The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 94, titled:
Astrology Forecast for December 2016
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on November 23, 2016
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released November 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Tuesday, November 22, 2016, at 1:28 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 94th episode of the show. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and for information about how to support the show and support the production of future episodes, please see our website at theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees about the astrological forecast for December 2016. So, hey, guys, welcome back to the show.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey, Chris.
CB: Hey. All right, so it’s been an uneventful month. I don’t know if any major events have happened since we talked last.
KS: Pretty quiet.
CB: Hopefully, we’ll find something to talk about in this episode. Let’s see, before we get started, a few announcements. So this is the fourth episode since our last drawing. So it’s actually time for another drawing and to announce the winners of the October and November patron giveaway that we host every four episodes, either once a month or every four episodes. So our prizes this month—we actually have some really cool ones—the first one is a free copy of the astrology software program called Delphic Oracle, which is specifically designed for Hellenistic and Medieval astrology. And it’s the program that I use in order to calculate all of the time-lord techniques—like zodiacal releasing and profections and other things—that I use, so I was really excited to have them as a sponsor this month. You can find out more information about that program at astrologyxfiles.com. So the program’s really awesome. Let’s see, let me pull a name out of the hat and see who the winner of this month’s drawing is. And the winner is patron Ricardo Carmona. Yeah, Ricardo Carmona, who is actually a student in my Hellenistic course, and who’s a pretty good traditional astrologer. So I don’t know if he has the program already. But if he doesn’t, then he just won a free copy of Delphic Oracle. So congratulations to Ricardo. Just send me an email, and I’ll give you more information about how to get access to the program.
And then our other prize this month is a pass to the upcoming NCGR astrology conference that’s taking place in February, in Baltimore, just a few months from now, in February 2017. So the NCGR conference—this is gonna be basically the biggest conference of the year. There’s gonna be several hundred astrologers in attendance. There’s over 60 speakers. There’s also a bunch of pre- and post-conference workshops. The title of the conference is “The Many Faces of Astrology,” and the focus is the diversity of the astrological tradition, as well as the many different applications of astrology. That’s the name, “The Many Faces of Astrology.” So it’s gonna be an awesome conference. It’s being hosted by an awesome organization, which is the National Council for Geocosmic Research, and it’s gonna be in sunny Baltimore in February. So let’s see who the winner is. So the winner from the $10 tier of patrons—for the free pass for the NCGR conference—is patron and listener Barbara Willis. So Barbara has been a patron for a few months now. So congratulations on winning the pass to the NCGR conference. Please send me an email in order to collect your prize, and I’ll give you information about how to get your free pass to the conference.
All right, so that’s our monthly or bi-monthly giveaway for patrons of the show, which are people that sign up to support the show either on the $5 or $10 tier through Patreon. We’re still working out the prizes for next month’s giveaway. But if you’d like to be eligible for that, then just sign up to become a patron on the $5 or $10 tier and then you’ll automatically be entered into the drawing. And when people do that, it helps to support the show, and it helps me to continue to expand and improve it by buying microphones for guests, or, hopefully, starting to divert some money in order to have some more interesting and more frequent episodes, and so on and so forth. All right, so that’s it for that. Let’s get onto our discussion this month. So, as I said earlier, not much has happened in the past month. What’s been going on with you guys?
KS: Personally, I’ve been super busy traveling. I’ve been to a couple of events and things like that, astro-wise, so that’s been a lot of fun. But it’s been a really full month. I would say I feel very stretched, and I’m kinda looking forward to coming into the home stretch for this year, without mentioning the elephant in the room.
CB: You’ve actually been traveling?
KS: Yeah, I just got home on Saturday from a couple of days in New York. And prior to that, I was at the SOTA astrology conference.
CB: Oh, yeah. How was that?
KS: Yeah, it was really good. It’s a small conference, just in Buffalo, which is just across the border from where I am in Toronto. And it’s lots of fun. It’s great, some really fun people. You get to mix really well with everyone. So it was good. It’s lots of fun.
CB: Awesome. Cool. Yeah, that sounds like a great conference. And then you’ll be in Baltimore in February, right?
KS: Correct. Yes. I’ll be in Australia in January and early February, but I will be back for Baltimore. As you said, ‘sunny’ Baltimore in February.
CB: ‘Sunny’ Baltimore in February. Well, we’ll all be very warm inside. Sometimes the downside of conferences is you don’t get out of the hotel much. But if you’re in Baltimore in February, that’s not necessarily gonna be a bad thing.
KS: That’s what I’ve been telling people who were worried about the weather. I’m like we’ll be inside, just come and join us. There’ll be plenty of excuses to have a red wine at the bar after classes are done for the day.
CB: Right. I mean, it’s not like the workshops are held in the pool area outside anyway, or that people are trying to work on their tans while they’re attending astrology lectures. You’re like inside a hotel 90% of the time with these things anyway.
KS: Yes.
CB: Yeah, it should be fun. Austin, you have not been traveling. You’ve been slaving away on the column, haven’t you?
AC: Yeah. Basically, yeah, I’ve been working on writing. I’ve actually managed to steal a few hours to work on little fiction projects. I keep telling myself that I’m going to get fiction projects done and never doing it. And I realize that I just need to steal an hour every now and then, even if it’s only two hours a week or whatever. So, yeah, writing the column, trying to make sense of the big story as it is unfolding, and doing readings, teaching classes.
CB: Awesome. That sounds very good and productive and making progress and steps.
AC: Keeping up, at least.
CB: Yeah, it’s good to get by and keep moving forward. Yeah, I haven’t been that productive this month, cuz it’s been a really weird month, frankly. I mean, a lot of it had to do with the election and this curveball that that represented, both in terms of the general surprise on a world level that I think many people experienced, but also the personal surprise of messing up my prediction and being bummed out about that and trying to figure out what happened in retrospect. I know that this wasn’t something that we talked about a lot on the podcast, cuz it wasn’t our main focus, but I know there were a few statements made at different points over the year. Have you guys done any reflecting on that? Or what was your reaction?
AC: Yeah, I have a few technical points which I realize that I missed. So I didn’t issue any predictions. I didn’t really get into everybody’s charts. You know, I looked at the charts and I thought about how they characterize the candidates’ personalities and some of their life stories, but I didn’t push it to a predictive level. Nonetheless, I was really surprised by the results. You and several other astrologers—whose work I really respect—had a different answer than life did this time, and I was looking at it and I was also thinking about the general tenor of the times. You know, one of the things that we have been saying on here is that, okay, once Jupiter gets into Libra, then Jupiter’s gonna be in this sweet mutual reception with Saturn and things will cohere, solidify, become more peaceful or mellow, and as far as the tenor of the times go, I feel like that’s pretty dead wrong. I’m absolutely seeing the Jupiter in Libra trying to happen, and I see it happening in little ways in people’s lives. But as far as the collective goes, I would have to cheat like crazy to say that that’s what’s been happening, and so I was looking at what I missed. Chris, I think we spoke privately about this last week. You know, I kept feeling like there was some sort of secret Uranus transit happening.
CB: Right.
AC: Uranus has this ability to shock and awe and sometimes create trauma by changing things too quickly, or changing situations, expectations, etc., etc. You know, it’s not the bold move in the game, it’s flipping the game table upside down.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, there are a series of oppositions between Jupiter and Uranus coming up, but they haven’t happened yet, and so that can’t be it. And so, I was looking at what the planets are doing and what they’ve been doing, and in the middle of November, Neptune stationed direct atop the South Node, which was a really interesting moment of—we talked about this last month—needing to rewrite stories or rethink personal narratives. And it was interesting cuz it ended up being about rewriting narratives and ‘how did this happen’ for a lot of people, and so it was much bigger than I thought. But I was looking at that, and I just talked about antiscia in one of my classes. And I was just looking at the chart of where things are, and I realized that Uranus and Neptune have been in perfect contra-antiscia, on and off, for a lot of this year, and Uranus was in a perfect contra-antiscia to Neptune at that moment. And for people who aren’t familiar with antiscia or contra-antiscia, they’re basically special aspects which have been part of the astrological tradition for a very long time. You can see them in Hellenistic texts. They’re very clear in Firmicus, for example, and what they’re supposed to do is they’re supposed to act as strongly as oppositions and conjunctions. And so, if you apply this rule, and you look at these things, they’re basically special weird aspects that have an extremely tight orb. But if you look at this you have an antiscial opposition between Uranus and Neptune within a degree, right in the middle of November—actually for all of November—and suddenly the symbolism started making a little bit more sense. You know, if you imagined Uranus being capable of opposing Neptune, you have a shock. You have storylines disrupted. You have the sense of waking from a dream or falling asleep, or finding yourself in a surreal dream world rather than your normal world, and so that helped get me there. And that’s been on and off all year. I started thinking about the election results, and it really felt like a Joker card was played, or a wild card. I felt like everyone was counting cards. Well, three of the 4’s have been played, two of the 5’s are out, and there were all these extremely reasonable expectations of the way things would go, but I feel like we, and other people, weren’t entirely understanding that the deck was loaded with Jokers this time. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that that’s been happening all year.
CB: Right.
AC: You know, there have been events which upset expectations. And I think I was so focused on the Mars cycle for a lot of the year—with the blatant conflicts that it brought—that I missed some of that seeming randomness or that upset of expectations which Uranus brings. You know, what’s funny is I guess two things as far as the Joker card, of course Trump is a Sun-Uranus conjunction—Sun-Uranus-North Node conjunction in his chart—so he’s very natally-disposed to play that role. And I started thinking about the clown sightings, the scary clown sightings that people have been reporting all over the United States for months.
KS: Very good, Austin.
AC: Yeah, I was like, “Oh, my God, I missed the omen,” right? You know, what’s funny is there’s a reader and teacher by the name of Jason Miller who does some astrological magic and some other things, and he was asked what he thought about the presidency—I don’t know, gosh—towards the beginning of the year. And he did a tarot spread on it, just one card for each candidate, and the card he drew for Trump was The Fool. The Fool is also the Joker, the Fool is the wild card, and The Fool is also very regularly associated with Uranus. The Fool doesn’t know what the story’s gonna be, he’s unprepared, and maybe his story is a surprise to other people as well. And Jason called Trump based on that.
KS: Wow.
AC: And he didn’t like it and tried really hard not to believe it as far as I can tell. That was not his desire.
KS: Preference, yeah.
AC: But, yeah, it was just a really, really quick, simple reading. To me, that was interesting cuz that was the significator, and I feel like that Uranus/Fool/Joker/surprise complex was the hidden factor. I mean, gosh, if we’d sat down and thought about that, and took antiscia seriously and said that, okay, there’s gonna be a Uranus-Neptune opposition on and off all year within degree, we would have interpreted that. And personally, I think I noticed that, but I wasn’t sure if antiscia actually applied to collective matters. I know it matters in natal charts.
KS: Natal charts, yeah.
AC: Yeah.
KS: Yeah, so interesting, Austin. I love that ‘clown’ piece. I’ve had some thoughts of course since the election, reflecting on my own practice. Like you, Austin, I didn’t make a public prediction or anything. I don’t know, in hindsight, I know I was so biased for who I wanted to win for a variety of reasons. But also, I was so repulsed by many of the things that came out from Trump’s side through the campaign that I almost had a visceral reaction to looking at his chart, which of course is not conducive to doing good predictive work. It was like, “I can’t even look at this thing.” So the only thing I did in advance of the election was I took a look at the temperaments. So Trump’s temperament—using that Medieval-type technique—and assuming the 8:00 AM time for Hillary’s temperament. And there was a quote—I think Romney made this quote much earlier in the year that Trump doesn’t have the right temperament to be president, which got my ‘astro’ wheels turning, and that made me wonder what his temperament was. So I had a little look and he’s sort of a pure choleric type. And while the US tends to elect choleric, dominant presidents—Barack is a choleric dominant, as was George Bush—those two previous presidents have a very strong secondary temperament which tempers or kind of modifies the choleric, whereas in Trump’s case, he is sort of this pure choleric type. In a number of ways, the fact is you can consider it and it sort of keeps coming back, so I was really just looking at is this temperament well-suited to the roles or the responsibility of the presidency. And so, that was an interesting thing to think about.
And some of the descriptions of choleric in the traditional texts, I mean, they talk about the hair that is sort of an orange or a ruddy color and skin that is orange or yellow. I mean, ‘flaxen’ is the word that they use, so that was really interesting to think about. And then in hindsight, of course many of us are reflecting—because so many astrologers did call for Hillary, I guess there are two things there. One, I also clarified my own ignorance, again, of the American political system. You know, it’s not as simple as people vote and the outcome is the result, because the electoral college actually dominates. And then the fixed stars—based on the chart we have for Trump—he does have Regulus right on his ascendant. You know, I was like, “Ah, duh.” It’s one of what we call our ‘royal stars’—and there are only four of them—and they are considered to be literally trump cards. Which means that if you have a dominant or a prominent royal star in your chart—and Regulus would arguably be the most powerful of the four royal stars—having it on your ascendant would make it incredibly prominent. It’s like any competition or battle you go into, the other person is going to at least need to have what you have to try and better you. So that was an interesting point of reflection I had. I’m like, gosh, that would have been something to think about, because I don’t think any of the birth times that are tossed around for Hillary would put fixed stars in such a prominent place for her. So when we think back to the primaries and how Trump seemed to blow everyone else out of the water, that, to me, seems a little bit like that Regulus energy at work, that nobody could come near him, I guess. So that was just something that I had been sitting with since the election. You know, it’s good learning on all fronts, I think.
CB: That’s a really good point. And actually I meant to mention that in the last episode—where I did my review of what I overlooked—and that Regulus thing’s really important and it was widely noted. But one point that I wanted to make about that is that I’d been leaning more towards the Virgo rising chart. The minute that he was recorded in, the first half of the minute, it’s Leo rising, and then the second half of the minute, it’s Virgo rising. And I’m not gonna make a hard argument right now, even though I’m leaning towards Virgo rising. But one of the things that I think would be interesting is, if he was Virgo rising, remember, just a few years—it was only like four or five years ago—all the astrologers were talking and there was a lot of emphasis and a lot of lectures being given on how the fixed star Regulus had just ingressed into Virgo.
KS: Yes.
CB: It had just moved into, due to precession, the very first degree of Virgo a few years ago, around 2011. And what’s actually really funny about that is that’s the point at which Trump started gearing up to run for the presidency.
KS: Oh, that’s interesting.
CB: Take that as you will. But it’s just one of those things where, again, there’s some ambiguity to me. Even though I understand the arguments for the Leo rising time and why many of us took that for granted—and why I certainly took that for granted over the past year—sometimes it might be hard to tell the difference between somebody with 29 Leo rising and Mars conjunct the ascendant in Leo versus somebody with 0 Virgo rising and Mars still conjunct the ascendant in Leo. There can be such overlap between those that sometimes it might be hard to tell the difference between the two.
KS: Yeah, that’s a really good point, Chris. And actually I was just looking at some various stuff on YouTube recently, and there’s an old interview with Trump and Melania they did with—I can’t think of the guy’s name. The really old guy. I hope I’m not insulting anyone here.
CB: Oh, like Larry King?
KS: Larry—yes. Like he was really, really old. Mature, shall we say. Experienced. And it was just after Melania and Trump got married, and they were asked, “What did you do for your honeymoon?” And the response was, “We stayed home,” and Trump was saying a few different things about, “Why would we travel? We’ve got this big, beautiful estate in Florida.” And one of the points that he makes is that it’s clean.
CB: Right.
KS: And that would kind of give you a little bit of the Virgo rising, cuz they would really care about that.
CB: Well, yeah. And some people actually don’t know that, but an interesting and quirky personality trait he has is he’s kind of germaphobic. And he doesn’t like shaking hands apparently. There’s like a few other little things like that, that are things that automatically, to an astrologer, would make you associate with Virgo. But it’s just so much of the past year what we’ve seen has been the fiery rhetoric and all of this other stuff that’s been much more fiery and much more ‘Mars-y’, as well as many Leo-type traits. I’m not gonna underplay that either. But one of the things I just keep replaying in my head is whether there could be little things like that that we don’t know, that are little personality traits, that would tie it much more closely to a Virgo rising ascendant rather than Leo rising. So that’s still something I’m looking into.
KS: Yeah, plenty of food for thought for both candidates, I guess.
CB: Sure. I mean, one of the points that’s worth talking about here—and I didn’t really get into it as much in the last episode. I ended up talking for like three-and-a-half hours. I should have had one of you guys there in order to cut me off at some point.
KS: To rein you in a bit.
CB: Right. Just going through all the things that were going through my head over the week after the election and where I may have gone wrong, and the issues with the birth times, and the fact that I may have been using the wrong birth chart for both candidates, and so on and so forth. But one of the things that both of you just brought up that I didn’t get into as much is just one of the things that a lot of people in the astrological community—or a lot of commenters or observers—have immediately raised was issues of bias in the astrological community of why did so many astrologers predict for Hillary, if Hillary ended up losing and the many different reasons for that. But one of the points that I didn’t get into as much—I remember, Austin, you mentioning it at one point this summer where you said, “I don’t think that by October or November it’s even gonna be close.” And there was this general assumption amongst the media and amongst most observers that—
AC: Well, amongst pretty much every pollster.
CB: Yeah, all of the polls.
AC: It wasn’t even close, according to the polls.
CB: Right. So, outwardly. That’s one of the issues with things like this panel—the ISAR panel—that’s gotten a lot of attention—or at least in the astrological community it comes up, because it was one of the more recent things, outwardly it didn’t look plausible that Trump would win due to polls. So it was like you would have to have seen something in the charts that strongly went against that that indicated that Trump would win, and that was actually a legitimate piece of bias that I think a lot of us had. I mean, there’s some astrologers who were trying to say in retrospect that they privately thought that Trump would win, but they publicly predicted Hillary. I don’t know the truth of that. I’m a little uneasy about that as precedent to set. Nonetheless, just a few weeks before the election—when everybody got together for the panels or other astrologers predicted things—there was this presumption that this was already a done deal. And so, that’s one of the reasons in my last episode I emphasized how I didn’t put much effort into this and that was one of my biggest mistakes. But what was connected with that is I didn’t put that much effort into this, and it looked like it was overwhelmingly going in Hillary’s favor. When I glanced at the chart and saw that in the zodiacal releasing periods for this hypothetical and perhaps not even correct time, she was in the highest part of her career, but it looked like it would be difficult. I just assumed she would get in, but then have a bad time. And in retrospect, obviously, that narrative is completely different now.
AC: Actually it may be right that this was the high point in her career.
CB: Well, no, it’s totally right. It was the high point.
KS: Of course it is. Running for president, whether you win or lose. Same with Al Gore.
AC: It just didn’t look how you expected it to look.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there was a completely different interpretation to that that turned out to be the case, that makes sense. It’s just I want people to understand how you could’ve miscalled that, and how there was bias going into it, but it’s because astrologers—even though perhaps they shouldn’t—do sometimes have to take into account other considerations that are going on in the world around them. But sometimes that can actually mislead them in certain instances, and this was definitely one of those instances.
AC: Also, I feel like we could go into—
[crosstalk]
KS: I have segue.
AC: I just have one parting thought that I don’t think is easily soluble. So when you’re looking for the winner, ideally, you’re looking for the person who wins the electoral college. But Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a pretty good margin.
KS: 1.7 million and counting, I think.
AC: Like that’s not small. You know, astrology—it’s not like we have a technique for the electoral college and a technique for the popular vote, and we compare those two. There’s an additional layer of complexity/monkey wrench there. In United States history, Chris, do you know if we’ve ever had such a discrepancy between the two? Because Trump won the electoral college by a huge margin. A huge margin, as it were. And Hillary won the popular vote by a good margin as well. Neither was particularly close.
CB: Right. I mean, Bush versus Gore in 2000, the difference was only like 400,000 votes. So we’re already over a million votes. This is definitely the biggest.
AC: It’s over a million-and-a-half actually now. Or at least that’s what I’ve read.
CB: It’s over a million more than it was with Bush versus Gore. So, yeah, it’s the biggest spread in terms of that. But at the same time one of the things that’s a little annoying to me is I am seeing some discussion in the ISAR community, and in part of their official press releases they’re putting out for this, they’re a little bit like, “Oh, we still called it because she won the popular vote.” That’s a little bit sketchy to me. As I said in the last episode, that’s something that would benefit me, theoretically, if I was to pretend that I still somehow called it because Hillary won the election according to the popular vote. Like that’s not what hardly anybody was attempting to predict.
AC: No. Also, you don’t get that trophy, but you do get the ‘integrity’ trophy for looking at how you got it wrong, how that might have happened, and looking at all of the different factors. The ‘integrity’ trophy is considerably more enduring than that one ‘I was right’ trophy.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s really important. And it actually really worries me—some of the statements that are being issued in the ISAR newsletter in the past couple of weeks—because they are trying to spin it in a more positive way. And I don’t think that’s healthy or useful as a community because if we don’t recognize this as a major problem, or that there were many issues surrounding a lot of the predictions and a lot of astrologers got it wrong, then we’re not gonna really learn from this and grow from it.
AC: Yeah. You know, I was talking to a colleague of mine who had also made a prediction about this and had gotten it wrong. We were talking about being wrong publicly and the conversation wound around to the way that people tend to view astrologers. In that, astrologers are doing something that is, by most accounts, sort of impossible or magical if you’re coming from outside the astrological perspective. I feel like the viewpoint on what we’re doing skews either towards nonsense or omniscience, that we’re all-knowing or we’re totally full of crap. And neither of those is the case, right? That’s not how astrology works, but people, especially from the outside, it’s like they can’t look directly at astrology because it’s complicated and weird and doesn’t fit in their worldview, and so it skews into one of these directions. And being able to discuss what happened publicly, or being able to discuss being wrong publicly—and being able to be wrong and still be a good astrologer who’s right about a ton of other stuff—people need to see that, because that’s how it actually is.
CB: Right. Amongst actual practitioners, when we talk to each other and actually research, or what the actual process of researching and growing as a practitioner in this field is actually about.
AC: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah. So I guess part of that is having those conversations more openly in order to change the perception of what we’re doing and being more straightforward about that. I mean, that’s part of the reason I used as the cover image for my last episode a picture of some guy looking into a crystal ball or something like that and looking surprised, just because it’s one extreme end of that spectrum of what it’s assumed that astrologers are doing when they say that they do astrology. Yeah, I mean, I tried to articulate that in the last episode, where I was talking about astrology as forecasting or something like that. I don’t usually like to frame it purely as ‘forecasting’. But in terms of the process of looking at many different possible signatures or data points, and trying to tabulate all of that in order to figure out the overall direction that things are headed—in the same that some stock market analysts, some financial analysts do, or that some weather forecasters do, for example—that’s almost a more accurate analogy for what astrologers are trying to do sometimes, especially when looking at major events that involve so many different variables that you’re trying to take into account and then figure out which direction it’s gonna go.
AC: Yeah. I mean, we look at a lot of data points and then we interpret them.
CB: Right. And that there’s a process of interpretation to that.
AC: Yeah. And there’s also a process of deciding what data is most relevant.
CB: Sure, sure. And then that of course becomes relevant in our forecast episodes because what we’re trying to do here is look at major, overarching signatures during specific timeframes and then interpret or try to draw some conclusions about what kind of themes we’ll probably see in world events or sometimes in individual lives as a result of that. I mean, one of them—that I wanted to mention before we move on from this—that has just been blowing my mind and has been fascinating over the past year since we did that episode was, again, just the Saturn in Sagittarius episode as a thing onto itself, and a lot of the themes that we talked about as potentially being relevant, and just the way that they’ve come out in such a blatant fashion over the past year, especially in terms of politics, and in terms of some of the political changes that have happened this year. But then the other one that’s been really interesting to me—that’s been so much in the news over the past couple of weeks—seems to be more connected with the Saturn-Neptune square and this idea of false news stories being a major issue or being something now that a lot of companies are starting to deal with. Facebook, for example, initially denied it but now is having to figure out a way to address it in some form or another. Did you guys notice that? Does that seem like a Saturn-Neptune-type thing to you? I mean, to me, it was Saturn-Neptune in the sense of blurring the distinction between what’s real and what’s not real.
AC: Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.
KS: Totally.
AC: You know, when I sat down to write my November article, I was overwhelmingly of the impression that a lot of November would vibe off of the fact that Saturn and Neptune were separating from those squares, but were both getting a lot of attention from planets.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, I thought we’d really see that clarification—the clarification of the stories that had gotten fuzzed. That’s why I called that piece “Sorting Stories.” I didn’t necessarily expect it to look like this, but I’m not immune to the process I was describing either. But, yeah, that like, “Oh, gosh, you guys, we’ve been telling each other lies all year accidentally.”
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right.
KS: And that’s so Neptune, isn’t it? To not read a situation correctly, or not even be aware of that ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ type of thing. You know, when you think about the big issues that came up during the election, so much was obscured, I guess. The facts were all foggy. Is this true or is that true? And that sense of confusion just seemed to be really apparent. You know, hindsight is 20/20.
CB: Right. And I guess it’s easy to look at some of that stuff in retrospect and make observations, but I guess it was just fascinating to me how much that’s become the major focus lately, or how much that’s become a major news story. I mean, I remember it was only like a year ago. It was a very low-level news story at the time, but it couldn’t have been more than a year or so ago when Facebook announced that they would be not using humans to sort out some of the news stories anymore and that they were gonna completely automate the process. Cuz I remember that at the time and thinking I hope that goes smoothly. And then of course this year, a year later, one of the major stories is that Facebook was used in order to promote a lot of news stories on both the right and the left that were not necessarily accurate or were completely false. And then as a result there were these false narratives floating around on both sides that turned out to be not necessarily connected with what was going on in reality. It was just a really fascinating parallel. Cuz my focus earlier this year—I kept mentioning over and over again how I was fascinated by the Saturn-Neptune square and the virtual reality thing that was going on, and then you had the Pokémon Go thing happen over the summer, during the last square, and this weird blurring of reality. And then just the final, nice little cherry on top of that is, what other narratives or other blurred realities have people been collectively buying into over the past year? And how has that actually tangibly influenced the course of history as a result?
KS: And I think things will continue to clarify. I mean, Neptune’s gonna be at its station degree for quite a few months, but once it moves away, more clarity coming through, I think.
CB: Oh, right. It literally just stationed yesterday, right?
KS: Yes. I mean, of course I only know for personal reasons exactly how long it’s gonna be at this damn 9° of Pisces.
CB: Or maybe it was a few days ago on the 19th.
KS: It was around the 19th of November.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah, and it’ll be at 9 until early January. The Saturn in Sag theme that’s there too is that idea about what’s truth and what’s integrity and where and how we find that these days when there isn’t control, or there aren’t any checks and balances over the flow of information.
CB: Right, and that delicate balance. Cuz now there’s a debate between now there should be more oversight on news and sorting out what’s news versus what’s not news. And then the counterbalance to that I’ve seen has been you run the risk of getting into an authoritarian-type state or news situation, and how do you choose what’s actually news or what’s real versus what’s not and some of those debates. I don’t know, it’s a funny and weird debate.
KS: Well, it’s interesting. And to flip that into December, if you like, Neptune has handed the baton, and Saturn is now going to trine Uranus right around Christmas, like December 24th or 26th. Let me double-check. So this is gonna be a really different version of the Saturn in Sag theme, if you like.
CB: Right. So trining Uranus. And this is the first time it’s gotten—
KS: The first hit, yeah. And it is gonna be setting up a theme or a story that’s going to continue to next year into 2017.
AC: And we can’t talk about that configuration without talking about Uranus opposite Jupiter.
KS: Yeah, the Jupiter factor.
AC: Cuz they’re all at 20.
KS: Yes. So if you have any stuff in your chart around 20° of an air or a fire sign, strap yourself in, because the roller-coaster is about to take off.
AC: It’ll be a very interesting December.
KS: Yeah. Of course I’m kind of excited about it cuz I think there are some good things that can come out of this, but it’s definitely got a chaotic quality. I don’t know. What would you say?
AC: Yeah. Yeah, it has a chaotic quality.
KS: We agree, Austin?
CB: Yeah. Cuz another thing that we touched on last month that was really important is that it’s taking that Uranus-Pluto square and it’s almost making it active again by transferring the light between Uranus and Pluto. And so, it’s like you get the Uranus-Pluto juice of that outer planet transit and square that was so much more potent a few years ago, and it almost reignites it or throws some gasoline on the flame by throwing Jupiter in there and sort of blowing everything up again.
KS: Yeah. And that’s really starting now, isn’t it? I mean, late November, as Jupiter comes in and makes the square to Pluto first, and then we’ve got a few weeks for that second part of it. It’s a big reactivation.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, ‘reactivation’ is a good way to put it.
CB: So Jupiter opposes Uranus exactly for the first time around December 25-26?
KS: December 24, to be exact.
CB: December 24, okay.
KS: Sorry, beg your pardon. Jupiter-Uranus is 26th, you’re right. It’s the Saturn-Uranus that’s the 24th. Of course it’s Christmas, for people who celebrate that, but we also have Jewish Hanukkah kicking off on the 24th of December this year. So it’s right in the middle of those big religious festivals.
CB: Okay. Interesting.
KS: It’ll be an interesting end to 2016.
CB: Right around the holiday times, okay.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so let’s get fully into the forecast, since we’re running out of time here. We’ve got about 45 minutes left. So right off the bat, just starting from the beginning, we’ve got Mercury ingressing into Capricorn on December 2. Eventually, later in the month, it’s actually gonna station retrograde. Is it already in its shadow by that point?
AC: It is. Mercury’s going to station direct in January at 28 Sag.
CB: Okay.
AC: And I’d just like to point out 28 Sag. 28 of fire signs is huge next year.
KS: Next year.
AC: It’s an introduction to a theme, right? We get Saturn and Uranus stationing in those last couple of degrees of fire signs (Aries and Sagittarius), and we get a solar eclipse in the last couple of degrees of Leo. That’s a big degree. And so, we’ll get that station just into the new year, just in time to meet that particular theme.
CB: Nice. An intimation of things to come.
AC: Indeed.
KS: Correct.
CB: All right, so that’s Mercury. So we got a Mercury retrograde in December as a nice little focal point in Capricorn and Sagittarius. Then Venus ingresses into Aquarius on December 7. So we’re also getting cued up there for a Venus retrograde that’s coming up before too long, right?
AC: Uh, yeah, but the Venus retrograde’s gonna be in Aries primarily, so I don’t think we’ll have shadows of that. It’s just going into Aquarius.
CB: Okay, so we’ve got some time before that.
KS: Yeah, the one thing about Venus in Aquarius, she will participate in that Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus ‘pattern’, if that’s a neutral word to use. Because of course she will trine the Jupiter, sextile the Uranus, and sextile the Saturn in the week leading up to the Christmas period. So it’s that week starting the 19th. I mean, it’s very close dates actually. So she’ll be participating.
CB: Yeah, that’s actually really wild. I hadn’t seen that. I didn’t know. Like Kirk Kahn put that on the Planet Watcher Calendar, but I didn’t understand why. Cuz it says Venus sextiles Saturn and Uranus opposite Jupiter, but I didn’t really know why he was noting a Saturn sextile Jupiter. But now I’m actually looking at it in the chart. And if you cast a chart for December 25, you see Venus at 20 Aquarius exactly sextile Saturn at 20 Sagittarius, and then both of those are trining Uranus at 20 Aries and Jupiter at 20 Libra. So it’s actually a really tight, kind of spectacular configuration there. It’s like a half-grand sextile or something, right?
KS: Something.
CB: What was the name for that? I think there’s a name for that pattern.
KS: Oh, Star of David, or grand sextile-something.
CB: Right. I don’t know. There’s a lot of wacky names that whoever—it was probably Marc Edmund Jones—introduced in the early 20th century. But just having all those planets exactly at 20° is pretty rare and notable. I mean, it’s not necessarily even negative, though. I mean, the Jupiter-Uranus opposition is kind of—
KS: I don’t think it’s negative. No, it’s an easy opposition in some regards because of those sextiles. I mean, it’s still Jupiter-Uranus. But it’s Jupiter-Uranus. This is not Saturn-Pluto opposition.
CB: Yeah. Anytime there’s an opposition with Uranus there’s a possibility for unexpected things or instability. But the fact that it’s getting these, otherwise, pretty flowing aspects from Saturn and Venus, and that it’s a Jupiter-Venus trine exactly that day with reception, or a Venus-Saturn sextile with reception—there’s a lot nice receptions and flowing aspects here that seem more indicative of something more positive rather than negative.
KS: Something more positive or something happening really easily.
CB: Sure, sure.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And something worth noting, if we’re gonna talk about the Jupiter-Uranus oppositions—which we absolutely should—I think it’s worth thinking about them cyclically. Any two planets in relationship to each other, one will be faster and one will be slower. And so, one will—over a long enough time scale—appear to move around and then catch up with the slower one. The archetype for that cycle being the Sun and the Moon, right? And so, if you look at the Uranus-Jupiter cycle, this is the opposition, just like the opposition between the Sun and the Moon is the Full Moon phase, where there’s tension and energy between the two. But the New Moon or the beginning of that cycle was in 2010 with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions then. We had the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries right when Uranus entered Aries, it’s first ingress. And if I’m correct, Richard Tarnas looks at that cycle—that Jupiter-Uranus cycle—as being about updating, revolutionizing, culture. He looks at it very much in terms of culture. And the seeds of revolutionary culture were certainly sown in 2010 and then bloomed very shortly thereafter for good, bad, and other. And so, this is the halfway point this year. The Jupiter back-and-forth between oppositions with Uranus is the halfway point in that cycle. And so, if we looked at 2010, for example, that was the year that the Tea Party took a lot of seats in the US legislature, right?
KS: Okay.
CB: Yeah, it was. We’re talking 2010-2011.
AC: And then of course you had all the events of the Arab Spring shortly thereafter, etc., etc. You have radical movements left, right, up and down. And so, I think we can say the results of a lot of those actions have become apparent and that’s where we are now, right? And from a longer-term perspective, from a cyclical perspective, that’s where we are, that’s where the Jupiter-Uranus thing is. We’re seeing what that accomplished or simply the consequences of those movements left, right, and other.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it makes a lot of sense to tie into that and to go back to that, because those midterms—at least politically—were a big deal, and you can totally see how that would be tied into right now.
AC: Yeah, which changed the Republican Party, and then the Republican Party got changed again. They keep getting pulled by their constituents in—I don’t want to say ‘radical’; it’s sort of an empty word, or only a half-full word. But they got pulled really strongly in a direction by the sweep of the Tea Party folks, and then they got pulled again very strongly by the constituents with Trump. You know, Trump was not the candidate that represented what the Republican Party establishment was trying to get done. They were kind of forced to run with him.
CB: Right. In the same way that was happening with the Democrats with Bernie Sanders, but then it didn’t fully go in that direction. Yeah, that’s a really good point actually. Huh, I’m just thinking about that. Cuz that was basically the 2010 midterms, and that makes sense. And then after that, you also had Occupy Wall Street like a year later.
AC: And Arab Spring. There were a bunch of protests and movements in other countries over the next year or so. You had a lot of unrest in Thailand proceeding from that. You know, there was so much of that Uranus square Pluto action in the ensuing years, I think that we didn’t think about the Uranus-Jupiter cycle. That planted a seed that was then immediately, let’s say, watered by Pluto, by those Uranus-Pluto squares.
CB: Sure, sure. Interesting, okay. Let’s see, getting back to core other things happening this month, we’ve got a New Moon. The first lunation is a New Moon in Gemini on December 13.
KS: A Full Moon in Gemini.
CB: Oh, yeah, you’re right. I can’t believe I messed that up, you’re right. So it’s a Full Moon in Gemini.
KS: Oh, that’s okay.
CB: At—what? 22-ish degrees?
KS: 22 Gemini, yeah. And that’s gonna be a pretty exciting Full Moon trine Jupiter. Because the Full Moon is at 22 Gemini, we’re right back in that hot spot degree of the 20-22 of the air and fire signs.
CB: Right.
KS: So that pattern we talked about that forms over Christmas, the Full Moon sort of previews that, if you like.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah, those degrees—like the 10s and early 20s—of fire and air signs are absolutely being activated. And it’s worth noting that the Sun is conjunct Saturn for that Full Moon.
KS: Yes.
AC: The Sun-Saturn conjunction—which happens once per year—is on December 9, right ahead of that. You know, that’s kind of no joke. Or if it’s a joke, it’s Saturn’s sense of humor.
KS: Yes.
AC: And that’s really gonna define a lot of the tone of the first-half of the month. You know, the Sun basically applies to Saturn at a rate of 1° a day and then leaves or departs at about 1° a day, right? So if you’re looking at orbs, it’s like when it’s a week out, the Sun is 7° away, and then 6°, and then 5°, and then 4°, and then leaves just as slowly. And so, that’s a lot of Sun-Saturn action, and we get that every year. One of the things it does is it provides the check-in with how things are now in reality, right?
KS: Yes.
AC: Cuz Saturn is sort of this roving finger pointing at what we need to take seriously, and it moves very slowly. And when the Sun comes to conjoin it every year, it’s like, okay, let’s all sit down with whatever Saturn is doing. And so, if Saturn’s been in your 3rd house for a year-and-a-half now, it’ll be time to sit down and think about what you’re doing with your schedule, how you’re arranging your time. If it’s your 6th, it’s time to take a look at your health. And this is gonna be a review cuz the Sun has conjoined Saturn in Sagittarius before, right? This isn’t year one. This is, okay, we’re gonna do this again.
KS: It’s like getting a cosmic report card really, isn’t it?
AC: Ooh, good analogy.
KS: That’s what I always use for Saturn. Yeah, you give yourself a report card, or the cosmos gives you a report card.
AC: Right. It’s like, okay, what am I gonna do next year? How am I gonna do better with this? You know, what am I gonna do about this? It’s sitting down with facts. Which is scary and sometimes ends up being not nearly as scary as you thought, and sometimes ends up being just as depressing as you thought it would be.
KS: Yeah.
AC: But you have to sit down with them either way cuz they chase you.
KS: Totally. It’s like having your performance review, and you have to take on more of the feedback.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And so, I guess one thing worth noting is this is the last conjunction of the Sun and Saturn in Sagittarius that we’re gonna have for 28 years because next year the Sun catches up with Saturn just after the ingress into Capricorn. So this is our last Sun-Saturn.
CB: Wow, that’s wild.
KS: Yes, by like a day or something.
AC: By day. Yeah, it’s really close.
KS: I was like, “Are you sure, Austin? I need to double-check.”
AC: Oh, no, I thought that and then I double-checked it on my little program before I said anything.
KS: No, that’s true. This is the last report card of the Saturn in Sag period.
CB: Right.
AC: So it’s the Sun illuminating, right? Shining a light on that report card. And it’s not necessarily super-duper fun, but it’s necessary. Like you said, it’s feedback. Those are the planets that get you that information, right? You don’t get other combinations that let you just see how things are in that area and how you’ve done with it. You know, a more positive way of looking at that is, okay, there’s another year of Saturn in Sag. The Sun gives you your performance review, as you said, and now you’ve got another year to get that right.
KS: Yes. Cuz I often think with Saturn, too, it’s this idea of rewards and consequences.
AC: Yeah.
KS: So going through your performance review, here’s what you’ve done well, and here’s the bonus or the raise or the reward that you get as a result, and here’s where maybe you’ve dropped the ball a bit or there’s still room for improvement. And then, as you said, Austin, we’ve got this next 12 months, all of 2017, basically, to improve things where they need to be improved.
AC: Yeah. And this originally ‘tangented’ off of the Full Moon discussion, because the Full Moon in Gemini occurs only a few days after that Sun-Saturn conjunction, right? So if you’re just looking at it, like six hours before the Moon is perfectly full and opposes the Sun, it’ll oppose Saturn. So there’s a bit of a Saturnian component of that Full Moon.
KS: Both the lights are tied to Saturn in the days before and the days after that. That’s a really good point, Austin. So it really is like the spotlight of the Saturn in Sag cycle.
AC: Yeah. And like you said, we have that Jupiter and Uranus opposition, which at that point sees Uranus at 20 and Jupiter at 18, very close to this. Saturn’s at 19 and then the Sun and Moon will be at 22. And so, the Jupiter-Uranus opposition gets a lot of input on this, but not as much as Saturn. You know, if we just go back to Astro 101, what are the most powerful aspects? The conjunction and the opposition, right? And so, that’s the primary conversation.
KS: True.
AC: There’s a lot of input from Jupiter in Libra, which is like, “Hey, guys, can we somehow find a balance with this? Can we find peace with this?” And Uranus, is like, “Fuck peace. We need to change things. I’m not getting okay with this.”
CB: Yeah, I like those keywords. Cuz one of the things we might want to start doing in order to make things a little bit easier or more digestible is just throwing out some keywords for certain configurations we’re talking about. We don’t need to have great expositions of it, but one of the ones that came to mind for the Jupiter-Uranus opposition was ‘rapid growth’ as a keyword for Jupiter-Uranus opposition. Are there any other ones that spring to mind for you guys?
KS: Sure.
AC: I would say ‘rapid and unstable growth’, or ‘instability threatening plans for growth’.
CB: Nice. That’s good.
KS: I would add ‘an unexpected breakthrough’. Cuz sometimes one of the positive expressions that I see from Uranus is this idea of, yes, it’s rapid and that can feel shocking or unsettling, but it somehow leads to a breakthrough. The other piece that I often throw in for Uranus is the idea of change that leads to freedom. So we often think about Uranus as stirring the pot or shaking things up, challenging the status quo, but it doesn’t do that with no purpose or for no reason. With Uranus, the ultimate outcome or underlying goal is, how can we create more freedom or more independence or more space to be one’s self? So if there is to be something coming out of this Jupiter-Uranus, it’s like the opportunity that allows that freedom or helps you really breathe into a more authentic version of your life or yourself.
CB: Totally. That’s a great concise description of that opposition.
AC: Yeah. Kelly, you reminded me of my favorite juxtapositions as far as Uranus goes. You said ‘breakthroughs’. And what I see with Uranus is it’s both breakthroughs and breakdowns, and breakdowns can lead to breakthroughs.
KS: Yes.
AC: Especially if we’re taking a therapeutic context, they’re almost always linked, and it’s hard to know which one you’re gonna get with Uranus.
CB: Well, cuz sometimes it’s like the removal of the old order in order to make way for the new.
AC: Right. And old order, old patterns don’t just sigh and then fade out of existence, either on a collective level or on a personal level.
CB: Right. It’s usually a difficult process or there’s sometimes some trauma involved. That was one of the funny things—the ‘shockingness’ about the election on the 8th. Like one of the things that was so Uranian about that is just that feeling of unexpectedness, of getting hit with a curve ball that you just did not see coming, that is so wildly different than what you anticipated. I hadn’t felt that in a long time, and it completely reminded me of what Uranus transits can be like sometimes. Or just the feel of Uranus can be the last thing that you expected, that you didn’t even conceptualize happens, and you suddenly and very rapidly have to adapt to that. I mean, I felt like there were a lot of people that felt that way suddenly on the 8th and the 9th. And I meant to mention this—cuz I was looking for the Uranus thing as well. And somebody pointed out to me—that I thought was really fascinating—that if you do the secondary progressed chart for the United States using the Sibley chart, the progressed Moon is exactly opposing Uranus right now.
KS: Oh, wow.
CB: Yeah, I actually meant to mention that to you, Kelly, cuz one of the things this election has done for me is it’s reignited my interest in secondary progressions.
KS: Yay! Cuz Trump’s Sun had just progressed to 0 Virgo.
CB: I know, I know. It just progressed to 0 Virgo just this summer. That was in July, right after he accepted the nomination. And so, then you have the question of, did it hit his ascendant then? Is it on his ascendant right now, now that it’s in Virgo?
KS: My research that I have done with other famous people—for whom we have an accurate birth time—the progressed Sun hitting an angle is a huge activation. The one example that comes to mind is Whitney Houston in the ‘80s, who kind of burst onto the scene and wasn’t just like a so-so singer, she topped the charts. A young black woman in the ‘80s, in the US, whose music was selling more albums than these white men bands, which were more palatable or politically correct. Sorry, I’m getting so excited here. So the salient argument from that, the 0 Virgo, is that progressed Sun hitting that ascendant is like being plugged into ‘the matrix’. There’s a huge amplification of that solar energy. Basically, he was crowned king in his country.
CB: That’s really wild to me. And then there was some secondary progressed stuff in Hillary’s chart. Anthony Louis pointed out on his blog that she had a secondary progressed Sun-Mercury cazimi depending on which time you used. If it was the ‘AM’ chart, then it happened in October, right before the election. Whereas if it was the ‘PM’ chart, then it was sometime earlier this year, when she clinched the primary nomination.
KS: Yeah. And progressed conjunction in Hillary’s chart is square her natal Neptune. And when you think about this whole ‘what’s really going on’, the emails, ‘is she sick’, that’s just so much of that Neptunian energy. And her progressed Sun and her progressed Mercury are both square to her natal Neptune.
AC: Also, while we’re talking about the US Uranus, one of you mentioned the United States secondary progressed Moon opposing the natal Uranus.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That natal Uranus is at 8 Gemini, which is square Neptune at 9 Pisces. And how did we miss this? Well, because I wasn’t looking at secondary progressions. But that was this year—Mars stationing at 8 Sag opposite the United States Uranus at 8 Gemini.
CB: Right.
AC: Saturn and Mars conjoining one degree further at 9. Like there were a lot of stressors on the US Uranus this year. Maybe people were talking about it. I’m sure some astrologer was and I was just blind to it. But looking back I feel like I’ve learned some things.
KS: Totally.
CB: Yeah.
KS: All of us have, haven’t we?
AC: There were a lot of things to look at.
CB: I mean, we should have done a show on it probably. If this had been more of my focus, or if I had not been working on the book, or if I wanted to get into political astrology—which I was otherwise trying to avoid this election season and decided at the last minute not to stick with—we probably would have done a show where we would have explored a lot of these things. If you go back four years ago, and listen to the podcast that Patrick and I did right before the election, we did actually, because we had spent the whole year working on it. But I guess what this is doing is—at least in the future, for future elections—we know a lot of the different things that you can look at and the importance of looking at many different charts in order to get an overall feeling. Because even if it looks like it’s going one way, if you start seeing things in the astrology that don’t make sense within the context of the narrative of where everyone thinks it’s going, that should maybe give you more pause than it might otherwise. So, yeah, secondaries. And I already mentioned this in the last episode, but I meant to mention it to you, Kelly, Trump’s chart, by secondary progression. Because he was born a few months before Bill Clinton, Trump’s chart turns into Bill Clinton’s chart by secondary progression, which is just kind of weird.
KS: That’s true.
CB: Yeah, even with the rising sign and everything because Clinton has Libra rising and Trump has either late Leo or early Virgo rising. So if you progressed that by 60-70 years, you end up with Libra rising.
KS: Yeah, which is what he has in his progressed chart now. Yeah, that’s very true.
CB: That’s more like a random observation, but it was just something that caught my eye. So, yeah, let’s see, just looking at my notes.
KS: Oh, yeah, December. Back to December.
CB: Back to December.
AC: I mean, to be fair, I feel like some of this is appropriate to the last month of the calendar year. There’s always some looking backward and some looking forward.
KS: Nice tie-in, Austin.
AC: Thank you.
KS: You’re good with your themes.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So one of the things that we should talk about with December—which is more of a December thing—we have that Sun-Saturn conjunction, and then we have the Full Moon about four days later, which then lights that up again. And then on the 18th, we have Mars changing signs again. You know, I’m still not used to Mars changing signs.
CB: Right.
KS: Right.
AC: Cuz we barely had that. But we have Mars going—
KS: Into Pisces.
AC: And we have Mars going into Pisces on the same day that Mercury goes retrograde. It’s the 19th, but it’s in the middle of the night on the 19th/early morning. In a sense it’s Sunday night/Monday morning for those of us on American continents, and those are two interesting things. And then the next day, the Sun moves into—well, two days later, the Sun moves into Capricorn. So we have a change in the line-up there.
KS: Oh, yeah, and there’s a theme change. Because we’ve got Mars going from Aquarius to Pisces and the Sun going from Sag to Cap. So we’ve got the quieter yin coming through. I don’t know, you might disagree. Based on what happens after, that’s true—or at least could be.
AC: I think those are true of just those positions.
KS: Yes, that’s true.
AC: However, we get that perfect 20° Jupiter-Uranus-Saturn line-up with Venus in the week after that. So I don’t think people will necessarily experience it as a gentling-down.
KS: That’s true. I mean, you’re right. We have to put it into context. And I think what happens between the 23rd and the 27th of December—when that 20° pattern really kicks in—will override probably everything else that month, other than the Sun-Saturn stuff. I think they’re probably the two biggies.
AC: Well, I wanted to point out as well, yeah, the Sun-Saturn and then the Full Moon activating again a few days later is pretty dramatic. So that’s the Full Moon in Gemini, right? But if you go two days later and you look at Thursday, the 15th, you have the Moon in the middle of Cancer—or the end of the middle of Cancer—where it T-squares the Uranus-Jupiter opposition and opposes Pluto. You have a pretty righteous grand cross right there. And then Mercury’s trying to get in on the action. But you have a cardinal cross with degree ranges between 16 and 20. It looks like it’s 2014 again.
KS: Yeah. Okay, Austin. Yes, that’s true.
AC: And I imagine that that will be getting tangled up for the collective. That’ll be getting tangled up in some of the complications of that Full Moon, cuz it’s only two days later. And so, the thing about a transiting grand cross like that is a lot of times it will describe a day that’s really hectic. Cuz it’s only one day because it depends on the Moon. And so, you’ll have a day where things get tangled up, or you can’t do this until you can do that, and Catch-22s and all that. You know, many of the factors will be real factors, but usually what I find is that things are not nearly as complicated as they seem on that day or two. Sure, there are real issues that need to be solved or tasks that need to be accomplished, but they’ll be easier the next day.
KS: Yes.
AC: There’s an illusion of additional complexity on those days.
KS: That’s so true for those grand cross/grand T-square-type combinations, the feeling of being pulled in many directions at once and all these external pressures demanding ‘now, now, now’. And I think, Austin, the best advice is that ‘now, now, now’ is either not your personal priority or maybe not as urgent as other people are making it out to be, and the idea that 24-48 hours things start to pull apart in terms of the difficult pattern and progress can be easier.
AC: Right. You’ve just got three workable problems to solve. When crosses dissolve into their constituent pieces, it’s like they just become a matter of addition, like 1+1+1 is 4, rather than taking things to the next power, and the next power, and the next power, which doesn’t work if you use the numeral ‘1’. But let’s say you use the numeral ‘2’ cuz there’s tension or an issue. 2+2+2+2 is 8. However, 2 to the 4th power is a considerably larger number. All right, I don’t think that mathematical analogy hit.
KS: I’m like, you’re really making me think, Austin. I was really good at math in high school, but that was a long time ago.
AC: You know what I mean.
KS: Too funny. So, I mean, for December then, I guess what you’re saying is, yes, we’ve got all the personal planets—or the inner planets, or however we describe them—Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all gonna change signs, but really the theme is that we’ve got these particularly intense patterns that are forming, that are going to be real release points of different energy.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Do you think they’re gonna be release points?
KS: I don’t know. I was just trying to phrase it in a more friendly way. They could be outbursts.
AC: So if we’re looking at the Jupiter opposition Uranus, there will be outbursts.
KS: Oh, for sure. And over the holidays, right?
AC: But that Jupiter-Uranus opposition is the introduction to a thing we’re gonna do for almost all of 2017.
KS: Yes.
AC: We’ve got two more of those on the way. That’s starting a storyline. And sometimes the storyline begins with an outburst, but it’s not a release in the sense that, “Now there’s nothing left to release. We got that out of our system.”
KS: Oh, yeah, that’s true. It’s more like something comes to the surface that you get clear on, that this needs a shakeup and then you work through it over the rest of the hits, if you like.
AC: Yeah. And to tie it into what I said about the Sun-Saturn conjunction earlier, it’s like, okay, here’s your job. This isn’t a review. We haven’t been doing Jupiter opposite Uranus for years. But it’s like, okay, so we’re gonna do this for the next year. Do you want to get good at this? Do you want to get the most out of this? Do you want to minimize difficulties and maximize good stuff? Sorry.
KS: Oh, Austin. Too funny.
AC: But, yeah, I see that as an introduction.
KS: Yes, and the introduction for the Jupiter-Uranus. For instance, late December 2016, then we have February 2017 and September 2017 for the second and third phase or stage of that story.
CB: September, just before it goes into Scorpio?
KS: Yes. Yeah, very late. Cuz Uranus is also there, very late in Aries.
AC: Right. And so, we have Mercury retrograde from the 19th on, which means we’re gonna be getting those. You know, I generally get strong pings from a Mercury retrograde in the week leading up to it, especially the three or four days leading up to it. And so, I think we can say—as far as thumbnails go—the second-half of the month is pretty Mercury ‘retrograde-y’. And it stations retrograde right next to Pluto. Mercury is moving through Capricorn, slowing, slowing down, and almost conjoins Pluto, right? Mercury stations at 15 and Pluto’s at 16, and then Mercury heads backwards. And that’s interesting because, one, it occurs on the same day as a sign change. That Mars’ sign change, moving into Pisces. So that’s the 19th. I know it’s the 19th. But isn’t the 19th supposed to be Electoral College Day?
CB: Yeah, a lot of astrologers have been talking about that, noting that the Mercury retrograde stations right around that time.
KS: Yes.
AC: Yeah, I haven’t studied that enough to make a prediction—and this particular season has shattered my taste for it—but we can say there’s a lot of stuff happening. And it’s also fair to say no matter what the result is, a lot of people will have very strong thoughts and feelings about it.
CB: Sure.
KS: Yes. And making a decision on a Mercury station day just doesn’t seem like a good thing to do.
AC: No, the stations are dramatic.
KS: ‘Drama’ is gonna be the word.
AC: Right. I mean, Schmidt’s translation of phasis is the planet making an appearance that speaks. You know, what would be hilarious is if they’re like, “Yeah, we’re gonna think about it.”
KS: That’s true. “We need to take more time or do more research.”
AC: Right. But I think what the 2012 election taught us something about Mercury retrograde stations is that—Chris, it was 2012, when there was a Mercury retrograde station right on Election Day? And everybody was like, “Oh, my God, the results are gonna get overturned,” or “It’s gonna be another popular versus Electoral College thing,” and it was just like nothing.
CB: Yeah, cuz Mercury was stationed direct on Election Day in 2000. And so, a lot of people associated the delay in the election results with Mercury retrograde for whatever reason. And so, when it happened again in 2012—except it was gonna station retrograde on that day—a lot of astrologers assumed that would similarly lead to Mercury retrograde snafus or delays in the election results. Actually it was pretty much the opposite. It wasn’t exactly the opposite, but it ended up getting called pretty early that evening. The only thing that did end up getting connected with that was sort of tie in with some zodiacal releasing periods. We noticed that Mercury would station retrograde on Election Day, and it would station direct later in November. We noted that there was also a foreshadowing period on Election Day and then a loosing of the bond that was connected with that. So it was almost like there was something that wasn’t finished in Romney’s chart until a few weeks later. And what ended up happening is he ended up visiting the White House later in the month to have a private meeting with Obama around the time of that Mercury direct station, and around the time of the loosing of the bond. The only actual Mercury retrograde thing that seemed to happen on Election Day happened in Romney’s camp, where his get-out-the-vote program called Project Orca just completely went on the fritz and fell apart due to weird technical issues on Election Day. And that harmed, to some extent, his ability to do last minute—
AC: Oh, that’s really interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.
KS: Oh, yeah, I remember that. Their big ‘mobilize-the-voters’ thing just flopped, basically.
CB: Yeah. We went back and looked at his inception chart for his campaign, and it was a heavily Mercury-ruled inception chart. It had Virgo rising, with the Sun and Moon in Gemini or something like that.
AC: His Mercury is pretty heavily-afflicted in his natal chart.
CB: Sure. Yeah, and I can’t remember if he was in a Mercury profection year as well. But there ended up being a specific reason that we realized, in retrospect, why it was tied primarily to Romney as being a personal thing for him rather than a broader thing that affected everybody, like the 2000 election did.
AC: Well, I would say something affecting election results is a broad thing, even if people don’t recognize that it happened.
CB: Right, right. Yeah, so that was that. How did—oh, yeah, so that came up just because it’s stationing retrograde here when the Electoral College gets together. I mean, some people have speculated about that, but I don’t know. I’ve read some other articles saying there’s no way that that’s actually gonna happen with the Electoral College flipping or refusing to certify the process.
KS: I don’t think historically that it’s ever happened, that they’ve overturned a result. I mean, I think occasionally there’s been one or two people that have voted differently from how they were expected, but nothing in a way that changes the outcome.
AC: To be fair, this is a year of unprecedented events.
KS: That’s very true, Austin.
AC: And also, even if the election result is upheld, this will be a turning point for people who are interested in resisting a Trump presidency, of which there are millions. By the way, in terms of Uranus opposite Jupiter and that theme already starting to grow, with Uranus in a Mars-ruled sign, that’s resist, right?
KS: Of course.
AC: That’s like, “I’m gonna fight this.” And Jupiter in Libra is like, “Come on, let’s just be friends, let’s give each other a chance.” That’s the Jupiter in Libra line. And so, I see in my digital world those two perspectives clashing already, where people are like, “No, let’s just see how it goes. Maybe it won’t be so bad.” But other people are like, “No, no, no, it’s gonna be a frigging nightmare.”
KS: I was in New York just a few days ago, and one thing that I was sort of dumbstruck about was this idea that there were people that marched in New York to protest the outcome of an American election, and I don’t recall that happening before. Regardless of how strongly people do or don’t feel about it, there is actually protesting going on. To me, that was sort of like, wow. Maybe, as you were saying, Austin, there is more upheaval here than people might be put into just yet.
AC: Yeah. The other point I was gonna make, yeah, I can’t remember that happening. People were really upset when Obama got elected.
KS: Well, they were. But they didn’t protest in the streets about it, I don’t think. We’ll have to fact-check.
AC: I don’t want to get all the way back into that.
KS: No, no, for sure. Carry on.
AC: But, yeah, I hear you. I think it’s another—maybe not a first. But it’s certainly not normal, or not usual. Not business as usual.
KS: Yes, yes.
AC: So what I was leading up to is there are a lot of people who are trying to figure out strategies of resistance to four years of Trump. And so, if the Electoral College says, “No, we’re gonna uphold this,” that will be a major pivot point in the strategies of resistance. Cuz there are a lot of people who are like, all right, well, maybe it won’t happen, maybe it’ll get overturned. And so, even if the answer is, no, it won’t get overturned, well, then all of those people are gonna have to look for a new strategy. And certainly other people are working on things now, but that’ll be a major shift of attention in terms of resistance, which is Uranus is Aries.
CB: Sure.
KS: ‘Resistance’ is a good word.
CB: I was reading a Vox article on this, and the final point that it made—in addition to the fact that with the Electoral College it’s only happens a few times in history, with one or two people changing their vote—is just it would completely undermine the entire process of democracy if the Electoral College was to do that. So it would have to be something so major to necessitate that, that it would force a constitutional crisis in order for it to happen.
AC: I mean, the Electoral College is set up to be able to do that.
CB: In theory.
AC: Right, in theory. It hasn’t been exercised, but it’s not unconstitutional. Like that’s one of its primary functions. That’s why there’s an Electoral College rather than just whatever the result is, that’s the result, even though it hasn’t been exercised.
CB: Right. But in terms of actual execution for the past 200 years, it’s basically just a formal process of ratifying the result of Election Day from the Electoral College, which is the primary thing that determines the outcome of the election. So if they were to go the opposite direction—regardless of anybody’s feelings about it, or even regardless of the popular vote, where she is winning by a large margin, or a decently large margin—it would still come back as a complete reversal from what happened on Election Day.
AC: Oh, absolutely. And it would be unprecedented.
CB: Sure.
AC: It wouldn’t be unconstitutional, but it would be unprecedented.
CB: Cuz a few astrologers have floated this to me over the past few weeks, and I’ve been trying to caution them about putting too much emphasis or hope on that, in terms of their predictions still becoming true, or in terms of their personal political beliefs still winning out or whatever. It is really weird that Mercury stations right on that day, and that could be indicative of something.
AC: It’s also worth pointing out Mars changes signs that day. Mars changed signs on Election Day.
KS: On Election Day, yeah.
AC: In the middle of Election Night.
KS: In the middle of the count, yes.
CB: Oh, yeah, I know.
KS: As the count was coming through.
CB: Did you guys see all the astrologers? You’d have Republican friends and Democrat friends, and my Democrat friends were all praying that the Mars ingress was gonna change the course of things. Cuz by that point, it was already trending towards Trump. They were all hoping that the Mars ingress would shift things back towards Hillary. But instead what happened is that was pretty much the point—shortly after Mars went into Aquarius—when the results became known, that it became clear that he was gonna win. Like an hour or two later, right?
AC: I think it was about 9:00 Pacific when Mars shifted.
KS: Yeah, that midnight Eastern.
AC: There was an astrologer—and I apologize for not remembering your name—who actually did a graph of the momentum before and after the Mars ingress, and that’s when it started swinging decidedly towards Trump. There was like danger and back-and-forth leading up to it, and then it was just like it started—as far as the Electoral College went—becoming a landslide. That’s like when it started.
CB: Right.
KS: Yes, cuz it was at that point that we had gone to bed. My husband was like, “She won’t be able to come back from this. He’s got too many votes.” Very interesting. I have one more thing to say about December.
CB: Sure, go ahead.
KS: It’s not election-based.
AC: Thank God. You know what’s funny? We were like, “Oh, when’s the election gonna be over?” Now it’s been over for weeks and people are talking about the election more than when it was in the future.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah. I mean, it’s the shock. It’s how people heal, basically, and for people who are, I don’t know, struggling with the results, a lot of processing. But in non-election news for December, this is just one thought that occurred to me. Most of December we have the Sun in Sag until the solstice of course, and Sag is ruled by Jupiter. Jupiter is in Libra, which is the 11th house sign position from the Sun in Sag. So I just thought that was speaking to hope or finding those moments of being uplifted. I thought that was kind of a nice thing, that the ruling planet or the Sun is in a really juicy house, the ‘eleventh sign’ thing to connect that. I don’t know if that’s something that you guys have thought of or wouldn’t really give much weight to in terms of looking for something positive.
CB: Yeah, totally. That’s a really good point. And I know we have to wrap up—we’re at our time now—but did we mention that Uranus stations at the end of the month, right on the New Moon?
KS: Maybe we didn’t, because we were so excited about 200 other things with Uranus. But it does, yeah, December 29. It stations direct at 21.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s huge. Even though the exact opposition of Jupiter-Uranus occurs earlier in the month, those stations always really seem to energize the outer planets in pretty striking ways. Even though the opposition was exact earlier in the month, that station of Uranus at that time at the end of the month could re-energize that opposition.
KS: Well, yeah. In fact, the opposition is only three days before that station. So it’s still, I would say, well in play for sure. That’s a really good point.
CB: Okay. So that’s gonna emphasize it even more than most of those themes we were talking about before. It could make it much more significant. And then of course we have a New Moon in Capricorn on December 29, at about 7° of Capricorn, and that’s our final lunation, or second lunation of the month. Yeah, so that kind of brings us towards the end of this.
AC: There is something we should mention about that lunation. You know, the New Moon, or the Moon conjunct the Sun, also occurs at basically the same time as Mercury makes the inferior conjunction to the Sun.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, if you were gonna look at the solar system from an outside view, you would see the Sun, Mercury, Moon, and Earth all aligned, right? And that’s the key point, that’s the very heart of the Mercury retrograde. That’s the cazimi point. And so, that’s a time of unusual clarity and vision usually about things which have been anything but clear in the preceding weeks. And so, those two cycles coinciding—the lunar and the mercurial—is pretty interesting.
CB: Right.
KS: That’s gonna be nice, too, cuz we’ve got that clarity moment that you’re saying there, Austin: Sun conjunct Mercury and the Sun and Moon conjunct. And then just at the very end of the month—I just reminded myself—we do have Mars conjunct Neptune on the 31st, which would be the opposite of clarity perhaps, but maybe good for partying for New Year’s Eve.
AC: Yeah, yeah, probably good for that.
KS: Yeah, I like that clarity piece. I hadn’t realized that. That’s beautiful.
AC: Yeah, it’s interesting. So that’s basically at 7°-8° Capricorn.
CB: Right. So we’ve got a New Moon and a Mercury cazimi at 7 Capricorn.
AC: 7 and then 8. I think the cazimi is at 7. Oh, no, are they both at 7? It doesn’t matter. One’s a 7, one’s an 8, they’re right there. If you have a planet in either degree, it will matter.
CB: Right. All right, and in terms of elections this month, I don’t really have any. Leisa did the elections again this month, and she had a really hard time finding charts. And so, there’s a few of them, but there’s no good rising signs and no good rising signs to give you a good ruler of the ascendant. So she was using some Gemini rising charts early in the month on December 1st and 3rd. But, yeah, really coming up with much of anything was pretty tough, and some of the charts end up putting Mars in the 1st house in a day chart, which is something you would otherwise stringently want to avoid. As a result of that, I’m not really recommending any electional charts this month. If you’re desperate for some electional charts, just get the latest issue of The Mountain Astrologer magazine for this month, for December, and then it should have the ones we found for this month. If you’re desperate, it’s pretty slim pickings this month in terms of that. And then in terms of the future—since we stopped doing the electional column for TMA—I think our prepared elections are gonna run out next month. So I actually wanted to get some feedback from listeners to see if they wanted us to keep doing that in terms of the podcast, with these forecast episodes. Or if people are not really even paying that much attention to them and it’s not a big deal, we can stop doing them and instead focus more time on just our forecast discussion. So people who listen to the show, let us know either way if you like and use the electional thing and you want us to keep doing it each month, or if you’re fine with us letting it go. Give me some feedback in the comments section for this episode and that’ll pretty much determine whether or not I keep doing it.
AC: You know, in terms of action, the question that electional astrology answers is when to act. And on a general summarizing note for December, there’s a lot of Uranus stuff in play. There’s Saturn, right? There’s the Sun-Saturn thing and there’s the trying to get things under control and create some order, but there’s a lot of Uranus in play. You know, Uranus is aspecting both Jupiter and Saturn and has a station this month. Personally, my feel on that is that there are still wildcards in the deck, probably both collectively and individually. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you get the wildcard, and you get to play a hand that you didn’t think you could put together. You know, when we look at Uranus, we can say, “Oh, it surprises.” But with astrology we get the ability to make unknowns known-unknowns, right? And so, if you’re going to make some big decisions, it may be useful to wait until a little bit more of the data comes in. Wait until a few more hands have been played and you can see where things lie. Because with Mercury retrograde and all this Uranus stuff, I feel like there are gonna be surprises. There are surprises on the way for people, and your hand may be better or worse than you thought. And so, trying to proceed in a wholly Saturnian, predictable, ‘I’m just gonna do this and then this is gonna happen and then I’ll be here’ manner may not be the best strategy. Being a little bit more responsive, listening to where things are going and preserving some of your optionality might be a better general strategy.
KS: For sure. I agree, Austin. The two keywords I often suggest for people when dealing with Uranus is to be ‘flexible’. As you said, keep your options open. If something is locked in, but at a cheaper price, or a little bit more expensive with room to change, that’s gonna be a better choice when we have so much Uranus energy. So flexibility. And the other word is ‘spontaneity’. You know, the idea of picking up on that spur of the moment or last minute thing, not, as you said, being too rigidly adhering to the Saturnian plan, and giving yourself that wiggle room; that if something does come up last minute that is of interest or you have a charge around, you have some room to explore it or dive in with it.
AC: Totally. I like spontaneity. I think that’s another good one.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s a good lesson for everyone, and to expect the unexpected. Unfortunately, the trick is that you can’t really anticipate the unexpected or the unanticipated because, by definition, the thing that you can’t even conceive sometimes can happen. So some of what you guys said is applicable to that, just in terms of allowing yourself enough flexibility to be able to take on that if the unexpected happens and to not be completely knocked off your feet. I mean, theoretically, that was in the Hellenistic tradition. That’s what most of the astrologers said the purpose of astrology is—to be able to anticipate things in the future as if they were in the present, so that you’re not completely knocked off your feet by them when they come along. You have some preparation and you’ve been able to prepare yourself mentally to some extent for what is to come, whether it’s something good or something difficult. And somehow this can help in terms of a person’s internal philosophical or psychological disposition in the long term. So on some level that’s still what we’re doing here with this. Even though sometimes that can be difficult with Uranus transits to fully anticipate, it’s good to remain flexible and open enough to be able to go with those things, even if they turn out different than what you expected. All right, well, I think that brings us to the end of this month’s forecast episode. Any final words? Or any final things that we needed to mention that we forgot to?
KS: I think we’ve had a good look. Thanks for having us.
AC: Yeah, that was interesting. It was interesting to talk with you all about this stuff.
KS: Yeah, really good to catch up after a month.
CB: Yeah, I’ve been dying to talk to both of you on the podcast and to process some of this stuff, so I’m glad we got to have this conversation. Next time we’ve gotta do our full yearly forecast. So it’ll be a special forecast episode where we look at the entire upcoming year and perhaps still do a little bit of additional processing about this past year, but mainly focus on some of the major trends of the coming year. So I’ll be looking forward to that. I guess you’ll be around?
KS: Always.
AC: Yeah, I’ll be around.
CB: Okay, cool. Well, thanks everyone for listening then, and we’ll see you next time.
AC: Bye.
KS: Bye.