in the run-up to the election and then especially around election day.
So this is something that I saw and I was very aware of. And it’s ironic looking back on it in retrospect because if you listen to that lecture that I gave at ISAR on zodiacal releasing and you listen to the principle that I teach where I say the activation of the signs that are angular from the Lot of Fortune indicate periods of heightened importance and heightened activity, but they don’t tell you whether the period’s going to be experienced as subjectively positive or negative, you can only determine that by looking at which planets are aspecting the sign by hard aspect, especially the benefics and malefics.
So basically, the end result is that it was true that it was a period of heightened importance and activity and eminence—and probably the most eminent time in her entire life—but because it switched over and activated both malefics on the lower level, it also resulted in it being very subjectively difficult and sort of crushing. So she encountered a very public defeat basically. One of the problems with Hillary’s chart is that she has different periods in which she sometimes becomes eminent but then gets into conflicts or fights and has major opposition but still becomes eminent. Other times there are periods—like in 1980—where it’s just that she becomes eminent but then gets defeated.
So the issue that I ran into there, again, is I saw that the broader period lasted through till 2018—that the broader peak period lasted from 2010 until 2018—and then it would switch into a more difficult period after that because the peak period would end. So what I assumed was that she would win the presidency in 2016 and get into the White House, but that she would only serve for one term because the peak period ends in October of 2018, which is around the time of the midterms and then there would just be two years before the election of 2020.
So again, what I misread is that it was indicating that this would be the high point of her career, but that she would run into major difficulties. And the narrative that I had sort of thought in my head was then sort of compounded by the fact that that’s the way it looked like it was going—additionally in the polls and as far as most people were concerned, or most spectators or commentators were concerned—that it looked like it was a very eminent period in which she would win, but then encounter major opposition and difficulties and that was sort of my reading of it.
Instead, I misread it, and the actual narrative now in retrospect is that this will be the high point of her career, almost winning the presidency—even winning the popular vote. So technically, she got the most votes in the presidential election, but then the difficulty ultimately is that she still lost and did not win the presidency.
So obviously that narrative is clear now in retrospect, but it was hard to call that ahead of time because she had this mixed history of sometimes winning and then getting opposition rather than just being defeated right at the start; and therein lies I think the problem with what I ran into. So that’s largely from the perspective of Hillary’s chart and that’s partially because hers was the chart that we’d been working with the longest since 2006, but also, just more recently since our prediction in 2012 that she would indeed run.
I should say that it was also complicated a little bit by the zodiacal releasing periods indicating that Trump would have a major transition between December of 2017 and March of 2020. And that’s something that still bothers me because you have this separate issue of uncertainty surrounding Trump’s birth time with those three different charts or three different times that I mentioned earlier, but using pretty much all three of them—if I’m correct—result in similar zodiacal releasing periods. There is a difference between the early Leo rising time and the later Leo rising time where the earlier one might actually make him winning make sense more because then the ruler of the Lot of Spirit would be activated when he moved into the 25-year Cancer period that he started in the year 2000, that he’s still basically in the middle of now.
What threw me off with Trump’s the most in terms of his zodiacal releasing periods, everything else aside, is that for some reason he has this thing called the ‘loosing of the bond’—my keyword for that is a major career transition—and it takes place between December of 2017 and March of 2020. And my thinking ahead of time was that looked more like him having a major career transition in the aftermath of the presidential election and having to figure out what to do after he lost. And so, I kind of assumed that maybe he would pursue that thing that it was being speculated about if he had lost—that he would set up a different media network or something like that, like a new news network, which had been speculated over the past few months.
So the issue was I didn’t understand why he would be having a major career transition that would only start a year after the election if he was to win. And that was the thing that compounded my assumption that Hillary would still be able to pull it off because she was in that peak period, even though it also became a very difficult period, and the thing I was seeing as more prominent in Trump’s chronology was still a year or two away after the election.
So unfortunately, that’s going to be an issue that’s still on the table then in the future that we’ll have to see how it plays out. Because the only way this makes any sense is if he does end up having some sort of career transition that ends up making his chronology—or ends up marking his chronology more strongly than his winning the election than his inauguration will. And that’s something obviously that I’ve started to think about and look into to try to contemplate the possibilities.
I mean, Leisa and I noticed that it’s weird that it starts in December of 2017 because of course we know that Saturn will complete its two- or three-year period in Sagittarius in December of 2017, and it’ll move into Capricorn for a couple of years. And we were looking at Mike Pence’s chart the other night and we noticed that Mike Pence has Saturn at 5° of Capricorn. So weirdly, right about the time that’s starting Pence will be starting his second Saturn return.
Yeah, there’s a lot of different ways you could go with that. It’s probably not my place to speculate on the nature of that transition at this point, but only to explain why I got the current prediction wrong. And that was the thing that threw me off partially about Trump’s chart and made me put most of the emphasis then on Hillary’s chart and trying to interpret whether that major peak period that she was in—that seemed to indicate this is the high point of her career—whether that indicated that she would then take the presidency. So we’ll have to see what happens with Trump’s career in the long term and what ends up happening with that, and if that at some point sort of becomes clear or explains why that was showing up as more prominent to me than the current timeframe.
So those are really the two main things. A lot of it comes down to miscalling Hillary’s chart—if indeed that was even the correct birth time. I know it’s not abundantly clear, but I hope I’ve at least been able to convey the general point that the issue is that in the main techniques, she was clearly in a period that should have been more eminent, but then would have been difficult. But because of some of her past history, I called it as being she’s going to win, but then will encounter major opposition and difficulty and probably only serve one term. Instead, she was just defeated right at the start of it.
While this will probably in retrospect end up being the most eminent time in terms of her biography—the sort of high point of her career—nonetheless, she did not win the presidency; and so that ended up being a misjudgment on my part. But I hope it’s at least understandable why I sort of made that call, and you can sort of see how—if you put yourself in my shows—you could have potentially made the same call.
All right, so other miscellaneous thoughts—I’ve finished the main part of this episode where I really just wanted to review what happened and sort of talk through some of the things I’ve been thinking about over the past week because I’ve been reviewing my own prediction. I have a few other miscellaneous thoughts that I’ve just been sort of jotting down in notes over the course of the past week since this has happened, just things that I’ve thought about and that I’m reflecting on in the aftermath of the election that I want to talk about for the remainder of this.
I mean, one of the points is just that astrology obviously is not a crystal ball that shows you a scene of exactly what will happen as if you’re watching it through a television, or you’re watching a movie or something like that. And this is an issue because it gets to the core of a fundamental misconception about what astrology is and what it does and what you can do with it. And assuming I don’t back out and change it at the last minute that’s why I have as the main image for this episode this wizard-looking guy who’s like staring into a crystal ball and looking surprised because on some level the public perception of astrology and what astrologers are doing is that we’re looking into a crystal ball and seeing a live image of the future somehow; and therefore, that’s how we’re able to tell things about the future.
Most astrologers realized that that’s not the case and that instead what we’re doing is something closer to—I mean, we can’t make any perfect analogies, but one of the analogies that you can make with astrology is that it’s kind of more like forecasting or weather forecasting or something like that. You have many different data points and all of it eventually adds up, and then you’re trying to call it or predict the totality of where all of those data points are going to lead to; even though in many instances what you’re looking at is conflicting data points and a confluence of different conflicting things that you’re trying to figure out—when it comes down to the final totals—what direction that’s going to go.
So I think one of the ways to conceptualize this is that astrology involves the study of omens in order to determine the future. So these are sort of individual indications about the future. It’s not mechanistic in that you get this entire thing that all points definitely in one direction and causes that to happen, or it all points definitely in another direction and causes that to happen. But instead, what you have is that there’s many different omens and many different layers that are pointing in different directions and revealing different things about the different aspects of the situation. And this is one of the reasons why astrologers can get it wrong because they can misinterpret certain omens, or they can misinterpret the overall totality of where everything is going.
And the reason for that is obviously that elections are complicated things, and you’re going to have many different positive and negative things happening in a person’s life or in the world in general, or you’re going to have different positive and negative events that come about in the course of the campaign and each person’s campaign throughout the course of it. You’re going to have certain things that are very positive and certain things that are going to be very negative, and you’re trying to sort through all of that ultimately in order to figure out a specific thing, like who’s going to be the president over the course of the next four to eight years.
So one of the issues then that’s challenging is that there’s a problem in terms of falsifiability in that no situation repeats itself exactly the same, so everything ends up being a unique scenario. And while you can look back at historical instances in which some of the indications were the same—or some isolated omens were the same are repeating now—the totality of all of the different indications are always going to be unique.
So there was never any election like 2016 in the past that we have to refer to and show that when these two people with the exact same birth charts did this—a hundred years ago or something like that—that this was the outcome. You don’t have that. All you have is the ability to sometimes focus in on one of those things and then look back at past instances either in the person’s own life—like I did with the profections—or sometimes in a broader mundane sense—like if you were to look at eclipse cycles and who won the presidency over the past several years.
I should mention one of the people who was right in my local astrology group named Paula Roosa, she used the technique of looking at whether Venus was a morning star or evening start as favoring the party that was in power or the power that was challenging, and has developed a technique like that which she’s tried to take back and look at other presidential elections. And we talked about that at a local meeting this past Saturday where we had a group discussion about what happened in the astrology of things and sort of reviewing it.
So it’s like sometimes you can take individual isolated things, but the greatest challenge is just that it’s always going to be a unique situation, so you’re never going to be able to fully rely on any past indications. And there’s always going to be many different positive and negative indications for both candidates because there’s so much going on. The challenge to the astrologer is to attempt to weigh it all and see the broader trend, but sometimes this can be tough.
So one of the things that came up in past elections—like in 2004 when Bush was having his Saturn return—is the point that you can’t always predict that a candidate will lose if they’re having difficult transits, because if they win, they’re about to take on an incredibly difficult and taxing job for the next four to eight years. And that was one of the lessons that I tried to remember and obviously influenced my prediction here.
This is one of the reasons why even though Hillary’s activations of that Mars-Saturn-Pluto conjunction looked bad and make sense in retrospect as a sort of crushing defeat, I didn’t necessarily automatically assume that it meant that she would lose when I looked at it. I remember those points at different points over the past year where I looked at that and had concerns at different points, but I also tried to remember that you can’t always take a super negative-looking transit as fully indicative of defeat depending on the context; for example, Bush during his Saturn return in 2004.
So let’s see—other points that I’ve noted over the past few days. When it comes to public figures, astrologers’ perceptions of those figures and their interpretation of their charts are partially shaped by the way that they’re portrayed in the media. So this is problematic because, on the one hand, this partially then becomes a matter of the person’s public persona versus their private one and whether those two things are one and the same or different; which can be really tricky with politicians especially because they typically are trying to put forward a public persona in order to accomplish whatever their political goals are and in order to speak to a certain audience who are the people that are going to vote for them basically.
So that’s been an interesting thing because this is of course the issue that we’ve talked about a few times before on the podcast in terms of doing research into astrology and using chart examples and the difference between using a celebrity chart versus using the chart of somebody you know. One the one hand, the advantage of the celebrity is their lives are documented to some extent, but the downside is that you don’t actually know them.
And so, there could be a major disconnect between the public persona versus the private one, and this can lead you to interpret the chart perhaps differently based on that to some extent; or at least to base more of your assumptions about the person—especially if you then have to rectify the chart—which of course becomes an issue in this case where essentially for both candidates, both of their charts did require some level of rectification.
So we have a bit of an issue here in terms of the person’s public persona versus their private one because we’re dealing with celebrity charts of people that we don’t know and have never talked to, and are sort of studying from afar through the media or through the things that the person themselves have put out into the world in terms of how they wanted the world to perceive them.
Additionally, in this day and age, an astrologer’s perceptions of public figures—and especially politicians—is also affected by the way that the candidate is portrayed in the specific brand of media that the astrologer consumes. So obviously, this was an issue in this election, and this is why some of the more conservative astrologers would characterize Trump positively, as this sort of transformative figure who was helping the working class man or something like that, whereas some of the liberal astrologers or other people would characterize him as literally Hitler or whatever.
A lot of it came down to—it didn’t completely come down to this, but I’m just making this as a general observation that depending on where the astrologer was getting their news, they were going to perceive that person differently and that was going to affect their interpretation of that person’s chart to some extent. So basically, either way, this results in a skewed picture of that person on multiple levels, and it’s one of the challenges of doing political astrology in modern times.
And this is important because part of the analysis of the charts involves determining how the archetypal qualities have manifested in a particular person’s life. And some of that comes down to a judgment call, and it comes down to what’s being emphasized in the person’s biography and what parts of the person’s character and motivations and their overall life narrative—what version of that is the astrologer subscribing to.
I feel pretty much on both sides of the spectrum as politics—especially in America—becomes more divided and more extreme, you end up having this sort of battle with trying to figure out who the person is that you’re trying to make a prediction about and what their actual life story or life narrative is and to sort of cut through everything, and that can be very difficult.
And this is also important, to put it really simply, because the same birth chart for Donald Trump could also be the birth chart of a turtle or something, and the concept is going to be different depending on what the creature is and what their background and upbringing has been. And this is why I go back to this whole point about part of any natal analysis involves determining how the archetypal qualities have manifested in the particular native’s life.
The same analogy could be extended to somebody who was born at the same time as Trump, but just wasn’t born into the same family or wasn’t born in the same country or what have you. They may have qualities and timelines that are similar to Trump, but the different background is going to provide a different context that emphasizes certain qualities differently. And coming to a sort of objective assessment of how the person is manifesting that quality is actually I think a really integral piece of being able to make predictions about them correctly.
And that’s one of the advantages of being able to talk to and work with a client directly and get that sort of immediate feedback about things and then form the judgment by talking to the client themselves versus one of the drawbacks about making predictions about public figures is unless you’re working with that person directly, you don’t have that sort of access. And so, there’s some level where your understanding of that person and their life narrative may be off, and it may be influenced by things that are giving you a slightly different view than you might have otherwise.
So let’s see—other points that I’ve jotted down. One of the things I’ve seen floating around the astrological community is some astrologers saying that the predictions about Hillary winning are still right or could still be right because she won the popular vote. And for the most part, I don’t think this is a very good statement or argument to make; and I’m saying that as somebody who that statement would otherwise benefit. I mean, I could attempt to take that and say, “Oh, I predicted Hillary would win, and she won the popular vote, so technically she won,” but I don’t really think that’s an accurate thing because that’s not what any of us were ultimately trying to do.
We were trying to determine who was going to be inaugurated on January 20 and who was going to be the president for the next four years, and who has the most eminent chart or timing periods that looked the most eminent during this point in time, who will ultimately become the next leader of the United States, and most of the techniques and the measurements that people were looking at were more designed to say that.
I mean, one of the points that has been made a few times already is I don’t know of any technique that could tell you who’s going to win the electoral college versus who’s going to win the popular vote; I mean, there’s some possibility. I want to acknowledge that there could be some technique, like some mundane technique or some electional technique—like inceptional astrology—that perhaps if it was very tied into the actual voting or the actual process of the votes versus the electoral college or something like that, perhaps it could show something like that about there being an issue about it being split, or there being ambiguity, or one candidate winning one and another the other—I don’t know.
I don’t know that astrology can make those kinds of distinctions. If it can, I don’t think the majority of astrologers were using a type of astrology that would have been able to make that distinction. And so, therefore, I don’t think astrologers should use that necessarily as an excuse. On the other hand, I mean, in defense of that I will say in terms of Hillary hitting the most eminent time in her life—the fact that she did win the popular vote—she’ll go down in history as the person who won the popular vote, but still lost the presidential election and did not become president. I mean, that will ultimately be on some level the most eminent period in her life.
So it’s sort of true that that’s connected to and part of her narrative and that that is something that we all picked up on in her chart, but I think that we all still miscalled it to the extent that we saw all of the indicators. And probably why many different astrologers got this wrong is because we all probably did see so many indicators of this being an eminent time, but there was a misjudgment in terms of it being an eminent time that was also incredibly difficult, in which, ultimately, the way it worked out was that she suffered a very public defeat basically.
So yeah, I wanted to mention that really briefly since that’s something that’s going on in terms of the broader community discussion of what happened. Other things that are happening, I mean, there’s a little bit of posturing from some people who got it right, and some finger-pointing and other accusations that are being thrown around.
The only thing I’ll say—because I don’t want to get too far into this—I just want to say that I don’t think it’s that classy to gloat. I mean, I think you should make note of your success and certainly have some recognition for it, but then move on. And this is one of the issues I’ve seen in the past couple of elections. This is one of the reasons why I didn’t want to keep doing this after 2012 and why I announced that I was going to get out of political astrology, because it’s really lame during even the process itself for there to be different accusations being thrown about people’s motivations and partisanship and things like that, and then the aftermath of dealing with accusations and finger-pointing and all sorts of other stuff.
Additionally, in connection with this, I mean, one of the things that I will say is that I don’t think personally that it’s impressive if somebody did this. If somebody hypothetically was hyper-partisan and was correct about predicting that their candidate—or the candidate that they prefer won, and they’re constantly throughout the course of that exalting the person who they’re predicting will win and saying negative things about the person that they don’t like, then that’s not as impressive to me; or that doesn’t come off as an impressive prediction to me.
And this goes both ways because this is something I especially noticed in the 2012 election, and I think it goes for both liberals and conservatives because there’s a tendency for both of them to do it. And I made that statement already in 2014 during my ISAR lecture and also in my 2012 roundup where I actually excluded at least two predictions—one of them was from a liberal and one of them was from a conservative—because it was just clear that they were being super over-the-top about predicting that the person that they personally preferred would win and saying that the person that the other preferred would lose.
So that’s going to be an issue when it comes to this presidential election, and I know in the aftermath of this this is already starting to happen a little bit where some people are sort of throwing up their hands in the face of seeing that so many astrologers predicted wrongly that Hillary would win. Some people are immediately jumping to the conclusion and saying, “Well, astrologers tend to be more liberal,” or something like that. And so, of course, most of the astrologers predicted Hillary would win, and therefore, got it wrong.
Part of the problem I have with that narrative and part of the reason I would caution that is I know that several of the astrologers who predicted that Hillary would win were conservatives or were people who probably—I mean, I don’t know for sure—but very likely voted for Trump. And therefore, even though there might be certain trends like that that are definitely worth noting and worth paying attention to especially in the future, I want to encourage people to be careful about adopting simplistic narratives about this stuff.
As I’ve been researching and trying to reflect on it over the past week, every time I see or every time I consider a specific narrative as the ‘silver bullet’ that covers everything and explains what happened and why everybody got it wrong, there’s always some conflicting piece of evidence that contradicts that hypothesis to some extent. And while it doesn’t completely override it as an obvious trend, I just want to caution people about making too many presumptions about things like that or looking for too simplistic answers.
So tied in with that or in relation to that one of the other issues, one of the related issues is that it’s very hard I think to ignore when both the astrology of the situation and the current narrative surrounding the candidates seem to be in agreement in indicating something and to go against that. And this is another one of those trends that’s worth noting, but at the same time, I want to be very careful about not going too far in that direction.
Hillary, for the majority of the race—I think except for one brief period over the summer when the polls got really close, and then another period towards the very end of the race where they got close again—for the most part, Hillary was the person who was leading in the polls for the majority of this election; and obviously, I think that did have some influence on some people’s predictions. I definitely think, for my part, I will say that it made it easier for me.
In that one- or two-week period when I threw together my predictions for the presidential election and was going over their charts again—and going over Hillary’s chart and looking at those eminent periods that she’s in right now and looking at Trump’s chart and seeing the major career transition takes place a year from now—it made it easier for me to not worry too much about it and not push too hard to look at all of the other charts that I could have considered for secondary and third and fourth confirmations, but instead to sort of become complicit about the primary thing that I thought that I already knew, which if the Scorpio rising chart was correct, then she’s in a very eminent period right now that would be very difficult.
But I could sort of—I don’t want to say ‘convince’ myself because I’m not going to pretend that I was totally deluded. I thought I could make that call because of her history that she would be in a very eminent period that would be subjectively difficult, and that she would probably run into major problems over the next few years and only end up having one term. I certainly made that prediction with that assumption based on the technique, but I think it made it easier the fact that that was also the mainstream narrative that most people assumed.
And that’s why election night—obviously not for everybody, but for I want to say a lot of people—was so surprising just because it was much easier for me to adopt that narrative and become complacent in it rather than push harder to do my due diligence in looking at all the charts and ‘dotting all of my I’s and crossing all of my T’s’ or what have you. That narrative from the polls and from the public perception of where that election was going, the fact that that seemed to match up with the view I had from looking at those two techniques didn’t help and it did certainly influence things.
So the general point there just in terms of the long term or the future is just that sometimes it can be hard to go against the narrative when the narrative seems to match with just the basic assumption that you’re making with certain techniques in the astrology. I mean, that’s the reason why if a few instances I will tip my hat off to a few people who did go against the narrative and predicted that Trump would win if they did a good job, and if it’s clear that they were using—that they were doing that because of the astrology rather than due to their political views. That’s when you have a truly impressive prediction.
If the assumption is that the incumbent is going to win and then all of the astrologers predict that the incumbent is going to win, that’s not always as impressive than if the polls are saying one thing, but then the astrologer or a lone astrologer predicts something else. There is a certain amount of impressiveness to that as long as that was coming from the astrology rather than from the person’s personal beliefs. And it really varies from person to person and that’s something that I ran into during the 2012 election when I put together this roundup of the 60 or 70 predictions. And one of the things that I tried to institute when I was presenting those predictions is I tried to create a ranking system to rank the predictions based on different factors.
So here are some of the ranking things that I took into account. And I’m going to mention this just because I think we need to be doing more of these types of meta-analyses of predictions in the community, but we also need to rank them because you can’t always just take a prediction at face value; not all predictions are necessarily the same.
So here are some of the ranking points that I took into account in my meta-analysis of the 2012 election. So the first one was the prominence of the prediction in the mainstream media either by being featured or cited in a news story or in an interview. So the general point there was the more prominent the prediction, the higher of a rank I would give it.
So the difference there is if somebody makes a prediction and then it ends up in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or something like that, then that’s more notable than if somebody sends a private Facebook message to a friend of theirs and says, “I predict such-and-such will happen,” and they do it privately like that; or if somebody just writes a short post on their blog and nobody ever sees it. I rank those differently because there’s a sort of intent and a sort of effort involved in having something featured more widely and being more prominent than if it’s something that’s more private and the person is not pushing to be as public.
Other than that the prominence of the prediction in the astrological community either by being featured in an astrological publication or in an astrological venue such as a conference. So actually instead of just publishing a prediction on your own blog or something like that, getting it published in a magazine, or giving a lecture on that topic, or being on a panel like I was, for example. Again, it’s a difference of intent in terms of how forward and how certain are you about this prediction that you want to put your name on the line in order to put it out there strongly versus how much are you kind of hedging a little bit by putting it out there but not too much.
Other things—how eminent or well-known the astrologer is who made the prediction either inside or outside of the astrological community, which is pretty straightforward. Like if Rob Hand makes a prediction then that’s different than if my friend Bob from Facebook makes a prediction that nobody knows.
How standard are the techniques that the person’s using versus are they using non-standard techniques that are unique to the astrologer. So that was a little bit tricky when it gets to different traditions because sometimes different traditions have different techniques that are specialized to them, but within those traditions those are mainstay or staple techniques; I brought that up in the 2012 analysis. There’s some techniques that are pretty standard in modern astrology—like transits or like secondary progressions—whereas there’s other stuff that can be a little bit weird or a little bit non-standard.
And sometimes I would run into an astrologer who was doing super, super-idiosyncratic, non-standard-type astrology so that it was almost like their own system that no one else besides that person ever used. And so, I would have a tendency to rank that lower if they were using something that was so highly non-standard or highly idiosyncratic that it wasn’t something that other people could even analyze in terms of whether it was valid or not, or whether it was something that other astrologers had used in the past as a valid technique.
The next ranking factor when I was gathering together all of those predictions in 2012 was how thoroughly the astrologer appears to have researched their prediction. Did they do a lot of research? Did they put a lot into this? Did they put together a pretty comprehensive-looking write-up or presentation, or did it look like something that the person just sort of threw together and didn’t put much work into or much effort into?
Does the person know, for example, that election day was on November 8 this year, or did they accidentally base their prediction on election day being on December 2 or something like that? At which point you might question whether the person actually prepared for this very well. Did they research the candidates’ backgrounds, or did they research other mundane factors that they’re basing their prediction on are talking about thoroughly? How thoroughly did they do that?
I mean, this is one of the ones where I’ve criticized myself in this episode—for researching this prediction less than I did in the 2012 prediction and putting less emphasis onto it. But even what I did here, there’s other astrologers that have done even less research or less preparation for it and still issued predictions and put them out there. And I don’t necessarily think if a person does minimal or almost no research for their prediction and they just throw it out based on one or two factors, I think that should be ranked lower in terms of the final tally of predictions than one that seemed to have been more thoroughly researched.
Other than that—let’s see, other factors. How far in advance was the prediction issued prior to election day? Again, that’s another one where I would dock myself points in this one because the prediction wasn’t even made until the presidential panel took place in October, which was like a month out before election day, whereas in 2012, we made sure that we issued it pretty far ahead of time as soon as we knew for sure who the two primary candidates; it would be Obama and Romney in 2012. So we issued our prediction in late April of 2012, before the November election, whereas in this election, the panelists issued their predictions in mid-October of 2016 about a month or less before election day.
Other predictions—how detailed was the write-up for the prediction? And how much research did they base their prediction on, and did they actually share? So did they actually outline everything clearly in terms of what their methodology was ahead of time, or did they just focus on the prediction itself without outlining the methodology? Again, this is another area where the ISAR panels really messed up especially on the second panel.
So we were supposed to have two eight-minute periods in order to present our predictions, and the first four minutes was supposed to be presenting our traditions and what techniques we would be using and everything else, and then the second four minutes was supposed to be presenting what the technique says and then presenting our prediction about it. So that was interesting to me and that’s part of the reason why I accepted to do the panel.
Initially, the way it was pitched and the way it was done in 2012, it was going to be more of not just getting up there and making some statement about who’s going to win, but there was actually going to be a presentation of different traditions and different astrologers who use different approaches and different techniques—outlining their techniques and their methodology to the astrological community and then making their prediction—and there being something useful about that not just in terms of the process of making a prediction and attempting to get media coverage for it or whatever, but just for the actual process of doing astrological research and different traditions sort of coming together and sharing the results.
So that kind of got axed basically at the last minute when they cut our time in half, and instead of having two four-minute segments, we just had one four-minute segment where we had to say everything. And pretty much the only time I got a chance to talk on that panel was literally opening up as the very first panelist in the first four minutes and outlining things very quickly and very basically. So of course I also decided—because I knew that going into it—to devote my 75-minute ISAR lecture to that technique of zodiacal releasing, so I could at least present one of the techniques that I was using and then outline what my methodology was in that lecture.
But nonetheless, that’s another one where I’d have to dock myself points for because if I was more committed to and more engaged in this election and doing it the right way as I had done in 2012, then I should have issued my actual prediction way back in April or something when it became clear who for sure the two primary candidates would be. But that’s just another instance of how this is really not something I was focused on most of the year, but nonetheless, I think that this criteria is important in terms of ranking predictions and how high they should be ranked in terms of how seriously people should be taking them.
And then just two more points—one of them is how clearly the astrologer stated their prediction as opposed to either being unclear or hedging. This is something that saw a bit of in the 2012 election to the extent that I actually had to create a separate category for a few astrologers who were either so unclear or hedged so much that I wasn’t even going to put them in for having predicted one or the other candidate because they clearly were either completely inconclusive, or they were trying to straddle both sides so much that it would have been wrong to say that they actually did predict the outcome for the presidential election regardless of who won.
So there’s a little bit of an issue with that in this instance where I’ve noticed that there was some hedging from some astrologers that I saw. There was at least one astrologer where they said one thing at one point and then later sort of tried to imply or sort of tried to say something different. And now, in retrospect, they seem like they may be trying to take credit for the correct statement that they made and not necessarily owning up to the incorrect statement. And there’s something a little bit off about that that has me a little bit annoyed, but that’s something that I think just as a general principle people should pay attention to when they’re analyzing the success or failure of predictions and when they’re ranking predictions ahead of time in terms of ones they should take more seriously or less seriously, just in terms of good practice in terms of making predictions in general.
So the final point that I had here on this list back in 2012—so this is still up on The Political Astrology Blog at this point—the article is titled “Astrologers Predict the 2012 Election Roundup.” So the final point was how neutral or how non-partisan the astrologer appears to be in making their prediction. And like I said, in the 2012 roundup, there were at least two astrologers whose statements and predictions were so tied up in just political statements about their preference for or their distaste for certain candidates that it was obvious that these were not neutral or non-partisan predictions. They were instead just people that had very strong political opinions that were making a prediction that had very little to do with the astrology.
So one of my issues—I know there’s going to be a lot of accusations just about astrologers having done that in this one with so many predicting Hillary, which I guess I’ve already covered and explained that there’s some issues with that. But one of the things I will say and one of the things I do say sometimes in terms of that is while this isn’t true for most astrologers, I would hope that most astrologers would be more concerned about making a public prediction that’s accurate and the implications that has for their career and their reputation in their field, or their reputation with the public; that they would be more concerned about that than they are about making a prediction that matches or is in accord with their personal political preferences.
So while it’s true that doesn’t always happen and there’s issues with that within the astrological community, in my mind, or at least for me in terms of my motivations that’s what’s more important for me, because if you didn’t do that then you end up with instances where if you predict just based on who you want to win, then you might end up being wrong if you’re ignoring what the astrology actually says; yeah, and that’s just a general thing.
Anyway, so back to my list of the final points. Watching the reactions of some astrologers has been interesting. One completely unrelated point is that watching the reactions of some astrologers has been interesting immediately after the election. I mean, some people—I noticed pretty immediately—were sort of mad specifically at the ISAR panelists in particular, presumably since that group got the most attention most recently for their predictions and in terms of press coverage and everything else, and because both panels unanimously predicted that Hillary would win, both the international panel at the beginning of the conference of I think five astrologers and the closing panel at the end.
So one of the things that people have said and one of the accusations that’s being made that goes along with that is the idea of, “Thanks a lot, guys, for making us all look like idiots for representing the astrological community poorly because you all got the prediction wrong.” And it’s interesting for me being in that position or being on the other side of that fence in this instance because I think anyone who’s listened to this podcast long enough will know that I’m normally the first of many people to be overly concerned about astrology’s PR problems, being deeply concerned about it, but also just deeply aware of how bad something like this looks or could look in terms of how the general public views astrology.
So that’s not something I’m unsympathetic to in terms of that criticism and that being directed towards either the ISAR panelists or towards astrologers in general who ventured to make a prediction at this point. One of the other criticisms was making the prediction based on not very stable data, especially, for example, with Hillary where her true birth time is unknown and some of us then who used the birth charts based it on a speculative time.
And in retrospect now, it does look like that was a terrible move to make, that was probably unwise and not recommended on my part, either because I got it wrong or even if I got the right chart, it may have been misinterpreted. But nonetheless, as a general practice, it was probably a bad idea to use a rectified chart to base that sort of prediction on. I mean, we are going to have a question in the future of if we run into elections where there’s no birth charts for anybody—or at least birth times—what do we do and are any predictions made. I mean, that’s sort of besides the point. Anyway, back to the point about astrology’s PR.
Usually, I would be the first one to be sort of on the bandwagon about that. But in reflecting about it this week, one of the things that I will say is one of the ‘silver linings’ that I will put out there—and I don’t think this is the complete answer, but it’s something that at least has giving me a little bit of solace given some of my feelings about political astrology over the past few years, especially given the reason why I publicly announced that I was getting out of it in 2014. Part of the ‘silver lining’ here is that all of us getting it wrong so publicly in this election, one of the positive side effects of that one could argue is that politicians potentially will continue to not take astrology seriously; which arguably, when it comes to politicians, I think one could argue would be more of positive thing rather than a negative thing.
And this was something I was talking to Austin about the other night, and he referred to this as astrology having this sort of ‘twilight’ role in society, and it’s something I’ve talked with Demetra George about a lot because this is something that she really argues very strong as well and I always felt ambivalent about. But when it comes to political astrology, I’ve sort of come around to over the past few years this notion that astrology plays this weird ‘in-between’ role in society where it’s opposed by a lot of different groups.
It’s opposed typically by religious groups; it’s opposed by scientific groups, so it’s neither endorsed by religion nor science. Politicians sometimes historically have taken it seriously. But typically, in those periods in which they do—as I said at the beginning of this episode—when they do, they usually either try to use it to manipulate or use it for propaganda, or they try to suppress it because it’s not something where you can control the message or the narrative sometimes. In either instance, historically, there have been different periods in history where astrology and politics coming together has not worked out very well for the astrologers and sometimes has led to astrology getting outlawed or getting banned, or astrologers getting in serious trouble and getting their books burned.
So my point here is just that on some level while this might sound like an excuse on my part, if you go back and listen to my ISAR 2014 lecture, you’ll hear me basically saying the same thing, which is expressing concerns about if politicians do start taking astrology more seriously that it’s probably not going to be good for the astrological community, and explaining that that’s basically part of the reason why I’m going to stay out of the 2016 election—which I think went back on and unfortunately didn’t do.
So the only thing I’ll say is while I generally apologize myself, genuinely, to whatever extent this reflects negatively on the astrological community, I will say that there’s some small piece in terms of my own personal opinion where this makes me sort of breathe a sigh of relief slightly more. Because if it was the opposite end of the spectrum—if you imagine all of the astrologers had gotten it correct and all the pollsters had been wrong—while that is the ideal scenario that we all kind of dream of and we all kind of assume is possible and on many levels, it could have happened if things were cleaner in this election and we were just working with very straight, unambiguous birth times, sort of like in the 2012 election where we just had birth records for both of them.
While that’s a great idea and it would have looked really good for a brief period of time as a sort of historical moment and as a touchstone where all the astrologers got it right and everybody else in the world got it wrong, the flip side of that coin would have been that in four years—in the 2020 election—you would have seen a lot of propaganda pieces being written using astrology, you would have seen a lot of astrologers working for different political campaigns in order to push different narratives and in order to push different things, some of which you might personally believe in and other things you might strongly not believe in. I mean, you would have seen a lot of different ways in which astrology would have gotten perverted and used in ways that you otherwise might not think are so great.
So in terms of just trying to have some optimism over what is otherwise clearly an abysmal failure on the part of the community, and a sort of mishap or disaster that’s very embarrassing, I at least want to put some optimistic or slightly positive note on that in terms of one ‘silver lining’ that might be good. Yeah, I could keep talking about that and go into that a little bit more in terms of my thoughts on that, but I think that’s sufficient for now, especially since this is turning into an extremely long episode.
So other ‘silver linings’—one of the really funny ‘silver linings’ or lessons for me that was really hilarious over the past week in a kind of depressing way is that my transits/astrology right now—especially on election day—were pretty amazing, and that’s interesting to me; amazing in a really bad way where it looked like I was having really terrible transits at that time. And this is something I noticed months ago, but I sort of thought to myself, “Surely, that doesn’t mean I’m going to get it wrong, the fact that I have terrible transits that are going to go exact right about the time that the decision about the outcome of the election becomes known.” And I was sort of like, “Sure, that’s not it,” but here’s what it was.
So my birthday was on November 1—so it was about a week before election day—and I switched into a 9th house profection year. So my 9th house started to be active for the entirety of this year; the 9th house of course has always traditionally been associated with astrology and with divination, but also with just the general process of forecasting and prophecy and prediction in general.
So one of the things that’s interesting about that is my 9th house in whole sign houses, Libra gets activated. So my 9th house is ruled by Venus, which natally is placed at 15°20’ of Sagittarius. And the planet that clicked over and moved into exactly 15°20’ of Sagittarius on Wednesday, November 9—right when the outcome of the presidential election became known to everybody—was Saturn.
So Saturn moved into 15°20’ of Sagittarius exactly on Wednesday, the 9th—in the immediate aftermath of the election, within hours of the outcome becoming known—and then exactly conjoined the ruler of the year for me, which is the most important planet over the course of this year, and suddenly, I’m having a really not-great Saturn transit to the ruler of my 9th house of astrology and prediction and prophecy and everything else.
So there were a couple of other transits that were interesting as well. Of course one of the ones that everybody was paying attention to on Tuesday night was that Mars was going to ingress into Aquarius on election night. So it had been in Capricorn for a while and then it was going to move into Aquarius later that night, around midnight, everybody knew.
And when the election itself became really tense in terms of the electoral college votes starting to roll and tending towards Trump later in the night more and more, a lot of my friends on Facebook—a lot of my liberal friends—were all hoping that as soon as Mars went into Aquarius that suddenly the momentum would shift and that Hillary would come from behind and still win somehow, even though it kept looking worse and worse for her. But instead, what happened is that Mars ingressed into Aquarius and then not too long after that—basically within an hour or two—I think the election ended up being called for Trump; or at least it became fully clear that Trump had won the election.
So that Mars ingress is interesting of course; it’s interesting in terms of the candidates. I mean, it ingressed into different houses depending on what charts they had of course, and that’s always been one of my arguments for whole sign houses. Sometimes when a planet ingresses into a new sign, you can see this immediate shift of energy into the sphere of life or the area of life indicated by that house. And sometimes if it’s a difficult planet that can just indicate negative things in general becoming more prominent in that area of life for the person.
So anyway, one of the things that was just funny about that is I have Aquarius rising. So Mars ingressed into Aquarius and into my 1st whole sign house the night of the presidential election as we’re basically watching the returns come in, and then suddenly it becomes clear that I messed up the prediction. So I had those two negative transits and then on top of that, the next day, on Wednesday, the transiting Sun exactly conjoined my natal Saturn.
So the interesting takeaway from that that I thought was kind of informative—even if I got it wrong and it’s otherwise very depressing and embarrassing or what have you—one of the interesting things is just the prospect or the idea that sometimes you might be able to tell when an astrologer is going to predict incorrectly. And there is actually some precedent for this in some Indian and Hellenistic texts, especially in Indian astrology.
They actually have a system to some extent for this—for being able to know when in general the person’s judgment might not be that good, but also specific periods when the person might have not-good judgments about making predictions or doing divination or what have you. But this is one of the first times that I’ve actually seen that happen really blatantly in front of me in my own chart and been able to feel it in this very sort of visceral way in the surprise of election day that happened on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning with transiting Saturn exactly conjoining the lord of the year that day.
So there’s other things related to that but I’ll just leave it. I’ve already made the point about there’s some cool stuff in secondary progressions that I’m just now hearing. Anthony Louis pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s progressed Sun and Mercury exactly conjoined in October. So she had a progressed Mercury cazimi in mid-October if the Scorpio rising chart is correct; whereas if the 8:00 PM chart is correct, then it would have been earlier this year in April when she was locking up the primary.
There’s a bunch of cool secondary progressed things that I didn’t really look into prior to this election, and that’s one thing, as I said, that this election has done, is it’s sort of reignited my interest in at least checking out secondary progressions every once in a while because there was some cool stuff like that. I also noticed—I don’t know if anyone else has pointed this out—that Trump’s secondary progressed chart basically looks like Bill Clinton’s chart at this point, which is kind of weird. And then of course the whole thing about Trump’s secondary progressed Sun conjoining his Ascendant was all very interesting, and I’m sure there’s many other points like that.
Let’s see—final point that I wanted to get to before I close this down. There needs to be more meta-analysis of community predictions. So I did mine in 2012, and I couldn’t find any earlier instances of that, so I don’t know if it’s really been done before. For this election obviously I didn’t do it again, and so that’s part of my hesitation to and inability to do a full meta-analysis of what happened and what went wrong with this election; I didn’t personally collect those predictions ahead of time like I did in 2012.
However, as I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, Scottish astrologer Mark Cullen did do a roundup of predictions, and he’s done the only roundup of predictions that I know of this year. He’s been updating it—he updated it just a couple of days ago—in a thread on the SkyScript forums. That’s at SkyScript.co.uk in their forum section, and then in the mundane section of the forum. You should be able to find a locked thread that has Mark’s roundup of presidential predictions. And I think I’ll probably link to it in the description page for this episode.
So I think that’s really important for a number of different reasons. Obviously, it keeps us honest and it provides a running track of who got it right and who got it wrong, which I think is useful on a number of different levels. It also helps us to understand what techniques are being used in the community, and it helps us to study those techniques and see how they’re being used and have data on how well they’re working, but also certain ways that they’re being applied if they weren’t used correctly, or if there’s a way that it could have been done better. Being able to study the track records of different astrologers is really helpful.
So my hat’s off to Mark for doing that this year. I mean, if any of these astrological organizations actually did astrological research—despite that being their namesake—then they should be doing something like that already and actually funding research like that in order to collect different predictions by astrologers so that we could sort of grow and learn from them as a community.
The purpose of my roundup four years ago was not to shame anyone. I felt bad that some people were deleting their predictions afterwards due to embarrassment or whatever and I understand why they did that—and that’s really not the point. The point is just to sort of grow and learn as a community by looking at our past history. And unless we collect that history and document it, then we can’t do that, and we can’t have that process of introspection and self-reflection, so that’s part of what I’m doing with this episode and what I hoped to have accomplished.
I would definitely recommend checking out Mark. I think he’s going to do a write-up about it at some point. I do wish that he had applied something like a ranking system to it and that there had been more details surrounding the predictions like I did in 2012. And I’m a little bit cautious about how some of those predictions are going to be interpreted because they’re not ranked as a result of that.
And I think that without some of that ranking and some of that sorting in order to gauge the predictions that somebody had put a lot more effort into versus the predictions that were just kind of ‘blow-off’ predictions that somebody posted in afternoon or something on their blog—I think without distinguishing between those there’s a little bit less value to it or usefulness. There’s the potential for some not-great conclusions to be drawn from it—for people to draw the wrong conclusion. But nonetheless, I think it’s a great community thing that he did, and I fully support and recommend that people check it out. So thanks to Mark for doing that.
All right, well, I think that brings me to the end of this episode. Let’s see—final words—I meant to mention I’m going to be recording an addendum to my ZR lecture, and I’ll send it to those who bought it, so keep an eye out for that. What else? Yeah, I think that’s it. So I hope that I’ve outlined everything clearly. I hope I’ve explained where I was coming from and what my shortcomings were.
One of my immediate reactions to this—it was funny that I got into this election of course after I stopped writing The Political Astrology Blog and after I gave the lecture at ISAR saying in 2014 that I was retiring from political astrology and wasn’t going to do it again. It’s funny that I got back into it and got it wrong, partially because I thought it was going to be easier, and because the surface level of the techniques seem to be more straightforward in terms of what I thought was going to be a win for her and that seemed to match the trends of where it was going. It seemed like it was going to be an easy call and then I could just get out of doing political astrology. So it’s ironic in that it would look good on my resume or something like that.
And so, it’s ironic now in retrospect that it’s in fact the exact opposite, and I’m now one-for-one with having gotten the last election in 2012 and having totally missed this one in 2016. I mean, I’m still back to where I was previously in 2014 in terms of probably not getting back into political astrology and this not being something that I’m going to be doing publicly in the future if I have any good sense.
I mean, I’m hoping that in three or four years that I don’t suddenly get the urge to vindicate myself by coming back and getting it right next time. Because while that would be nice on a sort of personal level, I think the downsides that would come along with that in terms of some of the concerns I had about astrologers being involved in politics should probably outweigh everything else.
Nonetheless, I hope that this review of what happened and where I went wrong with my techniques and my methodology is useful to other people who do want to look into astrology and politics—even if they just want to do that personally, for themselves, or personally in terms of improving their own techniques and approach to astrology—to sort of learn from my mistakes.
And that’s I think really the primary thing that I wanted to do with this episode, in addition to just coming clean and being open about what happened and sort of owning it and putting it out there. So I hope other people are able to learn from that and it will help you to become better astrologers and help us as a community to become better collectively.
All right, I think that’s a good point to end on. I’ll probably remember something else later that I forgot to include, but I think three-and-a-half-hours is a sufficiently long podcast episode. So for anybody who listened to this, thanks for listening. Thanks for bearing with me. Thanks for listening through this entire series of election episodes over the past few months. So thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.