The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 240, titled:

February 2020 Astrology Forecast

With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees

Episode originally released on January 28, 2020

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2020/01/28/february-2020-astrology-forecast/

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

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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson

Transcription released May 14th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Wednesday, January 21. Tuesday, not Wednesday. It’s Tuesday, January 21, 2020, starting at 8:22 PM in Denver, Colorado. And I’m not sure what episode of the show this is, but we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for February of 2020. Joining me today are astrologers Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock. Hey, guys.

KELLY SURTEES: Hey.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, hey.

CB: We are back again for the first time. It’s been two months since we met up last and recorded a bunch of episodes that I’ve been slowly releasing since then. But this is the first time that I’ve talked to you guys in a while, and it feels like it’s been kind of a gap. Cuz usually we don’t go more than like a month. A month is usually like a long time between talking to each other, but now it’s been two months.

AC: Yeah, it was a decade ago, or was within the last decade.

CB: Yeah.

AC: So much has changed.

CB: We were younger then. We were much more optimistic. The world has gotten darker since then. We’ve gone through some eclipses, some Saturn-Pluto conjunctions, and things like that.

AC: Yeah, back when Jupiter was still in Sagittarius.

CB: Oh, yeah.

KS: I was thinking about that today when I was at the grocery store. Well, I was in Whole Foods, and I was remembering how many snacks I bought.

CB: We’re still working on the snacks that you left behind from your Denver trip, Kelly. I was put to shame. Your snack game was so strong that I was caught off guard, and I need to work on that before our next meeting.

KS: That’s okay. I just realized, “Oh, that’s what’s changed,” cuz today I was very muted at Whole Foods. I’m like, “That was when Venus and Jupiter were in Sag still,” so, yeah.

CB: Okay.

KS: It does feel like a whole new astrological space out there, cuz Jupiter has changed signs since we last spoke.

CB: Yeah, Jupiter changed signs. Everything’s in Capricorn now. And that is only going to get worse, or that’s gonna increase in February when Mars moves in there. But we will get there in due time.

KS: Yes.

CB: All right, so for those that are finding this show for the first time, in the first hour, we’re gonna go over the astrological forecast for February. We’re gonna do a little bit of a review of the past month or so first, at the start of the show, before we get into the forecast. And then after the first hour, once we finish with the forecast, we’re gonna do some random discussion topics, astrologically-related, for the second half of the show. So with that being said, let’s jump right into—well, first, just, what’s been going on? So we’ve alluded to it. There’s been a lot of astrology. We just finally got out of eclipse season, which seemed like it wasn’t gonna end for a long time—but it finally has—and we went through the Capricorn/Cancer eclipses. And those weren’t the final two in those signs, but we’re getting towards the beginning of the end in those signs, right?

AC: Yeah, well, the nodes—which are the eclipse indicators—move in May, and we do have one more total eclipse, which is a solar in Cancer. And then we have like an ‘eh, I guess it’s an eclipse’ in Capricorn basically the end of spring, beginning of summer, between Q2 and Q3. But we also have an ‘eh, kind of an eclipse’ in Sagittarius. So our next set will be solidly between cycles. This was the last full installment that was just on the Cancer/Capricorn axis.

CB: Yeah. And here is—for the people watching the video version—that Capricorn eclipse in late December at 4-ish degrees of Capricorn. That was the last solar eclipse in Capricorn. So at least that’s the last of that one. And then just a couple of weeks later, we had that lunar eclipse in Cancer around the 10th of January, around 19°-20° of Cancer.

KS: Yes.

CB: And that’s the one we’ll get one more of. Cuz we’ll get one more solar eclipse in Cancer in six months.

KS: We will. And as Austin was saying, the nodes will have shifted signs. So it will have a slightly different tone or tenor to it because it’ll be a solar eclipse in Cancer, but the nodes will now be in Gemini and Sag when we have that. It’s right on the solstice, I think.

AC: Yeah, it is.

KS: Yeah.

AC: It’s just hours into the next season.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Brilliant.

AC: That’ll show up for quarterly charts, for people doing mundane.

KS: Mundane.

CB: Oh, yeah, that reminds me of the last episode that I released. When you guys were here in November, I tried to talk you into us doing like a light series of horoscopes for the year ahead, for all 12 signs.

AC: But we knew better.

CB: Yeah, one or both of you wisely was like, “That’s a terrible idea, and there’s no way that we’re gonna get through this week,” just in terms of energy expenditure, if we attempt to do everything we planned to do, plus, we attempt to record 12 horoscopes, which I had thought would be just like a light affair. But I’ve learned some things. I’m a different person after.

KS: You’re wiser now?

CB: Yeah, or more aware of how unwise that was planned because I ended up recording each of them, 12 of them, between an hour, and some of them were like an-hour-and-a-half. So each rising sign got a really good treatment. So I want everybody listening to go and listen to those because otherwise my work will have been in vain. But it was actually a really good and really detailed forecast for all 12 rising signs. And you should look at it from the perspective of your ascendant or rising sign. Cuz then it’s like a transit forecast where I go through what houses each of the major outer planet transits are gonna be going through this year. But yeah, good call, not falling for that and letting me talk you into that one.

KS: Uh, yeah.

AC: You’re welcome.

KS: Yeah, anytime.

CB: I mean, there’s always next year.

KS: I know. I can see the wheels turning in your brain right now.

CB: 2021, we’ll see what happens. All right, so eclipses. Eclipses were not the only thing that happened. The other major thing that happened was we had the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn, and the world was getting really tense. It seemed like in that span between the eclipse, the solar eclipse in Capricorn, and then the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, things got kind of serious. Things got kind of real during that week-or-two-period in late December, early January.

AC: Yeah. You know, I really agonized in my write-up of 2020 over how to talk about configurations that I knew were hard. Cuz I wanted to be honest, but I didn’t wanna rub it in people’s faces. And I was like, “Uh, I can’t, in good conscience, sugarcoat, but I will try not to be cruel.”

CB: How do you deal with that, by the way? Cuz I’ve been really struggling with that. Cuz some of the responses to some of the horoscopes were—cuz some of them, it was kind of tough. Cuz we’re talking about eclipses falling in difficult houses, or the Capricorn pileup falling in difficult houses. And sometimes it brings up topics that people would rather not think about or have to deal with. But as an astrologer, you can’t really just not say that. Or I guess some astrologers do, they just omit that part. But how do you guys deal with that? How do you predict the future without bumming people out?

AC: Well, to sort of misquote Donna Haraway, you stay with the trouble. You just struggle with it. I don’t have a formula.

CB: Well, you’re a little bit less averse to bumming people out, I feel like, than most astrologers on average.

AC: Yeah, well, and that’s a responsibility. A lot of the people that read my stuff assume that I’m not going to sugarcoat things for them.

CB: Right.

AC: Which doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle and think about what to say and how to say it. But just one thing real quick. What I was leaning towards is, I was like, okay, there was some sugar I was maybe gonna sprinkle on it, that I thought was dishonest. But then I think by January 2, World War 3 was trending on Twitter.

KS: Yes.

AC: I was like, “I’m glad I didn’t sugarcoat.” People were like, “Yeah, that’s kind of what you said.” I didn’t say, “Here comes World War 3,” but, “This is gonna be gnarly, and people are gonna be upset.” And was like, okay, the year showing its cards immediately. I’m sorry, Kelly, how do you deal with what to say, what not to say, how to say it? Do you have wisdom for us?

KS: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I have wisdom, but I can try and share what I do. I do try to be honest as much as I can. You know, Saturn is associated with ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’, or Pluto. I will sometimes say to clients, “This could be a heavier time,” or “You might struggle with ‘x’, ‘y’, or ‘z’.” Because most of my work with clients is individually-oriented—so we’ve got the individual’s birth chart—I’ll try to be specific, like there looks like there’s some difficulties to do with money or to do with a friendship, or this could be a heavier time in our relationship, where you’re ‘grappling with the foundation or the heart of why you’re together’ type of thing. So I’ll try to make it more about one specific topic or area, cuz as we know, the Capricorn stuff is in one part of the chart. And so, it’s not as though the whole life is crap, but there might be a part—and I don’t know that I would say ‘crap’ to a client, but maybe I would. Actually some clients that I know really well, and we’ve got a level of honesty, I’ll be like, “Yeah, can’t lie to you.” And sometimes I’ll say, “I can’t even spin this one. This is just gonna be a heavier time to do with,” maybe it’s their health or something. And most clients’ response to that, that honesty—when you’re talking about something that looks like a bit of tough cycle—we might say, “You might have trouble finding stability or getting clear answers,” or “You might feel overworked or overburdened.” You know, there’s some great vocab you can use to be a bit more explicit than just, ‘this is hard or heavy’. But most clients really appreciate that. Because they would rather have a heads up, so that they can be prepared, if you like.

CB: Okay.

AC: Very nice.

CB: So just a careful realism, but you’re not trying to go overboard or anything like that.

KS: Yeah, and I guess that’s something that does come, too, from having done so many sessions with so many people over so many years. People live through these things.

CB: Right.

KS: It’s not gonna be the end of your life, that this Saturn-Pluto conjunction happens. It might be hard to deal with friends, or it might trigger an underlying mental health issue, depending on what it’s activating in your chart. And then brainstorming strategies about managing that is normally how I’d approach it.

CB: Yeah, and for people that are going through difficult transits, sometimes that’s reassuring when you do mention that, and you are somewhat clear about addressing it. That can sometimes help them to find a greater sense of meaning and purpose, as they’re already struggling with some of those things. So you’re not necessarily always telling them something they don’t know, per se.

AC: Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for like, yeah, this is difficult territory. You’re not just slow. It’s that you’re walking through mud, right? Like acknowledging the mud makes the person feel like maybe they’re not so bad at walking.

KS: That’s actually perfect, Austin, because that’s exactly it. Otherwise people feel like, “Maybe I’m doing career wrong,” or “I’m doing relationships wrong, cuz it’s such a struggle for me right now.” It’s like, no, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just dealing with a really meaty, intense scenario. That contextual framework is really helpful.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, well, and it’s different to do something—like you were doing, Chris—with horoscopes or writing a piece about the year. Cuz that’s one audience or listener who is many, that is a large and composite being.

CB: Yeah.

AC: I find it much easier to read for an individual person, especially once we have a sense of each other because then we can just kind of talk about it, whereas you know that there are going to be people who have very different personalities and have very different situations. Like when you’re describing what’s going on for all of the Aries risings, or when I’m writing about the year as a whole and its configurations. They’re different. They’re all different problems.

CB: Yeah, I mean, that being said, it’s really nice to be able to tie the mundane astrology into almost a quasi-birth chart, by looking at it relative to the rising sign. And I feel like I have a much better grasp of this overall year after having done that and how some of this stuff is gonna really affect some people’s lives.

AC: Yeah.

KS: It’s such a great tool, yeah.

AC: I mean, you’re literally going over the same situation from 12 different angles, and it’s such good practice. And if and when you look at clients’ charts, you’ll remember all of the work that you did for Aries rising. You’ll be like, “Oh, well, this is Aries rising, and they’ve got this there, so it’s a little bit different, but you’ll see what might be just Sun sign or rising sign, or one sign, from the perspective of ‘one sign’ stuff, turning up in a shockingly literal manner in individual charts.

CB: Yeah, I like that. That’s nice. That’s like a preparatory then. Doing general forecasts is preparatory for client consultation in some ways.

KS: I’ve always found that, even when I was writing. There was about 12 years where I wrote quite detailed annual forecasts, and I felt like I was almost doing the groundwork for all the year ahead consults that I would do. And as you said, Austin, you just nuance them to each individual chart. But you’ve got the heart of it, you’ve got the meat of it, just from doing the ‘year ahead, rising sign’ version.

AC: Yeah, you’ve got like, “Well, so this is for Cancer rising,” and then you’ve got a template. You can say, oh, well, this is inappropriate for this one because of this unusual arrangement of planets. But for a lot of them, it’s like, “Oh, well, I can use this piece because it’s relevant.” You’ve already got material to work with. It’s great practice. It’s great practice.

KS: It’s the best.

CB: Definitely.

AC: Kelly, you just—

CB: Back to—

KS: Yeah, we can talk more about this after. But what were you gonna say?

CB: Just bringing us back to the forecast, since I’m already violating my ‘let’s talk about the forecast first’. Cuz we’re going far afield into ‘conceptual astrologer, practical, how to write’ astrologer discussions. It wasn’t just World War 3 that was happening at the beginning of the month, or that was threatening to happen, with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, but also, there was an entire continent that was on fire. Kelly?

KS: Yes. Yes, my poor country.

CB: You just got back from a trip there.

KS: Yes. Yeah, I just flew out of Australia less than 24 hours ago. I do wanna say that some of the images that got circulated on social media were fake. So there were a lot of fires burning around the country, but there was one particular image that kind of showed the whole country on fire and that was a false image. But yes, literally Australia has had its worst start to the bushfire season, and the intensification of that energy, between Christmas and New Year’s, was phenomenal. And I was very concerned with some of the warnings, the weather warnings, that were coming out late December because I could see Mars sitting at the end of Scorpio, and I thought Mars moving into Sag is not gonna be helpful for bushfire season. And so, the first weekend, or the first three or four days of Mars in Sag, there were just firestorms that were incredibly destructive. Weirdly enough, what do you think of the symbolism of Sagittarius? Relatively less loss of human life in these bushfires than what Australia has had in previous bushfires, but an extremely large loss of native wildlife.

CB: Right. They’re talking about like crazy numbers, of just like millions and millions of animals.

KS: Yeah, the first count that came out was something like 480 million animals. Especially some of our really exotic ones that have specific habitats, like the koalas and the wombats and the kangaroos and things. It was a weird eclipse portal, that a country was in this weird, nodal, kind of dragon belly fire of some kind. And it’s not that it’s gone. But within about two days of Venus moving into Pisces, the temperatures cooled down, and there started to be little bits of rain showing up that have helped contain some of the out-of-control fires. So it’s been very interesting to watch that just from a very simple transit perspective. And of course the big rains are forecast for February and March, when we’ll have Mercury doing its extended cycle in Pisces.

CB: Right. Is there a national chart, like a solid national chart for Australia that you use?

KS: I usually go with the federation chart of 1901.

CB: Okay.

KS: Which the ‘swearing in’ chart, it’s January 1, 1901, at around 1:35 PM, in Sydney, Australia. It has 29 Aries rising. And in that chart, the Sun and Saturn are at 7 and 10 Capricorn, and there is a stellium of planets in Sagittarius.

CB: Wow. And the ascendant’s at 21—

AC: Oh, yeah, that one.

CB: —Aries?

KS: 29 Aries, I think.

CB: Okay. What was the data, again? I’ll put the chart up.

KS: So I’ve got here, from Solar Fire, 1st of Jan, 1901, at 1:35 PM, in Sydney.

CB: And what is this?

KS: The ‘swearing in’ chart. So it’s when Australia kind of became a separate entity, but still under the British Crown.

CB: Got it.

KS: Yeah, I know some astrologers prefer the settlement chart, from a couple hundred years before.

CB: You should preface that. Cuz the US chart, for example, is widely debated and is just all over the place. It’s not that bad, it sounds like, though.

KS: No, there was a specific swearing in of the first Australian government at this time. Whereas the only contention with Australia—or the contention with Australia, I should say, is that some people, particularly Ed Tamplin, who was a very well-known mundane astrologer out of Australia—he used to favor the settlement chart, when the white settlers first arrived in Australia, which was a couple hundred years before this. I favored this chart just because of the political connection. You know, this is basically when Australia first formed its own government.

CB: Okay. Yeah, so this would put a cardinal sign rising and a Sun-Saturn conjunction in the 10th house. And then that’s exactly where the Saturn-Pluto conjunction happened recently, up there in Capricorn, and then of course the solar eclipse in Capricorn, and the lunar eclipse in Cancer.

KS: Yeah. And the leader, the prime minister of the country, has been absolutely lambasted. He’s been trashed for showing a horrific lack of leadership through the fires. In some ways, being incredibly disrespectful, showing up in fire zones for photo ops, when people are still trying to work on recovery projects and things like that. Did you catch that?

AC: Sort of the ‘mission accomplished’ moment?

KS: Yeah, but people are like ‘nothing’s done, we’ve just managed to survive the night’ kind of thing.

AC: So in the US, Kelly, George Bush, Jr. showed up on an aircraft carrier, with a big thumbs up, it said, “Mission Accomplished,” like, I don’t know, a year or two into the Iraq War and all that, and it would go on for years and years after that. But that picture of fake accomplishment was sort of a banner for his incompetence.

KS: Yes, that’s exactly what it’s been like. He showed up in a few areas, and there was footage of ‘firies’ that were exhausted. You know, cuz most of our firefighters in Australia, too, like there is a professional service, but in the most rural areas, they’re all volunteers. And the prime minister was trying to shake somebody’s hand, and the guy was like, “I don’t wanna shake your hand.”

AC: Oh, that’s amazing.

CB: That’s an interesting example of that thing they always say, that sometimes the 10th house of the country’s chart can represent the people in charge. And it’s interesting, with some of those transits going through that sign, the leader of the country getting so much flack for the handling of the whole crisis.

KS: Yeah, yeah. So that’s been, I guess, a notable thing.

CB: Yeah. All right, so that was one of the major things. So that kind of brings us to where we’re at today, cuz we’re just starting to come out of some of that. It’s kind of tricky, though. Cuz I wanna say we’re coming out of eclipse season, we’re coming away, a little bit, from the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. But then in February, it’s like Mars goes into Capricorn and Venus goes into Aries. So there’s a little bit of an intensification, in some ways. Some of that pileup of major outer planet stuff in Capricorn only gets intensified at this point.

KS: Yeah, there is this weird thing where, aspect-wise, there seems to be fewer and less-intense aspects, you know, direct degree-based aspects. But with the ingresses of Venus, and particularly Mars, into cardinal signs, it’s almost like there’s still a pressure coming through on this very inflamed cardinal axis.

CB: Yeah, and we get the buildup to the Mars-Saturn conjunction, which is gonna culminate eventually, not in Capricorn, but once they both move into Aquarius. But it sort of starts building up at this point in the middle of February.

KS: Yeah, and there’s this weird thing where for nearly three months, we will have Mars and Saturn co-present. Because Mars and Saturn will be together in Capricorn for about six weeks, and then there’s like a week’s transition where they both move into Aquarius, and then we’ll have Mars and Saturn together in Aquarius for about six weeks. So there is that sense of we’ve done the Saturn-Pluto and now we have some Mars-Saturn to come.

CB: Right. All right, so here’s the chart for February 1, just to give us context of where we’re starting at the beginning of the month. We’ve got Mars going through the later part of Sagittarius in the first half of February, before moving into Capricorn on the 16th. It does that simultaneously as the Mercury retrograde. That was like the main thing I really focused on in my horoscopes for February, that simultaneous Mars into Capricorn on the 16th of February and Mercury stationing retrograde, which seemed pretty notable. Is that, as far as you guys were concerned, one of the most notable things that happened this month? Or what caught your eye about February?

AC: Yeah, if you’re gonna just do one paragraph on the month, it’s that it’s pretty solidly split down the middle.

KS: Yeah.

AC: On the 16th, we have Mars moving into Capricorn, where it joins the South Node and Saturn and Pluto and Jupiter. And on the very same day, we have Mercury stationing retrograde. And so, we have some important ingresses of Mercury and Venus during the first week-ish of the month, and then we have a Full Moon after that. And then we get to the middle of the month and then that’s a different kettle of fish, as some people might say.

CB: As our Australian friends might say.

KS: I love it. We’re infiltrating. Yeah, I mean, it’s gonna be quite big, isn’t it? To have all three of the superior planets, plus, the South Node, in the same sign for a chunk of time. Second half of the month.

CB: Yeah, I mean, for me, it seemed like some of the people with day charts may have been skating through some of the Capricorn stuff relatively okay. But then once Mars gets there and crashes the party in Capricorn, it’s like nobody’s quite getting through that area of their life without any disturbance whatsoever, whether it’s a day chart or a night chart.

KS: That’s a good point. And I guess the other thing—just as we’re sort of summarizing February—most of the astrological activity is happening in the last two weeks of the month. Just when you look at the layout of different aspects and things like that. There’s this weird period in the middle of February where even the Moon doesn’t make any aspects for quite a few days. That’s sort of the week following the Full Moon itself. When I say ‘aspects’, it’ll obviously be making sextiles and squares, but it isn’t conjunct any planets. Yeah, it’s just a little different.

CB: The other major thing this month—so we’re focusing on the Mars ingress into Capricorn because that just intensifies the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto transits that are already going through there. But the other thing that starts is that Mercury retrograde in Pisces conjunct Neptune, which is really similar to the Mercury retrograde we had around this time of the year, last year, that was also in Pisces and closely-conjunct Neptune. Which is kind of problematic because it takes the already preexisting propensity for Mercury retrogrades to have to do with miscommunications and things like that and kind of amps that up. Because then Mercury-Neptune conjunctions, also, typically, miscommunication or even deception can be a major theme or a major factor during those aspects. So we get a redoubling or an intensification of that as a possible theme, especially right around the middle of the month, around mid-February.

AC: Yeah, it’s a very classic Mercury retrograde. To add to the possibility of poor communication, travel-plan problems, electronic madness, etc., all the classic Mercury retrograde things, it’s Mercury in the sign of its fall, sharing the sign with Neptune, and then adding retrogradation, and then eventually, towards the end of the month, combustion. And so, it’s really as underwater as Mercury can be. But what’s interesting about it—a saving grace—is that at least Mercury is not tightly-aspecting a malefic, right?

CB: Okay.

AC: You know, one thing to remember is that Mercury delivers whatever’s in the mail, right? And it’s planets that Mercury aspects that put the packages in Mercury’s hands. And so, even though, metaphorically, our Mercury here is the worst post-person ever, they’re not carrying mail bombs, right? And that’s something, right? To be fair, if we contrast this with the two other Mercury retrogrades this year—where Mercury is not quite as bad off—Mercury is strongly-configured to Mars in both of those.

KS: Yeah.

AC: So Mercury will be carrying Mars’ mail and delivering those packages. And so, for me, looking at this, the saving grace here is like, well, at least Mercury’s not doing evil business. It’s just doing business badly. But I think it’ll be a really classic Mercury retrograde. Like no better, no worse, it’ll do a good job of confirming Mercury retrograde clichés. There’ll be a lot of head-smacking.

CB: In the comments here—cuz we’re recording this episode live, in front of a live audience of patrons who have joined us through our page on Patreon. So thanks everyone for joining us tonight. Ray Rawlings says that: “Yes, I hired a shady contractor at that time last year. I won’t be doing that again at this time.” And that’s really funny, cuz that reminds me of my Mercury retrograde story last year, which was that we needed to sign a lease to move into a new place, to try to get the place with a podcast studio. And that was during that Mercury retrograde in Pisces last year, conjunct Neptune. And we were really nervous about having an electional chart for signing the contract—and that Mercury-Neptune was gonna be prominent no matter what—so we just did our best to mitigate it, as best we could. But then we signed the contract and moved into the place, and then they forgot to tell us that the whole building was gonna be under construction over the course of the next year, and there would just be like loud banging and saws and stuff for months and months and months on end, which is still happening. Which is why, consequently, we’re recording this episode at like 8:00-9:00 at night, in order to avoid the construction noise. So that was my fun Mercury retrograde conjunct Neptune story from last year. Did you guys have one?

AC: I don’t know if it was fun. I took an unexpected trip to hang out with my ailing grandma.

KS: That’s right.

AC: Yeah, and that included my birthday. And so, I flew from up in the mountains on this side of the country to being up in the mountains on the other side of the country. None of my flights were late because I think that Mercury was pleased enough with my suffering, as it was. I think there were like four different connections to get from here to there, right, when you fly from like one semi-rural airport to another one very, very far away. And so, I was very cut off from normal communications and just in a very different world.

KS: Yeah, I’m also thinking about this Mercury retrograde. So it starts February 16. And it’s not exactly conjunct Neptune, but it’s close enough that we’ll definitely feel the Neptune. To me, this feels a lot like having to go slowly, or having to kind of feel your way forward, which is by necessity gonna have you making decisions more slowly, or having to take into account factors that are harder to clarify or identify. And I agree. I think you sort of summarized this, Austin, beautifully, where it’s gonna have those cliché delays. But sometimes if you know that’s coming up, you can just take the pressure off yourself. I always like to give about five days before or after the station retrograde date itself. And that usually covers, for Mercury, the period when Mercury is in station, kind of around about that same degree, just to either catch up on stuff from the past, or to take a bit of a mental break. So we can get more easily overwhelmed, particularly with this Mercury in Pisces, with Neptune. It is so sensitive. And so, things like baths or just timeout, music, maybe time away from technology. It’s not gonna be super productive, but if we can know that, then we can plan extra downtime where we’ve got the ability to control that.

AC: Yeah, I advise and practice a variance of that. I try to leave slack during Mercury retrograde periods. You know, there are some times where I’ll schedule myself really tightly, and I expect ‘x’ to get done so that ‘y’ can get done next. Because Mercury retrogrades very often have little delays or little reschedulings that mess up a tight sequence, I just try to not do that then. You know, when you put things in a tight little row, if you nudge one thing, then it messes up your whole idea of how things are gonna go. And so, I just try to leave a little slack, so that when the little chaos bubbles come up and burst that it doesn’t actually mess with the pattern that I had envisioned for that period of time.

CB: Right.

KS: That’s beautiful. The breathing room.

CB: Sit back and let it ride during the Mercury retrograde. Let it all play out.

AC: Just leave a little space. Because stuff comes up, even if it’s not big, even if it’s somebody else who has the delay, but you are gonna get a thing from them. To the degree that we’re intertwined, it doesn’t even necessarily have to be your transit.

KS: Yeah, someone in the Q&A section was asking about whether they’re more susceptible to Mercury retrograde because they are a Virgo Sun and rising, and they’ve got the Moon in Gemini. I don’t know what you guys think about that, but I usually say, yeah, if you’ve got a lot of Mercury-ruled significations in your chart, you might find the Mercury retrograde more of a thing. You’ll also find Mercury retrograde, potentially, more impactful if you’re in a Mercury-ruled profection year.

AC: Yeah. Double yes.

CB: Or if it’s going over an angular house, and especially an angular degree in your chart. So for this person, if they have Virgo rising, if their descendant is really close to, let’s say, 12 Pisces—which is the degree that Mercury goes retrograde—then that would heighten the potential for that to be personally tied into their life.

KS: Yeah, I know people are often wondering like, “How much is this going to affect me?” So there are some other ways to work that out.

CB: Yeah, I’ve been meaning to actually do a new Mercury retrograde episode. Cuz you and I did one, Kelly, but it was like the third or fourth episode of the podcast.

KS: It was so long ago.

CB: It was really early, and we were not taking it that seriously. I think we’d just got back from NORWAC or something like that. So I’ve been meaning to come back to do a more detailed and thorough Mercury retrograde episode at some point.

KS: Totally.

CB: But maybe after this one. I’m sure we’ll get some good stories and good anecdotes out of this one in February.

KS: Yeah, and I do wanna just amplify what Austin said earlier about, of the three Mercury retrogrades in 2020—and at least in 2019—this has a relatively benign quality compared to the other two. So even though it’s gonna be a bit confusing, it doesn’t have the more clanging or difficult interchanges that the subsequent two Mercury retrogrades are likely to flare up.

AC: Yeah, the other ones have teeth.

KS: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.

AC: Yeah, on the sliding scale of 2020—

KS: This is the best Mercury retrograde.

CB: We need like a diagram or a ranking.

KS: Yeah, yeah. But I think that’s a big feature. I mean, I think you’ve really honed in, Chris, when you started talking about the Mars into Cap and the Mercury retro. They are two of the standout features for February.

CB: It’s like those are two main things. So the Mercury retrograde, it starts around February 16, when Mercury stations retrograde around 12 Pisces. The halfway point, when the Sun and Mercury form a conjunction, exactly halfway through the Mercury retrograde cycle, happens around February 25-February 26. And by that point, usually, whatever the issue was—if you’re having some Mercury retrograde snafus or difficulties or delays or miscommunications—usually there’s a turning point around this time, around February 25th-26th, during the conjunction with the Sun, where those issues start to be resolved. Or at least there’s some sort of end in sight that starts to become apparent. And then eventually Mercury—it actually retrogrades back into Aquarius in early March, around March 3rd or 4th, before eventually stationing direct at 28 Aquarius on March 9 and March 10.

KS: Yeah, and Mercury moves into Pisces on February 3. So pretty early in the month.

CB: Okay. So it begins, basically, the buildup to that. It’s already in its shadow by the beginning of the month. When does it actually hit its shadow?

KS: Oh, good question.

CB: 28 Aquarius. That means it looks like the 1st or the 2nd.

KS: Yeah, I would say by the 2nd.

CB: Okay. So whatever the issue is—because Mercury, by February 2, will reach 28° of Aquarius, which is the degree it’ll later return to—there may be something that’s initiated in early February, in the first half of February, that you think is like a one-time event, or that should be a one-time deal, but for some reason, later in February, in the second half of February or early March, you have to return back to it. And there might be some sort of either revisiting or some sort of do-over where you have to go back to that thing that you initiated previously, in the first half of the month.

KS: And the one other thing that maybe we should pop on the screen—if you guys are interested—is just to have a quick look at the Leo Full Moon.

CB: Yeah, so that is the first—

AC: No love for Venus moving into Aries, which is what happens between Mercury and the Full Moon?

KS: Yeah, if we’re going chronologically. Give us your love for that, Austin.

AC: There’s a big difference in tone between Venus in Pisces. Venus moved into Pisces on January 13, and will be there until early February.

KS: 7th.

AC: Yeah. And so, Venus in Pisces, it’s the exaltation of Venus. Venus is trying to make peace, trying to bring harmony while it’s in Pisces. It was square Mars for a lot of that time.

KS: Yes.

CB: Road bump.

AC: Right. But it’s still Venus trying to do that, right?

KS: Yes.

AC: Whereas Venus in Aries isn’t trying to make peace.

KS: No.

AC: Venus in Aries will enjoy conflict. Venus in Aries can turn a little friction into fun, but will also not go out of its way to make peace, nor will the natives, right? It’s enjoy the conflict or just have it be conflict.

CB: Right.

AC: Venus—go ahead.

CB: If Venus in Pisces says, “Make love, not war,” Venus in Aries says, “Why not both?”

AC: Yeah, I mean, it’s Venus in Mars’ sign, right? And so, Venus will find the fun to be had with Mars-y things, which can be the aesthetic of beautiful weapons, right? It can be the majesty of an explosion. It can be the good part of friction between people, right? It’s boring if we all just agree on everything all the time. But those same sparks can easily turn into actual conflict. And so, in terms of Venus’ fundamental signification, peace-making, not so strong there. And so, we’ve got that for, I believe, the rest of February. Yeah, we’ve got that for the rest of February. And Venus has to make some rough squares to the Cap party, to the dark fortress. Everyone hiding in the dark fortress of Capricorn, which even if it’s useful, is not the most fun set of planets to feel or to relate to on an emotional level.

CB: So it looks like Venus squares the nodal axis around the 13th-14th of February, where it’s squaring the nodes, which are around 7-8 Capricorn and Cancer. And Venus passes over that degree pretty quickly. Later, it squares Jupiter around February 23, from 18 Aries to 18 Capricorn. And then it starts getting into a lovely square with Pluto around February 28, from 24 Aries to 24 Capricorn, following into the early part of the next month with the square with Saturn, from 28 Aries to 28 Capricorn on March 3.

AC: Yeah. And I would say that very last part of the month and then the beginning of next month is the rough, rough part.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Venus squaring Jupiter doesn’t bother me at all. I’m actually glad Jupiter is there to kind of pad that square because it means that for the first while, Venus is applying on its way to square Jupiter. Which is fine, they’re both benefics. They’re both friends. Even though they’re not in great places, they’re good-natured. Whereas once Venus gets done with Jupiter, then it’s Venus on the way to hang out with Pluto. And then the least favorite couple of days are between squares from Pluto to Saturn, right? Which is, I don’t know, not rock in a hard place. Rock in a haunted place.

KS: That’s great. I’m like, “What word are you gonna use?” That’s perfect, yeah. I agree completely. I think the Venus square Jupiter is less of a problem. It’s almost like the Venus-Pluto and Venus-Saturn is Venus getting into the darkest part of the scary woods, which she’s been approaching for weeks.

AC: Yeah, well, and one of the vibes and landscapes that Saturn-Pluto has been putting out is the ‘trapped in a scary place’. Whether it’s like trapped in a world out of control, trapped in a house where there are fires coming up, trapped in a relationship—whatever the trap is, right?

KS: Yeah.

AC: Saturn-Pluto, historically, we see borders and boundaries and all that. Personally, we get that same theme, but it’s being stuck inside of, right? Stuck inside of walls that are ominous and unfeeling, right? And so, when Venus configures to things, we feel that same pattern, but relationally. That could be relationally in terms of other people. You know, you might feel like your relationship is this terrible trap for a few days, or it might be the way you relate to the world. But it’s hard for Venus to do the Saturn-Pluto because it’s so felt.

KS: Yeah, she’s feeling the restriction, the pressure, the lack of choice, the lack of joy. And you mentioned this at the start of your piece on Venus in Aries, Austin, where you were talking about the dignity change, and Venus going from Pisces to Aries is one of those extreme shifts. You know, when a planet changes signs, it doesn’t always go from high to low. Sometimes it goes from like good place to neutral or neutral to tough. But to go from a good place to a tough place, it is quite an extreme shift almost overnight. So the first week of February, we still have Venus in Pisces, and then Venus goes into the difficult part. And we’ve talked about this in episodes over the last couple of years, as we’re getting this growing emphasis on the cardinal signs. Anytime we get a planet going through the cardinal signs, they’re just picking up on that. The good thing—not that I can say really anything great about Venus in Aries because it is tough—is that it’s basically four weeks, and then we get Venus in Taurus.

AC: Yeah. You know, the Moon conjunct Venus in Aries is still the Moon conjunct Venus. Like it’s fun. You know, it’s not something you necessarily wanna save forever.

KS: You don’t wanna make a magic potion on it.

AC: Right. You don’t wanna make a magic potion. If you have like a whole year to pick elections, and you’ve gotta pick the best, single one, you’re probably not gonna go with the Venus in Aries. But like when a benefic is in a sign where it doesn’t have a lot of essential dignity, it’s not as good at providing the good. That doesn’t necessarily turn it into a monster, right? Venus doesn’t become a Saturn-Pluto conjunction just because it’s entered Aries. And so, those nuances are important. And I think Venus in Aries can be fun. But I have things that configure to that one.

KS: To that nicely, yeah. Well, and it is good. I think the fun part of Venus in Aries—dare I say this—will be in those first few days before she gets too into the heavier part of Aries. Because we’re gonna have Venus in Aries and then we have that Full Moon in Leo. So there is a little bit of a fire vibe. Like there is this sort of lively, active, social, extroverted luxury with the Moon in Leo, potentially. It’s a fire tone. It’s just a nice signature, I think, for those few days.

AC: Yeah, I think it’s the Moon’s first ingress, like the day before, day-and-a-half before the Full Moon, when it just makes a nice trine to Venus. I think the Moon hits Venus just after the ingress.

KS: Yeah, I think you’re right. And Chris is doing—yeah, there’s Venus going into Aries and then the Moon into Leo.

AC: Yeah. Yay.

KS: Yeah. And then we have the Moon off-axis to the Capricorn, the dark woods. You know, the Moon in Leo is bringing a totally different point of view through.

CB: Yeah, I like that.

AC: It’s kind of a nice break.

KS: Yeah, and that’s why I’m really excited about the Moon in Leo, the Full Moon in Leo this month because it is just a change and a bit of a more upbeat or forward-looking vibe. And I think because it’s our first Full Moon since the eclipse season, it’s just got a more kind of neutral—I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s gonna have a little bit of an uplift in it actually, that fire vibe.

AC: Yeah.

CB: It’s not as weighty as the eclipses we were just dealing with.

AC: Yeah, it’s our first Full Moon to not be eclipsed of the year, right? Cuz we’ve only had one Full Moon this year, and it was an eclipse.

CB: In a decade.

AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, again, like on the sliding scale of 2020, it’s pretty great.

KS: Yes. Yeah, and it’s Leo.

AC: Great on that bell curve.

KS: That bell curve. And it’s like over the weekend. You know, that weekend of February 8th and 9th, I think. You know, go out, do something fun. Do something a little bit more enjoyable, or even a little bit more expensive relative to what you might normally do. Just play and have fun.

CB: Yeah, and it’s also nice. Cuz the thing I like about Venus changing signs at this point as well, is it just gets out of that square with Mars. And while there will be a little bit of a return to that, once we start getting the sign-based square, once Mars goes into Capricorn like a couple of weeks into the month, there’s this nice little reprieve where Venus is moving through Aries and it’s no longer got that really close degree-based square, for about a week, with Mars. But instead, it’s just sort of hanging out on its own there, and it’s not hitting any hard aspects with other planets for quite a while. So that week seems kind of nice here, the second week of February.

KS: Yeah.

CB: And definitely has a lighter vibe to it, compared to some of the months that we’re coming out of, as well as some of the months that we’re probably going into, especially once Mars goes into Capricorn.

AC: So you know what’s really frustrating—go ahead.

KS: I was just gonna say, the one aspect—you, go, Austin.

AC: No, you go.

KS: No, okay. So the one aspect that I am watching, with Mars in Capricorn this month, is the South Node conjunction around the 25th of February.

CB: Okay.

KS: That’s sort of my pick. I think this could be a bit of a gnarly couple of days—a little bit of almost like the slicing and dicing of separation or ending or letting go, with Mars there on the South Node. Weirdly, with maybe a little bit of some low energy, just cuz of the South Node is kind of zapping.

AC: It’s definitely—go ahead.

CB: That’s the same time as the Sun-Mercury conjunction halfway through the retrograde cycle. So maybe that’s connected in some way, or will be for some people. Whatever the resolution of the Mercury retrograde is requires that ending or releasing or severing symbolized by the Mars-South Node conjunction.

AC: I think that’s a really nice connection. Not only do they happen at the same time, but they’re almost perfectly sextile.

KS: Yeah, by degree.

AC: Yeah, I mean, Mars and the South Node both like to negate. They do it in different ways, but they can definitely agree on purging. Whether it’s the body, the friends list, the relationship, the job—there’s a profound agreement between the two about negation. And purgation is really the right concept. I remember I was thinking about this years and years ago, cuz there was like a Mar-South Node thing—which is once every two years—coming up. And then in the news, there was an article about somebody who was leading a sweat lodge retreat, and they had left the heat on too much and several people died. And I was like, “That is too much purgation.” That was more extreme than the metaphor that I had considered, but that’s the good worst-case scenario. You know, if you feel the urge to purge, by all means. But make sure you’re not metaphorically or literally hanging out in the sweat lodge until you have a heart attack.

KS: Go too far.

AC: There is such a thing as too little of a bad thing. I don’t know. Whatever. There’s such a thing as too much purging, even if cleaning up is a good idea.

KS: Yes, yes. As you were telling the sweat lodge story, when you said ‘purging’, I was like it reminded me—and I don’t know if I can talk about this. I don’t wanna gross anyone out. But I don’t know if any of our listeners—

AC: Oh, bring it on.

KS: Yeah, I’m like, “You guys might like this. This is not a typical Kelly story.” Has anyone ever done colonoscopy prep? Like had a colonoscopy?

CB: Uh, no, not yet. Some day. I’m looking forward to it.

KS: You guys are probably far too young to do it. We have bowel cancer in our family, so we’ve had to start younger than most people normally would. And colonoscopy prep is basically having a laxative for 24 hours to completely empty out your system. And that, to me, it’s right on the edge of an extreme purge, but you don’t wanna take it too far, obviously.

AC: Right.

KS: That’s a Mars-South Node thing, I think.

AC: And as I’ve been saying for many years—and I see the people on Twitter are coming to agree with me—the tail of the dragon is the part that would be most involved in the colonoscopy prep for the dragon. One of the range of primary significations for the South Node—when we’re talking about bodies—involves that and the things that happen with that end.

KS: Yes. Yeah, sorry to gross—I can see some of our listeners are actually in the right age bracket. We’ve got someone who’s a nurse and somebody who has done colonoscopy prep. So it’s the emptying out, basically.

AC: You know, everybody poops, Kelly.

KS: Everybody does poop. And when you do colonoscopy prep, you have to do all the poops.

CB: Did we find our title for February?

KS: All the poops.

AC: Everybody poops, yeah. It’s a classic children’s book for a reason.

KS: It is. It is. I mean, it’d be a great toilet trainer. Anyway, so that’s the Mars on the South Node. I mean, cuz I feel like we’re gonna see some sort of reactivation of the Marie Kondo thing. And that was quite destructive 12 months ago, when her Netflix documentary came out, shortly after the South Node went into Capricorn.

AC: I feel like—

KS: Yeah?

AC: Oh, I was just gonna say, I don’t feel like that ever let up.

KS: It hasn’t.

AC: I feel like it’s just been like—

CB: What didn’t? What are you guys talking about?

AC: The Marie Kondo-ing of different life structures since South Node-Saturn-Pluto formed up. It feels like some sort of dungeon adventure where you clear one level and then there’s like a deeper level, and then there’s a deeper level. Like I was just lamenting how much left there is to do the other day. And I looked back and I was like, “Didn’t this start like a year ago?” And I thought about all of the clearing out of the inbox and this structure, and we moved, you know, like all of the stuff that we’ve done. And I was like, “Oh, and there’s still this much more to go.” I was like, “This is literally gonna last until the goddamn South Node leaves Capricorn, isn’t it?”

KS: That’s what I think it is. I think the South Node in Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, is this quality of time and matter and material world. At a more inspirational level, with the Mars-South Node, it’s clearing the clutter from the schedule. It’s clearing the clutter in terms of how you’re using your time and developing different skills with time management. But yeah, this is like we’re just not quite done with those South Node activations in Capricorn.

AC: Yeah. Well, and that’s a good point. I feel like we need to say—I’m gonna say some nice things about Mars in Capricorn.

KS: Oh, yeah.

CB: Okay.

AC: So Mars is a malefic. And so, that means that just like a sharp blade or a hot flame, it is not hard to injure yourself with it. Nonetheless, we need sharp blades and hot flames for a variety of tasks that are necessary to life. And if you’re going to Mars, then having a really strong Mars—Mars in Capricorn, it’s exalted there—ambient in the sky can be very helpful. Again, the same sharp blade with which you chop the carrots for soup may be turned against some people, depending on their charts and lives. But if you find yourself doing the chopping and making the soup, it’s nice to have blades that sharp and a stove that is ready to cook.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Sorry, one more point.

KS: No, no. Go, go.

AC: There’s a really kind of annoying contrast with the Mercury retrograde.

KS: Yes.

AC: Cuz I feel like the desire to get some shit done is going to be stoked in a lot of people by that Mars in Capricorn, but then you go to do it and the details, ruled by Mercury, are gonna tend to just kind of run all over the place. And so, we’ve got strong desire. And it doesn’t mean the implementation is impossible, right? It just means that you’re gonna get right to it, cuz you’re really motivated. You’re like, “Oh, I’m finally gonna clear that out,” and it’s gonna take twice as long as it might at another time because Mercury is trash.

CB: Right. ‘This is gonna take longer than I thought’ would probably be a good keyword for this month.

KS: Absolutely. The Mars—sorry.

CB: Go ahead, Kelly.

KS: I was gonna say Mars conjunct South Node, it’s 6° of Capricorn on February 25. We just had someone wanting to clarify when that’s happening.

AC: They’ll be co-present within a few degrees for pretty much the whole second half of the month.

KS: Yes.

CB: And this might help us to focus on the second lunation of the month, which is this New Moon at 4° of Pisces, which is happening right in the thick of all of that. Cuz Mars is just getting up to the South Node by that point, and Mercury is firmly retrograde and getting close, but not quite there, to the conjunction with the Sun, in the halfway point in the retrograde cycle.

KS: Yes. Yeah, that little New Moon in Pisces, it’s still happening, even though there’s a lot of other stuff going on around that last week—the start of the last week of the month.

CB: Yeah, well, it kind of anchors some of that stuff.

AC: Yeah, it does.

KS: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think, too, like we’ve been talking a lot about Mercury in Pisces and Mercury retrograde, that 48-hour window with the Moon moving through Pisces—which is anchored by this New Moon in Pisces—is just gonna have a very ‘Piscean, fluid, flexible, maybe slightly dazed and delayed’ vibe.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Right.

AC: You know, this might be somewhat individual, but I like the Sun moving into Pisces, as far as navigation goes. I believe it’s the 18th that the Sun moves into Pisces. You know, if we’re gonna be doing this ‘underwater, echolocation, dream, sonar, Mercury retrograde in Pisces’ thing, it’s easier, I think, to have the light of the Sun down there, too. Whereas earlier in the month, when the Sun’s in Aquarius, the Sun’s trying to do ‘rational, cloud-writing, up above it, satellite view’ stuff, and that’s not where Mercury is at all. And so, having the Sun go into Pisces, at least we’re kind of in that. You know, it brings the Sun and Mercury into the same territory, the same geography. And so, it’s like, okay, we’re doing sonar, right? And sonar may not be the easiest thing, but if it’s sonar, but you’re trying to do radio, then it’s even worse. At least you know you’re doing sonar.

CB: That’s a good point, though, with the Mercury retrograde in Pisces and needing to switch to other senses that you might not be used to using, or might not be as refined or detailed, in order to navigate the situation, as a matter of necessity.

AC: Yeah, yeah. You know, as I’ve said, that might be more me, cuz some of my senses are in Pisces. So I’m like, “That’ll be easier.” But everybody’s got an intuition. Everybody’s got that dream echolocation.

KS: Absolutely. And I think there is definitely something—as a general thing for everyone—the Sun and Mercury being in the same signs. You know, that piece can sometimes help out with clearer messaging, in whatever form we have to get the message, than when the Sun and Mercury are split in two different signs.

AC: Well, especially if there are problems to solve, right?

KS: Yeah.

AC: I’m cool with Mercury being somewhere else when it’s doing fine. But when Mercury’s calling in ‘mayday’, it’s useful to have some assistance, right? If you wanna go back to that New Moon—I guess, right there—one thing that’s kind of fun is, one, again, it’s strangely motivated, being in a perfect sextile with Mars in a strong position. And then, two, it’s right on a nice fixed star. It’s right on Fomalhaut, which gives a little bit of extra twinkle to that lunation and to the reset that everybody gets during the dark of the Moon there.

KS: Yeah, it’s beautiful to have a New Moon on Fomalhaut. It’s just such a nice internally-aware, but clear type of star. This conversation about sonar and going deep is reminding me of a quote I read today, I just found. I’m just gonna read it out. The quote is from the Tim Ferriss blog, but he’s quoting someone else, a mathematician, Donald Knuth, I think I’m saying. I’m just gonna read out a couple of sentences, cuz I think it’s relevant for this Pisces New Moon period. So this mathematician, Donald Knuth says: “I’ve been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life it is to be on top of things, but not for me. My role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.” And I’m wondering if this analogy about the sonar is sort of like maybe disconnecting from some of that busy, Mercury, technological stuff will allow everyone to dive deep into a particular topic or area of their life and get more of a felt sense of it, which will then filter up, in the days and weeks to come, to clearer choices that are coming from a more embodied or integrated place internally.

AC: I think it’s great advice.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

AC: It makes me think of a certain depth of the ocean. It’s the aphotic zone, or ‘a-photic’ zone. Like ‘photo’ or ‘photon’. It’s the depth below which light cannot pierce, where all of the crazy animals are. Like the mind and the soul both have an aphotic zone as well.

KS: Yeah, and I think that’s what Mercury in Pisces and some of this Pisces New Moon is about. It’s about getting out of the place where the light and the thinking is happening, so that you’re drawing on—as you said, Chris, earlier—the subtle senses. The feeling, the intuiting, the sensing, which is more abstract by its nature, but can actually steer you in a more meaningful way. You’ve just gotta slow down and get quiet enough to hear what it has to say.

CB: Yeah, and there’s something, also, just tremendously optimistic about Pisces in general, even with Neptune thrown in.

KS: Really? I don’t believe it.

CB: Yeah.

AC: That is my reputation.

CB: If there was like a dictionary where you opened it up, and it had an entry for Pisces, there would be a picture of Kelly, and Kelly looking very encouraging and optimistic, and that’s what I think the highest expression of Pisces is. Especially with the Neptune stuff that’s transiting through there and some of the issues we get into with miscommunication or things like that, that can be the challenging side. But the positive side is just pushing through and having an overriding sense of optimism that can carry you through any situation. And that New Moon has that feel to me, especially with the fact that once the New Moon is complete, the next aspect that both planets make is that sextile with Mars, immediately in Capricorn. So maybe the combination of that overriding sense of optimism with the sense of rolling up your sleeves to do some hard work and put in some long hours, carrying you through and helping you to resolve whatever the Mercury retrograde issue is this month.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah.

KS: I did wanna say that normally I really love the Mercury in Capricorn cycle—and I don’t know, Austin, you spoke to this earlier. And I do still think it’s gonna be an incredibly productive time, it’s just gonna require a lot of effort for us as a general theme, individually. And that was a beautiful piece there, Chris, where you linked the Mars in Capricorn to the New Moon, of like balancing the ethereal with the material, or the tangible with the intangible.

CB: Yeah, I always like looking at the next aspect that the Moon makes as soon as it completes the lunation as sometimes really coloring. Cuz like the first experience you get in that new lunar month is whatever that planet is that the Moon applies to. And here, it’s that sextile with Mars.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right, so this is taking us, of course, to the end of the month. We’ve covered both lunations. By the time February ends, we’re still in the tail-end of the Mercury retrograde period. So that’s still going on.

AC: Yeah, this is a long one. This one is longer in days than most Mercury retrogrades.

CB: Okay. Is that literally true?

AC: Yeah, yeah. They’re not all exactly equal in length.

CB: Okay.

AC: So this one starts on the 16th and doesn’t get done until the 9th.

CB: Interesting. Okay.

KS: Oh, yeah, that is long. It’s almost like three weeks.

AC: No, it’s well over three weeks.

CB: Yeah, cuz three weeks is a normal average. But if it’s going longer than that, then that is a little long.

AC: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they can be a little under three weeks to several days longer than three weeks, like this one.

CB: Okay. So by the end of February, we’re still in that, but we’re in the second half of the Mercury retrograde cycle. Mars has made it up to 8°-9° of Capricorn, but hasn’t started conjoining the Capricorn planets, like Jupiter and Pluto and Saturn yet. It doesn’t do that until March. Venus is still making her way through the later part of Aries, as we talked about at the beginning.

KS: Yeah, and the Moon-Mars, the Moon-Venus aspects—sorry. Austin, you briefly mentioned this in passing. That’ll happen towards the end of the month.

AC: Oh, yeah.

CB: It’s like the 27th-ish.

KS: Yeah.

AC: That’s actually really rough.

KS: Right. The degrees, right? It’s basically Venus, Pluto, Moon, Saturn, bam.

AC: It’s like Venus and the Moon holding on to each other for comfort and dear life, between a—what is it? Between a heart in a dark place, or a haunted place.

KS: A heart in a haunted place, yeah.

AC: Yeah. But that’s just whatever. That’s fine. At least they have each other.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right, so that Moon-Venus conjunction’s on the 27th, around 22 Aries. And then we’re pretty much at the end of the month at that point. Are there any other major—a leap?

KS: It’s a leap year. So there’s February 29.

AC: It’s a leap year, which means nothing astrologically.

KS: Astrologically.

AC: It’s a correction mechanism in this calendar system. It doesn’t have a special astrological meaning. I know that sometimes people don’t know that, and now they do.

KS: Yay. Yeah.

CB: Yeah. All right, well, I believe that brings us to the end of our forecast for February then.

KS: It does.

AC: Yeah.

CB: I should mention at this point—cuz I forgot. I should introduce the election for February.

KS: Oh, yeah.

CB: So we always, each month—with the help of electional astrologer extraordinaire Leisa Schaim—pick out one electional chart. It’s basically a lucky date for starting different types of ventures and undertakings using the principles of electional astrology. And we always try to pick out one good general-purpose electional chart that has most of what you would look for, no matter what type of venture you’re trying to begin. So obviously, it’s better or worse for different types of things, depending on what you’re trying to initiate. But at least it covers most of the major bases in terms of things you would look for in any type of election. So the election this month actually takes place right at the beginning of the month. The best chart we could find was on February 1, 2020.

AC: Ha. I have some things scheduled for that. I was like, “Did they pick what I picked?”

KS: Yeah.

CB: Right.

AC: Great minds. Great minds.

KS: I love it.

CB: Yes.

KS: I love how you were waiting there, Austin, to be like, “Did they get what I chose?”

AC: But they did.

CB: Well, and that’s what’s funny. You can see sometimes when astrologers have picked elections, or when they launch certain things, or when a bunch of astrologers start launching things all at the same time.

KS: All in the same 24-hour period. They’ve both got the Moon aspect.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

CB: So this is set for February 1, around 2:50 PM, local time. So just before 3:00 PM. And here is the chart. The chart has Cancer rising. So yeah, Cancer rising. We’ve got about 6° of Cancer rising, but that’s not huge. We’re mainly just shooting for Cancer rising in this chart, and the Moon ruling the ascendant, and being located in Taurus, where it is exalted. And it’s, in our location at least, at about 10° of Taurus in the 11th house, which is one of the most positive or most favorable houses that has to do with friends and alliances and groups, as well as hopes and wishes for the future. The Moon is exalted there in a fixed sign, and it’s applying relatively closely to a trine with Jupiter, which is at 13° of Capricorn, and in this chart, in the seventh whole sign house, which is the place of partnership and relationships and marriage and other people in general. So it’s a very other people-partnership-and-friend-focused electional chart that should be relatively good, especially for both of those topics, or at least initiating something in which you might want friends or partnership to play a significant role and a positive role. Let’s see, part of the chart that’s a little tricky is Mars in a day chart in the 6th house. So it might be a little bit problematic for things involving subordinates. There’s also the potential where it might not be great for health issues—but it kind of depends on what you’re dealing with or what you’re using this electional chart for—but it’s relatively good for 11th and 7th house topics. Yeah, so that is our electional chart for the month. What were you gonna use this for, Austin? Can you say, or was it for something secretive?

KS: Something secret.

CB: Right.

AC: No, it’s literally my plugs for later in the episode. I will be announcing my 2020 class schedule and opening enrollment on February 1. I will also be opening up reading/booking for the first time in a year. You know, it’s funny, I was gonna do it a few days earlier. I was gonna do it on the Pisces Moon. And then I started looking at it, and I was like, “Why not wait three days or four days and just do the Taurus Moon?” So yeah, I had actually just made that adjustment a few days ago. I was like people, and myself, can wait for the better election. And it’s nice. You know, February 1.

CB: Yeah.

AC: I may go Taurus rising with that. We’ll see.

CB: Okay.

KS: Cuz Venus is still in Pisces, isn’t she? And then if you’re doing classes, then you get the Moon in the 3rd.

AC: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there are a couple ways to do that. I wouldn’t do Pisces rising, cuz I don’t want Mars in the 10th, but I could maybe go Taurus rising.

KS: Oh, I beg your pardon, Taurus rising, yeah.

AC: I’ll also hem and haw about planetary hours. But yeah, it’s a nice one. So one thing about the Cancer rising that Chris put up there—that’s, I think, particularly sexy—is that not only do we have an exalted Moon ruling the rising, but that exalted Moon is ruled by an exalted Venus. So we’ve got exaltations, two layers deep.

KS: Yes.

CB: Yeah, it’s a nice exaltation chart. The only reason we avoided Taurus is cuz we’re still getting away from the Venus-Mars square. Which at least is finally separating in this chart, so it’s more preferable to some of the ones in January, when Venus was still applying to that square with Mars, but it’s still a little tricky. If you were to make Venus ruling the ascendant, then Venus is square Mars within 3° in a day chart, over there in the 8th house, which is just a little spiky, prickly, I think you could say, at the very least.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, I understand the call.

CB: Yeah, so for this one, we went with Cancer rising. This is the one, best electional chart that we could find for the month, but we also found three others. And we’re getting ready to record our monthly auspicious elections episode, which we release to patrons on the $5 and $10 and other tiers, through our page on patreon.com. So you can find out more information about that by just going to patreon.com/theastrologypodcast, and then you’ll see the Auspicious Elections Podcast as a potential benefit, if you sign up to become a patron through our page there. And then since it’s been two months since we recorded the last forecast at the end of November, Leisa and I, we’re still scrambling to get our 2020 Electional Astrology Report together. We actually finally recorded that and released it, and it was actually a lot of fun. We recorded a two-hour discussion where we went through and found one lucky electional chart for each of the next 12 months, and then we presented that as like these are the best elections of the year. And yeah, we actually found some great planetary elections this year. It was like almost every single planet, we were able to find a good electional chart for at different points in the year. Like there was a Saturn election, a Saturn in Capricorn election. There was a Venus election at one point, when Venus is in Taurus. I think we have one or two Mercury elections. There’s a Sun election, when the Sun is in Leo. And since the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction is taking place later this year in January, or December, we found an electional chart that focuses on that conjunction, which is really rare and only happens every 20 years. So it’s like a rare opportunity to pick out a major outer planet alignment of the two largest planets in the solar system and sort of capture that in an electional chart, and I’m really excited about that one. I don’t think I was doing electional astrology in 2000, the last time they were conjunct in Taurus.

AC: Right.

KS: Yeah, that’s so exciting. That’s a great resource for people, Chris.

CB: Yeah, so people can find out more information about that if you go to my website, ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com/2020Elections. And that’s like a report that you can download as a video or there’s an audio version. And we also have a long, detailed write-up, and then we share all of the charts. And Paula Belluomini also made us a little calendar this year. So you can see all of the best electional dates at a glance in a little PDF that you can print out.

AC: Yeah, and that’s the way to do it, too, is to look way ahead.

CB: Right.

AC: It’s one thing if you’re like, “I don’t know, should I have the party this weekend or that weekend?” But if you’re doing something like starting a business, you’re holding off on when to file the paperwork, or buying a home or getting married or doing something momentous, that doesn’t happen every year, you don’t wanna just come into the month and be like, “I don’t know, what’s good?” right? You wanna come into the year and see where the ripest fruit lies.

CB: Yeah, and that’s why we did that, cuz people are always asking us for more long-term elections for scheduling a marriage or launching a business or some other major thing like that. Having a conference or founding a country—these things that people do from time to time. And yeah, so we do our monthly elections each month, where we just do the month ahead. But we wanted to have something a little bit more forward-looking for those that are trying to make long-term plans. So we did our first time last year, it worked out really well. And this year, I think, we’ve really got the formula down and it worked out even better. All right, so that’s the elections for the month. What else? Let’s transition to talking about some miscellaneous topics. The first one that was kind of heavy was that there was actually a major, prominent astrologer who passed away in the past month. And that was Noel Tyl, who died in December, right?

KS: Yeah, at the end of December, I think.

CB: So he died actually on his birthday, which was December 31, 2019. And he turned 83-years-old. So this was kind of a notable thing that happened in the community, cuz Noel Tyl was one of the most prolific authors of astrology books in the late 20th century. I don’t know how many he wrote, but I know he wrote like over a dozen books or something like that. Some of my early astrology books were written by him, and I was kind of going in that direction before I got into traditional astrology. And I think, Austin, you read one of his books pretty early on as well.

AC: Oh, no. I found like, I don’t know, I think it was an eight-or-nine-book series of just ‘learn astrology, here’s the basics’ that he wrote, in a used bookstore, in 1998. And that’s how I learned ‘basic’ basics like, “This is a trine. It’s 120°. It means ‘this’.” You know, “Mars rules Aries and Scorpio.” “This is a transit.” Like all of that basic, basic building-block stuff I got from a series of Noel Tyl books.

KS: Yeah, I think he ran a pretty comprehensive teaching program for quite a long time. So there are many practicing astrologers today who did their training or at least a part of their training with him.

CB: Yeah, he had some certification courses that were really popular. Sometimes modern astrology is criticized for being too ‘airy fairy’ or too nebulous and not having a very clear structure. But his work often stood out in that it was very structured, and he had a university background. And somebody’s pointing out in the comments section—Maureen is pointing out in the comments section that he was also a noted opera singer, so he actually had this interesting and colorful background. But one of the things that he really brought to the table was a focus on creating a structure and steps for delineating a chart. And he also incorporated some new and sort of innovative techniques from the cosmobiology school, which was the use of things like midpoints, as well as techniques like solar arc directions was one of his big timing techniques that he really helped to popularize in modern astrology.

KS: Yeah, that’s the one book of his that I have, the solar arc directions one.

CB: Okay.

AC: Yeah, I never really read any of the others. I just got the basic, basic stuff from him. And I think I read something else like 10 years later, for five minutes, at Project Hindsight, actually. I think it was just lying around in a room.

CB: Okay.

AC: It involved—yeah, anyway.

CB: Yeah, there was a phase in the early 2000s—like three or four years into my studies—where I was really into his stuff. And he actually had a really active astrology forum back in the day, probably one of the most active astrology forums in the early 2000s that I participated in a lot. Like I cited him as one of the people I aspired to be like at some point in my application to Kepler. And sometimes around 2003 or so, I issued a prediction on his forum. Because I saw some major transits coming up in George Bush’s chart, and I thought it looked really tense and potentially negative or dangerous, and I thought it would be like something super-negative. I was like 17 or 18. I thought it would be like an assassination attempt or something like that. And then I posted it on the forum as a prediction, and it ended up being he flew, suddenly, into Iraq or Afghanistan on Thanksgiving or something as a surprise trip on that very day, and I ended up posting about it. I don’t think I was gloating about it, but Noel Tyl specifically said like, “That’s impressive,” but at the same time chastised me for making a prediction about a potential assassination and said that’s not really a good idea, but nice work otherwise. And I think I ended up citing what I took as an endorsement at the time in my application letter for Kepler, when I tried to apply, I think, a few months later. So I ended up getting into traditional astrology and going that route, which took me away from his work to a large extent. But I otherwise probably would have stuck with that and would have been much more influenced by it, if I had stuck with that approach, which was largely influenced by him at that point. So yeah, that was a major loss. We’ve been really starting to lose a number of astrologers. I know, Kelly, you mentioned that a major Australian astrologer, Ed Tamplin, who did a lot of work with mundane astrology, passed away a few months ago as well, right?

KS: Yeah, he passed away in October, after a battle with cancer. And he was sick maybe three or four years ago, and then he kind of had a year where his health was okay and it sort of seemed like he was perhaps bouncing back, or potentially, I guess, gonna beat cancer at that point in time. And then, unfortunately, it did return in a way that was more extreme and not able to be treated. So I was just at the FAA astrology conference in Melbourne last weekend, and his partner, Sharon, was there. So it was nice to catch up with her and just sort of check in and see how she’s doing. But he was an amazing—I mean, he was one of the people that I really looked up to when I first started in astrology in Australia. He had a weekly radio show on one of the main, regular radio stations in Australia for many, many years, through the ‘90s and even through the 2000s. Like I think it was a Saturday night show and he did astrology on mainstream radio for a couple of hours, which was fantastic. And we were all sort of lamenting the fact that we’d really love Ed to be around with all the crap that was going on, particularly with Australia, both politically and with the fires. And then of course Ed was really good at doing mundane astrology everywhere. So for China and America and Britain and the royal family and politics. You know, his voice is desperately missed at this point in time.

CB: Yeah, he was a good mundane astrologer. And I remember following some of his different predictions—about different elections and stuff—closely. And he actually wrote a really lovely review of my book just a few years ago, right after it came out.

KS: Yeah. Oh, that’s beautiful.

CB: A nice guy.

KS: He was a really warm person, as well as being like a really solid astrologer.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, so again, this is gonna become more of a recurring segment, I fear, of just losing major astrologers. And yeah, a few months ago, I was going to and almost did an interview with Noel Tyl, but that didn’t end up coming together. So I didn’t realize things were going south as fast as they were. So I’m sad not to have gotten that, but I think there’s a good interview with him that Kathy Rose posted on YouTube recently. So people can do a search for that and they’ll probably find it.

KS: Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that, Chris, cuz that came up for me a little bit when I was at the conference. I was talking to Dorian Greenbaum. You guys know Dorian, right?

CB: Yeah.

AC: Mm-hmm.

KS: Yeah, I was just having a chat with her. Dorian and I have had a beautiful connection at different conferences. So I just sort of cheekily asked her, “Is there enough time for you to publish all the things you’re working on (cuz she always seems to have so many deep, intense projects on the go) in the rest of your lifetime?” Because I do get a little concerned about the experience and the research that some of these older astrologers have done. I don’t want that work to die with them. So the work you do, Chris, with interviewing people, I mean, if they can get their stuff published. And I know Tony at Astrology University is always very keen to try and capture some of their work in webinar recordings, just so that the brain trust of what other people have done before us is kept or made accessible in some way going forward.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s a real stark reminder of just like what you lose when a major member of the community dies and all of the collective wisdom that they have from years of experience of doing astrology and working with clients and making predictions and then seeing how they work out and learning from that. And some of them, fortunately, write and teach and have students and proteges and people that go on to carry on their work. But even for the most prolific of them—like Noel Tyl, probably—a small portion of their actual knowledge that they actually share or get out on paper in a lecture or what have, a lot of that just sort of disappears when you lose them, otherwise.

AC: Yeah, I would also add that knowledge can be written down to some degree, but skill really needs to be passed down. You really need that person there. Cuz there are so many little nuances that you pick up in terms of how a person approaches each individual situation. And again, some of that gets distilled into knowledge, which is easier to pass down. It’s more coalesced and concrete. But there’s also skill, and it’s very difficult. You know, you have to reconstitute knowledge into skill. Whereas when a person is present, they can pass on skills in a way that’s just not possible when they’re not here anymore.

CB: Right.

AC: You know, Noel has a legion of students, and so, his skills did not go quietly into the night.

CB: Yeah, definitely. All right, let’s see, what other major discussion topics or news things have happened over the past month, since we last spoke?

KS: So I forgot a couple when we were talking before the show. Did you guys see my note on this?

CB: No.

AC: No.

KS: So I wrote an article for WellBeing Astrology in 2017 looking at Saturn going into Capricorn, and I had just flagged January 2020, with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, having to do with changes with dynasties, in addition to some of the political stuff that we were looking to see.

CB: Right.

KS: And then I just remembered halfway through the show today, I’m like, “There’s something really big that happened in January to do with the dynasty.” Of course, the royal family. And there was also a bit of a thing in the Murdoch family, which is the family that runs Fox. I don’t know if either of you have any—do you want me to say a bit more about either of those topics? Or do you guys have thoughts?

AC: This is Megxit.

KS: Megxit.

AC: Megxit.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Murdoch—isn’t he part of the royal family of Australia?

CB: No.

KS: I don’t know if people wanna claim him.

AC: Joke.

KS: Yeah, I know. Murdoch is Australian.

CB: Yeah, let’s start with the Prince Harry one. Cuz that one’s interesting, cuz we actually have birth data for both Prince Harry, as well as Meghan Markle, right?

KS: Yes, we do.

CB: Okay.

KS: And funnily enough, we just mentioned Meghan Markle’s chart in our year ahead episode, one of our listeners reminded me. Or maybe our Q&A episode. Which chart are you gonna do? Harry. So Harry—I mean, there’s so many things for Harry, just to give you a quick setup. He’s a day chart. So Mars is his out-of-sect-malefic, and it’s placed in the twelfth whole sign chart.

CB: Right. Although, like first things first, he has Capricorn rising, and Jupiter in Capricorn.

KS: Okay, right, right, right. Yes.

CB: Okay. Let’s just start with the most—

KS: Start with the very basics.

CB: There’s so much stuff going on in Capricorn right now. We just had that eclipse there, the solar eclipse at the end of December. And he has Capricorn rising. So that is like, number one, pretty important.

KS: Totally important. And that eclipse that we just had in December—which was very early Cap—was right on his Jupiter, which is his time-lord right now because he’s 35. And he’s in a 12th house year by profection.

CB: 12th house profection year, nice. Those are fun.

KS: Well, they’re fun anyway, but especially when you throw in that he has Uranus, Mars, and Neptune in his 12th.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Okay, and the solar eclipse was in his 1st house in late December. But then there was the lunar eclipse in his—

KS: In the 7th.

CB: —7th house right after that. So a major new beginning and defining in terms of his sense of self, with Capricorn there in the 1st, but then, also, some sort of culmination events with respect to his relationship, or in this instance, his marriage, with the lunar eclipse taking place in his 7th.

KS: Yes. Yeah, and on the eclipse piece, I mean, just slow me down if I go too fast, guys, cuz I’ve obviously looked at this a lot. This is like my jam with the royals. Meghan is a Cancer rising chart, about 24 Cancer rising.

CB: Really? Okay.

AC: Oh.

CB: Wow.

KS: So her descendant is 24 Capricorn, so she was also very eclipsed during this time. So they have, basically, reversed signs on their ascendant/descendant axis.

CB: Yeah, let me put her chart up really quickly. So she was born August 4, 1981, 4:46 AM.

KS: You’ve got the data there, Chris? Okay, cool.

CB: Yeah, I’m pulling it up from Astro-Databank. Which it’s really helpful that astro.com puts all of this out there for free. A great public service. California, okay. So that gives us her chart, which is, as you said, 24 Cancer rising. Moon is the ruler of the ascendant at 4 Libra, conjunct Saturn at 5 Libra, in the 4th house—and Jupiter.

KS: Yeah, so you talk about a cardinal chart, she’s incredibly cardinal.

CB: Yeah. That’s great that their ascendant/descendant axis is flipped, though. That’s really funny. And then it brings in time periods like this—with the eclipses, when they’re falling in that axis—into pretty stark alignment with each other.

KS: Absolutely. Absolutely. And of course her ascendant—or her descendant at 24 Cap—is very close to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction and will, in fact, see two exact Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions at 24 Capricorn throughout 2020.

CB: Okay.

AC: Wow.

KS: So it’s all sort of 7th house activation for her.

CB: And what’s her profection this year?

KS: So she’s a little older. She was born in ‘81. I think she’s 38. So I think she’s in a 3rd house year.

CB: Okay. Cuz just going back to his, that’s super interesting. And this brings us back to this conversation we had in part two of the ‘houses’ episode. So 12th house profection year, he has Mars there, in a day chart.

KS: Yes.

CB: This really brings in the issues that I often see with the 12th house. And I just wanna defend—like this is a hill that I will die on, which is the 12th house having to do with enemies or sometimes detractors or people that are working at cross-purposes to you, when you have especially difficult placements in the 12th house, and that sometimes becoming a much more significant part of your life than it might be for somebody else, especially in years in which that’s activated. And so, literally, the primary reason that they’re making this change is due to being hounded by and receiving negative press in the tabloids and the media, to the extent that I guess that’s the primary motivation for them. What has he done, officially? They’re like relinquishing their titles, and they’re gonna start splitting their time between half in the UK and half living abroad.

KS: I think, technically, they keep the titles, but they won’t be using them. Like the ‘HRH’, they’re not gonna be using, but they’ll still be the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. And yeah, the enemy here, I mean, Harry has spoken a lot about the paparazzi. It’s very hard to explain the paparazzi in Britain. They’re not like paparazzi anywhere else in the world. They’re incredibly aggressive. I mean, it is Harry’s belief that the paparazzi killed his mother.

AC: Right.

CB: Right. Cuz the paparazzi were literally chasing her.

KS: Chasing his mother’s car through the tunnel when it had crashed.

CB: Right.

KS: So he’s very sensitive to the concept of the enemy, just based on his natal chart regardless. He’s got lord 12 in the 1st, and his out-of-sect-malefic is in the 12th. So he is very much like, “I will do whatever I have to to protect my family from this enemy that I feel is attacking me.”

CB: Right. Cuz after an initial honeymoon period with the press and the paparazzi, they turned pretty drastically against Meghan over the past year or two and have been pretty relentless in attacking and criticizing her for a range of different things.

KS: Yeah, there has been a real turn. The weird thing is that Harry has always probably preferred a lower profile life and this is just sort of the catalyst of that desire at this point in his life, with the change in circumstances, now being married with a child. But I think they will, perhaps, be living most of their time outside the UK. But all of this came up right before the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, like from a timing perspective. And Meghan and Harry announced on Instagram that all this was going on behind the scenes, which was to a great shock and surprise for the Queen and for Buckingham Palace. Don’t forget that in all of this, the Queen’s ascendant is 21 Capricorn.

AC: Ooh, that’s beautiful.

KS: Yeah. She is a 0° Taurus Sun, and her Moon is around 11 Leo. This is a Meghan and Harry story for sure, but it is a monarchy story, and she is at the top of that tree. Whether we should have a monarchy or not today, there’s obviously lots of debate around that. So it’s interesting. The Queen and Meghan’s ascendant/descendant axis are opposite within 3°.

CB: Right.

AC: Wow.

CB: So the Saturn-Pluto conjunction was at 22 Capricorn, right?

KS: Yeah, it was, at 22 Cap. So basically, dead on the Queen’s ascendant.

CB: Right. On the Queen’s ascendant and on Meghan’s descendant.

KS: Yes.

CB: And so, the reports—and I don’t know, this was speculation at the time—but they were saying that the Queen my take this much more seriously because she takes her role as the royals providing this continuation and institutional thing that is bigger than any one person—she takes that concept very seriously. And so, in some ways, she might have not been happy about this because this is like a breaking down of that to some extent.

KS: Yeah. Harry’s not in the direct line of succession because his brother William has three kids. So Harry comes after William’s kids. Harry’s like five or six in the line of succession. So it’s like the abdication of 1936, when Edward stepped down, but the Queen would have still been probably very disappointed. She wanted both those boys there, I’m sure. I mean, the Queen has actually said in her statement, “While I would have preferred that Harry and Meghan remained full-time, working members, I understand, and I give them my blessing to decamp to Vancouver Island.”

CB: Sure.

KS: So there’s a lot of astrology to be said there, but I know we had a couple of questions. Austin, did you have any thoughts on that?

AC: No, it’s really interesting from an astrology perspective. You know, I’m not really into the royals. I mean, I guess it’s kind of fun for countries to have mascots, little human mascots.

KS: That’s a great way of describing it.

AC: The charts are stunning. I was just sort of wrapping what I know about that family around those quick flashes of charts, and it reminds me of something I think we’ve all found to be true, but I think I first encountered it as a statement through Robert Schmidt back at Project Hindsight. He pointed out that in the charts of extremely prominent people, you don’t see their charts matching them less than people who are less prominent or successful, but the bigger the life, the more perfectly the charts match. You know, it’s so easy, right? You know, I just noticed with Elizabeth, the Queen, she has the IC on Algol.

KS: Oh, yes.

AC: But the IC is in the 5th of children, right? And so, it was her daughter-in-law who was literally decapitated, who had Venus right there. Anyway, there are a couple of other things. I guess I can not forgive, but I understand wanting to look at royal charts because they fit so well.

KS: You’re right, Austin. They’re incredibly symbolic in a way that’s almost just so simple with the astrological stuff. You don’t have to get complicated, no.

AC: You don’t have to be like, “Well, it’s as if.” It’s like, no, no. There is literally somebody who’s decapitated. This person’s a king. This person’s a queen. There’s money. Yeah, it’s all there.

CB: Well, and for me, it’s just a good example, cuz it’s just a documented, public example that everyone is aware of right now of the principle that we talked about before it happened, which was if you have personal planets or points at around 22° of Capricorn or the other cardinal signs, then you are going to experience that Saturn-Pluto conjunction, potentially, in a much more personal way, and it may be much more significant for you compared to somebody else that doesn’t have a close, sensitive point there. Or, for example, if you have a cardinal sign rising—like Capricorn or Cancer rising—then those eclipses are gonna be right in your 1st or 7th house, and therefore, they might be much more personally relevant to you in terms of either your sense of self or your sense of relationships. And yeah, it’s just like a great demonstration of that in a notable, documented life that people are talking about right now.

KS: Yeah, and I think someone I had a conversation with—cuz I’ve been on a bit of a teaching tour throughout January, so this conversation about the astrology of what’s been happening in the news and the people in the news has come up a lot. And somebody made a comment about the Harry and Meghan thing that everybody can relate to knowing a friend or having a family member who gets in a relationship and then they wanna break away from their family. Even though that’s being played out in the context of the royal family, that’s a scenario that happens everyday and every week and every month in our everyday lives. You know, so-and-so got together with this other person, and then the two of them seem to be making decisions, and now they don’t wanna be so much with us as the family. You know, that’s not an unfamiliar drama to everyday people.

CB: Sure. Well, maybe it’s just something inherent to the square between the 4th and the 7th house—especially if you have planets in both of those houses—how there can sometimes be a tension there between going in one direction versus going another direction, between family versus your partner.

AC: Sure.

CB: Yeah.

KS: Yeah.

CB: All right, well, we could probably actually keep going about that for like an hour, cuz it’s really interesting.

KS: Well, let’s talk about Meghan’s out-of-sect-malefic. But no, you guys probably have other things you wanna talk about, and I’m sure our listeners wanna hear different things.

CB: Actually could we mention that really quickly? Cuz that’s interesting. I was rectifying somebody’s chart recently, where I was talking to somebody a couple of nights ago who was saying that they didn’t resonate with their whole sign chart compared to their Placidus chart. They had a really late ascendant rising, so it shifted all of their house placements over at least one or two houses. And one of the things that they were having trouble resonating with was Saturn moving to their 4th house and there were a few reasons for that. But when I started asking about some of those things, I was like, “Well, what was your relationship like with your parents?” And she was like, “My relationship with my mom was a little rocky when I was younger, but it’s fine now,” and she didn’t mention her father. And I asked, “Why didn’t you mention your father?” And she said, “Well, he wasn’t around, and I don’t know why he wasn’t there at all in my life. And I didn’t meet him until I was 16.” And so, it was funny, cuz it was just a repetition of something I commonly run into that’s a real issue, which is that people normalize whatever their personal experiences are in their life and assume that’s the same for everybody or don’t see them as unique, when that’s like a unique thing compared to other people. Like not everybody has that experience necessarily in their life.

KS: Yeah, so they just thought it was normal.

AC: Right. Well, they just didn’t think about, “Yeah, I’m part of 8% of the population,” right? Which means that there are lots of other people who have that situation, and so, people normalize it. But I think I’ve had that conversation with people 300 times. Kelly, I’m sure you have as well.

KS: Yeah.

AC: Where you’re like, “No, no, no.” The fortunate version is also true. You’re like, “No, no. Do you realize how well things went for you here?” Like talk to somebody at 35, in whatever house it’s in, and you’re like, “There have been no major interruptions or problems? Even when that terrible thing happened, it didn’t damage this, let’s say, career, or this area of your life? This is uncommonly good, and we can see this right here in the chart.” And that’s part of what studying and being around astrology does for you. It shows you not just how you’re unique as an individual—which is, I don’t know, always in danger of becoming a cliché—but the unique shape of your life, right? Like where your miseries and joys and luck and misfortune are all distributed, it really is characteristic. You know, your life has its own very particular pattern, not just your idea of yourself.

CB: Yeah.

KS: Yeah, I think there is something known in psychological fields where things that are familiar to us, we project as being normal for everyone.

CB: Yeah.

AC: We have to normalize things in order to go about our lives.

CB: Yeah, in order to just like get by and survive, but that’s really tough. So that’s something astrologers learn really quickly. It’s only by seeing hundreds of charts that you understand many different lives and how they can work out and like what’s unique versus what’s not unique to an individual, so you can start making some of the distinctions. But that’s really tough, then, if you’re trying to make some of those judgment calls early on in your studies. And I kind of can feel for some people, then, why they run into that issue when they’re trying to figure out something like house division. They’ve just come into the field, they see that there’s this discrepancy between some people using whole sign houses and some people are using, whatever, Placidus or equal, and their primary test subject is their own chart and trying to figure that out. And then it’s complicated by another thing, which is that you can’t just take modern astrology and start applying it to whole sign houses necessarily, but you really need to use the entire apparatus of traditional and especially Hellenistic astrology if you’re gonna evaluate something like whole sign houses properly. Because you need to be aware of things like sect, the traditional rulership scheme and how house rulership works. You need to take into account things like sign-based aspects and profections.

KS: And sect.

CB: Yeah, sect is huge. Like this person wasn’t taking into account sect, for example. Yeah, you’ve gotta use the entire system in order to see if that technique works. You can’t just pull one technique out of that and test it in isolation.

AC: Yeah, and I also think that if we’re talking about Hellenistic techniques and whole sign houses, it’s important that we’re also looking for the kind of outputs from those techniques that you’re supposed to get, which is not a nuanced topography of how you feel. You will feel some of the stuff, but the Hellenistic techniques are there to describe exactly what I was talking about earlier, which is life shape, right? We, of course, feel that life-shape. It’s not that our psyches are insensitive to that life-shape, but those techniques are not primarily trying to show you a psyche-shape. They’re trying to show you a life-shape in which a psyche is embedded, right? Whereas there are techniques, we could argue that a lot of modern techniques are pointed directly at psyche-shape and texture, right? And so, there’s the aims of the techniques and all of the pieces that go in there.

CB: Yeah, I mean, that brings up a related topic that I’ve been thinking about lately, which is I see some of the younger astrologers that are trying to reconcile quadrant houses—like Placidus, used by modern Western astrologers—and whole sign houses, used by traditional or ancient Hellenistic astrologers. And one of the common solutions that keeps being put forward by different people lately—but even 10 years ago, people were making the same speculation was maybe Placidus and quadrant houses are psychological and more how you view yourself subjectively and whole sign houses is more objective and external or predictive in some sense. And I’ve always wondered about that, cuz I’m open to that idea. But I worry that it’s hard because that could just be a false-positive. Because modern Western astrology was so psychological, usually we’re used to just looking at our Placidus chart in that modern, psychological context and that could be giving us like a false-positive. Whereas when we encounter Hellenistic astrology, it appears much more predictive and concrete and external. So we start to associate it—just because those traditions tend to use those forms of house division—assuming that quadrant is more psychological and whole sign is more predictive. And while I’m still open to that as a solution, I don’t wanna shut it off completely. I just want to be careful, and I wanna try to find a way to isolate that first, to make sure that that’s not all that’s happening there. That people are doing that because that was the context in which those techniques were used, instead of it being inherently that was in and of itself. Does that make sense? Am I explaining that right?

AC: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Unless astrologers from, I don’t know, about 1300 to 1700 in Europe, who were doing predictive work with quadrant-style houses were just dead wrong, you can do predictive, external stuff with a house system like Placidus. That said, if I look at my chart or any of a dozen or several dozen charts I can think of offhand, and I read them psychologically using Placidus, it works fantastic. I would say for my chart that it’s probably better. It’s probably a better psyche portrait if I use Placidus than if I use whole sign, but it’s a much more accurate life portrait if I use whole sign.

CB: I don’t see whole sign as lacking in that psychological element, though.

AC: Let me finish my point. So just because I can use Placidus to get a good psychological portrait, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for other things. And so, what you were starting to say is the converse, right? Just because whole sign can be used effectively for life-shape, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for psyche stuff.

CB: Yeah, I mean, one of my objections is just I see the psychological component of the birth chart showing through and being just as clear in whole sign houses as the objective, external component is. And while the external component is more there and more obvious to me—and that’s one of the reasons I think whole sign is useful, cuz you can test it by looking at ingresses—sometimes those sign ingresses are activating psychological complexes just as much as they’re activating external events. Like Mars going into your first whole sign house and getting a period where you’re more energized, but also, potentially, more irritable psychologically or what have you. Where are you at? Have you solved this riddle, Kelly? Cuz I saw you re-post, or did somebody re-post for you, ‘your whole sign houses and why you switched to it’ article recently?

KS: Yeah, I shared it again recently because I have been doing so much teaching in person and the question’s been coming up a lot.

CB: What was the title of that article, again?

KS: Yeah, I think it’s called, “Why I Switched to Whole Sign Houses.”

CB: Okay.

KS: And it just basically details my experience and the process that I went through and how long it took me to make that change. Like what I read, who I was encountering. There’s a link, I think, that Rob Hand book. It’s like a booklet, I guess, called Whole Sign Houses: The Original House System. It’s available as a free PDF online. So there’s a link in the blog post for that. And it took me about two years to make the change. I guess I do feel that you can get both external descriptors of events and the internal psychological state with the Hellenistic approach. And that is a huge part, I guess, of why I started to just streamline towards that. You can definitely get the psychological approach in Placidus. And I found I got better predictive outcomes when I was working in Placidus, once I switched to traditional rulerships, which was actually the traditional thing I did first, I switched rulerships and then it was a few years after that that I switched house systems. But I also think—to the point you made earlier, Chris—it’s not just as simple as saying, “I’m gonna do modern astrology in a chart that’s now structured over a whole sign format.” Whole sign house format. You actually have to import a lot of the Hellenistic techniques or traditional astrology techniques into the chart. And that’s what I’ve been sort of saying to students over the last month. When you don’t understand your chart, looking at it in whole sign houses, there’s six other things that you might need to bring in to do with the sect and the rulership of the houses and things like that you wouldn’t get just out of modern astrology.

CB: Right.

KS: I think I’ve gone a bit off-topic of what your question was.

CB: No, it’s a system. Like that’s a really good point. It’s not just one piece. It’s like part of an overall system that has at least like 10 major, interrelated things. On top of that, you also have to be aware that you still pay attention to the degree of the midheaven and IC and the degree of the ascendant and descendant, and those are still important powerful points that have the same meanings and can shift and import those meanings into different parts of the whole sign chart, which is like another hugely important thing. Like you still pay attention to a planet. Like Jupiter, just the other day, hitting the midheaven here, locally for me, like an important event took place.

KS: Yeah, I mean, I think the midheaven degree is incredibly important. We might split on this, but I favor it over the tenth whole sign house when I’m trying to do the trend or the tone for career and life direction. I tend to prioritize the midheaven degree and the rulerships associated with it. But yeah, it’s still hugely important.

CB: Right.

KS: Yeah, so this is such a good debate, and we’re still having it, however many months or years later, which is so juicy.

CB: Yeah, well, it’s just important because the context of the discussion was somebody was saying that they felt bad because they wanted to like their whole sign chart, but they weren’t clear how it matched with their life, or there were just some inconsistencies. And then in sitting down with the person, it just reminded me that usually what happens is you have to show how all of the techniques work together and what things they need to be paying attention to like sect, like house rulerships and how that shifts and other things in order to truly understand what they’re even looking at, when they look at a whole sign chart. But there’s just things that all three of us take for granted, that somebody just coming into this doesn’t know that they need to be taking for granted necessarily, if they’re just listening to our forecast episodes or something like that.

AC: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I think you began the discussion saying something like, “Oh, I feel bad for people who are in this position.” I kind of feel bad for everyone, including ‘past’ me, who’s like a year into astrology, where you’re now far enough in that you can’t just leave. And you’re aware of a lot of things, and you’re aware that a lot of it is meaningful and you can’t just junk it and be like, “Eh, it doesn’t matter,” right? The way out is closed, but the way forward involves a lot of complexity. One thing I’ve found as a practitioner and seen as a teacher many, many times is that the complexity and confusion opens and then you get through maximum complexity and madness. And then things start to come together again, cuz all the different things you had to learn somewhat separately start connecting. And you can just look at a chart and see sect and essential dignity and accidental dignity and configuration to the midheaven, you know, all that stuff. And it’s just like, oh, those are just different brushstrokes in a painting, but you have to learn those individually. And it is a very confusing point, and if you’re there, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong. It just means, keep going. It actually gets easier.

CB: Mm-hmm.

KS: Yeah, I like the complexity there, Austin, like that wide point. It feels chaotic. Cuz all of a sudden, it feels like things are starting to get away from you. But it is a place just to sit, and it does start to coalesce. Like sit in that mystery or be curious about “Well, how might I need to shift?” or “What other thing do I need to learn to help me move forward?” It’s not like, “Oh, my God, it’s a bit confusing, so I’m just gonna throw it out.”

AC: Yeah. Or, “Oh, I’m making terrible mistakes. If I was doing it right, it wouldn’t be confusing.” Like, no, no, you’re making excellent progress. Like this is a point in the journey.

KS: Yeah, don’t be disheartened by the lack of clarity.

CB: Yeah, so, anyway, the reason why it’s coming up is just cuz it’s an ongoing community discussion, and there’s a desire to reconcile whole sign houses and quadrant houses. And that’s a desire that I share. I just wanna be careful about how we do it, so we can do it right and not recreate whatever the problem was that led to all of this division a thousand years ago or 2,000 years ago, when the house division thing first went awry. And obviously, probably a Saturn-Neptune-type subject, I think, is the signature for the house division debate, I’ve noticed, that I’ve talked about in previous episodes. So there may be some level where it’ll never be fully reconciled in a hard, Saturnian-type way, where everybody’s onboard and everyone’s on the same page. But it would be nice to create some sort of synthesis between the systems that makes sense and seems logical and is, at least, a worthwhile middle-ground for everybody in some way. But I don’t know that anybody’s fully found that yet, but I’m interested in the discussion that’s taking place, that’s attempting to move in that direction right now at least.

AC: Yeah, it’s necessary.

CB: Yeah. All right, so that was a discussion topic. The only other discussion topic is I’m getting ready to do my interview with Christopher Warnock about the Picatrix tomorrow, so I’ve been reading through all of the Picatrix for the first time. I had like sort of skimmed through it previously and gotten the gist of it. But now I’m like sitting down and going through it, from start to finish, and that has been a fun and interesting process. There’s been some twists and turns along the way. Some positive surprises, some not-so-positive surprises. I don’t know the order in which I’ll release—if this episode will come out first, or if that episode will come out first, but that’s been fun. And I know, Austin, you were curious about checking in on that after our ‘magic in astrology’ episode.

AC: Yeah, well, I’ve been ‘Picatrix-ing’ for as long as it’s been in English. And so, what was your favorite thing, something that you thought was really cool?

CB: The coolest thing for me is just their application of electional astrology. One of the things that came out of our episode that was a paradigm shift for me—out of our discussion that came out in December, from the ‘magic in astrology’ episode that we recorded in late November—was the question of, is electional astrology itself inherently magical in some way? And the fact that it could be was a little bit of a paradigm shift for me, cuz I think there’s different ways of conceptualizing how electional astrology works. But one of them is just the premise that if you start something at a certain moment in time, you might be able to affect the outcome. And it may not be clear how you affected the outcome, and there may be something hidden, or to use a synonym, occulted about the mechanism for how the outcome was changed specifically, by controlling or manipulating or altering when you begin something, you could alter the future, and in some ways, alter your destiny, or alter the fate of whatever you initiated at that time. And starting to think about electional astrology more in that way was an interesting paradigm shift for me. But seeing how they were actually doing it, and how it was tied into the magical tradition has been the most interesting thing for me. One of the most interesting things hasn’t been the Picatrix itself, but instead, some of the tradition it’s drawing on, especially this book by a 9th century astrologer named Thabit ibn Qurra, who had a little book that was translated by John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock, titled, Astral High Magic: De Imaginibus of Thabit ibn Qurra. So it just has some cool electional stuff for creating talismans, basically, and this concept, at this point, of if you can capture an electional chart, and if you can capture the energy of a moment in time, in a specific object. Cuz we already do that with elections in general by launching a business under a certain date and time, or starting a journey, or getting married at a specific time. And those things almost have their own independent entities that you can rationalize for why the alignment of something or doing something at a specific moment in time could be important and either positive or negative. But the idea of creating a talisman and going out of your way to attempt to like capture the chart of a moment in an object is kind of interesting in and of itself. And just some of the rules that they were using to do that are interesting to me because I can see it coming out of the late Hellenistic electional stream where all of the rules that they’re doing are just perfectly in alignment with most of the electional principles I’m already applying, but they’re just doing it in interesting ways.

AC: Yeah, I went back and looked at Dorotheus on elections last year. You know, I’ve been focusing a lot more on doing magical elections, just using all the rules I’ve been doing for a long time, and I was like, “Wow, the root of this is absolutely in the first paragraph of Dorotheus on elections.”

CB: Yeah, well, and the Picatrix actually cites Dorotheus and summarizes a paragraph or two from him at one point.

AC: Yeah, it’s very clearly a specialized outgrowth of the same art, or of the same timing art. Obviously, the crafting of talismans requires other things that happen at that time. It’s when you do the magic. So you have to know how to do magic as well. But yeah, there’s great continuity with the tradition as far as the elections go.

CB: Right. So that was an interesting thing. It also brought up other things about, yeah, them doing good electional stuff, but also, “Here’s some rules for doing some bad things using electional astrology,” and some of the moral gray areas. Or not even gray areas, but moral black areas of astrology, as well as the discussion we had about why some people that are into astrological magic don’t share their birth chart under the premise that one might use it against them. And I have a little bit of a clearer idea of why that might be, or how, in some instances, that was being recommended at this point in some of these Medieval texts. That’s a whole topic I think I’ll get into with Warnock, so we don’t have to dwell on it too much.

AC: And I think that the way that something as explicit as here’s an election to bring ruin to a town or village, something as explicitly destructive as that, and there’s the election for it—it magnifies an element that’s already there in all of electional astrology, right? There were plenty of astrologers electing for their prince’s time to go to war, and war is for killing and for taking things that are not yours.

CB: Yeah, cuz I remember in our discussion, you had this rationalization, which was fine at the time, in some low-level, meta thing of anytime you’re gonna elect something for somebody, it’s gonna indicate an increase for someone and a decrease for another.

AC: Not anytime, but in any competitive situation.

CB: Sure. But certainly in that instance, you start getting into much more clear specifics of like in this instance they’re talking about here’s an electional chart for destroying a city or something, and it gets a little bit less ambiguous in terms of the application of astrology and some of the moral issues with sometimes using astrology in ways that could be destructive.

AC: Yeah, and that’s what I was saying, is that it really brings that to the forefront that that’s a thing. That is part of the power of electional astrology, whether you’re doing magic with it or not.

CB: Sure. Yes, so that’s fun stuff there. There was some weird stuff. The Picatrix kind of lost me once I got to the second half of book three, and it started recommending some really weird magical, alchemical potions and talking about using like human body parts and stuff with that, which I was very not onboard with.

AC: Haven’t gotten around to that experiment yet.

CB: Okay, good. Well, I’m glad to hear that and I hope you don’t, and don’t talk about it on the podcast.

KS: But you guys are reminding me that I need to go back and listen to that ‘magic’ episode that you recorded. That’s the one episode that I haven’t heard yet from November.

CB: Okay. It was a good discussion. Have you read the Picatrix yet, Kelly?

KS: I’ve read just little sections of it. I do own the Warnock edition.

CB: Okay.

KS: So this is a good reminder for me to go back and sink my teeth into that. I’m rereading Maternus at the moment because I’ve just got the Holden translation. 2019, I got the Holden translation.

CB: Nice. Sweet.

KS: That’s where my head is at.

CB: Yeah, reading. I’ve really been getting back into reading lately, through sitting here reading the Picatrix and like having something that’s a brand new thing to jump into, and then also read all the scholarship around it. Cuz sometimes there’s commentaries or other books related to it. With Holden’s translations, for example, you can read all of his lovely footnotes and stuff, which is always fun.

KS: I actually like reading the footnotes.

CB: Yeah. No, I wasn’t being sarcastic.

KS: No, no, no. Yeah, like they’re very detailed. But then if you wanna know more about this point, go and read this other book. It’s just a book, word-nerd rabbit hole and it goes on forever.

CB: It was Holden’s excesses in his footnotes which probably influenced my own. And it’s one of the reasons why, in that area, my book is a little bit of a mess in some places, in going kind of crazy with the footnotes and the long digressions. But I always enjoy reading Holden’s works for that reason because he has these great footnotes.

KS: Yeah. Yes. So anyway, that’s not on the Picatrix, sorry. Cuz you’re interviewing Chris this week, Christopher.

CB: Yes, tomorrow, in like not that many hours. I’ve gotta read the rest of the Picatrix tonight. What do I have in store for me in book four, Austin? Do you recall?

AC: Well, there’s probably the most infamous passage.

CB: I don’t like this face that you’re making. You look nervous.

AC: No, it’s the best part.

CB: Okay.

AC: No, no. I’m nervous for you, I’m fine with it. But it’s how to construct an oracular head, which doesn’t really seem like astrological magic at all, but it’s in there. You’re gonna get into the rumors section, where the author is like, “I heard from somebody, who heard from somebody, that some people do this.” And so, that’s where it gets even more colorful.

CB: Yeah. Well, I’m definitely here for the advanced use of electional astrology, and it has a lot of really interesting stuff. Some of the Medieval ideas about certain things, I’m not as here for. Like it says something dumb at one point about women’s menstrual blood being able to kill a man or something like that. Like anybody who bathes in it will die. And I was being reminded that it was a text that was written in the 10th century.

AC: Yeah, that’s probably not true.

KS: Yeah.

CB: Probably. I like how you qualified that statement.

KS: Different cultural understanding of such things at the time.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, well, with the Picatrix, there’s a lot of gems. It’s not a how-to manual. There are pieces that are how-to, but it’s not organized for clarity of comprehension. There’s like clear section, unclear section. I remember when I first got a copy and it was in 2007. I picked it up, and I was like, “Oh, I’ll do a Venus election.” There was a good Venus in Libra election coming up. I did a thing, I got cash prizes and treats. And that part was really clear, but then there were whole swathes that were confusing. And I would say that more of it is useful and clear now than it used to be, but there are still some sections that I don’t think have a lot of utility. As a practitioner, they may be of some historical value, but it is a hodge-podge. It’s an intentionally-constructed hodge-podge, but it is a podge, and you gotta pick through it.

CB: Yeah, definitely. But there’s definitely some good stuff there, so I recommend checking out. Probably not a good intro to astrology book. Probably not gonna replace The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need, but it’s somewhere a little further down on the hierarchy.

AC: What’s funny is so a lot of people in the occult community and ‘magic land’ knew about the Picatrix for years and years and years before it was available, and they were super-excited to get it and do some fucking magic. And then they found out you get the Picatrix, and you’re like, “Oh, I have to spend like five years becoming competent in traditional astrology before I can really do any of this.”

CB: Right.

AC: And most never cleared that bar. But people were like, “Oh, I’m into astrological magic. I’ll just get the Picatrix and get started.” Are you really good at astrology? Like do you have high-level electional game?

CB: Yeah, well, electional and natal game. Cuz one of the things is they want the chart, in some instances, to be rooted into the natal chart, and put a lot of emphasis on that. But then it raises this really interesting issue back to the fate/free will issue, which is there’s an implication that unless the natal chart or the horary chart has promised that thing, you don’t have any business trying to elect it. Which really comes back to a fundamental issue about the electional astrology and how much leverage we have to elect or to create something if it’s not already promised in the birth chart or by fate in some way to begin with.

AC: Yeah, or if we were to loosen the language allowed, there may be some things that we are allowed, but not promised. We are permitted, but not guaranteed.

CB: Right. And sometimes you just have to do things. And one of the issues that we’ve run into sometimes with just recommending the electional charts each month is you can’t always root every chart really well into your birth chart. And while that would be good, ideally, sometimes you just have to start things on a certain day. And if you have to do that, then when is the best day to do that, or the best hour to do that on a specific day or in a specific week, in a given month? And that’s often what we’re more preoccupied with, with some of the electional charts on the podcast.

AC: Yeah, personally, I’ll take a good election over a well-rooted one. If I have to choose between being rooted to the nativity or just being a better chart, I’ll take the better chart.

CB: Yeah, I mean, Kelly, when you’re trying to do something, will you first start looking at the chart, or will you first start looking at the transits for the birth chart first? What’s your order?

KS: I don’t do a lot of electional work these days, but I went through a period where I did a lot for clients, and there was a fair amount of relationship and wedding elections that went there. So I would have always started with a look at the natal chart in those situations. I don’t know, for me, I think the more significant the undertaking, the more important it is to find that sweet spot between a nice chart, but also, some anchoring in the natal chart.

CB: Right.

KS: You know, obviously the ideal is to get a nice chart that triggers your birth chart nicely. There are certain times of day that I just won’t do things because I know it’s not great for my chart, even little things. Yeah, so it’s trying to find that sweet spot, which is tricky, and I’m not sure I’ve got a hard-and-fast rule. Cuz I always sort of feel like based on this circumstance, I’d do it this way, but in this situation, I might prioritize something different.

CB: So in the short term, though, if we’re just talking about on a specific day, are you paying attention that much to the chart of the moment?

KS: Less. Like if I just want a nice time to send a newsletter or something like that for work, I’m like, “Oh, there’s a nice Moon aspect, send it,” and I’m much less concerned with how it would interact with my chart, for instance.

CB: Okay.

KS: But when I was doing a wedding chart, and doing wedding charts for clients, I was much more concerned about what it was triggering in the natal chart, in addition to it trying to be a nice chart itself.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Yeah, that’s fair. When I was talking about erring—so the ideal situation is a great election that’s rooted, right? I think we can all agree on that.

KS: That’s what we’re all striving for. We have to make concessions.

AC: Yeah, and when I said earlier that I would err on the side of a good election over the rootedness, that’s generally true. But you bringing up marriage charts, I would probably try hardest to root it for something as deeply personal as a marriage chart.

KS: Yeah.

AC: And that’s literally what I’ve done, when I think back on it.

CB: Well, and one of the issues is just what do you do when you’re having bad transits and you still have to do something. You don’t just stop and not do anything. You just do the best you can with what you have available. And sometimes that’s when you’ve just gotta pick the best electional chart, even if you’re having tough Saturn transits that are long-term at that time.

AC: Yeah, well, it’s the best of all possible worlds, right? Not the best of all imaginable worlds. Although, to be fair, there is something to be said—and this is maybe just I’m getting older. But recognizing that I’ve been around for a while, I’ll probably be around for a while, there are some things that feel like they need to get done right now, but that’s okay if that’s a next year project, right? There’s the stuff that absolutely just needs to get done and pick the best time of the times that are here. I don’t know. I think we live in a pretty frantic culture and there are generally some things that we feel need to get done immediately or this month that realistically aren’t gonna get done for a while, and we might be better off letting those coast out in time.

CB: Yeah, definitely.

KS: And then there’s the thing that happens where you don’t actually have the power to do electional astrology for something that’s coming up. Like sometimes with my teaching events, it’s like, we’ll, I’m gonna be in this city, on this date, so let’s do something. And then, in hindsight, it’s like, oh, that was a good thing, or that was actually a bit of a tricky thing, but we managed to make it work because of ‘x’, ‘y’, or ‘z’.

CB: Yeah, I love that the most, the thing that happens, that nobody messed with at all. They just chose the time that made the most sense for whatever practical reasons, and then it just has like an amazing electional chart. Like Jupiter’s right on the midheaven and the thing goes off without a hitch, but it involved no meddling on the part of an astrologer or something like that. It just naturally went well, and also, happened to have a good electional chart, or inceptional chart.

AC: And those tend to be rooted, too.

KS: Yeah.

AC: They’ll naturally root. That’s what I’ve found.

CB: Yeah, well, it’s sometimes a mixture of having a good electional chart, and also, being good transits to the natal charts involved at the same time.

AC: Mm-hmm.

CB: Yeah. All right, good times. I think we’re getting towards the end of this episode. Kelly, you just flew from Australia to where? To California?

KS: To LA. Yeah, so I just did Sydney-LA last night, this morning. Like Tuesday, the 21st of January, which is our recording date, has been about 36 hours long for me—

CB: Oh, wow.

KS: —because of when you fly from Australia back to the States. I left Sydney at about 11:30 AM on Tuesday, but I landed in LA at 6:30 AM on Tuesday, cuz you go over the date line.

AC: Yeah.

CB: What the hell are you doing in LA right now?

KS: I’m just actually having a couple of days off to do some work, like catch up with you guys, and a few other things. And then I go to Palm Springs where I’ll be teaching my sold-out, year ahead retreat this coming weekend. And after that, I’m teaching in New York on Saturday, the 1st of February. So if anybody is listening to this before then and wants to come along to the year ahead planning day in New York, on the 1st, the details are on my website. And then, February, I’ll be online teaching. And mentoring starts for me. My group mentoring program starts in February as well.

CB: You’re restarting that. The group mentoring is like you do mentorship, like you would one-on-one, but you do it with a closed group of astrologers.

KS: Yeah, we have about 20 astrologers, and it’s a mix of senior students. So students that are quite advanced, or getting there, and newer practitioners. And our focus will be chart interpretation skills. So if anybody is looking to really pull together their chart interpretation skills, it’s less structured than a class, but we have lots of time to go through some examples and just do some of that deep question-and-answer stuff that we don’t always get when we’re learning technique.

CB: Okay, brilliant. What’s your website, again?

KS: Oh, KellysAstrology.com.

CB: Okay, awesome. And I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video, as well as on the podcast website, for those listening to the audio version. Cool. Well, good luck with that. Austin, what do you have going on in the coming month?

AC: Well, I’m finally gonna put my 2020 teaching schedule up on February 1, the election discussed earlier. And I’m also gonna open readings back up. So people can book consultations again. And then there is a Mars in Aries—or excuse me, Mars in Scorpio series that I elected, that was created during the holidays, that will be released by Sphere + Sundry on a currently undisclosed date in February.

KS: Love it.

CB: Brilliant.

AC: It’s Mars in Scorpio, right? It’s gotta be stealth.

CB: Right. I like that. What are the websites, again?

AC: AustinCoppock.com. A-U-S-T-I-N-C-O-P-P-O-C-K.com. And then Sphere + Sundry, it’s Sphere+Sundry.com, I think. No, it’s SphereandSundry.

KS: It’s ‘and’ in the URL.

AC: Sorry. Yes, the branding has a plus.

KS: Yeah.

AC: SphereandSundry. S-U-N-D-R-Y.com.

CB: Okay, brilliant. As for myself, let’s see, I already plugged the horoscopes. Everybody go to YouTube and read the horoscopes, or watch the horoscopes, cuz they’re really good. But also, I put a lot of work into it. Make sure you subscribe to YouTube. That was a livestream. We experimented with livestreaming all of them, and it worked really well, so I think I’m gonna do that more in the future. I also launched the posters, which I had talked about on our last forecast episodes, but I actually did get it together and get them out. And I’ve shipped a bunch of them so far, so I’m actually starting to run low on stock. Like I have a few hundred left, but I’ll probably not do another print run. So if you were holding off on ordering those, you might wanna go ahead and get one here pretty soon because they might not be around permanently. So those are the same images and illustrations we use in the forecast episodes each month. I’ve put a print poster out with those same things, so you can look at the astrology of the next year at a glance, and it’s pretty useful. So you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2020Posters. Other than that, I mentioned the electional report. I did wanna mention people constantly ask us what software we’re using, and I use the astrology software program called Solar Fire, which is for PCs, for Windows. They’ve given us a promo code where you can get like a 10% discount on it. So that’s ‘AP15’ if you purchase the program through the website Alabe.com. And then the last thing I was kind of excited about is there was an artist, a painter, who tagged us, The Astrology Podcast, on Instagram a few weeks ago. It’s an artist who goes by the name of Toad, and she was listening to our 2020 year ahead forecast while painting this really beautiful painting. And I was really struck by her painting, and checked it out, and ended up ordering one. So that’s the painting you can see over my shoulder of the Moon. It’s a Moon-Venus conjunction in Libra, and that’s actually like the title of the painting. You can’t fully see it here, but maybe I’ll put an image up. But I wanted to give a shoutout to her, cuz she has some great artwork. You can find her Instagram @ArtbyToad, or go to ToadArt.co to check it out. So just a shoutout to one of our listeners who does awesome artwork. If people have stuff like that, I always like to see what people are doing when they listen to the podcast. So tag us on either Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook or what have you, and we’d love to see what you’re out there doing as you listen to us. Have you guys seen some good tags and things like that lately? Kelly, I know you’re on Instagram constantly.

KS: I just love Instagram. I mean, I do enjoy it. Look, I do waste a lot of time there, but also, I find out some interesting things. Nothing new. I’ve been following the bushfire relief support work on Instagram, which has been really interesting. But I’ll check out this ArtbyToad.

CB: Yeah, check her out.

KS: Austin, do you spend much time on the ‘gram’?

AC: I think I’ve been on the ‘gram’ like 10 times.

KS: In your life?

AC: Like looked at it 10 times. I posted, I think, five times.

KS: Right.

AC: I mean, I’ve got an account. I might use it at some point. I look at the Twitter sometimes. I like the words.

KS: The Twitter. Love it.

CB: Brilliant. All right, guys, I think that is it. On that note, that is our forecast for February. So just quickly, a quick shoutout. Thanks to all the patrons who joined us for this live recording of this episode. We appreciate you. We liked some of your comments and that helped facilitate some of our discussion here. Also, thanks to the producers. So there’s a new tier on our page on Patreon, which is the Producers tier. So I wanted to give a shoutout to some of those producers on that tier, such as patrons Christine Stone, Nate Craddock, Tanner Robinson, and also, Maren Altman. Also, a shoutout to the Astro Gold Astrology App, which is one of our sponsors, where they have an app that’s available for both Android and iPhones. And that’s actually the astrology program I use on my mobile device. So you can find out more information about that at Astrogold.io. Also, a shoutout to the Portland School of Astrology at PortlandAstrology.org. And of course the much talked about Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs that it seems like everybody and their mother has a copy of at this point. But if you don’t have a copy, you can get one at Honeycomb.co. And finally, all three of us are gonna be speaking at the International Society for Astrological Research Astrology Conference, which is happening in Denver, Colorado, September 10-14, 2020. More information about that at ISAR2020.org. And then, also, the Northwest Astrological Conference is happening in Seattle from May 21-25, 2020. More information about that at NORWAC.net. And you can find out more information about how to become a patron and join us in getting a Producer credit, or getting early access to new episodes and other bonus content at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast. All right, guys, thanks for joining me today. It was good to hang out and talk with you again. Let’s not wait two months before the next one. But let’s maybe do this again.

AC: Let’s do something next month.

KS: Let’s do that.

CB: Late February, maybe talk about March?

AC: I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see what comes up, right?

CB: Yeah, well, we’ll be probably recording that right in the heart of the Mercury retrograde, so that should be fun.

KS: We’ll see if we can coordinate our schedules.

CB: Awesome.

AC: Yeah, it’ll be the—yeah.

CB: All right, brilliant. Well, thank you guys for joining me tonight. Thanks to our audience for listening. Please be sure to like, subscribe, and give us a rating on iTunes. And we will see you again next month for the astrology of March. So good luck in February. All right, signing off.

AC: Take care, everyone.

KS: Take care, everyone.