The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 220, titled:

September 2019 Astrology Forecast

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on August 31, 2019

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2019/08/31/september-2019-astrology-forecast/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson

Transcription released April 15th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Wednesday, August 21, 2019, starting at 12:25 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 220th episode of the show. In this episode, we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for September of 2019, with astrologers Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock. First, at the beginning of the show, we’re gonna catch up and talk about what’s been going on over the past month and some miscellaneous astrological topics and discussion for probably the first 45 minutes, and then eventually we’ll get to the forecast for September later in the episode. So I’ll put timestamps in the description for this episode. So if you wanna skip the pre-forecast chat and go straight to the forecast for September, just look below this video on YouTube, or look on the description page for this episode TheAstrologyPodcast.com website to figure out where to jump to in the video. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and help support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Subscribe. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining me today.

KELLY SURTEES: Hey.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.

CB: Hey. All right, it’s been a month since last time. We are now, I think, fully free of the meat grinder that was this summer’s astrology, in the Cancer/Capricorn axis, with Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars and everything else. We’ve finally started to have some lunations since that time. And I think, for the most part, at least the three of us made it through relatively successfully, right?

KS: Yes, we’re still here. Still smiling.

CB: You’re both still getting settled into your new places. But it looks like that’s finally coming along, and you’re both getting to a new stage of ‘settledness’.

AC: I would say it’s creeping along. It’s movement, but it’s not impressive in its velocity.

CB: Right. That sounds very much like a post-Mercury retrograde period, when it’s still like moving super-slow. And it’s not quite there yet, but things are starting to move forward again.

AC: Yeah, yeah. What’s interesting is we talked about the Mercury retrograde coming to an end, at the end of July. And it was mentioned, but in retrospect, I think, under-emphasized how much in shit condition Mercury still was after it was direct, while it was still in Cancer. I saw a lot of mistakes. Or not even mistakes, but just decisions that were made or things that were put in motion during the Mercury retrograde show their full difficulty during the direct phase, that people call the shadow, right? The direct shadow. It was like, oh, yeah, that thing that you ordered two weeks ago, that was the wrong thing, or what got set in motion then. And as I was telling y’all earlier, it really reemphasized to me how important whole sign aspects are. Because even though Mercury was not configured by degree to Saturn, Pluto, or either of the nodes, it was still sharing an axis with all three of those troublemakers, and so, therefore, multiplied-afflicted. And that’s exactly how Mercury acted in the Mercury things. There were multiple afflictions, and I think that delayed people’s post-meat grinder celebration.

CB: Yeah, definitely. I always say that that’s the reason why in contemporary astrology—for the past hundred years—nobody can agree on orbs, and that orbs are just something that’s all over the place. And I think it’s because the aspect actually comes into effect as soon as the two planets are configured by sign, but then it just grows more intense the closer they are by degree. And that’s why you’ll see a range of astrologers saying, “No, it’s a 1° orb,” or “No, it’s 6° (or 5° or 10)”, or what have you. It’s cuz there’s no specific fixed amount where the aspect is fully there by degree. It’s just as soon as it comes into the sign and then the closer it gets by degree.

KS: Absolutely. And I think what you’re saying there, Austin—almost the exact opposite was true as soon as Mercury moved into Leo, in that it became, to use your phrase, ‘off-axis’ to the Cancer/Capricorn palaver. But as soon as it moved into Leo, it started picking up some support from Jupiter in Sagittarius. Even though it was not exact by degree, it’s at least now getting that sign benefit or that sign relationship support.

AC: Yeah, and sharing the sign with its own ruler, the Sun, which was in Leo. Yeah, I’m not usually a huge fan of Mercury in Leo every year. It’s not a place where Mercury has any essential dignity, besides a single bound. But this year it was such an improvement over how Mercury was doing in Cancer that I did a little jig.

KS: Yes. Yeah.

CB: It was really nice as it was applying—especially over the past few days—to that exact trine with Jupiter as well. Like as soon as it went into Leo, it started forming. But yeah, that trine between Mercury and Jupiter, and then even most of this month, all of the planets hitting trines with Jupiter really played out relatively well.

KS: Yeah, we got a great piece of feedback on something else that I had shared about online. I had talked about how Mercury-Jupiter can be receiving happy or welcome news, especially in this sort of configuration, where there’s the trine aspect. And someone on Twitter commented that someone they know, who had been on the transplant list for a kidney for a really long time has received the news that they are going to finally be getting a kidney transplant.

CB: Wow.

KS: So it’s a pretty dramatic example. And I’m sure there must be some specific things in that individual’s chart, but it’s just lovely that they got that news in that 24 hours before the Mercury-Jupiter trine became exact.

CB: Wow. That’s really impressive. That’s a good example.

KS: Yeah, just a really nice, happy example, since we don’t always have a lot of those.

CB: Right.

AC: Yeah, new organs for everyone.

KS: Yeah. What were you gonna say, Chris?

CB: I was just gonna say one of the things I’d been thinking about this month and noticing—cuz it was more stark, Leisa and I talked about this in the electional episode this month—a lot of the Sagittarius rising elections were just so good this month. And I could see, sometimes, somebody would initiate something or start something, or I would do something under Sagittarius rising, and just see it be successful and really work out well compared to other rising signs that were not as well-situated this month. And it just reinforced for me, I think there’s something to be said for paying attention, obviously, to the natal chart and to a person’s transits. I think people often underestimate and don’t realize how significant the chart of the moment can be, sometimes, in setting up a new foundation for success or failure, for things that are initiated at that time. And that’s one of the great things about technology and having Solar Fire or Astro Gold or what have you on your phone—just being able to know the chart of the moment at any time and see the shift in the energies during the course of a day, with the different rising signs.

KS: Absolutely.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

KS: Now would you say that the Sag rising chart might be a little different this September, based on Mars having moved into Virgo?

CB: Yeah, it really sucks, cuz now Jupiter’s direct finally in Sagittarius, and we’ve got day charts. But then suddenly Mars has switched over into Virgo, where it’s overcoming Jupiter through a superior, sign-based square, and it’s gonna be applying to that exact square with Jupiter pretty much all month. I guess it’s not all month, but it’s squaring Jupiter most of the month, which really does mess up a lot of those elections with Sagittarius rising. Because then even though Jupiter’s well-placed, it’s being afflicted by Mars in those day charts. So it’s like a placement where somebody has everything going for them, and they excel in every area, but still something negative befalls them, that frustrates or cuts short their efforts despite that, is the broad potential.

AC: I would read it that way if Mars wasn’t deeply combust. But being so deeply combust and having no light of its own for the entire month, I think it has very little power to trouble Jupiter, which is part of how I read combustion. The planet doesn’t get to do what it wants. It’s totally overruled by the Sun.

CB: See, I just read combustion—especially in the Hellenistic texts—as something being hidden or internalized. So it still sometimes manifests, in that there is a negative event—for example, in this case, associated with Mars—but it’s not as obvious or as blatant as it could potentially be. But I don’t know. We’ll have to see how it goes and sort of manifestations we see.

AC: Absolutely.

CB: All right. Usually we do some pre-forecast chat discussions, and we had a few possibilities this month of different topics, and we actually have a live audience. A live audience of patrons that have joined us for the recording of this episode. So if anybody has any questions as we go along, or discussion topics, let us know. One of the discussion topics that came up, though, that I’ve been thinking about a lot is this thing about how—especially for new students of astrology, or especially younger astrologers—there’s sometimes an issue where there are certain placements in your birth chart that just don’t make sense, or they won’t sound like they resonate with you when you’re younger. Then at different stages in your life, as you get older, suddenly those placements will make perfect sense. Or your life will change in certain ways, or even your personality in some instances will change in certain ways, so that those delineations from, let’s say, years ago suddenly fit your life perfectly, or sometimes even startlingly well. And that’s kind of an issue, I think, when studying astrology when you’re younger—sometimes making the distinction between what is a delineation that truly doesn’t fit, or is incorrect, versus what is a delineation that perhaps hasn’t happened yet in your life, but still might at some point in the future. Have you guys had the experience? Cuz I’ve had that experience and that’s part of what got me thinking about it. But have you guys had that experience of reading something when you were younger, as an astrologer, that you didn’t quite connect with, but later on, suddenly, you connected with it more than you thought you ever could?

AC: Yeah—go ahead, Kelly.

KS: I was just gonna say maybe not exactly that, but something in my early exploration of astrology where I sort of thought, “This seems like a real negative,” because my understanding of astrology was quite limited at that point, and then as I got to understand astrology better, realizing that something I thought might be a real problem could actually be something positive. The example I’m thinking of is that in my chart, I have Saturn in the 7th house of relationships. And almost every person who’s newer to astrology, that discovers they have this, is like, “Oh, my God. Does that mean I’m never gonna have a relationship?”

CB: Right.

KS: I even had a client this week who has Saturn ruling her 7th house, which is also how you can get a Saturn tone affecting relationships. And she was like, “Is this bad?” And I’m like, “It depends on Saturn in the chart. You know, day chart versus night chart, the strength of Saturn, the condition of Saturn.” So I’ve definitely had that experience of misunderstanding or underestimating something in the chart, partly because of my own lack of knowledge. Yeah, but that’s not exactly what you’re saying, but sort of along those lines, I guess.

CB: I mean, maybe a part of what you’re saying there, or what it makes me think of is the thing where sometimes you’ll see a negative placement, or what could be a challenging placement, and think about it in the worst-cast scenario. But then once you actually get to the event itself—and it manifests and it perfectly matches the symbolism of the placement—it’s oftentimes more manageable than your worst fears about it could have been. And while it’s not pleasant, it’s something you still get through and you come out the other side. Is that part of what you experienced with that placement?

KS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s almost like every Saturn in the 7th house cliché. Most of the people I dated were substantially older than me, even in my teens and 20’s. Which of course horrified my parents, but that was just who I was drawn to and astrologically that made sense. And then, of course—cuz I know you’re kind of getting into the timing piece—I get to my Saturn return at 29, and I meet an older man who now is my husband. And to get together, I have to move countries, so there’s this big effort involved. But ultimately, it’s totally worth it because ‘he’s my guy’ kind of thing. So it seems to have a lot of the hallmarks of Saturn, and even the timing is so Saturnian, but when I was 21 and 22 learning astrology, I thought it was this horrible thing, that was not gonna help me in my love life ever. But instead, it’s giving me a lot of stability in that part of my life.

CB: Right. So your advice then for younger people—if there’s an age differential and you have to explain it to your parents—is just give them your chart and say it’s in your birth chart.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay.

KS: Just say something like, “My Venus is conjunct Saturn,” or “I have Saturn in the 7th,” or “Saturn rules my 7th.” They will be probably thinking you’re crazy if they don’t know astrology, but at least you’ll feel like you’re being true to yourself, basically.

CB: Right. That’ll just compound the situation and make it worse.

KS: Maybe. I mean, that’s a whole different kettle of fish, how you negotiate your parents, for sure. Austin, you were gonna say something, though. I feel like you might have a good story here, too.

AC: Oh, I don’t necessarily have a story. Whenever I look at a configuration in a chart, I think about not only what it is and what it says—the variety of things that it says—but also, when will that come online. Like when will we see that in three dimensions as events? We were talking earlier about a purely psychological versus or in contrast with an event-based astrology. You know, the configuration or the mindset or whatever, the setup, that may lead to great success in publishing, let’s say, will be there when a person is one-years-old. However, we would be in error to assume that that one-year-old is going to have great success at publishing. And so, just starting with the ad absurdum argument shows us that it takes a while. The configurations have their own time and, to me, that’s a huge part of what stacked time-lord systems do, like profections, zodiacal releasing, the natural years of the planets, transits to a certain degree, and a variety of other things. They show you when the thing that says ‘this kind of stuff happens’ actually comes online. And one of the things I’ve been not obsessed about, but focused on for the, I don’t know, last several months—because I feel like it’s a missing piece of what we’re supposed to be doing—is looking at what the natural years of the planets are. Ptolemy gives us basically a time-lord system that’s the same for everyone, where everybody gets, I believe, four years of the Moon, and then it goes to Mercury, right? Cuz when you’re Moon—or excuse me, when you’re a Moon, you’re a baby—

KS: When you’re a Moon, yeah.

AC: You know, when you’re in the ‘why, why, why’ and the monkey-see-monkey-do phase of learning—up until roughly 12—that’s Mercury-ruled. And then when you go through puberty, then you enter a Venus period, etc., etc. You’re not gonna see a person’s Venus—as far as it testifies to an erotic relations—when they’re five, right? You might see hints of that, but you don’t see it played out. And so, traditional astrology gives us when things naturally happen, and we need to be looking at configurations against the background of the natural human sequence. And there’s several versions of that in Vedic. It’s called Naisargika, which just means ‘natural’. I like Ptolemy’s, too. But that would be the first step in, “I’ve got a Saturn thing that’s good.” Saturn’s not gonna smile on me when I’m 13, right? And you’ll see that when it’s activated by profection, right? For example, Kelly, for you, with your 7th house profection, which would highlight your Saturn in the 7th. That’s gonna look so different at 18 than at 30 and at 42. We can assume that’s gonna improve each time, but it’s gonna be rough. We could say that’s gonna be actively malefic at 18, whereas at 42, some challenges will come up. But unless it’s completely aggravated by other factors, they’ll be much more negotiable. So yeah, I see that as what you should always be doing. What does this say, and when should I see it?

KS: That’s a really beautiful point, Austin, and I know we were talking a little before the show. Because one thing that always confused me in my early years of studying astrology, when I was trained, my entry into astrology was via the modern psychological route. And not everybody in that area, but certainly some people that I encountered would talk about how predictive or timing astrology was ‘bad’ or we shouldn’t be doing it, and that seemed to really confuse me because one of the great gifts of astrology is the different timing mechanisms that it has. I know that we’re all very much on the same page here, that we should do timing with our astrology and that’s kind of the whole point because not everything in your chart is active every given year. And there’s so many different timing techniques. Some of them directed and symbolic, some of them to do with transits, then of course solar returns and things like that, that can let us know when certain themes or planets are going to really run the main narrative of our life. And profections—it’s one of those techniques that I’m just so happy has been reawakened or brought back into the astrological practice because it is such a useful and accessible technique. You know, that linking your age to the houses, repeating on cycles of 12, basically.

CB: Yeah, that was the missing piece from modern transit theory.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, well, you know what’s really interesting is I saw an astrology pamphlet that was dated from the first decade of the 20th century, and it had a quick-and-easy guide to profections. And so, that was not lost like 500 years ago or a thousand years ago. That was literally lost somewhere in the middle of the 20th century.

CB: Not even the middle, it was the late. Like that’s actually a realization I’ve been having. I showed you guys that copy of the first edition of Lilly I got. I’ve been collecting other books. Because I spent most of the mid-2000s and the following decade working on my book and trying to really excel at Hellenistic and ancient astrology from the Roman era, and I didn’t focus as much on the later part of the tradition. It’s coming from me. There’s like construction going on.

KS: I was like, “Oh, my God.” So we have this guy that lives downstairs who likes to do drumming randomly, for 5 or 10 minutes every night. And I just thought that was him, so I was paranoid. But if it’s you, Chris, I don’t worry about it. That’s fine.

CB: Yeah, my fault. I might have to move to a different room at some point.

KS: What’s happening? Is somebody doing the big pots and pans back there?

CB: No. We, of course, moved into this new place, and they decided to redo the entire exterior of the building. So there’s actually scaffolding all around my window. And probably, by next month, it’ll be even worse, of people just hammering on the side of the wall. Anyway, I don’t wanna bore you with that. I hope it’s not too distracting. Let me get back to my main point. I focused a lot on ancient astrology. Cuz one of the things about traditional astrology—if you’re gonna go back and study the tradition—late Renaissance astrology is 1,500 years after the tradition started. And from the perspective of Hellenistic astrology from the 1st century CE, Renaissance astrology almost looks like modern astrology, for all intents and purposes. Like they’re already starting to do weird things like minor aspects and the sign equals house, like ‘1st house equals Aries’ thing, so there’s a lot of changes by the end of the tradition. And so, when I first started studying traditional astrology, I decided to focus on the early part of the tradition because I wanted to know what the true, original tradition was before it changed over the course of the next 15 centuries. But now that I did that, and I published my book, I’m starting to catch up on the later parts of the tradition, like the William Lilly-type era and Morinus, as well as some of the authors that came after that. And one of the things that I find interesting is some of those texts from the 17th century, like Lilly, were transmitted relatively consistently over the course of the next couple of centuries, all the way through to the early 20th century, and some of the early 20th century astrologers that we think of as modern astrologers were still reading at least parts of Lilly and other texts like that. And so, what I realized recently is what we think of as modern astrology is really just a product of the astrology of the Pluto in Leo generation, and that type of astrology didn’t really fully congeal until the 1970s and 1980s. But for us, since we all came into the field in the late ‘90s or 2000s, that was modern astrology, that was contemporary astrology, and those were the books that we were reading for the most part. But I’ve only had this realization recently that astrology was still relatively recent and only a few decades old at that point. Like, for example, Pluto as the ruler of Scorpio—which was so ubiquitous and was just taken for granted by the time we came into the field—that even was only a few decades old. Like astrologers were still sorting that out about the 1960s and stuff. Like if you read Isabel Hickey’s book, Astrology: A Cosmic Science, she doesn’t even fully treat Pluto yet in the first version, and had to write a follow-up later, like a decade or two later to deal with it. So anyway, I was just responding to what you were saying, Austin, about profections actually being transmitted and still being used relatively recently. It’s because modern astrology, as we think about it, is a much more recent product than we often realize.

AC: Yeah, it’s post-‘60s, or at most, post-World War 2 astrology.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

KS: Yeah.

CB: I mean, you guys—what were your first astrology books? I mean, for me, it was Sakoian and Acker, The Astrologer’s Handbook, and Alan Oken’s Complete Astrology, who, consequently, I’m really excited I’m gonna finally do an interview with next month. I just sent him a microphone. So Alan Oken is gonna join us on the show, I believe, sometime in September.

KS: Cool. Yeah, one of the first books that I remember studying from, Shirley Soffer—who’s a New York-based astrologer—wrote something like A Little Astrology Sourcebook or Astrology Handbook. That was one of the first. And then I got to meet her a couple of years ago, which just blew my mind. But the big one that most people would know is Stephen Arroyo’s Chart Interpretation Handbook, which I just found a really great resource in the very beginning, something my teacher recommended to me. And then Steven Forrest’s and Liz Greene were some of the big books that I read early on. What about you, Austin?

AC: Oh, it was the series on Noel Tyl books that were like Learn Astrology, I don’t know, volumes one through seven or something. And it was like, one, signs and planets, two, aspects and houses, three, etc., etc.

CB: And all of these, so far, are all products of the 1970s and forward, in terms of some of the dates, like 1970s and 1980s. I’m just thinking of the publication dates of some of that.

KS: Yes. Yeah, so we were all in that post-‘60s or even post-World War 2 era that Austin just defined. The astrology that we were all touched by first, I guess, came out of that period. And then each of us has reached back beyond that, I guess, through our own exploration.

CB: Yeah, well, it’s just what we think of as modern astrology is just a much more recent development than I realized. And if you go back to the early 20th century, they were still drawing more on the 17th century, to the first astrologers who were writing books in English and stopped writing them in Latin. The early 20th century astrologers were drawing on those still or were influenced, at least, by those more than you would think. And then, in turn, Lilly and the 17th century guys were drawing on Latin texts from the 12th century, which were sometimes themselves translations from Latin or Arabic texts from the 8th century. So there’s this interesting interweaving and transmission in the history of astrology that goes all the way up until modern times, but there was just some sort of disconnect that happened. And I don’t know. It’s interesting to think about how recently that was, I guess.

KS: Yeah, I mean, it always amazed me—when you were referencing the Pluto rulership of Scorpio—I mean, Pluto wasn’t even discovered a hundred years ago. So it always struck me as a bit odd that people were so obsessed about it being the ruler of Scorpio, for instance. Cuz I thought, well, what did we do in 1920 for a ruler of Scorpio, and what did we do prior to that? And obviously, it was Mars. So it is good to really make that point, I think, that the modern stuff is really, really new. It’s fresh. It’s like ‘baby’ astrology compared to the history or the length of astrology’s history.

CB: Right. I mean, which is fine. Cuz sometimes there were some positive things that came out of that, that were good developments, where we almost needed that break from the tradition in order to innovate in useful ways. But now, it’s useful to bring some of that older wisdom back and reunite it with some of the modern developments and advancements.

AC: Yeah, well, and it’s just good to get the years right.

KS: Yes.

AC: There’s sort of a story that’s told in traditional astrology circles that Lilly was the last time anybody did anything correct and that it’s all just been a disaster since then.

KS: Since then.

CB: Right.

AC: There were certainly some disruptions in the 18th and 19th centuries. And the 20th century was nothing, if not a big disruption. But if you actually look at the texts, I have Alan Leo’s Dictionary of Astrology, and there’s a ton of super-technical traditional material in it.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

AC: You know, if we’re actually going to give an accurate history, we need to give an accurate history, rather than, “It’s been 500 years since anybody did anything right,” which just isn’t true.

CB: Right. Yeah, I mean, that, to me, is a little heartening, cuz it just makes you realize that there was more of a continuous tradition and modern astrology was not as much of a unique invention that came out of nowhere as we sometimes think, or as you sometimes have to frame it in order to explain why the revival of older texts is important. That’s a whole complicated topic, so let’s move on. Can you guys hear? Are you hearing this?

KS: Yeah, I’m totally hearing it. It makes me feel so much better about the bongos that could go on downstairs, and also, the crash-bang that happened in last month’s recording from my end.

CB: All right. Well, my apologies to listeners if this completely ruins this episode. But actually, maybe, slightly related—cuz I’m kind of failing at recording podcasts right now—one of my other discussion topics was what if your destiny was to fail at something. And this was a little bit of a controversial discussion topic that started on Twitter. And I don’t know if this will come across the same way to everyone else as I explain this, as it did to me, but it was like a past governor of Mississippi passed away this past week. And I was just listening to NPR while driving, and they just did a really quick blurb about it and then said something very brief about her life, but then said, “And she was the governor of Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, and she was widely criticized for her handling of that event. And then they were like and she then left office and struggled with cancer and then she died this past week at the age 78. And I was just really struck by it. Cuz I was like, wow, the main thing that they focused on, in terms of her biography—the main event that she’s known for in that respect—is having mismanaged, at least from whoever’s perspective, or failed at her management of that event, when it happened in her state. And it sort of made me think of something, which is not something I haven’t seen before, but it reminded me of a broader topic, that sometimes a person’s life can sometimes be characterized by a single failure or event. And obviously, our lives are complicated and there’s positive and negative things that we do, but sometimes there’s certain things that you’re almost destined for, that could be characterized as a failure. Or you might be destined to fail at doing something and that’s almost part of your—I don’t know how to frame that, cuz I don’t wanna put it in overly-stark terms, but almost like your destiny to fail at something, at a certain point in your life. And sometimes that strikes people when you say that the wrong way because they start going into things about learning and growing from things. But sometimes, what if it’s at the end of your life and that’s it, and there’s not necessarily good growth or a learning thing from it, but it’s just something that happened, or how that was the confluence of events in your life? Have you guys thought about or worked with or dealt with stuff like that?

AC: I mean, I take that for granted.

CB: You take it for granted. So you don’t think that’s controversial.

AC: No. Everyone will be put into situations that they are not capable of wrestling excellence out of. I don’t know about her particular situation. But especially if you’re looking at a high-level power structure thing, if a system is corrupt or doesn’t function, you might be the name attached to it for a couple of years. Institutions get built and degrade over decades, right? Again, I don’t know about her case, but if you’re working at that level of power, you could easily be put in a situation where the institutions aren’t set up. And you can make the best decisions possible, or just be a normal person and try and not be perfect, and it’s gonna look like a failure.

CB: Sure.

AC: But that’s true in all walks of life and at all levels. Welcome to being a human.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah, and it’s interesting, too. Look, this sounds like a pretty absolute situation. The hurricane response was not handled according to a certain criteria, and therefore, it was considered a failure. But there are certain things that you may fail at achieving in the ultimate outcome, but the experience or the steps along the way is what does teach you something in which you grow. And I’m not trying to be simplistic, like every failure is a good thing because I think that sometimes failure is just failure. You didn’t win the gold medal and the last four years of training have not led to where you want.

CB: Right.

KS: But what happened inside you, in that process of getting ready for that could be valuable and could have richness to add complexity to you as an individual, even if, externally, there is that sense of you falling short of the mark. To my mind—and I don’t know if I’m really maybe being as articulate as I’d hope—the idea is that learning and living is about trying and failing. You know, that old, little proverb of ‘fall down seven times, get up eight’. You just kind of gotta keep going. And it also sort of then leads into that fate versus free will piece around can you have everything, or can you can be successful at everything, and I don’t think that that’s true. I think that each of us has things that come easily to us and things that are a real struggle and maybe close doors for us this go ‘round, for instance. So, yeah.

CB: Yeah, I feel like that’s okay, and acknowledging that is okay. Sometimes you can’t have everything. Or sometimes, despite doing your best and making your best effort and there’s nothing you could have done better, you still may not achieve something, or hit the mark with something that you’re aiming towards. But that’s just part of life. And being able to identify that astrologically should be something that we can do and are capable of talking about without having to reframe it in a psychological context in terms of growth and achieving whatever you want in life or what have you, necessarily.

AC: Yeah, well, and on the ‘growth and lesson’ level, one good lesson is the annihilation of hubris. You know, if you think you can do whatever you want and God has a special plan for you, and it’s more special than anybody else, then maybe getting knocked down by circumstances under control is an excellent lesson, perhaps the only lesson, that will give you a correction there.

CB: Yeah.

AC: But it’s not fun. And when people are looking to astrology as entertainment or as a form of strengthening their belief in themselves, then that’s not helpful. And this is different because what you can say as an astrologer that is accurate is different than what is most useful to say, like the subset of what is most useful to say in a given conversation, with a given person, at a given time, right?

CB: Right.

AC: It might be that like, yeah, when you’re 55, you’re gonna be in this situation where there’s just fucking no winning, and you’re gonna get embarrassed. Like if you’re talking to a 22-year-old, what they need at that point is to self-actualize, to realize all the great things that they do have and to learn to embody those and to wield those tools beautifully. Why would you talk about this embarrassing thing that happens in the late 50’s, right? I think to a certain degree, yes, we can say astrology can, more often than not, accurately predict a situation like that, but that’s very rarely—no, I would say it’s never the whole of someone’s life. And like why would you bring up that one thing and dwell on that in a reading context rather than the thousand other things, which are probably more relevant?

CB: Yeah, definitely. What you can say versus what you should say. I’ve always held this position that we really need to disentangle some of these discussion topics from the consulting room setting. Cuz sometimes we, as astrologers, end up focusing on what should be said to clients versus the broader, almost conceptual or philosophical discussion of what can we do with astrology, or what can we see as astrologers. And we need to be able to have those discussions without them getting stopped or entangled by the concern over what should be said to clients, which is a valid and legitimate separate discussion topic, but it’s almost like an aside from just what are we capable of seeing. And one of the interesting topics that is touchy is just things like the astrology of failure, that would almost be like an interesting lecture or something like that. Because there’s so many different ways people do fail and different extents and degrees of failure, that it’s a much broader topic than you might initially think. It’s something that has a lot of subtlety and a lot of nuance in terms of different levels of failure.

AC: Yeah, it’s a whole tarot deck full of Tower cards.

KS: Totally. Even the definition of failure—and the thing that keeps coming up as we’re using that word today—is someone’s marriage ending, for instance. Someone going through a divorce. And one person’s take on that might be, “I failed at this,” or “This marriage was a failure,” and another person’s take might be, “It didn’t last, but that’s actually a better thing for me, cuz I realize I was in the wrong relationship.” So someone might say, “There’s a level of success because I walked away from a relationship that was stunting my growth,” versus someone else might say, “This was a failure.” So I guess there are some ways to absolutely quantify failure, but I think also sometimes it’s perspective or point of view.

AC: Yeah, well, failure and success are relative to a particular aim or end.

CB: And I was thinking of a signification of Saturn recently, and I was trying to articulate it and condense it into the broadest archetype I could. And as close as I could get it at this point is just sometimes Saturn indicates that which does not come to completion. Like that which does not complete and that manifests in a bunch of different ways. Cuz there’s a bunch of different ways that something that’s set in motion can not be brought to completion. So, for example, somebody that’s writing a book, or has a plan to write a book, but never successfully finishes it due to, let’s say, internal inhibitions and are never able to finish the project. Or a person that wants to have a relationship, but never ends up having a relationship due to various reasons. In some ways, there’s different scenarios for failure, but sometimes Saturn can be one that’s most closely associated with it, due to this idea of something stopping it from being brought to completion, either due to external or internal circumstances.

AC: Yeah, I think if we’re gonna give one of the seven planets failure, it’s gotta be Saturn. That doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing that Saturn means, but if you’re deciding who to give failure to, it’s a hundred-percent Saturn. And also, if you intend to keep living, but you die instead—as is the case with most people—that’s a failure in these terms. And everybody fails at that, except for the few people who totally decide when they’re gonna go. Some people will accept that it’s their time to go, after their hand is forced, but very few people are just like, “Yep, I’m gonna leave my body. I’m going to disentangle the knot that binds my spirit to my body, and I’ll see you later.” You know, we all fail. We all fail at staying alive.

KS: Yeah, that’s beautiful.

CB: Yeah, that’s good. Well, no, I was just gonna segue.

KS: It’s very Saturn.

CB: One other possible discussion topic that’s related, that could lighten this—not lighten drastically, but a little bit—I was trying to define malefic energy at one point this month. Cuz I was really seeing there was a manifestation of it, that something like malefic energy in astrology sometimes manifests as that which causes discomfort or pain in others, as an inadvertent, but necessary byproduct of actions, which arise naturally on the part of the one taking on the agency of the malefic. And sometimes you can come into another person’s life and end up playing that role, where you’re accidentally causing discomfort or harm in somebody else’s life, which they perceive and respond to as malefic. But sometimes the person taking on the agency of the malefic is just doing their job, or not really paying attention and accidentally causes that in somebody else’s life. And I was trying to think about that just in terms of what malefic means and how people often perceive that or experience that versus what the energy is in and of itself. A sort of related topic here, to some extent.

AC: Yeah, I would generally agree with that, with your definition as given. When you are playing the role of the malefic, yeah, you’re not comfortable. Neither Mars or Saturn bring comfort. Harm is a very general term. But both of the malefics have a quality or an energy or a set of significations which lend themselves to destruction much more easily than sustenance or creation. You know, I think of a drill instructor who’s job is to fucking scream at people, right, and to break whatever ideas that the recruit has, that will make them less effective as a soldier, right? That’s malefic energy, particularly martial in that case because of the yelling, if we’re gonna use the stereotype, which is not inaccurate. And so, yeah, that’s like somebody fucking yelling at you and making you do push-ups, and your body hurts, and your ego is certainly wounded. That might ultimately be for the good of you and the people that you’re stationed with, but the action is certainly malefic. And, of course, we are put in a position where we take on the role of the malefic in an active sense, where we don’t accidentally cause harm. If we look at most of human history in a lot of places, it was necessary for the humans to eat, to kill animals. Whether that’s true or not where you are now, that’s a different thing. But there are a lot of ecosystems where the humans had to murder animals and devour them, right? You are being a malefic if you go out into the woods to try to kill animals and devour them, right? That is taking on the role of Mars. For a while, I’ve been thinking about the hunter as the first Mars. Cuz human beings were hunting way before they were organized into soldiers or before they were working iron or any of that, and that’s a very clear malefic intention.

CB: Yeah, well, and that reminds me of the original topic or the original experience that brought that up to me, that made me think about it. I was walking down the sidewalk one day, focusing on my destination and stuff and just walking, and then I looked down and there were just a ton of ants everywhere. And I realized I accidentally stepped on a few ants, or almost did. And in the experience of that ant, they were just majorly injured or maimed or even killed. But, for me—who, let’s say, theoretically, was taking on the agency of the malefic in that instance—I was just like walking to my destination and just incidentally played that role in some other sentient being’s life. And I think there’s probably a lot of other scenarios where that’s probably the case in the way that that sometimes manifests in different spheres of the world.

AC: Yeah, like if we read the lunar return chart for those ants, you were transiting Saturn on top of their Moon. Like you were read as the malefic entering their life and ending it.

CB: Yeah, well, and it makes me think of other instances like that, where sometimes you might be driving your car, and then somebody else slams into you and they didn’t mean to, or play that role. But then transiting Mars was hitting your natal ascendant that day or something like that, and that person happened to have natal Mars on their ascendant or something like that, and sometimes that’s how it does work out. But sometimes the experience of malefic energy is just accidental or incidental in a way, which is interesting to think about.

KS: Yeah, it’s not intentional.

CB: Right.

AC: And the same can be said of benefics. Somebody can, without meaning to, put you in an excellent position, or do something which creates a very favorable situation relative to you, but they didn’t mean to. And, of course, people can try to help you, yeah, both intentional and unintentional with malefic and benefic.

CB: Sure.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right. Any final thoughts on that, Kelly?

KS: Look, it’s such a big topic. I have like 200 thoughts. But I think Austin did a really nice summary of unintentional versus intentional. Yeah, cuz I was thinking, even in conversation, someone can be really sharp at a time when you’re about to express something really vulnerable to you or really meaningful and then you shut down, you pull back. And that whole thing that was gonna come out just doesn’t come out because somebody was either judgmental, which might be Saturn, or critical, or they were angry and sharp with you. And vice versa, somebody could just give you a very timely compliment, or a positive something that gives you a lift. So I think one of the keys we’re sort of alluding to is without meaning it, and meaning to be it, we’re probably all a little bit malefic in some of our day-to-day encounters, and we’re also a little bit benefic just randomly, according to our nature or who we’re bumping into, at what time.

CB: Yeah, really loud over here. I apologize.

KS: Imagine if you were trying to record a podcast, and there was basically a Mars eruption outside your window. Like something is being malefic to you right now.

CB: Yeah, and sometimes that probably just has to do with synastry. Cuz it’s like sometimes you meet somebody you have really great synastry with, and all the pieces just happen to fall into place, and they play a positive role in your life in different areas. Or other times, there may be somebody where, for some reason that’s almost inexplicable—especially if we weren’t paying attention to the astrology—you just don’t jive with, or you accidentally get in each other’s way, or accidentally press each other’s buttons. But sometimes when you see the astrology, the astrology itself is reflecting that. And that’s probably part of the missing piece there in terms of the secret reason for why that happens sometimes.

KS: Yeah, I mean, the one other thing that keeps running through my mind as you guys are talking is the idea of an oyster that creates a pearl. And that comes from some piece of detritus that gets inside the oyster, that irritates the flesh of the oyster. So that triggers the generation of the enamel, which then leads to the creation of the pearl. And I keep thinking about how sometimes that accidental malefic stuff is almost the sharp word or the tough love that actually prods someone into a more productive direction, for instance. Like sometimes you just need to be told you’re off-track or you’re being lazy or whatever it happens to be. And I think I’m getting into sort of a blend now of like malefic, that can lead to a more productive outcome.

CB: Right.

KS: And, of course, I think about the ‘poison versus the medicine’ and the’ sword being wielded as a weapon or a scalpel’ kind of thing.

CB: Yeah.

KS: You know, the intention of what’s done with something can factor in as well, I guess.

CB: Yeah, and just the fact that it can go either way in some instances. Like sometimes, no, you’re just poisoned, or you get poisoned by somebody and you get sick or you die or something like that versus other times, yeah, there can be medicinal uses of even dangerous things. But the ability to see it going either way, and the ability sometimes to interpret that astrologically and know if it’s going to be more constructive or it’s gonna be more destructive is useful, and I think is something that we’re all striving for in terms of refining our astrology and looking to traditional astrology for some of those answers.

AC: Yeah.

KS: Totally.

AC: One technical note I would add there is that if malefics rule favorable houses, that’s more often the case. You know, if Mars rules your 1st, you need to be challenged in order to rise to your best. If Saturn rules your 10th, you need to learn patience, you need all those slow, grindy lessons that Saturn provides, etc., etc.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, definitely. And sect is also a big piece of that for me as well, in terms of constructive versus more destructive experiences.

KS: Yes.

AC: Yeah. Right.

CB: All right.

AC: It’s still a malefic, but it leads to—

KS: Yeah, and I guess that’s the point I was trying to make. It can be malefic, and technically, it might be all these sort of negative or challenging things, but there are ways to put that to productive use or productive outcomes. And Austin, I’m glad you said the 1st or 10th rulership, cuz I actually see this a lot with clients who might have Mars or Saturn rule the 10th house or MCs, that actually work as, symbolically, the surgeon wielding the knife. So they’re working with the problem or the difficulty, but they’re going in to help the solution or the remedy, if you like.

AC: Nice.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right. This has been a really heavy discussion, and usually we don’t take it in that direction or that far with the pre-forecast chat. So I wanna lighten this up a little bit before we transition immediately to the forecast episode because there’s been some great astrology memes this month. And I wanna give a shoutout to Patrick Watson, a friend of the show, especially, who has been on a roll with a series of memes. And one of them, like his final one—which I believe was his finest creation—was a set of significations of the houses using slang terms. Did you guys see this?

KS: It was brilliant.

AC: I did.

KS: I was all about the 11th house ‘squad’ and the 7th house ‘bae’. I loved the 2nd house ‘bread’. I mean, I know other people were laughing at the 9th house ‘woke’.

CB; Do you wanna go through and read them?

KS: Sure.

CB: Okay.

KS: Okay, so the 1st house, Watson is saying, ‘it/me’.

CB: Okay.

KS: The 2nd house, he’s like ‘bread’. I’m like that’s great, you know. 3rd house, ‘bruh’, like brother kind of thing. 4th house ‘fam’. 5th house ‘turnt’. I think I might have missed something with that, cuz I didn’t quite get that one. But I could be showing my age or my lack of current lingo there. Yeah?

CB: Yeah, yeah, that’s fine.

KS: Okay. And then 6th house ‘yikes’. You know, that’s the part of the chart that is like a bit, “Oh, not great.” 7th house ‘bae’, before anyone else. I love that. The 8th house is the ‘sus’ place, like this is a bit dodgy here.

AC: I don’t know. Can y’all explain ‘sus’ to me?

CB: It’s like suspect.

AC: Oh, like suspect?

KS: Suspect.

AC: Oh, okay.

KS: Yeah, a big dodgy.

AC: That makes sense now.

KS: Okay. And then 9th house ‘woke’, like, “Are you woke?” 10th house ‘goals’. I thought that was fantastic. 11th house ‘squad’. Obviously, who’s in your squad. I think we can thank Taylor Swift for bringing that into the collective consciousness. And then the 12th house, the ‘haterz’. I thought that was brilliant. And then everyone on Twitter was like, “My chart is full of ‘yikes’ and ‘woke’ and ‘haterz’,” you know, whatever houses were most emphasized.

CB: Right. Yeah, I told Patrick that if everything is destroyed and society crumbles, and there’s one thing that survives, that shows what astrology was like in our time, I hope that it’s just like this one diagram that somebody has to translate 2-or-300 years from now to figure out what astrologers were thinking of the houses. You think that would be a good representation of astrology in our time, Austin?

AC: No.

CB: Very good.

AC: It just makes me think about fate. Patrick has spent a decade-plus of serious astrology. And perhaps it is his fate to be remembered for this rather than anything else that he will ever do. Patrick, I hope that’s not the case.

CB: He alternates.

AC: I don’t know. I might put ‘squad’ in 3rd, by the way.

KS: Okay. Okay, yeah.

AC: We could have a debate about that.

KS: Ooh, I like it.

CB: All right. This could be a longer lecture or workshop. I mean, I suggested to him, he might wanna turn this into a talk, cuz this would be a good talk. Cuz there’s something funny about it, but also, he actually did a good job of connecting the meanings to the specific houses.

KS: Well, that’s, I think, what makes it so brilliant. It is funny in just a simple, first glance perspective, but it’s also relevant if you go deeper into it.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So you can see that meme and other astrology memes—cuz he did a whole series on the planets and other stuff—on his Twitter page, which is @PWatsonAstro. Yeah, just do a search for ‘Patrick Watson’ or ‘PatrickWatsonAstrology.com’ and you’ll find his Twitter account.

KS: Yes.

CB: All right, I think that’s it for pre-forecast chat. Why don’t we transition now into talking about the astrological forecast for September of 2019?

KS: Perfect.

AC: Let’s do that.

CB: Let’s do that. All right, so let me first throw up the transit chart, which shows you where the planets start off at the beginning of the month in the signs of the zodiac and then how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the September; basically, where they’ll end up. So this artwork was made by Paula Belluomini, and this is also on the calendar that we sell each year. So as you can see, basically, the inner planets start out in late Leo and early Virgo and then make their way through most of Virgo and into Libra. We’ve got lunations. We’ve got a New Moon in Libra this month and a Full Moon in Pisces. What else? We’ve got Saturn stationing direct in Capricorn. What are some of the other major highlights of the month?

AC: Well, everything moves through Virgo. Mercury, Venus, the Sun, and Mars all make a square to Jupiter and a trine to Saturn in a very tightly, compressed period of time. We have a relatively rare conjunction between Venus and Mars, and that occurs at—ooh, sorry, that occurred at the end of August. But we still have Venus and Mars being largely invisible all month, and then Mercury goes invisible as well. You know, something for students of astrology to note is when you have a lot of things conjunct the Sun, it means that you won’t be able to see them. They’re not capable of arising independently, under their own light, but the 2nd and 3rd have a really interesting sort of combo superior conjunction. We have Mercury, Mars, and the Sun all within the same degree for a little while. And Mars conjoins the Sun every two years, Mercury direct conjoins the Sun three times a year, but we very rarely see Mars and Mercury conjoining the Sun together, and each other, within one 24-hour period. So that’s pretty interesting and that kicks off the month.

CB: Yeah, that’s super interesting.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So have y’all taken a look at that?

KS: Yeah, I have. I was just checking. You know, it really is this very intense, short timeframe. I think you really spelled it out beautifully there, Austin. Like the Sun and Mars are together once every two years. And when that happens, it’s very unusual to have Mercury there at the same time. I’m like this is definitely something special and different. Chris, just showing your entire screen right now.

CB: Uh, okay.

KS: Sorry.

AC: Emails and stuff.

CB: No. I was checking to make sure there were no emergencies. Yeah, sorry. I’m trying to mute myself, so there’s not huge clanging in the background.

KS: Okay. That’s okay. That was successful. That part was very successful. So yeah, I think it’s really special. And, I mean, look, it’s all happening in Virgo. And it just really feels like this hyper-Virgo energy, but from an introspective/reflective place because of that quality of planets being hidden by the Sun, if you like.

CB: Yeah, so we don’t usually have that. We had the conjunction of the Sun and Venus at the very end of the month, and then we had what is now last month, and then the quick conjunctions at the beginning of this month. And then as we move forward, we end up getting a bunch of squares later in the month, with Jupiter in Sagittarius. And especially in terms of the square between Mars and Jupiter, that becomes one of the defining aspects of the month, it feels like.

AC: I wouldn’t define the month primarily by that, but that’s certainly a feature. You know, one thing playing into Jupiter—we also have the fact that Jupiter and Neptune do their third and final exact square. And so, all of the planets in Virgo that aspect one aspect both sides of that square.

KS: Yeah.

AC: All the planets in Virgo will oppose Neptune and square Jupiter and trine Saturn in the same couple of days because those planets, all three of them, are in the middle of their signs. And so, planets in the middle of Virgo are going to hit all three of those at once. And that’s really interesting, and it’s a dynamic we get one, two, three, four times, not even counting the Moon, which will also stimulate that axis, so there’s a lot going on there. And furthermore, it’s Saturn as it’s stationing direct, right? So the directionality of Saturn’s input is in the midst of changing while everybody’s talking to Saturn and Jupiter and Neptune, so there’s a lot going on. It is just a ton of Virgo, but it’s also a ton of things in Virgo having a really complicated conversation with three outer planets.

KS: And that phrase of ‘complicated conversation’, that almost feels like a theme for this month because all the planets are aspecting so many things. Like the personal, quick-moving planets, if you like—Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars—the interactions with Saturn and with Jupiter, particularly, but also, with Neptune, later in the month with Pluto, too, there’s also just a higher volume of aspects this month as well. I know last month, we were like, “Are we done already?” cuz there was just less going on.

AC: We were like, “Yeah, things are trine Jupiter.”

KS: Yeah. And this month, I was watching the data come up, and I’m like, “Oh, my God. There’s like triple the amount of aspects happening this month because Mercury and Venus are moving a little bit more quickly. Mars is in Virgo.” And Virgo happens to be one of those signs right now that’s on-axis to everything. You know, if you’re a planet in Virgo, through your tour of Virgo, you’re dealing with Uranus and the nodes and Neptune and Saturn and Pluto and Jupiter. So there’s that feeling of juggling a lot or having to multi-task and really be on your game. You know, it’s not just one thing.

AC: Which is very Virgo-shaped.

KS: It really is, isn’t it? Because that’s the way Virgo kind of excels.

AC: Yeah. That’s the nature of the challenges that are brought to Virgo.

KS: Nature of the challenges.

AC: Handle this list of 75 things in the next four hours.

KS: In the next four hours.

CB: And I don’t know if we touched on this, but also, we get the third and the last of the Jupiter-Neptune squares this month as well, later in September, right?

AC: Yeah, yeah.

KS: Yeah.

AC: I mentioned that earlier.

CB: Okay.

AC: And that’s what makes all the planets squaring Jupiter more interesting. Cuz they’re not just squaring Jupiter, they’re also squaring Neptune just as the two are about their third and final.

CB: Sure.

KS: Well, yeah. I mean, they’re in Virgo, so they’re gonna be opposing Neptune and squaring Jupiter. I mean, we had this period earlier in the year as well.

CB: You mean when everything was going through Gemini and Pisces?

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Right.

CB: So usually, it seems like the third transit—most of the time in astrology—is like the most clear one, or the one where you sort of get the lesson of whatever it was that that transit was about. And it’ll be curious—especially I would think—for people that have mutable placements around the middle of the signs, if this is like the final pass, where they sort of see what that transit was about for them.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Or I would say, in many cases, see the outcome of actions taken during the first two, and then, yeah, also lessons. If it was happening to them, then they’ll see that third thing. If it was something that they were doing, it’s like, “Okay, and this is how it worked out. This is what we set out to do, and now we’re getting into that ‘reaping results’ phase.”

KS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and just to add a little extra mutable madness, maybe, is, of course, the Full Moon this month, which happens September 14 in the sign of Pisces, kind of in the thick of Mars actually squaring Jupiter and opposing Neptune. That’s kind of all happening within a few days.

AC: Yeah, and that’s gonna be September 13 for people on the North American continent.

KS: Yeah, that 14th should be Eastern time. Maybe not.

AC: It’ll be just after midnight Eastern time.

KS: Right.

AC: It’s the night of Friday the 13th.

KS: Friday the 13th, of course, of course. Yeah, a Full Moon on a Friday night. That’s always extra fun.

AC: So yeah, and that’s gonna slam home, for lack of a better term, all of the stuff we’re talking about, right?

KS: Yeah.

AC: The Neptune input, the Jupiter input, and the Saturn input. Because the Moon is opposite the Sun during the Full Moon, and so, it’s gonna aspect all of the same things in this case.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Even though some of those oppositions and trines and squares will all be happening in the week leading up to the Full Moon, the Full Moon will make that super obvious, right? It’ll bring those things to a crescendo.

KS: And it is a Full Moon in Pisces, very near to Neptune. So expect a lot of emotion or a lot of sensitivity. I don’t know. As much as a Full Moon can be the bright light of the Moon with illumination, this does feel a little bit confusing or maybe having a couple of drinks to kind of wash the week away, at the end of the day, on the Friday.

AC: Yeah, yeah.

CB: It’s interesting. The Mars opposition is exact at nearly the same time with Neptune. So it’s a Full Moon conjunct Neptune, and then Mars is at 17 Virgo exactly opposite Neptune at 17 Pisces simultaneously.

AC: Yeah, there’s just all sorts of stuff happening. You know, we got benefics, we got malefics. We’ve got whatever Neptune is.

KS: Whichever way Neptune feels like going.

AC: Unless y’all think it’s inappropriate, I think it’s worth breaking down some of the longer-term constituent pieces here, right? Like Jupiter in Sag in general, now direct, configured to Neptune. And then what is Saturn stationing direct look like? You know, we’ve had Saturn retrograde for four months at this point. Because that’s what all of the more swift-moving planets are configuring to, right? They’re all spotlighting Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn.

CB: Yeah.

KS: Yeah.

CB: That station of Saturn direct, I think, is really crucial, especially for people that are going through a heavy Saturn transit right now. Because when it slows down and stations, especially direct, it sometimes powers-up Saturn. And if that’s a positive, constructive thing for you, then it’s gonna be an important intensification of that energy and a change in direction, where somebody can start moving forward again after maybe a period of treading water, with whatever constructive business they’ve gotta accomplish. But if Saturn is more like a difficult setback transit for them right now—if they have things around 13° of the cardinal signs, then for some people, it’s gonna be more like a setback that causes a major challenge in their life at that time and feel like that energy is at its most intense.

AC: Yeah, that’s great. I think that the way that this month is set up—at least the first half of this month is set up—it’s going to err on the side of the constructive because we have four planets trining, right? And so, the tone of a lot of the month is set up to be in accord with concrete, structural improvement, which would be ‘constructive’ Saturn in Capricorn. I would also say that I find, in general, that the direct phase of Saturn after the retrograde is more proactive archetypally. The Saturn retrograde phase will be dealing with structural problems and perhaps dealing with chaos that needs to be managed or brought into order, whereas Saturn direct after that tends to be more intentional. Like, okay, now back to that thing that I was trying to build. What am I trying to construct versus what, I don’t know, structures am I trying to escape or renovate? And so, a bunch of trines put planets in accordance with that work, which is better than it could be.

KS: Yeah, it feels like there is maybe a little of cohesiveness or collaboration or a sense of focusing on the one thing or the big thing and putting a substantial effort behind it for a period of time.

AC: Yeah. All right, so remember, if we look at when planets are trining Saturn, right, they’re going to square Jupiter and oppose Neptune like the day after, right? The sequencing of our experience is gonna be like, “Oh, yeah, oof,” leading up to a trine with Saturn for each of the planets. Okay, I need to get my shit together. We need to get back on track. Or, that’s done, now I can get back to this. But then immediately after, it’s Jupiter-Neptune, right? And so, there’s a lot of—how shall we say with Jupiter and Neptune? That’s like ambitious, positive, potentially delusional. Maybe just extraordinary. You know, if we’re looking at Jupiter as being a focal point of—ambition is too crude a term. Aspiration. Jupiter is a focal point of aspiration. What we’re aspiring to with Jupiter-Neptune is pretty fantastic. I mean, fantastic in the sense of that’s fantastic, but also, it might be too fantastic and just be a fantasy, but all of those are tied together. It’s Saturn and then Jupiter-Neptune. And so, that’s part of what really interests me about the sequencing of this. You know, it’s all within, basically, two days for every planet.

KS: Yeah, that’s a really beautiful point, Austin. It’s a quick turnaround from the heads-down/bum-up of working and being productive or creating some tangible, structural output versus diving back into that ‘visionary, sometimes overreaching, but sometimes maybe lifting your game’ piece of the Jupiter-Neptune square.

AC: Yeah, in some cases, that’s the perfect combination, right, having that heavy, responsible, structural input from Saturn and that contextualizing the Jupiter-Neptune, right? If it was just planets interacting with Jupiter-Neptune, without any sort of grounding, the chances of floating off into the clouds is pretty good. If it was just Saturn, without any ‘this is what you have to do’, but without any aspiration or excitement, then that’s a bummer. But we’re kind of getting both here, which is maybe not so bad.

KS: Not so bad at all. I mean, one of the things I think about, just in general with combinations of Virgo and Capricorn, is this kind of precise, enduring productivity, where there’s sort of a specific goal or target that you’re looking to hit and this sense of just working towards that. And so, I do think—particularly in the first part of the month, when we’ve got all of those planets moving through Virgo—that productiveness is there. It’s almost like you get through your hard day or your busy week with the trines from Virgo to Cap, and then you get to remember why you’re doing it, or you get to take a break from having done that. And in either case, that is where some of that inspiration from Jupiter and Neptune can be a nice counterpoint to the ‘getting the work done’ of the Virgo/Saturn, Virgo/Capricorn, sorry.

AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CB: Can I interrupt you guys for a second?

AC: By all means.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So the noise over here has gotten worse and so bad. But I just wanted to interject a funny astrological observation, which is that we didn’t really elect the time for this episode. But Mars has been passing like right over the midheaven in my location over the past little bit here, right as this is starting to happen. So I’m not interjecting in this conversation as much as I could just because there’s crazy noise, and if I start talking, you’ll both hear it on the Zoom call. But I thought it was a funny little electional note.

AC: Yeah, very nice, very nice.

KS: I mean, that sounds like a lot of Mars.

CB: Well, what’s funny is they hadn’t been working outside my window. They’d been working on the other side of the building for the past three or four weeks now. And this is the very first day—as we started recording—I think they suddenly are now just deciding to work outside my window, with hammers, on the side of the building. Anyway, Mars conjunct the midheaven, everybody.

KS: Love it. Talk about the lived example of the malefic.

CB: Yeah, exactly.

AC: And also, if I’m going to do a quick sketch for Mars in Virgo, the handyman or handyperson. You know, the person who comes in and works on stuff and fixes stuff and bangs on it, like that’s Mars in Virgo. That’s one of the top three Mars in Virgo images. It’s the Knight of Pentacles.

CB: Yeah. And also, just the importance of the chart of the moment and paying attention when planets are passing angles. Sometimes there can be a literal manifestation of that, and that in and of itself is educating and instructional if you’re paying attention.

KS: Yes.

CB: Albeit, annoying in this instance. Okay. And Teresa in the chat, the live chat, also points out the Moon conjunct Uranus in our lovely electional chart today, which is probably a good point as well. All right, sorry to interrupt.

KS: No, no! Oh, my gosh, this is great.

CB: Yeah, so back to what you both were saying. Austin, you were talking about the Jupiter-Neptune and the idea or aspirational focus of it sometimes. Sometimes it can seem, though, like attempting to expand and move forward to something and not really having a clear idea of what the goal is or what the end thing is in mind. Like I’ve seen both versions of that. Like there’s definitely the super-idealized, like, I have this amazing image, and I may or may not hit that mark, and then there’s the other one, of just the nebulous need to move forward, don’t really know what the end goal is in mind, but hopefully, I can stumble into something vaguely positive in the end.

AC: Yeah, well, what I would say is that Neptune doesn’t recognize limits. Jupiter is expansive, but recognizes limits, right? It wants to expand into a big space, but it’s not an infinite space. Whereas Neptune doesn’t recognize there being a limit to the space, right? It’s anything you can dream. And so, in order to navigate that particular collision of powers in a favorable way, you need to add the limit. Neptune’s not going to do it for you, right? You know, Jupiter in Sag is super-motivating and capable. It’s a great influence and then Neptune expands that vision. And then whether that’s going to disperse the vision to the degree—what’s the word? To dilute it to such a degree that it doesn’t matter at all, or whether it just takes it to the next level, a lot of that’s how you handle it. And I think one of the key pieces is you have to provide the limits because Neptune’s not going to. And that’s another reason why it’s kind of nice that planets are trining Saturn at almost exactly the same time that they are opposing Neptune, right? Cuz if any planet can offer you a lesson on limits and structure, it’s our buddy Saturn.

KS: Yes. Yes, it is.

CB: Definitely.

AC: And then I would just say that all of that basically rolls into the Full Moon, and the Full Moon hits the same axis. It lights up all the same stuff and then things change right after the Full Moon.

KS: Yeah, it’s like a whole different ball game, isn’t it?

AC: Mm-hmm.

KS: I mean, the one thing—just on the Jupiter-Neptune piece—Neptune is taking its cues from Jupiter in Sag right now. And I wonder if that can slightly skew, not towards containment, but to just help keep Neptune in touch with a little bit of reality, if you like. You know, this Jupiter square Neptune—it’s the third in a series of three that’s been going on all year. If you’ve been striving for quite a big dream or quite a big push, I mean, you’re gonna see how close you can get. And it may be that you fall far short because you didn’t back up that dream with consistent effort. It may be that you’ve done enough effort to get a version of that hope or that vision into your life. Maybe not completely, but at least enough to keep you going.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And when you’re talking about Neptune being in a Jupiter-ruled sign, I feel like it’s like Jupiter is like, “So I’ve got this really great aspirational, ambitious plan,” and Neptune’s like, “I’m going to write a book,” right? And then Neptune’s like, “What if the book was made of diamonds? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” And Jupiter’s like, “That would be amazing. We’re not gonna do that.”

KS: But we’re just gonna write the manuscript.

AC: Yeah. And some of the imaginative suggestions might be ‘integratable’ and then some of them need to be cast aside, right? Yeah, I don’t know that a $700,000 book is gonna sell very well.

KS: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I mean, Austin, you kind of alluded to this, but the big change right after the Full Moon—well, the first part—is Mercury and Venus both change signs. They’re kind of holding hands together right now, skipping through the zodiac, BFFs, and they’re leaving Mercury’s sign and taking up residence in Libra, in Venus’ sign. And it’s very much like a mid-month mood shift with this.

AC: Oh, totally.

CB: Yeah.

AC: It happens, I believe, in the 12 hours following the Full Moon.

CB: 13th and 14th.

AC: Yeah, it’s within 12 hours. After the Full Moon, Mercury and Venus both change signs.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And that’s a pretty exciting, fun thing. I personally like that a lot because it brings us into a window where now both benefics are in the signs they rule. And Mercury—although less excellent as just Mercury stuff in Virgo—is now in Libra, where it’s completely competent, with the ruler of Libra.

KS: Right there.

AC: And it’s no longer sharing a sign with Mars, right? And so, that’s pretty nice. It’s not perfect. But as far as general electional windows, when I did my exploration, my cartography of the year last year, the second half of September was one pair of two weeks that I really liked. And so, that’s actually when As Above, my event with Gordon White, is scheduled. Actually we’re beginning just as the Moon enters Aries, on the 14th, and opposes, and therefore, is configured to both Venus and Mercury, you know, all that stuff.

KS: Yeah, I’m totally with you, Austin, on having the love for this Venus in Libra period. It is something that I’ve been looking forward to all year, just to have both the benefics in good condition. In addition, they happen to be in signs that form a sextile, so that just adds a nice little juiciness there. As you said, it’s not perfect because Libra is now back on the dynamic or hard axis with the Capricorn stuff.

AC: Absolutely.

KS: I personally just love the shift of Venus, from a dignity perspective, out of Virgo and into Libra. You know, not every planet changing signs has such a radical change from a limited place to a place of peak function. But the Venus shift from Virgo to Libra is one of those, going from a low to high overnight, basically.

AC: Yeah, yeah, it’s quite nice.

CB: One of the things that’s a little trickier—was trickier when we were looking at the elections for this month and trying to take advantage of Venus being in Libra, in its home sign—was that Saturn hanging out there in mid-Capricorn, stationing direct this month. It means it takes a little while before Venus clears Saturn. It’s like applying to a square with Saturn for a good week or two. And unfortunately, now that Jupiter is direct and has been moving forward again, it’s no longer earlier in degrees than Saturn. So we were in a period, for most of the summer, where planets applying would hit Jupiter first and then Saturn. But now, it’s switched, so that some of them—like Venus going through Libra—will square Saturn, and then eventually after that sextile Jupiter. But it’s just a little tricky thing.

AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, there is a fly in the ointment, for sure. And so, part of the way I approached that electionally is hit Venus way early or way late.

KS: Yeah, to give some space.

AC: But one thing. And maybe I’m over-apologizing or going out of my way to see mitigating factors, but it’s worth noting that there’s a fair amount of reception between Venus in Libra and Saturn in Capricorn. Libra is Saturn’s sign of exaltation. And generally speaking, Saturn likes Venus. That may not be good for Venus, but it’s good for Saturn. And so, some of that Venusian goodness during Venus’ time in the middle degrees of Libra may not be as good for strictly Venusian matters, it will probably help Saturnian matters, cuz it’s in such a favorable relationship—or it’s in such a favorable place as far as Saturn is concerned. You know, there’s a potential for, how shall we say, mutually-constructive interaction between the Capricorn and Libra than there would be in a lot of other squared signs. And that doesn’t mean schedule your thing the day that Venus squares Saturn exactly, but there is some mitigation there.

KS: I completely agree, Austin, that as far as Venus-Saturn aspects go, these two signs are more productive or more conducive to finding some sort of outcome that everybody can get onboard with or live with. As you said, it can be a bit harsh for Venus. But it’s almost like Venus can help maybe take some of the edge off Saturn here a little bit. He’s still doing his thing, but maybe with more of a smile on his face, or at least a little bit more consideration of others.

CB: Looks like the Venus-Saturn square goes exact on September 25, for those who were wondering about that. And this is probably a good segue then. Funny enough, the election for this month—we actually decided to go with the Venus election, with Venus in Libra. Leisa Schaim picked out this election this month, and I think this was our highlighted election for September and for the entire year. We also had some Mercury in Virgo elections earlier in the month, but we decided to highlight this one for the purpose of the forecast and the main election for this month, and save the Mercury in Virgo election for the Auspicious Elections Podcast. So the Venus election is set for the end of the month, for September 29, at about 7:10 AM, with about, let’s say, 8° of Libra rising in your location. So basically what you should do is cast a chart and set it for your city, where you’re gonna start your election. Set it for about September 29, at around 7:10 in the morning, and adjust the chart until the ascendant is at about 8° of Libra, just so you can start the election just after sunrise. So basically this is just probably a few minutes after sunrise that day, where the Sun has just risen over the eastern horizon in Libra, and the rising sign itself is in Libra as well. So what you’ll end up with is an electional chart that has a pretty heavy Libra stellium, where this is shortly after the New Moon has taken place in Libra just the day before. So the Sun is at 6° of Libra, in the first whole sign house. The Moon is at 17° of Libra, Venus is at 18 Libra, and Mercury is at 24 Libra. So basically, this is a Venus election. We tried to focus on getting it so that Venus is separating from Saturn rather than applying, just so that you can still get Venus in Libra but not have to worry about the boundary or the obstacle that Saturn presents, even as a surmountable difficulty in that instance, cuz it’s separating. So it’s ideally, or at least hopefully, something that’s moving into the past.

We were trying to get Venus applying to Jupiter, but it’s a little bit tricky to do, as you can see. There’s actually variations to this election. Like if you back it up by just a day, you can end up with Venus applying to a sextile with Jupiter at 17° of Sagittarius. But then you end up with a waning Moon at the very end of its cycle, which is usually not as good for starting new things, but can be very good for wrapping up old things. But if you’re not trying to wrap up something old or bring something to completion, then I’d probably recommend using the one that takes place on the 29th after the New Moon. The Moon itself is at 17° of Libra, and it’s applying to a conjunction with Venus. Venus is in its own sign. The only thing I don’t like about this election—that we couldn’t really get around—is even though Venus has cleared Saturn, it’s still applying to or is closely square to Pluto. So you’re sort of putting a Venus-Pluto signature in this chart. But sometimes that can be okay, you just have to be careful about going to extremes. So when Patrick was giving some of his significations this month, he left out Pluto. One of the significations, I realized, for Pluto—that’s a really good summary of what it often does—is to overreact to something, to like go too far. And sometimes that’s the danger, especially with Venus-Pluto aspects, just going overboard with something related to Venus. Otherwise, as long as you can navigate and manage that, it’s a relatively good Venus election for artistic or creative or other affairs that have to do with aesthetics, or where aesthetic appeal is an important part of the process, this would be a good election. It’s also not a bad election for communication, with Jupiter in Sagittarius in the 3rd and Mercury in the 1st with Venus relatively well-placed. Mars is in the 12th, so it’s not that great for, as Patrick says, ‘haterz’; that could be a potential problem with this election. But otherwise, this is our electional chart for September. Does this capitalize on some of the Venus in Libra stuff that you were also going for in your election, Austin?

AC: Yeah, there are some things I like about this. One thing that I just noticed is the same election in, I believe, an Eastern timezone will put Venus between aspects to Jupiter—or will put the Moon between aspects to Jupiter and Venus, which is a supremely-protected place for the Moon. I’d have to check that out in different timezones, but that should be possible.

CB: If it was Eastern?

KS: Well, even on the screen, that’s showing. Oh, no, I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. Yeah, it’s applying to both. But what you’re saying is separating from one and applying to the other.

AC: Yeah, cuz the Moon is still too close to the Sun for my taste. You know, it’s good, but if a Moon is that dark, I wanna give it as much help as possible, especially as the ruler of the 10th. And so, yeah, I believe in an Eastern timezone, you’ll get a supremely-protected Moon. I mean, it’s already definitely getting fed benefics. That was just something that occurred to me. Or whatever timezone is one timezone east of Eastern in South America, you could definitely get that. That would be so nice—as Kelly would say, ‘juicy’—to have the Moon between those because it has such an important role ruling the 10th. Anyway.

CB: I think you’re thinking about Western timezone. Cuz if it was Eastern, the Moon’s gonna be earlier, and it’s gonna be not in between.

AC: Oh, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. So people in Hawaii, this one’s for you. Yeah, thank you for the correction. Yeah, I want the Moon to be later, not earlier.

KS: Yeah, you want it to go a bit beyond. Yeah, so basically, the Moon is maybe early 18°-and-a-few-minutes. So it’s, technically, just past the sextile to Jupiter and then applying, by a few minutes, to Venus.

AC: Yep, exactly.

KS: Yeah, and we had a term for that.

AC: That would be perfect.

KS: Yeah, that showed up a few years ago. I don’t know if you guys remember a ‘benefic sandwich’.

CB: Right.

AC: Yeah, there were some other less appropriate terms thrown around as well.

KS: Well, I went with the appropriate one. Yeah, totally. But, I mean, Austin, the chart is quite decent. You know, Chris, I mean, you’re basically getting the Moon-Venus-Jupiter kind of collab there, which is always great, especially with Venus and Jupiter having so much dignity. But yeah, Austin, what you’re saying is there is a window of time—of probably just a few hours—where the Moon is gonna be separating from Jupiter and applying to Venus, and that’s gonna be really nice.

CB: Yeah.

AC: That’ll be about an hour-and-a-half.

KS: Yeah, you just may not be able to get the right ascendant. That’s the challenge with electional work.

AC: But yeah, anyway, great. Yeah, there’s a lot to love here. And Part of Fortune on Venus, bonus, win.

KS: Nothing wrong with that.

AC: Nothing.

CB: Yeah, so this is our best electional chart for the month of September. It’s at the very end of the month. Most of the other elections are actually at the beginning of the month. So we picked out, I think, three or four other electional charts, and a lot of them are Mercury elections, with Mercury in Virgo. So that’ll be on the Auspicious Elections Podcast, which we just recorded and are about to release in the next few days, which is available to patrons on the $5 and $10 tiers. So if you wanna get access to that, you can sign up through our page on patreon.com. Just search for ‘The Astrology Podcast’. All right, so that’s the election for the month, and now we’re getting pretty far into the end of the month at this point. Are we skipping over any major transits? We talked about Saturn stationing direct, which happens on the 18th. We talked about the Jupiter-Neptune square, which goes exact on the 21st. What else? Are we overlooking anything late in the month?

AC: Well, the Sun does move into Libra.

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah, so Libra season starts, as it always does, around this time, around the 23rd. And we do not, thankfully, get Mars ingressing into Libra yet. That’s saved for the following month, for October. So most of this month is just Mars moving through Virgo and all of the other planets are left sort of on their own, doing relatively okay without Mars, for the first time in a while, as they’re going through Libra. Any other outer planet activity, or anything like that?

AC: Saturn’s direct, but it’s still conjunct the South Node.

KS: Yeah.

AC: They’ve been pacing for months. And so, now that Saturn’s direct, that’s actually gonna mean they’re gonna conjoin again, but they’re gonna start to depart because the South Node’s normal movement is clockwise and Saturn’s normal movement is counter-clockwise. However, when Saturn was retrograde, they were both regressing at nearly the same rate through the zodiac, so we’ve had that Saturn-South Node just pacing, pacing, pacing. But the direct motion will give us the last conjunction and then they’ll start separating, where the South Node is going towards the beginning of Capricorn and Saturn is going towards the end. And so, that’s something to look forward to. That’s a consequence of the direct station this month, but they don’t actually pull apart until the fourth quarter.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So more of the same. Sorry, go ahead.

KS: More of the same, yeah. You know, if you have been finding the Saturn-South Node super-close pairing really difficult—cuz it is one of the signatures of this year—know that we’re reaching the last hurrah with that, whatever that has been dredging you through or forcing you let go of or reconstruct/deconstruct. Yeah, I’ve got September 28, 13 Cap for the last exact conjunction of Saturn and the South Node. And you’re right, Austin, we don’t really feel the effects of that until October-November, as they actually start to get a few degrees apart. And I think for people who have planets around 13°-14° and maybe even 15° of the cardinal signs, this couple-month period is pretty full-on because with Saturn coming into station at 13 Capricorn, he’s actually spending a lot of time around the 14-13-degree-marker over a couple of months. Like mid-August to early September, he’s at 14 Capricorn, and then by the end of September and most of October, he’s back at 14 Capricorn. So there is this sort of extended emphasis of Saturn, particularly on those degrees. And with the South Node there, it’s just adding a level of intensity and perhaps destabilization or discomfort. So I’ve seen this coming up in client work a lot, with people with planets or even angles around those 13°-14° of any of the cardinal signs. So that includes you if you’ve got planets, or your ascendant, or your midheaven at 13-14 of Aries, Cancer, Libra, or Capricorn because the aspect configuration coming out of Saturn is affecting all of those degrees in those other three signs as well.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, and it looks like the squares that the planets in Libra make to the South Node and Saturn will be the last hurrah of that year-long Saturn-South Node theme before it degrades relatively quickly and gives way to other configurations.

KS: And that’s very much the last week of September, isn’t it, where we have Venus and Mercury certainly going through and squaring Saturn, just as Saturn is getting so tight with the South Node there.

AC: Yeah, but Jupiter’s direct and square Neptune, right? Kind of the same old story. Uranus is doing its thing over there in Taurus. Pluto is creeping inevitably, where it’s been all year. So yeah, that’s the status with the outer planets.

KS: Planets. And look, a special mention on Jupiter in Sag. Like we are starting to get towards the pointy end of the year, and we have a very time-limited opportunity for anything that he may be able to give you or that you wanna take from his time. I mean, we’re doing the forecast for September. And after this month, you’ve got two months and a couple of days of Jupiter in Sag and then we’re done with it for 12 years. So even though it’s not perfect, if a planet is activating Jupiter, just take what you can from it because this’ll be it, basically.

AC: I’m reminded of what you said about the big transition in Venus’ essential dignity from Virgo to Libra. So the opposite happens. We go from fall to rulership there. The opposite happens with Jupiter moving into Capricorn in December.

CB: Yeah, December.

AC: We go from rulership to fall. It’s not just, oh, Jupiter’s in its fall in Capricorn, it’s co-present with malefics galore.

KS: Yes.

AC: And so, that which is Jupiterian will be much harder. You know, there’s a much larger load to bear. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible, doesn’t mean it won’t hit some people exactly right, but in terms of the numbers, for most people, it’s gonna be way harder to ‘Jupiter’ from December onward than it is for these last three months of Jupiter in Sag.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And so, get it in. Strike while the iron is hot.

KS: Yes. Yeah, helping Jupiter this month is that second half of the month, Venus in Libra boost. We do get another little Venus boost. Cuz I think Venus returns to Sag before Jupiter departs in November, but that’s a teaser for the November forecast. So take what you can in the second half of September with Venus-Jupiter and go forth.

CB: Yeah, I think that’s good advice. And next month, things will clear up a little bit, once Mercury gets out of Virgo and is no longer squaring Jupiter. Once it moves into Libra, it’ll clear up some okay Jupiter elections for that month as well, especially next month.

KS: Oh, when Mars goes into Libra. Yeah, it’ll help Jupiter. It just creates a little bit of frustration from Libra to Capricorn.

CB: Yeah, definitely. But just in terms of if you wanna take advantage of Jupiter being in Sag, next month is gonna be the safer month in terms of Mars departing from that square finally.

KS: Nice.

CB: All right, well, I think that brings us pretty much to the end of September here. Because we’ve checked off all of the major boxes in terms of the outer planet alignments. We’ve focused a lot on the transition, early in the month, of planets moving through Virgo and then eventually moving into Libra later in the month. And I think we’re pretty much covered everything. Are there any major things that we’re overlooking? Or does anybody in our live audience have any questions or points before we wrap up?

KS: We’ve done a good treatment of this very busy month. The image that keeps coming to my mind is what, Austin, you and I were talking about earlier, about that sort of juggling and just getting a lot done in short spaces of time, especially in the first part of the month, with the extreme Virgo emphasis. Cuz that is unusual to have Sun-Mars-Mercury-Venus all in Virgo together.

AC: Yeah, there’s a lot to get done. There’s a lot to get done.

KS: Productive and busy for the first half.

AC: Yeah, and a lot of good opportunities to, how shall we say, bring things into equilibrium with that Mercury-Venus in Libra, which is different than just grinding and getting it done. You know, just Virgo stuff—especially with Mars there—is very grind, like accomplish things. But then Libra follows Virgo and it’s like, okay, so now that you’ve done all those things, there’s the task of getting the life shape, so that it’s balanced and you’re not hyper-focused on just one thing. You know, Virgo’s strength and weakness is to hyper-focus, but Libra’s strength and weakness is to look at the different pieces of life in relationship to one another. And so, if people are gonna have a job this September, it’s first half, get all the details and then step back the second half and make sure everything’s balanced, so you’re going into the fourth quarter looking good.

KS: Yeah, great tips.

CB: Yeah, that sounds like good advice. All right, guys, I think we have successfully covered the forecast for September then. We’re gonna be back again next month, one month from now, to talk about the forecast for October, which is weird to say, of 2019.

KS: Yeah.

CB: I’m gonna go to the Baltimore astrology conference, the NCGR conference, next week. So I’m looking forward to seeing some listeners there, if anybody’s listening to this episode before the conference happens. There are also some other conference announcements. I think two sets of speaker lists were just released for the two main conferences next year, right?

KS: Yeah, I think both ISAR, which is the September 2020 conference in Denver, and then NORWAC, which is the May 2020 conference in Seattle. Both published their speaker list. So that started to generate a lot of buzz about what events people are going to next year and where you can catch different astrologers throughout the year. So that’s exciting.

CB: Yeah, and it looks like there’s a lot of great talks and a lot of great speakers at both of those conferences next year.

KS: Yeah, it’s gonna be some good pickings on the conference circuit.

AC: And where can we catch you, Kelly?

KS: Next year or next month?

AC: Next year, at the conferences that we just mentioned.

KS: Yeah, I’m actually very lucky to be invited to both of them. So I will be presenting at NORWAC in May and then presenting at ISAR in September. I think the three of us are gonna do a little something-something in September next year.

AC: Indeed.

KS: And what about you, Austin? You tell us.

AC: I will be at NORWAC as well. And for the first time, I will be joined on the speaker list by my skillful wife, Kaitlin Coppock.

KS: Very exciting.

AC: Kait will be giving her first talk at an astrology conference. So that’s exciting.

CB: And that was her first astrology conference that she attended, right?

AC: Yep, yep. That was the first conference she attended. We got together in the NORWAC parking lot.

KS: That sounds very romantic.

AC: It’s so much more modest than you would ever believe. We both have the rulers of our 7th house in Virgo. Trust me, saying that is so much dirtier and more fun than our very careful, thoughtful conversation.

KS: Well, of course it was a conversation, right? Your 7th rulers are both in Virgo.

AC: Yeah. But yeah, we got together there. It was Kait’s first astrology conference. And so, yeah, a mere 12 years later, she’ll be speaking for the first time at an astrology conference, which is pretty exciting.

KS: That’s super exciting. And this is sort of a shameless plug for something I was involved in, but Kaitlin is the nice segue here. I believe she just also had one of her first articles published in print in the WellBeing Astrology magazine, which is just on newsstands now out of Australia. And Kaitlin contributed a gorgeous article, an introduction to planetary magic.

CB: Yeah, that just came out, and you edited that entire magazine. And it looks like it has a super-great lineup of a bunch of articles from a bunch of great astrologers.

KS: Well, yeah. You know, every year I am fortunate enough to be able to select some of the articles and the writers. And yeah, we also got Leisa Schaim in as well, Chris. So that was very exciting. Her article—both Kaitlin and Leisa’s articles have really touched me. And Leisa’s article on finding joy and meaning in the birth chart is something that I think is gonna bring some really fresh ideas and get people thinking about some of the more positives in astrology. But I know that was actually based on a talk Leisa did earlier this year at NORWAC, I think.

CB: Yeah, that was her NORWAC talk this year. And it went over so well that apparently she was invited back to give two talks at NORWAC next year. So she’s also one of the speakers that will be there. And I meant to ask, can people order WellBeing, the astrology magazine internationally? Or how does that work?

KS: Yeah, totally. So you can order the hard copy. It does ship from Australia. And you will find that postage is expensive, cuz quite a high-quality publication and it weighs a lot, so it’s heavy. But you can also buy an e-version, which I’ve already seen people putting up in their Instagram stories. So there is a post on my website right now, “WellBeing Astrology 2020,” and it has both the links. So you can pop in and see whether you feel like paying the postage, or if you just wanna order the digital version. The links for both are there. And I’ve got a full list of everyone who’s contributed and some of the things that they’ve written on.

CB: Awesome. Yeah, well, people should check that out. Cuz you’ve got like 10 or 15 amazing astrologers, all to write good articles, plus forecasts, plus everything.

KS: Yeah, there’s a Moon calendar in it for 2020, and then, yeah, some detailed year ahead horoscopes as well, written by Cassandra Tyndall, who’s another astro-friend and colleague as well. So yeah, this is the first year we’ve had her.

AC: One of ‘The Water Trio’.

KS: She’s one of my gals, ‘The Water Trio’. Yeah, so that’s very exciting. Lot’s of growth, which is good.

AC: Right. So Kelly, are you doing anything in September?

KS: Oh, yeah!

AC: Pulling back the timeframe a little bit.

KS: Yeah, coming back to the present. Yes, I have my next four-part, online training, which is about counseling skills for difficult aspects. So that starts September 9, and it’ll be four nights—or four live classes throughout the month, with some online discussion. For those who are really keen, there is homework as well. It’s not compulsory, but some students really enjoy the chance for feedback. So yeah, I think that’s what I have going on this month. What about you? You’ve got two classes going or more?

AC: Yeah, three. All my classes are in motion.

KS: Okay.

AC: Enrollment is no longer open. I elected a bunch of clever stuff in August that’s gonna come out via Sphere + Sundry in September. Again, some stuff you might expect, some stuff you didn’t expect. Got some kind of sneaky-but-excellent fixed star elections. And I’ve got As Above in Portland on the 14th. And so, there are actually some people who booked early but couldn’t make it, so I think we have a couple of tickets made available. Cuz it sold out in two weeks, but then people were like, “And I can’t actually make it,” so I think we have a couple available. So if people wanna come, they should absolutely go and see if there are any left. And then, let’s see. Is there anything else? Oh, this isn’t a plug for me, but I just wanna say the Northwest, as far as the esoteric Northwest, we have As Above in Portland on the 14th, the Texts and Traditions Conference in Seattle is the next weekend, which is awesome, and then Demetra is doing her retreat in, I think, Eugene or somewhere in Oregon, at the end of September. So yeah, that second half of September being full of benefic configurations, at least here in the Northwest.

KS: Love it. So we should all just relocate there temporarily.

AC: Yeah, well, we got room.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Slumber party at Austin’s house.

KS: Love it. Chris, what do you have going on? What do you wanna talk about?

CB: Well, I was thinking of actually attending, for the first time, the Texts and Traditions conference because I’m getting into old books, and I hear there’s some good old books there and otherwise nice books. But I don’t otherwise have anything going on, except for being at the NCGR conference through early September and then returning. I have moved into a new phase of the whole Patreon thing, where the last funding goal that we set a little over a year ago was to be able to get a place for the podcast recording studio, which of course we accomplished earlier this year, and it’s been nice being able to record stuff in person. But now, the next challenge is figuring out how to get people out here, so we can actually record stuff in the studio, in person. Including having you two out, we’re hoping, later this year in November, for possibly recording the next yearly forecast episode for 2020. So I’ve set a new funding goal on Patreon in order to help accomplish that, so I can either fly people out here to interview them in the studio, especially older astrologers, where I’m trying to get some good biographical and other technical episodes, or, alternatively, fly myself out to some of those older astrologers, if I need to do the interview with them in person at their home. So I set this new funding goal, and I launched a new tier on Patreon for a $25 tier, where people can get a producer credit for each episode of the podcast that is released, that they’re helping to produce. So I just launched that and we have our first three producers. It’s a producer/advertiser credit. So our first patron I wanted to thank was Christine Stone, who’s actually one of the longest patrons who’s been supporting the show over the past year; I think ever since I signed up on Patreon. And she’s our first producer who signed up for producer credit. So thanks to her for funding this episode. And then, also, thanks to our advertisers, which are Astro Gold for Mac OS and iOS. And that’s actually the astrology app that I use on my Android phone to look at, for example, where Mars was hitting the midheaven earlier when all of that noise was happening, which, consequently, now that it’s off the midheaven and the rising sign has changed, is no longer happening. But they make a great astrology app.

And people keep asking me about Solar Fire’s gonna be available for the Mac. And I checked in with them again recently, and they still said, “I don’t know. Check back in a few months. Maybe later this year.” But Astro Gold is already a mini-version of Solar Fire that works on Macs. So you can actually find that at astrogold.io, and it’s a pretty good program. And then our second sponsor is the Portland School of Astrology, which, speaking of the Pacific Northwest and Austin’s current home state, is a nice resource. I know a lot of people we know have gone through the Portland School of Astrology, right?

AC: Yeah, I’ve guest taught there.

CB: Have you? Have you given a guest lecture there yet, Kelly?

KS: I haven’t, no. I would love to, though. I understand it’s a really amazing school. And the crew that are teaching out there have really pulled something together. Cuz I think there’s something quite special that happens when you can actually study together in person.

CB: Right.

KS: So I’ve always really admired what they’ve done and how they’ve really been able to grow and develop their program out there. Cuz they’ve been around for a few years now.

CB: Yeah, it seems like a decade now or something. But Portland seems like one of the big hubs for astrology and has for several years now. And I think part of that is because of them having this in-person school and the diversity of their curriculum. So you can find out more information about that at portlandastrology.org. So if anybody wants to sign up to be a producer credit, to help us have more interviews in person, then you can find out more information by going to our page on patreon.com and doing a search for ‘The Astrology Podcast’, and then you’ll find the $25 tier over on the bottom-right corner. All right, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks for joining me today, guys. Thanks for bearing with me, with the sound issues. In the future, I’m gonna avoid putting Mars near the midheaven shortly after the episode begins.

KS: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was really fun.

CB: Yeah, I’m glad that you’re both more settled into your places, and you’re both looking good and looking more settled and less harried than as you were moving over the past few months.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Definitely feeling less harried.

KS: It was really like something else. And I just wanna say thanks to you guys and to everyone listening for bearing with me. Now that I’m starting to feel more settled, it’s making me realize how unsettled I have been, really since the start of July. So yeah, this is much better. Do you notice the same, Austin?

AC: Sort of. I was very aware of how unsettled I was.

KS: Okay.

CB: I think your book collection looks more settled in the background. And that’s my main litmus test for any astrologer’s state of mind—how well-arranged their book collection looks like.

AC: Just you wait. I’m getting new cabinets.

CB: Okay. And Kelly, you might have some books in the background next time?

KS: Yeah, I’m going to take up the book challenge, and I shall prepare a bookshelf for perusal next month.

CB: Brilliant. All right, well, I look forward to seeing that. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to all the patrons who joined us for the live recording of this episode and everybody else that supports us. So that’s it. So thanks for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.

AC: Bye.

KS: Bye.