The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 224, titled:

October 2019 Astrology Forecast: Mercury Spookygrade

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on September 30, 2019

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2019/09/30/october-2019-astrology-forecast-mercury-spookygrade/

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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. This episode was recorded on Friday, September 27, 2019, starting at 8:45 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this the 224th episode of the show. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with astrologers Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees about the astrological forecast for the month of October of 2019. But first, at the beginning of the show, we’re gonna catch up and talk about what we’ve been up to since our last forecast and discuss a few miscellaneous astrological topics that are happening in the news. And then eventually, about 45 minutes into the episode, we’re gonna transition into talking about the forecast for next month. So if you want to just jump ahead straight to the forecast, and you don’t wanna listen to the pre-forecast discussion, then you’ll be able to find timestamps on the description page for this episode on TheAstrologyPodcast.com website, or just below the YouTube video, if you’re watching the video version. 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 tonight.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris.

KELLY SURTEES: Hey, guys.

CB: Hey. So we’re having some connection issues with Austin’s internet. So we’re gonna not do video, but we’re gonna—I think in post—put a really striking picture of Austin in place for that. So I’m sure you have something striking we can use. Right, Austin?

AC: Well, some of the pictures from the As Above event turned out pretty nice. Although I’m thinking because this is October, and October contains Halloween, we could pretend that I’m a ghost.

KS: I was gonna say you’re like this disembodied voice. That’s perfect.

CB: Right. Maybe Stephen can Photoshop just a picture of a ghost into your spot there. All right, so let’s get caught up on what you guys have been up to. Kelly, right now, you’re actually at an astrology intensive in Oregon, right?

KS: Yeah, I’m actually attending Demetra George’s planetary conditions retreat in Bend, in Oregon. And yeah, she’s just had her book come out, so she’s teaching from that. There’s a group of about 60 of us. I’m not actually the only Australian. There’s a couple of Aussies that have flown from the West Coast of Australia, which is even further away, plus some people that have flown in from England, and of course, all over the States and Canada as well. So we’re having a really fun time. It’s a beautiful location. I actually felt today, for a moment, this is like being at an astrologer’s boot camp or something. You know, cuz it’s a five-day thing, so it’s longer than a typical conference. But it’s really amazing.

CB: Yeah, that’s exciting, and she’s had a huge turnout. There’s like 64 people that are there or something like that, which is a lot bigger than her usual intensives. But this is the first year she’s done one, since her book has been out on Hellenistic astrology.

KS: Yeah, so I think that’s had a huge impact. And there’s a real mix of people. There’s obviously some people who are attending, who are familiar with Hellenistic astrology and are just wanting to learn from Demetra herself. But there were actually about a third of the attendees who are quite new to astrology and are just getting started. This is sort of the first astrological event that they’re attending. And so, that’s really interesting, too, that they’re coming straight in—I don’t know if it’s the deep end, but they’re coming straight into some really rich material as their starting place.

AC: I mean, that’s definitely drinking from the fire hose.

KS: Right. I mean, there’s no small sips there.

CB: Yeah, well, that’s been really exciting to me over the past two years, since my book came out, where I’ve had a number of people that have come up to me and said that either my book was their first book on astrology that they’re getting started with, or I’ve had a few people in the past few weeks where they’re doing my course on Hellenistic astrology as their introduction to the subject in general, cuz they found me on YouTube. So it’s been interesting seeing people now starting out their studies of astrology at the very beginning and foundation of the tradition, when it started 2,000 years ago, and then working their way upward, as opposed to how a lot of us have had to do it, which was starting with modern astrology and then working our way sort of backwards, which is almost an odd way to do it. And it’ll be interesting to see what the result of that is over the next few years or the next decade or what have you. I’d actually like to hear—if there’s anybody that has started studying astrology through me or Demetra’s books over the past year or two—what that’s been like and how that’s been working out for you, just out of curiosity. All right, so you’ll be there for a few more days? It’s a five-day thing?

KS: Yeah. Yeah, literally it’s ‘hump day’ today. It’s day three. Yeah, so two more days. But yeah, it’s been really good. I am really excited to hear from Austin, though, because I know he’s had a very special event that we haven’t heard about yet, he just did on the Pisces Full Moon a couple of weeks ago.

CB: Yeah, the As Above event just took place last weekend. Right, Austin?

AC: It was on the 14th.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Two weeks, okay.

AC: I mean, it feels like yesterday. But yeah, coming up on two weeks ago. And I actually chose the Moon’s ingress into Aries, and its configuration with Venus and Mercury—which had both moved into Libra—for the event. I thought that would be boisterous. So yeah, As Above happened. Gordon White flew out all the way from Tasmania, and we had almost 300 people there for one big night. Gordon and I talked for a little bit and then got out of the way. And it was really spectacular. I’m super-grateful for everybody who came, especially those who flew out from all over the place. Gordon, not in the least, coming out from Tasmania. And Kait, most of all, for doing all of the back-breaking logistics work and arrangement to make it run so smoothly.

CB: Yeah, it looked like an amazing event. You guys hired a professional photographer, which was a stroke of genius. And whoever that was, they did some amazing work—just from an outsider’s perspective—taking photos. But that’s crazy that you had 300 people there. That’s larger than some small conferences, basically. Like NORWAC usually never used to be more than that.

KS: No.

AC: Yeah, it was really exciting. It was exciting to see how excited people were to come out and spend time together. And one of the motives behind this event—as well as So Below, which was its companion event in Melbourne last year—was bringing people together from different communities and different crowds.

CB: Yeah, that’s brilliant. Well, that looked like a great event. I think the recording is available now, or will be available on you or Gordon’s Patreon page, right?

AC: Yeah, the recording is available on my Patreon and for Gordon’s premium members.

CB: Brilliant. All right, well, people can check out your website, AustinCoppock.com, for more info about that. Otherwise, in terms of events, we are actually talking about getting together, the three of us, in November. And we’ve finalized some dates—I think around the third week of November—to meet up to record a few episodes of the podcast, and to record the yearly forecast, the year ahead forecast for 2020. Right, Kelly?

KS: Yeah, that’s going to be a step up for us, mostly because you guys have moved and now have a live studio that we can come to. Yeah, so I think the main intention was to get together to record our year ahead show, which is really popular. So the three of us will be live together in the studio. I’m so excited about that. But then, of course, because we are making the effort to fly together, to be together, we’re gonna record a couple of other episodes that are maybe not month ahead forecasts, but more of the ones that people could come back to over time. Yeah, that’ll be just before—yeah, third week of November.

CB: Okay, yeah. And we’re gonna do our two-part series on the significations of the houses and maybe a Q&A, and who knows, maybe some other bonus episode or live webinar or something. We’ll see what happens.

KS: We’ll see what happens, yeah. Yeah, so that’s gonna be really exciting.

CB: Cool. So what else has been going on in the news? Oh, yeah, and me, if we’re just doing retrospective stuff—

KS: Yes. What have you been up to?

CB: Well, I did a thing I can now finally talk about, cuz I couldn’t talk about it until recently. But I actually ended up on The History Channel last month—the very end of the month. The episode aired on Season 14, Episode 13, titled, “The Constellation Code.” If you do a search for that, you can rent it for like a few dollars on YouTube. But it was an episode of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. I was told they were doing an episode on astrology. And I thought that the Ancient Aliens series had just become like a catch-all for their weird episodes on different, odd topics. So I did the interview. And I was only in there for like 30 seconds. I flew out to LA and did the interview, and I was only there for 30 seconds. But it went well. And I defined astrology really relatively well, and I think did a good job. The rest of the episode was a lot of stuff about how astrology came from aliens and stuff like that, that I can’t really get onboard with and can’t say that I had anything to do with.

KS: You didn’t contribute to that part.

CB: I did not.

KS: For those of us who might be outside the States, for instance, and wanna see the episode, is there a clip that you’ve been able to get, that’s on your website or anything like that?

CB: Yeah, on my Twitter account, I have me at the hotel room, cuz it aired while I was at the NCGR conference, weirdly. And so, you can see a little clip of me holding a phone in my hotel room kind of laughing about it, if you scroll back to the end of August. Like August 29th or 30th or something like that, when it aired. But otherwise, just do a search for ‘The Constellation Code Ancient Aliens’ and you’ll find links to where you can rent the episode or where you can watch it on television or what have you.

KS: Cool.

CB: Yeah, so that happened. The NCGR conference happened. It was a relatively quiet event, but went relatively well in Baltimore. And that’s about it in terms of me. There has been some news that a lot of people have been asking me to check, because it’s been a developing story this week. But basically, if you’ve been listening to the podcast long enough, you know I’ve been waiting this summer to see what would happen with Trump, because in zodiacal releasing—which is one of the main timing techniques that I use—there was supposed to be a major transition this summer. And if you go back and listen to the year ahead forecast episode that we did last December, in December of 2018, I talked about the specific date ranges and especially narrowed it down to a date range where the focal point was when he would be in a loosing of the bond—which is like a major transition of some sort on all four levels of the technique—which zeroed in on July 22 through July 28. And at the time, that ended up being when Robert Mueller testified before Congress for the final time. And it sort of came and went, and we were sort of left scratching our heads and wondering if that was really it and if that was gonna have greater implications than it seemed to, or if that was pretty much the end of it—until this week. Now, a couple of months later, suddenly, this new controversy surrounding Trump calling the president of Ukraine and trying to do some sort of political maneuvering involving them and involving them getting just various things—I don’t wanna get into it. But basically, that news came out this week. And it turned out that that call that he made to the president of the Ukraine happened in that exact timeframe between July 22 and July 28 of 2019. So it happened right in the loosing of the bond, during that critical transition point. And what’s interesting about that, which Leisa Schaim noticed—cuz she’s been tracking this better than I have over the past week or so—is that the news broke when he reached the next loosing of the bond, on Level 4, which just happened this past week, between September 22 and September 26. So all of a sudden, the whistleblower report becomes public news about the call happening. And then the House, as a result of that, announces that an informal impeachment inquiry has been initiated or has started. So that happened during the next loosing of the bond. So there’s still stuff that will come up in the future before this is all played out—in terms of his chronology and the time period and this being an unfolding story—but it will be really interesting, in retrospect, if that ends up being the major thing, which it’s sort of looking like it is at the present time.

AC: Well, it’s certainly an event, right? Like it’s certainly the type of event that’s timed to what you expected from the technique, regardless of what the eventual consequences are. Like people have been trying to get an impeachment rolling for quite some time. And it actually getting, at the very least, closer than it’s ever been is timed to the releasing. I also think that that validates the birth time. Cuz there’s that Virgo/Leo rising question. And so, the timing syncing up this tightly says some nice things about the birth time.

CB: Yeah, definitely. It does help to confirm the birth time. This has been a two-year-long, or three-year-long, odyssey for me at this point because that was one of the questions we had in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. Do we have the correct birth time, even for him, and are we using the correct zodiacal releasing periods? And what I said back then, in November of 2016—if you go back and listen to my post-2016 election recap—is we’ll know if he has a major career transition, that really gets rolling at the focal point, during this loosing of the bond that’s gonna take place in 2019. So we’re starting to see some of that happen now, and it does seem to confirm the birth time. But we’ve still got a while to go. I think he doesn’t finish the whole Level 2 loosing of the bond until the spring of next year. So we’ve got some time to see how the rest of it plays out from this point forward.

KS: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting. I’m nowhere near as well-versed in American politics as you guys are, but I know the impeachment discussion has been going on for such a long time. It seems quite striking or significant that that has actually now been launched, or that proceeding has been officially sort of called. And I don’t know the specifics, but it seems like there’s been an escalation on that side of things.

CB: Yeah, well, it’s like the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi—lots of Democrats have been calling for impeachment for quite a while now.

KS: But nothing had happened.

CB: But nothing had happened. And the leadership of the House was really either stopping that from proceeding or was slow-rolling it or something. It wasn’t really clear what Pelosi’s thing was. And she was, therefore, having a lot of tension with her constituents and the other party members. But then, all of a sudden, this came out this week, and suddenly, she was fully onboard with proceeding with an impeachment inquiry, which seemed to be quite a turnaround and presumably means that they thought that it rose to some sort of level of actually proceeding with things. So we’ll see how all of this turns out in retrospect, and that’s really what I’m waiting on. Because sometimes you don’t know in the moment, as things are still unfolding. But it’s definitely suggestive that all of this happened during those crucial periods. So if you go back to the forecast episode that we did last December, you can hear me talking about it at about 1-hour-and-55-minutes into that episode. And that was Episode 187 of The Astrology Podcast, just for more info about that. All right, so we’ll check on that again over the course of the next few months. I think that’s it for news and pre-forecast discussion stuff that we had to touch on before the forecast. Unless you guys have anything else.

AC: Oh, I just wanted to add that the nature of the impeachment proceedings syncs up very well with the language around loosening the bond. You know, the idea is that it’s something that’s been there but has been restrained. And it might look dramatic in the moment, but when you look back at a person’s past, the precedent for whatever that is, is always there. You know, in this case, it’s external rather than internal. We don’t know what’s going on inside Trump. But people have been wanting to do that but have been restrained. And there’s a loosening of action. There’s a release of action that has been pending for a while.

CB: Yeah, and something has been unleashed, that was, before, maybe held back or kept in check.

AC: Mm-hmm. Bonded.

KS: And that’s, I guess, what I think is so striking. Cuz Pelosi has for a long time been saying, “No, I don’t wanna go,” or “This isn’t quite ground for it. We’re not doing it yet.” But she has now gone forward. So exactly to your point, Austin, the restraint that was holding her is now gone.

CB: Yeah, so there should be other important turning points at the culmination period and the completion period. And so, at this point, that’s what we’re looking forward to next, as the next major turning point for those that study zodiacal releasing and know what the hell I’m talking about when it comes to that. Anyway, let’s not get stuck on politics too much, especially since that’s gonna be developing for a while. All right, so let’s transition to the forecast. Before we do that, let’s get our plugs and promotions out of the way for anything that we have coming up, in terms of events or other things. Kelly, do you have anything coming up this month that you’re doing or teaching in October?

KS: I do. I have a webinar that I’m doing for Tony at Astrology University. It is on traditional house rulership for beginners. So we’re gonna be going through how the signs and houses are connected through the traditional mindset in the chart, but really then getting to the rulers of the houses in the birth chart. You know, how to figure out which planet rules your 7th house or your 10th house, your 11th house and so on. So we are pitching this one very much at the beginner level, so I’m just gonna kind of come back to basics with that. So for people who are either newer to astrology or newer to traditional astrology and just wondering how we get planets connected to houses, this is gonna be a webinar for you. So that is on my website. You can also sign up through Astrology University as well. But that’s my big thing for October. Yeah, what have you guys have going on?

CB: Austin, what are you up to?

AC: All right, so a couple of things. Fortunately, no more big events.

CB: 300-person events.

AC: Yeah, right? So I’m gonna be spending October hard at work on the second edition of 36 Faces. It’ll be out before Christmas. And then some of the stuff that I elected for Sphere + Sundry last month will actually be coming out in October. The Full Moon in Aquarius was actually right on top of one of the fixed stars, one of the Behenian stars, Deneb Algedi. And Deneb Algedi is the Tail of the Goat, and it’s wonderfully protective and stabilizing. It’s sort of like ‘friendly grandpa’ energy—for lack of a better term—who thoroughly believes in moral decency, but isn’t a dick about it, would be my read on the vibe. And then there’s also an ancestral series that Kait created, that we found an election for just in time for the season of honoring the dead.

CB: Brilliant. So people can find out more information about that on the Sphere + Sundry website?

AC: Absolutely.

CB: What’s the URL for that, again?

AC: I think it’s sphereandsundry.com. I think it’s sphere+sundry.com.

CB: Okay. Well, that makes things simple. All right.

KS: Super easy.

CB: Brilliant. As for myself, primarily, I’m just trying to push the Patreon right now, because, like I said, in previous months, I’m starting to plan to do more interviews with famous astrologers. But I really wanna try to do them in person, to whatever extent we can, to get better audio and better video—especially for archival purposes—with some of these older astrologers. One interview that I had to do was a distant one—but I was really happy that I got to do it, finally, this month—with Alan Oken, whose astrology book was one of my very first books on astrology. So it was a real honor to have him on the show. He’s 75-years-old, and he’s in good health, but others are sort of getting up there in age. And so, I’m feeling a little bit more pressed to try to get some of those interviews while I still have a chance with the Pluto in Leo generation, especially. So I am promoting the Patreon where you can sign up, if you wanna support those efforts of me either flying astrologers out here to do episodes in person, in the studio, and get higher-quality audio and video, or me flying out there. All you have to do is sign up through our page on patreon.com. And we have different tiers where you can volunteer to support the production of the podcast by donating a dollar, two dollars, or three dollars every time that I put out a new episode, which helps to support the production and everything else. And in turn, you get access to a bunch of benefits and other subscriber bonuses, like a behind-the-scenes newsletter, a private discussion forum, early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, like our audience joining us today of about 30 people, who are watching us as we’re trying to work through some technical issues. There’s also other cool stuff. Like on the higher tiers, there’s a full, 45-minute podcast each month on electional astrology, where we tell you the most auspicious dates for launching new ventures over the course of the next month. And I’m actually gonna release a preview video of that, here, in just a few days. But also, there’s an exclusive podcast series. And finally, there’s a new tier for having your name listed at the end of each episode. So I’ll read some names at the end of this one for patrons who are supporting us. So for more information about that, just check us out on patreon.com. Because I’m really excited about doing that, and I appreciate it when people support the production of what I’m doing and help me to go out there and collect some of these interviews and then share them with the community. All right, any other news before we jump into things?

KS: I don’t think so. Austin, do you have anything?

AC: No. Nothing more than what I’ve described.

CB: Awesome. All right, well, let’s transition then into talking about the astrological forecast for October of 2019. So this month has a lot going on. Like 2020 just has some crazy astrology. I actually went out and caught up and had dinner with my friend Cam White the other night, and he was going through the astrology of 2020. And there’s just so much going on next year that it kind of boggles your mind. And I’m really curious how we’re gonna get through all of that in our year ahead forecast episode, cuz there’s just so much stuff going on. But we’re starting to get there, it’s starting to heat up, and we’re gonna start seeing some of those changes pretty soon. And it feels like October has some stuff going on or has some shifts starting to take place.

KS: It’s a big year next year.

CB: Right.

KS: Like for a year, for 20 years, for 200 years, like there’s a number of significant cycles of varying lengths that are resetting or restarting throughout the course of 2020. So, yeah.

AC: Yeah, so one of the things that I did for As Above was I spent some time with the next 15-20 years and just walked myself through all of the outer planet configurations, looking at the eclipses in connection with that. And it just gets weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder. I think if there’s, how shall we say, an effective mode to coming into next year, and the year after whatever, is not to expect things to get back to normal, but to gear up to steer through the weird. If that makes sense.

KS: Yeah, so it’s not about, “How can we try and get back to what we used to know?,” but to find our way forward into something new and different.

AC: Yeah, well, we’re gonna find our way into something new and different regardless. And we can do a good job at that or wait for it to go back to normal.

CB: So I’m gonna throw up—for those watching the video version—the chart for October 1, so that we can start to see and start to visualize some of the astrological placements for this month. So it looks like when we open the month, at the beginning of October, a lot of stuff is still traveling through Libra. The Sun, of course, starts out at 8° of Libra on October 1. But also, Venus is still going through Libra at 21° of that sign, and Mercury is in the last few degrees, starting out the month at about 27° of Libra. So all of those planets—at some point during the course of the month—are gonna shift, of course, into Scorpio and spend most of the month in that sign, at least when it comes to Mercury and Venus. Mars starts out the month at 28° of Virgo, but then very quickly transitions and ingresses into Libra on the fourth of the month, on October 4. Jupiter is moving really quickly at this point through Sagittarius. And this is one of our last full months of Jupiter moving through its home sign of Sagittarius. It starts out the month at 18. And then Saturn is now direct and is moving forward at 14° of Capricorn at the beginning of the month. So why don’t we go through this chronologically? One of the things I noticed, that stands out this month, is Mercury transitions into Scorpio on the 3rd, but then it slows down pretty quickly in the second week of the month.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Mercury already reaches its shadow. Cuz it’s actually gonna station retrograde this month on Halloween. So Mercury’s gonna station retrograde on Halloween, in Scorpio, and already some astrologers are starting to talk about this. Cam White, on Twitter, is calling this—what is he calling this? He’s calling this ‘Spookygrade’, cuz Mercury’s stationing retrograde in Scorpio on the day of Halloween.

KS: That’s clever. Mercury going into Scorpio—we’re gonna have two months of this, including the retrograde. So we’re getting into a different part of Mercury’s cycle.

AC: Yeah, once Mercury enters on October 3, we’re going to have Mercury there until—ooh, I think it’s the 8th of December.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So that’s a lot of Mercury in Scorpio.

KS: Yeah, a lot of deep thinking or deep discussions about intense emotions.

CB: Yeah, and it’s just surprising. It’s a nice mnemonic device, that it stations or hits its shadow period at 11° of Scorpio, on October 11. So I feel like people should remember that. Because some of the events and circumstances surrounding the retrograde—if you’re paying attention—sometimes they’re subtle, but they’re already gonna start to slowly begin to develop as soon as Mercury shifts into that phase on the 11th.

KS: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Cuz that’s a little more than half the month, really. Nearly three weeks.

CB: Yeah. So let me take it forward. What is some other stuff? I know one of you—Austin, you were talking about, in terms of overviews, some of your thoughts on mutual receptions or reception in general. And that was partially centered on or motivated by the fact that Venus and Mars are gonna be exchanging signs for the entirety of the month.

AC: Yeah. And so, yeah, just the first week-and-a-half of the month holds three sign changes: Mercury enters Scorpio, as you just mentioned, and then we have Venus entering Scorpio, and then Mars enters Libra. So it’s a very different lineup than what we had in September. It changes—one, two, three. And so, with Venus in Scorpio, Venus is in Mars’ sign, and then with Mars in Libra, Mars is in Venus’ sign. And so, there’s an exchange of domiciles. There’s a mutual reception at the sign level. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and for a while I’ve been poo-pooing mutual receptions that didn’t have a classical aspect between them. But I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s not quite right, at least in natal charts. And so, to a certain degree, whether there’s a mutual reception and it helps or not changes a lot of the way you would interpret the Venus-Mars this month. If that mutual reception actually works, that actually helps out both planets significantly because on their own, they’re in their exile or detriment. They’re trying to operate in modes that are very foreign to them, right? Mars speaking Venus’ language, Venus speaking Mars’ language. And actually I’m already accidentally stealing Kelly’s metaphor from earlier. Kelly, would you share that? I thought that was just about the best angle on exile or detriment that I’ve heard.

KS: Yeah, we were talking before we started today, and I was saying that having moved to a country where I don’t speak the language, I’m really getting this lived experience of what being in exile means from the planetary perspective of a planet in detriment. We say it’s a planet in exile, and everything just takes a lot more effort and a lot more energy. And when you do get out and you do a task—if you go to the store or you’re trying to do some errands—because you don’t have the language, you can do the basic component of go to the store and buy the thing. But if you’ve got a question, or you’re trying to get more of a nuance-specific thing, that’s almost impossible for me to do because we live in the French-speaking region in Belgium, and I don’t speak French. So I either have to wait until my husband can come with me, because he is a French speaker, or I Google Translate. I’m getting very familiar with Google Translate on my phone. But even still you lose something from when you actually would speak in your native tongue or you both have a common language. So I’ve really been thinking a lot about this idea of a planet in exile and how you can get things done at a basic level, but without that level of detail or nuance that you could get done in other circumstances. And it just seems to sort of illustrate there’s like that rough edge and things aren’t as refined for a planet that is in exile.

CB: Yeah, I love that. And that’s why in my book I tried to suggest bringing back some of that original language of referring to planets opposite to their domiciles as being in exile, cuz that’s as far away from the home sign as a planet can get, basically. And that’s how it was originally conceptualized, was the planet being in a foreign country where it doesn’t speak the language and it can’t really be as effective in doing its job.

KS: Yeah, I mean, my experience is I don’t speak the language. But you might not have the status to work. You know, there’s so many things. Yeah, anyway, it’s just very interesting. And I know you’ve been talking about that word ‘exile’, Chris, which is why it has stuck with me. Austin, were trying to chime in there?

AC: Yeah, all of this is entirely in accord with Bonatti’s teaching metaphors on dignity. All of them are about what kind of status you have in a particular land. And he goes from rulership, where you’re the sovereign, to dignity by face, where you have no citizenship, you don’t know anybody, and you’ve just gotta do it on talent alone. You know, he describes triplicity dignity as being a citizen, right? You don’t have special privileges, but you do have rights. Dignity by bounds or terms is you’re not a citizen, but you’ve got family there that can hook you up. And so, when a planet’s in its detriment, in most cases, it doesn’t have any of that. And so, it’s a stranger in a strange land, and it follows that it wouldn’t be able to speak the language. So yeah, it’s all extremely coherent.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay, yeah. So yeah, the metaphor is about being at home versus being away. But then to your original point, Austin, that’s also something I felt very strongly about, and that was the lecture that I gave at NORWAC and the NCGR conference. You have to still take into account what the relationship is between the planet and its domicile lord because that can hugely change the condition of the planet zodiacally, especially if it’s in a sign that it otherwise doesn’t do well in. Because then it’s the difference of if the planet has reception, and has some relationship with its domicile lord, even though it may be in a foreign country, it may have a host that’s trying to help it out and give it a little bit of support versus, let’s say, somebody that doesn’t have any support whatsoever, and therefore, really flounders even more versus somebody who’s able to make the best out of a situation that’s maybe not as easy for them naturally.

AC: Yeah, perfect. Well, and Kelly’s married to someone who speaks the language, right? So strong aspect, conjunction, to a planet that’s much more comfortable in that sign.

KS: Yeah, that’s what I was just thinking when you guys were talking. Yeah, having someone that helps, I mean, my husband speaks the language. So when he’s around it’s very easy. Yeah, so that idea of the planet and the host—yeah, is your host well-resourced? They’re gonna offer you what they have, but they don’t have a lot to support you.

CB: Yeah, and this month Venus and Mars are exchanging signs. And that’s like a little bit lower down in my hierarchy in terms of mutual reception because they can’t see each other, but there’s still something there. Because they’re exchanging signs, that’s a lot better than if they were in the signs of their detriment without having any sort of reciprocal relationship whatsoever. And I think that was part of what you were trying to say as well, Austin, right?

AC: Yeah, yeah. And I poo-pooed that kind of mutual reception without aspect in the past, but I’ve been rethinking it. And so, now I get to take a look at it.

CB: Yeah, definitely. So that’ll be prominent, cuz that’s happening most of the month. Cuz Venus and Mars are gonna spend most of the month in those two signs, in Scorpio and Libra, respectively. What else do we have going on this month?

KS: Yeah, so we’ve got the dates. Mercury moves into Scorpio around the 3rd, Mars into Libra around the 4, and then Venus into Scorpio around the 8th of the month.

CB: Yes.

KS: Yeah, so basically, Austin, you’re gonna have lots of time—which is obviously what you’re looking forward to—with Venus in Scorpio and Mars in Libra for four weeks or so.

CB: So eventually, later in the month, in the second/third week, on the 15th of October, we have our first lunation, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Aries, right?

KS: Yeah, I think it’s around the 13th. Yeah, it’s a Full Moon at 20 Aries. And that’s gonna kind of pick up the Sun square Pluto activity around the same time. And Jupiter is involved as well. Jupiter will kind of sextile and trine the Full Moon. So that’s a bit of a busy 48-hour period.

CB: Yeah, that’s a really nice mitigation, having Jupiter right at 20° of Sagittarius by that point, exactly sextiling the Sun and exactly trining the Moon, and sort of balancing out the tension of that T-square with Pluto at 20° of Capricorn hitting the two luminaries.

KS: Yeah, there’s two different things going on, the Sun-Jupiter and the Moon-Jupiter. That’s definitely a little bit of a boost or a helper. But it does feel like maybe there is more of this intensity or a heaviness around the Full Moon itself because of that square to Pluto. It’s a Full Moon in a fire sign to start with, which always kind of kicks things up a little more from a drama activity, maybe expressive/potentially a little bit explosive, with people dealing with their emotions or getting things out, but a lot more intensity with the Pluto involvement there.

CB: Definitely.

AC: I would be a little bit less glowing in my endorsement of this Full Moon.

KS: Oh, I’m not trying to endorse this one, Austin.

AC: I do love that trine to Jupiter. I would call that a saving grace. Because if you just look at what’s angular from the Full Moon, it’s only malefics or ‘trouble’ planets.

KS: Grace.

AC: You know, what’s angular from the Full Moon is Mars-nodes-Saturn-Pluto, and so, thank God for that Jupiter.

KS: Yeah.

AC: You know, there’s a lot of rough there.

KS: There is a lot of rough there. I think there is an explosive, volatile kind of tone to that.

CB: So that’s our first lunation in the month, and that’s the Full Moon in Aries on the 13th, as Kelly said. Let’s see, moving forward into the month—one of the things that’s kind of forming all month, that I noticed—that doesn’t go exact till very late—is that Mars-Saturn square.

KS: Yes.

CB: But that seems like one of the more tense aspects this month. What do you think?

KS: Yeah, I picked that as my most difficult aspect for this month. The difficulty is it doesn’t happen in isolation. Nothing in astrology does. So Mars will square Saturn 15 Libra to 15 Capricorn around the 27th or 28th, just depending on exactly where you are. But we also have the New Moon in Scorpio at the same time. And so, the New Moon in Scorpio is ruled by Mars, which happens to be in a square to Saturn. And so, both the lunations in October, well, they’re both ruled by Mars to start with, but they both have these other kinds of tense qualities that are triggered around the aspects or happening around the lunation itself. Oh, yeah, by the way, we haven’t talked about oppositions to Uranus this month either.

CB: Right. Austin highlighted that basically anything that goes through Scorpio—which is all the inner planets this month—have to run through the opposition with Uranus during the process, and first, really early on in that.

KS: Austin.

AC: Yeah, everybody has to pay the toll.

KS: Pay the toll. I like it.

CB: The weird tax.

AC: Yeah. Nobody tells you what the toll’s gonna be.

CB: Okay, so the first one is Mercury. Which it looks like October 7, it opposes Uranus from 5 Scorpio to 5 Taurus.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Then Venus goes into Scorpio and opposes Uranus on October 13.

KS: Yeah.

CB: And then eventually the Sun goes in there and that’s that lunation, that second lunation.

KS: Yes.

CB: That New Moon in Scorpio—that’s happening on the 27th, 27th-28th—is at 4° of Scorpio, and it’s very, very closely, almost exactly opposed to Uranus at 4° of Taurus. So that New Moon is pretty much primarily characterized by that opposition with Uranus in the weirdness or instability or unexpected and erratic-ness energy that that brings.

AC: Yeah, there’ll be some surprises around then.

CB: Right. So it’s like a new surprise, though, cuz it’s a New Moon. So it’s setting a foundation or laying the seeds for something. But maybe it’s something that you didn’t expect, or something that sort of comes out of left field.

KS: Yeah, I mean, I definitely get the out-of-left-field cuz it is Uranus, and anytime we’re talking about triggers to Uranus we want the ‘expect the unexpected’ kind of motto. The only thing that I did notice is that their oppositions to Uranus are all happening 4°-5° of Scorpio to 4°-5° of Taurus. So there is a little bit of a repeated place of activity throughout the month with the Mercury opposition, the Venus opposition, and then the Sun. So whether there are developments along the same theme or along the same storyline, of course, for all of us, this 4 and 5 Taurus/Scorpio will be on a particular axis in our charts. So there’ll be a pair of houses that we’ll each be having to pay our tax on, as you said, Austin.

AC: Yeah, definitely, definitely. It’s interesting, though, right? With Uranus, sometimes it’s tax, sometimes it’s the taxes having to adapt to an unexpected event. And it can be an unexpected opportunity, an unexpected connection. But one of the things that’s consistent about Uranus is that whether it’s positive or negative, you usually have to redraw plans. You have to change your schedule. You have to make room for something that you hadn’t accounted for. Although if you’re listening to the podcast, you can now account for it by leaving a little space open to pivot or adjust.

CB: I mean, you can try. But, I mean, how many astrologers—when they actually have Uranus come up in their personal life, even seeing it come 10 years or like 20 years ahead of time—there’s still sometimes a curve ball that you can’t always anticipate. You know, you can only go so far to expect the unexpected, but that in and of itself is not always super-detailed once you actually get to the matter at hand.

AC: Yeah, well, but you don’t need to know what it is to leave space in your schedule. If you leave slack, then you’ve got room to adapt no matter what it is. And so, you can just leave space for the unknown rather than over-scheduling yourself, as I like to do—where everything has to work out because everything’s really tightly packed. But if you leave room, then you’ve got room to move when something does or does not happen.

CB: Yeah, if you have a really delicate house of cards built up that is entirely premised on the table not being shaken at all during that exact timeframe, then you’re gonna have a much harder time than if you just have a couple of cards on the table.

AC: Exactly.

KS: Totally.

CB: All right, so try to maintain some flexibility around that New Moon in Scorpio late in the month. And that’s actually funny, cuz that’s doubled. Because right around then is also when Mercury’s stationing retrograde, just a few days later, as I said, on Halloween, at 27° of Scorpio. 26°. 26°-27°.

KS: Yeah, and we get a little bit of a weird aspect forming, where Venus is actually applying to Mercury, because Mercury’s in station and Venus will also be going faster than him. So that’s sort of like the last aspect and then Mercury goes into retrograde there, just right at the end of the month.

CB: Yeah, I’m actually a fan of that, cuz that seems like a much smoother retrograde. Not just because it’s basically conjoining Venus at the same time that it’s stationing retrograde, but also, you’ll notice that there’s not really any close, hard aspects with outer planets. And I feel like the past few retrogrades that we’ve been through have been kind of rough in terms of that. Like over the summer, we had the Mercury station retrograde conjunct Mars. Or we’ve had other ones squaring Neptune where there were greater issues with miscommunication, or the one conjunct Mars where there were greater issues with arguments or disputes. But this one is sort of clear of some of that and just has that nice conjunction with Venus.

AC: Yeah, it’s less complicated, certainly, than the one over the summer. You know, I’ll take a whole sign opposition to Uranus for $10, Alex. Its ruler being Mars—and Mars caught up in everything that Mars is caught up in—doesn’t excite me, but I’ll take it over the one that we had a few months ago.

CB: Sure. Yeah, that’s a good point, that it is still taking place sort of in the vicinity of that whole Mars-Saturn square.

KS: Which we kind of didn’t speak too much.

CB: Yeah, we kind of just wanted to skip over that, but that is gonna be the more difficult aspect of the month. That’s also one of the ones we had the most trouble with, with finding electional charts this month, and pretty much had to just avoid the very end of the month because that tense Mars-Saturn aspect is pretty tricky to maneuver around.

AC: It’s grindy.

KS: It’s very grindy, isn’t it? I’m not a fan of this Mars square Saturn aspect. I think there’s gonna be that sort of heavy, sluggish, pressured, back against the wall, but 10 things due that day or push comes to shove. There is a real sense of pressure with that.

AC: Yeah. And with them where they are, with Mars in Libra, a lot of times one of the issues with Mars in a Venus-ruled sign is people just experience low energy levels. They’d rather do Venus stuff than do hard stuff. And squaring Saturn doesn’t speed Mars up when it’s already in that condition.

KS: No. That’s a beautiful point actually, Austin, yeah, that Mars just wants to do Venus stuff. And then Saturn is just sort of very slow anyway.

AC: Yeah. You know, of the two possible squares between Mars and Saturn, it’s this one with Mars superior that puts both in full aspect to each other, from a Vedic astrology perspective. Saturn gives a full aspect to its tenth, Mars gives a full aspect to its fourth. And so, from a Vedic perspective, this is the harder of the two squares, when Mars is superior, which is the case here.

CB: Sure. So let’s see if we can break down just some keywords for Mars squaring Saturn. I mean, I was thinking a lot about malefic energies recently, but one of the things, in the best-cast scenario, that Mars is really good about is being decisive. Whereas Saturn often tends to be the opposite, but it tends to indicate inaction, which in its most positive sense can be slowing down and thinking things through ahead of time in a really detailed manner before initiating action, so that you can do it really deliberately and really effectively, but sometimes more slowly and it can take a while to get going. So having a square between those two, we often end up describing it as tough or difficult or not-great energy, just because it’s contrasting so wildly in terms of being diametrically-opposed impulses. And sometimes when those impulses hit a sensitive part of your chart, it can indicate a major tension of two different parts of your life that are being pulled in opposite extremes and are coming into some sort of conflict or clash with each other.

KS: Yeah, and I think Mars is normally very decisive. Although in Libra, one thing he does really struggle with is making a clear choice. And so, I did wonder if that feeling of indecision or feeling pressured to make a choice—but feeling very unsure or even quite anxious about what to do or which is the best option—I wondered about some of those experiences being really intense at this point in time.

AC: Yeah, I think this one may be good for producing anxiety.

KS: I just love how you say that, Austin. “It is good for producing this.”

AC: Oh, I’m being positive.

CB: Anxiety and indecision. Like indecision, I think, would be a really good keyword for this. Because you have that doubling-up, Mars in Libra can sometimes be indecisive and Saturn can delay taking action. So that sort of compounds each other in a way.

AC: Yeah, I find that Mars in air signs tends to stir up anxiety and that anxiety is actually connected to indecision.

KS: Yes.

AC: Where you feel like you’re supposed to do something, but you can think of five different ways to do it and none of them are the right one. And so, you just flit from option to option without being able to commit to any and build up a good, foul wind inside yourself.

KS: It’s so true, though, Austin, yeah, because Mars can be associated with disturbances or things that become unsettling. I agree with you completely. Mars in air signs in general can be a bit of an anxiety trigger. And yeah, absolutely, psychologically, indecision leads to anxiety. Anxiety creates indecision. It’s a horrible feedback loop, those two things.

AC: Yeah, so don’t get caught in it. I don’t know.

KS: Be aware. Like have your mental health, self-care things, whatever you need.

AC: Yeah, the move there is obviously to have the wine ready next to the bubble bath, with the chocolate, and whatever music is pleasing.

KS: I love it. Bring in the Venus things? Is that where you’re going with that?

AC: Yeah, I wasn’t thinking Venus. But yeah, Moon-Venus stuff, right?

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s a configuration that is likely to generate more anxiety than normal. And so, if you have some moves, have those ready, right? If you have some equipment for when the going gets anxious—

KS: Yes, but it’s a good point. Because if you are someone who likes to have a massage, if that helps you, or you like to go out for a big hike, you can get these things set up in advance knowing that. I mean, what day is the aspect exact? The 27th-28th. I mean, we’re gonna have a good couple of days before and after the exact aspect.

AC: It’s really close to the Full Moon, or excuse me, the New Moon.

KS: Yeah. Cuz Mars is the ruler of the New Moon, I thought it’s just really dialed into that timeframe.

AC: Right. And so, one of the ways that that will work out is Mars-Saturn, frustration. Frustration is a keyword.

KS: Yeah.

AC: But Mars ruling the New Moon, which is opposite Uranus, “I’m so frustrated with this. Fuck it. I’m gonna do something else.” Or, “Just let me out of here.” And maybe that’s just like two days away from whatever normal and frustrating is, but there’s definitely buildup and a desire to release, get some freedom, get some space, all those desirable Uranian things.

KS: Yes. And actually, yeah, Austin, you just phrased that beautifully. I hadn’t quite pulled that together in my own mind. The Mars-Saturn piece is hard, so you look to the Uranus as a way of taking a break. You know, you have one heavy area of life and you’ve just gone to this other wild thing for a little while and get some space, I guess.

AC: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that Uranus is in a Venus-ruled sign. And so, our ideas of liberation or freedom from constraint and stress are going to look increasingly Venusian over the next several years, right? We’re so used to Uranus coming from Mars-ruled Aries because of the last decade, but this is a different conception of freedom and different reasons to rebel.

KS: Beautiful.

CB: Definitely.

KS: That’s actually making me feel better about this timeframe, Austin.

CB: Austin, always the optimist.

AC: Yeah, well, clearly I’ve failed in my sacred duty.

CB: Right.

KS: Love it.

CB: I also think sometimes, depending on the sect of the person’s chart, if they have a day chart or a night chart, they’re gonna tend to have a tendency to wanna overdo either Mars or overdo Saturn. And when you have a square like this—if it’s hitting a sensitive part of your chart—overdoing one of those could lead to repercussions. So it’s like Mars is gonna wanna take action, but then you might run into a wall if you take action too quickly without thinking things out. Some people, if they’re gonna struggle with Saturn, they need to be decisive and need to take action, but they’re gonna get caught up worrying or have fears surrounding what the outcome might be; and they might, if they wait too long, miss the opportunity and end up regretting it in retrospect. So I would be careful in having extreme tendencies to go in either direction with that. Instead, the key surrounding this square towards the end of the month, around the New Moon, will be trying to find balance between those two extreme tendencies because going in one direction all the way or the other could backfire in some way.

AC: Yeah, definitely. You’ll get feedback from the other planet.

CB: Right.

KS: Totally. Chris, you just pulled up the Moon-Mars conjunction.

CB: Yeah, it’s just I noticed that because the New Moon takes place like a day/day-in-a-half-or-two after the square, that the Moon actually passes over and conjoins Mars and squares Saturn right before the exact Mars-Saturn square takes place. So this happens around October 26. So whenever that happens, the Moon comes up and highlights an aspect like that. Sometimes that can be the real trigger.

KS: That’s a beautiful point. Yeah, so to be aware that some of this stuff is happening even before the Mars-Saturn is exact.

AC: Yeah. And Mars moves slow enough that that Mars-Saturn square is really something to keep an eye on for at least the last third of the month, if not the second half of the month. And we’ll feel it, too, on the Cancer Moon a week before that, right? The Cancer Moon will T-square all of that.

KS: Very good point. The weekend before. The 20th-21st.

CB: There we go. It’s around the 20th.

KS: Yeah.

AC: The old ‘meat grinder’ axis.

KS: This old chestnut. Oh, my goodness. Cuz we are kind of a little back in it. We didn’t talk about the Sun square Saturn earlier in the month, but it is just picking up some of those vibes.

AC: Like we’re halfway between the last eclipses and the next eclipses. You know, it’s the same issues, and we’re gonna do another set of eclipses in January. Late December and January. And so, we’re still working on this Cancer/Capricorn axis, and hopefully, we’ve sorted some things out. But there’s still work to do, and this is sort of a check-in with that. You know, the Sun and the planets in Libra squaring both sides of that.

KS: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It’s such a potent axis. You know, the original axis of life and then death and departure, with this being the axis of the solstice points and the solstice signs. There’s some juicy stuff there.

AC: Yeah, Kelly, you had a post the other day about the Egyptian idea of the souls coming in through Cancer and departing through Capricorn.

KS: Yeah, it was actually a partial transcript from my NORWAC keynote. I actually got one of our listeners, who is a fantastic, quick transcriber. So I asked her to type that up for me. I paid her regular fee. But yeah, so I was able to share that on the website. But yeah, the stars originally associated with Cancer have been associated with life for such a long time, going way back, more than 2,000 years, and then the stars in Capricorn, with death and with departure. Like literally souls coming in, in Cancer, and sort of departing. And that resonates even within the Thema Mundi, where we see Cancer in the 1st house, which is the part of the chart to do with life, and then Capricorn, in the west, where the Egyptians thought things died and went into the underworld. So I don’t know. It just seems to me that all this Capricorn, with the node in Cancer—it’s very poignant on so many levels because of that symbolism about the ‘life and then the departure/death axis’ thing activated. It feels like such a powerful time of transition.

AC: Absolutely.

CB: Definitely. And not to interrupt—I don’t know if that was it.

KS: No, no, no. You’ve got an election that you wanna share.

CB: Yeah, I just realized we need to introduce the electional chart for the month of October. We came up with a few charts. Like every month, for patrons on the $5 and $10 tiers, we do an Auspicious Elections Podcast, which is like a 45-minute podcast just for subscribers, where we go through four or five electional charts that are the best charts that we found each month for starting different types of ventures and undertakings using the principles of electional astrology. And we had a hard time deciding which one to highlight this month. But we decided to focus on this one that we always share—just one of those on the monthly forecast episode—then we keep the rest for subscribers. So the electional chart we’re highlighting for this month really takes advantage of the last—we’re getting into the last phases of Jupiter in Sagittarius. Because at this point, Jupiter’s moving super quickly. It’s direct and it’s moving super quickly through Sagittarius, and it’s already gonna be moving into Capricorn in December. So this is one of the last full months where if you wanna take advantage and start something with Jupiter in Sagittarius—which is such a great feature to have in any electional chart—if you’re starting any new, major undertaking that’s gonna last for a while, then you’re really gonna wanna take advantage of it this month. So the chart we decided to highlight takes place on October 22, 2019, starting roughly around, let’s say, 10:23 AM. So 10:23 in the morning. I have the chart set for Denver, Colorado. But what you wanna do is set the same date and time and then set it for your location, and then adjust the ascendant so that the ascendant is somewhere in Sagittarius. And then see if you can get the midheaven to be around 20° of Virgo, ideally. And you may or may not be able to do that, but the idea there is to get it sextiling Venus and Mercury in order to mitigate their position in this chart. That’s how you mitigate 12th house and 6th house, and to some extent, 8th house placements. Just make the midheaven sextile or trine them and then that can often really counteract, and you’ll see some of the more constructive manifestations of 12th and 8th and 6th house placements when you do that. But anyway, the main emphasis or focal point of this chart is having Sagittarius rising and Jupiter ruling the ascendant, placed in the first whole sign house. And it’s in its own domicile, which is Sagittarius. It is direct. And this is also a day chart. And one of the nice things about this month is that since Mars has moved out of Virgo, it’s no longer squaring Jupiter. So if you remember from last month, from September, we unfortunately had to avoid a lot of Jupiter elections because it was afflicted by the square from Mars most of the month. But now, we’re finally free of that, so we can use our Jupiter rising elections once again. So yeah, it’s a good chart for Jupiter-related things. Austin, what are some Jupiter-related electional things, especially that you use for magical purposes, or just keywords?

AC: Oh, for Jupiter? I mean, to a certain degree, success in any undertaking. That’s why we love Jupiter. Anything that has to do with education, teaching, expounding of viewpoint. You know, you might be writing a book and the writing part is mercurial, but the successful, how shall we say, propounding of what you’re trying to say, your viewpoint itself. And that could carry over to digital mediums.

CB: Yeah, so things like the affirmation and rectification of things are good, broad keywords for Jupiter in a day chart, as well as the stabilization of things.

AC: Oh, bringing people together, right, around a purpose or perspective. You know, there’s that cohering, connecting, ‘we’re all on the same team/page’ quality to Jupiter when it’s strong.

CB: Yeah, as well as an optimism and an inclusiveness, other keywords like that. What are some other Jupiter keywords you would use, Kelly?

KS: Yeah, I think you guys have said some good ones. Generosity. The idea of coming together, yeah, with a shared vision or a shared purpose. Jupiter is just—there’s an optimism. So that idea of seeing the positive or seeing the potential, that sort of forward-thinking, hopeful kind of outlook. But I also think Jupiter often describes that process of wanting to experience as much as you can. So there’s a desire for fullness. We don’t wanna skimp out or cheap out on things when Jupiter’s around.

AC: Well, and I would also add this is Jupiter in Sag, right? So this is our fire sign Jupiter. And so, there’s absolutely a quality of adventuring and adventurist-ness. There’s a lust for the journey with Jupiter in Sagittarius.

KS: Go and try the thing, do the thing, have the experience.

AC: Right. And one of the things that came to me when I was thinking a lot about Jupiter in Sagittarius last year was that the idea of the quest brings together the meaning-seeking of Jupiter in Sagittarius and the traveling, journeying, in search of part, as well as, often, the bringing together of people. There are very few stories of journeys or quests where a party doesn’t collect. You know, that’s always part of the story.

KS: Yeah, one person sets out and then they meet this person, and they go on together and then they meet a couple more. So it’s the gathering really, isn’t it?

AC: Yeah, it’s a gathering in motion, right?

KS: In motion with a purpose or something.

AC: Yeah, well, and you find out that you have a purpose that aligns with someone else’s because you both ended up on the same road, heading in the same direction.

KS: At the same time.

CB: Right. And Christina Labetti in the chat, in our live audience, says that she always thinks of Jupiter as connected to humor. That’s another good keyword for Jupiter, and also, Sagittarius to some extent.

AC: I think Jupiter probably rules dad jokes.

KS: Totally, totally. Ah, yeah, dad jokes.

CB: Yeah, so this would be a good election for that. It’s kind of emphasized—we tried to emphasize the Jupiter placement with the Moon being around 13° of Leo, and it’s applying to a trine, a wide trine, with Jupiter. It’s not very good for 11th house matters related to friends, cuz it’s got Mars in the 11th house in a day chart. So it could be problematic for groups, associations, or other things related to that. Not super-good for financial matters as well, cuz Saturn’s there at 14° of Capricorn, and it’s got that applying square from Mars. So not a super-good financial chart. We’ve got other charts this month, in the elections podcast, that are better for financial ones. But this is just primarily good for pure Jupiter in Sagittarius stuff.

AC: So what are we gonna do when Jupiter moves into Capricorn? I feel like this has been the best year to get into electional astrology ever. Cuz you’re like, “I don’t know. I’ll do it when the Moon’s in Sag.”

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right.

AC: “Nah, I’ll probably put Sag on the rising.” But we’re basically gonna be without a Jupiter next year.

KS: Yeah, the whole year.

CB: We’re just gonna get really acquainted with Saturn in Capricorn elections and looking for really good Saturn elections, I think, is gonna be part of it, but that’s gonna be a much different energy—with all that stuff in Capricorn for a while—than what we’ve been dealing with this year.

AC: Yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited for the South Node to eventually leave Capricorn. And I’m excited for Saturn to move into Aquarius. Because there’ll be some squaring of Uranus, but at least it won’t be conjunct Pluto. I can work around Uranus.

CB: Yeah, the nodes. I’m surprised at how soon the nodes shift. Like it’s not that far from now.

KS: It’s May.

AC: Yeah, it’s like eight months.

CB: I guess I was just thinking of it being a two-year period. I guess I’m often surprised that it’s more like a year-and-a-half.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Comes sometimes the eclipses will border around closer to two years, occasionally, but it’s the nodes that are pretty strict about being 18 months.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, but you’re right.

KS: The eclipses are longer.

AC: Yeah, well, and shorter. You get slosh around the boundaries.

KS: Yeah, no, cuz what you guys are really saying is that right now we’ve got outer planets and Saturn and nodes all on this Cancer/Capricorn axis. And as we move through the first half of 2020, that’s gonna start to disperse, so that it isn’t such a collection of all those energies in one place.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, well, and also, just this is the last time. This next month, maybe month-and-a-half, part of November is the last time you can get Jupiter in Sagittarius elections for the next 12 years.

KS: Yes.

CB: So I started thinking about it in that context. You know, it’s gonna be a while before we see this again. So definitely take advantage of it, if you can.

KS: And I just hope that our resident—I was gonna say magician, even though I’m referring to a female, but maybe that’s okay. I hope there’s a lot of Jupiter in a bottle, cuz we might need the supplies. 12 years is a long time between topping up the supplies.

AC: I currently have 12 Jupiter elections for the next two months.

KS: Oh, fantastic.

AC: I’m gonna be narrowing them down.

KS: To the best couple, I guess? Or the best few?

AC: Yeah, it’s gonna be like The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, or one of those silly game shows.

KS: Where you pick the best.

AC: There’ll be like rounds and cuts. I’m gonna see which ones I’m most in love with.

KS: Who you wanna make your bride. Which election you wanna go home with, basically.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

CB: Fantasy football with electional astrology.

KS: Oh, my God.

AC: Oh, but the game is real, Chris. The game is real.

KS: The game is real life.

CB: It reminds me of that anecdote. Holden has this anecdote in The History of Horoscopic Astrology that was this legend, I think, about Bonatti or somebody, where he created a talisman for somebody made out of wax, under a super-auspicious astrological alignment. And then he put it in a box, and he gave it to this person. And the person suddenly became rich and fortunate and everything started going well for them. But they talked to a religious person, like a priest or something, who made them feel bad and made them second guess whether they were using evil magic from the Devil or something like that. I don’t know if I’m relaying this correctly at all, so just bear with me. So the person felt bad, and they ended up smashing the talisman and getting rid of it. But then all of a sudden everything started falling apart, and they lost all their money, and their wife left or whatever. So the person comes back to Bonatti, and he says, “I destroyed that thing, and I felt bad, and everything’s going wrong. I need you to make me another one.” And then Bonatti replies, “You fool. That astrological configuration won’t recur for another 60 years. I can’t remake it for you. You’re out of luck.” I don’t know what happens after that point in the story, but it’s one of those funny legends. Like if there was a Disney movie about astrology, like that would be one of the little central premises.

AC: Yeah, and that can be motivation. Like I had a ring made when Saturn was in its exaltation degree in Libra last time because I knew that it was gonna do that just then and not for another 30 years. And Saturn, of course, is the slowest. But if you’re looking for, I don’t know, a dignified Saturn in configuration with another thing that doesn’t happen very often, the pressure is real.

KS: Yes.

AC: You know, it’s like the stories of the flower that only blooms for a night every 60 years or whatever.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So you gotta be on the hunt.

KS: Well, yeah. And I guess it’s finding a balance. I’m just thinking this through, Austin. Obviously, you wanna get the best elections for the strongest things. But then I also wonder, since it’s not happening again for another 12 years, is there a part of the thought process that’s like, “Well, we’ll take this maybe B-grade election. Because we may as well bottle that, even if it’s not what we’re gonna release first.” Thinking almost like winemakers and scotch-makers, maybe, where it’s like, “This is our best, and we’ll release that first. But we will keep a little bit.” This isn’t the best Jupiter in Sag, but it is still Jupiter in Sag, and we’re not gonna get it otherwise for 12 years.

AC: Yeah, and that’s part of the way I grade magical elections. So there’s strength. There’s the strength of the thing you want, but then there’s how much of an admixture of what you don’t want is in there. And I’ll take a weak version of exactly what I want over a really strong ‘what I want’ with weird side effects.

KS: Right.

AC: Because you’re still adding exactly what you want. You know, it’s still wine and not raccoon pee.

KS: Yes. I love these metaphors.

AC: There are some late nights, right, where you’d much rather have not-the-best wine. It’s, “Do you have another bottle or not?” And if it’s like, “Yeah, but it’s not the best, it’s the fourth bottle.”

KS: It’s the fourth bottle. Who cares?

AC: No one cares.

KS: Yeah, exactly. That’s fantastic.

AC: But yeah, that’s absolutely a consideration.

KS: Yeah, I love this.

AC: Although, of my 12 candidates, I know I can do better than fourth bottle with at least two or three of them.

KS: Right. Okay. Of course you can. I’m sure you’ve got the Venus-Jupiter thing on your sight-lines.

AC: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t know.

KS: Yeah, I don’t wanna preempt you, cuz we all like to hear when you’ll get it out.

CB: And that’s our election for when you’re coming out here, Kelly, isn’t it? The Venus-Jupiter conjunction?

KS: Oh, shizers. Yeah, I think that might be it.

CB: Yeah, our past selves already saw that. And that brings us to transition from Austin’s ‘raccoon pee’ metaphor—

AC: You’re welcome.

CB: Thank you. I appreciate that—The Electional Astrology Podcast. So that’s the one election we’re highlighting for this month. I think there’s four other electional charts this month that we’re gonna highlight in the Auspicious Elections episode, which I just released last night—as is available now to patrons on the $5 and $10 and $25 tiers—through our page on patreon.com. I’m actually gonna release last month’s Auspicious Elections episode for September, where all of those elections are already used up. But I realized that most people who aren’t patrons don’t really know what we do in that. So I’m gonna release a full episode from last month, if you wanna watch that through our page on YouTube. So you can see what the Auspicious Elections episodes are all about, and if you wanna sign up, you can through our page on Patreon. So I think that’s it for the elections for the month. Do we have any other forecast stuff that’s going on, that we completely spaced out and forgot to mention?

KS: I might just mention the visibility factor with Venus and Mars, mid-month, around the 15th. I just think it’s interesting. We’ve had Venus and Mars in their ‘hidden, close to the Sun’ stage for quite a while now. So it’s interesting. It’s always great to have them come back to visibility. But it was just striking that it’s happening within the same 24-hour period, around the 15th. Mars is gonna be the morning star and Venus will be evening star.

CB: Got it. So when they both reach about 15°, give or take, of their conjunction with the Sun, they both start to come out from underneath the beams of the Sun, and be distant enough from it that you can see them either early in the morning, just before sunrise, or in the evening, just after sunset.

AC: Yeah, and Venus will be pretty bright by then. Venus is so much brighter than Mars.

KS: Yeah.

AC: You can sometimes even see Venus a little bit when it’s within the orb of combustion. But getting clear of that 15° is a nice and important thing. Oh, I didn’t realize that it happened basically on the same day. That’s a good grab, Kelly.

KS: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I’m not quite sure how I knew to look for that, but something occurred to me to look. And yeah, that’ll be nice.

CB: So people should pay attention in the mornings, just before sunrise this month. Especially increasingly in the second half of the month, you’ll see Mars rise over the eastern horizon as a bright, sort of reddish star, just before the Sun rises at sunrise. And then in the evenings, you should pay attention, especially increasingly in the second half of the month, where, just after sunset, if you look on the western horizon, you’ll see Venus as a bright, whitish, twinkling star set shortly after the Sun does, over the horizon.

KS: Yeah, the interpretive piece that I was holding for this—the idea of Venus and Mars becoming visible—is some kind of clarity or insight. Something that has maybe been a little bit hidden or a little bit obscured is starting to become clear, or you’re seeing something that you’ve been struggling to understand.

AC: Yeah, I also find that when the planets are invisible, and then come back to visibility, it becomes easier to externalize things of that planetary sphere that you’ve been thinking about, right?

KS: Beautiful.

AC: With Venus, it’s like, “I’ve been kind of feeling this way and that way,” and you can finally get it out and make it visible to other people.

KS: Yes, rather than be kind of just churning inside.

AC: Yeah, and then, I guess, with Mars, it’s probably acting on the things you’ve been thinking about doing. Or the results of your actions over the last two months, where it’s been visible, starting to bear fruit. Seeing the results of the actions.

CB: Yeah, especially that which started as an initially just purely-internalized notion at the conjunction with the Sun, during the beginning of the synodic cycle. And then suddenly the planet emerges and sometimes the thought or the internalized action becomes externalized.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I heard from a lot of people during the tight Sun-Mars conjunction. People were like, “I’m gonna do this new exercise thing,” or “I’m gonna get on this schedule,” you know, “I’m gonna get disciplined.” And then you might see that now that it’s like a month-and-a-half later. Yeah, about a month-and-a-half later, right? Cuz there’s doing the work and then there’s getting to see the results.

KS: Yes.

AC: Which anybody who’s ever dieted or exercised, you know that there’s a delay there.

KS: Yes. Yeah, you start the protocol, but you won’t see any results right away. You have to give it time to run the process.

AC: Yeah, you walk by the mirror and you’re like, “Hey. Hey there. Hey there, stranger.”

KS: That’s fantastic. So yeah, I don’t know, did you guys have anything else? Austin, do you wanna throw anything else in for this month?

AC: I don’t know. I might. I was muzzled for most of this podcast.

KS: I know. But now you’re coming through really clearly. Cuz of course we’re out to get a Gemini rising and the Moon is done with Mars.

AC: Just to be clear to listeners, I was not muzzled physically or by Chris or Kelly.

CB: Right.

AC: It was a digital muzzle. It was an internet muzzle.

CB: And it’s funny, cuz now the Moon—Kelly, you’ve just noted—is now separating from a conjunction with Mars. And we had it applying most of the earlier part of this episode, where we were running into some of those technical frustrations.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Which was funny, cuz last month, right about the time Mars hit the midheaven, here in my location, we suddenly had all the construction noise, which I’m not happy to say has continued and gotten worse here. So all of my interviews—you’ll notice this month—have been happening at night, at like eight o’clock, like this one, or ten o’clock, just because there’s crazy noise here still, and I’m waiting for that to go away.

KS: Waiting patiently.

CB: Right. Very patiently.

KS: So Austin, do you have something else to say?

AC: I don’t know.

KS: Are you thinking now?

AC: Well, now I feel free to say, but I think the time has passed.

KS: Right. Okay.

AC: I kinda wanna redo the whole introduction, but whatever.

KS: I don’t know if it’s in the version we’re going with, or the first version, I can’t recall, but there was a moment where you started talking about the As Above, and your sound just went straight into the drunk. And I’m like, “Oh, my God. It’s like you’re literally channeling the Pisces Full Moon that you had your event on.”

AC: Yeah. Well, yeah, you didn’t hear me, cuz I talked about how it was actually on the Aries Moon, the day after.

KS: Oh, okay.

AC: Hopefully, it got recorded. I wanted the Moon configured to Venus and Mercury, which had just moved into Libra.

KS: Oh, that’s what you were trying to say. Okay.

AC: Yeah.

KS: I’m so glad that you clarified that.

AC: I wanted that boisterous, just-past Full Moon configured to a newly-empowered benefic.

KS: I think actually you did tell us that. So you waited until the Moon ingressed into Aries that afternoon. You did say such nice things about your wife then at that time, but it was kind of lost. Do you wanna repeat them?

AC: Yeah, absolutely.

KS: I’m teasing you.

AC: Well, I thanked everybody for coming out. It was a great night. People came in from all over. I’m really grateful people were willing to do that. You know, Gordon flew in from Tasmania, so probably the longest trip of all.

KS: Yeah.

AC: You know, Kait earned a new hero badge by handling all of the logistics and the arrangement and the lighting. It went off without a hitch because of Kait, and it was really great.

KS: I’m so happy. I’m so happy with such a success for you and for Gordon. And I’m so happy for what it says about astrology right now, at this point in time—like so many people coming together for just a night together in person.

AC: Yeah, well, it’s another experiment on the Uranus in Taurus hypothesis, that getting people together in person is radical and catalyzes things that the internet can’t. And apparently enough people agreed that they were willing to fly out. And I would say based on the feel of the night and the feedback that that was true. And we’ll be doing a little bit of that in November, right? The three of us.

KS: Yes.

AC: Three of cups.

CB: We are finally getting together. We were talking about having you two rent an Airbnb, which sounds like a funny sitcom in and of itself.

KS: Yeah, me up at seven in the morning, doing yoga.

CB: Right. And Austin—

KS: And Austin’s still asleep.

CB: Channeling dead spirits in the basement.

KS: It’s gonna be so fun.

AC: Yeah, I’ll still be up.

KS: Yeah, I’ll be waking up, and you’ll still be—yeah.

AC: There will have been a fine election for necromantic work the night before.

CB: People are laughing. We were quoting our last one, which was something about December, about electing the birth of the Anti-Christ or something, your last electional quote.

AC: Well, that’s the solar eclipse on Christmas.

KS: On Christmas.

AC: That’s an awesome electional chart for an Anti-Christ baby.

KS: Yeah, but I think somebody came up to me and said they’re actually having a baby then.

AC: Well, that’s awesome. Now we know who it is.

CB: All right, well, this is not a great segue, but I’d like to mention our sponsors.

AC: Kelly was born in a solar eclipse, and she’s lovely.

KS: Actually, yes. Thank you, Austin. Because, yeah, Austin has confessed that he was basically born on the ‘meat grinder’, and I realized I have not confessed to our listeners that I’m an eclipse baby. So eclipse babies, they might be a little bit vague, but not all Anti-Christ-like. That’s not me at all. But Chris, I can set you up for this because I’m sitting at a table at this retreat with someone who has a Honeycomb transits diary.

CB: Are you?

KS: Yes, I’m seeing one in the flesh.

CB: And are you as excited about them as I am?

KS: They’re amazing. I’m like, where do I get one?

CB: Yeah, and I just heard about it at NORWAC. But then Leisa and I got a couple of them, and we’re actually really impressed. And I don’t know how they actually pulled this off, but let me share this on the video version. So the name of it is the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs. And what it is, is it’s actually a printed yearly almanac that you can get, which is not just a generalized one—like a Llewellyn one, where you get it, and it’s printed up the same for everyone—but it’s actually personally customized to your birth date and birth time and location. So it’s actually based on your birth chart and then it creates a personal, 12-month almanac just for you. So it gives customized natal transit planners for professionals and student astrologers. Each almanac contains monthly and weekly calendars displaying astrological transits specific to the owner’s natal chart, alongside current mundane transits. You’ll like this part, Kelly. This has to be your favorite part, that it actually has an ephemeris for every single month.

KS: Fantastic, yes. And cuz it’s your personal transits. You know, when it says the Sun square Saturn, it’s in your personal chart.

CB: Yeah, exactly. It’s sort of like some of the computerized ones you see elsewhere. But one of the things is that it’s designed much better than any personalized almanac I’ve ever seen, and it’s also surprisingly affordable. Like I’ve seen one other personalized almanac, but it was like a hundred dollars or something. And these are just 20 or 30, which is just kind of shocking, given how highly personalized it is. So are you seeing this? This is what came, and the one that was sent to me. It has a copy of your birth chart and shows your element and modality breakdown. You get a personal ephemeris for your city, like your actual location, each month, which is just beautiful.

KS: I think we need to pause on that. Everyone’s gonna be able to get all of their highlighters out and figure out exactly what’s happening. That’s amazing.

CB: So that. It shows all the lunations, daily exact aspect transits.

KS: And so, these are the transits to your personal chart.

CB: Yeah, and one of the ones I like the most is the graphic ephemeris that it displays when it shows exact aspects that you’re getting to your natal chart and what the extent and duration is, as well as the exact hit. Cuz sometimes we focus too much on the exact hit and need to realize that there’s an orb of influence, or an orb of when the transit is activated.

KS: Okay, so the dots are like the non-exact hits, but between the first and last exact hits.

CB: Yeah, it’s like the vertical line is the exact hit, but then the straight, non-dotted line is the orb of activity in some sense.

KS: Yeah, I was very impressed when I saw it.

CB: Yeah. Anyway, so there’s like a perfect-bound version, and you can see my Sun, Moon, and rising is printed right on the cover. And there’s also a beautiful spiral-bound version, which I think I prefer, just because it lays open flat.

KS: You can open it, yeah. That’s my favorite for diaries.

CB: Full color and not black-and-white. And yeah, it’s pretty awesome. So they’re our sponsors this month. And it’s exciting, cuz I wanted to start doing sponsors. I’m thinking about flying out to do an interview possibly with Noel Tyl, if I can. And that’s one of the things that our sponsors are helping to do this month, helping us to accomplish, in addition to all of our patrons. So it’s exciting, though. Some podcasts will advertise like underwear or other stupid stuff like that, that you’re not actually endorsing. But this is actually a product which I actually enjoy and is really cool and I feel like I can confidently endorse. So it comes in increments of 6 or 12 months, and you can find out more information about it at Honeycomb.co. All right, so did you already order one, Kelly?

KS: No, but I will do it as soon as we get off the show.

CB: Okay, cool. Well, thanks to them for sponsoring us this month, and definitely check out their website.

KS: I literally just saw it today, which is why I can’t believe that they’re actually our show’s sponsor, which is fantastic.

CB: Yeah, Arienne in the chat says: “12 months for $35 for one, or 6 months for $22.” And that’s like super cheap.

KS: Super cheap.

CB: All right, anything else you want to mention? I did mean to mention I’m looking for a good astrologer, who’s also good with WordPress. So if there’s any listeners who are very good with WordPress, and also have some background in astrology, let me know. Cuz I’m looking for somebody to help with my websites and different website-related projects.

KS: Yes, feel free. If you could send your names to me, too, we’re looking for someone as well.

CB: And then, Kelly, you wanted to mention that registration is open now. NORWAC has announced that their registration is open, and ISAR will be announcing that they’re registration is open for both of those conferences, which are taking place in May and September of next year.

KS: Yeah, yeah, they are. So I think by the time we’re out, live, with this episode, both registrations will be open. NORWAC’s in May and then ISAR in September. So there’s gonna be some fun stuff next year astrologically.

AC: Yeah, well, Kelly, you and I will be at NORWAC.

KS: Yes.

AC: And we’ll definitely all be—Chris, I don’t remember what you’re doing at NORWAC. But I know we have a big thing altogether at ISAR.

KS: Can we say?

CB: Yeah, I believe we can announce.

AC: I mean, oops.

KS: Well, we are gonna be teaching together at ISAR.

CB: Yeah, well, we’re gonna do a podcast event.

KS: A podcast event.

CB: At the very least.

KS: I thought we were doing a workshop.

CB: Oh, okay, yeah. I guess that’s it. So that is the podcast event. We’re gonna teach a workshop—a pre-conference workshop—with the three of us. Very unique, first time this has ever happened, as an opening thing at the ISAR conference for a full, day-long workshop.

KS: Yes.

AC: Yeah. Six-hour podcast.

KS: But also, I wanna give a shoutout. Austin, I know that so many people are very excited about when your book comes out again. But you’re gonna be teaching on this next year, I think, at NORWAC, right? You’re doing a workshop.

AC: Yeah, yeah. Well, and thank you for reminding me, just cuz people keep asking. I’m working on the second edition. I’m working with an artist. No reason it shouldn’t be available to everyone before Christmas. I’d like to get it out the end of November. Maybe it’ll be the second week of December, but it’s getting done. There’s not that much more to do. Definitely will be available by Christmas. And yeah, my workshop at NORWAC—we’re gonna do all 36 decans. And then we’re gonna spend an hour or two—once we’re acquainted with the decans—going through all of the decans. Well, not all of them, but going through a number of decan-specific techniques. You know, if you scan traditional texts for decans, you’ll find a lot of decan-specific techniques, which range from where to get a tattoo to medical stuff. There’s actually—it’s not in Rhetorius. But there are certain planetary combinations where if you have Venus in certain decans, you are certain to be a very lascivious person.

KS: You have mentioned this before, Austin.

AC: I found it as I was packing my books, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is good,” and I just paged through it, cuz that’s how I pack books, extremely inefficiently. And there was just a whole section on, yeah, Venus in what decans and under what conditions makes for a voracious appetite for the company of others.

KS: Right. Well, all will be revealed at your NORWAC post-conference workshop. I think it’s really exciting, cuz I know people are so hungry for the material on the decans. So the fact that you’re gonna have the book reprinted and then you’re teaching a workshop on it, I think that’s really exciting.

AC: I think it’ll be fun. I hope so, at least. I think I’m gonna definitely have fun.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, people are dying for the decans book to be reprinted. And by then, Kelly, your book, hopefully, may also be out?

KS: I don’t know if we’ll have it out for NORWAC. The goal is ISAR.

CB: Okay.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Summer of 2020.

KS: Yes, I am already clearing my schedule in the first half of next year to ensure that we can meet our deadline.

AC: I wanna try to write like 40 books next year. I have like an anti-library of the books that I’ve been saying that I’ll get to for like five years. There’s just like a big empty space where my work is supposed to go. Yeah, it’s an eye of disappointment. It looks upon me with disgust.

KS: I don’t know, Austin. I’ve always thought—I don’t know. I’ve just had this feeling. I mean, we could maybe speculate as to why. But I’m like, “I always thought, yeah, in my 40’s, I’ll get to writing all the books.” So we can share that and get them all out in the next decade.

AC: Yeah, we’ll write all the books.

KS: Put our Saturns to work. And Chris, are you gonna do another one? Since we’re speaking of book writing.

CB: I’m trying to decide about writing a shortened version of the book. Cuz a lot of people want to translate it into different languages, but it’s so long.

KS: It’s a long book.

CB: It’s a long book. There’s too many footnotes. And I’m trying to decide if I want a shortened version of the book, so it can be translated. But it feels a little bit like going back to an old project rather than forward to a new one. However, I have been reading Abu Ma’shar’s Greater Introduction recently, and I understand now why he wrote the Shorter Introduction, which is like a much abbreviated version of the longer book, and I can see the appeal of doing something like that.

KS: Okay. So you’ve got a few irons in the fire.

CB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually made a discovery of Abu Ma’shar about some lost—he’s citing some lost, ancient Greek work that actually may explain the rationale for the domicile and the exaltation schemes, and actually seems to provide a tropical rationale for those rulership schemes, which is really interesting. Cuz it could mean the original rationale for the domicile assignments and the exaltation assignments is firmly based on a tropical rationale. So I’m actually starting to write a research paper on that, cuz I think it may be a super-huge discovery, and it could be the other piece that was missing, that was sort of an addition or a follow-up to the planetary joys discovery that Ben Dykes and I made several years ago, that I published a paper on in 2012. So I’m hoping to have an announcement about that soon.

KS: Ooh, that’ll be great.

CB: Yeah. Anything else? Any other miscellaneous stuff? It looks like we’re at 1-hour-and-42. So either we can wrap it up now—unless you guys have any miscellaneous astrology discussion topics.

KS: I think we got everything, but we can always keep talking.

AC: Well, I would just like to make a—here’s an idea, Chris.

CB: Yeah.

AC: For the cut-down version of the big book, what if you worked with an editor that you trusted, and let somebody else do a cut, and then see what you think?

KS: Oh, that’s a great idea.

AC: Because you wrote the book that you wanted to write. But this would necessarily be for a different audience. Just as an experiment.

CB: Sure.

AC: Just as an idea.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Listen to their remix.

CB: Right. Yeah, that’s not a bad idea.

AC: That’s a good point.

CB: I mean, there’s basically just a lot of history stuff that I can cut out of the book. Part of the book was reconstructing the historical origins of where Western astrology came from, and that took about 200 pages. Then there was a long chapter on the philosophy. And then there was also an excessively-long chapter on the origins of the house division debate and where the three different approaches to house division came from. Cuz I was trying to solve all of the mysteries of Western astrology in about 700 pages, but there’s a lot of that stuff that I can cut out, or I can abbreviate pretty easily and get the book down to, I don’t know, 2-or-300 pages.

AC: Yeah. Well, and some people just wanna know how to do it.

CB: Yeah, exactly. And there’s so much. One of the episodes Leisa and I released this month was a recording of us leading a meeting of the Denver Astrology Group. We just introduced profections very briefly and explained how it worked, and then we started asking audience members to apply that to their chart and share their examples. And when people start talking about life stories like that, it very much replicates what happens in a consultation, and the interesting and informative stories that you see when you’re reading somebody’s chart. But there are so many basic techniques like that, that we’ve recovered from Hellenistic astrology, that I’d love just to have a much more concise treatment of, so that astrologers can start putting them into practice right away and just see how effective that system is. So that’s the other appeal about writing a book, where people don’t get bogged down or scared away by the history, but instead, just get the best techniques that they can start applying to charts right away.

KS: Yeah, just like a how-to. Yeah, like this is how we do it. “This is how we do it.”

AC: There you go. There’s the theme song.

KS: Don’t get me to sing it. I’m like not musical at all..

AC: No, what has to be the theme song is you singing us into our podcast.

KS: Absolutely not. If I’m singing, you guys are dancing.

AC: Deal.

CB: Austin’s agreed to that for both of us.

KS: Oh, my gosh. That would be really cool. I think annual profections deserve just a little book that’s not huge, just so it can be disseminated.

AC: Actually I do have an astrology-related topic I would like to bring up, cuz I think it’s appropriate for the podcast.

KS: Go.

AC: A lot of people started talking about—was it the Astra Inferni or whatever? Basically, there’s a concept that’s become very popular among, I believe, Brazilian astrology, which is to watch out for the last month leading up to your birthday. And my immediate thought was like, “Oh, that’s monthly profections.”

KS: Yeah.

AC: Cuz we have our yearly profections, but then much like zodiacal releasing, you can chunk down profections several levels. And so, monthly profections is a very common technique. And so, you’re always in the 12th house during the month leading up to your birthday.

CB: The 12th house relative to the yearly profection?

AC: Yep, exactly. And so, I was like, “Oh, okay.” You know, that apparently recently-popular idea does have some anchorage in solid technique.

CB: Yeah, I always have seen there be a preview of the profection year to come, that sometimes kicks in, in that month just before your birthday. And I always figured it was because it’s activating the 12th house relative to the yearly profection in the monthly profections. And the 12th house sometimes, as a cadent house, does have this precursor-type feel.

AC: Yeah. Well, and also, you have to deal with this before you get to whatever’s next. Personally, I like profections on a monthly level, on a sign basis. I very consistently observe that my profections start when the Sun goes into Pisces, even though my birthday isn’t for a couple of weeks.

KS: Oh, interesting.

AC: Yeah.

CB: So you think the profection preview starts when the Sun ingresses back into its natal sign?

AC: Yeah, and I’ve seen that over and over and over again. It was like a hunch and a suspicion a few years ago, and at this point, that’s just my default. Obviously, the date of birth, the actual day of the solar return matters, and your solar return isn’t timed to the Sun’s ingress into your sign, but the profections stuff all seems to switch.

CB: Yeah, there’s—go ahead.

AC: Oh, anyway, so if I were gonna modify the Astra Inferno or whatever concept, I would probably say it’s when the Sun is in the sign previous to the sign that the Sun was in when you were born.

CB: That’s interesting. Yeah, in doing some different episodes this month, I did an interview with Helen Avelar and Luis Ribeiro about their work in Medieval astrology, and then I did the William Lilly episode, finally, this month, with Nina Gryphon. And it’s been interesting seeing some of the variations in profections and in the profections doctrine and how that changed during the course of the tradition, due to some of the shifts that happened with house division. And so, it’s like you’ve got it pretty straightforward. Since they were using whole sign houses in the Hellenistic tradition, you’re just counting one sign and one house, since the houses and signs coincide with each other perfectly. So it’s pretty clean. You’re just going from the rising sign, one sign per year, and it’s pretty straightforward. But then eventually at some point, in the Medieval tradition, by the time of Abu Ma’shar, you’ve got quadrant houses starting to emerge as a more separate thing that’s going on, and there’s some shift towards using quadrant houses more than whole sign houses. But Abu Ma’shar is, interestingly, still primarily treating profections as a sign-based technique because he’s inheriting it from the earlier tradition of Dorotheus and Valens, where they’re clearing counting by signs. So he’s still trying to maintain that to some extent. But then in some of the later Medieval astrologers and Renaissance astrologers, you have them profecting by house using quadrant houses. Or you have some of them—I think Nina, for example, explained that she profects at a continuous rate. So it’s moving forward 30° a year and then there’s subdivisions within that based on moving it forward just like a degree or two at a certain rate.

AC: Yeah, I believe that’s the method delineated by Lilly. He does it by degree.

CB: Okay, so that’s Lilly’s approach.

KS: That would make sense, with Nina’s background.

CB: Yeah, but it was just interesting seeing some of those different variations even in a very simple technique like profections, based on some of the transitions and changes that happened during the course of the tradition.

AC: Yeah, definitely.

CB: Yeah.

KS: Totally.

CB: All right, guys. Well, it is late at night, and we’re getting to about two hours for this episode. We had some delays. So maybe we can wind it down for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks a lot for joining me today, both of you. I’m really excited to see you both in person in a couple of months.

KS: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s always so fun. And I’m so excited for November.

AC: Yeah, it’ll be really nice. Hopefully, I will be able to come to you both, being shorn of my Faces rewriting duty.

KS: Yes.

AC: I will have all my final edits, and it’ll be off to layout. All the illustrations will be done. I’ll be able to come to you with a clean conscience and an open mind.

CB: Brilliant.

AC: That’s all I’m doing in October. I don’t have any classes people can join. I’m not doing readings. The series from Sphere + Sundry that I elected, a couple of them are coming out. It’s Deneb Al-Full Moon on Deneb Algedi and an ancestral series. That’s all I got.

CB: Brilliant. Well, I am looking forward to your book coming out, so people can stop asking me where they can find your book.

KS: Yes.

AC: It’s $15,000.

CB: It literally is. On eBay, there’s people selling it for like $1,500 for some copies.

AC: Yes, and when it comes out, it will be priced as a normal book.

KS: Yes.

CB: Brilliant.

KS: Just a couple of more months.

CB: Awesome. All right. Well, and I’m making some changes to the podcast, cuz I’m always trying to improve. There were a lot of things I did with the podcast when I started that were just placeholders until I found something better, like the theme music, or me not really knowing what to say at the end and just saying “We’ll see you next time.” So I need a catchphrase. And I used to use one in my electional column, which is kind of hacky—but I always thought it was useful—which was, “May the stars be ever in your favor.” So barring somebody submitting and coming up with a better sign-off—if you wanna send me one or email me one, then definitely let me know—I think that’s gonna be my new sign-off for The Astrology Podcast. What do you guys think?

AC: Do I have any ideas?

CB: If you come up with anything, let me know.

AC: How about, “Amor fati, motherfuckers.”

CB: We’ll have to put a poll up, and I’ll put that as one of the votes.

KS: I mean, amor fati is fine, but I think we’ll drop the ‘mf’ at the end.

AC: I was just trying to make it approachable.

CB: Right. Yeah, love your fate is very approachable. All right, well, I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast.

KS: No more suggestions.

CB: I’m sure we’ll get some suggestions. I look forward to hearing them. And maybe in the Facebook forum for the patrons, maybe we’ll do a poll or something like that.

KS: That’d be fun.

CB: Brilliant. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. That’s it. So may the stars be ever in your favor, and we’ll see you again next time.

KS: Bye.

AC: Bye. Amor fati.

[credits]

Thanks to the patrons who supported the production of this episode through our page on patreon.com, including patrons Christine Stone, Nate Craddock, the Astro Gold Astrology App, available at Astrogold.io, the Portland School of Astrology, available at PortlandAstrology.org, and finally the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanac, available at Honeycomb.co.