The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 269, titled:
September 2020 Astrology Forecast
With Chris Brennan, Austin Coppock, and Kelly Surtees
Episode originally released on August 30, 2020
Original episode URL:
https://theastrologypodcast.com/2020/08/30/september-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 July 13th, 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 looking at the astrological forecast for September of 2020. Joining me today is Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock; hey guys.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey there.
CB: Awesome. And this is episode 269 of the show, and we’re recording it on Tuesday, August 25th, 2020, starting at 11:44 AM in Denver, Colorado. So let’s go ahead and jump right into the month.
All right, so sequentially, September starts off with a Full Moon in Pisces on September 2nd. Then a couple days later, we get our first ingress of Mercury into Libra on the 5th, followed by Venus into Leo on the 6th. The big transit of the month is Mars stationing retrograde in Aries on the 9th of September, which will be retrograde for a few months, followed by Jupiter stationing direct in Capricorn on the 12th. And then a week later, we get a New Moon in Virgo on the 17th, followed by the usual annual ingress of the Sun into Libra on the 22nd. Mercury zooms through Libra, and moves into Scorpio by the 27th of September, and then at the very end of the month, we have Saturn stationing direct in Capricorn squaring Mars at the same time on the 29th of September.
So that’s kind of the sort of sequential short version of the play-by-play forecast this month, however I’ve also got one other animation here just showing you – that was sort of like, the calendar version. But our graphic designer, Paula Belluomini, made a round circular calendar as well, and it was animated this month by Hugh Tran to show us how those same planetary placements look just from the perspective of the round, circular zodiac and in terms of the aspects between the planets, which tell you a large part of the rest of the story.
So that lunation in Pisces, that Full Moon, is actually sextiling Uranus and the Sun is trining Uranus. Then later in the month, we get a New Moon in Virgo, which is very interesting and has some really curious aspects that we’ll get into later in the episode. But the biggest thing really happens towards the very end of the month, and it’s that station of Saturn in late Capricorn, which actually stations very close to Pluto. This is the closest that Saturn will get to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction again for the entirety of the rest of the year for the next like, 30 years before it starts separating and moves on. And almost simultaneously, we get Mars squaring Saturn right at roughly the same time. So that ends up being like, the culmination of the month in some ways when we get that square between Mars and Saturn with Saturn stationing.
So that’s the quick overview of this month. Why don’t we get into going through it sequentially week by week? Do you guys have – before we start – did we come up with like, a title for this month or like a main theme?
KS: Austin, did you have a suggestion?
AC: Well, usually the titles grow out of the conversation. The theme is “oh shit, there’s another planet in late degrees of a cardinal sign.”
CB: Yeah, Mars, late degrees cardinal sign joining everything else?
AC: Well, no – because we have both malefics at the end of cardinal signs, that “oh shit” was, “Oh, no, Venus is there; oh no, Mercury is there; oh no, the Moon’s there again.”
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right. Yeah.
AC: That is the theme.
CB: Definitely. Last month, I was talking about August being sort of like, when you get to the top of a rollercoaster. But also I was thinking this month that if last month was kind of like the precipice, then this month is like, the plunge where you really get into the final part of some of the most pivotal aspects of the year and the pivotal transits. I know when we did the year ahead forecast, we focused a lot earlier in the year on the pileup of planets in Capricorn with Mars and Saturn and Jupiter and Pluto there in March and April, but then September was one of the other big and what seemed to be one of the more tense months of the entire year because of a similar pileup of planets in cardinal signs.
KS: Definitely.
AC: Yeah, I had like, a top three worst months of the year in —
CB: Okay!
AC: — my year ahead.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And yeah, and it was March, September, and October, and I think September might have had it by a nose when I was looking at it last year. Having looked through the next two months, I don’t know; I think it’s gonna be a photo finish between September and October. I’m not sure September is worse or that October is better. So I don’t know if that’s like, a positive or a negative free assessment, but there’s some tough stuff! And I like that – I brought up to you the other day – I really like that analogy for a couple reasons. One is that Mars has been edging towards its retrograde station for a while now. And so when any planet, but particularly Mars, is moving towards a retrograde station, that means it’s moving towards a stop, and so it’s going slower and slower and slower. And what that feels like being a human being is that there’s – it’s as if there’s exactly the same amount of energy, but it doesn’t get to go anywhere. And there’s often a feeling of increasing tension and pressure, which has a nice analogy to that getting to the top. And then also, September and October really just – one flows into the other or crashes into the other. I don’t know if “flowing” will be our experience. But one becomes the other quite quickly, and it’s really the same set of primary configurations getting triggered over and over again, so it’s gonna feel like one block. And so, you know, it’s the wild ups and downs and this part with the screaming with the rollercoaster makes a lot of sense to me.
CB: Okay. I like that. So super serious September – I think that one of the names we were kicking around. We’ll see if that works out.
AC: Oh yeah, super serious September.
KS: Super serious September! Yeah.
CB: All right. Let me share the chart for right now. So this is our meeting chart for our little quasi-election today. Right now, Mars is – we’re just coming off of the first exact Mars-Saturn square this year, the first of three, and that’s happening this month in August, and then next month we’ll get the second square towards the very end of the month right around the time that Saturn stations. So that’s kind of important —
AC: We don’t actually get the third one until next year.
KS: And the sign —
CB: Okay.
AC: It’s a trick!
KS: — they both change signs by the time —
AC: Yeah, they both change —
KS: — we get the third.
AC: — signs before number three.
CB: Okay. But that’s an important thing, because it might be part of a sequence in terms of at least for some people if you have planets —
KS: Yep.
CB: — in late cardinal signs, it could be opening up something which will continue on and sort of come back as a theme in sort of echoes or in having a beginning and a middle and an end.
All right, so let’s take a look at September, and let’s open by looking at the very first thing essentially that happens in September, which is the lunation – the Full Moon that happens right at the very beginning of the month – at 10 degrees of Pisces. So here we go.
So Full Moon, 10 degrees of Pisces; it happens late on September 1st or early on September 2nd, depending on where you’re at. Mercury is still in Virgo at this point. Unfortunately, simultaneously, Venus is kind of getting hammered, and it’s completing an exact opposition with Saturn from 25 Cancer to 25 Capricorn at the same time. And after that, Venus will move into also a square with Mars. We open the month with Mercury in Virgo in later degrees of Virgo, but it’s moving pretty fast at this point, so it doesn’t actually spend a lot of time in Virgo in September, and moves into Libra pretty quickly. And then it only spends about three weeks in Libra before moving into Scorpio.
Mars is already slowing down and is super, super slow at this point because it’s pretty much already almost stationary at 27 degrees of Aries and getting ready to station at 28. And Jupiter is also slowing down at 17 degrees of Capricorn.
So how do you feel about this lunation, Kelly, or what are your thoughts on a Full Moon in Pisces at the beginning of September?
KS: Look, the Full Moon in Pisces I do like. I love a nice mid-Virgo-season chance to take a break and chill out. It’s hard to go past the fact that Venus is opposing Saturn on the same day, and that creates this almost conflicting experience where the Full Moon in Pisces might be, you know, go slow, take a break, escape, you know, follow your feelings – you can imagine this Full Moon in Pisces is going to trigger a lot of emotion, maybe some intuition. That could be overwhelming emotion or just feeling a lot. And then the Venus-Saturn opposition, unfortunately, has a level of discomfort or pleasure denied or something delayed or dealing with a challenge related to a person or a partnership that’s really important to you. So I quite like the Full Moon; I think the Full Moon on its own, making those aspects to Uranus, is kind of nice and shifting things, but not in an overly dramatic way. But it’s hard to ignore that Venus is opposite Saturn on the same day.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there’s almost like, a liberating sense to the Full Moon having that very close sextile with Uranus from 10 degrees of Taurus to 10 degrees of Pisces, and then the very close trine between Uranus and the Sun at 10 degrees of Virgo. But then you’re right, there’s this really weird contrast with the coldness and the sort of offputtingness of Venus opposing Saturn at the same time.
AC: Yeah. And although it is the opposition with Saturn which is exact that day for Venus, Venus has spent the last couple days opposing Pluto and applying to that opposition with Saturn, and then will spend the next couple days in a square with Mars. And so, you know, this qualifies for part of my suggested theme, my first suggested theme, which is “oh no, there’s another planet at the end of a cardinal sign!” And so —
KS: Yeah.
AC: And the reason we all know is basically a planet there will get hammered by all of the difficult things that are going on. And so it’s a really rough, basically half-week, week for Venus. We’re not really going to feel – Venus doesn’t really escape from that until it escapes the sign. And so —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — it’s, Kelly —
CB: That is one of the planets that gets like, clear of all of that and is in relatively good shape this month is Venus once it makes it into Leo.
AC: Yeah. After doing the gauntlet.
CB: Right.
AC: And so, you know, Kelly, you were saying, you know, usually the Pisces Full Moon being a water Full Moon, there’s a nice – it’s sort of a like, yeah, it’ll take time to catch up, process emotionally, but if we look at what is there to feel at this point, Venus provides —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — a fair amount of what there is to feel. And so that doesn’t necessarily feel super good. But actually, Chris, as you were talking, you know, about the liberatory or freedom-seeking nature of Uranus, which has a nice relationship to both the Sun and the Moon here as well as the fact that Mercury’s in really good condition with the Sun —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — it’s almost like, what can we do to repair or improve the source of some of these difficult feelings? Right? Maybe not everything. Right? We can’t fix the world. But this is almost more about fixing, improving, assessing what’s going on on an emotional and psychic level, and then doing some tweaking. Because that —
CB: Right.
AC: — Mercury and that Uranus are in a really good position to help. And —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — Mercury is also in a perfect trine with Saturn, right? And that was another thing I was thinking. Like, Saturn is bringing some – has brought, is bringing, will bring – some difficulties, but that Mercury’s in a really useful place to diagnose exactly what those are, and to come up with maybe in some case fixes, but at least adjustments. At least meaningfully useful adjustments.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah. I had honed in on Mercury there as well, because the last aspect that Venus will interact with before she changes signs is the sextile with Mercury. So she does have a really rough patch, you know, running the gauntlet of dealing with Saturn-Pluto and then Mars. But there is this, the final aspect she makes is the sextile to Mercury, who – just as you’re saying, Austin – is able to maybe point the way towards a solution or a tweak or some sort of small but significant change that can lead to an improvement of some kind.
CB: That reminds me of earlier this month, I did an episode with Carole Taylor on aspect patterns finally – I’ve been meaning to do an aspect patterns episode forever, and it was a really good discussion – but one of the things that came up was one, the idea that aspect patterns are any close aspects and configurations in a chart that involve three planets or more, but that sometimes when you have a hard aspect between two planets like this opposition between Venus and Saturn and some of the coldness or the hard feelings that come along with that, that if there’s another planet that comes in – a third planet – and makes soft aspects to those two planets in the opposition, that it can help to mitigate them or help to find a release for that opposition so that you can find a solution to whatever the problem is that it presents. So perhaps part of the solution here is like, communication or talking with Mercury swooping in and making that sextile to Venus and the trine to Saturn.
AC: Yeah, Mercury ends up looking like the key from a couple different angles. When I was looking at this, I was looking to see if Venus would be fully besieged for a few days between —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — an opposition to Saturn and a square to Mars. And it’s not! Because Mercury sends supplies.
CB: Oh! Mercury breaks that —
AC: There’s a little supply drop that gets in there.
CB: I see. Nice.
KS: Oh!
AC: Which is great.
CB: That is really nice. Yeah —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — because Mercury does not have the same luck later in the month when it gets in between the same hard aspects between Mars and Saturn. So that’s a good point. Also, what we have there is a T-square between the opposition between Venus and Saturn and then the square with Mars. So that’s really tense aspects, and Venus is not in great shape, but perhaps there’s a solution that’s coming through Mercury. But the fact that it’s taking place on a Full Moon indicates like, a culmination of events or a bringing to light of something. So maybe it’s that culmination of events or it’s bringing to light something that’s difficult emotionally or could present an obstacle in relationships or relating with another person in your life, but through sort of dialogue and talking through it, there’s an opportunity for it not being the worst case scenario.
All right. So —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — that’s the very first thing at the top of the month is that lunation, that Full Moon, in Pisces. Other than that though, we pretty quickly after that, things start to shift, and we start getting some ingresses. Our first two ingresses take place on the 5th and 6th, and that’s Mercury moving into Libra on September 5th, and then Venus moving into Leo on September 6th.
So that ingress of Mercury, though, is really important and Mercury’s playing a surprisingly pivotal role this month even though it’s not retrograde. But it is showing up in interesting and odd places throughout the course of the month. Like I said, Mercury is moving really fast, though, so it doesn’t actually end up spending a ton of time in Libra this month, and I think it zooms through in something like, three weeks, right?
KS: Yeah. It’s just over three weeks, which is not as fast as Mercury can go, but obviously not as slow as when it’s in the sign that’ll be retrograde.
CB: Right, which is what we’re looking forward to next month when we get Mercury retrograding in Scorpio. So there’s that ingress of Mercury into Libra there on the 5th, and the next day, we get Venus moving into Leo; Venus finally gets clear of Mars and Saturn, so there’s a bit of a sigh of relief. And we don’t really have a lot of hard aspects, at least to challenging planets, this month, although there is a square with Uranus that Venus will hit a little bit later on at 10 degrees of Taurus.
KS: Yeah, I think that’s sort of the only big aspect Venus in Leo will make, because she’s not in a position to aspect the planets in Capricorn. She will probably interact with Mars towards the very end of her time in Leo just by trine, but yeah, she’s definitely stepping out of the cardinal crunch territory and into relatively a more calm space.
CB: Right.
AC: Yeah, and Leo is not Venus’s favorite place to be, but it’s a place that’s not being attacked, right? Whereas some of the other signs, there’s a lot of heavy Mars-Saturn-Pluto action, and so simply not being in those crosshairs is a big improvement for a planet and its actions during this period of time.
CB: For sure.
KS: And so for the Mercury ingress, as soon as Mercury comes into Libra, it’s in a sign that’s gonna interact with the other cardinal sign stuff. But Mercury has a couple – about half of its visit through Libra, it’s just approaching Jupiter and somewhat protected, I guess, so it’s more the second half of Mercury’s tour through Libra where things get a little bit hairy.
CB: Yeah. I love that placement of Jupiter at 17 degrees of Capricorn this month, because it’s just protecting any planets moving through early cardinal signs because then they’re applying directly to Jupiter and that square first, which I think actually really helped out this month or over the past month when Venus was still applying to Jupiter and applying to that opposition with Jupiter; that was a lot different compared to getting closer to that opposition with Saturn and that square with Mars. So that applying square between Mercury and Jupiter lasts all the way until about the 16th or 17th of the month when Mercury completes the square with Jupiter, and then after that point, it’s just applying straight to Pluto first at 22 Capricorn by a square, which it completes around the 20th, and then eventually to Saturn at September 22nd and Mars right after that on the 23rd.
So that is Mercury’s trip this month. I don’t know if we’re trying to go sequentially, if it’s a good place to mention – since we picked out a Mercury in Virgo election – to try to take advantage of the very last bit of that. Should I throw that in here, or —
KS: Yeah!
CB: — keep it ‘til later?
AC: Yeah, let’s go ahead and do it.
CB: All right. So Leisa Schaim and I were looking through elections for this month, and it’s funny, because one of the things Leisa said is it would actually be a good month for elections if not for Mars stationing retrograde and Mars squaring Saturn. So basically, if not for all of the difficult astrology stuff that’s really terrible this month, it would be a great month to get some electional charts out of it!
So that being said, the electional chart for this month – it takes place very early, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to mention it early in the show, because it takes place on September 2nd, 2020, starting at about seven AM – so just after sunrise that morning.
So basically just cast the chart for September 2nd, and then set it to about seven AM local time, whatever time – just seven AM in your city. And what you’ll end up with is a chart with about the middle degrees, about 15 degrees of Virgo rising, and the Sun has just risen over the horizon at 10 degrees of Virgo, so it’s a day chart. And Mercury is still in the sign of its domicile and exaltation at 24 degrees of Virgo in the first house – both the first quadrant house and the first whole sign house.
So unfortunately, by early September it’s too late to get Mercury still applying to trine Jupiter, so it’s actually separating from that trine with Jupiter at 17 degrees of Capricorn. However, it does have a nice sextile with Venus, which is at 25 degrees of Cancer, which is in the superior position, so that’s a helpful sextile towards Mercury with Venus in the 11th house. And Mercury is applying to a very grounding trine with Saturn at 25 degrees of Capricorn.
So this is a super earthy, super grounded type Mercury election, which would be good for Mercury-related activities involving communication of different sorts, whether that’s writing or talking or speaking or what have you. But also especially doing it in a very grounded or sort of formal way with that very nice applying trine with Saturn in Capricorn.
The Moon is at 14 degrees of Pisces, so this is just after the Full Moon. So the Moon has just barely started waning at this point, but it’s still pretty bright since we’re only four degrees off of the opposition and the Full Moon with the Sun. It’s in the 7th house, and it’s actually applying with reception to a sextile with Jupiter. So this kind of emphasizes even more some of what we already saw with some positive 11th house indications for friends and groups and growth over time with Venus in the 11th house by also making the ruler of the 11th house in the 7th house of partnership almost sort of bonified or at least well-placed through an application to a benefic.
So that’s pretty much this chart. Good for communication, other Mercury activities, good for 11th house activities. Not bad for partnership and pretty good for career matters since Mercury is ruling the 10th house. So that is the electional chart; you guys have any comments about that one?
KS: Yeah, look – I —
AC: I’d be a little – go ahead.
K: I was just gonna say I kind of like the Mercury trine Saturn aspect. It’s not happy, but it can be – you know, we often talk with Mercury stuff about, you know, don’t sign things here because Mercury’s not in a great condition, or it’s retrograde or what have you. But Mercury trine Saturn, to me, feels like this would be a good time to make an agreement that could be long-lasting. You’re gonna be cautious; you’ve done your research. You’re not gonna overpromise anything with Mercury trine Saturn. So there’s a level of like, clear thinking maybe paying off or coming together in a practical type of agreement of some kind.
CB: Right.
KS: Something that’s really got a bit of substance.
CB: Very careful or deliberate or substantive communication; those are good keywords.
KS: Yeah. What were you gonna say, Austin?
AC: Oh, well first, I agree with that, and I think that if we’re talking about Mercury being configured to a malefic, that can also be addressing a problem in a meaningful and useful way. Right? Bringing the malefic signification in. I would probably lean much harder onto Mercury for this one, which is first house as well as the significations we just discussed as well as 10th house. That Venus is getting hit pretty hard by Saturn and Mars, so I would probably lean away from the 11th house. Like, big, social. I would not use it for a charm offensive.
CB: Yeah, that’s definitely fair. But yeah, so deliberate communication, and you’re right about – because Mercury-Saturn aspects, especially flowing ones, are good for critical thinking and critical communication, which is also something Virgo can sometimes excel at. So it’s like, you get a double threat Mercury action going on this month.
KS: Totally. Yeah, I think there’s – I was just thinking about these aspects yesterday, and I thought, yeah, there’s something really strategic or you’ve done your research or very diligent, all of the things we’re talking about. It’s like a functional Mercury. Like, respecting the rules of engagement but finding a way forward anyway or something along those lines.
CB: Yeah. And the very last thing I meant to mention and – go ahead?
AC: I think it would be particularly nice for doing a research project, particularly historical research. Bringing in, making a place for Saturn in a useful way.
CB: That’s really funny that you say that, because I started my book – Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, available in fine bookstores everywhere – under a Mercury in Virgo election back in like, 2006 or something like that. So that is exactly what you could use an election like this for. And —
KS: Yeah!
CB: — the very last thing I wanted to mention, one of the reasons I liked it and liked using a Mercury election this late in Mercury’s travels through Virgo, even though it’s separating from Jupiter by this point, it’s also separating from that opposition with Neptune, which I really appreciate to get a much more grounded and less fuzzy-headed sort of Mercury in Virgo applying to Saturn.
All right, so that’s the election for the month. Leisa and I found three or four other electional charts for September, and you can get access to those by becoming a patron on the five dollar tier through our page on Patreon. And we’ll be recording and releasing a 45-minute episode talking about those electional charts in the next few days.
All right, so back to the month. What is – we’ve talked about our first lunation; we’ve talked about our two ingresses. Is it time to —
AC: It’s the Mars station.
KS: It is, yes. The thing that —
CB: It’s time to get to the elephant in the room.
KS: The big elephant in the room!
CB: Okay.
AC: Yeah, and so it’s important to note that this Mars station happens with just a couple days after Venus and Mercury’s ingresses. And although Venus gets that ingress into Leo is an improvement for Venus, what that kind of means is it’ll be like, oh, that’s – you know, we’re no longer, our attention is no longer drawn to that problem. But we have a fresh bouquet of problems —
KS: You’re gonna call it a bouquet?!
AC: Yeah! It’s a bouquet. Yeah, we have a fresh bouquet of issues that’s being presented immediately by Mars’s retrograde station.
CB: Yeah. So this has been building up for a while now. When did Mars first go into Aries? It was just I guess —
AC: End of June.
CB: — right at the end of —
KS: End of June.
CB: — June, so 27th of June. It’s been building up to this. And some of the topics probably associated with the retrograde may have started to develop either in the world in general, or in some people’s lives in particular if this retrograde’s gonna be —
AC: They may have started to develop!
CB: Yeah, may have, to put it —
AC: We say as a couple states are on fire, as we’re coming into what will likely be a record-breaking season of civil unrest, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Yeah, some themes you may have —
AC: It may have started to develop.
CB: — started to notice. Some themes.
So however, when a planet stations – I was thinking about this the other day, because there’s a little bit of disagreement. A little bit inconsistency sometime in the astrological tradition about whether a retrograde is like, a weakening of the planet or a strengthening of a planet, and there’s different authors that say different things. But it seems like part of the answer is that when a planet slows down and stations retrograde, it’s just sitting at the same degree for a very long time, which is really unusual and out of the ordinary. And for that reason, it causes sort of intensifications of the significations of the planet at that time for better or worse.
So the way I look at it is that while some of those themes may have started and we may have seem some things start to develop, there’s gonna be a real intensification of some of that energy especially around the time that Mars stations retrograde on September 9th.
AC: Yeah. Right, so it’s an intensification. If we imagine the planet keeping an eye on whatever is in its degree, then it keeps an eye on – like, a beam-y laser eye —
CB: Right. Like the Eye of Sauron?
AC: — of, yeah, yeah, on a very – Eye of Sauron with fire beams – on a very small set of topics, right? You wake up and Mars is still looking at the same thing. So we have that, but it’s – so it’s an intensification, but it’s a change of motion. Right? Instead of heading towards a thing, like, oh, it looks like it’s all going in this direction, you know, Mars basically literally does a rollercoaster loop if you look at it in the sky, if you watch its progress through its retrograde. And so there’s not – and when we flatten that and look at it from the top on a chart, it looks like forward-back-forward. But if we look at the whole thing, there’s also a change in terms of up and down. And so there’s a little bit of a rollercoaster-y feeling. And you may find it interesting that in the Shadbala assessment of planetary strengths, a retrograde motion is considered to be an intensification of strength because the planet is considered to desire the same thing much more intensely. Its capability is not improved, but because its desire for something is strengthened, that thing is more likely to come about. Right? So like, you know, it’s like, something you care about a lot even if your skills and abilities aren’t different, if you just really, really care about something, it’s much more likely to come about. It’s not necessarily likely to go easier, but I really like the idea of strengthening via desire. I thought that was cool.
CB: Yeah, that is good; I like that. So one of the things, though, that Mars does when it’s stationing – I mean, one of the broader overall things we have to talk about is that this begins a few month retrograde period that’s gonna last all the way until I believe the middle of September. It doesn’t station direct, because Mars will start moving backwards from 28 degrees of Aries to 27, so on and so forth, and then I think it gets all the way back to like, 15 degrees of Aries by mid-November?
KS: Yeah, about 15 Aries by about the 14th of November.
AC: So it stations direct here in the States on Friday the 13th —
KS: There you go.
AC: — of November. Gotta love it.
KS: Yeah, it’s almost —
AC: We don’t have to love it, but —
KS: — a solid two month —
AC: — I suggest you do!
KS: — period.
CB: Yeah.
KS: I liked what you were saying, Austin, about that idea of that intensification of desire. Like, just really honing in on something and not letting go. And when we often think about a planet retrograde, the symbolism we often use in our language is it’s bouncing around the same degrees over and over again, so it’s like, I’ve gotta figure this topic or this thing in my life out; I’ve gotta go deeper; I’ve gotta mull over it more. I’ve gotta be present with it for an extended period, and sort of in a more intense way. I like that idea that you can get improvements from doing that.
CB: Yeah, and one of the things in terms of intensification of desire is it’s stationing retrograde within three degrees of squaring Saturn. So that’s really huge, and that means that that’s one of the signatures that’s really being intensified at that time is not just Mars stationing and slowing down and hitting that degree of 28 degrees of Aries, but also really grinding – especially over the course of the next month when it’s super close to Saturn again before eventually squaring it exactly – is just an intensification of some of that energy that we might wanna talk about again of what Mars squaring Saturn indicates that we’ve kind of been feeling already, especially over the past month since we’re just now having the very first square here in late August. But there’s gonna be a return to that that’s gonna be felt perhaps even more intensely in September.
AC: Yeah. Well, so those of us with the rising degree in late cardinal signs have been feeling it rather consistently for a while now.
CB: Yeah. Of just a huge expenditure of energy, but also feeling ground down and feeling worn down?
AC: It’s a lot!
CB: Is that the nice way of how you’d describe how you’re feeling right now?
AC: I would say that that is all accurate.
CB: Okay.
AC: You know, part of – so one thing I will add that’s not too horribly negative, well, so one – it’s been easier to feel horribly negative, which is something I’m pretty good at normally! But this has made me even better.
CB: Sure. So like, pessimism or is pessimism one of the traits of like, Mars-Saturn or Saturn aspects in general?
AC: Yeah, well, I would say it’s frustration. Right? Saturn is like —
CB: Frustration.
AC: — oh, this thing sucks. And Mars is like, yeah, but maybe we can through effort, maybe we can make it better. But they’re in —
CB: Right.
AC: — such a place where it’s just like, this sucks, and I’m mad and can’t do anything about it, and then that just sort of bounces. So there’s a little —
CB: Sometimes despite Mars wanting to push through it and say, well, if we just expend extra energy to get through this, maybe we can overcome it, but then in some instances, Saturn will still say no, you can’t. And it’s just like a wall that you can’t proceed past.
AC: Yeah. And I mean, I think we’d all agree that if we have to pick one very simple, like, experiential word for hard Mars-Saturn aspects, it’s frustration.
KS: Hundred percent!
AC: Because the effort is pushing against the wall. Right?
KS: Yeah —
AC: Saturn doesn’t represent —
KS: — and the wall is not moving.
AC: — things – yeah! Saturn represents that which is enduring. And if it’s a problem, it will take a long time to come about. It’s a good thing, it will take a long time to come about. And Mars specializes in short bursts of energy. Bursts of intense energy, which will not solve the ambient issues.
What I was gonna say is one of the things that I was reminded of which I sometimes forget is that rough Mars transits very often just look like being super busy. Like, there is more to do than can possibly be done while still maintaining, you know, a healthy and balanced lifestyle, and there’s just a push, push, push, push, push. And that that is in and of itself malefic and not necessarily pleasant, but it’s also not the calamity from the sky or the disastrous accident that is sometimes imagined, which —
CB: Sure.
AC: — Mars and Saturn can deliver, but most of the time that’s not the case.
CB: Yeah, it’s just hard work or “stop and go” are other good keywords for Mars-Saturn.
KS: Yeah, that’s reminding me – you know, one of the ways we explain malefic planets is we describe their extreme in their nature. So they’re extremely hot or extremely cold or extremely dry. And what you’re touching on there, Austin, I guess is the manifestation of extreme behaviors or focuses or, you know, if you’re extremely busy in your work, that can be great professionally but it can cost you in other areas of your life, health-wise or personally or professionally or in terms of your mindset. So maybe that’s something that we should all be thinking about is where am I going to extremes in something in my life right now, and what is that costing me elsewhere perhaps.
CB: Have either of you had any clients lately that have been getting hit by the Mars-Saturn square, the first one that’s going exact right now, and that have had interesting manifestations of that that you can like, talk about anonymously? Have you see any offhand, Kelly?
KS: I mean, the one that comes to mind is a client that I consulted with a couple of months ago. So it wasn’t in the thick of it, but we talked about this coming up, and she had given me permission to talk a little bit about her chart from a teaching perspective because I thought it was a great example of Mars-Saturn.
So she has a Capricorn 2nd house, and an Aries 5th house. So we talked about the Mars retro in the 5th house to do with kids – now this was a more mature woman kind of nearing retirement age, so I’m like, you know, these would be your adult children. And the situation had to do with one of her adult children was still receiving quite a lot of financial help from her, and she was like, “I need to put an end to this, because I wanna retire and now I’m seeing that helping this adult child of mine out financially is having a negative impact on me. “ So we talked a little bit about some of the timing and how it can feel really difficult to make these changes, but you know, the Saturn in the 2nd house for her was like, you’re getting that reality check around what you need to do for money, and that may involve saying “no” over here to the Mars in the 5th house, you know – the Mars in the 5th isn’t necessarily money to do with children; it was how the square aspect was linking the topic of children – 5th house – and the 2nd house of money. And then knowing that in this aspect, Saturn wins in the end, so the child doesn’t get what they want; we need to put some limits or we need to restrain or cut back there. So that was a really interesting situation. You know, and she was able to – she was already feeling it, and then we could talk about how this was gonna be the big project for her through the second half of the year was to navigate that with her adult child.
CB: I love that; that’s really straightforward example of just the connection between the two houses and their basic significations of the 2nd house of finances and the 5th house of children and just what happens when two transiting planets are making a hard aspect and tying together those two houses in your life. So people could think about that in terms of what houses are Mars and Saturn transiting for me right now, and how might those two houses be linked through some sort of tension in my life, especially if I have personal planets there in late cardinal signs or especially if they’re activated as time lords or what have you.
AC: Yeah, that’s really good. You can also – you think about how, so the United States has a Sag rising, and therefore has Aries in the 5th. And you think about how the next couple months are gonna be on kids.
KS: Yeah.
AC: You know, the beginning of the school year.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s one of the big things – it’s just happening, it’s just starting to develop right now is so many children have gone back to school, both from very young age all the way through college level, but then there’s some breakouts of covid that are now starting to happen at college campuses, it sounds like.
AC: Yeah. And if we’re talking about the probability of, you know, I guess what people are calling a second wave or some people might call a third wave, as well as a lockdown response to that, there’s a really good chance that a lot of kids will have their school year interrupted. And that, you know, it’s not just an inconvenience, right? It’s a disruption of their total social world, et cetera, et cetera. Just one of —
CB: Right.
AC: — the things you can —
CB: Well, and that’s funny also, because one of —
AC: I don’t think the school year will proceed normally, is my shocking prediction.
CB: That’s funny, though, because one of the criticisms is that perhaps some schools have been too quick to like, accept – especially like, universities – to try to get people to come back and to have the same rates for tuition and the sort of financial incentive to try to just keep things as normal even if things aren’t as normal. And almost like, a mundane version of that same tension between the 2nd house of finances and the 5th house of children.
AC: Right. There’s that 2nd house-5th house square showing up again.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, I was never a big fan of the Sibley chart, but this year has really been testing my skepticism for it pretty hard, and I might be a convert —
AC: It’s pretty good!
CB: Yeah, it’s pretty —
AC: Pretty good!
CB: It’s a little tough. We’ll see; jury’s still out. We’ll see how this election goes, and if we survive… There’s actually some other interesting —
AC: Yeah, well —
CB: — stuff related to that that might be worth —
AC: What I would give you as an out with the Sibley chart is you can regard it as a valid chart that is useful and tells you things without having to say that it is the only chart. Because this is not a human being; this is a nation. And the land was here before the nation was. There was a lot of things – the United States didn’t just pop out of a mother, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: So it doesn’t have the same sudden beginning. So I think that allows us room to say, you know what? Multiple charts might be valid. I think this one is, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no other chart that could tell us something.
CB: For sure. Very good point. Another good point that both Leisa Schaim and Kelly mentioned independently recently was that Mercury in the US chart that’s at 24 degrees of Cancer is really getting hit by an opposition from Pluto right now, transiting Pluto opposing it, as well as pretty much all the other hard cardinal transits that are happening right now. And one of the interesting manifestations of that lately, of course, has been what’s happening with the United States postal service basically and the attempts to take it apart or sabotage it in order to sway the election.
KS: Take it apart! They’re literally removing post boxes while we watch! It’s like, a public dismantling, let alone what’s going on behind the scenes.
CB: Yeah. I mean, the reports are saying that there’s like, hundreds of mail sorting machines that are being removed from different post office centers all over the countries, and there’s like, 23 senior officials that have been displaced, and there’s mailboxes – like, street mailboxes – being removed from the streets in many cities around the country. So that’s a very literal – if we just think about Mercury as signifying, as it has always done traditionally, like, messengers or messages. It’s really interesting just abstractly, aside from being an American that’s sort of horrified what’s happening, but there’s also like, an abstract, intellectual way where it’s interesting how we’re sort of watching this in real time as the dismantling of the postal service with some of those heavy transits hitting the Mercury in the chart of the country.
AC: Yeah. That’s very literal, very good. Also note that in the Sibley chart, the Mercury rules the 10th house, which is leaders, people in positions of power, and I would say that we’re not in a great place there.
KS: Yeah.
AC: That there’s some tension —
CB: Sure.
AC: — surrounding these topics!
CB: Yeah, well, and it’s an attempt to maintain power or to sway the election, which decides who is in power for the next four years of what have you. So we can see the —
AC: Right. Well, and that actually – yeah, so there’s the obvious connection to the 10th house, which again, in a nation’s chart, represents leaders, those who are in charge, et cetera, et cetera. And we’ve got Mercury doing its just planet thing. Mercury in any nation’s chart would have to do with message delivery. But in the US chart, it also rules the 10th, right? And so they’re literally one of the biggest questions that is being argued about is do we do mail-in voting, right? Which is what connects to this. But it’s literally, it’s mail-in voting for who gets to live in the 10th house, right? So these things —
CB: Right.
AC: — are linked very clearly.
CB: Well, and even in an interview – like, the guy currently in charge of the 10th house, the president, said in an interview with Fox News recently that he was actively – like, he said very outright —
KS: Very openly that he was actively —
CB: — that he was trying to hinder mail-in voting by holding up funding to the post office so that it wasn’t even something that was like, subtle or sort of covert or something; it was very open. Like, this is sort of what we’re doing.
All right, so —
KS: Yeah.
CB: — Austin, you had actually mentioned that some of the things surrounding that were probably put in place back when Mercury was going retrograde in Cancer over the past few months, right?
AC: No, it was after the – I didn’t get a chance to double check this, but didn’t this sort of arc of —
KS: Yes.
AC: — with the post office, didn’t it start when Mercury was at the end of Cancer getting nailed by Mars and Saturn? Wasn’t that —
CB: Yeah.
AC: Wasn’t that like, when this arc got hot?
CB: Yeah, roughly.
KS: Yeah.
CB: What happened was they announced the new postmaster general May 6th, 2020, and their intention to install somebody that was like, a political person in this otherwise neutral government role on May 6th. And then he actually began the job on June 16th. So that was like, right in the mix of some of that really heavy —
AC: Oh, so that wasn’t a Mercury retrograde.
CB: — stuff.
AC: Or sorry, Venus retrograde. So that’s a very different – I was thinking of the end of July when Mercury was —
KS: I think there was —
AC: — Mars-Saturning.
KS: — something in mid- to late July where DeJoy – I think his name’s DeJoy; I might not be pronouncing it correctly. He was put in the role starting officially in June, but the impact of him being in the role started to become more known in the second half of July. So —
CB: Right.
KS: — that’s when Mercury was going through the crunchy part, and that’s when it was like, oh, this guy’s been there now for four to six weeks. This is what he’s doing.
AC: Okay —
CB: Yeah.
AC: — yeah, I haven’t been following it very closely.
CB: So it was just interesting because sometimes —
AC: He had to figure out some shipping things, but had to refigure —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — out some shipping things, but.
CB: Yeah. It’s just interesting that sometimes, well, look at this right here. Like, if he started on June 17th, look at – like, that’s right when Mercury was stationing retrograde in Cancer. So I don’t know; it’s just interesting, because sometimes these mundane things happen, and we can see difficult transits happening like some of the ones that we’re talking about coming up in September intensifying. And sometimes you see that stuff in the news right away, but other times you don’t fully see it or you don’t realize what’s happening unless you’re in a specific position where you happen to be able to observe it. And sometimes it doesn’t become really public news until some time later.
Yeah. All right. So back to after that really digression —
AC: Mars retrograde.
CB: Mars retrograde. Do we have anything else we really need to say about that or hasn’t been articulated about Mars stationing retrograde, intensifying itself in late Aries and squaring Saturn? I guess it’s squaring Saturn, but also squaring Pluto and everything else.
AC: Yeah. Well, one thing I would say is that the difficulty with Mars retrogrades that’s not really present with most of the other retrogrades is that with Mars, we’re playing with fire. We’re figuring out what fights are worth having, right, we’re figuring out when is force useful. You know, and there’s a different – although there is a risk with, for example, a Venus retrograde and picking your friends wisely, with Mars, we’re picking fights. And so the confusing loop-de-loop of motion that Mars does through the retrograde portion of its cycle is higher stakes, right, because as I’ve said in previous months, you know, we’re not storing frosting; we’re storing gasoline. And although your frosting might go bad if you store it in an open container in the garage, bugs might get into it, that’s much lower stakes still than if you’re storing gasoline next to the smoking section. Right? And so because of that, you know, Mars is much more volatile and inherently dynamic and violent. And so we’ve already been seeing Mars-Saturn things happening with states on fire and other states devastated by windstorms and we’ve got hurricanes on the way. There’s a much more destructive quality to the malefics, which is why we call them the malefics, which is not necessarily morally wrong, right? It’s certainly – there is a time to fight, and there are things worth fighting over. But we have to pick those very carefully, because most of the time, starting a fight is wrong to some degree and has negative consequences. And so Mars’s retrograde puts a giant question mark around all of that, and internally causes a lot of – retrogrades always bring back and forth, and those strong swings of back and forth like, when those back and forth are towards or away from conflict are much more consequential.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And that reminds me one of the keywords that you used there reminds me of we had a really literal not very positive manifestation of one of the major configurations with Mars this month, which was the explosion that happened in Beirut on August 4th, which was right when Mars was completing its first square with Jupiter from 19 Aries to 19 degrees of Capricorn. So we have the exact time for that; it was August 4th at 6:07 PM in Beirut, Lebanon, and look at this. Like, Mars was at 19 degrees and 47 minutes of Aries and had just barely completed the square with Jupiter at 19 degrees and 43 minutes of Capricorn. So and what ended up happening was – what was the setup again, Kelly?
KS: I think the roof of the warehouse that the ammonium nitrate was in caught fire, which then led to a series of small explosions or things combusting, which then led to the larger explosion.
CB: Right. There was like —
AC: And note that that was —
CB: — this abandoned —
AC: Go ahead.
CB: What were you saying, Austin?
AC: That was one day after the Full Moon that was almost exactly T-squared Uranus to.
KS: To Uranus, yeah.
CB: Yeah. And so it was like, there was all this explosive ammonium nitrate that had been taken from an abandoned ship that was just like, sitting there for six years. And then it caught fire and exploded for some reason, and then there was at least 181 deaths; there were 6,000 people injured, and over 300,000 people left homeless by this huge explosion that just ripped through the city.
They actually said that it was detected by the US Geological Survey as a seismic event of magnitude 3.3, equivalent to a 4.5 local magnitude earthquake, and it’s now considered one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history at this exact Mars-Jupiter square. So that’s a very literal manifestation of that square.
KS: Yeah. And I mean, it’s a very literal kind of visual expression of the destruction that can happen with some of these more malefic or inflammatory aspects, I guess.
CB: Yeah. Like Mars as an explosion and Jupiter just magnifying it and making it even bigger than it should be otherwise, or a fire that becomes bigger like Mary Grace mentions in the chat.
Okay. So there were some weird things that happened with that; there was like, a video on social media of a bride who was getting wedding photos taken and then the explosion happens, and that was really sad. There was also like, a baby who was being born right at the same time. So this chart that I was sharing basically ends up then also being the birth chart of the baby; the baby’s name was actually George. So he would also end up having this Aquarius rising, and that to me was actually kind of interesting in terms of a statement that Rhetorius makes about the 12th house indicating the events that happen just prior to birth. And you would have that Mars-Jupiter square there sort of focalized in the 12th house, so it’s sort of – I understand that sort of principle of delineation a little bit better now as a result.
I did wanna mention, and we did wanna mention that there’s some recovery and there’s some like, support efforts for the people that were impacted by that in Lebanon. So it seems like the Lebanese Red Cross is one of the main groups that you can donate to if you wanted to by going to SupportLRC.app – A P P – and then, Kelly, I think you had some other another page?
KS: Yeah, there’s a great Guardian.com article which I think we’ll just link in the show notes below if people are looking for aid organizations that are supporting the recovery reliefs in Lebanon.
CB: Yeah. Or just google “Beirut explosion, how you can help victims in Lebanon” and that Guardian article should come up first.
All right. So back to the forecast. One of the things that’s happening pretty much simultaneously just a few days later after Mars stations retrograde is Jupiter actually stations direct in Capricorn, and then thus commences its final run through the rest of Capricorn which it will complete eventually in December before moving into Aquarius. So that’s the other side of what’s happening this month is we don’t just have Mars stationing retrograde in Aries, but we also get some major planetary stations happening in Capricorn at the same time, first with Jupiter and then later with Saturn.
How do you guys feel about that? Feelings?
AC: I feel like they’re certainly worth mentioning; I think they’re significantly less important than Mars’s retrograde station. They’re also rare – one of the reasons Mars’s retrogrades are often such a pain in the ass is in terms of a thing which happens less often being more disruptive to what we experience as normal, both Jupiter and Saturn station twice as often as Mars. Mars actually stations retrograde and direct less often than any other planet. And so those are certainly significant, but there is a degree of magnitude that I think is worth noticing with Mars. They’re rarer; they’re every other year, rather than every year.
CB: Sure. Yeah. Certainly Mars is playing the outweighed side of the equation this month in terms of the intensity and importance of its station right there in the middle of September and just the entire chapter that it’s gonna open up between now and mid-November. I do think the Jupiter station, especially for people with day charts, and if you have planets in Capricorn close to that degree, could be a helpful and sort of much needed respite or sort of balancing of some positive things that are helping to counterbalance everything else that’s been going on in Capricorn and counterbalance some of the intensity and the fieriness of Mars in Aries. So at least some people, especially if you have planets, let’s say, close to 17 degrees of cardinal signs, that could be a somewhat positive transit that’s helping out a little bit.
KS: The one, I guess, larger symbolic shift with Jupiter and Saturn stationing direct is that it does indicate that it’s like, the start of the last chapter in Capricorn for both of those planets. So —
CB: Yeah.
KS: — even though we’re still a few months away from them leaving Capricorn, we’ve gotta get them back to forward movement before they can actually head out of Capricorn. So certainly happy for Jupiter to station direct and get moving so that it can leave the sign of its fall, and I think we’re all happy to see the back of Saturn in Capricorn. So we’ve still got a few months before they’re out of Capricorn, but this is sort of the start of the final push to get them into Aquarius.
CB: Yeah. And the final commencement, especially for people that are having things like their Saturn returns in Capricorn, this month is like, the final opening of the last chapter of that. Because it’s been – have you guys seen how striking it’s been seeing some of those people that are having their Saturn returns in Capricorn, now that it has fully retrograded back into that sign, some of those themes really coming back and either this push to finish that up and to finish the last steps of their Saturn return, or in some instances just a review of some of those significations in that area of their life. Like, I was looking at somebody’s chart that had it in their 7th house, and they had experienced some really difficult relationship stuff earlier in their Saturn return. But now it seems like they’ve started one new major relationship with Saturn retrograding back into that sign over the past few months, and they seem to be doing much better in this one or to have moved into a new stage of their life with relationships that’s much more distinct compared to earlier. Have you guys noticed that in like, client charts?
AC: Certainly. It’s more of the same. That’s great that the person you’re talking about is having what seems like a very positive development; I think that should not be assumed to be the case with people who are having their Saturn return. This last bit is rough with Mars there. But back to Jupiter, what I would say is Jupiter can’t help much, but it can try. And that the Jupiter direct, you know, it’s like, okay, it’s the way forward. And it’s not gonna fix everything, and it’s maybe, you know, it’s not much, but it’s a way to go, you know? It’s better than not having that. You know, Jupiter’s really outgunned here and not in a position to have control over much. But it’s something, you know? It’s, “Well, we can at least do this.”
CB: Right. Yeah. All right. So that’s Jupiter stationing direct on September 12th. Just a few days after that, Venus squares Uranus on September 17th. It’s one of the like, more quasi-exciting aspects this month is a Venus-Uranus square from 10 degrees of Leo to 10 degrees of Taurus. Are you guys excited about the – Kelly, you’re excited about that?
KS: I don’t know if I’m excited. I’m always curious, because you know, I remind myself that while Uranus is in Taurus, Venus is its ruling planet. So it does add a little bit more juice or charge to the Venus-Uranus aspects. It can be, you know, there can be a freshness or a sense of let’s jumpstart something that’s quite stagnant, I think, with this Venus-Uranus aspect. You might think about relationships being stimulated or activated, you know, romantic life, dating life, if we think about typical Venus things. But of course, there is some adjustment or that idea of the surprise or the unexpected development partly because it’s a square angle, and partly because we are dealing with Uranus as well. So I’m curious about it partly to see what it means for around the 15th or 16th of September, depending on where you are. But I’m also curious about some of the press or the news stories then that might help reveal a little more about the longer Uranus in Taurus trend.
CB: Right. Yeah, definitely. And it’s one of the only things that’s happening in fixed signs. Like, fixed signs kind of have a break during this period aside from that quick square and whatever is going on with Uranus if anybody has another at 10 degrees of fixed signs. But I saw somebody on Twitter recently saying like, the fixed sign people will get theirs before too long. They’ve got a temporary break right now while all of the cardinal signs are getting hit, but then next year we have Saturn and eventually Jupiter also moving into Aquarius, and a pretty sizeable shift into much greater focus on those signs.
KS: Austin, did you have any thoughts on that aspect?
AC: No, not too much. I mean, you know, with Venus-Uranus contacts, it’s usually good to shake it up – you know, whatever you’re doing. Whatever you’re doing for fun or pleasure – Venus – you know, whatever the relational patterns are, the best way to work with a potentially harsh Uranus contact like that is just to shake it up. Do something different. Don’t go back to the same old thing. Do something else for a couple days.
It can be positive if you’re intentionally injecting, you know, innovation. If you’re intentionally doing the work of avoiding stagnation. If you try to like, do exactly the same thing, that disruption is more likely to be done to you than by you.
CB: Good advice. All right, so let’s move forward to September 17th where we get our second lunation of the month. This one is a New Moon that’s taking place at 24 maybe barely 25 degrees of Virgo. So New Moon in Virgo on September 17th. Interestingly, Mercury is pretty much exactly – Mercury is not only ruling this lunation because it’s taking place in Virgo, but Mercury is almost exactly squaring Jupiter at the same time from 17°26’ Libra to 17°26’ Capricorn. So I thought that was kind of interesting, because it’s kind of a positive aspect having Mercury squaring Jupiter at the same time, but then after this point after September 17th, we get out of that sort of protective period of Mercury applying to Jupiter, and then it’s just careening towards the more difficult aspects with Pluto and Saturn and Mars for the rest of the month.
AC: Yeah. So with Mercury, right, we’re looking at – especially with Jupiter, Mercury configured to a benefic and with the lunation itself being Mercury-ruled, we really – you know, it’s like, okay, what can be fixed? What can be improved? What can be protected? Because that’s, you know, it’s the other side of what is benefic, right? There’s to make things better, but then there is also to shield things against potential harm.
KS: Ooh, I like that. Yeah. I did see that Mercury-Jupiter aspect when I was looking at that New Moon, and I thought, oh, that’s interesting! I wonder if there’s a sense of just before Mercury goes into the dark valley, if there’s a sense of like, this is where we’re getting ultimately something about looking forward or some sort of boost or lift that then pushes you – maybe can act as a motivating or an inspiring factor to deal with, you know, the challenges just around the corner.
CB: Yeah. One of the cool things about the – and important things – about the lunations this month is that because they’re taking place in the mutable signs, that means that we basically are at the halfway point between eclipses. So because the nodes have moved into Sagittarius and Gemini and will be taking place there back and forth for the next couple of years, when we start getting other lunations in mutable signs, it means we’re at the midpoint. And sometimes something that started or initiated during the last set of eclipses roughly two or three months ago, we’ll see a new development in that and a new progression of that at this point with the lunations in Virgo and Pisces.
KS: Yeah, that’s a really good point.
CB: All right.
KS: And then, yeah, because it’s so late – the lunation – so then we’ll get the Sun moving into Libra for the equinox just a few days later.
CB: Yeah. So is that our next major thing is just the Sun ingressing into Libra a few days later on September 22nd?
KS: Equinox time.
AC: So we enter – finally we get to the fourth quarter of 2020.
CB: Fourth quarter!
KS: Yes.
AC: The exciting —
CB: That’s weird to say.
AC: — finale!
CB: Yeah. So this is the episode – the series finale of the show called 2020. And we’ve had some ups and —
AC: It’s a four-part miniseries that everyone hated.
CB: Everyone – yeah, the last season or two was a little rough. I’m hoping it ends on a high note. I mean, it kind of will, looking forward to that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction as something to look forward to.
AC: I don’t think – I mean, I don’t think ends on a high note. I think it ends on a everything… I think it ends on a “all is not lost” note.
KS: Yeah.
CB: That seems appropriate. Okay. So Sun moves into Libra on September 22nd. We begin the fourth quarter of the year. Mercury moves into its kind of challenging period where Mercury squares Saturn on September 23rd. It opposes Mars on September 24th. It goes through this brief like, period where it’s actually enclosed by the rays of the malefics through the square and opposition of Mars and Saturn. And another thing that I noticed is that Mercury actually enters its shadow period at precisely this same exact period starting on September 23rd once it hits 25 Libra, because this is actually the degree it will retrograde back to eventually and station direct on, what is that, on election day, basically, right?
KS: Like, the day after or something. November 3rd or 4th.
CB: Okay.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Let me show that. So if we think some of the Mercury hijinks that are happening with the country now with the US Mercury getting hit are kind of crazy, wait until Mercury goes retrograde for three weeks basically leading up to election day in the US and then stations direct on election day. History question – do you guys know the last time that Mercury stationed direct on election day?
KS: I do!
AC: I do; it’s 2000.
KS: November 2000.
CB: Exactly 20 years ago – one Mercury period. Mercury periods are 20 years, which means that we’ve got a bit of a repetition of that. Which is always weird, because it was Mercury stationing direct on election day, which you would think would be like, the alleviation of some Mercury retrograde issues. But instead, it was just – at least 20 years ago – unleashed this whole can of words in terms of the election being undecided, basically, and then all of these arguments about hanging chads and voting and the Supreme Court having to break the deadlock and everything else.
KS: I mean, it symbolically —
AC: I think we’ll probably do something very similar.
KS: Yeah, that’s what I’m expecting is like, a delayed result. And when you think about it, Mercury ends its retrograde, but it takes quite some time to get back up to a level of speed or pace. The end of the retrograde is not “now I’m going a hundred K’s an hour again;” the end of the retrograde is “I’ve just turned and I’m not facing backwards, but now I’m facing forward. But I’m still not really going anywhere!” And it’s gonna take Mercury a few days to actually even get off the station degree. So some kind of delayed or contested result in the election – it seems like a no-brainer to be expecting —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — that with this.
AC: Well, and it stationed exactly square Saturn.
KS: Yeah. So when you get deeper into that chart, it doesn’t get better for Mercury! It’s just like, oh yeah. This is gonna be —
CB: Yeah, so here’s the direct station at 25 Libra on November 3rd-ish. November 3rd, November 4th. And then so if we take it back to when is the first time that Mercury crosses that degree that it will later station direct at, we come to —
KS: It’s September —
CB: — this —
KS: September 23, yeah.
CB: — lovely chart around September 23 where Mercury at 25 Libra is squaring Saturn at 25 Capricorn and then shortly after that starts opposing Mars at 26 Aries. So we really get the opening of some can of worms there in the pre-retrograde shadow period build-up, the build-up to the Mercury retrograde that leads us into election day begins at this point around September 23rd.
KS: Yeah. Actually, as you’re putting those charts, I’m like, oh my god, yeah. Mercury squares Saturn for the first time, and we’re not done with that until early November. So it is gonna be a solid six weeks of Mercury kind of getting that vibe as an undertone from Saturn.
CB: Yeah. So Mercury tries to make it through the gauntlet in a couple of days there – September 23rd, 24th, especially tough. Opposing Mars on the 24th. Then eventually it gets out of there for a little bit and moves into Scorpio by September 27th, Mercury makes it into that sign, but then not super long after that it’s gonna start slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde the following month.
KS: So just a couple points about the Mercury-Saturn, Mercury-Mars in terms of what individuals might experience with that. That can be a very heavy mind kind of a weighty decision. It can be really mulling things over. There can be a melancholy or even an anxious quality that people could be experiencing. It might be specific to an event or a circumstance that comes up at that time. It might be just this general malaise. You know, with Mercury in such difficult condition, you might find you’ve gotta make a tough but necessary choice or sort of feel like you’re choosing between two options that you don’t love but you’ve gotta make a decision about something. So that’s really like, September 23, 24. And the reason I just wanted to mention it was just for everyone to take care of their mental health and their mindset around then as best you can.
AC: Yeah. With it being opposed retrograde Mars as well as square Saturn, it’s pretty rough, right? Because the Saturn is the weighty and the melancholy, and then the Mars is “Maybe we should freak out.”
KS: Yeah.
AC: And so, yeah. That’s about as rough a condition as Mercury can be in.
KS: Yeah.
AC: It’s not great for communications. I’m sure the national conversation here in the states, as well as a variety of other conversations in different parts of the world, will not be in an ideal place. It’s not a great time to have a difficult talk.
CB: Yeah.
KS: No.
CB: One of the things —
KS: If you get the choice about when to have the difficult talk.
AC: Right. You might have to respond because you’re being screamed at, but if you have the choice whether to initiate a conversation that really requires a lot of nuance, choose not to under those circumstances. And particularly like, even though Mercury’s just cleared the square with Saturn on the 25th, the Moon is conjunct Saturn square Mars square Mercury. So that extends those difficulties a little longer.
CB: Yeah, good point. Definitely good point. And just being pulled between different extremes.
One of the things that a lot of the ancient traditional astrological texts always talk about is how Mercury just exacerbates whatever planets it is paired with. So if you pair it with benefics, it will take on their qualities and kind of amplify them, but if you pair it with malefics, it will kind of take on their qualities and amplify those qualities. So it’s playing this sort of amplification role for a few days here in the later part of September. And eventually, this brings us to our final last major thing, which might be the focal point. I mean, I’m sometimes getting torn between whether the actual Mars station in the second week of September is the focal point or whether this is the focal point, which is on the 29th of September, Saturn stations direct at 25 degrees of Capricorn and then begins moving forward and begins its final forward movement, its final slow march basically from this point until the last of going through the last of Capricorn before it leaves and moves into Aquarius in December.
So Saturn stations direct at 25 Capricorn; there’s an intensification of Saturn energy, and pretty much simultaneously, we get the second Mars-Saturn square. So Mars squares Saturn as it’s stationing direct. And then finally, the last thing that’s important to mention here is that because Saturn is stationing direct at 25°20’ Capricorn, it actually comes back within the closest it will get to a conjunction with Pluto, which is at about 22°29’ Capricorn at this time. So we get the closest recurrence of basically the Saturn-Pluto conjunction which we experienced way back in January, which at that time seemed to, in retrospect we realized later coincide with the ramping up of the outbreak of covid in January and some of the first public news stories about it, like in the New York Times reporting on a mysterious new virus that was coming out of China around the time of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in January.
So that’s really intense cluster of —
AC: Yeah, I mean, this is —
CB: — three different aspects.
AC: Yeah. I mean, this is – like, September and October are like, pretty peak economic and political crisis as well as probably ongoing bonus natural disasters. Right? Like, this Mars-Saturn isn’t just like, “It’s kind of a frustrating month.” Right? Like, it is, but it’s also literally the – you know, it’s describing the backdrop that we’re already in because we’ve already had a Mars-Saturn and lots of things are on fire and blowing up. And there’s wind and rain also destroying things. Like, you know, I’m not trying to be negative, but like, I think it’s important to not undersell how just gnarly the background is here. Right? You know, we should probably have disease, the economic stuff which is already there landing in waves, and then of course the ongoing political crisis in the United States.
CB: Yeah. It’s like, a bunch of overlapping stuff. And actually, you can kind of almost illustrate that with the astrology, because there’s a bunch of overlapping transits.
KS: Yeah.
CB: So —
AC: Right. It’s not just one malefic or one problem. It’s three things all at once all creating malefic synergies, baleful synergies!
CB: Yeah. Like Kyle from ArchetypalExplorer.com who’s actually our sponsor this month – and I’ll talk about later in the episode – sent me some graphs. So this is the Saturn-Pluto graph of showing that conjunction between Saturn and Pluto which went exact, like I was saying, back in January. And then it got far away once Saturn got into Aquarius and sort of got some distance from Pluto by May and June. But then when it retrograded back, this point in late September and early October is like, a return of the closest we’ll get to that exact conjunction, and I guess really a question of since it’s not an exact conjunction but it’s within three degrees of orb, how much does that conjunction really become operative and come back full force, or does it not quite as full force? It is like the threat almost of coming back full force, because it doesn’t go exact? How do you guys feel?
AC: Well, it’s getting – it’s not going exact, but it’s being set on fire by Mars. Right? We could say Mars is translating the light between Saturn and Pluto.
KS: That’s one way of putting it. I mean, to my mind —
AC: By the way, I think —
KS: Yeah?
AC: Go ahead.
KS: I was just gonna say the —
AC: I was gonna say so —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — baleful synergy as the title for if I were naming the podcast this month, I think I would go with “Baleful Synergy.”
CB: “Baleful Synergy,” okay!
KS: Yeah. Because to my mind, the Mars-Saturn stuff, it really – we started to be in orb of that, if I think about a three-degree orb when Mars is within three degrees of Saturn, that started about the 15th of August, and it’ll take Mars until about the 11th or so of October to get at least three degrees away from Saturn.
CB: Okay.
KS: So the way I’ve conceptualized it is the entire time has that Mars-Saturn vibe, and as Austin’s saying, it’s just contributing this underlying explosive dry, extreme quality that is just gonna light up. You know, Saturn and Mars maybe don’t have to be as close – sorry, Saturn and Pluto don’t have to be as close as we might otherwise expect because the quality of what else is going on is so volatile and combustible.
CB: Yeah, totally.
AC: We’ve got the Moon carrying the energy between them four times a month.
KS: Yeah.
CB: And here’s another graph with just the first exact Mars-Saturn square that happened in August. Then we get the second one at the end of September. And then that long sort of gap before we eventually get the final Mars-Saturn square that won’t happen until like, January. So you put all of that together, and you get 2020, and we are approximately, what, like, three-quarters of the way through this graph by the time we get there at that second square between Mars and Saturn at the end of September. But because that starts the retrograde period, there’s just a lot of overlapping stuff going on.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So Saturn-Pluto, this is gonna be our final sort of opportunity to mention Saturn-Pluto. I don’t know if there’s any retrospective things you guys wanna say. One of the things in talking to Leisa – Leisa in research, she was reading a lot of Saturn-Pluto stuff in the lead up to this. One of the themes she kept focusing on years ago when we first started talking about it when Saturn went into Capricorn and joined Pluto was in the past, Saturn-Pluto alignments and the potential for authoritarian governments and authoritarian tendencies among governments. And we keep remarking sort of privately to each other just like, how strikingly that has come up and become more prominent around the world over the course of the past few years, even more than I think anybody would have expected when it began in, what, December of 2017.
KS: December of 2017, yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that idea of authoritarianism and the attempt to amass power and things like that amongst the powerful is one of the major themes, I think, of Saturn-Pluto that we’ve seen and one that could become more intense for some reason as we get that conjunction coming close again in the sky over the course of the next month. What are some other —
AC: Yeah, I —
CB: — Pluto-Saturn themes?
AC: — don’t think I’ll be ready for a retrospective until they’re separated by sign. I think we’re still very much seeing the story play out all over the world. And we’ve got about four months to go at this point.
CB: Right. Yeah. Okay. Let’s see – any other, because we’re at the end of September at this point, any other final points in terms of Saturn stationing direct in Capricorn conjunct Pluto and to a lesser extent Jupiter? Or the second Mars-Saturn square that’s happening at the same time, or just Saturn itself stationing direct in Capricorn and beginning its final run through that sign?
AC: I think it’s – I mean, more of the same is one of the themes. Like, it just keeps the party going.
KS: Same mood.
AC: You know? More combustible garbage into the dumpster. I think that it’s a little confusing to watch for myself and a lot of people to watch the stock market right now. I think September might be able to bring it back in line with economic data. I don’t know. You know, it’s a weird – it’s an odd thing right now. I think it’s safe to say that it won’t keep going up throughout months and then years of economic depression, and so it’s gotta come down at some point. I think that especially late September seems pretty capable of popping that balloon, but we’ll see.
CB: Yeah.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I mean —
KS: I was just gonna say —
CB: Go ahead, Kelly.
KS: — I wonder about that Saturn-Mercury-Mars placement around sales data, you know, quarterly reporting and things like that for businesses starting to release information that’s more relevant to this year rather than, you know, earlier in the year still releasing data from last year. So I wonder about that, and I also known historically October tends to be a very difficult month in the stock market in general. And so yeah, I too am sort of thinking, “Don’t believe the economic stuff that’s coming out,” because I think that’s definitely gonna change September and October.
CB: Yeah. Well, and also especially with like, messing with things like the post office and how many little businesses that must affect to have something like that happening just further compounding some of the already existing issues with the economy. And we’ve all been waiting, because one of the main keywords we talked about I think in the year ahead forecast was just ideas of contraction in terms of the economy. So certainly having Saturn station there next to Pluto, if we’re gonna get a contraction and if we’re gonna run up against a greater sense of like, reality, the reality of a situation, certain Saturn having an intensification is something that would be – we would anticipate in terms of that being really realistic and being like, what happens when you hit the wall and the reality of a situation suddenly becomes clear.
AC: Yeah. Back to earth.
KS: Yeah. Let’s come out of the clouds. Pop the bubble!
CB: Yeah. All right. So something I forgot to mention last month that’s relevant in terms of mundane astrology becoming and has become somewhat less relevant now in terms of the future, but was Comet NEOWISE, and we’d mentioned this months back in one of the early forecast episodes earlier this year in like, March and April, but just in terms of the coinciding with especially the worldwide pandemic and this comet, which was actually discovered on March 27th which was right around that whole timeframe of the Mars-Saturn-Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn. But then it eventually became the brightest comet in the northern hemisphere since Comet Hale-Bopp, which occurred way back in 1997 and was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. I think it peaked in brightness and visibility in something like July. Did you ever get to see it, Kelly?
KS: I didn’t get to see it, no. But I remembered the Hale-Bopp comet from ‘97; it took me back to being younger and, you know, getting fascinated by things in the sky. That’s a beautiful picture.
CB: Yeah. Nice little picture of the Comet NEOWISE over in San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, just to show you how clear it actually was in terms of being able to see the tail and everything else.
KS: Beautiful. You can imagine seeing that how much the ancients would have looked at that and wondered what it meant and what it foretold, whether it was positive or negative. Because even to our modern eyes that are used to seeing much more spectacular things, you know, with animation and technology, to see something like that in the natural world, it really is quite a spectacular visual.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s also something you can’t predict, and especially ancient people couldn’t predict, and even us with our modern telescopes and the advancements in astronomy only discovered this thing on March 27th, and then it was like, just a few months before it became fully visible to the naked eye. So you get a real sense of how a comet from a visible astronomical and astrological standpoint, especially in conceptualizing it as a type of divination where you’re looking at things that are visible from the standpoint of the observer and what that means symbolically, seeing something like that happen that’s out of the ordinary or that’s like, not a natural occurrence in terms of the periodic cycles of the planets, which are predictable, and everything else, this is something that sort of comes out of nowhere that indicates that something weird and something unique is happening this year during this point in time.
KS: Something exceptional. Something unusual.
CB: Right.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So some people are saying that that should be classified as like, a great comet like other great comets that are periodic and visible. There’s some argument about that, but I think it was an interesting coinciding in terms of the uniqueness that we’ve all felt and sort of lived through and experience of this year and there being this new astronomical event that coincided with it.
KS: Totally.
CB: We were just talking about the comet, Austin.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Did you have any thoughts about it?
AC: You know, I mean, comets in almost all omen traditions are heralds of disaster. Seems right on time!
CB: Yeah. They are not usually interpreted as particularly positive things, and certainly the comet coinciding with the most intense part of the pandemic in some places and when thousands are people are dying is sort of notable and memorable in and of itself.
AC: Yeah. But again, yeah, I think it’s right on time. It seems to be a nice confirmation of texts that might at first glance seem superstitious to a modern person.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right. Any last things we should mention before we move on from the forecast for September, or are we good? I think we might be good, right?
AC: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s pretty good overview. Little overview with some anatomy.
CB: Okay. Brilliant. All right. Well, then let’s move onto I wanna talk a little bit – we’re gonna transition into some miscellaneous discussion topics. I also want to talk a little bit first about our sponsor this month, which is a website I’ve mentioned a few times because I’ve been using graphics from them all year. But the website is called ArchetypalExplorer.com, and Kyle over at ArchetypalExplorer.com, he launched this website several years ago and I’ve been talking about it since then and I’ve been using it off and on since then. But he actually did a redesign over the course of the past year or so, and the website is really amazing at this point because I thought he was just like, photoshopping some of these graphics – like the Saturn-Pluto conjunction graphic that I was showing earlier or the Mars-Saturn conjunction or square graphic that I was showing. But this is actually something that you can generate, either natal transit graphs or you can generate mundane transit graphs using this website, which is crazy. So let me just read the little promo thing that I put together.
So it says Archetypal Explorer is an online astrology program for natal and mundane astrology. It features a suite of visual and interactive tools for studying astrological transit. The program was built for the modern tech-savvy astrology enthusiast and aims to provide all the necessary resources in one place. The delineations – it actually gives you delineations for natal transits come from Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche through a partnership he worked out with Tarnas. It helps astrologers to engage in a rich and rewarding astrological practice. It is a membership-based astrology program that you access through your browser or through your mobile phone, and you can sign up for either monthly or annual memberships. And it actually has a seven-day free trial period that you can try in order to get started and see if you like it. So you can find that at ArchetypalExplorer.com.
I’d really recommend actually going to the website, because once you go there, you can pull up a page like this where it shows what your current transits are that you’re actually experiencing right now in your life. And then it’ll provide not just the transit graph that shows you when it goes exact and what periods it’s gonna be most intense or less intense for, but it’ll also give you these lovely delineations just below.
So isn’t that cool? So you can set it for different time periods, different planets. You can tell it what aspects you want it to generate. You can also do the same thing for mundane transits. So here’s one showing a few-month period from June through November. So it shows the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction; it shows the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and it shows other things like Jupiter trine Uranus and so on and so forth.
Finally, it’s also got an animate chart feature, which I love, which means you don’t have to just have like, Solar Fire to animate a chart. But you can also use this program to look at world transits like we do on this podcast every month.
AC: Ooh, I like that.
CB: So pretty cool stuff. Have you guys used this before?
KS: I have not! But it seems amazing.
CB: Yeah, it’s definitely worth checking out. And I was talking with Kyle about integrating a thing so that you can export high-quality images from the transit graphs, which might be useful either for like, sending them to clients or for using them on a YouTube channel or something like that.
KS: Super cool.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, everybody check out ArchetypalExplorer.com for that, and thanks to Kyle for sending us the graphs pretty much all year, because that’s been super helpful as we’ve been trying to describe some of these outer planet transits. So I’m happy to have that website as a tool to use.
All right, so let’s move into other discussion topics, other miscellaneous discussion topics. We have the really important topics, and then we have the slightly less important topics. The really important topics are Kitten Watch 2020 and then the lesser topics are the fate of the United States and the US presidential election. Which one would you guys like to start with first?
AC: How about the – did you mention the ISAR conference, which —
CB: I did not! Which I also —
AC: — forgot to mention last week —
CB: — forgot to mention last month —
AC: — last month too?
KS: Okay. Yeah, like, next on the agenda is ISAR!
CB: We left out so much stuff last month because there was so much to talk about each month; it’s hard to remember it all. So last month, the International Society for Astrological Research announced that, of course, sadly due to the pandemic, they could not hold their much anticipated conference in Denver in September of 2020 like they planned to. So instead, they broke it up and what happened is they moved so that in September – this September in the next few weeks, in just a few weeks – they’re going to host a two-day online astrological conference using a webinar format like we use to record our monthly forecasts. So two-day online conference this year. And then some time next year, they’re in the process of negotiating trying to do an in-person conference and having the same or a similar in-person conference some time next year, hopefully once the pandemic winds down a little bit.
So you can find out more information about that at ISAR2020.org, and what’s happening is that in this two-day conference, the first day is gonna be a series of short 20-minute talks that all sort of focus on the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that’s coming up here at the end of the year in December. So that’s gonna feature astrologers like Steven Forrest, Michael Lutin, Georgia Stathis, and Wendy Stacey. Leisa Schaim and I are actually also gonna be giving a talk that day, and our topic – at first, I couldn’t think of a topic to talk about and I was gonna decline. But then I actually came up with a really good topic, which is electing – picking an auspicious electional chart for the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction and trying to take that conjunction into account and use it as the focal point in an electional chart in December, because we actually had picked out some elections to do just that. So in this 20-minute talk, we’re gonna walk through our process for doing that.
Day two of the ISAR conference is a presidential panel where they’re gonna be discussing the US presidential election. So that’s pretty much the conference, and you can find out more information about the talks or sign up to register at ISAR2020.org.
And we are, luckily we are off the hook, so we don’t have to do like, a huge webinar workshop in September. Are you guys excited about that?
KS: I’m excited —
AC: I’m so excited —
KS: — not to have —
AC: — about not doing that!
KS: — yeah! An insane amount of online teaching to do in the middle of the September madness.
CB: Yeah. Oh, and somebody in the chat asked what the dates are; it’s September 12th and 13th. Thank you for asking that; I appreciate it. Yeah, so no workshops, sadly. Hopefully next year a year from now sometime next summer or fall, we’ll be able to still meet up in Denver for an in-person conference. But we’ll see what happens.
KS: See how things unfold.
CB: Okay.
KS: So much. Yeah.
CB: Next discussion topic, important topic or less important topic? Do we end on a high note, or do we end on a other note?
AC: We end on a high note.
CB: Okay.
AC: We end on an adorable note.
KS: Right. So —
CB: Adorable note.
KS: — we’ll save the —
AC: Adorable —
KS: — most important discussion —
AC: — September.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So —
KS: I hope there are photographs that are going to be shared when we get to this!
CB: I do have some photographs. Let’s not —
KS: You do? Okay.
CB: — we’re building it up a lot.
KS: We gotta go into other territory first. We have to go through —
CB: Okay.
KS: — our own minefield!
CB: Other news that’s been going on – we’ve been catching up pretty well. We mentioned the Beirut explosion, we mentioned Comet NEOWISE, we mentioned the post office. Obviously we’re heading into – we’ve headed into officially political season in the United States, and it’s hard not to talk about that. One of the major things that happened was Senator Kamala Harris was picked as Joe Biden’s running mate for the vice presidency. And this is important and somewhat notable because from an astrological standpoint partially because Kamala Harris was born in California, which is an open state, so we actually have her birth time and therefore we know Kamala’s – her entire birth chart.
So what that means is that the final piece is in place so that astrologers could hypothetically, if they were so inclined, start looking at finally the US presidential election and sort of know as much data as we’re gonna know about that at this point where we have birth times for Trump, we have a birth time for Biden, and we have a birth time for Kamala Harris. The only person we don’t have a birth time for is Pence, unfortunately. We’re still holding out on that. I still keep holding out hope that it’ll be like the 2012 election where Obama like, printed his birth certificate on mugs and sold that as merchandise. I pray for a return to those days at some point.
So Kamala Harris’s chart, for those that don’t have the data or would like the data, here is the chart for those watching the video version. She was born on October 20th, 1964, starting at 9:28 PM in Oakland, California, which according to Solar Fire gives her 24 Gemini rising. The ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury in Scorpio at one degree of Scorpio in the 6th house, which is forming a trine to the Midheaven at two degrees of Pisces. What other placements she has? She has a night chart. Interestingly, one of the things I find really interesting is she has a night chart, and she was born almost precisely at an exact Full Moon where the Moon is at 27 degrees of Aries opposite to the Sun at 27 degrees of Libra. And I thought that that was really interesting, because there’s one other person that has a Full Moon chart; I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy. His name is Donald Trump, who has his Sun at 22 degrees of Gemini versus his Moon at 21 degrees of Sagittarius. So we’ve got a battle between two Full Moon political candidates basically in this election, which is kind of an interesting thing to compare.
Other notable points about this chart that you guys have seen just in terms of the basic set up and placements?
AC: Well, one thing that I just noticed right now is that both Kamala and Trump both have the nodes in the same signs, and very prominent in both cases. Trump —
CB: Yes.
AC: — has them on the Sun and the Moon, and she has them on the Ascendant and Descendant.
CB: Yeah. And guess what nodes just moved into the same pair of signs?
AC: Yeah. Guess —
KS: Yeah!
AC: — guess which two people are having nodal returns.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Right. So the nodes recently, as we’ve talked about a lot on the forecasts over the past few months, just moved into Gemini and Sagittarius. So we just started getting a shift of eclipses a couple of months ago, also into that axis of Gemini and Sagittarius, and that’s gonna ramp up especially later this year, I believe in December, when we get eclipses in Sagittarius and Gemini —
AC: In —
CB: — again.
AC: — November and December.
KS: In November, I think, we start.
AC: We get our first full set of eclipses within a – on that axis – within a month of the election.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Oh —
AC: Funny how things work out.
CB: Okay.
KS: Funny that!
CB: Well, that’s really important. Let me animate the chart just to – not that I’m skeptical, but to show how that actually works, because that’s very striking if that’s true.
KS: I mean, and you have the —
AC: It’s definitely true.
KS: Yeah, it’s definitely true!
CB: Not that I’m skeptical!
KS: I love it. That’s —
CB: So there it is. A Full Moon in Gemini at nine degrees of Gemini, and that’s a lunar eclipse on November 30th. And then what? It’s like, the next one’s a solar eclipse in Sagittarius at 23 Sag on December 14th-ish, it looks like.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Yep. It’s end of November and then mid-December.
KS: And it’s worth noting the significance of like, the Sag-Jupiter axis in general in that the Sibley chart has a Sag rising. Joe Biden, who has already been vice president of America and is now running for president, has a Sag rising. Kamala Harris, I’m not sure exactly the pronunciation – if it’s Kamala or Kamala, please definitely correct me if I’m getting it wrong – she has a Gemini rising as well. And then of course Trump has huge things across the Gemini-Sag axis. So it’s a really significant axis and quite interesting that it’s being hit by eclipses at this particular election cycle.
CB: Yeah. And when I saw – because I was holding off on looking at much of the political astrology at all, honestly, until this VP pick, because I just wanted to wait until everything was in place so that we didn’t have to speculate too much on people who didn’t end up being the candidates. But now that it is picked,, and seeing Joe Biden having – or seeing Kamala Harris having Gemini rising and then Joe Biden having Sagittarius rising, that’s actually a really interesting and notable in terms of the eclipses, because that ended up being one of the indicators for Obama first for his two elections was when he was elected in 2008, the eclipses had just shifted into his rising sign and his 7th house. And then when he was reelected in 2012, the eclipses shifted into his 10th house and his 4th house. So there was this eclipse first house and 10th house emphasis during both elections, and then we saw a continuation of that in retrospect with Trump when he sort of got the White House in 2017 when there was eclipses that started taking place in his rising sign. So there’s this like, weird, interesting continuation of that. So that’s one of those little pieces of data just in terms of do we see a continuation of that, of people getting elected to public office when eclipses start hitting their angles? Or alternatively with Trump having the eclipses returning back to his Sun-Moon eclipse natal axis, if that ends up being more important to him for that reason.
AC: One thing that’s interesting that we can say is that the people who end up being so centerstage during a period of history, not surprisingly, have charts that are really configured to what’s happening, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: And that’s not necessarily positive transits, right, because taking on – well, running at all is, I think, mostly not fun.
CB: Right. Imagine what a grueling process that is.
AC: And then taking office, especially whoever, you know, anyone who took high office in the United States over the last couple years, over the next probably decade or so, is probably not going to get to gently oversee a land of prosperity, peace, and accord. Right? It’ll probably be an unpleasant job. And that’s something —
KS: It’ll be hard.
AC: — we noticed before too with like, Saturn, right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: Like right as Trump took office, that was Saturn going into the same sign as his Moon. Right? Be like, if we were reading that for a person, we’d be like, oh, it’s gonna be a bummer. Right? It’ll be unpleasant emotionally. There’s gonna be a lot of weight, you know? You might be stressed out. You might be more stressed out than normal, and that’s not – I’m just using the most recent president as an example – but that’s not uncommon at all.
KS: Not at all.
AC: George Bush Junior had – so he’s got the Sun and I think something else in Cancer. And it wasn’t when he got elected, but not too long after he got elected, he got to be president for all of Saturn in Cancer.
KS: Yes.
AC: Right? Saturn across his Sun and all that. So you see, like, big slow-moving, often malefic planets hitting really tender spots in charts of people who will take on high office.
CB: Yeah. Well, there’s no shortage of that for these three, because all of them —
KS: All of them!
CB: Speaking of all of those like, transits we’ve been talking about this month that are all around the later degrees of the cardinal signs, especially 25 through 27 Capricorn and Aries, it’s like, we have Trump having his Venus there at 25 degrees of Cancer conjunct his Saturn at 23 Cancer. And he’s, of course, is in a 3rd house profection year, which is the place of siblings. And Saturn is transiting over that and Pluto transiting over that right now, and his brother – his younger brother, I believe, passed away in the past month, which is really interesting in terms of being in a 3rd house profection year. Saturn’s like, hitting the ruler of his 3rd in the 12th, and he loses his brother. So Trump has that going on with 25 Cancer Venus. Notably, Venus is also the ruler of his 10th whole sign house as well as his Midheaven, so it’s sort of relevant not just for 3rd house matters but also for 10th house matters.
When you look at Biden’s chart, you see that Jupiter there at 25 degrees of Cancer, and that’s actually the ruler of his Sagittarius rising Ascendant. So the ruler of his Ascendant is gonna get hit and is being hit by some of the same transits in terms of Saturn opposing it from 25 Capricorn and Mars squaring it from 27 some odd Aries.
And then finally, Kamala Harris has the Sun-Moon axis. Her Moon is at 27 degrees of Aries, and her Sun is at 27 degrees of Libra, which is right where Mars is gonna station retrograde here very soon in late September.
So yeah. All of them have like, pretty heavy transits going on. I have a funny anecdote about Kamala Harris, actually, because Leisa Schaim, my partner Leisa, noticed way back in like, late 2018 there was this period where Leisa discovered that we had a birth time for Kamala Harris, and she just sort of like, ran the zodiacal releasing periods one day. And then there was this period in 2018 where she would not stop talking about how notable and eminent it seemed like Kamala Harris’s chart became during the 2020 election. And almost to observe jokingly, but she just kept going on and on about this, and I think even like, I may have had to institute a “no prognosticating in the shower” rule at one point when she was like, making predictions about the presidential election based on like, zodiacal releasing periods. And I don’t wanna go into all of the details; she did eventually issue a prediction at one point – or not a prediction, but a little tweet – because both of us were trying to stay out of politics, so there was like, much deliberation about whether to say anything at all. But in January of 2019, she issued a tweet outlining a little bit of what she had noticed about Kamala’s chart becoming more prominent in 2020. And the main thing that Leisa was noticing was that she’s been in this 30-year build-up period that eventually culminates when she moves into a 12-year peak period using zodiacal releasing from the Lot of Spirit starting in December of 2020, which is in that weird sort of in between period just before the inauguration takes place in January.
So it’s gonna become one of those questions in terms of zodiacal releasing where does the peak period starting at that time begin because it indicates somebody getting into office and reaching the highest political appointment during their lifetime, or does it indicate that she’s becoming more prominent but perhaps even if she doesn’t win this election it sets her up to run again, let’s say for the presidency in 2024? It could go either way. So you’d have to take in a lot of other factors into account in order to answer that question.
Kelly, I think you said you’d seen some interesting stuff in her chart in terms of secondary progressions?
KS: Yeah. There was I guess before the official announcement came, there was some sort of scuttlebutt out on the internet that Kamala Harris might be named. It was back in early August. It was like, oh, somebody’s seen something; it was like, sort of a purported false announcement. And I thought, “I wonder if we’ve got her chart;” it’s probably the same thing Leisa did. So I just pulled the progressions just to see if there was anything notable. At that time, she had, you know, withdrawn from running for president and wasn’t, you know, I didn’t know what was going on basically. And there were a couple of things that were significant and similarly it’s not as though you could say off this, oh, you know, her team will definitely win, but it certainly increases that visibility profile. So her progressed Moon phase, she is in the first quarter Moon phase by progression. So looking at the Sun and the Moon in the progressed chart. And in some of the research I’ve done, when we progress into that first quarter phase, the Moon is now at least half full and getting bigger. And it usually indicates people entering about an eight-year period of incredibly dynamic progress that is usually correlated with an increase in fortune or success, if you like. And so when I’ve looked at sports stars or even people in business or private enterprise, they seem to go into every successful period when they come into this part of their progressed Moon cycle. So that was one thing that was significant.
And then her progressed Sun is also moving over her natal Part of Fortune, which is not something of course that everybody will experience. But it can certainly indicate a level of, you know, with Fortune or even with the Moon, it’s the idea of sometimes being in the right place at the right time, or something going your way that you personally might consider being favorable. So not saying, you know, that everybody would think what’s happening for her is favorable, but from her perspective, from the inside of the chart looking out, if she has these high political aspirations, then this would be a time. You’d certainly, you know, if this was a client, you’d certainly be encouraging the client to reach for something more if that’s the case.
So the other significant shift which interestingly might time out a little bit with some of the ZR stuff is that in early 2019, February 2019, her progressed Midheaven sign changed from Aries where it had been since the early ‘90s and into Taurus where it will now be for the next sort of 20, 25 years. So she’s moved out of a period in her life where her career is influenced by Aries and Mars and into a career or a period in her professional life where the Taurus-Venus vibe is going to hold more sway.
So just a few changes there in tone and focus, but also a sense of elevation. And then, you know, as we all know is this just the elevation that comes from running for office, or does this indicate actually winning high office? So we do need to explore more, because of course she’s not running alone.
CB: Yeah. So there’s a lot of different charts you can take into account. There’s the birth charts; there’s also, what’s happening right now is the nomination charts where sometimes either when a candidate is nominated at the convention or when they accept the nomination, Patrick Watson and I try to document previous elections and which charts were working better for that. There’s also the inauguration chart. There’s also comparison with like, the US chart and all sorts of things that we need to get into if one wants to look at this question really seriously.
With the zodiacal releasing periods, I meant to show Leisa’s tweet just because she had outlined it back then in January —
KS: Oh yeah, that’s great.
CB: — of 2019. It just says, “I looked at Kamala Harris’s chart/career history, and she’s definitely rising somehow. Her zodiacal releasing will be excellent soon. At the end of 2020, peak periods on level one, two, and three. Her whole preparatory level one period since 1991 has been a steady climb upwards, matches timing perfectly. In what should have been less prominent/more challenging period compared to 2021+. She’s in a completion period now on level two. Switches to a peak period on level two in July for a year. Then a level one peak starts December 25th, 2020. So somehow more prominence and more positive coming up. Looking forward to seeing how that plays out.”
And the entire basis of that or a large part of the basis of that was just the fact that she’s been in this very long, 30-year Aquarius period for those that know zodiacal releasing. And what’s interesting about that is Aquarius in her chart is actually the sign that contains Saturn in a night chart. So it’s actually —
KS: The out of sect malefic!
CB: — one of the most – right. So it’s actually one of the most subjectively difficult periods. It’s compounded by the fact that it’s also opposite to Mars, which is in Leo in a night chart, although there’s a little bit of alleviation coming from Jupiter in a night chart in the 12th in Taurus. But what happens is that in December, she switches into a 12-year Pisces period. And Pisces is the 4th sign from the Lot of Fortune, which is in Sagittarius. So it’s a peak period; it’s more active and more important for 12 years. But then also if you look at the sign opposite to that, you find Venus in a night chart. So it’s also a more subjectively positive period for some reason, and it’s moving out of the most subjectively difficult period, which was the 30-year build-up period that started in 1991 and ends in December of 2020.
So that’s some of the background. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in terms of looking at this. I don’t know if I’m gonna do an episode on it, because I made a vow a while ago which I stupidly broke to stay out political astrology in 2016, and I shut down the political astrology blog that Patrick Watson and I used to run until we ended it after the 2012 election because I could see that politics was getting more vitriolic and just more negative and more intense. And I didn’t really want to be involved in that because I quite enjoy doing astrology just on its own for its own sake and don’t need to be involved in stuff like that. But maybe I’ll do like, a Casual Astrology Podcast or something like that to talk about some of the candidates’ charts here for patrons at some point in the future.
Any final thoughts on that topic?
KS: It’s hard to say final thoughts. It’s still an ongoing situation, isn’t it? Still a developing situation, as they say in the news.
CB: Yeah. Well, I’m sure we’ll check back in over the course of the next few months as there may or may not be some interesting events occurring between now and election day.
KS: The one tiny little thing —
AC: I think there may!
KS: There may!
CB: Yeah!
KS: I won’t bore everyone with detailed looks at, you know, Biden’s progressions and Trump’s. But the one thing that stood out to me very briefly on Trump’s chart with his progressions were that his progressed Moon is going to make a square to his natal Uranus through the month of October. So basically the whole month of October. And that usually —
CB: October surprise?
KS: — indicates – the October surprise. Yeah, a Moon-Uranus aspect when the progressed Moon aspects Uranus by a hard angle will typically create emotional volatility, an increase in fluctuations or erratic behavior and choices. So if you’re not already stable, that gets more, and if you are stable, you know, that kicks in. So I think to your points earlier, Austin, definitely more ahead with September and October as like, an ongoing vibe.
CB: All right. Well, now that we have the unimportant news out of the way, let’s talk about more important matters.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Austin, I hear that you have —
KS: Austin!
CB: — a new —
KS: You have show and tell!
CB: You have a new feline —
AC: I do.
CB: — addition to your family I’ve heard.
AC: We do! We do. So —
CB: And the importance of this for astrologers is that you have a birth chart with a birth time for this new addition to your family?
AC: Oh no, this momentous event for everyone is packed with good astrology. So —
CB: Okay.
AC: — as long-time listeners may know, I am now in a 6th house profection.
KS: Yeah!
AC: And within the first month of entering a 6th house profection, the 6th house is the house of usually it’s like, health problems and various pains in the ass, but it is also the house of pets, which are a pain in the ass that are desirable. Oh, by the way —
CB: Do you want me to show the chart?
AC: — I have a new 6th – oh, not yet.
CB: Oh do you wanna just leave it at that? I mean, your chart.
AC: Yeah, this is —
KS: He’s doing the set up.
CB: No, I mean his natal chart.
AC: Oh no, we don’t need to show —
CB: I don’t know – I don’t remember if he shows his or not.
KS: Ah.
AC: But anyway. So within that first month of being in a 6th house profection, I literally had a cat walk up to my office door and then just walk in and make itself at home as soon as I opened the door. And so I said, “Okay. This is the 6th house is showing itself.” I have never had that happen before. This is not my new cat; this is a neighbor’s cat who decided to hang out with the person having the 6th house profection. And then when I got to the 6th month from my birthday – so 6th house monthly profection in a 6th house year, right, so double – a kitten was delivered about two weeks earlier than we thought into our lives. And so I can go grab her. She’ll —
KS: Yes!
AC: — hate it. But she’s adorable. And I’ll be right back.
CB: Okay.
KS: Oh, it’s not pics! It’s the real girl.
CB: I also have an instagram —
KS: Do you have the cat’s chart?
CB: Here’s the video from —
KS: Oh!
CB: — the Sphere and Sundry instagram page.
KS: Honestly, I do not know how either of you are getting any work done!
AC: Meow!
KS: Okay.
AC: I know it’s terrible!
KS: We need full screen on Austin now. Oh my gosh!
CB: So and this is the cat —
AC: This is Sumo.
CB: — what’s the cat’s name? Sumo.
AC: She’s going to be gigantic. It’s a future name.
CB: So this is a Maine —
AC: She has a little —
CB: — Coon?
AC: — eclipse face. Oh, you hate it?
KS: Yeah.
AC: You hate it too much? Want me to put you down?
KS: Aww!
AC: Okay, I’ll put you down.
KS: Oh, she is so sweet. That was actually a really cute video; I forgot about the one that Kait posted on insta!
AC: Sorry. So that’s —
CB: Yeah. So we were just saying her name’s Sumo, right?
AC: Yeah. Sumo, Eclipse Face – we’ve got like, five other names – Coppock.
CB: And it’s a Maine Coon?
AC: She’s Catholic, so she’s got a lot of names.
CB: Okay!
KS: I love it!
CB: So you got her from a breeder, and one of the side effects of that is you actually have an exactly timed birth chart, right?
AC: Yeah. We have an exactly timed birth chart, and it’s already – I’m like, cat astrology is not really my specialty. But it’s been shocking how real – like, we’ve only had her for about a month.
CB: Well, and to complete your profection story, she has Sagittarius rising. And you’re in a Sagittarius 6th house profection year.
AC: Yeah, my 6th house. And Kait’s 6th house is Aries, and where is Aries for a – where is Mars for a shocking amount of the year?
KS: Yeah.
AC: Oh, it’s in – like, so Kait’s having like, big 6th house activation not from profection, but literally as activated as possible by transit, right? And what was funny was the, again, like, she was delivered like, two weeks early. The breeder was like, “Yeah, I know we were on track to do this in a couple weeks, but can you come get her right now?” And it was like, I think the second day that the Sun entered Leo, so it’s like, oh yeah, the Sun is in a feline sign now where it’s strong. And that was me by monthly profection entering the 6th from the 6th, and so it was, you know, the astrology was crazy. And the experience of bringing her into our home has correlated with her birth chart in both fortunate and unfortunate ways.
So our – what was I gonna say? All right, so she —
KS: Your existing cat?
AC: — was born, yeah. She was born right after a Venus retrograde station. And part of our plan is we have a much older cat; he will be 13 right about now, honestly. We don’t – we got him from a shelter, so we don’t know exactly when he was born. And he was actually – what’s funny is he was born right – we know he was born right after the Venus direct station in Leo in 2007. But what we wanted was to get him a buddy, because he was kind of bored and we’re really busy and we try to spend time with him, but we thought it’d be – he’s kind of bored and he’s kind of lazy. And we thought it would be useful to have a buddy to like, chase him around and get him moving. And with little Sumo not having – or excuse me – having a Venus retrograde station, our initial plans for kitty harmony have not gone exactly as we hoped. I’m sure they will be friends, but not only did they not become friends swiftly, he actually had like, his worst health issue within, I don’t know, a year or two within a week of her arriving. And so he, yeah, he had vet stuff for basically a week, week-and-a-half. We got to, instead of it being a joyous arrival – well, it was joyous because she’s adorable and fun, but we ended up having to take him to the vet several times. And so this actually created disruption in the house, which makes sense because as we now know, our little kitten has Mars on the degree of Kait’s IC. Right? So the house, right? So it’s created a little – there’s like, literally kitty friction in the house.
And of course, Mars rules Kait’s 6th. So the astrology – you know, I’m not – this is probably the only time anyone will hear me talk about kitty astrology, but —
KS: Yes?
AC: — it really is like, crazy – it’s like, crazy precise astrology. It’s not like, oh yeah, she’s a Taurus and she likes food! Right?
KS: Yeah.
AC: You know, it’s —
KS: No, it’s the timing that makes it so interesting in addition to her being adorable.
AC: Like, our charts, her charts, her bringing – like, bringing her chart into our lives and then pinging off of everybody else’s chart. Like, her Venus is on my Moon. I like her a lot! And she hangs out in my office a lot. She sleep – there you go! Yeah, she’s sleeping on the things. But —
KS: Bless.
AC: — it’s —
CB: I actually did an episode of The Casual Astrology Podcast with Cam White a few months ago on pet astrology and specifically cat astrology because we had a listener of the show who had a Maine Coon cat as well that they had a birth time for, and they had like, an instagram account for called Sylvia the Maine Coon. And Cam and I did this like, theoretical exercise where we walked through all 12 of the houses trying to think about what they would mean from the perspective of a cat. And it actually was a really good exercise for understanding the significations of the houses at a deeper level by taking it out of a purely human context and putting it into the context of what would it look like for another being that has a different context when you’re looking at that birth chart, and it was kind of an interesting exercise to go through.
AC: So as Kait just reminded me, one of the things that’s interesting is – so she has a stationing and angular Venus. And so every time she walks by anything even vaguely reflective, she’ll stop and stare in the mirror, right? Even if it’s just like, the shiny part of my computer. And it is interesting that this is, you know, it’s a stationing angular Venus that rules the Midheaven, and this cat is getting a lot of publicity right now.
KS: Yes! That’s true. She’s —
CB: Yeah.
KS: — so sweet.
CB: So Sag rising with Jupiter as the ruler of the Ascendant in Capricorn in the 2nd house. Her most difficult planet is the Saturn in the 3rd house of like, siblings and neighbors. Saturn in a night chart —
AC: Right!
CB: — in Aquarius.
KS: Oh!
CB: Yeah, I thought that was good.
KS: Yeah, she doesn’t get on with her brother!
CB: Not getting along well —
AC: Not yet.
CB: — with the other cat.
AC: It’s a dignified Saturn; it will mature with time.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Once we get – so Saturn’ll come back; your cat will actually have a very early Saturn return in like, December!
AC: That’s funny.
KS: Because how old is Sumo? She’s only like, a few months old, right? When was she born? May?
AC: She’s maybe like —
KS: Six months.
AC: — six – yeah, 16 —
KS: Yeah.
AC: — 17 weeks?
KS: She’s tiny. She needs a year or two to settle. And your other cat will adjust. I mean, when we adopted our —
AC: He’s doing better already.
KS: — third cat – he is? Okay. They just —
AC: Yeah.
KS: — sometimes they’re just so moody and they just need time. And the new cat we brought in never became like, besties with the two that we already had, but they certainly got to the point where they could all be in the same room together very comfortably. They just never curled up together. But I reckon Sumo will get into his heart eventually.
AC: Yeah. Boog is pretty – he’s pretty cuddly. I think once he realizes there’s someone else to cuddle with, he’ll get excited.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So this brings up —
AC: We’re not excited —
CB: — just that you can create charts for all sorts of different things, not just humans but also potentially animals and there can be an interesting side of that that’s actually fascinating, because what astrologers are dealing with is like, time and snapshots of time, and whatever being born at that moment in time sharing some of the qualities of that moment. And you can do things like that, like not just look through the houses and the relational placements that a person has, but also things like synastry. Like, what is the synastry that the cat has with you and your wife, but also what is the synastry that the cat has with like, the other cat that it’s not getting along with, and the idea that two entities can like, clash or not get along not necessarily through any fault of their own, but through inherent things that are hard to get around or something like that.
AC: Well, and so one thing that I actually just realized – so i, you know, her saint name is Eclipse Face. And I don’t know if you could see, because I didn’t wanna – she kind of doesn’t like being picked up very much. So half of her face is like, yellow-gold, kitty blonde, and then the other half is much darker. So I jokingly called her Eclipse Face. And she has the nodal axis right on the Ascendant-Descendant axis, right? So there’s literally the eclipse energy is right there on the Ascendant.
KS: Yeah, she seemed to have like, a white patch on the lower half of one side of her face and then real darkness around the other eye, which I thought was really spesh.
AC: Yeah. If I were to hold her up in a way that she would hate, you would see it’s pretty much half and half. It’s like —
KS: Half and half, yeah.
AC: Yeah, it’s like dark and light.
KS: So sweet. And so, okay, Austin, you now have two cats. I have two cats.
AC: We can be friends!
KS: Chris – we can be friends! Chris, when are you and Leisa getting a pet?
CB: We have a problem because I’m a cat person and she’s more of a dog person. So we’ve been at a stalemate. We need to work that out; we’re still working on it. I think we’re leaning more towards cat at this point because they’re more self-sufficient, but we’ll see how that goes. That’s a very big commitment, though, thinking more about this —
AC: Yep.
CB: — the idea of bringing a new family member into your family, but it having a chart and like, yeah. That’s a big step.
KS: That’s gonna slow you guys down even more!
CB: Yeah.
KS: That’s not helping the process!
CB: Right.
KS: Our two cats we got literally like, off the back of a truck. Some lady had a box of kittens, and we just, we got, we adopted two of them. So we have —
CB: Okay.
KS: — no idea. We kind of know —
CB: Don’t know?
KS: — the month they were born in, and that’s about it, unfortunately.
CB: Okay. That would drive me crazy.
KS: Yeah.
CB: I’d been trying to do —
KS: They just – well, you kind of —
CB: That leads to the other like, venerable —
KS: That rectification.
CB: — art of cat chart rectification, yeah.
KS: Oh my gosh. I mean, you can – it’s interesting because you can tell by their physical shape and their personality type. You can start to sort of say, oh, this is the Moon cat because she always wants to be cuddled, and she’s a little bit more well-rounded, and she’s always eating. And then we have like, the Gemini cat who is very curious and like, the cliche curious cat, eats like a bird, and really, really slender. And so you can sort of associate different types with them, but it’s not as accurate, of course, as having the birth chart.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: We don’t know about the Moon for our other cat, for Bear.
KS: Ah.
AC: But we know he’s Sun, Saturn, Rahu in Virgo, and he really likes eating. He’s really picky about what he eats. His digestion’s not super strong. And he’s, you know, he’s kind of adorable and grumpy.
KS: Aww!
CB: Well, that’s a good —
AC: You can see the like, Venus stationing direct in Leo. I feel like that’s an exaltation position if you are a cat.
CB: Oh right. Kelly has no comment on cat exaltation, essential dignity?
KS: No, I thought it was perfect! I thought that was —
CB: Okay.
KS: — brilliant! And then there’s some cheeky commentary going on in the chat box.
CB: But it’s a good exercise in terms of on the one hand, there’s astrologers who would say like, oh, pet astrology, that’s really lame, or are you —
KS: I would say those people – I mean, if you have a pet, it’s a big deal.
CB: Well, it’s just realizing that astrology extends much further than people realize sometimes. It’s not just about birth charts, but also through inceptional astrology and looking at inceptional charts you can apply astrology to all sorts of things. And in that context, it becomes a much broader study that you can actually learn more from if you are paying attention and applying it to many different things rather than just one area of life.
AC: Yeah, and it was also from a human astrology point of view, you know, there was a big 6th house almost unprecedented 6th house activations for both Kait and I, right? And the 6th house is supposed to be where pets are. And so it came to pass.
Although I am still having my randomly hurting myself 6th house stuff more than normal. I added some poison oak to my collection of small irritations recently.
KS: Oh no!
CB: Nice. That’s good.
AC: It’s totally par for the course this year. Almost broke my toe. Smashed my finger in the door and just about lost the nail. Somehow spattered cooking oil on my stomach and gave myself blisters on my stomach, and now like, first poison oak or whatever – poison anything, you know – in a decade. It’s just little stuff. I’ll take it if it stays —
KS: It’s manageable.
AC: — at this level, no problem.
KS: Yeah.
AC: Oh, and my back —
KS: Solvable difficulties.
AC: — hurt a lot last week, last month, which is unusual.
CB: Yeah. Well, I think getting a cat is a good 6th house propitiation ritual then in that context. And I support those efforts.
I wanna mention a few other things that happened on the podcast this month. One, had Levente Laszlo on to talk about translating ancient Greek astrological texts, and one little cool thing to tie into some of our earlier discussions about the US chart that I thought was really interesting is he had this text from Shadhan, this 9th century astrologer who wrote in Arabic. And this was in episode 267 of the podcast. But I wanna make sure people check out this episode because we released – in working with Levente, we released four free translations that you can just download and read. Like, usually you have to pay a bunch of money to buy academic translations of texts, but through what Levente is doing with his translation project where he’s basically like, crowdfunding it through Patreon, he’s able to release these translations for free.
So one of them was this text called Discourses with Abu Ma’shar on the Secrets of Astrology where one of Abu Ma’shar’s students named Shadhan just went through and recounted like, a bunch of little anecdotes and things that he learned from his teacher or that his teacher said to him in passing. But one of the funny ones in terms of mundane astrology that I thought was really interesting – it was just one sentence that was translated, and it said, according to Shadhan it says that Abu Ma’shar, he said, “When Saturn is in Libra and Jupiter is in Cancer, they always effect great changes in the world.” And I thought that was really interesting; it made me think, because we’ve been talking so much about the birth chart of the United States and the Sibley chart especially this year. And of course, where were Saturn and Jupiter in 1776 in the founding of the United States but of course Jupiter was in Cancer and Saturn was in Libra.
So I don’t know; I thought that was pretty impressive because it becomes a statement from a 9th century astrologer about some sort of like, shared or collective wisdom that he’d gained, and then several centuries later – like, seven centuries later – that turned out to be a relatively accurate statement, I think we can all say in retrospect.
AC: Yeah. And that pairing of Jupiter and Saturn and the reason that’s exceptional, of course, is that it’s both Jupiter and Saturn are simultaneously in their signs of exaltation. And so Chris, didn’t you time it out? Isn’t it like, about a century or so, but sometimes it’ll skip a century? Isn’t it something like that?
CB: Yeah. I tried to search and see how often that had actually happened over the course of the past thousand years. And I only came up with like, 12 something – like, a dozen hits maybe tops. But sometimes they cluster together somewhat closely, Jupiter being in Cancer and Saturn being in Libra with Jupiter on a 12-year cycle and Saturn on a 30-year cycle. But some of those times when it happened were spaced out by like, three centuries, by like 300 years. So it’s not that frequent. It’s somewhat infrequent of a thing that happens if you’re talking about a thousand-year period. So I’d say given that that it’s a pretty impressive statement to have made in the 9th century.
AC: That’s really interesting.
CB: Yeah. So that was one of the things —
AC: That happen again soon?
CB: That’s a good question. I did not look —
AC: Could use a win.
CB: — forward thinking. I think maybe Kelly, if you whip out your ephemeris it’ll take you a couple minutes to look that one up!
KS: Let’s have a little look. We’ll see. When is Saturn gonna be in Libra next? That’s our starting point.
AC: It’ll be a while.
KS: I’ll do that while you guys carry on. Let’s see.
CB: Okay. I was half joking; it might take you a while to look that up, so don’t —
KS: Well, my ephemeris only goes up to 2050, so I’m not gonna be looking too far into the future!
AC: We can check the next one, and that’s about it.
KS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well —
AC: Yeah, no dice.
KS: Yeah. No dice. It won’t happen then.
CB: In the meantime, I just want to re-recommend if you haven’t listened to that episode with Levente Laszlo to check it out not just for those free translations of texts, but because he’s basically starting a new crowdfunded open source version of Project Hindsight. And if you wanna see him producing translations and translating all of the remaining Greek astrological texts that survive and then basically putting them out for free as PDFs, then consider kicking in like, five dollars or 10 dollars or 15 dollars a month. And then if he’s able to hit his funding goal, I think he’s gonna dedicate himself to translating these texts full time, and that’s kind of an exciting prospect to me since Project Hindsight wasn’t able to complete that goal that it set out to do in the ‘90s. But it seems like somebody else might be able to pull it off.
AC: Yeah. So that would be an appropriate remedial donation if you have Mercury afflicted by Saturn.
CB: Yes. Propitiating to Saturn by donating —
KS: That’s great.
CB: — to a translation project for ancient astrological texts.
AC: Right. Helping those poor texts buried by history.
CB: Exactly. Speaking of poor texts buried by history, the other episode I did this month was on Tajika astrology. You always laugh at my transitional phrases.
KS: That was a good one!
CB: Yeah, it was pretty smooth. So I did another episode on Tajika where it turns out that some texts on medieval Arabic astrology – like Sahl ibn Bishr and Abu Ma’shar – were actually translated into Sanskrit in the 13th century, and then it started this long tradition of using a form of what we consider to be western astrology but it was basically medieval Arabic and Persian astrology, which was then practiced in India for several centuries and still to this day where it’s usually referred to as, I don’t know if you guys have heard of varsaphal. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but it’s basically annual astrology where they do solar return charts just like western solar return charts and look at things like profections and stuff like that. It’s actually pretty cool.
So —
KS: Nice.
CB: — I would recommend checking that out just because it also came with a free ebook where Martin Gansten got this, what was it, not donation, but he got a grant basically – a large research grant – and one of the things it allowed him to do is to actually publish this text, and they released the publisher, brill, released it for free as a free PDF. So you can basically just download it as a PDF and then you’ve got a full 17th century text on annual astrology and solar returns that you can just read. So I wanted to do an episode on that partially to promote that as a free resource in terms of making astrology more accessible, especially for some of these texts that are otherwise usually very expensive, like a few hundred dollars to buy and therefore not accessible to everybody.
All right, guys. I think that’s it then for this forecast. Are there any things like last month where I just like, completely forgot to mention the ISAR conference moving online, or any crazy things like that?
What do you guys have coming up? You promoting anything? You doing anything in September, or are you just trying to take cover —
KS: Oh yeah.
CB: — and like, keep your head down?
KS: I actually do have two things coming up. I’ve got my next online chart interpretation course where we’ll be looking at the role of Moon phases, fixed stars in birth chart interpretation and also be touching on how sect can influence aspects. So that course starts Monday, September 14.
And in September, September’s like a back-to-school month for me with starting to teach again, so the other program I have starting is my group mentoring, which is a once a month meetup for senior students and new practitioners. Oh my gosh, thanks Chris; that’s very kind. So that’s the —
CB: Nice website.
KS: Oh, thank you! That’s thanks to Tony, who does all of that. So the – yeah, if you go – the chart interpretation course is on the home page, and the fastest way to get to the group mentoring link if you’re interested in that is just via the calendar tab on the home page. So that group mentoring is limited to just 30 students, and we’ll meet once a month; we’ll go through charts; you’ll have a chance to practice. And the focus for the September group mentoring is timing techniques, so it’s a chance to practice making forecasts and doing predictive astrology. So that’s what I have going on.
CB: What is your website again?
KS: Oh, it’s KellysAstrology.com.
CB: Okay. And I like that group mentoring model because I get a lot of people that contact me and ask for mentoring, but I don’t offer it anymore – I used to – because there’s no, I just don’t have enough time with the podcast and doing six episodes a month and everything else and teaching courses. And a lot of astrologers it seems like once they get to a certain level get so busy that it’s hard to do one-on-one mentoring, but I like that you’re doing that with groups in order to make it possible to have that sort of connection outside of just personal consultations.
KS: Yeah, I think it’s important. There’s a level of it being practical, but it is also helpful for the student because as we all know, we don’t learn in a vacuum, and we actually learn from our peers as much as, you know, learning from whoever might be leading the group. So the students really enjoy hearing not just how I might go about something, but how other people would approach it because there’s always a few different ways to come at any given thing.
AC: Absolutely.
CB: Yeah, and —
AC: And that’s what I’ll be doing this month as well, as well as —
KS: Yeah!
AC: — the month before and the month after. That’s how I teach my yearly classes. There’s like, all of the presentational stuff, and the learn these techniques stuff which is all in videos. But then we meet up several times a month and do live group sessions. So I’ll be – right now we’re in month five? Yeah, we’re in month five of the eight month program, and oh, we’re at the end of month five of the eight month program. And yeah, that’s what I’ll be doing. That and dragging Faces 2.0 over the finish line.
CB: I’m looking —
KS: Yes.
CB: — forward to that, because people —
KS: Very excited.
CB: — everyone’s looking for that book. It’s become like, the hottest commodity in terms of astrology books because you can’t get copies like, anywhere.
AC: Well, you can; they’re just super expensive.
KS: They’re just like —
CB: Yeah.
KS: — 500 dollars!
CB: It’s like a thousand dollars.
AC: Which is so funny. It’s so funny that like, a paperback is going for that. I mean, it’s a compliment. Somebody – I think it was last year, somebody was super mad at me because they thought I was just like, squeezing the market, whereas it’s literally just the secondhand market. It was originally sold for 25 dollars like other books. The second edition will be sold for normal book prices. It’s not gonna be like, “Here’s my new book; give me 150 dollars.”
CB: Because your publisher for the first edition literally did a limited print run and then you guys ran out of copies. So that’s part of the background —
AC: Yeah.
CB: — but with this —
AC: Yeah. There was just a print run and then it was out of print.
CB: Right. Cool. So you’ll be doing that. What’s your website again, Austin?
AC: AustinCoppock.com.
CB: And you also have a very fancy and very nice website I’m impressed by. I always love your partner Kait’s web design skills. Cool! All right. Any other news and announcements?
No? All right. For myself, the only thing is I’m pretty much focusing everything on the podcast. I’m starting to take this a little bit more serious as like, a full-time job. It used to be like, my side thing and I never expected this to become my primary thing. But now that it is, I’m trying to take it more seriously and put more research and effort into every episode I do, including sending out equipment to get good audio and video for each interview I do. This month, we’re gonna start trying to upgrade Austin and Kelly’s video so that we can get good high-quality video as if we were in the studio even though we’re gonna be doing the year ahead forecast by distance, like, through Zoom later this year in December and getting ready for that.
So if you want to support that work, then just become a patron of The Astrology Podcast through our page on Patreon, and that’ll help out a lot. You get access to benefits like being able to access the live chat and watch episodes like this live where we have an audience of quite a few people who attended us today, and thanks to everybody who joined us in the chat. I appreciate it. And in general, thanks to everybody that supports my work with the podcast, because I’m trying to create a resource where people can take almost like, a university-level astrology course with this podcast for free essentially by covering all the different approaches to astrology. Like this month we covered Tajika astrology, so Indian astrology. We did an episode on translating ancient texts. And I did an episode on aspect patterns with Carole Taylor. So we’re pretty much trying to cover everything.
All right. I think that’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks, guys, for joining me today; this was a lot of fun.
KS: My pleasure. Thanks, guys!
AC: My pleasure.
CB: Thanks to our audience for joining us as well. I love you all. Good luck in September. Let us know how it goes. Write in and let us know your experiences and if there’s anything we need to bring up and make sure we mention in the next forecast episode. And otherwise, I think that’s it for the forecast for September. So thanks for watching or listening, and we’ll see you again next time.
KS: Bye everyone!
[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, Thomas Miller, Bear Ryver, Catherine Conroy, Michelle Merillat, Kate Pallotta, Kristi Moe, and Sumo Coppock.
As well as the Astro Gold Astrology app, available at Astrogold.io; the Portland School of Astrology at PortlandAstrology.org; and the Honeycomb Collective Personal Astrological Almanacs, available at Honeycomb.co.
The production of this episode of the podcast was also supported by the International Society for Astrological Research, which is hosting an online astrology conference September 12th and 13th, 2020. You can find out more information about that at ISAR2020.org.
And finally also, Solar Fire Astrology Software, which is available at alabe.com, and you can use the promo code ‘AP15’ for a 15 percent discount on that software. For more information about how to become a patron of The Astrology Podcast and help support the production of future episodes while getting access to subscriber benefits like early access to new episodes or other bonus content, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.