The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 96, titled:
Astrology Forecast for February 2017
With Chris Brennan and guest Austin Coppock
Episode originally released on January 28, 2017
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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 8th, 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 January 27, 2017, at 5:09 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is Episode 96 of the show. Today I’m joined by Austin Coppock. Hey, Austin.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.
CB: All right. So we’re gonna do just the two of us today. Kelly is on a vacation to Australia and can’t join us, but she’ll be back next month for our next forecasting episode. So it’s just gonna be the two of us today, and like I said to you earlier, I think the battle of the long-winded talkers will begin.
AC: Yes, dueling monologues.
CB: Right. All right, so let’s see, stuff we need to mention right at the top of the episode. So this is Episode 96. To find out more information about the podcast, of course theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. So we’re doing giveaway prizes over the next month or so. They’ll be announced in Episode 98 for patrons of the show who donate on the $5 or $10 tiers. Our grand prize that we’re gonna be giving away on Episode 98 is a pass to the upcoming Northwest Astrological Conference, which is taking place in Seattle in May. It’s gonna be the best conference of the year. It’s gonna feature I think over 20 or 30 speakers for a three- or four-day conference, with pre- and post-conference workshops. I’m gonna be speaking there. Rob Hand, Demetra George, lots of other people who have appeared on the podcast will be there. It’s a great beginner’s conference, especially if you’ve never attended one before, and even if you have, it’s always a great time. We were just talking about you probably making an appearance there this year. Right, Austin?
AC: Yeah, I think I’m gonna make out.
CB: Awesome. And I should have my book with me. I will definitely have my book with me by then, and I’m gonna try to do a book signing and maybe a little get-together or something like that. So yeah, it’s gonna be a big deal. So we’ll give away the pass to that conference on Episode 98 for patrons on the $10 tier. And for patrons on the $5 tier, we’re giving away a set of CDs that contain back issues of The Mountain Astrologer magazine. They contain several years’ worth of back issues of The Mountain Astrologer magazine from the late 2000s, with a lot of just amazing articles. So The Mountain Astrologer magazine of course is the premiere astrological publication in the astrological community. They’ve got forecasts. They’ve got elections. They’ve got great editorials all the time. It’s a great publication. So check that out at themountainastrologer.com, I believe. So we’ll also be giving away the free copy of that CD on Episode 98. So in order to sign up, just become a patron of the show through our page on Patreon, and you’ll gain immediate access to that drawing. All right, other news and announcements. So Kirk Kahn finally finished the calendar for the current year, for 2017, for the Planet Watcher Calendar. And so, I’m using the image of it for this episode, so he wanted me to let people know that that will be available soon. I think you can find out more information on planetwatcher.com. Otherwise, as soon as I have the link, I’ll post it on the description page for this episode, where you can order the poster for the 2017 calendar. Do you have any news or announcements or things going on, Austin?
AC: Uh, yeah. So on Saturday, February 4, I’m going to begin a new year of fundamentals classes. And so, the first year I taught it, it was six monthly units. And then I decided that synodic cycles were really key, and so it became seven. And then this year, I decided that at least a cursory understanding of the most important fixed stars was fundamental to astrology. So now it’s an eight-month course. And so, yeah, that gets going this Saturday, February 4. And I’ve cut it up because people are at so many different places in their study of astrology. A lot of people are self-taught to one degree or another. People have kind of a patchy distribution of learning, where they know this really well, but they never got introduced to that. And so, people can go ahead and take the entire course and go with me for eight months, or they can sign up, they can drop in for an individual monthly unit. Like if you want to do traditional dignity and rulership with me, you can just do that. Or you can just do planets. Or you can just do fixed stars. So it is created to be a logically-constructed, progressive eight-month course, but it’s also constructed so people can drop in for whatever they’re interested in or whatever they’d like to shore up. So that’s a big deal. Then what am I doing? I’m writing. I’m writing every week.
CB: Yeah, you’re writing still, like a machine.
AC: Yeah, the machine has gotten upgraded. As of January, my Patreon hit the point where I’m now doing dailies. And so, I’m now writing everyday, in addition to every week and every month. And so, those dailies come out on a daily basis. But for all of my Patreon subscribers, they just get a PDF file with every day of the month on the first of the month.
CB: Good times—yeah, your highly-enviable ability to really write prolifically. And I’ve been seeing that come through in the Patreon feed like every other day it seems.
AC: Oh, well, thanks. You know, I switched up my writing regimen the last week of December, and it’s gone so well and it’s actually easier than what I was doing before. I want to share this just in case it’s as useful for other people as it has been for me.
CB: Right.
AC: What I’ve started doing is once I get up in the morning and I drink my coffee and I do my tai chi, I then block out two hours where I do not go on the internet at all, and I am not allowed to do anything except write. Not only is that area of time protected, I also do it before I’ve been sullied by exposure to the world. You know, it’s very hard not to react to the world, positively or negatively. You know, it’s like you have a ball. And once the ball’s in motion, it’s bouncing off of things and all that. But anyway, I’ve been doing that and it’s been really good. It’s less time than I was writing before, but I’m probably half, again, as productive. And it’s less painful.
CB: That sounds a lot more optimal than the routine that I fell into of waking up in the morning and just checking in to see ‘how is the world ending today’ for what’s been like for a little while now.
AC: Yeah. You know, this particular structure is like the 30th that I’ve tried. You know, I remember when I was writing the 2013 almanac, I decided that writing was a job and I should just do it for eight hours a day, five days a week, and that was this horrible descent into months-long burnout.
CB: Right.
AC: And I started noticing that after hour four, the quality and quantity of the writing diminished radically. So I’m trying to skim the cream off my brain everyday, and it’s been working.
CB: Brilliant. I will have to try that out at some point. So, for me, I’m finally finishing up, and I’m excited to announce that the book will be out in February. Probably in early February, we’re trying to meet. We’re basically in the middle of indexing the book right now, which means everything else—all 674-odd pages—have been fully laid out and finalized at this point, and we’re just trying to populate and index everything, which is a lot more painful and time-consuming than it sounds. I mean, I guess that’s not true. Cuz indexing already sounds like it would be a very painful and time-consuming endeavor in the first place, but I’m learning that it’s actually much more so than you would even expect.
AC: I mean, I think it does sound boring. You know, nobody ever says, “Hey, do you want to go indexing?”
CB: Yeah. I mean, reading through my own work, it’s actually been kind of nice, in the sense of just populating different terms and then creating a web of references and guiding people towards the preferred ones. And there’s been something about learning the philosophy. I’m working with my friend Shannon Garcia—who does the layout for The Mountain Astrologer magazine—and she’s the one doing the brilliant work laying out my book. But she apparently does indexing as a professional thing sometimes for university press and has recommended to me all of these books on indexing. There’s like entire books written about indexing and the philosophy of indexing, and I’ve had to read a bunch of side articles in order to understand what I’m supposed to be doing when I index. It’s not just a table of every word in the book, but there’s a structure and meaning and purpose to what you’re doing that’s a little bit more complicated than you would think, so I’m learning that process. But I guess we’re recording this on Friday, the 27th, and she and I are trying to finish the book and have the final manuscript by Tuesday, the 1st of February, which is coming up really rapidly.
AC: I’ve got some great news for you, Chris.
CB: What’s that?
AC: Wednesday’s the 1st.
CB: Wednesday. Oh, that is good news. That gives me an extra day.
AC: Yeah, you’re welcome.
CB: Wednesday, February 1, thank God. Okay, so we originally set that on the 17th, as we needed two more weeks. That makes sense. So Wednesday, the 1st, is gonna be our deadline. And I’m hoping to have a final version of the manuscript at that point and then submit it to the printer, and then they’ll send me back a proof copy. And if that looks good, then the book is gonna be ready and for sale. So I’m trying to get it out before the NCGR conference that starts on the 16th. And I’m actually gonna be there in Baltimore speaking at that conference, so I want to have, ideally, a box of books with me to sell and maybe do a book signing or something like that at that conference. But when the book is available for sale, it’s gonna be available for purchase through my website at chrisbrennanastrologer.com, probably in the ‘store’ section, so /store. If you want to receive an announcement—cuz I’ll probably send out an announcement through my newsletter when it comes out—just sign up for my newsletter at chrisbrennanastrologer.com/newsletter. And yeah, I’m really nervous but also excited that it’s finally done, and that it actually came out really, really well. So I’ll be excited to show it off and show everybody what I did.
AC: Yeah. Well, an anticipatory congratulations to you. That’s a huge achievement.
CB: Thank you. Yeah, it’s a lot bigger than it sounds, cuz it’s been something I’ve been working on for 10 years now, since September of 2006. Which is almost 11, so it’s 10-and-a-half years. And then this year especially I sort of threw everything aside and stopped doing consultations and saved up a little bit of money and have just been writing since last January, a year ago. So it’s been a really intense year. I’m super exhausted and just over this entire process and ready to move on. But I’m glad to announce that I’m actually there, and we’re at the stage where I’m about to have a physical book ready for sale. So yeah, the good news about that as well is I’ll also be able to start doing the podcast again regularly and doing my usual four episodes a month, hopefully, by the end of the February, but probably not until March. But listeners can be aware that I will start doing that stuff again pretty soon. And once that’s off my plate, I’ll have a host of really great episodes and topics lined up to discuss in the near future. All right, you know, a lot has happened in the world since our last podcast. Cuz we recorded the last one in mid-December, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: So it seems like we’re a world away. We’re basically a month-and-a-half away from when we recorded that, and so much has happened. I’ve sort of jotted down a list of a few topics that I’ve been building up, since I usually try to when I have something on my mind that I’m thinking about. Because I’ve been doing the podcast for a few years now, I try to set it aside as something that would be good for an episode, and I feel like I’ve got a whole list of those at this point. Or at least a list of major events that have happened in the world that would have made for an interesting discussion on the podcast with you and Kelly. So maybe we could talk about some of that. Should we talk about that stuff first and just have our general discussion right at the front? Or should we get into alignments and then have digressions as we go? What are you thinking?
AC: Oh, let’s start with the past. And we’ll talk about the astrology of the past, and I’m sure that’ll lead us into the astrology of the present and the oncoming future.
CB: Okay. And for those of you who want to jump straight to the forecast, I’ll probably put the timestamp that you can jump to in the description for this episode. But otherwise, let’s see, so what’s been going on? One of the things that’s happened so much in the past month-and-a-half—it’s almost a little dated at this point, cuz we’re like a month past when it was really being talked about so much in the news—is the whole thing about fake news, which we talked about, because it was already being discussed heavily by mid-December. But one of the things I remembered after we released that episode, that I meant to mention was one of the first instances of fake news—as all astrologers should be aware of, that I totally forgot about—was that whole astrology rumor that happened last fall, like around August and September mainly, where the media and everybody was talking about how the zodiac had changed. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a new, fresh zodiac controversy for some reason, and all of the astrologers were really bewildered about how this happened and why everybody was talking about the zodiac having changed.
And if you remember in that episode—if you go back and listen to it or even just read the description—I actually did some investigative work and tracked down where that story originated. And what I found really fascinating at the time—which now looks much more interesting in retrospect—is that it all came down to some sketchy-looking, fly-by-night blog that had written an article about this, and it cited some NASA page that had been updated earlier in the year. But this sketchy-looking blog actually misappropriated some statement from NASA—that NASA had put in one of its pages for educating children earlier last year—and it made it out to be as if something new had changed, or that NASA had announced a new change that affected astrology and the zodiac, when in fact it hadn’t. And NASA ended up being forced to put out a statement to that effect. It all came back to this sketchy little blog that was promoting that story and then got picked up and promoted and passed all around Facebook. Because of course Facebook had removed the human oversight that it previously had and instead tried to automate everything, so that there was no quality control filter for any articles on Facebook past a certain point. So that’s really interesting to me, cuz that’s actually a perfect demonstration of what the fake news phenomenon is actually really all about, at least what that term originally meant. To some extent people have been pushing back and attempting to apply that more to the mainstream media or something like that. But using the original designation, that’s actually a perfect instance of what that whole phenomena was all about. And it’s fascinating to me that the first victim or casualty of that wasn’t necessarily in the political sphere, but actually astrologers themselves had this really significant exposure or incident with that right away last fall. I don’t know. Did you connect that? I didn’t connect that until later that that was really the same phenomena or was tied into that, but I thought that was really fascinating.
AC: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I mean, as we’ve noted before—and as a lot of astrologers have noted—that’s been coming up on and off for a number of years. I logged into Facebook the other day, and you know how it’ll show you something you posted five years ago?
CB: Right.
AC: And there was a post that I had written about “No, your sign hasn’t changed,” from five years ago. And I was like, “That’s funny. That’s what I’m saying.” You know, I felt like that showing up in my ‘barely in this decade’ history was a good illustration of that. But yeah, the whole fake news thing, one of the things it makes me think about is this atomization, this horizontalization, this movement away from hierarchy which characterized a lot of the 20th century and the 21st century. A sort of stepping away from rigid towers and pyramids where these are the people who are right and those people are wrong, or there’s some sort of stratification of correctness, right? Sort of an institutional classification of truth and non-truth. You know, we have this sort of vast, horizontal, atomized, fragmented thing where in the most extreme cases everything is true and everything is false, and everyone’s an expert and no one’s an expert. In some ways, I think that some of the fake news stories that are blatantly fake are kind of reassuring because we can know the difference between truth and falsehood, or facts and things that are not the case.
CB: Right.
AC: But it’s kind of part of our situation now where it’s not like there’s the news outlet that tells the truth and then there are the ones that lie, right? You know, we’re in this seemingly impossibly complicated situation where there are 70 different voices describing the same phenomenon. We can maybe throw half of those out right away, but then we’ve still got 35. It’s still a giant headache. And just in terms of the time it takes to research and consider the vast number of perspectives on any single thing, it would be several full-time jobs just to keep up with everything.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s potentially very exhausting, but it’s something that we make choices about because we can’t not make choices, right? You know, the decision to not read any of the news or to read some of the news, we have all of these filtering choices, and it’s part of the present definitely. And that Saturn-Neptune square, what did it have? It had about a 13-month length. That just described it beautifully.
CB: Yeah, and it brought it to a head. It’s many of those elements that had been present or building up for a while, or possibilities in the background, suddenly all sort of coalesced in this really interesting way, in multiple areas in the world. I’m sure there’s a number of other areas where it came together, that we don’t even know about. Because we’re not in those fields, we’re not aware of that having happened, but I’m sure there’s other fields where it was prominent like that as well. It’s just interesting to see a really great example of it in our field, in the astrological field, coinciding with that last one, which I think hit in August. But back to what you were talking about, the issue now is information overload in the information age. And we’re in this weird period of history where the internet and the amount of information that everyone’s supposed to have access to was supposed to create—in the most idealistic sense or for some of the most idealistic people—the most intelligent or well-educated society possible or imaginable because suddenly everyone has access to, at their fingertips, libraries and libraries full of information, more than anybody at any age past has ever had access to. But instead somehow we’re finding the opposite. People are more not knowledgeable or more easily misled or more buying into falsehoods than you would expect than at other times. One of the things that’s happened is even though the internet has given everyone access to anything, it’s also removed all of the gatekeepers. There used to be all these gatekeepers, on the one hand, to accessing information. There would be editors at newspapers and stuff who would determine what stories met the standards or the qualities of that outfit, and they would reject ones that weren’t good stories or that weren’t well-researched or what have you, and only let through those that supposedly met a certain threshold.
So on the one hand, you have the removal of those gatekeepers to some extent, but then also the removal of others to the extent that now anybody can set up a blog. Or even in my instance, for example, anybody can now publish a book with self-publishing becoming this huge thing and starting to become not just a fringe thing, but something that’s more mainstream and something where people can publish respected or legitimate works through that avenue. There’s no gatekeepers there either, whereas in the past you’d have to submit a book to a major publisher, or a manuscript, and hope that they accept it. And if they do, then you get your information out there, but it still goes through this layer of having editors and fact-checkers and illustrators and design people and other people looking at it. Now you have people that can just publish a book that can have whatever quality. It’s completely under the control of the person publishing it. So there’s this weird theme of the removal of gatekeepers to the distribution of information, but also the consuming of information. And it’s an interesting point in history cuz it seems like societally we don’t know how to deal with that at this point. And you have a lot of people, the majority of society, that’s good at consuming information—cuz we’ve been doing that for a while now—but not necessarily always good at filtering out and figuring out what’s valid information versus what’s not. That seems to be part of the other underlying issue at this point as well, in terms of this whole phenomenon surrounding issues with the news or issues especially with fake news and things like that.
AC: Yeah, and even with real news, even with facts. You know, the thing about facts is facts are not the same thing as meaning, right? We can both look at a pattern of data—or a room of us can look at a pattern of data and one person can make an argument that it suggests things are going this way, another person can make a different argument; maybe not opposed, but another argument. Even if we all had the same facts and agreed on them, in many cases there’s still a variety of interpretations. Not an infinity of interpretations, a range certainly. But yeah, that is the present.
CB: Well, and the issue now is that we don’t agree on the baseline. I don’t know, however many years ago, it seems like there used to be, with something like global warming, for example. If the majority of scientists said that global warming exists, then there was a debate about what’s causing it and what we do about it or what are the best solutions economically or socially or what have. It seemed like that used to be what the debate was, for example, in the United States. Both sides acknowledged that this existed, but we debated the best way to deal with it, as well as something about how it’s happening or how it’s coming about. But now it’s morphed into this debate of we don’t even agree that this is a thing or that this is a topic of discussion that even requires debate, or whether it exists. It seems like there’s a lot of things that have morphed into that where it’s less about debating two sides of the same coin and instead debating whether the coin even exists or something.
AC: Yeah, yeah. I think especially with the United States, I often privately lament that there are so many real issues that we’re gonna need to solve, but we aren’t even gonna get to those. We have like, I don’t know, 10 more years of debating things that aren’t even new or relevant challenges, or things that we really had figured out a hundred years ago or 50 years ago. Yeah, I certainly think that the Saturn-Neptune square exacerbated what is part of our historical state, right? Like this is just kind of where the humans are at now, but that Saturn-Neptune square certainly poured a little gasoline on that, especially in the United States. Because if you’ve looked at our transits lately, it’s just not that good. We’re going through a hard time.
CB: Right. And speaking of transits, I mean, the other thing that happened since our last episode was Trump was inaugurated. And one of the things that’ll be interesting to pay attention to in the country and the world in general over the next few years is there’s a statement that Ptolemy made at one point where he basically—if I’m recalling correctly—says that the chart of the leader of a country becomes the chart of the country for the period in which that person is in power. And this is a concept that I talked about a few years ago, cuz I remember really distinctly seeing it in Obama’s chart. We knew that around the time of the 2012 election that Saturn would be ingressing into Scorpio and that that was his 10th house. And so, Patrick and I, in our prediction for the 2012 election, we said Obama would win, but he’s gonna have some problems, he’s gonna have a rough time for the first couple of years of his second term, because we were really focused on the Saturn transit through his tenth whole sign house, through Scorpio. And one of the things that was really fascinating is it wasn’t really far into that term when the whole Edward Snowden leaks came out. I feel like that, more than anything, really hit Obama in his reputation on both sides of the aisle in a way that you hadn’t seen during his first term. People were generally or universally concerned or opposed to some of the invasiveness of the collection practices that were disclosed at that time, and that certainly seemed to be one of the major things that came up that embodied the sense of Saturn going through Scorpio, of all signs, at that time. But it was interesting how it was also very much tied into that being a Saturn transit through Obama’s 10th house at the same time. So in that way, I felt like at the time that we almost saw a real demonstration of that concept that Ptolemy talked about, of potentially the chart of the president or the chart of the leader acting as sort of an ‘umbrella’ chart for the entire country while that person is in power. It’s gonna be really interesting to see if that’s the case with Trump as well, and if you can see a noticeable shift and change in the dynamics of things just based on that chart. You know, one person’s chart leaving and another person’s chart coming into power and setting a stamp on the country in that way during that time period.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think that the proportion to which I would read the country through the leader would be a function of how powerful the leader is in the country. You know, when you’re dealing with a Roman emperor-type situation like Ptolemy was—where you had vastly more power, near unlimited power—that would make tons of sense. They’d just be like, “Okay, that’s the chart of Rome now.” Even though the executive office has been getting stronger over the last decade or so, decade-plus, it’s still not even comparable to a kingship or the position of emperor, but it matters.
CB: Sure.
AC: You know, it matters. What he says affects stock markets, affects international relations.
CB: Right. I mean, the other side of that is not just the chart, but just the transits at the time sort of setting the tone for that time period. And I’m still continually amazed over the past few weeks of how much some of those transits—especially the outer planet transits—are still continually manifesting in really literal and straightforward ways. Especially the Saturn in Sagittarius stuff is just coming through so blatantly that it’s almost—I don’t know what it is, but it’s really blatant. So Trump signed an executive order recently—as soon as he got into office in the past week or so—to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. You know, it’s something we’ve talked about in the past. But even just that symbolism of Saturn in Sagittarius and building a wall between two countries is pretty literal, right?
AC: Yeah, absolutely. You know, this is part of the Saturn-Neptune complex that we talked about for most of last year, which I abbreviated as ‘waves and walls’.
CB: Right.
AC: That was a huge issue in Europe with the waves of North African and Syrian immigrants, right?
CB: Right.
AC: Some of them were literally building walls. You know, it’s this issue of borders. And as we also discussed with that Saturn-Neptune square, Saturn was in the superior position. And so, if we’re gonna summarize, walls won. The ‘wall’ candidate won.
CB: Right. And that’s because of Saturn in the superior position. I mean, yeah, it’s that. I mean, he issued—I think it was an executive order—stating that people from certain countries couldn’t immigrate to the United States anymore, which were largely from Africa and the Middle East. There was like a proposal on the table to defund the United Nations or something. Even though it’s been submitted regularly, they were saying it might have a better chance of going through than in the past. He signed an executive order pulling out from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is like a large trade deal that’s had a lot of coverage over the past few years. I mean, all of this stuff we’ve been talking about a lot over the past year—that were campaign promises—were very much fitting into the zeitgeist of that transit in some sense, in a very literal way. But it’s really wild and weird to see some of this stuff actually happening now. This is becoming policy and law and stuff in the United States in concert with the last year of this transit. I’m not trying to getting into the politics of those and morality or advisability, or what that’s gonna do to international relations and everything else, but just on a very basic astrological or symbolic level, I still have not gotten over seeing the literalness of some of the manifestations of some of these transits.
AC: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that we’ve literally gone from a ‘Saturn-Neptune’ year where it’s like, “I don’t know what’s real. Are the Pokémons real or not? Is this person a real candidate or not?” And then we kind of found out. We got some clarity about what was real and what wasn’t, whether we liked it or not. And now we’ve moved onto a ‘Saturn-Uranus’ year, right? Literally, Saturn is back and forth in a trine with Uranus all this year. And so, now it’s, “Surprise.” It’s like, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” right? If we look at Uranus’ significations—sudden changes, surprises, quick reversals, all this kind of stuff—once you’re already inside a Uranus phase, then the unknowns become ‘known-unknowns’. We’re looking at, well, he said that. Is that actually gonna be a law? Is that actually gonna be carried out? Is that gonna be this? How long is this guy gonna last? That’s sort of where everybody’s at this year, right? That’s where the money is. It’s on, ‘I don’t know’. They say this, but is it going to happen? And when it happens, what does it actually look like?
CB: Right. Yeah, that difference, and that’s a big thing lately. I noticed with the ‘Obamacare’ thing where suddenly there’s that whole trending ‘Twitter’ thing of people that are surprised that they might be losing healthcare or something because they thought that the Affordable Care Act was different from Obamacare. And now they’re mad at Trump for potentially taking away their healthcare, even though he said on the campaign trail he was gonna repeal Obamacare, and that was one of his core campaign promises. And it’s interesting seeing that dynamic, but seeing also the dynamic of Mercury-Neptune squares, which is one of the aspects that I’ve always had a big issue with because of interactions with certain characters in my past that had Mercury square Neptune as a really prominent thing. I don’t know how to explain this but when I was living in Maryland, I knew somebody who would constantly say that he was in the process of finishing some project, and he was just about to release it, but then he never did. And he kept saying that for like two years. But when you would talk to him in person, he would appear to look so genuine when he said it that it was really easy to take his word for it, and you’re really inclined to buy whatever he was saying. But after a period of time, you’d have to realize that you couldn’t listen to what the person was saying, that you’d have to look at what he was actually doing and what his actions were. His actions were frequently very different from what he was saying, and at some point you had to stop paying attention to the words entirely and instead just focus on the actions.
And I think that’s gonna be interesting, to some extent, cuz the past two US presidents have had that aspect, have had Mercury square Neptune. And so, to some extent, this is a sort of continuing theme, or at least something that you could say that people were doing or should have been doing in the last presidency. But I’ve found it humorous that the media has started saying this in this instance, that you have to pay more attention to what Trump does versus what he says, or what the promises are. Because sometimes he might find it harder to carry things out in actuality versus what is promised, just in terms of how politics are in terms of getting things done in Washington and things like that. And that’s been interesting to me just because I’ve had a real personal experience with that in the past, with people that have Mercury-Neptune in a tight square. Under certain conditions that can sometimes be an issue in terms of that divergence between what a person says versus what a person does. So that’s gonna be an interesting continuing theme this year as well. And I’ll be curious if that continues to be in the news, or if we see that become more prominent in some ways, despite the fact that once Saturn leaves Sagittarius by December, we’ll get out of this whole ‘Saturn square Neptune’ phase, and whether that won’t continue to be an issue here in the next few months. We’re trying to be careful here. But is that verging too close to being political or having too much of a political discussion?
AC: I don’t know.
CB: All right.
AC: I really don’t want to talk about Trump anymore. That’s all I ever hear about. It’s all that’s ever on any news ever.
CB: Yeah, and I didn’t mean to get tied into it too much. I guess it’s just that there’s been such a long space of a month-and-a-half since we did the last episode, and that’s pretty much what’s been dominating the news, just all of this stuff.
AC: Yeah. You know one thing that I think is funny is that what happened was exactly what you would have expected to happen. The person got elected and then they got inaugurated. One thing that is interesting was the women’s march. It was the day after inauguration, Saturday, and it was I believe the largest protest day in American history. And one thing that I think was really interesting about that astrologically is that one of the main players in this year’s astrology is the pairing of Uranus and Neptune. Sorry—the opposition of Jupiter and Uranus. Jupiter is in Leo—I can’t talk. Jupiter is in Libra and Uranus is in Aries. And the two have already made one perfect opposition—which they did at the end of December—and are going to make another perfect opposition here at the end of this month, and then they make another one. And so, what’s interesting about Jupiter-Uranus—if we just do a really brief history—is they seem to be fantastic for protest movements. The last one was in 2010, and that saw the birth of both the Occupy movement, as well as the Tea Party, both of which were protests against the way things are. And so, now, a week ago, with Jupiter and Uranus pretty much exactly opposed to one another, boom, we have protest and opposition on a historic scale. And so, because that’s one of the features of this year, that’s interesting. And that one just came along, right? That one just started at the end of December, and nobody saw that coming. A lot of the estimated numbers were like a fifth or a tenth of the people who actually attended.
CB: Right. That is really interesting. So it was tied into the conjunction. So that was in Aries, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Aries in 2010, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: Interesting, okay.
AC: If we’re using the lunar cycle as a sort of template for other synodic cycles, other paired cycles like that, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is kind of like the New Moon, and then the Jupiter-Uranus opposition—which we’re in all year—is the Full Moon. So we just entered the ‘Full Moon’ phase.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s the same with the Saturn-Neptune square that we’ve been talking about so much. I’ve really been meaning to go back and look more into the late ‘80s and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, especially to understand some of the cycle that we’re going through, because whatever is playing out right now—that’s happening in the Saturn-Neptune square—the seeds or the foundation were probably laid back then in the 1980s. I mean, I’m sure you’ve looked into that more than I have.
AC: Yeah, a little bit. One of the things I looked into with the Saturn-Neptune square is the last time we had the Saturn superior Neptune square, it was the end of the Carter administration. And so, that was interesting because we did a switch from Carter to Reagan under that one. And so, we have—God, it’s just impossible not to talk about politics.
CB: Right.
AC: So yeah, that was Saturn-Neptune, ‘79-‘80.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I happen to know that because that’s in my chart, because I was born in ‘79.
CB: Oh, right, okay. I mean, one more thing, and then we can get off politics completely. But one of the things I was thinking about—and it’s less fresh in my mind—but a week or two ago, I was thinking about this issue of bias in prediction or bias in astrological predictions in particular. Cuz that was one of the things that people immediately jumped to, and there were a lot of accusations made against people like myself that got it wrong in November, that predicted the election wrong; this assumption that it was just about political bias, assuming that all the liberal astrologers predicted that Hillary would win and all the conservatives predicted the opposite, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. I mean, there was a bit of a breakdown like that in terms of the small group of people that got it right were conservatives. And so, the people that were voting for Trump predicted that Trump would win. But the much larger group of at least 80-85%, maybe higher, that predicted that Hillary would win, that was a pretty mixed group. And while it’s true that there are more liberals in the astrological community—probably as a holdover from the New Age movement or the hippies that came in, in the 1960s and ‘70s—there’s a lot more conservatives in the astrological community than is assumed. And I know a number of conservatives that did predict that Hillary would win, so it’s not immediately just something where you can say that the bias was political. The issue when it comes to bias that’s more relevant is actually that it’s about the context of astrological predictions and how astrological predictions are made. And something that astrologers learn very quickly and very early on in studying astrology and trying to anticipate or make predictions about what will happen in the future based on astrology—something that you learn very quickly is that all predictions occur within the realm of what’s possible and what’s probable. Which is a separate, practical consideration that’s taken into place and becomes the lens through which you look at the astrology in terms of what’s possible or what’s probable.
So an example of that is, let’s say somebody gives you a chart, and they say, “Predict when this person will become president.” And you look at the chart, and the chart—using some eminence techniques—indicates that the person will become president in 2050 or in 50 years. So you say that, and then they say, “Well, this is the birth chart of a turtle.” And so, right away you know from the context of that that’s not possible for that turtle to become president—barring stranger things. I guess I should qualify that statement because who knows at this point, but in reality that turtle’s probably not gonna become president. And so, the context of that prediction right away would be changed. Or the astrologer would moderate it based on their knowledge—their practical knowledge of what’s plausible within the context of that entity, right?
AC: Yeah, we were talking about this earlier, and I gave an example of looking at a client’s chart and looking at some 8th house action. And so, the 8th house is the primary house which you use to look at death. But every time, for example, the Sun transits a person’s 8th house, you don’t assume that they’re going to die, right?
CB: Right.
AC: Nobody would make it to age one if that was the case. It’s like, well, the 8th house means other things, too. I bet that’s what we’re going to be dealing with.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like even though that is the thing that you would look at or expect to see in the event of that being the outcome, that’s not, most of the time, gonna be the outcome. It’s like you handicap it. I don’t know if that’s the right terminology to use. Golfers use that terminology of ‘handicapping’ something. And I’m not a golfer, so I’m not sure if that’s the correct one, but it sounds vaguely right. I don’t know. Are you a golfer?
AC: My dad made me golf when I was like 10. I don’t remember what my handicap was.
CB: It’s just this idea—in this analogy—that there’s a higher threshold for something. Based on the probability there might be a higher threshold for what you would need to see in order to predict something was gonna happen versus if something else was more likely, from a practical standpoint, you might have a lower threshold of what needs to show up in order to assume that that’s gonna be the probable outcome. So there’s this waiting almost that takes place. And that happens universally in all astrological predictions and all predictive work using astrology. It’s just something that’s not talked about very much just because very few discussions ever get to that level of the philosophy of astrology. So it’s just not something that’s been discussed a lot or explored a lot in the astrological community.
AC: Yeah. Nobody predicts what they think is impossible.
CB: Right. And that’s one of the funny things. Very early on in astrology, that’s usually a lesson that people probably do learn the hard way, by predicting things that are impossible. Maybe that’s sort of overstating the point, but all astrologers probably do have an experience at some point where there’s something that could happen, but it’s very unlikely; and they make a prediction saying that they will happen, or the opposite, saying that thing won’t happen. But I guess you just learn very quickly, once you get into astrology, that even though there’s this huge realm of possibilities based on the astrological placements, all of that has to be looked at within the context of what’s practical or what’s likely.
AC: Yeah, I think another common example of that is when people get into astrology and start working it, they tend to predict the more dramatic version of events.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s like there’s this once-in-a-lifetime, Saturn-Uranus-Neptune conjunction on top of a person’s Sun.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, you’re like, “Oh, this is gonna be crazy.” And, you know, it’s a little weird and some stuff happens, and you can see the planets’ natures, but for most people it’s not this world-changing thing. You know, for the five musicians who happened to write super popular hits when that happened, it was a big thing. But people will look at something that’s dramatic and that’s gonna be dramatic for that person’s life, right?
CB: Right.
AC: Or that’ll be a deviation from the norm. Or you’ll look at your own chart and you’re like, “Oh, this is gonna be so awesome, that’s gonna happen,” and it’s pretty good. And so, I think most professional astrologers kind of learn to rein in expectations. They pull it away from extremes and sort of look at the less-dramatic version of things, which is a way of confining things to the probable.
CB: And it’s something that comes up personally for a lot of astrologers regularly as well, specifically in the context of if you see a potentially negative transit coming up in your chart. Sometimes there can be this sort of apprehension of, “Oh, I’ve got this really heavy transit coming up,” and you think of what some of the worst-case scenarios could be, and somewhere in the back of your mind—in the lead up to that or right when it starts happening—you’re sort of on edge about not knowing if the worst-case scenario is gonna happen. More often than not, what happens is something comes up and it’s moderately unpleasant or annoying or challenging to work through, but it’s otherwise something that comes and goes and it’s not the end of the world. And it’s like that happens enough times at some point that you realize that even for what looked like really negative transits, you’ve gotta moderate that and be a little bit careful in terms of jumping to the conclusion that the extreme will be the case. And when you do that, that does have the effect of building in a handicap or a weight to your prediction based on past experience, in terms of when the probability of things wins out versus when the worst-case scenario of the astrology wins out.
AC: Yeah, it’s sort of like the ‘80/20’ rule. You know, you want to go with the 80% of probabilities that are likely, and you chop off that extreme 20%. And so, that means that you won’t be right a hundred-percent of the time, unless you’re absolutely divine in your astrology. But you’ve chosen 80 over 20, right? You’re not assuming that the extreme end of the spectrum is gonna be the case.
CB: Right. So I bring all this up because when I did my post-election podcast in November, I thought about it for a week and decided to talk for a solo show, for two or three hours, to work through what, in that episode, were primarily the technical things that I was thinking about at the time, to review what went wrong and what were the different scenarios and the different weaknesses of my technical approach to why I didn’t get that prediction right. I was thinking about things like the birth times—was I using the wrong birth time for Hillary Clinton, was I even using the right birth time for Trump—and all that other stuff. I was not at the point where I could deal with this other issue that people were bringing up, which was bias and what role bias played in either my prediction or everyone’s prediction at that point. And I think over the past few weeks I’ve gotten a better handle on this, and I think that is the access point. And I think the way in which bias did play a role in so many astrologers getting it wrong in this last election—I know some people will not like this statement—but I do feel in the media and just the general consensus was that it was more unlikely that Trump was gonna win, and there was this presumption that Hillary would win the presidency just from a practical standpoint.
Especially by the time that panel happened in October, the whole recording of him making those lewd remarks about grabbing women had just come out, and it looked like he was sunk; that his campaign was sunk from that and other stuff; the ‘tax return’ stuff had just been released. Just in general it seemed like she would win, and it seemed more implausible that Trump was gonna win at that point in early-to-mid-October. And so, I did go into that with this presumption that things were more weighted in her favor from a practical standpoint. And so, what that did then was it made me look at some of the negative things that were there in her chart and sort of weigh them less than I would otherwise and just assume she was gonna get in. Basically, she was in a zodiacal releasing period, she was in an extremely eminent period of her life, but it also switched over to an extremely difficult period of her life, where that Mars-Saturn conjunction was activated in her 10th house. For example, she was in a 10th house profection year that she switched into right before Election Day. And so, it’s emphasizing the 10th house. It’s emphasizing her career and her social standing and eminence and everything else, but then it’s also activating that Mars-Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the 10th house. So my presumption with this weighting was she’ll get elected, but she’s gonna have some really tough times, and it’s not gonna be a very pleasant experience necessarily. Especially that first year would be one of the more difficult years in her life, which had some bearing on past times that she’d been in 10th house profection years and similar things that happened.
So there was this sort of weighting that went into that, that was a sort of practical bias in some sense, because the practical considerations of what was going on in the world at the time were influencing my perception of the astrology and how I was interpreting the placements. And at the same time that was leading me to look at some of the things that you might look at in Trump’s chart—that indicated that this was a time of eminence or that he could win the presidency—and weigh some of those lower than I would otherwise normally. And to that extent it’s like the charge of bias is valid. But understanding what was happening at that point in time, and understanding why most of the astrologers would have weighted or altered their predictions—it’s safe to say that the general consensus was that Trump wasn’t gonna win just from a practical standpoint. It was unlikely that he was gonna win or the percentage was very low was the general consensus at the time. And I know this is debated after the fact, but it really didn’t seem like Trump himself even thought he was gonna win. Because when he came out that night to give the acceptance speech, it’s like he had a pretty small, not very extravagant room to give the acceptance speech, whereas when you switched over to Hillary’s camp, she had this huge ballroom in New York that had a glass ceiling and would hold tons and tons of people, and was obviously really set up to give an acceptance speech. Whereas when you switched over to his, it was like a pretty small room; it seemed like they weren’t necessarily anticipating that they were gonna take it. I know there’s been conflicting reports after the fact about whether he did or did not think he was gonna win, but it seemed that even his camp to some extent wasn’t fully anticipating it. So, I mean, it’s just something I’ve been meaning to bring up, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks in terms of the extent to which astrologers do take into account practical considerations and let that affect their predictions, whether that’s right or wrong, or whether that is necessary, and the effect that has.
AC: Yeah. Well, I think to a certain degree it’s inevitable. Like you said, you have to first concern yourself with whether it’s the chart of a human being or a turtle, right? And so, you’re looking at a different set of events for a turtle or a human being. So to do really good astrology, one of the things you need is cycles and you need to plug history into cycles, right? So if we want to know what the Venus retrograde in Aries is like for a person, we look at when it happens every eight years. And once the person has some years behind them, we get a number of useful precedents. And then if we know where they are now coming into that, then we can make some really on point predictions as to what that’s gonna look like, right? And so, the more data we have to plug in, the better the astrology works. You know, I think that it would be nice if there was astrology in the void, like we could just go on instruments. But I think the ‘turtle’ situation is pretty good and pretty illustrative because we have to know what we’re talking about first. Is this the chart of a nation, the chart of a man, a rat, etc.? And so, there’s no getting around that, and there’s no getting around the fact that we’re human beings and that we want some things and don’t want other things. Like there are some people who are terribly, ridiculously biased, but all of us have a bias. Yeah, we all have a position, and certain things are favorable or desirable and certain things aren’t. And so, even admitting bias doesn’t mean it goes away. Or it doesn’t even have to be bias. It’s just from my window, I can see this part of the street. From my neighbor’s window, you can see it from a different angle. And so, these things will always be part of any prognostication, or even any commentary or interpretation of current events. But what’s funny is that there being bias is bandied about as if it were something terrible, that only some people were guilty of, which is kind of absurd.
CB: Right. And that’s such a hard thing. It’s true that the politics of the astrologer—especially if the astrologer tends towards extreme ends of the spectrum politically—will influence how they’re reading the chart. I’m just thinking about some of the different news stories over the past year. It’s like some people think if you buy some of the news stories that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring or something like that, then you’re gonna interpret the chart through that lens. Whereas if you view it through other stories, that she does humanitarian work for children and that’s been part of her MO since she wrote her college thesis on that, then you would interpret the chart through that placement. So it’s not that an astrologer’s politics doesn’t influence how they’re gonna interpret the chart, it certainly does. And that becomes even more of an issue now as politics becomes more divided and as we’re dealing with things like fake news, which becomes an issue. You know, an astrologer’s gonna form their opinion of how that person is using their chart and how successfully or unsuccessfully they’re manifesting different placements in a constructive way based on what they read about the person, and if you’re only access point for understanding the person is what different news sources say—either in the mainstream media or in fringe media—then there’s the potential for developing a skewed picture of that person and a skewed understanding of their chart from that perspective alone, which is kind of an issue. But there’s just this other separate issue that’s also gonna affect your weighting. If you’re trying to tabulate all the positive and negative indications that are happening in that person’s life at any point in time, it’s gonna affect your weighting of that as well.
And then of course there’s other things. I mean, I’m still waiting to find out how two major things will work out in both Trump and Clinton’s charts over the next year. Because the other thing that threw me off is he has that loosing of the bond—which my keyword for that typically is a ‘major career transition’—that starts December 2017, December of this year, and lasts until early 2020. And part of my overall prediction at the time, or the thing that led me astray—that was one of the biggest technical things because I didn’t understand how he could win the presidency if it was indicating a major career transition that only started like a year after he became president. So that’s still one that I’m gonna be waiting around for to figure what the hell that was about and what that indication ends up coinciding with in his life. And then there’s another one coming up for Hillary in June. It’s a loosing of the bond that connects back to that Election Day. That entire month of the election was a foreshadowing of what I call a ‘foreshadowing period’. It comes back suddenly, and she has what’s called the ‘loosing of the bond’, where it indicates some sort of career transition between June 8, 2017 and July 25, 2017. It’s repeating the same period that she was in when she lost the election in November. There’s something that happened in November that almost happened, but then comes back or sets a foundation, and then it comes back between June and July of this year, and I’m really curious what that’s gonna be about. Cuz it’s almost like there’s something unfinished from the election for her until that time. And if you go back and listen to the forecast episode that you and I and Kelly did right before the election, I was actually bringing that up about Trump’s chart, cuz he had a lower level version of that on Election Day. He was in a foreshadowing period on Election Day, and then there was a low level loosing of the bond that happened later in November, and I said it was like there was something about Election Day that might not be finished for him until later in the month. And that actually ended up being some of the final votes didn’t get tallied until that loosing of the bond happened at the end of November, and then it was fully certified that he had definitely won that state; and that ended up being the final state or something like that. So yeah, there’s still a lot of things up in the air about that. Even though that was a long digression, it’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about and still pondering over the past few weeks, so I meant to bring it up. Okay, so maybe it’s time—unless there’s anything else we meant to get to. Maybe it’s time to switch to the forecast.
AC: That sounds good.
CB: All right. So we open up the month, the very beginning of February, and probably the very first thing that I would point to would be that Venus ingresses into Aries on February 3. Would you say that’s the opening thing that month?
AC: Yeah, I think that’s really important. So it’s important for two reasons, one, Venus is gonna be in Aries a lot for this coming season, and so this is the opening move here. This is our introduction of Venus into Aries. Venus is going to get to about 13° of Aries and then station retrograde in early March, and then come all the way back through those first 13°, and then back into Pisces, and then turn direct and then go all the way through Aries again. So it’s not just Venus in Aries for four weeks. This is the introduction to a lot of Venus in Aries, right?
CB: Right.
AC: So there’s that. And then the second thing is that when Venus ingresses into Aries, Venus will be joining Mars there, right?
CB: Okay.
AC: And so, actually, as we’re speaking, we’re speaking on the 27th, Mars is, I don’t know, four hours from ingressing Aries. So we know, one, Mars rules Aries, and so Mars is really strong in Aries. And both Venus and Mars will be in Aries, with Uranus, for all of February, right? And so, not only do we have greater weighting of planets in Aries, we have the ruler of Aries there. We have Mars there, right? So this gives February a much more Aries-like quality. I was gonna say ‘Aryan’, but that could be confusing. And so, we’re looking at Aries qualities. We’re looking at fast, impatient, brave, bombastic, explosive, intense, quick, spiky sine waves of big exertion and then exhaustion and then big exertion again. You know, I guess when people say, “It’s ‘go’ time.” Aries is ‘go’ time.
CB: Right.
AC: And we have a couple of moments where that comes to a head. But both Mars and Venus being in Aries—everyone will be able to see in the sky. If you look out when the Sun sets, to the western horizon, you’ll be able to see both Venus and Mars in Aries. That’s a big part of what gives February its character.
CB: Yeah, cuz I’ve been seeing that. I mean, it’s been really striking for a while now how you could see Venus. I guess it’s mainly been in the evenings. Like shortly after sunset, you can see Venus and Mars right now in the sky pretty close together.
AC: Yeah, they’re only 5° apart right now. So one thing that’s interesting, for a couple of reasons, is for the last couple of weeks, if we look at it, it looks like Venus has been gaining on Mars; like Venus is gonna catch Mars.
CB: Right.
AC: And if Venus wasn’t gearing up for a retrograde cycle, that would be the case. Venus’ average movement and speed is much faster than Mars. But Venus is actually slowing down and slowing down and slowing down while it pursues Mars, right? And so, if you kind of watch the month go by—if we look at next month at this time—there’s 10° of arc between them, whereas now there’s only 5. And so, while Venus is usually the faster body—which catches and overtakes Mars—she’s not gonna catch Mars this time. And so, that’s really interesting from a horary perspective. If you’re reading a chart, and Venus and Mars are the significators, it looks like they’re gonna make a conjunction, right? This matter is going to complete itself. But that’s not the case.
CB: Right.
AC: Venus is not going to catch Mars.
CB: There’s a name for that. Is that ‘frustration’? There’s like different versions of what Abu Ma’shar—
AC: Yeah, in my brain, I call it ‘false application’, right? It looks like it’s gonna happen, but it isn’t. But that’s just sort of my quick version. I don’t know what the traditional titles are.
CB: I’ll have to look that up.
AC: That of course matters for horary charts where those are important significators. But it also matters in general for the significations of Venus and Mars, right? You know, I think there will certainly be a crop of romances that weren’t that come out of this February and March. Especially February, where it looks like something’s gonna happen and then it doesn’t. Or it happens, but in a different way and much later. And so, anywhere where you’re looking at Venus and Mars coming together—if it looks like it’s just gonna come together—great, it’s on schedule, they’re only 5° away right now—that’s probably now gonna be the case, right? Again, one of the general themes for this year is ‘curve balls’ and ‘wildcards’, which I’m getting from Uranus being configured to both Saturn and Jupiter, making multiple exact aspects to both of them. And then with the Venus retrograde that’s coming up in March, we’re really getting into the territory of it in February. The planet won’t be moving backwards during February, but we’re getting into the stuff that we’re going to be going through, right?
CB: Right. It’s in its shadow period.
AC: Yeah. Actually I had a thought about the shadow period that I wanted to share. So for those who are new to the idea, the shadow period is the span of degrees that a planet will transit three times during a retrograde cycle, right? So in this case we’re looking at, I believe, 26 Pisces. Let me just look at the thing real quick. Yes, correct. It’s 26 Pisces to 13 Aries. So if we watch Venus’ movements over the next four months, we’ll see Venus go from 26 Pisces to 13 Aries, do the same thing backwards, and then do the same thing again, right? But what I was thinking about is in terms of visibility, we’re going to get three different kinds of light that Venus shines on these degrees. Right now, Venus’ ‘evening star’ is illuminating these topics, right? And then while Venus is retrograde, we’ll get ‘underworld’ Venus. We’ll get ‘vanished’ Inanna. You know, we get no light, right? We’re in the dark with it. And then after the direct station—which is on April 15—Venus arises in the east. And so, our third pass will be morning light. So we go evening light, no light, morning light—all of those illuminating or failing to illuminate the same set of topics, right? So the same thing, but from three different angles, which, I don’t know, I thought was kind of neat.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
AC: And that’s true of Mercury retrogrades as well. It’s true of all of them. You know, it’s looking at the same degrees under different lighting conditions.
CB: Right. And so, that one, it was 26. Basically, it becomes one of the more sensitive degrees.
AC: Yeah, it’s like 26 Pisces, 13 Aries. And so, we’re already in the Venus retrograde right now, I think.
CB: No.
AC: Are we at 26, yet?
CB: It’s like a day or two away.
AC: Oh, we’re at 24, so in two days.
CB: Literally, when we release this episode. Or shortly before, it will be in its shadow period by the time people listen to this.
AC: Yeah, yeah. And so, anyway, the bulk of the retrograde is in Aries. You know, if we have to pick a sign to shorthand it, it’s definitely way more Aries than it is Pisces.
CB: Right.
AC: So that’s what a lot of the topics are gonna feel like. So anyway, like you said, the 3rd of February’s ingress of Venus into Aries is really important, cuz that’s territory we’re gonna be in for a while. And with Mars in the same sign and ruling it, it really super-charges it, right?
CB: Yeah. Whenever I see a pileup of planets—cuz we do get one, especially at the very end of February—I remember in 2011, when Obama came out and announced the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound had taken place. They had killed Osama bin Laden and there was like a huge pileup of planets in Aries at the time, May 2, 2011. And it was like Uranus and Venus in Aries and Mercury and Jupiter and Mars, and the Moon had just passed over all of that stuff, and all of it was opposed by Saturn and square to Pluto. I don’t know, it just sort of reminded me of that. It’s not that there haven’t been pileups in Aries since then, but it’s kind of an interesting multi-collision of different planets in that sign that I haven’t seen in a while.
AC: Yeah, there’s a lot going on. And so, with Uranus having been there for years—and with Saturn in Sagittarius—there’s a lot more planets in fire signs this month than there usually are in February.
CB: Right.
AC: And again, just Mars in Aries by itself throws off a lot of heat. And so, you know, the positive side of that is going out and getting it done. The negative side is getting in squabbles and dumb little fights and conflicts for no reason.
CB: Yeah, cuz it really gets accentuated. Cuz later in February, Mars hits and conjoins Uranus at 22 Aries right about the same time that it opposes Jupiter.
AC: Dude, that’s the cherry on top of the month. We get an annular solar eclipse and a Mars-Uranus conjunction that are in almost perfect contra-antiscia on the 26th.
CB: Okay.
AC: If we can, I’d like to save that for the end of the month and just be vaguely sequential. I mean, that’s much bigger than any other event in the month, but we have a lot that leads up to that.
CB: Before we move on then, I did look up Abu Ma’shar and Ben’s book, which is helpfully titled, Introductions to Traditional Astrology: Abu Ma’shar and Al-Qabisi, translated and edited by Benjamin N. Dykes. He has this section, and the traditional term is evidently refrenation. But Ben actually translates it—cuz he always goes from much more literal translations—and he says the Arabic term means ‘revoking’. So looking up, again, Venus applying to Mars in Aries, applying to a conjunction and moving towards it, but then it stations retrograde and starts moving away from Mars before it completes the conjunction. Apparently this was called ‘revoking’ or ‘restraint’ or ‘objection’ or ‘annulment’ in the different translators, depending on which Arabic or Latin translation you use. And Ben has a translation from Abu Ma’shar’s Lesser Introduction where it says: “Revoking is whenever, with planets prepared for application, the one of them is not available for application because it was made retrograde.” Yeah, so I thought that was kind of interesting. So learn a new term everyday. Apparently the traditional Renaissance term is refrenation, but Ben’s translating it as ‘revoking’.
AC: I like that. So one of the things that Venus can offer Mars that you see in a lot of traditional texts, in particular, the Picatrix—it’s got this one section—Venus can fix whatever Mars damages, right? If Mars causes hostility, Venus can bring peace to that. And so, with Mars stirring up hostility, with Venus, maybe people will cool down. Maybe people will mellow out. Maybe we can all just be friends.
CB: Right.
AC: And that being revoked or rejected—Mars rejecting Venus—I don’t know, it’s pretty evocative.
CB: Yeah, the idea that hopefully cooler heads will prevail, and then the cooler heads slow down and turn the opposite direction and get the hell out of Dodge.
AC: Right. They’re like, “Okay, we gotta go back to Pisces.”
CB: Right. But then it gets back to Pisces. And that’s ironic because Venus retrogrades back and it finds the square with Saturn when it stations around 26 Sagittarius. Which is kind of interesting, cuz Kirk was asking me whether to put Chiron in the calendar for this month, and I said ‘no’, cuz it’s not usually something we talk about a lot. Even though I don’t use asteroids a lot, it was notable that when Venus stations direct, it’s stationing direct conjunct Chiron or something at that time, right?
AC: Yeah, absolutely. The way that I use Chiron is that I use it with similar rules as a fixed star. Like I don’t care if there’s a sextile to Chiron.
CB: Right.
AC: But if something’s right smack-dab on it—whether it’s an angle or a planet—I interpret it, and that comes out of my reading for people. Chiron doesn’t necessarily need to be a big part of every reading. But if you’ve got Chiron on the midheaven by degree, it almost always has a big role in your life.
CB: Right. And so, it’s at exactly 26 Pisces by mid-April, and that’s when Venus stations direct. And Venus stations direct at 26 Pisces. So you get this sort of weird alignment of Venus stationing direct conjunct Chiron and square Saturn within a degree, which is not very pleasant-sounding.
AC: No. It’s not a very auspicious point from which to move forward.
CB: Right. I think the term or the keyword that I used in the yearly forecast last month was ‘heartbreak’, but I’m sure there’s others. My general thing with asteroids is sort of like yours, but there’s just too many variables. I acknowledge the asteroids, that they work, and that you can see things symbolically with them sometimes. I do think people have gone too far, and I do worry about the modern tendency to put too much emphasis on the name that was ascribed to the asteroid having symbolic meaning, so that whatever name that was given to it was the name it was meant to get. Even if it’s something wacky like the asteroid Beer, that you’ll still have some symbolic correlation with that. I have seen, to some extent, that work out with certain asteroids, like Chiron. So it’s not that I completely discount them. It’s just there’s a point in astrology where there’s too many variables, and you have to figure out what to cut and what’s most important to pay attention to and look at, and what’s not.
AC: Right. Well, one thing that’s worth pointing out is that Chiron’s not really an asteroid. You know, it’s between Saturn and Uranus. It’s a planetoid. It’s part of a class of bodies called ‘centaurs’, strangely enough. And so, it’s not just one house-sized thing floating through the asteroid belt. Its orbit is relatively clear. I believe it’s a planetoid. So it’s a little bit less one of a million.
CB: Right. Cuz Ceres has the mass of all the other asteroids combined or something ridiculous like that. I might be overstating that.
AC: It’s considerable.
CB: Yeah. So I don’t discount the asteroids, but I’ve been meaning to state what my general policy was, which is just that there’s something to them, I’ve seen that. I did not decide to specialize in them because it seemed like there was already so much just dealing with the planets, even just the traditional visible planetary bodies. But also, when you incorporate Uranus and Neptune and Pluto and then the nodes or the Lot of Fortune or something, you’re already working with a lot of variables, which in and of itself you can extract a ton of meaning from if you really get down to it. So over the past 10 years, part of my process as an astrologer has been starting from less and working my way out and squeezing as much as I can out of just the basic bodies, and then at some point I can start factoring in other, more minor things when relevant. You know, for me, that approach works out better than the opposite approach—which I think most modern astrologers do—which is just you throw everything in the chart and see what sticks. But the issue with that is it’s a little bit more chaotic and a little bit harder to do systematically on a regular basis if you’re using that much stuff. I mean, there’s ways around that. For example, Demetra has a whole system that she talks about in her book, Astrology and the Authentic Self. Her system for working with asteroids and stuff is to focus on ones that are making hard aspects within a few degrees or something like that—to certain planets and certain personal bodies—as a way of narrowing down the hundreds of potential significators that you could be using. So there’s ways to do that, but it still involves working with a lot more variables than I’m comfortable with, or that I think that humans can normally take into account on a regular basis.
AC: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s generally my approach as well.
CB: Sure.
AC: Look at it when it’s basically right on top of something.
CB: Yeah. So that digression aside, this literally is right on top of something, and it is potentially notable that Chiron will be stationing—or Venus will be stationing exactly on top of Chiron and square Saturn. And that does kind of paint or elicit a picture for April, which will probably become more relevant then. So we’ll probably return to that in a few months.
AC: Yeah, we don’t even get Venus’ retrograde station this month, but we get the beginning of this, with the beginning of February. We get this first pass of ‘evening light’ across these topics.
CB: Right.
AC: And then shortly thereafter, on the 5th, we get Jupiter’s retrograde station. So Jupiter comes to a halt at 23° Libra, and it’s gonna be retrograde for about four months. Jupiter’s always retrograde for about four months. Jupiter’s gonna go direct on, I want to say, the 8th of June. The 9th of June. So Jupiter will go direct on the 9th of June at 13, right? So that means that Jupiter’s gonna recover those 10°. You know, one of the things in terms of general policy that’s worth stating is that Jupiter retrogrades are not signals that there are disasters unfolding. It’s not a dramatic thing. It’s not a big deal. You know, it’s not like Mars stationing direct, where it’s something you gotta really kinda ride out. Jupiter stations retrograde every year. It stays retrograde for about four months. In general, Jupiter retrogrades—if I had to say that there was a general message, it’s stop trying to take more territory or cram more in, and look at what you’ve got and look to establish greater coherence between what you already have, right? Look to consolidate gains you’ve made. Look to confirm lucky hits. You know, it’s more about consolidation and coherence rather than getting new prizes. And so, it’s not outright lucky as Jupiter direct, but it’s not some foul omen.
CB: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s time to transition to that, but that actually coincides with my first election for this month.
AC: Oh, great.
CB: Not just my first election, but only election. Before I completely change subjects—
AC: Oh, no. I just had a few things to say about the phase, which I said.
CB: Sure. So the phase, I mean, still it’s tied in with that square with Pluto obviously and that opposition with Uranus, which we’ve talked about and will come back to later. So electional-wise, as I announced on the last episode, because I’m no longer writing the electional column for The Mountain Astrologer magazine, we’ve decided to change the electional segment and do it as a separate 45-minute episode just for patrons of the show who are on the $5 or $10 tier. So Leisa and I recorded our first one late last month, which was the elections for January. We’re getting ready to record the next one, which contains the elections for February. This weekend we’ll release that for patrons. So if you want to get a hold of that episode, all you have to do is sign up for the $5 or $10 tier on Patreon, and then you’ll immediately get access to the download once it’s available. So that being said, we feature four elections each month in that 45-minute episode, but I’ve decided to still highlight one election each month in our monthly forecast. And the one election that we decided to highlight this month actually takes place on February 10, 2017, at approximately 4:30 PM in the afternoon. And you should make it—whatever your location is—around 4:30. Pick a time so that the ascendant is about 11° of Leo, and that should pretty much match what you should have in the chart based on what we’re going for here. So here’s the chart. It’s February 10, 2017. Leo is rising. The Sun is the ruler of the ascendant, and it’s placed at 22° of Aquarius in the 7th house. And it’s applying to an exact trine, in a day chart, with Jupiter, which has recently stationed retrograde at 23° of Libra in the 3rd house. So one of the main things we’re going for in this chart is the ruler of the ascendant is applying to a trine—which is the most positive aspect—with the most positive planet in the chart. Because this is a day chart, it takes places shortly before sunset, which means according to the doctrine of sect that Jupiter is at his most beneficent within the context of this chart. So I love the chart for that reason. It also has some other good stuff.
This is basically the day of the Full Moon, which also happens to be an eclipse. Leisa and I had some discussion about that, the pros and cons of doing elections on eclipse dates. The literature’s a little bit divided on it. I know there’s some astrologers who think that that’s a ‘no-no’ and that you don’t do stuff on eclipse dates. I have less reservations about that, cuz I usually see an eclipse more as important markers of time, or gateways where really important events can take place and can either begin or culminate. So I don’t have reservations about using elections on eclipse dates as long as they’re sufficiently auspicious. How do you feel? Do you have a feeling one way or another on that?
AC: It depends on the eclipse. I think North Node is way better than South Node in elections for doing stuff or starting something. Even so, yeah, I’m wary about it. Traditional material is almost entirely consistent that it’s to be avoided. You know, there’s this issue of compromising the lights. It’s like those are the luminaries, we need those. And so, I think that’s the standpoint that traditional writers are coming from. Yeah, I would just say that I’m very careful about it, and that I wouldn’t do it, that’s what I would say. Unless there’s a really good reason, I would avoid eclipses as elections for most things.
CB: And I agree for certain things possibly. I have a section about this. Cuz eclipses and stuff are very much tied into the meaning of the nodes, and a lot of the meanings of the nodes come through what’s happening with the luminaries, since the nodes themselves are derived from the luminaries. The nodes literally are just points on the ecliptic where the path of the Sun and Moon intersect. So it’s like if you were able to look up in the sky and then draw lines that show you exactly where the Sun and Moon are gonna go over the next few days or next few weeks along the ecliptic. If you drew those lines and then found the point where the line of the Sun and the line of the Moon crossed each other, that’s exactly what the node is, the intersection points between the two luminaries. And in the Hellenistic literature, there was this ambiguity and this debate about the nodes because of that. On the one hand, they were viewed as ominous because that’s also where eclipses take place. Because if you have the Sun and Moon exactly moving past each other—or having their paths intersect—then that means at those times is also when the Moon has a chance to move over the Sun and to eclipse it. So that is where eclipses take place, and eclipses were traditionally viewed as more ominous because of the endarkening or the eclipsing of the luminaries and of the Sun. But on the other hand, you also had these ideas of the North Node being associated with ascent and increase and the South Node being associated with descent and decrease. And that was a little bit more ambiguous in terms of whether that could be positive or negative, depending on the context, with the traditional thing about the North Node being bad with the malefics because it increases their maleficence versus being good with the benefics because it increases their beneficence versus the South Node being good with the malefics because it decreases their maleficence and bad with the benefics because decreases their beneficence. So in that context, you ended up with a doctrine where the nodes—when seen from that light—were more ambiguous because they could be positive in certain contexts or negative in other contexts, simply because their primary thing was not necessarily to do good or do bad, but just increase and decrease.
So that statement aside, that’s one of the reasons why I’m not as concerned in terms of either making the nodes prominent or making eclipses prominent in the chart, as long as it’s something important. Cuz the other thing that you will notice pretty regularly in natal astrology is that eclipses can be really important markers for important turning points in a person’s life. And if you’re starting something really important—that’s either a new venture or the culmination of a venture—there’s a pretty good chance you’re gonna see an eclipse taking place somewhere in a prominent part of the person’s chart at that time, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Patrick and I put a lot of emphasis on that in the 2008—or Patrick put a lot of emphasis on that in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections because Obama had a solar eclipse in his 1st house just before he became president in the 2008 election, and then he had another eclipse in his 10th house before he was reelected to his second term. So it’s within that context that I would recommend this chart. And the other thing that I would recommend it for is for 7th house-type elections that have to do with exchanges between people, or in certain contexts, partnership. Because the other thing about this election is that it’s Leo rising, with the Sun in Aquarius in the seventh whole sign house. So the ruler of the 1st is in the 7th, but it’s also applying within a few degrees. So the Sun at 22° of Aquarius is applying to a sextile with Saturn at 25° of Aquarius. So you have an applying favorable aspect between the ruler of the ascendant, or the ruler of the 1st, and the ruler of the 7th. And both of them are otherwise relatively well-placed.
So that’s a good setup if you’re doing something that has 1st house and 7th house connotations, where you have one party that’s initiating something and another party that’s receiving something; which the person who initiates is the 1st house and the person who receives that which is initiated is the 7th house. So traditionally, that was always applied to things like buying and selling, but it could also be applied to other things like marriage or partnership or contracts and other things of that nature. February, unfortunately, is not a great month for elections in general and we actually had a really hard time, and Leisa especially reported having a hard time finding good elections for February. So if you have a broad timeframe of the entire year or something to initiate a major venture that you’ve been building up to for 10 or 20 years, then I’m not necessarily saying that this is the chart that I would use universally in that larger context. But in terms of just looking for decent elections for initiating things during the course of this month, this is one of the main ones that I would highlight.
So yeah, the main thing about this election is the Sun’s bonification through the trine with Jupiter. The downsides to the election are that Mars is in Aries in the 9th house, in a day chart, with Uranus and Venus. So there’s the potential for some issues in terms of 9th house matters, which could be things like travel or education or religious matters and things like that. So it would not necessarily be as great of a chart if you’re trying to initiate a 9th house thing. I think it would be a decent and usable chart if you’re trying to initiate some major 7th house thing, especially if it’s something that’s coming to a culmination, or is a culmination of events with respect to the 7th house. This is a Full Moon chart where the Moon is at 21 Leo and it’s applying to an exact opposition with the Sun at 22 Aquarius, before the Moon then switches over and sextiles Jupiter at 23 Libra. But the effect of that is that both the Sun and Moon are both applying to the most positive planet in the chart through favorable aspects shortly after or around the same time that they are applying to complete the opposition with each other. All right, so that’s my one election I wanted to highlight for February. And then you can get the other three elections if you sign up for the Patreon at the $5 or $10 thing. A lot of people have signed up over the past month. So thanks everyone for doing that. We appreciate your support. And yeah, we’ll be recording that next episode sometime this weekend, so you should see it soon. All right, so back to the forecast.
AC: So there’s an eclipse on February 10.
CB: Yes, our first eclipse. And that’s the first eclipse—cuz we had a debate about this in August, about whether the last one was an eclipse, because it was so far away from the nodes.
AC: I mean, literally, NASA said no part of the shadow will fall across the body and eclipse it.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s not an eclipse.
CB: All right. This is funny. This is a six-month debate at this point, or a five-month debate. And one listener—I forget what her name was—actually pointed this out afterwards. Afterwards I reported getting sick, and she pointed out, “That had taken place in your 1st house, like on your ascendant,” or something like that, and I was like, “That’s a good point. I will bring that up with Austin and Kelly.”
AC: Yeah. But do you only get sick under eclipses?
CB: Do I only get sick under eclipses? No, I mean, of course not, and there could be other things going on with it. But it was an additional, nice little indicator that that specific lunation may have had more juice than it should have. Even if it wasn’t a full-blown solar eclipse, like ‘the entire sky goes dark and eagles or crows start circling’ type event, there may have been slightly more juice to it than it should have been, theoretically. But I don’t know, we don’t have to argue about it. So this one—I think everyone’s in agreement that this is a full-blown eclipse, right?
AC: It’s a penumbral eclipse. It’s one of the modest varieties.
CB: All right. But will this fit your very stringent definition?
AC: The very stringent criteria of there actually having to be a shadow on the body visible from someplace on Earth? Yes.
CB: Okay, okay.
AC: I’m pretty sure that’s what an eclipse is.
CB: But that’s an interesting point in terms of what is an eclipse, cuz this is something that comes back to a constant issue in astrology, and this is probably the source of our disagreement on that. Sometimes there’s this distinction between what is happening visually in terms of the observational astronomy versus what is happening from an abstract mathematical sense, and that’s where that issue comes in. It was technically within the 15°-range—or whatever the abstract mathematical range is for what people consider to be eclipses, or how eclipses are usually calculated—but it wasn’t observationally, as you were saying, something where the shadow was actually cast across the body of the objects involved. I mean, to me, that’s where I get stuck on this sometimes. For me, an eclipse is more of an abstract thing sometimes in that it’s a Full Moon or it’s a New Moon that takes place within the vicinity of the nodes. And we both agree on that, but it’s this debate about whether that can actually visually be seen and the extent to which that makes a difference or not. Anyway, this is the first of a series of eclipses that’s gonna take place in Aquarius and Leo. Full-on eclipses, right?
AC: Yeah. And so, this is interesting. It precedes the movement of the nodes into Leo and Aquarius. They’re still in early Virgo and Pisces. They’ll move in May. But yeah, as you pointed out in your election, both the Sun and the Moon are configured to Jupiter and Uranus with this one. We have the famous ‘mystic rectangle’ in effect.
CB: Right.
AC: But leaving out the mystic rectangle, the Sun’s at 22 Aquarius, so it can hang out with Uranus at 21 Aries and Jupiter at 23 Libra. And then the Moon at 22 Leo can see both Uranus and Jupiter as well. So one very simple thing that we can say about this is that this lunation is juicing that Uranus-Jupiter opposition. And the Uranus-Jupiter opposition is less than three weeks away from another exact hit, right? So we’re pouring the power of the luminaries into that again. You know, the Jupiter-Uranus opposition is important cuz it’s one of our configurations that’s basically gonna be there for almost the entire year, until the second-half of the last quarter—or the last quarter. Until halfway through the last quarter. And it’s really tight right now, so that’s definitely a push. You know, Jupiter and Uranus, wherever that opposition falls in your chart—if it falls near the AC/DC or MC/IC axis—well, then that’s pretty important, or if it falls on other sensitive points. So that’s one thing this particular lunation does. Another is, yeah, it’s an eclipse, and it’s off the North Node, and so those generally tend to be additive, right?
CB: Right.
AC: If you get into trouble with the North Node, a lot of times it’s too much. If we look at the Vedic take on the ‘more and less’ interpretation of the nodes, they say, yeah, you can get into plenty of trouble with the North Node. But you get in trouble with too much rather than South Node/not enough. And so, if you’re going to watch yourself, it’s being too hungry, too ambitious, too passionate, too much, right? Whatever too much Leo is—which some might argue is any Leo at all. Sorry, Leos. But that’s the idea. North Node Leo—too much of this. That can however be corrective for people who maybe don’t have enough of the leonine qualities. You don’t have enough confidence or have a hard time dealing with attention. You know, people looking at them, right? So it brings a lot of blood to the tissue of Leo. Although I will say that I would not get married under that election. As far as eclipses go, it’s pretty nice-looking. I like that configuration with Jupiter.
CB: Yeah.
AC: This is not a scary eclipse to me at all.
CB: Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly why we integrated it into that election, just because that couple degree or two trine and sextile with Jupiter really does take a lot of the edge off of that eclipse. Also, the additional sextile from Uranus and trine with Uranus at 21 Aries adds this sort of innovative or refreshing spark to it at the same time.
AC: Yeah, I don’t really like to mix Uranus and the Moon. I’m totally a fan of Uranus and the Sun, but I like to keep Uranus and the Moon away from each other.
CB: Even just a Full Moon itself already feels like Uranus to me. Cuz I always think of that thing that you hear sometimes, the idea that visits to the emergency room get busier or something during Full Moons. And this is one of those things where if you ask somebody who’s like a nurse or somebody who works in a hospital, they’ll be like, yeah, that’s true. For some reason Full Moons seem to coincide with greater periods of traffic at the hospital. It almost has that frantic quality to me to begin with—some Full Moons do—when they’re really prominent or when they’re activated, especially in a person’s chart. I mean, to me, that’s just emphasizing something that’s already there by adding an additional franticness or electric quality to it.
AC: Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, looking at this Moon, there are almost no planets in earth or water signs. All we have is Neptune in a water sign and Pluto in an earth sign, and other than that it’s all fire and air, right? It’s all yang, active, ungrounded energy.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And this election emphasizes that more than anything much of the year. The only other thing that comes close is probably gonna be some of that Leo pileup in August or something, right?
AC: Yeah.
CB: I mean, that’ll be the other side of this. That’ll be the solar eclipse in Leo six months later.
AC: And that’ll be a ‘righteous’ eclipse.
CB: Right.
AC: That’ll be a total solar. Yeah, so this one is an introduction. You know, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take notes. I’m gonna look at it, and I’m gonna look at the next couple of weeks after it, and I’m gonna see what these eclipses in Leo have in store, right? Generally, you get about 18 months of eclipses in the same pair of signs. And so, this is beginning quite an arc, and so I like to know what the story is about as soon as I can. These introductions give you a thread that you can follow to what the plot might be about for you and collectively.
CB: Right. So this is like the opening salvo for a year-and-a-half or two years of eclipses in those two signs, and that pair of Leo and Aquarius.
AC: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that’s what’s interesting, the nodes aren’t even in those signs yet. The nodes are still in Virgo and Pisces. So this is even more, in that sense, the preliminary buildup to a serious set of eclipses in those signs that’ll probably become more intense once the nodes move into those signs, into Leo and Aquarius, later this year; I think in early May. So even in that sense it’s almost preliminary or like a preview of a lot of the things that are to come.
AC: Yeah. And that’s really common with the eclipse cycle. What we have this month is, later, we have the last eclipse in Pisces, which comes after the first eclipse in Leo. And so, you get these linkages where you’re finishing up the old and starting something new in the same lunar cycle. That’s more common than not. You know, the way that the nodal cycles move isn’t start-to-finish, reset, start a new one, right? It’s like as one thing is ending, another thing is beginning simultaneously, or even earlier than the ending happened. There’s a sort of ‘knottiness’. K-n-o-t, not naughty.
CB: Right.
AC: Not the way we call children bad. But there’s a ‘tangliness’ to this. These aren’t smooth, sanded-down edges. And so, a big part of February is this beginning one thing and ending another, but we’re beginning before we’re ending, which is interesting. Different arcs.
CB: Sure.
AC: I mean, I’m not worried. I’ll probably enjoy this eclipse, this February 10 one. I think it’ll be fun.
CB: It’ll be good times. So that February eclipse is taking place in Leo. So people should really look at what sign that is and especially what house it is. I mean, cuz that’s really the big thing about eclipses, what house it falls in, in your chart. And it’s also a good useful factor when you’re trying out different house systems, seeing how an eclipse will fall in one house system versus what house it’ll fall in, in a different one. And if there’s a noticeable shift, and if you see one topic coming up and not another that seems to match one house, that’s a good, pretty solid method for testing things out or comparing things. So yeah, pay attention to what house that eclipse falls in. And since it’s a lunar eclipse, and basically a Full Moon—like a super-charged Full Moon—typically these ideas of a culmination or a climax of things tend to be bigger keywords for Full Moons. So look if there’s a climax or a culmination in that area of your life that matches the house that the degree of the eclipse falls in, at 22 Leo.
AC: Yeah. Another thing that’s interesting about this—with it being 22 Leo—it’s one of a bunch of stuff that happens in late fire signs. So this is one of your late ‘fire sign’ things, right? And I would also say look at Leo, but also look at Aquarius. If you’re a person who’s chart is defined by a tension between those two, this cycle—which is opening up—is gonna have a lot of adjustments, internal and external, for you. You know, one of my favorite words for what the nodes and the eclipses do is ‘churn’, right? And churning isn’t necessarily destructive. You gotta churn the milk, right? But the nodes stir it up. They stir up the tensions along that axis. And so, that’s shifting. You know, this is our herald in the shifting of that churning to the Leo/Aquarius axis, whereas it’s been bothering people like Kelly and I who live in the Virgo/Pisces axis for quite sometime now.
CB: Right. And now it’s gonna mess with those of us who have Aquarius rising, with the Aquarius/Leo axis.
AC: Yeah, you guys.
CB: Fun times. And not to bring it back to politics too much, but that’s actually a useful and relevant neutral statement that you made. It’s really interesting you making that statement about churning, because that’s what President Trump now has in his chart. One of the most interesting things that he has in his chart—or one the most prominent things—is the ruler of the ascendant is likely the Sun, and he was born very close to a lunar eclipse. And that’s one thing—whether you love him or whether you hate him—that he’s known for is stirring things up.
AC: Yeah. And he’s got Sun and Moon on the nodes. They’re churning, right?
CB: Yeah, exactly.
AC: And so, let’s talk about the other eclipse. Cuz I feel like we’re thoroughly onto eclipses now. So the second eclipse in February occurs on February 26, and it sees the Sun and the Moon at 8 Pisces. And so, this is on the South Node, or the dragon’s tail, Caput Draconis, Ketu. And this is the last eclipse we’re gonna see in Pisces or Virgo for almost a decade. We’ve had a number of them over the last year-and-a-half. I believe they started in September 2015, and so we’re getting done here. This is one final thing and this is a pretty dramatic note to go out on. So we said earlier the lunar is a penumbral, right? Even if you’re in a position to watch it, it’s not gonna be that dramatic. However, this solar eclipse in Pisces is an annular eclipse. And the annular eclipses are the ones where you get the glowing ring of fire, right? The darkness within and without, outside that ring. They’re some of the most visually-interesting eclipses. And you get those when the Sun and Moon line up close to the nodes. In this case, it’s about 4.5°. And so, if you’ve got planets in early Pisces or early Virgo, this eclipse is for you. Kelly, we miss you. This eclipse is for you.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s also for me, but it’s even more for Kelly. And so, that’s interesting in and of itself. But what makes it doubly-interesting is that it’s the same day that Mars conjoins Uranus in Aries.
CB: Oh, you’re right. Okay, so at 21 Aries?
AC: Yeah, so a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Aries. Mars and Uranus are pretty vigorous in Aries, just minding their own business. When they team up, that’s potent. And if you do your antiscia calculations, they’re basically in a perfect contra-antiscia with the Sun and Moon, who are being eclipsed.
CB: So 8 Pisces is contra-antiscia to 22 Aries?
AC: Yeah.
CB: And I misspoke. It’s actually the conjunction of Mars-Uranus, which barely takes place at the very beginning of 22 Aries, so not 21.
AC: Yeah, it’s off by maybe 25 minutes.
CB: Exactly.
AC: So that’s a hit in any book. What a wallop, right? Just an annular eclipse is pretty intense, and that annular eclipse is right next to Neptune. Mercury is 7° away, but it’s under the beams of the Sun. There’s a lot going on there. And then we have this big thing happening in Aries. And of course because this year we have Uranus-Jupiter opposed almost all year, Mars isn’t just conjoining Uranus, it’s also opposing Jupiter, right? Literally, the two planets are only 30 minutes of arc away from a perfect opposition. So we have Mars activating Uranus-Jupiter again, hitting Uranus first and then hitting Jupiter, but they’re so tied together. You’re not gonna get this totally separate thing. And also, if you just kind of follow the story, Jupiter of course rules Pisces, right? So it’s quite the structure. And I think that people’s experience of that eclipse—what happens in their lives—is really gonna depend on what their chart looks like, cuz there’s just so much going on there. You know, if you’ve got stuff on the Aries/Libra side, you’re gonna probably experience that primarily. If you live in ‘Pisces’ land, like Kelly and I do, that’s probably gonna be primary in your experience. But it’s a configuration underlying it. The end of the month really goes out with a bang.
CB: Yeah, this is all right at the very end of February. February 26-ish.
AC: Yeah. And I would also add a solar eclipse is basically a very special New Moon, right? So the Sun and the Moon are both at 8 Pisces. And then in the ensuing days, the Moon moves through Pisces and into Aries, right? And so, on March 1, we’ve got the Moon conjoining Uranus and Mars and opposing Jupiter, so that whole thing gets lit up again. And yeah, the thing about the end of February is it’s like an episode of a TV show you’re watching, where the episode cuts out in the middle of the action and you have to tune in next week.
CB: Right.
AC: Because early March is also chock-full of stuff. We’ve got Venus’ retrograde station the very first week of March. You know, it’s pretty action-packed.
CB: That’s a great analogy. It’s the Game of Thrones episode that gets really interesting right at the end, and then it cuts to black and you have to wait till next month to see the rest, how it concludes.
AC: Yeah, exactly. Because there’s a surprise twist, which is Venus literally twisting around and going backwards at the beginning of the next episode.
CB: Right. Well, that’s interesting also cuz that’s the thing that almost looks like it’s gonna promise some help or some aid, but then it turns out when you tune into the next episode, it doesn’t.
AC: Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting. So let’s just say good things and bad things about this. Uranus-Mars, bad thing, really volatile, unilateral, upsetting the apple cart. As far as volatility versus stability is concerned, very volatile, right? Good things—Uranus-Mars can also preside over moments of quantum leaps of personal empowerment, like realizing you can do something that you never thought you were capable of. The problem is some people don’t necessarily behave responsibly once they have been empowered.
CB: Yeah. And you’re getting this opposition from Jupiter, curiously, in Libra, so that there’s this attempt to balance it—or an attempt to bring balance through polarity and through opposition or countering, or setting something in direct opposition to what the Mars-Uranus symbolizes—and those two things end up being at odds.
AC: Yeah. You know, as far as looking at this Jupiter-Uranus opposition, throughout the year, different planets take sides or try to mediate, and this is definitely Jupiter at its lowest power to reconcile and mediate, right? You know, Mars is as strong as it gets in Aries. Just in terms of dignity and power, Mars in Aries outranks Jupiter in Libra. Furthermore, Jupiter in Libra looks to Venus as ruler. Oh, Venus is over there with Mars, in Mars’ sign, about to station retrograde. The planet has no dignity of its own in Aries, and so is looking to Mars for direction.
CB: Right.
AC: Jupiter will have the revenge of moderation. Jupiter will come later. But Jupiter’s super-outgunned in this particular stare-down.
CB: And it’s interesting as well, cuz the planet that’s attempting to mediate would actually be Pluto at 18 Capricorn, which is a little off, but it’s still within 3° squaring all of this that’s happening. I don’t fully know how this works when it comes to outer planets in terms of superior versus inferior, but it’s like Pluto has, theoretically, the stronger aspect over Mars, which it then has the weaker aspect over the inferior square going backwards towards Jupiter. So does that mean that Pluto’s empowering Mars more? Or does it mean that Pluto is damaging Mars, or holding Mars back more? I guess it depends on who Mars is and what it’s attempting to do.
AC: Yeah, I don’t know. I would say it just casts kind of a weird shadow over the whole thing. Like there’s some creepy guy watching the whole thing happen. And then there’s the fact that there’s the eclipse taking place, annular South Node solar. You know, there’s a huge depth to the solar eclipse in Pisces. If you want to talk about things feeling dreamlike, a solar eclipse in Pisces on the South Node, right next to Neptune, there’s definitely a kind of deep and surreal quality happening there. There’s action far beneath the waves. But then there’s also this action lighting up the sky, right? There’s this really obvious Mars-Uranus-Jupiter thing. You know, that’s not going to be just this kind of subtle, deep, psychological current, right? There’s gonna be stuff that happens, action. And so, it’s interesting. You have deep stuff and really obvious stuff happening at the same time. It’s a really wild mix. One thing I will say is that what almost all of the effects—both positive and negative—have in common is the volatility. And volatility—I don’t use that as a negative term, but this is not a period where things are fixed and static. You know, that which will be uprooted is likely to be uprooted under these configurations, internally and externally. And there are a lot of opportunities that come when things are in motion, when things aren’t just stuck where they are, right? And so, I don’t know, I would say be prepared to ride it. I would not plan out exactly how you think things are going to go and assume that there will be no surprises. I would do flexible planning for that last week of February rather than rigid planning.
CB: Yeah, ‘flexibility’ is a good keyword there. I mean, one of the things that’s weird is that eclipse has this weird sense of beginning, but also a sense of ending. So you were pointing out how it’s the ending of about two years of eclipses in Virgo and Pisces, and that’s the last one it’s gonna be in like a decade or something. But then it’s also a New Moon solar eclipse, which typically has a sense of something new or something that’s started or some seed that’s being planted.
AC: Right. But it’s a cycle. It’s a lunar cycle of wrapping some stuff up.
CB: Yeah.
AC: It’s not like we’re gonna end the whole cycle and understand everything in the hour-and-a-half that the eclipse takes place.
CB: Right. I guess I’m just saying that it’s the end of a series of a year-and-a-half, two years. So it’s almost like it’s the last chance to lay that final new beginning, or that inception or foundation of the seeds of whatever part of your chart that it’s falling in. It’s the last chance to lay the seeds for that, that will then grow over the course of the next decade or so, between now and whenever eclipses start happening in that area again.
AC: Yeah, I wouldn’t characterize it in terms of planting seeds. It’s the South Node. It’s an eclipse off the South Node. If anything, it’s about being the last installment in a cycle and your last chance to let go of something that was weighing you down. It’s about wrapping up or resolving. You know, it’s eliminating what you don’t need. And it’s Pisces, so it has a lot to do with getting rid of feeling complexes that you’ve been carrying around. Maybe I don’t need to be mad at my fifth grade gym teacher anymore.
CB: Right.
AC: It’s letting it go so you can do this new stuff, so you can move on.
CB: But it’s still a New Moon in some sense. It’s setting a tone.
AC: Right. But that can be a theme for a lunar cycle.
CB: Yeah, of letting go, right. But then it’s something that plays out. It’s not something that happens instantaneously. It’s something that then has to develop after that point, right?
AC: Yeah, I think the lunar cycle. Especially up till the next Full Moon, that’ll be a theme, like a pretty obvious theme. And then some of the solar eclipse stuff will echo around for the next six months, but a lot of it plays out in the next two weeks.
CB: Sure. I mean, it’s like those two eclipses especially are the big signatures this month, the way they get tied into some of those other configurations, like the Mars-Uranus conjunction opposite Jupiter and everything else.
AC: Yeah, it’s actually pretty simple. It’s two eclipses and a bunch of stuff in Aries.
CB: Right.
AC: That’s the short version, which really doesn’t mutilate things too badly. Like that’s basically the deal.
CB: I mean, there’s a bunch of other minor ingresses. So Mercury ingresses into Aquarius—it’s not Aquarius. It should be Pisces.
AC: Yeah, it does that on the 6th.
CB: Okay, 6th or 7th. Sun into Pisces February 18. Mercury into Pisces February 25.
AC: Just in time for the eclipse.
CB: Right. And that’s about it for the month, right?
AC: Yeah. Other than Mercury changing signs, it’s stuff in Aries, two eclipses.
CB: Right. Because Mercury’s gonna be cruising all month, because it’s getting close to or moving up to the conjunction with the Sun. At which point, it’s moving the fastest when it’s direct and conjoining the Sun.
AC: Yeah, we get a superior conjunction the first week of March.
CB: Okay, got it. Well, we will save that for next month. All right, so we covered all of the major alignments that we wanted to cover for February. I highlighted the one election that I’m recommending for this month. Although we’ll come up with three more this weekend in the forecast episode for patrons. Is there anything else—either astrologically or news-wise or personally—that you meant to mention?
AC: I don’t think so.
CB: All right, well, I think that brings us to the end of this then. I made all the announcements earlier. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of people in Baltimore in February, if you’re going to the NCGR conference in the middle of the month. If you do attend, then come up and say ‘hi’. We always love it when we meet new listeners of the podcast at these conferences. I think Kelly’s gonna be there as well. Austin, you’re taking a rain check on this NCGR conference, but you’re gonna come to NORWAC later this year, right?
AC: Yeah, correct. I have writing to do this month.
CB: Got stuff to do.
AC: I got fancy astrologer stuff to do.
CB: Right. We’ll just be drinking and attending lectures and hopefully signing books and things in Maryland, in sunny Baltimore in February. All right, well, I think that brings us to the end of this. I’m sure there’s things that I meant to mention, but I can’t think of them at the moment. Yeah, doing the giveaway on Episode 98. So that’s gonna come up pretty soon. I’m gonna start resuming doing normal episodes again later in February. I wanted to do a few episodes, and I wanted to talk to you at some point, Austin. I don’t know—given your schedule—that I can get you to come on more, but at least throw some ideas of things that you think would be good topics. I was thinking about doing one on self-publishing, cuz going through this process over the last year has been interesting. So I was thinking about having my editor, Aaron Cheak, and my layout person, Shannon Garcia, on to talk about this revolution that’s taking place in terms of astrological publishing, and how a lot of astrologers are moving to self-publishing and some of the things that are involved in that. But that’s actually something that you’ve done to some extent as well, right? Because you’ve followed that path, and you’ve been publishing your almanacs. Or you were publishing your almanacs yourself for several years, right?
AC: Yeah, I think I did the first one like six years ago.
CB: Okay. So you were sort of at the forefront of that in terms of astrologers taking advantage of new technologies in order to move in this new direction, so I was thinking about doing a show on that. I was thinking about doing a show on the book in general at some point to help promote it and talk about all of the work that went into it over the past year. Kenneth Miller wants to do a show on the Age of Aquarius at some point that we’ve been putting off for over a year now. Yeah, so I have a few topics floating around that hopefully we’ll get to in the not too distant future.
AC: Yeah, those sound good. I think self-publishing is really important for a small field like astrology. You know, it’s important, generally speaking, but I think it’s especially important for us. So I’d love to hear y’all talk about that.
CB: Yeah, it’s just a really interesting area.
AC: A quick recommendation, if you can get Ben Dykes on. Ben has published a lot of great material himself.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I just called him yesterday to get some more advice about publishing and print times and a bunch of other stuff, like using Amazon and what the deal is with hooking up the printer to Amazon and how long that takes and everything else. So he would be a great person, cuz he’s published like 20 books now through his own self-publishing company. And he’s got like two or three more that he’s finishing that should be coming out in the next few months. So I was actually gonna interview him, cuz he’s just translated a new version of Dorotheus of Sidon, which is actually amazing. Normally, that sounds like it could be kind of lame in the sense that we already have a translation of the Arabic of Dorotheus. But in fact, Ben has gone through and done a whole new translation, and he’s found a bunch of errors in David Pingree’s translation, including major ones like the calculations of certain lots. In Pingree’s English translation, it says to reverse the calculation, but then when Ben looked at the Arabic, it doesn’t say anything about reversing it. So that’s a pretty big deal in terms of him working out and clarifying and correcting some errors in that. And then he’s got a few other translations by Theophilus of Edessa and a bunch of other stuff—Sahl ibn Bishr—that will be coming out shortly as well. So he would definitely be somebody that I’d want to interview about that and see if I can slip in some publishing questions at the same time. All right, well, I think that’s it for this episode. Where can people find out more information about your work?
AC: Oh, people can find me at austincoppock.com. That’s A-U-S-T-I-N-C-O-P-P-O-C-K.com.
CB: Awesome. And my website is chrisbrennanastrologer.com. The podcast website is theastrologypodcast.com. And if you like the podcast of course, be sure to support us through Patreon. Be sure to review the podcast on iTunes, since that helps other people to find us. And yeah, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
AC: Bye.