The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 261, titled:
July 2020 Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on June 30, 2020
Original episode URL:
https://theastrologypodcast.com/2020/06/30/july-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 Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released August 12th, 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. In this episode, we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for July of 2020. This is episode 261, and joining me today are Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees. Hey guys; welcome back.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey.
CB: Hey. All right. So just to give people who are opening this video, especially on YouTube, for the first time, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna spend the first hour or so reviewing the astrology of the past several weeks and especially the last quarter since this is the end of the second quarter of 2020. And then in about an hour or so, we’re gonna jump into looking in detail at the astrology of July. So if you wanna skip the review and just jump straight to the forecast, then just look for the timestamp which should be in the description just below this video or on TheAstrologyPodcast.com website in the entry for this episode. Otherwise, let’s get into it.
So we wanted to frame this episode partially by breaking the year up into the four quarters which consist of three months each. So we just completed the second quarter of 2020, and now we’re moving into the third quarter of the year, which will consist of July, August, and September. So why don’t we start by doing a little bit of review, having just finished the second quarter – does that sound good or sound appropriate to you guys?
AC: Yeah, and it’s especially appropriate because the very first thing that happens in July on July 1st is that Saturn moves back into Capricorn. And so we had this preview period of Saturn in Aquarius almost exactly encapsulating the second quarter. And so there is, you know, the quarterly division almost makes some sense, but it makes extra sense this year. And that’s something we talked about a lot in our yearly ahead was like, we get this preview period of Saturn in Aquarius almost exactly enclosing Q2, and we’re leaving that. So a lot has happened, and you know, it’s worth thinking about both astrologically and otherwise.
CB: Yeah. So quarter one was very much focused on the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn, the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Capricorn, or almost in Capricorn – the copresence, the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn and so on and so forth. And a lot of that ended somewhat abruptly when Saturn moved into Aquarius. And Saturn in Aquarius became basically the dominant signature of the second quarter of the year, especially because this became the first time that Saturn was coming into an orb of squaring Uranus. And I think a lot of what we saw over the past few months had a lot to do with that Saturn square Uranus as well as some of the triggers of Venus being retrograde for 40 days and 40 nights, which recently stationed direct just a few days ago. What do you —
AC: Yeah, and so that Saturn, Saturn in Aquarius is really, it’s quite relevant to the future as well as just the last few months, because even though Saturn’s moving back into Cap for the second half of 2020, it’s gonna be in Aquarius for all of 2021 and all of 2022. And it’s going to be squaring Uranus. And on a bigger level, on a more Tarnasian, macro-historic sort of level, we’re going from Saturn-Pluto, which we have to finish up this year, into a couple years of Saturn-Uranus. And those are very different vibes. And we got a preview of that during Q2. And so, you know, on a very simple level, Saturn-Pluto is confinement, right? It’s confinement, not enough room to move, walls are too thick, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas on a very simple level, Saturn-Uranus is there’s a conflict, right? Whereas Pluto will intensify that Saturnian control thing, Uranus is rebellious. Right? In a sense, we have the rule-maker and the rule-breaker getting locked together in a little jar and shaken. And so we have a very different energy; it’s very rebellious, right? And so, you know, we saw a little bit of rebellion. Little bit of not feeling so patient with the rules as written and enforced over this last couple months, especially this last month. And that is not confined solely to June, right? That’s a signature we’re gonna do all 2021, all 2022. Right?
KS: Yeah. So when we say that quarter two is, like, it was the Saturn in Aquarius kind of quarter, it was all the associated aspects that go with that, and the qualities in terms of that quality about protest and even pandemic. You know, these are two words that we could link into that type of aspect. And we’re going to see, you know, well, quarter two was in some ways a preview of some of the themes that we will explore more, we will see continue in 2021 when Saturn comes back to Aquarius and reconnects with Uranus in Taurus.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah, and one thing that I would also add about next time we do this, because we talked a lot about this is gonna be a preview, this is gonna be a couple months of preview; we should watch this because it has implications for the near future. One of the things that we said that’s worth remembering is that this preview was harsher than actually doing those years is gonna be, because Saturn entered Aquarius with Mars. And there was —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — there was Mars copresence for, I don’t know, for six weeks of that. And so —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — you know, that’s the super hard version. And when we come back to Saturn in Aquarius square Uranus at the end of this year and then for the next year, we’re gonna have Jupiter there with Saturn in Aquarius, which is much more solution-oriented or “maybe there’s some hope”-oriented, right? And so we’ve seen the harsh version, and that’s good; I think it’s laid out a lot of problems. It hasn’t necessarily magically transported us to the world of instant solutions, but the problems have to be laid out and recognized on a large scale level well ahead of solutions. And so I think that this preview did a good job of laying out some problems and getting people to recognize them.
CB: Yeah. I mean – oh, go ahead, Kelly.
KS: I was just gonna say, yeah, with the Mars component that we’ve had that’s very unique, like, the Mars-Saturn-Uranus sort of combination in second quarter 2020, we’ve had an incredibly inflammatory – you know, we’ve had a very volatile, like, sort of the most volatile iteration of that. And I think that’s a great point to keep in mind that you’re making, Austin, that Jupiter is gonna have longer term aims in mind when Jupiter comes with Saturn, and there is – maybe it’s less inflammatory and more, as you say, kind of solution, looking to solution in a… I don’t know what the best word there is. Like, a structured or a clear kind of way. Less reactive. Less with that heat.
AC: Yeah. Well, Jupiter is… Always tries to help, you know? Might not be able to. Might not have good ideas. But you know, Jupiter tries to be constructive —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — right? And so whereas that’s not necessarily Mars’s first move. And what’s interesting is there’s actually – so there’s a lot of Saturn story here; we’re using that as the primary framing, and I think that’s right. But there was, is, will be, has been a very strong martial component to this story. You know, we had the Mars copresent basically sharing Aquarius with Saturn from, let’s see, April 1st to the middle of May, and then we got done with the Mars copresence, and that was interesting because we had suggested that the Mars-Saturn copresence would time the period of like, full total lockdown and that things would start easing after that. And that ended up being the right timing trigger – good on us.
CB: Right.
AC: But then after that, Mars didn’t disappear, right? Mars went into Pisces and was like, “Oh,” you know, “Oh, Pisces is so gentle. There won’t be any conflict here.” But Mars was deeply and importantly configured to our Venus retrograde story, right? Because what’s interesting is we got done with the Mars-Saturn copresence mid-May. Within a day, Venus stationed retrograde in Gemini, and then that took us from mid-May until a day and a half ago, so that was really the second half of the second quarter. And one of the things that we talked about and that we agreed that we undersold, just because there was so much happening in June, was the fact that the dead center of the Venus retrograde, which is Venus’s retrograde conjunction with the Sun – that inferior conjunction – was exactly square Mars. Right? And so and that was a big signature. And there’s other Mars things, too, but that was huge, and that was at the beginning of the month. And that was certainly connected to some action, right, all over the world. We had protests over injustice, not just in the United States – in all the major American cities and a number of minor American cities – but that threat of protest was all over the world, right?
CB: Yeah. I mean, it became a worldwide phenomenon of pushing against established structures of injustice and systemic inequities and racism, which was a great manifestation of the Saturn-Uranus square was – it was like, pushing against something that was terrible and not good, but then at the same time, there was a feeling of progress or of some change, of the world being on the verge of some change or being able to enact some change which seemed hopeful. And I think, because we focused on that lunar eclipse at the beginning of the month in Sagittarius as being somewhat optimistic, and while there was definitely more tension surrounding it because of the square with Mars than maybe we even stated or anticipated, that feeling of optimism was still there to some extent that something had shaken free finally when it came to some of those things.
AC: Yeah. Well, and that just in terms of that Mars thread, that was important and again, I think we under-emphasized it, because we had the Venus-Sun conjunction exactly square Mars, and then we had the lunar eclipse where the Sun and Moon were exactly square Mars. Right? And so that was – it was a lot! Right? Those were big, big things, and there was a lot of big stuff at the end of this month – you know, where we are now, what we’re just getting to – that are important and I don’t regret us talking about these things, but I do think we kind of flashed over the beginning of the month. It’s a lot of big moves.
KS: A lot. Yeah, in hindsight, looking at that first week of June through the rearview mirror, it’s like, oh yeah, there’s like, three different major Mars activations in a four or five-day period, including that square to the eclipse. And that just brings all of that heat, you know, and Austin, in one of our pre-show chats, we’re talking about Mars in Pisces and that idea of the fight, but with Jupiter in Capricorn, it’s the fight of feeling something very unjust or structurally unfair that is needing to be some heat raised about it, basically. Like, the Mars —
AC: Right. Right, we were —
KS: — in Pisces with Jupiter in Capricorn combination.
AC: Yeah, with Jupiter, yeah, because it’s not just Mars in Pisces; it was Mars in Pisces, Pisces is ruled by Jupiter, let’s look at Jupiter. Right? And so we have a lot, again, a lot happened in June. But the spark was the unjust use of force, and that is Mars. Right? Violence and force is Mars. And if we’re looking, just looking at Mars, it’s like, oh, it’s in Pisces, but it’s Pisces with its ruler being fallen. A planet that is in Pisces is ruled by Jupiter; it’s supposed to be trying to do the right thing – to be just, compassionate, high-minded, you know, all that good Jupiter stuff. But Jupiter is in a place where in Capricorn it is highlighting – and conjunct Pluto – it is highlighting in many ways its opposite. That’s what Pluto does, right? It does the funhouse mirror to a planet. Be like, “Here is the opposite of justice!” Right? “Here is the opposite of,” you know, “of well-run and ethical institutions.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: Right? And so there was that connecting piece right there.
CB: One of the interesting things we were struggling with trying to delineate last month was like, Mars in Pisces conjunct Neptune. And we were coming up with archetypal delineations of like, some like, walking into the waves with a sword or some indistinct noxious gas or something like that. And so much of this month and so many of the images of this month ended up being images of like, protestors getting teargassed and things like that. And that ended up being a really interesting literal manifestation of that transit which was in effect most of the month.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
KS: Totally.
AC: It was unpleasantly literal. And then we also had, you know, such wacky events as Poland accidentally invading the Czech Republic.
CB: What happened with that?
KS: Yeah?
AC: Well, Kelly, did you – you probably heard more about that, that being a couple hundred miles rather than several thousand miles away.
KS: Yeah! I didn’t hear much about it, actually; I thought it was a hilarious – well, I mean, not hilarious, but it’s just one of those weird, like, how does that happen kind of incidences.
AC: Yeah, they – apparently, yeah, there were some Polish forces that weren’t aware of the border, or the border was badly defined, and they like, took possession of a church, and people were trying – in the Czech Republic – and Czech citizens were trying to go to the church, and the Polish troops turned them away. But yeah, it was – which is, you know, technically they annexed a very small piece of the Czech Republic and then said, “Oops.” But that’s also, you know, that’s very – that’s as Mars-Neptune as you can get. “Sorry we accidentally invaded you.”
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s very literal. Let’s see. What else? I was looking for one of the unexpected and really interesting developments that seemed almost like, biblical was the tearing down of statues. Like, sounds like one of the most old school delineations for something that I would read in an ancient astrological text that you just think is like, never gonna be relevant again. And then suddenly it’s relevant, and this year with Saturn squaring Uranus and literally the sudden destruction, the tearing down of these symbolic representations of historical oppression and things like that. That’s such a brilliant manifestation, I guess, probably primarily of Saturn in Aquarius squaring Uranus again.
KS: Yeah, the symbolism —
AC: Yeah, I would kind of want to connect that to eclipse symbolism. You know, because it’s literally the eclipses, the face, you know, the lights – the Sun and the Moon, especially the Sun, are connected to the face or the visage of something. And to tear down a symbol, right, is very much like eclipsing an image. But I haven’t – it’d be interesting to look at, like, I think of in the during maybe 15 years ago during the Iraq business when the statues of Saddam Hussein were taken down; it’d be interesting to look and see if there were any similarities chart-wise. If there are any other crucial statue moments that people can think of. But yeah, it doesn’t happen —
CB: Right.
AC: — very often.
CB: Yeah. It seemed really notable and like, not just notable, but unique as a manifestation of some energies that were happening in the past month.
Let’s see, other review things, because I’m trying to go through everything else that happened over June. I mean, one of the things that happened with the eclipse – because the eclipse happened, just to share the chart again, this was the planetary alignments calendar that I showed for June. And we just had the middle of the Venus retrograde hitting very early at the very beginning of the month on the 3rd, and we had the lunar eclipse happening on the 5th in Sagittarius. But one of the things, of course, in the news and one of the people that was mentioned in the last episode, Kelly, you had mentioned Breonna Taylor and her murder at the hands of police. And then there was a lot of discussion about her and attempt to push her story more to the forefront of the news in order to seek justice for that. And that eclipse ended up coinciding with her birthday then on the 5th, and everyone was pushing to get some sort of justice for that and to spread her name more at that time, and her name was sort of everywhere on that day. And it fell on her birthday on that eclipse then on the 5th, which was kind of stunning to see from an astrological perspective as well as just, you know, from a human perspective.
AC: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting —
KS: That was —
AC: — right?
KS: — really striking —
AC: Go ahead.
KS: Yeah, that even after she’s been killed, there’s so much activity that seems to be then tying into her, that seems to happen on a weird astrological cycle and, you know, nobody has still yet been charged with her murder, so that’s sort of still an ongoing situation. But there was a real sense of trying to keep her name and her story in the collective awareness around that time.
CB: Right. I remember seeing videos that day of just thousands of protestors saying her name, and there was something really striking about that on her birthday. And then it turned out – I went back and looked, and she was born on a Sagittarius lunar eclipse just within a day of one. So I was just thinking about some of the deeper meaning of that from an astrological perspective and something I had seen before in other cases, like with Vincent Van Gogh, that sometimes for some reason, our charts can sort of echo on in eternity when we come up again in the future, even once we’ve passed away for various reasons when we still continue to be important to humanity or in consciousness for some reason.
KS: Absolutely.
AC: Yeah, and you know, it’s a good example of – there’s been some talk about sort of the use and abuse of astrology in relationship to, you know, in relationship to what’s happening in the world and how we use astrology to think about it and frame it. And there’s been some criticism, which I agree with, that astrology can be used to sort of look at the astrology as a form of pathological distancing from the world. But astrology can also provide greater depth of immersion and understanding, right? And I think that, like, you see Breonna Taylor’s chart and birthday and the events of this year, her murder, the seeking for justice – all of that, like, the astrology folds into and deepens that, right? That’s not a way of ignoring her; it’s actually a way of, you know, it becomes – there’s even more there with astrology. And that’s one of the things – I mean, the beginning of June feels like a million years ago. That was one of the things that came up and that I thought a lot about and, you know, how to make sure that we’re using astrology to stay in touch even better rather than using it to ignore things.
CB: Yeah. Or being sort of like, glib about it, and looking at something inappropriately or even putting the wrong spin on it. Like, there’s certainly sort of the potential to make errors or to do things in a not-tactful way anytime you’re doing that. But also, you know, astrologers also sometimes, even in their personal lives, are able to see a greater sense of meaning and purpose when they approach things from that perspective. And that’s often why they’re trying to approach it from that perspective, even if sometimes it runs the risk of over-intellectualizing something that needs to be felt on sort of like, a heart level.
AC: Yeah, and it’s tricky, because getting distance from things is sometimes very helpful on a personal level. And then sometimes it’s exactly the opposite of helpful. And so there’s not a simple answer, which is just “always do it this way.” It’s, I think as an astrologer, it’s something you – it’s an open question, and you just leave that question open and take every situation and conversation on a case-by-case basis. Right? At least, that’s what I think. That’s how I feel about it.
CB: Sure. I mean, for me, I remember back when my younger sister passed away, like, looking at and seeing her chart and how some of the eclipses had tied into the circumstances surrounding her death was helpful for me as part of my grieving process. So that’s one of the reasons I understand and relate when astrologers sometimes jump there, even for celebrities when they’re trying to like, seek meaning or answers for something and have some sympathy even if sometimes they stumble or don’t do it as like, well, perhaps, as they could or should.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Where in terms of review – I mean, should we go from here? I think we did definitely want to just emphasize in terms of quarter two, it’s like, we went into quarter two with this huge feeling of like, restriction and fear and the pandemic numbers were shooting up and the death numbers were shooting up. And a lot of that was coming off of the huge set of conjunctions that happened in late Capricorn and then early Aquarius. Then we moved into Saturn in Aquarius sort of weird internet zone where everybody was isolated and yet seeking connections with each other as best as they could through technology, through things like Zoom like we’re doing right now, and other things. And then as we correctly sort of assumed, things began to loosen up and there was this push for a lessening of the restrictions in May once Mars departed from Aquarius and completed the conjunction by sign with Saturn. And we started also to see some of the Saturn-Uranus square coming out because then there was also some initial sort of small protests of people like, protesting against the quarantine restrictions and things like that. And then Venus went retrograde, and then we saw a second and much greater and much more significant wave of protests focusing on racial injustice and systemic oppression and things like that in June, again, still probably really tied in with the Saturn-Uranus square and to some extent maybe the Venus retrograde and then the eclipse that took place in Sagittarius. And that’s, I think, one of the points that we wanted to make was just a lot of that or some of those themes – like, that Saturn-Uranus square didn’t even go exact yet. It’s just the Saturn-Uranus square coming into orb. And we won’t get the first exact square until, what? Sometime next year?
KS: February.
AC: Yeah.
CB: February.
KS: 2021.
CB: So —
KS: February 2021, yeah.
AC: It gets activated pretty immediately next year by Mars. Again.
KS: Yes.
AC: Our buddy, Mars.
KS: Yeah, our friend Mars is going to take on an aggravational role in 2021.
AC: Or persist in an —
KS: Persist —
AC: — aggravational role.
KS: — with that! Yeah.
AC: You know, one of our July topics, of course, will be Mars in Aries. The first of six months of Mars in Aries.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah. Yeah, July comes in pretty hot with some planetary changes right at the top of the month.
CB: Yeah, and so do you guys wanna transition right there? Are we ready to transition if you —
AC: Well —
CB: — or should we focus —
AC: Let’s maybe dwell —
CB: — more a little bit on the future?
AC: A little bit more on Saturn in Aquarius. So there is, you know, there’s the protest energy, right? That’s very clear. And then there was everything moving online. Right? It’s almost like – I was thinking about it reminds me of – what’s the word? Like, the internet filling up with refugees from the physical world. Right? It’s like, can’t do business. Gotta see what I can do online. Right? Or you know, literally fleeing the difficulties of – the difficulties and stresses and impossibilities of the physical world. You know, it’s like the internet flooding with refugees. And that’s true for business, but it’s also true for education, right? All of the institutions of higher and lower and medium and non-vertical metaphor education – you know, everybody’s gone online. There’s actually, let’s see, I just saw in the news a couple days ago someone – one of the students is suing Harvard because they, you know, they’re like, “I’m not paying 70,000 dollars a year to go to Zoom meetings.” Right? Which is a pretty reasonable – I mean, some Zoom meetings are really fantastic. But you know, in general, like, you know, someone’s like, “This is not what I thought I was buying.” And it’s the, you know, with that Saturn-Uranus, that Uranus challenging, shocking, provoking, catalyzing structural issues, right, with Saturn-Uranus – you know, some of the – there have been lingering, or there have been slow-moving issues that have been accumulating with higher education, especially in the United States, right? The cost being inflated, inflated, inflated, inflated over the last 20 years and the Uranus squaring Saturn is a bit of a spark. Again, it catalyzes an issue that was already there. Like, the cost was already inflated; people have been having problems with that. But now you have, yeah, anyway, now you have a spark to, yeah. Sorry.
I’m gonna drink some more coffee. My words are working as well as I would like them to.
CB: Yeah, same here. One of the things, speaking of that Saturn in Aquarius and the internet, one of the things I think I meant to do last month but I can’t remember – I may have actually not done it – was put up the chart of the launch of the world wide web. Did I share that last month, or was that just —
KS: Yeah, we —
CB: — during my NORWAC talk?
KS: I’m sure we shared it in a podcast episode, either last month or the month before.
CB: Okay.
AC: I don’t think it was last month.
CB: There was a little bit of a follow-up on that, because the chart that I shared previously was when Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 in Switzerland, when he announced the world wide web on like, a discussion forum, and that chart had zero Sagittarius rising. But I was looking into it more —
AC: Oh, yeah.
CB: — there’s actually somebody, I’ll look up her name quickly because it was a listener of the show who shared this with me from an old like, Time magazine article, but this was the chart about an hour earlier for the launch of the very first website on the world wide web. And I thought it was really interesting; it’s set for August 6th, 1991, at 2:56 PM in Geneva, Switzerland. And the chart has 18 Scorpio rising with Pluto right on the Ascendant at 17 Scorpio. There’s a little stellium in Virgo with the Midheaven at two Virgo, Mercury at five Virgo, Venus at six Virgo, Mars at 13 Virgo, a Sun-Jupiter conjunction in the 10th whole sign house, the Moon in Gemini in the 8th, and Saturn placed at two degrees of Aquarius in the 4th whole sign house.
So I’d been emphasizing and talking about this a lot. Originally, actually, Sam Reynolds was the one that shared this chart with me for the one for an hour later, basically, when this guy announced the world wide web and the existence of it. But it means that part of what we’ve been seeing in the second quarter of 2020 is the Saturn return of the internet. And it’s been interesting seeing how some of these themes and trends were already happening. It’s like, people were already using Zoom and people were already using online forums or taking classes online and other things like that. But what happened is, like, a crisis which is suddenly accelerating the adoption of some of these things. Even for me personally.
Like, I know I’ve had the ability, and my bank rolled out the ability to just scan checks and deposit them like that, you know, over the past few years without having to go into a branch. But I always just felt better like, walking into the branch and depositing all of my checks every once in a while, and that’s what I did until recently I just couldn’t do that anymore because they don’t have any open branches. And they basically make you deposit them online, so it sort of forced me to download this app and install it and scan the checks and realize how easy it was, and it took like, five minutes and it was done. So now I’ll probably do that from this point forward, maybe even for the rest of my life, but I wouldn’t have done it probably if not prompted with that necessity to – with sort of being forced into adopting that new technology. And I feel like that’s one of the major themes that we’re seeing come out with this early preview of Saturn in Aquarius is a crisis leading to the push to adopt new technologies and to accelerate the move to adopt them faster, perhaps, than they would have happened otherwise.
AC: Yeah. Well, it’s – yeah, on a very simple level, the adoption of the new is accelerated because the old isn’t just worn down; it’s broken or no longer available. And one of the larger – probably the largest – astrological framing device for 2020 is this shift out of, you know, a 200-ish year Jupiter-Saturn cycle – the earth cycle – into a new 200-ish year air cycle. And the, you know, you can really see what’s coming under criticism, what’s breaking, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of these things aren’t just recent developments. You know, to go back to the Floyd protests and everything that came out of that, you know, the structures and institutions that are being critiqued, that shit wasn’t invented 10 years ago or 15 years ago. We’re looking at things with centuries of depth, and that’s what’s coming under critique. And that, you know, that’s what the Jupiter-Saturn cycle is supposed to tell us, right? We’re literally shifting out of and doing this really sort of painful review of all of the horrors of the last couple hundred years, right? And you can see that as like, that bigger shift as an undercurrent to the moments this year. Right? It’s not just like, yeah, I made my point. I won’t overtalk it.
CB: What do you think, Kelly?
KS: Yeah, to pick up on the – yeah, the education and technology piece is really interesting, because this has been happening as you mentioned, Austin, at all levels of education. So university is a particular beast because there’s a lot more money that changes hand, you know, if you like, from the individual to the institution. But even primary, elementary, grade school – you know, having to try and teach or educate in some form five-year-olds and seven-year-olds and nine-year-olds online has been part of the learning experience, maybe not everywhere, but in many places in this last few months in this second quarter. And it has highlighted the possibilities of what, you know, learning online can look like. It’s highlighted – you know, because of my husband’s position, we’ve had some really interesting discussions about how some children who are quite shy in a group of 25 or 30 kids and may not be vocal or may not participate in team activities have really sort of shone or thrived when they’ve been able to use technology to express themselves, or they’ve been able to work maybe individually with technology. So for instance, the difference between standing up in front of a room of 30 people live and presenting versus recording your five or your seven-minute talk and then sharing it – it’s allowed some children to really thrive. So there’s been, it’s sort of, it’s really challenging educational norms and accepted practices. But it’s also highlighted some of the inequities around if you put everyone online, does every child have access to the internet, or does every child have access to a technological device that they can use for their schooling? Because that’s not true in every household and in every situation. So it’s like, there’s this potential, but with that Saturn-Uranus square vibe, there is – there are still many kinks in the system that need to be explored or, you know, figured out. But it’s sort of like, that sense of a preview of what could go, and if we go in that direction, what are some of the problems we’re gonna have to come up with solutions for.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
CB: One of the other themes that I’ve seen come up that I think is gonna become a bigger thing over the next two to three years is it’s been interesting, you know, when the internet was started and so much of its early history was its openness, and that’s one of the things that really helped with its adoption and its proliferation was just that it was an open system and the ability to access information freely for the most part or to have the proliferation and the spread of information and knowledge much more widely than you could at any other time in history. But one of the issues I’ve noticed coming up over the past few months is struggles to put rules and sort of limitations on things, and to question what the boundaries are or when websites do have to put rules and stop certain types of information from being spread. So we’ve seen some of that with like, YouTube and other sites banning what became labeled as like, misinformation about covid and videos that were seen as like, not good or were spreading false conspiracies about it or something like that. And they started cracking down on some of those videos for the first time and saying, “No, that type of content isn’t allowed.” And while I didn’t have personally much objection to that, I could see at some point if that becomes a broader theme as part of Saturn in Aquarius and the first Saturn return of the internet if astrology couldn’t end up sort of in a problematic place on some of these sites as well. Like, at what point does astrology – which is usually labeled as a pseudoscience – run up against attempts to control or stop the spread of disinformation if it gets labeled as such? It’s one of the things that made me a little bit nervous about that trend towards trying to stop the flow of misinformation.
KS: Yeah. It is really interesting to think about that as, like, we’ve mentioned it before, but just to have that reminder of the Saturn return of the internet and how is it going to be, I don’t know, restructured if you like. What are gonna be the rules here in the future? And how is that – you know, is it going to be restrictive, or is it going to have some safety elements, or is it, you know, swinging between both?
CB: Yeah, because it’s like, I —
AC: Well, and also —
CB: It’s been opened up —
AC: Go ahead.
CB: — more than that. It wasn’t just restrictions against like, covid misinformation, but now recently there’s been also like, certain sites like Twitter putting warnings in front of some of Trump’s tweets that things that were misinformation or that had been labeled as misinformation were suddenly being called out on that platform, which suddenly led to indignation about politicizing the platform or whatever. And that seems like it might be a theme that we see come back next year and become an even bigger ongoing discussion about the rules and limitations of the internet and when content platforms have an obligation to like, police their content to some extent that is put out by their users.
AC: Yeah, I think that’s a good call. I think that’ll be front page news on the nonexistent newspapers for the next couple years. And I would also add to that, you know, in a way, so we’ve had this sort of like, everything is forced online – or not everything, but as much as possible has been pushed online over the last couple months. And in addition to formal rules and restrictions or obligations, there’s also the – I think it’s become increasingly obvious to everyone that if we’re all gonna be on the internet, we all have to learn to be on the internet together. And that like, social norms, you know, that social norms, customs, expectations – I don’t wanna say politeness, but like, respect – have not caught up with how many people are on the internet. Right? The internet’s sort of like, it was this place where people would go and blow off steam or pretend to be somebody else or, you know, just vent, right? And when everybody’s on the internet and it’s just like, another layer of society, it’s not this extra place. Right? It’s just part of the place that the people live. And our social norms haven’t really caught up to that. But they’re gonna kind of have to, right, both in that formal sense that you were describing, Chris, but as well as just on a relational sense.
You know, people say —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — things online they would never say to another person in real life face-to-face.
CB: Right. As the internet becomes more of not a secondary, like, minor means of communication but in some instances as our primary or only means of communication and interaction with the outside world or with whatever our community is at large, like, one’s identity maybe becoming more relevant in terms of that.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So as we continue to go through and sort of wrap up, June – I mean, one of the things that happened was the Venus retrograde, and Venus has just stationed a few days ago on the 25th of June, so we’re now finally coming out of the Venus retrograde territory. Did you guys have any observations about that, either public or like, personal ones in your own lives?
AC: I have a hilarious story that I told you both privately that I’m not going to tell. Let’s just say —
KS: I have a —
AC: — that there were —
KS: Yeah.
AC: There was some hilarious romance gone awry moments with Kait and I. We planned a very nice evening and a hilarious Venus retrograde things happened that I will tell anyone in person. If we ever go to another conference again, ask me about it and I will probably tell you the story.
KS: In real life. Yeah. I mean, we had – because Gemini’s 4th house for me, and we had just almost like, a cliche retrograde planet in the 4th house. We had a repair required on our home back in Canada – you know, the tenants sort of let us know there’s this thing is not working – so we’re calling the repair people from Belgium to Canada. A part’s gonna be needed. Oh, the part’s gonna take a while to get here. So it was just almost one of those cliche problem comes up around the house area; it’s fixable, but there’s gonna be a delay because we’ve got this retrograde planet there. What about you, Chris?
CB: Yeah, it was really pretty notable for me; I had a ton of 4th house stuff because my IC is there in early Gemini at five degrees of Gemini, which is where Venus actually stationed direct. So pretty much the entire Venus retrograde for me was a lot of 4th house stuff. Some of that’s like, tied in overlapping with the Saturn transit, because Saturn going into Aquarius is then my waxing Saturn square, and it’s in my first house and then therefore squaring all of my angular whole sign houses and stuff like that. So it’s a little hard to disentangle completely from that. But as some of the 4th house IC things I was having was like, learning more about my father who passed away when I was very young and like, what his life was like and background and hearing more about his life story from initially my mother, but then randomly late in the Venus retrograde, my uncle who’s my father’s brother who I’d only seen like, one other time in the past 20 years – about like, 12 years ago – just decided to come out to Colorado for a vacation a couple weeks ago. And he brought like, his two children was like, his daughter and his son. So I met my cousins for the first time ever. And yeah, that was really weird. And then was able to talk to my uncle more about my father and learn more about him, and it was very Venus-retrograde-y stationing on my IC.
At the same time, my mom found the birth certificate of my older brother who passed away in infancy, and it was one of the one birth times of my entire family that I’d never had, and she just randomly found it somewhere just a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago. Again, Venus stationing on my IC and like, completing that last piece of my family tree astrologically.
Weirdly, and this is funny and more relevant for the podcast, Venus stationed direct and the day that the lunar eclipse happened in Sagittarius, it was at 15 degrees of Sagittarius and it was conjunct my Venus at 15 degrees of Sagittarius, and that’s the ruler of my 4th whole sign house. And just outside my window, they started taking down the scaffolding where starting last August they had put up this scaffolding and then very loudly had been doing construction on my walls just outside my window for just months and months and months from eight o’clock in the morning until five o’clock at night six days a week. And you could hear the clanking and the drilling and stuff on some of the episodes of the podcast going back to, I think, our forecast in August or September when they first started doing the construction randomly during our episode. And all of a sudden, with that Venus retrograde stationing on my IC and the eclipse happening on the ruler of my 4th, suddenly that ended. And it just like, dissolved outside of my window, and suddenly I can like, see outside the window again for the first time in almost a year, which was pretty insane.
KS: Quite revelatory.
AC: That’s so good.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I know that that’s been torturing you, and ruining a lot of sleep for you and Leisa.
CB: Yeah. Like, we basically are just not getting sleep, and it was rough for almost a year now. So having the Venus retrograde removing some of those things and sort of revisiting that and remembering what it was like to, like, be able to look outside the window was a nice thing that happened.
And it was initially making me a little bit nervous about seeing the 4th house significations come out more with Venus retrograding in the IC’s sign and thinking about the 4th quadrant house and that whole issue about quadrant versus whole sign houses, but it’s really complicated just because I’m in a 12th house profection year. So if you profect from Gemini, which is the sign that contains my IC, it then goes to Taurus, so Venus gets activated as the ruler of the year relative to the IC’s sign. So it’s like, not as clean as I would like it to be, and there’s like, overlapping reasons why that Venus retrograde would be so important in different ways for 4th house things in addition to the lunar eclipse on my natal Venus.
AC: Yeah. Well, I mean, Venus rules your 4th, right? So big Venus action, 4th house action.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah. Not a great example, but in some ways it’s a great example in the sense that no matter, regardless of which house system or style of house system you used, it would still point to 4th house things for you. And you kind of got all of it, right? Home and family.
CB: Right. Yeah. And then speaking of, because finding the chart of my brother was wild because then there was this Jupiter transit that went exact in his chart where it was like, transiting Jupiter hitting the degree exact to the minute of the ruler of his Ascendant the day that I got the birth time. And again, that theme or that idea of like, your birth chart living on even after you did because you still live on in other people’s memories in some way or other people’s consciousness. And when that comes up again, your chart getting activated for some reason. There’s a whole like, aspect to that in astrology that I’d really love to explore more, although obviously it can be very hard to research.
KS: Yeah. I mean, the piece about family history is really relevant, and I had a couple of things on that front, Chris, that you’re speaking to, and it sort of reminds me this time around, too, you know, this Venus retro in Gemini did have that Mercury rulership in Cancer. Like, particularly in June. Towards the end of the Venus retrograde, I called up two of my aunts who were mother-type figures for me when I was a child. And I was calling them up, and I said to each of them, “I have this memory of a story that you told us about our grandparents, and I don’t know if all the details are right, and can you confirm for me, you know, the specifics?” And so there was one memory that I had when my grandparents got married – my grandmother’s Lebanese and my grandfather’s English – and I remember being told that when they got married, neither of their parents attended the wedding because it was, and I couldn’t remember why, and I’m like, “Was that true? And why didn’t they attend?” And so, you know, I was able to get clarification about it was my grandfather’s parents that didn’t attend but my grandmother’s parents did, and it was because of religion, although ethnicity played a role in there as well. So it was just that sense of like, vague —
CB: Wow.
KS: — vague family memories, and I was like, “I wanna clarify this,” and you know, calling up and then luckily we do that these sort of family historian type aunts in the family who were able to say, “Well, this is exactly what happened, and this is why,” and so it was really interesting to get that sense. You know, and for me, it was 4th house and whatever house system you use it would be – I’ve got a Gemini IC, too, but it is in the whole sign 4th as well.
CB: Okay.
KS: So going back, not even to my parents, but into my grandparents’ experience, so that’s been really interesting.
CB: I love that; that’s really good. So you did, you were able to clarify the reasons basically why or who was there —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — and why?
KS: Why, and I thought it was both their parents that didn’t attend, but it was just my grandfather’s English parents that didn’t attend. So my grandmother who’s Lebanese, her parents came. She was Catholic, and at that time in Australia in the earlier part of the 20th century, being Catholic was apparently quite a scandal, or it certainly was to my grandfather’s family who were English who were Protestant and very anti-Catholic. So it was just interesting to get some of those religious themes coming through. And you know, my aunts said, you know, Grandma being Lebanese wouldn’t have helped the situation, so there was a little bit of that ethnicity immigrant component as well there.
So it was just interesting to feel like unraveling these little threads of stories that I’d heard, what was actually true, and what were the reasons for it. So that’s – I’m really happy about that, because it’s now started a dialogue around helping me better understand my family ancestry going back more than just, you know, mom and dad, which is super interesting.
CB: Was that something interesting for you this month with everything going on and a lot of the discussion and reflections this month about race and racism and having – realizing that some of that was in your family history in terms of tensions with family members maybe not showing up —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — due to reasons like that?
KS: Yeah, it just – it did make me question what is in my own background in regards to this? And I feel like there’s still a lot more that I need to understand, but certainly trying to understand – because I’ve always felt a real affinity with the immigrant experience and reminding myself that, you know, both my grandparents are immigrants. I mean, you know, they’re Australian, so they are immigrants; they’re not Native Australian Aboriginal; they’re not First Nations. So they’ve come from somewhere at some point, but you know, to find out the reasons why. So I still have more questions to go back.
Yeah, so just to understand, you know, I’d heard different experiences about my father being bullied for his ethnicity growing up, so just wanting to understand a little bit more about the nuances there. So that has been, yeah, I guess a personal experience of some of the collective energy.
CB: Yeah. Definitely.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s been, there’s been a lot of really positive discussions I feel like that have come up about – and I think this has been positive for the astrological community in terms of centering more and having more discussions about race as a relevant thing that needs to be discussed in the astrological community and seeing lots of astrologers reflecting on that seems like it’s been a positive or constructive thing, even though some of it’s been difficult or painful or coming out of something that was tragic or horrendous. Have you seen —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — I don’t know, have you been reflecting on any of that, Austin? Or what has your reaction been?
AC: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve just been trying to pay attention and think about things. And I guess what I’m seeing in the astrological community but just in the world in general is and what I take from – or one of the things that I take from – all the protests and everything and just all the discussion, all that, is like, at least we’re, I feel like people are agreed on the problems. Like, the problems can be stated, and even if there aren’t clear, easy-to-implement solutions, at least sort of the problem is laid out and people agree that there are problems. Right? I don’t see a lot of agreement on answers, but that comes next. And you don’t get problems before you get – or excuse me, you don’t get solutions before you get an agreement of what is the problem. And so that’s one of the positive things – I would say that’s my main positive takeaway about the last month. You know, it’s not like everything that happened was great, right? It’s 2020. There’s, it’s messy and difficult. But you know, it’s like, at least we can – and part of my thinking is like, in that sort of quarterly framing and the Saturn-Uranus framing is well, if we can at least agree on problems, then maybe when Jupiter comes around to join Saturn in Aquarius during that next go-around, then maybe that’ll be a solutions phase. Because I’m pretty bummed out by the second half of 2020. And so I’m not hopeful for solutions to anything on a collective level, but you know.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of difficult stuff still ahead and a lot of negative stuff that will continue. But in terms of at least seeing like, small incremental steps towards change, even in our own community, I feel like there’s been some really promising things.
It felt really cliche to use the phrase in my discussion with Sam Reynolds earlier this month, but I actually have been doing like, a lot of listening and learning and just trying to shut up and hear people’s experiences, and that’s been really eye-opening to me as like, a white male in western American society, because I don’t have access to some of the same experiences. And while that’s like, obvious – like, we know that as astrologers on some level intellectually – like, hearing other people’s stories and struggles with things like racism is really an important element that if you’re not subject to it or you don’t experience it, you need to be able to hear those stories directly from people in order to fully understand the scope and the extent of the issue. And I think part of the human condition, that’s something I’ve been struggling with or thinking about a lot, especially as it relates to covid, but also as it relates to racism, is that part of the human condition is not being able to fully empathize sometimes as well if you haven’t experienced a hardship yourself. And that was something I was seeing come across in discussions with occasionally people who were like, “Well, I haven’t gotten sick yet with covid and nobody I know has gotten sick, so I don’t think it’s a big deal.” Like if they weren’t directly impacted by it it wasn’t as real for them in some tangible sense. I was almost seeing like, a similar thing when it came to people having that as like, a blindspot when it came to issues of racism. So that was one of the positive things to me where I felt like there was some change in terms of people paying more attention in the astrological community that seemed like a positive development in a good direction.
Did you guys feel like you say some of those discussions as well? Kelly?
KS: I mean, the discussions where just sort of trying to listen more to people of color and their experiences, but particularly Black people. Is that kind of what you’re asking, Chris? Like, just the listening component of taking in more or hearing what people are saying?
CB: Yeah, and understanding that because even though we all – especially as white people or people that are passing as white or what have you – don’t have that direct experience, but if you’re talking to and listening to somebody and actually hearing what they’re saying and paying attention, like, you can develop a much better idea. But sometimes people don’t pay as much attention as they should, or they have some like, abstract idea that maybe racism still exists out there, but having not as much personal experience with it, they don’t really understand as much as they think that they do.
KS: Yeah, I think there is some, yeah, I mean – I’m just trying to get my thoughts together. Just because you haven’t experienced something for sure does not mean that it is not out there in the world, and I think that’s why it has been eye-opening for some people in these last few weeks to have had their eyes opened about things that they didn’t personally experience, or even maybe they benefited from – you know, if you have white privilege or you pass as white, you know, the way that things can be more helpful for you without you even realizing it.
CB: Right.
KS: I think it’s been, yeah, it’s been very eye-opening personally but also just collectively, and to have these conversations and to realize that there’s a lot that needs to be done to make up for is not the right word, I think – you know, repair or to try to create something that might be genuinely equal or fair, and it’s not gonna happen overnight. Yeah. So I guess it’s been a starting point maybe.
CB: Yeah, or even like, one of the discussions I had at the beginning of the month, and it was from seeing her talk at NORWAC, was with Diana Rose Harper and just talking about different areas of privilege and maybe even a way that you could identify that with your chart as a blindspot of somewhere where you’ve had positive things that have happened or come to you through no actions on your own part, and therefore it just becomes something you take for granted or don’t realize is something that not everybody else has access to. And having that awareness from an astrological perspective, I feel like, was important and can lead to a deeper level of understanding about the human condition in general as an astrologer. But because of the nature of privilege, some people don’t recognize that. And sometimes that word, even using that word can like, trigger people or have them immediately reject the concept out of hand due to some preconception about what that means.
All right. So —
KS: Yeah.
CB: Should we transition into talking about – how far through this are we? We’re, what, an hour in, so —
KS: We’re about an hour in.
AC: An hour in.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I said we would transition into talking about the astrology of July. We’ve gotta do a number of news and announcements first, so is this is a good maybe stop transition or stopping point to do that?
AC: Yeah, I just wanted to say that that point was really interesting, and that’s about like, just knowing your own chart means knowing where the benefics and the malefics and all that are. Like, you know, if you know that and you read for other people as well, you know where you’re lucky and where you’re not. You know where other people are lucky and where they’re not, and that’s a nice thing about spending a lot of time with astrology is that it disabuses you of that notion that like, your normal is everyone’s normal. It’s like, no —
CB: Right.
AC: — that’s normal for you, because you have a Jupiter-Venus conjunction in that house, right? Whereas, you know, that’s not – if you look around, you’ll see that that’s abnormal. And in many ways, figuring out how we’re luckier and unluckier than the average person is part of what astrology is. You know, we’ve got all these assumed things that are similar, like everybody can get sick, everybody will die, everybody has some good days and some bad days, but where are the deviations from the baseline? And astrology’s great for that. And that’s interesting to think about in that larger sense that you were describing.
CB: Yeah, just because it’s so – it can be so hard for people, and you don’t realize it because it’s a blindspot to otherwise realize those things that you take for granted, and that that’s a whole class of things that because you take them for granted, you can’t sometimes identify as unique until somebody points it out to you. And often that ends up being – for me, that was something I was struggling with, and I did an early episode with Ben Dykes, it was like, episode 19 or something like that on subjective versus objective reality where I was continually running into this issue of clients of just them not being able to analyze their lives objectively because they didn’t have like, an objective standard to compare it to necessarily. Whereas as an astrologer, having seen like, hundreds of people with different charts and different life setups, you could easily see how this person’s life was different in certain areas, and they had certain instances of let’s say privilege or whatever the opposite of privilege is in different areas, and they were taking both for granted. Like, if they had something really positive in one area, they would take it for granted that everybody had that positive thing. Or if they had something really negative that was a hardship for them or a shortcoming or something that was unfortunate, they would sometimes universalize that and just take it for granted that everybody deals with that. Or it’s like, everybody has a bad relationship with let’s say their parents if that was the area where they struggled with, not knowing that some people it’s like, the exact opposite or what have you. And you can apply that to any area of life or all 12 of the houses.
AC: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: All right. Well, so why don’t we move on. There was some stuff I wanted to make sure that we mention, because there’s a lot of like, news and events and community things happening. One of the biggest things that’s happening in July that I wanted to be sure that we gave a shout out to is the Queer Astrology Conference is happening July 10th through the 12th. And this is gonna be an online conference that anybody can attend. It’s got an amazing lineup of speakers and a great core group of organizers. This is actually gonna be the 4th conference that they’ve organized. Austin, didn’t you attend like, one of the early ones or —
AC: Yeah, I attended —
CB: — were you —
AC: — the first one.
CB: It was the very first one? Okay.
AC: Yeah, it was in San Francisco. That was, you know, back in the other universe of I think 2012? 2013?
CB: Okay.
AC: And —
CB: Back when the world —
AC: — yeah, that —
CB: — didn’t end.
AC: Right! Yet another apocalypse. Yeah, I was the – back then, I was the president of the Association for Young Astrologers, following you, and we tried – we promoted it, and it was just down, well, more than down the street, but it was local. So I was there.
CB: Nice.
AC: And it was great. Is it – are they doing every two years? Is that it? Or is it a little bit more informal?
CB: I think it’s a little bit more spaced out, just depending on like, time and circumstances and who’s organizing. I did an interview way back in episode 83 with Ian Waisler, who was the original I think like, head organizer of the first Queer Astrology Conference and some of the followups, including there’s a really great compilation of papers that they published afterwards that I really loved that Ian edited with Rhea Wolf. And we talked about that a little bit in episode 83. But the other ones have been a bit more sporadic. It seems like there’s a newer and younger group of people that’s really taking charge and organizing this one, and I’m kind of exciting about how they’re doing it, both in organizing, bringing in more young people, and bringing in a diverser audience, but also trying to diversify the lineup of talks and the topics as well.
AC: There are a lot of talks.
KS: Yeah, the speaker list, yeah. It’s a lot. Sorry, Austin, go.
AC: Oh, just, you know, I was just comparing it in my mind to that first one where, I mean, it wasn’t that the lineup was empty; there were just maybe, I don’t know, six, seven, eight, definitely under 10 speakers, where it seems like there’s a lot of talks and a lot of people this time. It seems like it has grown.
CB: Yeah. So you can find out more information about that at QueerAstrology.com. And yeah, they’ve already got registration up. There’s a really great lineup of speakers. Let me see if I can pull up the speaker page a little bit just to show it on the screen for those watching the video version. It’s running a little bit slow. But I noticed a lot of younger astrologers who may not even be people that you see on the normal lecture circuit, and that’s one of the cool things about this is I think they’re trying to bring in more astrologers whose voices maybe hadn’t been seen at other conferences or major conferences so far. Yeah, just people I know – Daniel Bernal, Deon Mitchell, Danny Larkin, Drew Levanti, Irina Tudor, Hilary Spiteri, Kirah Tabourn – is Kirah actually hear today? I know she was at the last live recording of this.
KS: I think Irina might be here today.
CB: Yeah, Irina is joining us today. Michael Morris, who I’m hoping to have on the show soon. Mychal Bryan, who is really awesome. Yeah, there’s just a great lineup of speakers. But like I said, that’s happening July 10th through the 12th, 2020. You can find out more information at QueerAstrology.com. And yeah, there’s like, a few speakers who are gonna be there that I didn’t know were speaking at that, but they’re gonna be on the podcast this month, so hopefully we can promote it even more over the course of the next couple of weeks before it happens.
AC: Be nice coordination.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
All right, other news and announcements that we’ve got going on. This is actually the five-year anniversary. Did you guys realize that we’ve been doing these forecast episodes for five years now, ever since late June of 2015?
KS: I saw that in our prep notes, and I was like, “That’s a typo! It’s not been five years yet!” But —
CB: Right.
KS: And then I was like, no, it was 2015, so it really has been five years.
AC: It feels like five years.
KS: Does it? Okay.
AC: I don’t know; it just feels like this has been life. Like, this has been literally a regular monthly part of life for, I don’t know, let’s see – I’ve lived three different places, I think, since we began. So it’s – or no, four different places, right? So it’s just sort of like, you know, it’s just been a constant while a lot of other things have changed. So yeah —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — it does, you know. Also, you know, because it’s so agonizing, and it just feels like it’s been forever. No.
CB: Here’s the chart, because I always remember it because it was that Venus-Jupiter conjunction —
KS: Venus-Jupiter. Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
CB: It was that Venus-Jupiter conjunction where Venus was getting ready to go retrograde, and then it would fall back towards Jupiter. And I remember that summer, because that was the summer where I was – we always associate, a lot of astrologers associate that Venus retrograde with the Supreme Court decision in the United States on same-sex marriage that basically legalized it with that Venus retrograde conjunct Jupiter in Leo. And that happened to be, it was like, Kelly, you and I had just started doing a bunch of episodes together after hanging out at NORWAC for —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — one of the early times. And then we just started doing the forecast like, the month before after coming back from NORWAC and having the idea at that conference. And we’d done one of them, and then we were getting ready to do our second forecast, and Austin happened to be visiting for a tarot conference that he was speaking at in Denver that weekend. And at the last minute before we jumped on the call, I just asked if it would be okay if Austin joined us and asked Austin if he wanted to just like, hop on for this wacky thing —
KS: Yeah!
CB: — that we were doing with the monthly look-ahead at the next month. And he was like, “Sure, why not?” And here we are five years later.
KS: And —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — the rest is – it was one of those real sort of synchronistic, couldn’t have planned it, but it worked out better than if we could have planned it, basically, and then we just went forward every month since then like a ritual.
CB: Yes, it has snowballed and taken on a life of its own.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So —
AC: That is has.
KS: It really has.
CB: That’s one of the other —
KS: So if we were together in person, if we weren’t social distancing, we could have cake. But we’ll have to – we’ll do that separately.
CB: Yeah, maybe some virtual cake later after the episode is over.
Other stuff I wanted to mention – there is a translation project that started recently for ancient astrological texts that’s kind of new and innovative and interesting, and I wanted to make sure I mentioned it. It’s called the HOROI Project – H O R O I – which is like, a Greek term which means like, the hour, sort of like the hour marker or the original term for the Ascendant. But it’s put together by a guy, an astrologer and scholar named Levente Laszlo, and he’s basically, he’s gonna crowdfund or crowdsource the funding of translations, basically, of all of the surviving ancient astrological texts, especially ones in Greek, that have not been translated yet. Because, of course, Project Hindsight ended prematurely and didn’t finish its sort of mandate of translating the surviving corpus of astrological texts. So there’s a lot of work left to be done.
So Levente basically is, he recently went through college and he has or is about to finish his PhD in classics and in the study of ancient texts. And he’s especially trained in studying ancient Greek manuscripts and translating texts from ancient Greek into English. So he started a Patreon page in order to fund this, and basically if we can get it funded, especially between now and September, he’s just like, translating stuff and then he’s immediately publishing it on his Patreon page. So he just released the other day this amazing translation, and I believe it’s actually public, so whether you’re signed up for the Patreon or not, this amazing translation of Julian of Laodicea’s instructions on how to use or interpret the astrological elements and inceptions. So it’s basically this Greek text that gives a bunch of rules and a bunch of aphorisms for Hellenistic electional astrology, and it gives some really cool stuff, including some different rules on eclipses and what eclipses indicate, what the nodes mean, and different things like that. Like, a lot of stuff that I think you guys would be really interested in.
Here’s one passage. It says,
“When there is a solar eclipse, the change will happen because of the decease of a powerful person. But when it’s a lunar eclipse, because of some common experience or the death of a woman.”
Yeah, so obviously it’s like, an ancient 5th century astrological texts, but there’s a lot of really cool stuff in there. And so I wanted to give people a head’s up about this. You can find out more information just by going to Patreon.com/HOROIProject, and I’ll put a link to that in the description below this episode either below the YouTube video or on the description page for this episode on TheAstrologyPodcast.com.
But pretty —
AC: That’s awesome.
CB: — pretty cool, huh?
AC: Yeah, that’s – I didn’t know about that. That’s great.
KS: That looks amazing.
AC: Shower him with cash, monthly cash.
CB: Yeah, basically. Because if we can get him funded, like, he’s already cranking out a ton of texts over the past few months. And I believe this guy will actually go through and finish translating everything that is left to translate, and he’s already making great headway so far.
So that’s exciting —
AC: Awesome.
CB: — in terms of the ongoing project to revive the rest of ancient astrology. Other news – I didn’t write this down, but jury is still out about ISAR conference in September of 2020. Do you guys think we’ll be meeting up in person?
KS: No!
CB: No.
KS: Definitely not in person. And I’m surprised that call has not been made already. I think —
CB: I think —
KS: — they should leave it ‘til next year, but you know, it’s not up to me to decide.
CB: I think the big thing I heard is just the conference, the hotel may still be keeping them on the line for like, a huge amount of money where if the conference pulls out first, they owe the money. But if the laws are still in place that don’t allow large gatherings in Colorado past a certain date in July or something, that then it’s okay and they can get out of it.
KS: That’s right.
CB: But there’s —
KS: Yeah, there’s a —
CB: — there’s still some —
KS: — financial reason. Yeah.
CB: The discussion has shifted to whether they should do a fully online conference, a big online conference in September, or whether they should move it and just try to wait until some time next year and try to reschedule an in-person conference for some time in 2021. And I know that they sent out some sort of poll or something to their membership a few weeks ago. Did either of you guys take the poll?
KS: I took the poll.
CB: You took the poll?
KS: Yes.
CB: What was your vote? Can we ask you your vote, or is that like, private?
KS: Yeah, of course! Yeah —
CB: Okay!
KS: — I feel like I’m comfortable to share this particular vote! My preference is that they hold it over to try and do an in-person event in the second half of next year. You know, if people can commit to September, September obviously works for them. I personally prefer to connect in person when it is safe to do so, so for me personally I’d rather wait and see if that’s a possibility. It may or may not be! you know, we haven’t looked at all the detailed astro of next year yet, but I’m happy not to do it this year for sure. Yeah.
CB: Okay.
KS: We’ll see.
AC: I —
KS: Did you take the —
AC: I concur.
KS: — quiz, Austin? Yeah.
AC: “The quiz!”
KS: You’re happy not to do it this year?
AC: Yeah, I passed the test.
KS: You passed the test!
AC: No, I didn’t – I have not had – when I go to my inbox, it is to shovel all of, you know, to do some digging and to get less behind on correspondence. And so no, I’m not like, okay – what I took from that was like, oh, the question is still open.
KS: Yeah.
AC: I wonder what they’re going to do. But I —
CB: Yeah.
AC: Maybe I should vote, if it’s still open. Because I think in person later would be nice.
CB: Yeah, if it can happen. It’s just hard because we don’t – who knows in like, 2021 what it’s gonna look like in terms of the specific details about whether you can have a meeting of or a conference with, you know, 500 to a thousand people or something, or whether there’s still social distancing restrictions in place due to whatever happens with the virus over the course of the next six months.
AC: Yeah. It’s a lot of uncertainty.
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was one of the other news and announcements. Final piece of news and announcements is our friends at the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs have just released, just dropped in the past few weeks, this update of version 2.0 of their personal astrological almanacs. And what was really cool and what I love about their company, aside from them – for full disclosure – being one of our sponsors for this episode, is they sent out updates to everybody who had already purchased the almanac months ago that gave this new add-on that they just released to the almanac which includes a ton of new stuff. Like, new monthly overviews, void-of-course Moon times, solar return charts. They also changed some of the font sizes and the different layouts that are available for the almanac. And the coolest thing for me is they intercreated this Hellenistic plug-in, and they’re just calling this like, the beta version of the plug-in and they’re sort of testing it at this point. But it has a ton of cool Hellenistic and traditional concepts integrated into it, including this really cool visual zodiacal releasing layout. Can you guys see this on your screen?
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like, a graphic version of the zodiacal releasing periods that lets you see exactly where you are in your zodiacal periods, and also gives you the broader overview of like, what’s happening over the course of your lifetime, if you’re looking at the level two periods, or over the course of a decade or over the course of the next year if you’re looking at your level three periods. And like, I had talked with them and worked with them a little bit as they were developing their graphical version of this to sort of finetune it, and I’m really happy and excited with how it came out.
So I think they sent you guys some online versions; I got a print version for me and Leisa which I like because they’ve got a new larger size format as well as their normal one. But did you guys have a chance to look through yours?
KS: Yeah, I had – I printed off some of the Hellenistic info that they added in. Yeah, so I got the PDF upgrade for the book that I already had, and yeah, it’s really interesting just to get, you know, the bonifications and the maltreatments listed. All the detailed dignity weighting is in there, plus, I mean, there’s so much more. It’s such a comprehensive publication. Like, how they do this much that’s so – like, all your bonifications and things.
CB: Yeah, look at – this is my favorite new page so far where it shows —
KS: Yeah!
CB: — like, a dignity breakdown of all of your placements and what the dignities and the rulers are. But it also shows this whole bonification and maltreatment breakdown of your positive placements and your challenging placements according to different ancient criteria, and the fact that they were able to come up with a program to automate some of this is just mindblowing to me, because this is stuff that usually you have to do and like, takes – like, Demetra has taught entire workshops on this where they spend a week going over how to —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — do this breakdown for your chart. And here they have a lot of it just like, on one page. And while it’s automated so it’s not quite the same as like, an astrologer sitting there and doing it with you, this is like, way, way more advanced than anything I’ve seen on sites like Astro.com or something like that. So I’m pretty excited about it. It might be kind of complicated for people that don’t have background in traditional astrology yet, but it’s a good starting point, and it’s something that you could use and then continue to grow and develop with, especially since one of the best things that you can do when you first start learning astrology – I think we’d all agree – is follow your transits on a regular basis and just know what planets are being activated in your chart in any given day in any given year, right?
KS: Yeah, just having the information at your fingertips – I mean, I keep thinking about something my husband says when he’s talking about educating children is if you give them the information, they’ll figure out what it means and how to use it. Like, you give the device, you give the technology, you give the information. And that naturally curiosity just kind of, you know, and that’s what this feels like. It’s giving – not that astrologers are children, but it’s giving everyone in astrology access to information that would often take a lot of labor to create or calculate or to work out. And it’s right there at your fingertips.
Now, you know, you’ve still gotta make sense of it. You’ve still gotta get some interpretive information behind, but you’ve got that starting point of here’s the data to work with.
CB: Yeah. So here’s the July breakdown. It shows like, what transits are going exact in your exact timezone, so it’s none of this like, some timezone several timezones off from you of east coast or west coast time. It’s like, your exact chosen timezone. Exact transits. And now it shows down in the bottom left corner what your level one, two, three, and four zodiacal releasing periods are that are active in any given day, which honestly is not something I ever saw that I would see in the planner. Like, this is why more than anything I ever anticipated in terms of finally being able to use some of these techniques and have them integrated in an everyday guide like this.
So I’d recommend checking it out. You can find out more information; in terms of the specifics, they’ve got a six-month and a 12-month version; the price for a six-month printed almanac is 22 dollars. 12-month almanac is only 35. There’s a digital version of each for 10 and 20 dollars, or you can add it onto the print one for only five dollars. You can find out more information at their website, which is just the Honeycomb Personal Astrological Almanac, which I believe is Honeycomb.co.
So thanks a lot to the Honeycomb people; it sounds like there’s a lot of people already in the chat that have theirs and are going crazy about it. Thanks for chiming in, everybody.
All right. Do you guys have any other news and announcements news before we move into the forecast for July?
KS: No.
AC: I don’t.
KS: I don’t think so.
CB: Okay. You guys are ready to get into looking at the future then, it sounds like.
AC: Yeah, maybe!
KS: Ready as —
CB: Maybe.
KS: — we’ll ever be!
CB: Okay! Let’s get into it then.
So let me put up a few things. I wanted to – in my NORWAC talk last month, I used more illustrations that I normally do, and I wanted to get in the habit of doing that because I think it’s helpful for people to have visuals and to be able to visualize some of this stuff perhaps more than just hear about it. So here’s the round calendar for the planetary movements just for the month of July. Can you guys see that?
AC: Mm-hmm.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So this just illustrates, for those watching the video version, where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and where they’ll end up in the signs of the zodiac by the end of the month. We’ve also got the planetary alignments, which just shows all of the ingresses and the lunations and other phenomenon that are gonna be occurring in the month of July. So Saturn retrograding back into Capricorn on July 1st, the lunar eclipse in Capricorn on July 5th. Mercury stationing direct in Cancer on the 12th. A New Moon in Cancer on the 20th. Then we have the Sun moving into Leo on the 22nd, and a Jupiter-Neptune sextile on the 27th. Those are sort of largely the main ingresses and stuff happening this month, right, Austin?
AC: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that’s not an ingress but weighs heavily on the month is Mars in Aries. Mars entered Aries, I don’t know, 12 hours ago. We’re here June 28th. But that’s, you know, just at the end of June, and Mars being in Aries is not only tremendously important for understanding July; it’s tremendously important for understanding the whole second half of the year. And —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — when we pair Mars’s ingress with Saturn’s regress into Capricorn, we have a pair of factors that really tell us a whole lot about the second half of 2020. Because Mars is gonna be in Aries for the second half of 2020, and Saturn will be in Capricorn until the last two weeks of the year. And so —
CB: Yeah. So now we’ve —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — even though —
AC: It’s really important.
CB: — the calendar doesn’t usually always work out this cleanly, like, this provides us a really stark transition point into the third quarter of 2020. And it also weirdly brings us back to many of the same energies or some of the same energies and dynamics from the first quarter of 2020 in terms of Saturn returning back into Capricorn where it was in the first three months of this year, and then also Mars moving back into a cardinal sign where it’s eventually gonna square Saturn and square Jupiter in Capricorn and square Pluto in Capricorn, which is a lot of what was happening that was really setting off stuff when the lockdowns and the coronavirus pandemic really hit hard, especially in the US in March and April, was that pileup of planets in late Capricorn.
AC: Yeah, getting activated by Mars. And so even though Mars won’t be in Capricorn like it was in the first quarter, it will still be activating all of that, especially a little later, but we definitely get some Mars this month. But just to kind of go back to that first quarter, and also to bring it back to our Saturn discussion, right, we talked a lot about what did this sneak peak of Saturn in Aquarius square Uranus, what was that like? What were the themes that we can expect to see in the next couple years? But Saturn’s return to Capricorn is it’s not just Saturn’s back in Capricorn; it’s back to Saturn-Pluto, right? We’re getting a reactivation of that pairing. And that is, as we all know now, heavy stuff, right? It’s —
CB: Yeah. I wanted to share this graphic. So I’ve been working a lot with – I’ve been promoting and talking about this company, it’s a website called Archetypal Explorer that gives you personal transit delineations, but one of the things that’s cool about it, it’s very much based on Richard Tarnas’s approach to archetypal astrology, which is more about especially outer planets and using wide orbs and looking at hard aspects and different aspects of the outer planets, especially in mundane astrology. But one of the things I love about Archetypal Explorer is it gives these amazing graphical ephemerises, basically, and I was working with Kyle to develop some ones to isolate some of these specific planetary cycles over large periods of time. And so I’m gonna show some of this. Any time you see a graph like this, it’s me bringing stuff over from Archetypal Explorer. This one shows, for people watching the video version, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction which of course went exact very early in 2020 and was sort of at its peak earlier this year. But this graph shows that we’re back, that we’re coming back into the upswing of the next closest hit of Saturn-Pluto, which doesn’t fully culminate until like, the September-October timeframe. But here now that we’re in July, we are on the very rapid like, upslope of that, especially once Saturn retrogrades back into Capricorn on the very 1st of July.
So —
KS: It’s great to see —
CB: — that’s fun.
KS: — it visually.
CB: Yeah. That’s the most —
KS: Well —
CB: — that’s the greatest thing you could say about that is it’s good to see it visually. It’s not —
KS: It’s good to see it visually.
CB: — maybe not so good to feel it viscerally.
KS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a good reminder that even though the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is not again exact by degree, it is close enough that we’re going to really feel those qualities of confinement or isolation, you know, oppression – those very intense Saturn-Pluto words. We’re going to have, you know, a reactivation or a revisiting.
CB: Yeah. And maybe I should show what that actually looks like on the screen, because it’s like, in July, this is a chart for July 5th. When Saturn retrogrades back into 29 degrees of Capricorn, that’s only five or six degrees off from the conjunction with Pluto at 23 degrees of Capricorn. And that’s only gonna get closer over the course of the next couple of months until eventually it looks like eventually —
KS: Saturn comes back to 25, I think, for his retrograde.
CB: 25? Yeah, it looks like Saturn stations direct in early – in late September at 25 degrees of Capricorn while Pluto’s at 22 degrees of Capricorn. So they’re only like, three degrees off. So for all intents and purposes, even though the conjunction isn’t exact, like, it’s super close once it gets to that timeframe. And July, the very beginning of July is the acceleration of that when Saturn moves back into basically the same sign or the same dwelling place of Pluto and reactivates that conjunction that had been, had gotten a little bit of separation by sign at least over the past few months.
AC: Yeah. I mean, I basically view that – Saturn’s return to Capricorn – as it just switches Saturn-Pluto on, and it’s on until the end of the year.
KS: Yeah, it’s good to maybe have a sense of the timing of when it might be a little more intense technically, but I think from an experiential perspective, Saturn coming back into Capricorn is like, the start of the feeling of that again.
CB: So the other fun fact, since we’re sharing fun facts and diagrams and graphic ephemerises at this point, is one of the things we focused on was how Mars ingressing into Capricorn and then eventually forming the exact conjunction with first Pluto in Capricorn, then Mars conjoining Jupiter in Capricorn, and then eventually Mars catching up to Saturn at the end of Capricorn in early Aquarius was in March and early April and happened to line up pretty nicely with the lockdowns in the US and the shooting up of the coronavirus tests and people being diagnosed with it, as well as people dying from it. That’s one of the things that’s coming back starting in July as well is Mars moving into Aries, as you said at the beginning of this segment, Austin, reactivates that, because now suddenly Mars is in another cardinal sign, and it’s gonna start making hard aspects with those same planets once again, which sort of recapitulates or brings us back to some of those energies of the March-April timeframe.
Now, that doesn’t fully start to hit actually until August and September, because that’s when the exact aspects between Mars and Pluto and Jupiter and Saturn actually go exact. But we’re basically in the buildup phase at this point as of the very end of June when Mars moved into Aries.
AC: Yeah. And so what we have in July is Mars-Mercury. We have more Mars-Mercury than you can, what was it, shake a stick at?
CB: Shake a stick at.
AC: That’s the figure of speech. Which – that makes sense. Mars shakes sticks. And I suppose Mercury is often depicted as having a fancy snake-covered stick. But so as the month begins, Mercury is retrograde in Cancer and will be retrograde until – is it the 12th? When does it station direct?
KS: July 12th. Yeah.
AC: Yeah. So and Mercury is retrograde until the 12th. But, you know, and often we look to, oh! Mercury’s finally direct; this’ll be, you know, things will get reorganized or things, you know, there’ll be less mess or chaos or whatever.
CB: Right.
AC: But it’s actually the direct station that is more of a pain in the ass, because we have Mercury retrograding back into a square with Mars, and then Mercury and Mars pace with each other because Mercury is slow right after that direct station. And so they’re just kind of hanging out together square for a lot of the month, a lot more of the month than we might prefer.
CB: Right. Like, literally the entirety of July is just like, one —
KS: Until the 27th. Yeah.
CB: — one long —
AC: Yeah, it’s just —
CB: — Mercury-Mars square.
KS: One long —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — growing, yeah.
AC: And so even though Mars isn’t setting Saturn-Pluto on fire this month, we will certainly – you’ll probably notice that Mars in Aries, right? But it’s through its effect on Mercury rather than the slower outer planets.
CB: Yeah, because I mean, what are some classic delineations of Mercury-Mars squares? It’s like, verbal altercations or getting into verbal arguments or having a verbal outburst of something like that.
AC: Yeah. Words as weapons.
CB: Words as weapons, yeah. The weaponization of words and communication and communication that is aggressive or trying to start a fight with somebody verbally or in terms of your —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — communication.
KS: Verbal attacks. I always think that’s sort of like the general thing is there’s this aggressive sort of quality of discord or tension or disagreement between Mercury and Mars. We’ll see heated conversations, contentious conversations, pointing the finger, and a lot of, if you like, aggression with conversation.
One thing I do hold a little bit of space for for all of us in our micro personal lives, some of us are not very outspoken. Some of us don’t speak up when we maybe could or it would serve us to do so. And —
CB: Yes.
KS: — sometimes, you know, if you’re more of a soft-spoken person, a pretty dynamic aspect like this might prompt you to say something that’s in your heart or you need to say your truth, you need to say your piece, and this kind of energy or aspect can make you so frustrated that you actually speak instead of holding your tongue, which might be your normal default. So as much as it is technically a difficult aspect and we will see that collectively, there can be some instances where the decisive or the expressive quality of this can prompt you to have an uncomfortable conversation – just because you say something doesn’t mean the discussion’s easy. The tenor of Mercury-Mars is a little bit of that heated quality. But in a personal situation, sometimes it can be really good to be more direct or explicit or clear. So I think there’s a little bit of that at an individual level that we could see.
CB: Definitely.
AC: I think it’s really nice.
CB: I couldn’t agree more. And the need sometimes for like, righteous indignation and for fighting words. Like, “fighting words” is a really great combination of —
KS: Them’s fighting words! Yeah!
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and I’m sure there will be some people that will use that in a productive way and that, even if it’s hard, like, the necessity sometimes of speaking out or speaking your mind in that way.
KS: Yeah, that’s sort of what I wish for some of – you know, I know I have clients and friends and family members that are a little bit more soft-spoken, and sometimes this kind of aspect can light a fire and make you so frustrated or angry that you overcome your fear of speaking. And you may get a slightly better result towards the end of the month when Mercury’s squaring Mars while it’s direct than you will at the start of the month, because there’ll be two exact aspects by degree. Around July 8th is the first one with Mercury retro, and then July 27th with Mercury direct. But as you showed on the chart and as Austin was saying, it’s a mood for the whole month of July because it’s only a few degrees apart even when it’s not exact.
CB: Yeah, definitely. So that might be on some level, that’s like, our keyword for this month and that might be our subtitle for this episode is “fighting words” or something like that might be a good subtitle for Mars-Mercury square for the entire month of July.
AC: Yeah. Well, and – agreed – and then just taking, you know, what does Mercury-Mars look like? you know, one of the less dramatic but relevant pieces of February and March this year was Mercury. Right? And Mercury being in, you know, what is classically rotten condition and that translating into people’s plans to go places and flit about here and there not working out. So I could definitely see with what things are looking like already at the end of June, I could definitely see some summer travel plans getting canceled or derailed.
KS: Yes.
CB: Right.
KS: Totally agree. And the other topic when you were reminding us of this earlier, Austin, reminded me that the US postal service came into the news for, you know, was under pressure back in that earlier time this year. And I wonder if we see any further discussion or debate about that come up through July as Mercury comes under pressure again.
AC: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, you know, I’m sure all the mail services are under – their logistics have been highly pressurized and will continue to be even more so, because even though there’s been some opening up and there’s some closing back down already starting, you know, everything is going through the mail. Right? Like Chris said about like, using a check depositing app —
KS: The checks.
AC: — a lot of people —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — are like, you know, they’re shopping – they had to shop online, and now it’s a habit, right? And so, you know, I’m sure whatever courier services are probably experiencing increased or accelerated wear and tear.
KS: That’s a great —
AC: And it’s a —
KS: — point, yeah.
AC: Oh, go ahead.
KS: Yeah. One of – somebody I know works in one of the postal services, and they had mentioned to me that, you know, in the postal system, the Christmas period is by far and above the busiest time of year. More parcels and letters get shipped in November and December than any other time of the year. But they were saying that April and May was as busy as their usual Christmas sort of. And you know, they don’t plan to staff at those levels at that time of the year. And so how does that, as you’re saying, when people are now going – you know, usually they expect the Christmas end of year rush to be two months. We’re going into months three and four in some places with potentially no let up. Yeah, what are the kinks and where do things maybe go a little awry?
AC: So I think you accidentally or – yeah, somewhat accidentally gave the most positive possible thing that we could say about 2020. It’s —
KS: Yeah?
AC: — Christmas all year long!
KS: If you work in the postal service! Or if you work in delivery or logistics! You know, if you’re shipping goods? That is probably – that’s true.
AC: It’s 12 months of Christmas.
KS: Yeah. It’s, yeah! I mean, I —
AC: Sometimes —
KS: — was online —
AC: — you have to laugh!
KS: — today ordering – yeah. Yeah! I mean —
AC: Go ahead.
KS: — when you said that, I was like, yeah, I ordered today some treat – like, the cat treat things that you give your cats so they don’t get bad breath or teeth or something, and I was like, oh, I’d run out because I usually have a bunch. I’m like, and that’s gonna come via the post in the next couple of days, and I’m like, that’s insane that they’re gonna get it here so quickly. Yeah. So the —
AC: So Chris, we figured out that 2020 is it’s Christmas all year long.
CB: Okay!
AC: Because according to Christmas levels of parcel delivery, right? The postal system.
KS: Specific to postage and parcel delivery!
AC: Right. But, you know, we can inaccurately generalize that statement for humor.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I like that.
KS: Yeah.
CB: That’s good. So Christmas all year, should that be our subtitle instead of “fighting words” for July?
KS: Could be a little —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — misleading, yeah. I was just talking about —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — the Mercury aspect and, you know, Austin had talked about the travel, and I was like, the postal service and knowing someone who works in the postal service, the levels that they’re delivering, the volume is Christmas-level volume, which is… Yeah. And they’re just not prepared for that level of volume at this time of year with staffing and things like that, so.
CB: Right. You know what’s funny about that is – I don’t know if I mentioned this on the last podcast, but – ever since the lockdowns went into effect, it’s impossible to get microphones and webcams especially, and even like, lighting, because everybody’s buying up everything, and all the supply chains have broken down. So I sometimes have to send out microphones – like, part of the Patreon when I started it was in order to raise money to send out microphones to guests in order to get good audio or sometimes webcams. And it’s super hard now to get like, webcams and microphones just because they’re just gone because everybody is doing everything online. So they all got bought up months ago.
KS: Yeah. Yes.
CB: Yeah. All right.
KS: So that was part of the Mercury-Mars mood for July.
CB: Yes. And I know it’s hard to – not hard to mention it, but I wanted to mention, and we sort of mentioned it in passing, but just right now at the very end of June, we’re passing the halfway point in the Mercury retrograde, which is the Sun-Mercury conjunction at nine degrees of Cancer on the 30th. And usually that’s like, the turning point where whatever the issue was at the start of the Mercury retrograde starts to get rectified or there starts to be some resolution to it. And maybe that’s still the case, but it’s interesting then that Mercury passes that halfway turning point in the three-week Mercury retrograde cycle and then goes headlong into that square with Mars, which goes exact around July 8th from six degrees of Cancer to six degrees of Aries.
KS: That’s a really good point, Chris; I hadn’t put those two things together. Because yeah, it’s June 30th, I think, that Mercury makes the conjunction with the Sun. And usually I think we’ve described that as like, you know, you’re now in the middle of the dark woods, and every step is gonna take you out even though you’re not out yet. But on the way out, there is a tiger or some sort of, you know, intense creature perhaps that you’re gonna have to dodge as you come to the end of the woods.
CB: A tiger. I like that. Or maybe you have to become the tiger.
KS: Maybe! Yeah, it was like, what would be a Mars animal in the woods? Yeah.
CB: Yeah. I like that.
KS: Yeah. Quick and sharp.
CB: Quick and sharp!
KS: Which is, it’s kind of a tiger – tone of Mars. I must have —
CB: Right.
KS: — sort of those types of animals. We just watched the movie Up the other night —
CB: Okay!
KS: — which I had just never seen, so Peter was like, “Okay, we’re gonna watch this,” so something different. Somehow that made me think of a tiger. Yeah. Panther!
CB: Brilliant. I love it.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So yeah, Mercury square Mars really, you know, having that first square at the beginning of the month, and then the second and final square is at the very end of the month, right around the 27th.
KS: 27th, yeah. So the first square’s about six degrees Cancer-Aries, for those of our listeners who like specifics. And then July 27th is about 16 degrees Cancer-Aries.
CB: Got it. And the Mercury direct station is on the 12th?
KS: At five degrees.
CB: Five degrees. Okay. So —
AC: Oh —
CB: — those are some of our —
AC: And one —
CB: — activated degrees —
AC: — final —
CB: — this month.
AC: One final simple thing that we can say about Mercury so tightly configured to Mars, just Mercury square a malefic, it’s the delivery of bad news.
KS: Oh, of course! Yeah.
AC: Right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: And like, that’s the economic data is going to be landing, and it will be bad news, and then more bad news.
CB: Right.
AC: That was – that’s —
CB: Because we’re back to —
AC: — part of —
CB: That’s one of the other quarter one things that we’re returning back to is the contraction of the economy, which I think is one of the things that we talked about in the year ahead forecast seeing so much of that lineup in Capricorn. And now with Saturn returning back to Capricorn, and not just that, but then us also having I believe it’s the final lunar eclipse in Capricorn on the 5th that occurs right around the same time.
AC: Yeah. It’s the —
KS: July 5th.
AC: You know —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — it – part of – the Mars-Mercury will be part of the dissolution of the illusion of the V-shaped recovery, right, or dead cat bounce as it will look in retrospect.
CB: And you know what’s interesting about that, that lunar eclipse that’s occurring in Capricorn this month, is that that then, since the lunar eclipse, we know that that’s the culmination of something that started six months earlier at the previous solar eclipse in the same sign. And that would have then been that solar eclipse in Capricorn that occurred in December that we put a lot of emphasis on at the time, which then it turns out behind the scenes by the time of that solar eclipse in December was the background development and sort of looming development of sort of covid in the background which eventually would emerge onto the world stage by the time of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in January.
So in a world sense, we can then see a sort of culmination of events with respect to that of something that began six months earlier. We could also say that for some people, if your chart is especially sensitive to those eclipses and that Capricorn-Cancer axis, then there could be something that began in your personal life, especially in the part of your chart that contains Capricorn or the house that contains Capricorn, something that maybe was initiated especially six months ago or over the course of the past couple of years as we’ve been getting those eclipses as well as Saturn going through Capricorn since late 2017. We see a final culmination of some of that and a final push to bring something to completion that coincides with this eclipse and the wrapping up of all of those Capricorn themes over the course of the next six months before Saturn leaves that sign and before the eclipses leave that sign for good after this.
AC: Yeah, and that’s a point I think worth further emphasizing is that this is the last eclipse on the Cancer-Capricorn axis that we’re gonna have for most of a decade. And we’ve been doing Cancer-Capricorn eclipses for the last year-and-a-half-ish, and this sort of mid-year eclipse season, there’s a little bit of a preview with the penumbral eclipse in Sagittarius. But mostly we’re wrapping up, you know, big solar eclipse in Cancer about a week ago, and then very slight penumbral eclipse in Capricorn, and then we’re done with the Cancer-Capricorn eclipses. And as a Cancer rising, I am happy to move along from that!
CB: Yeah. It is finally off of your angular houses, off of your first and 7th.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And people can listen back to the horoscopes that I did or that I did with Leisa Schaim from January where we actually went through and delineated what some of those eclipses should mean, depending on which of the 12 houses it actually falls in in your chart if you’d like more insight into that. You can find those on my YouTube channel.
Okay. So those are the first two things that are happening earlier in the month – Saturn retrograding back into Capricorn, eclipse in Capricorn, Mercury stationing direct. There’s one other major outer planet thing we need to mention because it’s actually looming over the first part of July. But it’s easy to overlook, because it actually happened on the very last day technically of June. But it’s that Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, the second of three, will take place on the 30th of June. So that’s like, right there at the beginning of July basically; that energy is very prominent then right at the beginning of July as well in the sign of Capricorn.
AC: Yeah. I mean, it’s worth noting the exact conjunction. It’s also worth noting that they’re just, like, Jupiter and Pluto teamed up earlier in the year, and they’re just basically conjunct the entire year. You know, it’s a little spike in that, but it’s not that those significations come out of nowhere. Like, that’s just part of the background for almost all of 2020.
CB: Yeah. I mean, I do think – like, looking at these spikes, one of the things I’ve been thinking about over the past week or two – so here’s a graph that shows the three exact conjunctions of Jupiter conjunct Pluto. And while it’s still in effect the entire year, there are at least these three exact hits. I remember a few months ago, and I wasn’t able to follow this as well as I wanted to at the time when I was sick in like, March and April, but I remember there being some background discussion then when the first Jupiter-Pluto conjunction hit that some astrologers went back and started looking at historical conjunctions and noted that the second and third wave of the 1918 flu pandemic coincided pretty nicely with Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions. And that was kind of like, an interesting thing at the time, and I always meant to go back and look at that. But what’s weird is that’s kind of happening again right now if you plot like, this graph of the exact hits up against the covid numbers, especially in the US, of just tests and diagnoses, not necessarily deaths at this stage. But that first exact hit of Jupiter conjunct Pluto was right at the beginning of April. And now we see the second exact conjunction happening right at the end of June as all of the numbers in the US or some of the numbers are starting to climb back upwards again. And I think there’s something really notable about that. Here’s one graph that I found from the Covid Tracking Project on Twitter that shows, again, look at that initial climb of just – these are just positive cases of tests coming back positive in the US. And you see the initial climb happening and peaking around early April, which is basically when the last – the first Jupiter-Pluto conjunction occurred. And then now they’re climbing back up again here towards the end of June, and that’s gonna be exactly when that second conjunction hits.
So there’s something interesting, there’s something kind of weird about that. I went back and I did look, I did do some research into the 1918 pandemic, and here’s a little image of that that was made, again, by Kyle from ArchetypalExplorer.com. And there was only one exact hit of the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction that occurred back about the middle around like, August of 1918. And what’s weird is that coincided with the very first wave of the 1918 pandemic happened towards the beginning of 1918, but it wasn’t very deadly. It was like, a wave that came and went, but it wasn’t super different compared to a normal flu season in terms of the number of deaths. But then what happened is that the “deadly second wave” came and hit in August of 1918. And that one was the biggest spike in deaths and was like, according to Wikipedia – I have this quote – it says,
“The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was much more deadly than the first. The first wave had resembled typical flu epidemics. Those most at risk were the sick and the elderly, while younger healthy people recovered easily. October of 1918 was the month with the highest fatality rate of the whole pandemic.”
And just looking at that, that’s like, exactly when the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction was hitting when in August of 1918 that really took off. So that’s kind of interesting, and then what happened is that it went away. The Jupiter-Pluto conjunction then separated. But then it retrograded back, and while it didn’t go exact, the Jupiter-Pluto did come back into orb of like, a few degrees of a conjunction by basically like, later in the first quarter by the first quarter of 1919. And this ended up coinciding with the third wave of that pandemic. And according to Wikipedia again, just to quote, it says about the third wave,
“It was less severe than the second wave, but still much more deadly than the initial first wave.”
And isn’t that interesting how the conjunction went exact in the middle of 1918, and that was like, the worst one, but then the second wave coincided with that retrograding back into orb, but then not quite completing the conjunction.
So I don’t know; I’m just mentioning that now, because right now we’re currently on track to the first wave of covid, at least in the US, nicely coinciding with that first conjunction of Jupiter-Pluto. And now the numbers are like, climbing again at the second conjunction of Jupiter-Pluto here this year.
AC: Yeah, it seems like —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — it’s a factor. I mean, we can’t —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — obviously the plague is not just Jupiter-Pluto, or else we’d have a – you know, we’d have something like this one out of every 12 years. But it does seem to be part of the complex of factors, astrologically, that’s timing the unfolding of this.
CB: Yeah. One of many, of a ton of different factors. It’s just interesting, because it’s like, none of us are epidemiologists, and none of us were like, you know, super had done detailed studies of pandemics in the past astrologically. So it’s like, a lot of astrologers are learning about some of these things now and we’re paying attention to some of these trends as things that are happening in real time right now and we’re learning things about them. But we’re also going back and looking at previous trends as well in order to try to learn on the fly as things are happening and apply them in real time. And just seeing some of that stuff line up and seeing some of those echoes is notable in some way. So —
KS: Yeah, I think something that, like, sort of combines what you’re both saying, Jupiter is making the conjunction to Pluto in the sign of its fall. And so there’s something a little bit more extreme, problematic, or difficult from the Jupiter perspective now. And it’s doing that while there is this copresence with the ruler of that sign, Saturn. So because I totally agree with you, Austin; like, if it was just as simple as Jupiter-Pluto, we’d get it happening more often. But I wonder if it’s the maybe slightly more compounded effect of this particular Jupiter-Pluto. Because I keep coming back to, you know, the quality of Jupiter in terms of being in the sign of Capricorn and how difficult that is for Jupiter. And then the heaviness of having Pluto there, but also the ongoing – you know, which we’re going back into in third quarter – of Saturn being there and just that extreme contraction around Jupiter that, you know, if Jupiter would be the help, being a benefic planet, in theory it should bring medicine or treatment protocols or some type of welcome and observed – like the social distancing type of thing. Because that has been somewhat effective in certain places around the world, but it’s also been completely ignored in many places. And I think the extreme debilitation of Jupiter is somehow speaking to this as well.
AC: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Sure. So yeah, so I don’t know what that means; we’re in the second peak now, and that’s somehow gonna color the early part of July, I think, in terms of the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction and some of those energies. And then weirdly —
AC: Yeah, it’s —
CB: — for whatever reason, the third and final conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto happens in November not too long after the US presidential election, for whatever that’s worth.
AC: Well, and so in addition, Jupiter-Pluto is also our sort of giant corrupt bailout signature.
KS: Yeah.
AC: And that’s gonna happen again. You know, that’s part of – again, this is like, back to quarter one, right? Which was —
CB: Right.
AC: — seems like an over-simplification, but it’s true on a lot of different points, right? We have, you know, we’re gonna have bad numbers coming in economically. And you know, it’s like, oh, none of these businesses are coming back, and this isn’t happening, et cetera, et cetera. And then there’ll be a correct and righteous desire to help people using the money that the government has so that fuckin’ people aren’t starving in the street, right? And then that will, you know, that will serve as the justification for another giant corporate bailout, which sucks, but that’s almost certainly gonna happen, and that’s also timed — you know, Jupiter-Pluto times big, big and suspicious movements of money. And the accumulation and stealthy movement of that capital.
CB: Yeah. The movement of huge amounts of money through the economy upwards and downwards, so to speak. And yeah. So and then the other thing, of course, that I talked about on last month’s which was a big insight for me was Jupiter-Pluto and the proliferation of conspiracy theories and people trying to find the truth and trying to uncover the truth, and sometimes the truth being manipulated or being different narratives being used and sometimes false truth being out there or the corruption of the truth in order to control people. One of the weird things about that was I actually discovered the birth time of the original author who got me into astrology, and it was like, these new age books that incorporated conspiracy theories like, super heavily and a lot of prevalent conspiracy theories in the 1980s were all woven together into this set of metaphysical books on Nostradamus, and the author’s name was Dolores Cannon. And I actually got into astrology through these books, because I came across the books and they said that World War III was about to happen, and it would be like, a big war, and there was a bunch of conspiracy stuff in it about what would happen. And I thought it would be good to learn astrology, which were like, sprinkled throughout the books, in order to help in the sort of war effort, which is one of my funny how-I-got-into-astrology stories was through conspiracy theory stuff. And I discovered this author’s chart and her birth time for the first time like, 20 years after getting into her books and many years after falling out of love with them once I learned more about the world and realized that some of the stuff she was saying – she was just like, making stuff up. Anyway, I discovered her birth chart this past week, and it turned out she had a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Cancer, which I thought was an interesting full circle thing in terms of some of that research I’ve been doing recently about Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions and conspiracy theories.
AC: Yeah, and that was – you shared that the other day; I thought that was just perfect. And that also ties in really nicely with Patrick Watson’s piece about Jupiter-Pluto that I think he wrote it last year. But he found that Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions timed a lot of big developments in terms of both microscopes and telescopes, which is being able to see what is hidden, right? And that ties into the economic thing, right, with these bailouts, but what’s actually going on? Where is the money actually going? You need a microscope or a telescope. That also, I think, ties into the motive for what gets called conspiracy theory. Like, what’s really going on here? Let’s examine this in a way that – you know, yeah, let’s look either very far away to what we can’t see – telescope – or really, you know, get granular – microscope. And so it’s interesting how all of these things tie together very tightly thematically. And —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — you know, in terms of the proliferation of conspiracy theory, I think everyone can agree that it’s sort of – no one believes the official story, but nobody knows – but that doesn’t – because you know the official story, whether about reality or about economic data or whatever, just because you know what you’re being told is incorrect, that doesn’t solve the problem of what is correct. Right? That’s its own whole giant, confusing mess, right? It’s useful to eliminate one option, but then when you eliminate that, everything else is an option. And so it makes perfect sense that that’s the point we’re at, right? And that the sky looks like that. There’s Jupiter-Pluto up in the night sky every night.
So everybody can probably see it, but we have a window out to the southeast, and so almost every night you see Jupiter and Saturn up in the sky. Jupiter’s really bright right now; Saturn’s about as bright as it’s gonna get. And I always kind of like, squint suspiciously at Jupiter, because I know Pluto is behind Jupiter. I’m like, “I see you, Pluto!”
CB: Squinting —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — suspiciously at Jupiter. I like that.
AC: Yeah. “I know what you’re hiding!”
CB: One of the things that makes me nervous, though, about the third Jupiter-Pluto conjunction hitting in mid-November just after the election and the first pass, I felt like, especially around the April timeframe coinciding with this surge in conspiracy theories around covid is it sort of reminds me that no matter what happens in November, no matter who wins the US election, there’s gonna be accusations about the election being somehow manipulated or controlled or things not being fair and ideas from the other side – the losing side – that it was manipulated in some way. And I sort of wonder if that’s not gonna be one of our main talking points that we’re gonna end up seeing in the news in November with that third conjunction hitting at that time.
AC: Oh yeah, and the rest of the things that hit at that time.
KS: I was gonna say there’s a lot going on in November —
CB: Sure.
KS: — that is all gonna contribute!
CB: Yeah, well —
AC: So let’s —
CB: — pay attention —
AC: — let’s say something nice —
CB: — to what happens – say something nice?
AC: Okay.
CB: Okay.
AC: About July.
KS: About July?
AC: About the Sun’s ingress —
KS: Sun’s —
AC: — into Leo.
KS: — in Leo! Yes.
AC: Which I am —
KS: We’re all —
AC: — looking forward to.
KS: We’re all very happy about that.
AC: And —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — so this is important because it – or – oh, let me just —
CB: Go ahead.
AC: — make one point. I was just gonna say, so there’s a lot of not-so-friendly skies this year, and so that actually makes the periods of time where things are relatively decent all the more important. Because we have these kind of short windows throughout the year where there are actually some decent elections, and there’s some good strong stuff. And so, you know, in terms of there are things that we always have to do. And so when we have to do things, we want good timing. And we —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — do have at the end of July one of these like, you know, 2020 hashtag 2020Good periods of elections. And so it’s really worth, like, you know, jumping on those. Not because it’s the best —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — thing ever, but it’s a lot better than what’s going to be available before and after.
CB: Yes. And I think that is actually a great segue into the featured election that Leisa Schaim and I picked out for this month. So thanks for that brilliant segue into that.
So the chart this month, the featured election for this month is – it actually takes place towards the end of the month once we get out of the Mercury retrograde, because in the second half of the month, Mercury is moving direct. And we also have the Sun in Leo. And we take advantage of this by having a Leo rising chart. So the election is for July 29th, 2019, at I believe about 7:30 in the morning is what we ended up going with, although there’s some wiggle room around there depending on your exact location on the earth. But basically set up the chart for Leo rising, and you’ll end up with the Ascendant in Leo and the Sun in Leo in the first whole sign house. And the Sun is in its own domicile, and it does not have hard aspects for the most part from at least the two malefics, Mars and Saturn, which is a nice little rare blessing this year to get some charts with not hard aspects between those two malefics, at least to the Ascendant ruler.
The Moon is in Sagittarius in the 5th whole sign house, and it’s applying to a trine with the Sun. So there’s this nice fire trine action going on, which is very helpful and very useful. Unfortunately, you know, you basically can’t get any elections during the month of July that do not have Mercury square Mars, but at least in this chart, we have Mercury finally at the very end of the month by the time you get to last few days of July, Mercury is finally separating from the square with Mars rather than applying to it. And while it’s still within a degree, Mercury is separating from Mars and applying to an opposition with Pluto at this point.
We set up the election so that it has the later part of Leo rising so that we could get the Midheaven around 17 degrees of Taurus here in Denver, which makes it sextile to Mercury, helping Mercury out of its 12th house position there at 18 degrees of Cancer and also forming a trine to Jupiter at 20 degrees of Capricorn in the 6th house to sort of help it out of its 6th house position as well.
The chart is not so great for 9th house matters because it has Mars in a day chart in the 9th house, although there are some mitigations since Mars is in its own domicile and it is applying to a square with Jupiter. Still probably not a great chart for like, 9th house activities involving travel or foreign countries or to some extent education or things like that.
AC: Founding a religion.
CB: Yeah, founding —
KS: Yeah!
CB: — a religion if you happen to be like, Joseph Smith or something like that. Like, don’t found a religion with the 9th house. I mean, that’s funny because that reminds me of – I was asking you, Austin, like, I was trying to remember like, what ancient text – I swear I’ve read ancient texts that have delineations of like, the smashing of idols and the pulling down of statues in like, mundane astrology, and then you were quoting like, a biblical passage about that, about the smashing of idols.
AC: Yeah, I did a search online and there are actually a great abundance of biblical passages that had to do with the smashing of idols.
CB: Right. I think you quoted one in our notes from like, Ezekiel —
AC: Yeah, I found one —
CB: — or something like that.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, I —
KS: That was a great quote.
CB: Ezekiel 6:6 – “In all your dwellings, cities will become waste, and the high places will be desolate, and your altars may become waste and desolate, your idols may be broken and brought to an end, your incense altars may be cut down, and your works may be blotted out.”
So yeah, pretty like, biblical stuff that we’re sort of going through now with like —
AC: It’s a —
CB: — the pulling down of —
AC: — pretty biblical year.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. It’s one of those years where if you’re like, writing it for a movie, they would send it back and ask you to tone it down like, a little bit.
AC: Yeah. Like, save some of that for, you know, the other parts —
KS: The sequel.
AC: — of the trilogy.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Anyway, so —
AC: Yeah, definitely Old Testament rather than New, as someone in the chat pointed out.
KS: Yeah.
CB: 2020 is very Old Testament. 2021, maybe we’ll get into more New Testament; we’ll see. Saturn back in Aquarius.
So anyway, that’s the —
KS: So the electional chart was basically taking advantage of the Sun in Leo and —
CB: Yeah.
KS: — getting the Moon applying to it, essentially.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Not —
CB: It’s basically —
AC: — a great Mercury —
CB: — a solar election.
AC: — election, but great for a lot of things.
KS: Good solar.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: It’s one of those months where you’re not gonna find any good Mercury elections because of how hard Mercury’s getting hit by Mars and the first half of the month just being retrograde all month. But you can get a decent solar election out of this. What sort of things would you guys use a good solar Sun in Leo election for?
AC: For scheduling a podcast.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I guess we will be scheduling our next forecast looking like at —
KS: Oh! Actually yes.
CB: — the end of July.
KS: Quite likely.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Anything where you need to put yourself at the centerstage or like, be the center —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — of attention or present yourself in a favorable light and maybe come off well for your own inherent qualities or the things that you radiate in the world in general.
AC: So we could say that it is a bad election for being sneaky.
CB: Yeah. Don’t —
AC: Don’t put this —
CB: — use this this election —
KS: That’s true!
CB: — if you don’t —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — want to be the center of attention.
KS: Yeah.
AC: So Gaia in the comments says, “Launching your personal website.” Yeah! I would say that if you’re gonna do that this month, that’s a good one.
CB: Sure. Or maybe some creative project or artistic project or something like that where you want to showcase your art or showcase your own creative instincts and skills.
KS: Yeah, and I mean, I’m just thinking about the Sun as the ruler of the first in this chart. If you wanted to do something for your body, for your fitness, for your wellness maybe, that could be an appropriate time to get something started.
AC: Yeah, definitely. And that would be making best use of that Mars.
KS: Yeah. Something physical or active. Yeah.
CB: Totally. So anyway, so this was or this is the chart that we found for July. Leisa and I also recorded our Auspicious Elections Podcast just a few days ago, and I just got it back from my editor so I’m probably gonna release that tomorrow as a bonus for patrons on the five and other tiers on Patreon, and that contains three or four other electional charts that we were able to find for the month of July. So you can get access to that just by becoming a patron on the five dollar tier or up. And I’ll put a link to that on the website.
We also – because we’re halfway through the year, we went ahead and discounted our 2020 electional astrology report where we picked out one of – the single best electional chart that we could find for each month. And I believe this was our election for July that we released way back in that report in December. But if you want some electional charts for further out in the year, then you can look into that.
AC: Yeah. Well, and so just to sit with why I was excited about the Sun moving into Leo, one – it puts the Sun in a whole sign trine relationship with Mars, which is gonna be the friendliest that the Sun and Mars will be all year. And the Sun is, in and of itself, strong and fortunate in Leo. And just as importantly, it’s where the Sun is coming from when it arrives in Leo, right? And so the Sun, if we look at the chart, when the Sun is in late Cancer, which will be the middle of the month, we have the Sun opposing Pluto and Saturn for about a week. The opposition —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — to Jupiter is maybe even kind of nice. But the opposition of the Sun to Pluto and then Saturn? It’s hard, right? If we think of the Sun as illuminating or spotlighting things, like, what are the Sun’s rays making visible to us? You know, they’re making visible that Saturn-Pluto signature, which is one of the most difficult things about this year and has timed a lot of this year’s difficulties – physical, mental, spiritual, societal, individual, et cetera.
CB: And speaking of that —
AC: And so that’s a —
CB: — look at that —
AC: — that’s a hard look.
CB: Look at that New Moon. Look at that New Moon at —
KS: And the New Moon is, yeah.
CB: 28 degrees of Cancer —
KS: It’s very special.
CB: — on the 20th of July, exactly almost to the – is it to the minute? Like – no, almost to the minute opposing Saturn at 28 degrees of Capricorn.
AC: Funny. I’m actually – I actually have something scheduled to begin then on purpose. I’ll tell you about it later.
CB: Okay. Off —
KS: On that opposition, though, I do think that’s worth a mention, because that’s sort of the middle of July from about July 14 right through to the 20th, that week, we have the Sun moving through the last part of Cancer opposing Jupiter, opposing Pluto, and then opposing Saturn. So there is this kind of seesaw quality that kicks in then where, as you said, Austin, the Sun is like, spotlighting that pressure, if you like. It does, as you just mentioned, Chris, highlight the New Moon there in Cancer. So it does feel – there’s a pressure quality for sure in that timeframe. And that’s part of the reason why I do totally agree with everything you said, Austin. We talked about this in our pre-show chat. As soon as the Sun goes into Leo, it’s like, ah! It’s not that all of the Capricorn stuff is gone, but you’re just not standing in direct opposition to it anymore. You can look at something different, you can focus on maybe something else just for a few weeks.
AC: Yeah. And that’s part of the, you know, in the looking at the Saturn-Pluto, as we’ve all been looking at Saturn-Pluto this year whether we knew those names or not. But there’s a like, looking at like, the whole structure of civilization and the brutality of societies and how these things aren’t gonna get solved and how people are gonna suffer because of physical disease, because of economic disaster. Like, you just look at these things, and it’s just this giant thing that makes you feel pretty powerless. Right? Like, “Well, I guess I’m gonna try to help a few people in my life,” right? But that ends up feeling very small. And that’s part of what just staring at Saturn-Pluto is, because it’s immense and powerful. And you know, with Pluto, Pluto is often evolutionary in a sense that is closer to the biological sense than a sort of spiritual sense where it’s just like, the power of the environment to force change. Right? The sort of adapt or perish. I suppose in some cases, it’ll correlate with a much gentler spiritual evolution sort of idea. But most of the time, it’s pretty brutal. And so it’s not that we should ignore all these things and the world that we’re in, but staring into that abyss for too long doesn’t empower you to make a difference. It can just feel, you know, crushing.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So we get to do that for a week. And then the Sun moves into Leo.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Three cheers.
KS: So that’s – I think that’s really good to be clear for our listeners that, you know, the staring into the abyss is this sort of seven-to-10 day period and then it’s quite a shift. So it’s a real contrast, I guess, that we get in that third week of July.
CB: Yeah, because we’re also then Mercury finally gets free of Mars and like, Mercury’s finally separating from Mars and no longer tied up closely in that hard square and those fighting words or the tense sort of verbal altercations that might be signified by that. Obviously once we get – so one of the things that’s interesting is so much of July is Mars moving through and treading through the first half of Aries, which in some level, aside from the Mercury-Mars square as you were saying, Kelly, might be relatively empowering and some people may be able to use in order to be more effective and to be more sort of forthright or more direct than they’re used to usually being, because we’re still in this interesting space in July at least before Mars gets into its full retrograde period and starts slowing down where it may still be able to use some of that Aries energy somewhat effectively to get stuff done.
AC: Yeah. And so speaking of sort of what is Mars in Aries good for, because we’ve had to, you know, as responsible or trying to be responsible astrologers, we’ve had to say, like, you know, this Mars in Aries for six months, there are gonna be some problems. But Mars is good for things. Just here’s an example – Mars moved into Aries last night, and there were some MMA fights that were gonna happen anyway. And people thought they would be good fights, and at the end of the night, everyone was like, “Oh, fight of the year. That was the most amazing display of skill, grit, valor, heart, et cetera, et cetera.” And so, you know, at least the fights will be good! And —
CB: Right.
AC: — you know, maybe that’s more than just Mixed Martial Arts. There’s something to be said for a good fight rather than, you know, a lot of the fights that we encounter.
One of the things that I – you know, I was just kind of waking up and feeling some Mars in Aries, and this connects with that Mercury, is the sort of like, well, let’s just like, have it out. Right? You’re mad at me; instead of stewing on it, just fuckin’ let me have it. I’ll let you have it. Like, sometimes that just like, let’s just air – you know, let’s air it out, and it might catch fire, but it’s very much a like, being tired of tip-toeing around things. And you know, some of that will go well, some of it won’t. But that’s just, you know, that’s the energy.
KS: Yeah, and I think – what I always think of with Mars making a sign change like this out of Pisces into Aries is the dry quality coming in. That Mars is by nature a dry planet; it’s been in a wet sign – well, it’s actually been in a wet sign for 12 weeks, because air signs do have that wet combination. But certainly Pisces being a water sign. So it’s a sense of maybe clarifying. There is a sharpness coming back to Mars. Like, what is it, you know, that I wanna fight for? What is it that I wanna take a stand about? And what you were just saying there, Austin, like that idea of having something out – that to me feels very clarifying. It’s like, you know, you’ve been pissy with me for a few days or whatever, and like, why? What’s going on? And it’s like you just —
AC: Right.
KS: — get it out in the open. You stop worrying about what it might be, the 25 things that are always worse in your head, and you’re like, “Oh!”
AC: Right.
KS: It’s this one specific thing, and now we can actually address it.
AC: Yeah. And that’s such a nice delineation of the movement of Mars in Pisces sharing Pisces with Neptune, which like, aerosolizes or makes conflict kind of gaseous and everywhere the way a gas will fill a whole room to Aries, where it’s like, it’s just this one thing. Or it’s these two —
CB: Right.
AC: — things, but they’re discrete rather than potentially infinite and in all direction.
KS: Yes.
AC: Directions. I think that’s really good, Kelly. Yeah.
CB: Aries is —
AC: Because that’s what it’s about, right?
CB: — direct and short.
AC: Yeah. Straight to the point.
KS: It’s very specific.
AC: And you know, on a relational level, you know, there are always periods where you and your whoever you’re hanging out with where there’s like, a buildup of tension and you’re like, “Is it this? Is it that? Did I —”
KS: Yeah.
AC: “Should I,” you know, “Should I do this?” And then when you actually have it out, it’s about one or two things. Right? And it becomes possible to deal with it when it’s a specific thing rather than everything and nothing.
KS: Yeah. It’s —
CB: Yeah.
KS: — and I think that the analogy that came to my mind is like, you know, say you get a bump on your leg or like, a lump somewhere on your body, and as a woman maybe you get a lump on your breast or something. And you think, “Oh my god, it’s cancer; it’s this; I’m gonna die.” You go to the doctor, and they do a scan; it’s like, this one specific thing, and this is what we need to do, and you’re like, ah! That’s great. My life, you know, is not gone down the worst case scenario.
AC: Right.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Well, and that, you know, that everything and nothing, that threat – you know, with Mars we’re talking about threats. Feeling that there are —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — threats everywhere is just murder on mental health.
KS: Yes.
AC: Right? It just, you know, it’s anxiety about everything and nothing all the time.
CB: So all of that being said about Mars and especially Mars in Aries being like, short and to the point, and I think a lot of that applies to the majority of July. But one of the things that I’m noticing is that Mars, when it goes retrograde – when it stations retrograde in September, it’s gonna retrograde all the way back to 15 degrees of Aries before it stations direct. Which means that all the way already by late July, by like, July 25th, 26th, Mars is gonna reach —
KS: Shadow.
CB: — the degree, its shadow period, and it’s gonna reach the degree that it’s later gonna retrograde back to. And that’s what’s so weird and what will be weird about this Mars retrograde period is normally something where Mars would just go into the sign and pass through it in about a month or so, it’s gonna just slow down and then grind over the same set of degrees for months and months and months after this point so that it’s gonna hit the same degrees three times rather than just this one quick pass that it usually is.
AC: Yeah. Well, and that’s actually part of what’s good about the Mars in Aries in July for the vast majority of July is that it’s not in the shadow. It’s not —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — we’re gonna come back to this and, you know, grind over it for months. Like, these first 15 degrees are just like, there is the opportunity to just hash some shit out and move on. Right? Because Mars is moving on from those 15 degrees. Mars is not moving on from the second half —
KS: The second half.
AC: — of the sign. That’s where the complicated stuff, the complicated, multi-layered stuff, starts stacking up.
CB: Yeah. Definitely.
KS: And if you – yeah, I’m glad we have made that point, because the first three and a bit weeks of July with Mars in Aries, that’s like, the productive part of Mars in Aries where if there is something that you wanna use that specificity or that clarity to act on, you know, I know Mars has got some complications with the square to Mercury and things like that, but Mars in Aries just from his perspective, he is operating pretty free and clear until he gets to —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — 15 Aries.
CB: I guess I would just say to pay attention, because I already noticed – I don’t know if you guys noticed, but when that shift happened recently, when Mars went into Aries on the 27th, like, I saw some people have a shift happen in their life where suddenly something happened in one specific area because that was Mars not just changing signs, but for everybody also shifting into a new whole sign house. And if that sign is somehow activated for you this year, something that otherwise would just be a one-month transit of Mars quickly taking a jaunt through that sign is gonna become a six-month transit of Mars through that sector of your life. So it could be anything that came up on the 27th or so right around the time of the ingress, of June, could become larger themes that persist for longer than it seems like they should later on.
KS: Yeah, I think one way to sort of contextualize this personally is that with Mars being in Aries for so long – six months, second half of 2020 calendar year – you will get a bit of a master class in that part of your life. You will get to understand what you can do, where you have power, where the roadblocks are, where the problems are that need attention. And we’ll be talking about this more and more as we get into September and October when we dive into the layers of Mars in Aries.
But you will get awareness or insight. You will have to deal with challenges – I don’t wanna make this seem like it’s gonna be a walk in the part – but you’re going to learn so much about that Aries part of your chart over the next six months.
CB: Look at Mars stationing direct at 15 Aries in middle of November.
KS: You’re showing the November chart? The middle of November!
CB: Again, it’s coming back —
AC: It actually stations direct on Friday the 13th.
CB: Nice. So that means not only is the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction going exact – the third one – in the middle of November, but also Mars is stationing direct in the middle of November at 15 Aries. So it’s returning back to the degree that it hits in late July. So there’s something that happens in late July with respect to Mars hitting that sensitive point of 15 Aries that’s gonna come back in November when Mars returns back to that degree.
But we also have like, Mercury stationing direct in November as well. I believe it stations direct like, right around election day.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Or so.
KS: Mercury. Yes.
CB: That’s fun. So lots of stuff looming and starting to be – the chess pieces are starting to be put into place by late July for trends that will come to full fruition in November.
AC: Yeah. So I did a like, second half of 2020 podcast with Gordon White on Rune Soup a couple weeks ago. And so one of the ways that I ended up talking about, you know, Mars in Aries, Saturn-Pluto, et cetera, et cetera, is like, these are the cards. Like, the cards have been turned over; there are gonna be several more hands played. But you know you’re playing with these cards, right? Or your opponent’s – the other players – like, these cards are in circulation. We know Mars in Aries is gonna be active, whole rest of the thing – Saturn-Pluto, that’s – what is it – two of a kind, right? That’s a pair. That’s gonna be available. And there are a couple other things like that where it’s all the same stuff, kind of, that we met at the beginning of the year, but it’s remixed, right? Remixed and I’m sure we’ll get rather tired of these particular songs being played on our collective radio. But it’s useful to at least know, okay, this is the deal. And like we’ve been saying, you know, pay attention as these cards get reshuffled and played in your life in July, because the stuff that you see in July is in large part going to tell you about the entire rest of the year. And it might —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — not be awesome and fun. But it’s better to know and to be able to work with, you know, to work with literally the hand that you’re dealt. Right?
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: That’s perfect. Look at this – all right, last graphic I’m gonna share.
KS: Chris! I love these!
CB: I’m gonna share —
AC: You’ve been —
CB: — graphics —
KS: All of them!
CB: This is the really overwhelming one of the entire year, so this is from Archetypal Explorer that just shows like, the Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions and cycle, the Saturn-Pluto conjunctions, then Mars hitting all of the hard aspects with those outer planets in Capricorn. And we are literally right there in the middle of this graph in July when some of that stuff starts to ramp up. And it doesn’t fully start hitting until August, but that is where we find ourselves.
So —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — on that note, I think that’s bringing us to the end of our forecast for July of 2020.
KS: And we will be here every month to keep you informed and help you —
CB: Hopefully!
KS: — figure out all of this! Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto. All those peaks! I mean, that’s gonna be our content for the next few months to talk about.
CB: Yeah. And we will get through it together as a team. Thank you guys for joining me to tackle this. It’s like, big stuff, and these like, forecast episodes that started so casually five years ago were just like, “Hey guys, wanna get together and just talk about the astrology of next month?” I do not think we fully envisioned the gravity of what we would then have to be forecasting a mere five years later and the seriousness and transits that are going on at the time. But I’m glad that we started that five years ago, because this has been amazing and this has been good getting through it together and sort of grappling with some of these big, you know, weighty topics together as a team. Not just with you guys, but also with our listeners. We had the biggest live audience that we’ve ever had this month of 175 people —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — so thanks everyone for joining us in the chat. This has been amazing. And thanks in general for the live chat, because that also, you know, sometimes guides and informs the things that we talk about like it did last month. So I really appreciate that.
KS: Yeah, we really appreciate all of you for listening at home or if you’re here on the live chat, just thanks for joining us each month.
CB: Definitely. So guys, do you have anything you wanna mention that you have coming up over the next month? Are you doing any teaching? Kelly, do you have any like, webinars coming up? Or you usually have like —
KS: I don’t know —
CB: — 20 things, it seems like.
KS: I know! But July is kind of a mellow month for me. I don’t have any new stuff coming out. We’re hoping with some of the restrictions lifting here in Europe that we can take a couple of short trips in a safe way, but we’ll see how that goes. I will have new workshops and webinars and things coming up for August.
The one thing I do have is if you missed any of my talks or my workshop from NORWAC, the recordings, including the video presentation and the slides, are now available for purchase on my website – KellysAstrology.com. That’s really it for me for this month.
What about you guys?
CB: Austin, do you have any classes coming up, or you’re basically in the middle of doing all of that —
AC: Yeah —
CB: — still?
AC: — I’m mid-stream on my yearly classes. Other than that, should have – fingers crossed, fingers crossed – should get 36 Faces second edition off to the printers by the end of the month. Things are —
CB: Nice.
AC: — relatively on schedule. The illustrations are almost done. I’m super excited about them. Respect and big thank yous to Grant Hanna, who’s been the artist I’ve been working with. And I was just thinking, Kelly, it really is the apocalypse that you’re not running around teaching everywhere. Don’t you usually —
CB: Not flying around —
AC: — at least —
CB: — the world.
AC: — you know, six to 12 live things that you’re doing every month? But yeah —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — oh, and I suppose I should probably put up my NORWAC talks for sale, too. So I’ll probably get around to that —
KS: You should!
AC: — at some point.
KS: Yes, because there are a lot of people I’m sure that didn’t make the decans workshop that would love to hear you, in addition to eagerly waiting for your book, they would love to hear you discuss them with all the energy —
AC: Yeah, oh and —
KS: — and enthusiasm.
AC: And we have a Sphere and Sundry release some time in the middle of the month. Gotta elect it. Maybe we’ll push it to Sun in Leo; I don’t know. Gonna see what days are available. That’ll be the Asclepius series.
KS: Excellent. We could all use a little bit more of that right now!
CB: Yeah.
AC: Well, we —
CB: I appreciated the Asclepius series a few months ago when I was dealing with some of the health stuff.
AC: Oh, good! Yeah, so basically we were – I was looking at the charts, right? And the Asclepius star is Rasalhague, which is towards the end of Sag. And the beginning of the year, we were like, “Oh shit, we can’t put the Moon on that star once the South Node moves in.” Right? So it was like, an end of elections on that for a year-and-a-half, and so —
KS: Oh, yes, of course!
AC: — I hustled and found a pretty good – not a pretty good, a really good – election just before the nodes changed sign. So that’ll be out second half of this month.
CB: Brilliant. All right. All that sounds amazing. Austin’s website is AustinCoppock.com. Kelly is KellysAstrology.com. Be sure to check out the Queer Astrology Conference July 10th through the 12th – QueerAstrology.com – or go to QAstro.org is another shortened link for that. Check out the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanac. Also check out – I’m gonna put a link to – I was looking for like, a good spot for donations for some of the protests and some of the different organizations and things associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. But I found the best one or the most comprehensive one I found was BlackLivesMatter.carrd.co. I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video or on the YouTube channel. And there’s a link to some great – there’s individual like, things that you can donate to, but there’s also link to great organizations that are doing important national or global or sometimes community efforts. And consider making a donation there to help with everything that’s going on.
And I think that’s it for the end of this episode. So thanks everybody for joining us for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks to all the patrons who fund us each month; I’ve got some amazing episodes lined up over the next month or two I’m really excited about. So I’ll have more announcements about that soon. But otherwise, we’ll see you again next month for the forecast for August. So thanks everyone for joining us —
AC: All right.
CB: — and we’ll see you next time.
AC: All right, take care of yourselves.
KS: Thanks everyone!
AC: And each other.
KS: Take care!
[END CREDITS]
CB: Thanks to the patrons who help to support the production of this episode of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon.com. In particular, shout out to patrons Christine Stone, Nate Craddock, Maren Altman, Irina Tudor, Thomas Miller, Bear Ryver, Catherine Conroy, Michelle Merillat, and Kate Pallotta.
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