The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 540, titled:

Babylonian Goal Year Periods in Astrology

With Chris Brennan and Patrick Watson

Episode originally released on June 27, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/06/27/babylonian-goal-year-periods-in-astrology/

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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 15th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Patrick Watson, and we’re gonna be talking about Babylonian goal year periods in astrology. 

Hey Patrick. Welcome back! 

PATRICK WATSON: Thanks for having me back. It’s great to be back. 

CB: Yeah, we haven’t talked in a while, but you and I have been researching this concept of Babylonian goal year periods for the last few years, and each of us has done separate things on it, and then we’ve also collaborated on it at times. But I’m excited that now I feel like it’s – we’re at a point where we can present this publicly. And it’s a really exciting new technique which is actually one of the most ancient timing techniques there is, yeah? 

PW: Yeah. I’m glad that we’re finally getting to do this. This was kind of always the plan. You know, it was sort of an accident, you know, that these other things sort of happened with it, but I’m glad that we’re finally getting back to the original idea. So yeah. I’m excited to talk about it. 

CB: Yeah. So for the viewer, just to give you a snapshot of what we’re gonna be talking about today, Babylonian goal year periods are long-term planetary periods where the placements of the planets, especially in the zodiac, will repeat over very extended periods of time. And just to give you an idea of what kind of timeframes we’re talking about, here’s a diagram that shows the Babylonian goal year periods just right from the start in order to give you an idea of the timeframes that we’re talking about. 

So here’s the periods. So Jupiter has two goal year periods, one of them is 71 years, and one of them is 83 years. Venus has the goal year period of 8 years; it has the shortest one. Mercury is 46 years. Saturn is 59 years. And then Mars has two periods, one of them – the short one – is 47 years, and the longer one is 79 years. 

So these are planetary period repetitions that we’ve been talking about a lot over the past few years on the podcast as I’ve gotten more and more into this where the planets will repeat over very long periods of time. And this can be useful both in terms of natal astrology and looking at people’s birth charts as a timing technique, but also because it deals in such long spans of time, they’re also very useful in mundane astrology. But it’s something that is kind of like, not used, or is unheard of in modern contemporary astrology, but instead, it’s something that we’ve been recovering over the past few years from ancient Mesopotamian astrology. And these were used in the first millennial BCE, or roughly let’s say at least by around 500 BCE or so these planetary periods were in use in Mesopotamia. 

PW: Yeah. You could say – I almost think of them as like, you know, if you’ve ever played with blocks or Lego, you know, the little blocks sort of add up to bigger blocks. And you know, if you work with minor periods, then that’s how these larger cycles can be kind of constructed. We can get into that with each one, but I almost think of these goal year periods as the particular return periods that are comprised of these smaller added synodic cycles that just happen to round really, really nicely in a nice, even equivalence between the number of years that are passed versus the amount of returns that planet has made, resulting in a planet appearing not only in the same place, but in the same phase that it has with the Sun. 

CB: Yeah, that phase relationship with the Sun is really important and is what’s really interesting about these periods, because it allows them to basically be in the same spot in the zodiac roughly on the same day or in the same part of the year in exactly these increments. So like, Mars for example, and especially in connection with solar phase cycle relationship movements such as when a planet stations retrograde, for example, or direct, or when a planet conjoins the Sun because these are recurrences that have to do with the phase relationship between the planet and the Sun. But just to give you an example, so Mars, which has a 79-year period, basically if Mars stations retrograde like it’s about to station retrograde in Virgo coming up, we know that exactly – it’s gonna station retrograde in Virgo early next year, I think in like, January of 2027. And we know that exactly 79 years earlier in the same month of January, that Mars also stationed retrograde in Virgo roughly in the same part of the zodiac and roughly in the exact same part of the year. And that’s part of what’s so impressive about these repetitions. 

PW: And, you know, when you just happen to know this offhand, this is what allows you to start making those kind of cross-comparisons across time really easily. You know, this is the first step to being able to be a human ephemeris like our friend Nick. You know, if you know those numbers that are associated with the planets, and these are among them, it allows you to instantly be able to make those kinds of comparisons across time. And we know that Mars will do the same thing 79 years on from 2027. So it just gives you a really large grasp over time, if you can master these cycles. 

CB: Definitely. And a large grasp of time and planetary cycles, and then of course, for us as astrologers, the most important point is that these movements of the planets coincide with or correlate with earthly events. And so sometimes what we’ve seen is that when an event happens that coincides with let’s say a Mars retrograde in a certain sign, and it’s a very specific and like, well-defined event, then what you’ll see is 79 years later, a repetition of a similar event that coincides with the same cycle. And then what we’ve seen further and where it starts getting really exciting is that once you establish what type of event coincides with a certain transit of that planet or let’s say a retrograde, you can then sometimes overlap when there’s like, multiple planets that are having recurrences in the same year, which can further specify the type of event that’s about to occur. 

PW: Yeah. I think we have some cool examples of that, actually. Yeah. It’s astrology astrology-ing, as per usual. But yeah, it’s incredible really. 

CB: Yeah. And one of the things that’s cool about it also I think that’s important is, you know, there’s been a lot of excitement with the revival of Hellenistic and medieval astrology over the past few decades, and the revival of the time lord systems and the realization that for Hellenistic and medieval astrologers, transits were often used within the context of time lord systems so that you would know which transit would be active in a person’s life at different points. And sometimes transits have taken a more reduced role in that context, but one of the things that’s interesting about this to me and these planetary periods and how the Mesopotamians would have used them in astrology is it means they were using advanced transits and repetitions basically from a very early stage. And then what’s further interesting about that is that some of these periods then got incorporated into and became the basis of many of the time lord systems, because the time lord systems like zodiacal releasing, for example, are based on the minor years of the planets, which are like, shorter term planetary repetitions. 

PW: And some of them add up to goal years when you see some of them in succession. I mean, yeah, really time lord systems that are based on minor periods really are just kind of like idealized transits in a way. They’re just, you know, they’re blocks that you put on top of each other. We’re playing with blocks. That’s the way I sort of think of it. 

CB: Yeah, and like, stacking planetary period on top of planetary period in a succession or in a sequence. 

PW: Yeah. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. I love that. Okay, so let’s see, where to frame in terms of introductory stuff from here. Part of the thing I wanna talk about is some of the ancient Mesopotamian history of this, and part of what I wanna talk about is like, the sequence of how I started getting into this over the past few years. And maybe I’ll start with the sequence of how I got into it — 

PW: Yeah, that’s interesting. I wanna hear that! 

CB: Okay. So it’s an interesting story, and that’s why I wanna record some of the like, lore of this, because it’s fascinating how some of this came about. But the starting point or one of the starting points, one of the first a-ha moments, it was when I was recording the year ahead forecast. I was getting ready to record the year ahead forecast for 2024 in December of 2023, and the night before the forecast, I was talking with my friend – with our friend – Nick Dagan Best about the Mars retrograde that was gonna happen in Leo that was coming up. And one of the things that – it was coming up in 2024 – and one of the things that Nick pointed out to me was that that Mars retrograde would be a 79-year repetition and exactly 79 years earlier, the same Mars retrograde in Leo took place in the 1940s, and one of the things that we realized as we were trying to situate it was that Trump was born just after that Mars retrograde in Leo almost exactly 79 years earlier. And so what I realized in that moment and what you can see when I reported this, actually, in the year ahead forecast for 2024 is I realized the implications of what that meant, which is that it meant that Trump was having a major 79-year repetition of Mars, which was extremely prominent in his chart since it’s conjunct the Ascendant in late Leo in his birth chart — 

PW: Yeah, little bit. Yeah. 

CB: It’s a little prominent. 

PW: Little prominent, yeah. Sticks out a little bit. 

CB: Well, I actually have a point for that I was thinking about recently, but we’ll come back to that. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Well, actually, I’ll say it right now; it’s like, you know, the two last presidents we had, you had Obama, because Obama just launched his presidential library, and it reminded that like, one of his main slogans was like, “Hope,” and “Yes we can,” and he has Aquarius rising with Jupiter in Aquarius in the rising sign. Whereas Trump, the president that came after him, has Mars in the Ascendant in the rising sign, and one of his most iconic images was after the assasination attempt in Butler when he stuck up his fist and he said, “Fight, fight, fight” before the Secret Service guys like, dragged him off the stage. And so those are two interesting contrasts in terms of two presidents and what planet’s in the rising sign.

PW: Yeah. I think that’s definitely – yeah. That’s a whole other path we could go down. Don’t wanna derail us from the lore of Babylonian goal years, but yeah —

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — that’s really interesting.

CB: Yeah. Well, but back to that. Like, with the prominence of that, you can see in that forecast that I recorded, I have like, this stunned sort of expression because I realize the implications of it and I kind of allude to that in that forecast episode that this major repetition of Trump then implied that he was gonna win the 2024 presidential election. And that’s basically what I alluded to when I reported on this 79-year recurrence in that episode. 

So that happened, and that was one of the first things that clued me into it. And then of course, when he did win the election, he eventually had the exact repetition on his birthday when he turned 79 years old in June of 2025, and Mars once again returned almost exactly to where it was when he was born in late Leo on that day. And on that day, of course, he famously hosted a military parade in Washington, DC on his birthday. There was a very large protest – the No Kings protest – at the time, Mars was also conjunct the fixed star Regulus, which is the king. And then finally, the first Iran war also started at that time with the strikes on Iran beginning shortly after that, which would eventually lead us into the war that we’re in today. So that repetition, that 79-year Babylonian goal year repetition, was strikingly accurate. 

PW: Yeah. Usually I’m just okay with going out for dinner, you know, at like, Red Lobster or something for my birthday. You know, the idea of having tanks destroy the street, just to flatter yourself is just ridiculous, right? But in any case, yeah, very very — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — on point for Mars, of course, to have a big bellicose in a sort of display for yourself. 

CB: Yeah. So that was like, the first thing. But then after that in 2024, I believe, I also did an episode on the Antikythera mechanism, and I was largely drawing on the book of Alexander Jones, which is titled A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World. And one of the things Alexander Jones, who’s a historian of science and of ancient astronomy and astrology, one of the things he pointed out was that the Babylonian goal year periods and similar and related basically long-term planetary periods and cycles were incorporated into the Antikythera mechanism which was this mechanical device that could calculate the positions of the planets far into the past and the future based on a bunch of interlocking gears and a cranking mechanism. So that got me even more interested in how the Mesopotamian astrologers were using these periods. And then finally, in 2024 and 2025, Nick and I started doing a lot of research about some of the upcoming Venus retrogrades that were happening. There was a Venus retrograde that happened in Aries and Pisces, and there was a Mars retrograde that happened in Cancer and Leo. And in order to understand what was gonna take place and make some predictions about it, we did some research episodes where we went back and looked at what happened in the past each time Mars had gone retrograde in those same signs or each time Venus had, and in the process started seeing so many more examples of how when a planet repeats a retrograde in the same sign, there will be repetitions of similar events. But I started seeing examples of the longer term cycles, of the 47 years of Mars and the 79 years of Mars, as well as how those sometimes overlapped with the eight years of Venus in really stunning ways. So that was like, kind of my entry point. And you and I recorded an episode, like a private episode of The Secret Astrology Podcast on this I think in 2024. And then you later also did a lecture on goal year periods at NORWAC last year, I think, right? 

PW: Yeah. At NORWAC in 2025, I did do a talk on Babylonian goal years. I was actually really stressed, because I don’t have a lot of talks in the tank. Every one I have, I have to really work to make happen. I also am a bit of perfectionist, and so I was really stressing about what topic to choose. And so at the time, we were planning on doing an episode together, and I kind of panicked because I didn’t have a topic to present. So that’s why I kind of pulled the trigger on going forward with a Babylonian goal year episode. So I’m sorry about that, Chris, for jumping the gun there. But you know, I’m hoping this sort of makes up for it, you know, times past. But yeah, I did do a talk, and I just sort of showed my preliminary kind of investigations into that, and I think there’s so much more I think to uncover about how this works, especially in terms of how it makes sense in people’s lives. My current theory about like, what it means when you reach a Babylonian goal year in your own chart or in your own life – and I guess this is true of any return – is that what it essentially means will have some way of coming about. That the times where you may be most likely to sort of discover what a given planetary placement means for you is when it comes to these special times where it repeats its same phases. 

And so that’s really interesting, because it implies that there is somewhat of a default template or schedule that we’re all kind of on, but perhaps certain ones will be more important in your life when you come to the returns of those planets. Say if you have a planet angular in your chart, or if you have a planet in a very particular relationship with the Sun. Then we know that upon the return of that planet both by sign and by phase with the Sun that the potentials of that placement would somehow play out in your life in a more extreme or more subtle way, perhaps. But yeah. So my own interest in Babylonian goal years kind of just emerged out of my obsession with the planetary periods – the minor periods. And I was obviously very impressed and affected and impacted by Nick’s research into Venus and Mars and the 32-year cycle. So really learning those combinations just naturally led me to seeing, you know, what other cycles are out there? And there are return cycles even larger than the ones that we have from the Babylonian goal years. So I think we might even touch on at least one of those in today’s talk. But yeah, so that’s kind of my own little journey with it. 

CB: Nice. All right. Well, let’s situate a little bit more historically where these periods come from and the Babylonian goal years. 

So one of the ways to situate them is I did a whole episode last year on Mesopotamian astrology that gives a really good overview and contextualization, and I touched upon briefly the Babylonian goal years in that context. But one of the things that was important with respect to them is there was this really long scientific project of observing the skies that was started earlier in the first millennium BCE. And in the ancient world, astrologers were also astronomers, and there wasn’t a differentiation between astronomy and astrology like we have today. The astrologers were doing the same function as the astronomers, and they would go outside every night and observe the stars in the sky. And they would often right down what they saw. And they would also right down observations of correlations that happened between celestial movements and earthly events where sometimes like, an eclipse would happen and the king would die or what have you. And over the centuries, they built up these observations into these collections that were really important. But for our purposes, one of the most important ones was a scientific program known as the Astronomical Diaries that started like, somewhere around 750 BCE where they would go outside – the astrologer-astronomers or celestial observers would go outside every night and write down what was happening in the sky and what the positions of the planets were. And they would actually do this and write this down on these clay tablets every night with multiple different skywatchers doing this for centuries. And eventually, it became the longest running scientific program in the history of the world because the Astronomical Diaries and the compilation of observations they made started around 750 BCE and it goes all the way until around like, 75 BCE or maybe even later. Maybe as late as 75 CE. 

So as a result of that, we’re talking about a very long span of time of writing down what was happening in the sky. And over that long span of history, they eventually started noticing that the planets would repeat their positions at very long intervals of time. And eventually they compiled these into a set of specific what we’re calling goal year periods for some of these longer-term repetitions of certain planetary cycles. 

Is that a good way of explaining it? Does that make sense? 

PW: Yeah. The only thing I’d add is I’d probably call them ziggurat boys, you know? I think you called them like, skywatchers or something; I just, think of something more playful. But yeah, no, it’s astonishing how long it went and how many years they provided these observations. I think reading some of those, you know, little observations just kind of funny because it sort of reminds me of my own sort of scribblings or open notepads. You know, some of them are kind of simple, you know? They’re just like, “Nergal slowed down and got – bring – and my sheep got slaughtered,” or something like that. Nergal, of course, being the Babylonian Mars. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: So yeah.

CB: Well, that was what would cool – that’s what’s cool is I talked about in the Mesopotamian astrology episode that they didn’t just write down where the planets were and what was happening in the sky, but they would also note sometimes what was happening on earth at that time. So they would note things about the weather; they would note the river levels. They would also note commodity prices. And also sometimes they would note political events that happened. Like, some of the diaries refer to the king died, or some of them are really interesting around the period of Alexander, because it’s noting that a battle has just took place or that one king lost to the other or other things like that, so that there’s… Even though sometimes they’re not making the specific connections in the texts themselves, it’s clear that this wasn’t just an astronomical program, but it was also a program that would have been very useful for tracking long-term repetitions in terms of astrology as well. 

PW: One other thing I would add to that, too, is that they were also tracking the appearances and disappearances of planets and stars. That’s another – well, weirdly enough, I just did a talk about that at NORWAC in 2026! And I’ve done a lot of work on creating ways to more accurately determine those periods astronomically, because the 15 degree rule is not reliable, to put it lightly. So that’s another huge, I think, piece that we can potentially integrate into our own practice today is taking that into account, the kind of local visibility conditions of your location in the kind of location-specific way that planets may appear or disappear in your place. And that was important to them, and I think it’s kind of important to all of us. Of course, the biggest nemesis they all had to deal with were clouds. You know. 

CB: Clouds. The —

PW: Clouds! 

CB: — bane of astrologers and astronomers for many millennia.

PW: Yeah. I mean, you know, and yeah. You know, maybe planets are these sort of cosmic kind of avatars or something, but yeah, clouds apparently is all you need to overcome that. But anyway! Sorry — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — I’m just, I feel like I’m here just giving like, the jokes. I’m kind of like your hype man or giving you a few like, funny lines. Anyway! Go ahead. Sorry! 

CB: No, you are my partner in this. 

PW: Okay. I don’t wanna — 

CB: You have done – I’ve done more of the historical research, but you’ve definitely done a lot of the empirical research, as we’re gonna see, because later in this episode we’re gonna get into examples. And so in terms of the Mesopotamians, though – yeah, you mentioned the clouds. We just had the Venus-Jupiter conjunction earlier this month, but like, a bunch of people couldn’t see it because there was like, clouds the day of the conjunction. And so there’s a lot of bemoaning that. 

PW: So does that affect how it manifests in that place? You know, it’s interesting to see how many were kind of pessimists in some ways about the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, maybe because of the ongoing Mercury-Saturn square. But the Babylonians would think that if a planet was obscured locally, that its sort of effect or influence would somehow be modified as well. So I don’t know, though, because it seems like eclipses kind of matter even if you’re not in a place where you can see it. So I don’t know. Can clouds overcome astrological significance? I’m not sure. The jury is still out. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s a whole interesting thing about this period also in the middle of the first millennium BCE, let’s say around like, 500 BCE, is just that you’re at this real intersection point where up to that – before that point for a long time, astrology originally developed as celestial divination where the appearance of the sky and the planets and what could be seen or not seen was interpreted symbolically for signifying things on earth or signifying things about the future. And that subject component is always really important in different parts of different forms of divination about like, what the visible phenomenon looks like from the perspective of the observer, from their time and location on earth, basically. 

But then eventually with astronomy, like, as they did these programs to observe the planets and the stars in the sky over these very long periods of time, eventually they realized that these planetary movements were fixed and predictable and had very regular, recurring orbits in some way and different things like that. And eventually, we get the emergence of mathematical astronomy. And by the 5th century BCE, astrologers start producing ephemerides, basically, as well as these goal year periods. And this is the point I said in my book – Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, available in fine bookstores everywhere – that — 

PW: Your local Wal-Mart, you know. 

CB: Yeah. That — 

PW: Your backwater gas station. Yeah. Go ahead. 

CB: Yeah. It’s not quite like, the Linda Goodman level yet, but someday. So this was the point, though, I said in my book, I made the point that where astrology and astronomy started to diverge. Because the point at which astrologers can calculate where the planets will be in the past if they’re trying to calculate someone’s birth chart, or where they will be in the future, that’s at the point where it starts becoming possible to make it more of an abstraction or something you can do based on ephemerides and later, like, you know, astrological programs and where you don’t have to observe the sky directly yourself to do it. And also, that’s the point at which it didn’t happen immediately; it took hundreds and hundreds of years — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — but where astrology and astrology start to diverge in the sense that there could be separate disciplines of like, astronomers versus astrologers. 

PW: Although it’s weird how it kind of folds back in on itself, because part of the reason that some people think Neptune means what it does is that it’s very discovery was sort of a mystery that had to be solved, and that it couldn’t actually be – it was only found by calculating its position abstractly. It was not directly observed until, you know, it was sort or predicted ahead of time through this sort of mysterious process. And so there’s, so it’s kind of funny how even going to the sort of furthest in terms of abstraction where you’re figuring out a planet exists that you can’t even see, you know, ends up itself being kind of symbolic of what that planet might potentially mean. So yeah. That’s really fascinating. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and to bring the previous thought around, like, to go back to your point about the observation is like, that’s a real issue in the astrological community in terms of some of the arguments about whether astrology is divination or whether it has an objective component. And I think astrologers have swung too far in the direction of just treating it as divination, because that was an important step in the 1990s. Like, especially through the work of Geoffrey Cornelius is recognizing the divinatory component to astrology and especially some approaches to astrology. But then what’s weird is this other component where astrology and the planetary cycles do genuinely seem to be operating out there independent of us paying attention to them or our perspective on earth or different things like that. So there’s both perhaps some subjective divinatory component, but then there’s also this other component as well. And I don’t think that conversation – that conversation kind of needs to happen, because I don’t think that’s been reconciled enough in the current time with some of these discussions. 

PW: Yeah. There’s kind of a nuts and bolts side to this phenomenon, and then a kind of squishier, weirder side to this phenomenon. But even the nuts and bolts part is pretty weird, too! But yeah. I agree with that. And you know, just putting my own cards on the table here, I guess, is I tend to be on the other side of that argument. I’m not so sure that astrology is just divination. I’m not sure I’m convinced that it’s just divination; there are too many examples like you said of these cycles meaning something independently. And I think that astronomy and the way things are seen and observed does still matter. For example, a lot of – sometimes I still hear people say that, you know, retrogrades are about inversions, or that they’re planets sort of turning inwards or times of introspection. When astronomically, for Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, those are times when those planets are most visible. As they come into opposition with the Sun, they come closer to the earth. Those retrograde periods are when they’re most sort of able to be seen and potentially, you know, from the Babylonian model, like, more active and maybe even going into sort of hyperdrive, and that their period of introspection would really be the timeframe in which a planet’s coming into conjunction with the Sun because it is no longer seen. And it’s then being subsumed into the light of the Sun. So I feel like it still matters. I feel like, to some degree – I don’t know how far you can take it. I don’t know how far it goes. But I do think that it should matter to some extent – you know, like, what things actually appear like. I don’t think it’s just a math exercise, but. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: We’ll see. 

CB: Yeah. I mean, and I think that comes up in other ways, like that the traditional planets can be seen with the naked eye versus the outer planets can’t, and maybe there are some distinctions there. I think like, Geoffrey Cornelius took the divination argument too far, and I think some people adopt that and go too much to an extreme, and that needs to be analyzed a little bit more critically than has been done —

PW: Sure.

CB: — so far in the astrological community. And I think this is actually a good time to do it on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, because issues of astrology and like, science versus divination things often come up on these conjunctions. But let’s save that — 

PW: The squishy versus the nuts and bolts, yeah. 

CB: Yeah, exactly. But let’s save that for another episode — 

PW: Sure. 

CB: — because that would be a great discussion. So to bring it back around, let me show the Babylonian goal year periods again, and let’s talk about what’s behind them and like, the synodic cycles involved. Does that sound good? 

PW: Yeah. That sounds great. 

CB: All right. So here is a table. This is adapted from the table in Alexander Jones’s book on the Antikythera mechanism. But basically again, just to reiterate, the periods Jupiter has a shorter one of 71 years, but a longer and more accurate one of 83 years. And the longer period is always the more accurate one. And we have Venus, which just has a short one of eight years, but it’s extremely accurate. Mercury is 46 years. Saturn is 59 years. And then Mars has two; it has a shorter 47 year period as well as a longer and more accurate 79-year period. 

And what I mean by “more accurate” is that the longer periods tend to recur much more closely on the exact day – same day – in those increments compared to the shorter ones tend to be a little bit, a tiny bit further off. 

PW: Yeah. Yeah, I’d say Saturn is also a tiny – it’s not quite as close as some of the others. But it’s reasonably good. 

CB: So you know, these are obviously longer periods. You had mentioned the minor years of the planets, which is the ones that are used, for example, in similar to like, zodiacal releasing, for example, where the minor years of the planets in Hellenistic astrology are, what? Mercury is 20 years. The Sun is 19 years. The Moon is 25 years. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Venus is eight years again. Mars is 15, and Saturn in the minor years of the planets is 30 years. So and those do give repetitions, but they’re a lot broader or like, rougher compared to when you do these longer term Babylonian goal year periods, the repetition on the same day of the year exactly let’s say 79 years apart for Mars is extremely close. 

PW: Yeah. And even those minor periods can be kind of subdivided in some ways. Like, you can divide a 20-year Mercury minor period into groups of seven plus seven plus six or seven plus six plus seven, or six plus seven plus seven. And that’s part of the reason why 46 works out, because it’s basically two 20-year Mercury periods stacked on top of each other with one extra six-year chunk on top of that. And that’s what allows it to add up to a really close return. But you technically get, you know, it’s part of a family in some ways. You could say it’s part of a family of Mercury returns that happen from age six to seven, 13 to 14, 19 to 20, 26 to 27, 33 to 34, 40, and then 46. So you know, you kind of get these little windows where you get these fairly close returns, but like, the really, really close one is obviously, yeah, 46. That’s where the math just works out that the remainders – the leftover and all – adds up closer to a whole number. And so you get that coincidence of the solar year and the returns of that planet. 

So yeah, that’s how it works. 

CB: Yeah. Maybe I could do a demonstration using like, Solar Fire to animate the chart and show people, because maybe that will ground it a little bit more. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: If we — 

PW: I’m like, yeah, thats fine, you got that, right? Yeah! 

CB: No, I’m just saying — 

PW: Just help to — 

CB: — yeah. 

PW: — yeah, see something. 

CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s pick a planet. Let’s do Mars again. Let’s… We need to take Mars to let’s say a station. So these have to do with the relationship – the periods all have to do with the relationship between the Sun and the planet. So they are most impressive if you’re using them to track when a planet will station retrograde or direct or when it will conjoin the Sun. So you can use them outside of that, but those tend to be the most sort of impressive ones. 

And so it’s 2026. So let’s do like, the retrograde I was —- 

PW: Okay. Yeah, the retrograde from early 2025? Or it actually – well, it stationed retrograde in late 2024, but. 

CB: Right. So I will do the retrograde from when it stationed retrograde in Leo. Okay, so here is Mars. 

PW: The Luigi Mangione Mars station. 

CB: Oh right. So here’s Mars. Let me put it on the Midheaven or in the 10th house. Let me – sorry – get rid of the Lot of Fortune, because that’s gonna be annoying having that in there. Okay. So this is December – where’s the actual station? There it is. So there’s the actual station. Let’s say December 6th, 2024, Mars is at six degrees of Leo, and it has just stationed retrograde. 

So the longer period – let’s do the longer period of Mars, which is 79 years. So Solar Fire has a cool feature that I only have gotten familiar with over the past couple of years because you showed it to me, but — 

PW: Yeah, I remember blowing your mind. I was like, “How do you not know this?” 

CB: Yeah, so in the animate chart feature where it says like, “Step By,” I always just had it set to one. But you can actually set it to different increments. So if you set it – the step feature – to like, 79, and then we set the step to years, when I move the chart forward or backwards it’ll automatically jump forward or backwards 79 years. 

So what we’ll do here is on December 6th, 2024, we see Mars has just stationed retrograde at six degrees of Leo. And if we jump back exactly 79 years, that takes us to December 6th, 1945. And here we again find that Mars is retrograde in Leo, and in fact — 

PW: It stationed just two days before. Less than two days before. 

CB: So I’ll back that up, so two days earlier – there it is. So there’s the station on December 4th. December 4th —

PW: Like an error of like, two days, you know.

CB: Yeah. There’s a slippage. So —

PW: Very, very small.

CB: So with all of these periods, there’s a little bit of a slippage, but like, that’s super close of a repetition that we know that almost to the day exactly 79 years earlier, that Mars also stationed in Leo roughly around the same degrees 79 years earlier. And what’s crazy is – so that’s the future, but – or that’s the past. But if we take it back to the present – so I’m gonna jump back 79 years into the present. So here’s December 6th, 2024. Again, Mars stations retrograde at six degrees of Leo. If we jump forward 79 years, we again find Mars slowing down and stationing retrograde in early Leo roughly right around that time. So just a few days later, it looks like on, what, December 10th in the year 2103, Mars will again station retrograde in the first part of Leo basically, roughly around the same degrees, roughly around the same month of that year, which is pretty mind-blowing in terms of a planetary repetition. 

PW: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like getting a hole in one from having started 79 years ago. You know? Yeah, it’s a very long shot, and yeah, but the return does happen though.

CB: Yeah. So that’s really cool. And then like, you can just like, take that far back in history, and it keeps working basically. So if we jump back to like, 1945, we remember that Mars retrograded in Leo. If we jump back like, 79 years before that, we’re in December of 1866, and Mars has again recently stationed retrograde in Leo. And there is like a —

PW: Zero Leo. 

CB: — there is a slippage over a long enough period of time, but it’ll keep working basically. 

PW: Yeah. I mean, if you could keep doing this for many thousands of years, and eventually you get back around to your starting spot. So then you’d discover some ultra mega Babylonian eon or whatever for that planet. But yeah, that’s exactly how it works. 

CB: Yeah. So that works with the 79 years. And then there’s a shorter period, which is 47 years, where there’s also a repetition, but it’s just a little bit less precise, right? 

So here’s like, let’s say December 10th, 2024, Mars has recently stationed retrograde in Leo. Let’s switch it to 47 years. And we jump back and we see that Mars is just getting ready to station in Leo like, two days later or a few days later, basically. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So there’s a shorter one, but the shorter one is a little bit less precise. But then there’s a longer one, and the longer ones tend to be more precise. 

PW: Yeah. And these ones are also kind of built out of the 15-year periods, because when you add up – let me make sure I got this right, because I have this over here. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah – the reason you get returns at 47 is because Mars is an orbital period of two years, right? But it also has this minor period at 15. So if you add 15 plus 15 plus 2, that’s what gets us to that 32-year return that Nick often mentions. And then 32 plus 15 equals 47. So 47 is – it happens because you essentially are using three 15-year periods that add up to 45. And then that extra two takes you up to 47. Because you’ll notice that, if you just advance the chart by 45 years, you can even get like, it’s not two close, but it’s like, close enough. It’s like, 45 is like, roughly when Mars is coming back, but you have to add that extra two years to get the geometry to match up more precisely. So yeah, it’s basically it’s just three 15s plus a two gets you to 47. And it’s a similar kind of breakdown for 79. 

CB: Yeah. There’s other – there’s different repetitions and lots of other repetitions that you can look at, but I think the Babylonian goal year periods are a special set of ones that became highlighted and really special to the Mesopotamian astronomer-astrologers, and I think it’s a good baseline to focus on in terms of if you’re looking at long-term ones because they’re so precise in terms of the astronomy. 

PW: And that’s why those are the ones which are highlighted, yeah! you know, that’s why 17 isn’t on the list, you know, even though it can be a fairly decent return. The other 47 and 79-year ones are the ones that stand out. You also get other ones around 62, 64. You know, those are other Sun-Mars returns. But yeah. There’s a reason the particular ones are – they’re the closest ones. 

CB: Yeah. And the closer the repetition, I think, the more compelling and more striking —

PW: Right.

CB: — it is astrologically. 

PW: Yeah, absolutely. For sure. 

CB: So that’s why these periods might be more special compared to other ones that – other — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — ones that exist. And then, as we’ll see later, there may be another hidden reason that they exist for other overlapping reasons. But we’ll save that for later. 

PW: Okay, yeah. Sounds like a good closer. 

CB: Yeah. It’s a really good closer. 

So one of the things I’ve learned about these conceptually before we get into things is repetition is the key to prediction in astrology. And I’ve become more and more convinced by this over the past several years. And this is one of the access points where it will become the most clear. There’s also other techniques and other ways that this shows up in astrology more or less sometimes clearly or other times obscurely or indirectly. But in this, that’s one of our fundamental principles that repetition is the key to prediction. And there’s also some notions in the ancient literature. Like, in Vettius Valens where he talks about planetary periods and especially the minor years of the planets, the notion that when a planet completes its period, it gives something up or it ends one chapter and begins a new chapter, or other ideas like that that I think are very important. 

And the reason I bring that up, because I think it’s crucial, is one of the ways, for example, that planetary periods were incorporated into ancient Hellenistic astrology is in the length of life technique. And this is weird, because in the Hellenistic tradition, there was some sort of transition that I don’t fully understand where they had the minor years of the planets, but then they also developed some longer term planetary cycles called the greater years of the planets. But those seem less astronomically based to me, or they almost seem like what the goal year periods were doing, which were much more closely tied in with specific astronomical cycles. But those became tied in with things like the bounds or the terms of the planets, which were used in the ancient primary length of life technique. And so it’s like, the Hellenistic astrologers were using something like the goal year periods, but they ended up coming up with different values, and to me, I think these could be more useful in the context in which the Hellenistic astrologers used them for, because we’ve seen some instances where sometimes when the period of a planet – a goal year period of a planet – is completed, that a thing will end its life cycle. And one of the examples that this happened that you found a couple years ago that was really impressive was that bridge collapse that happened exactly at the 47-year repetition, right? 

PW: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever done as much research on bridges as I have after that. 

CB: Bridgeology. 

PW: I think I made the same joke when we last talked about this. Yeah, I think it was on The Secret Astrology Podcast but – or The Casual, I forget which one – but yeah. That was weird. Yeah, the bridge collapse in, where was it? Was it Pittsburgh? 

CB: It was the Francis Scott Key Bridge — 

PW: That’s right. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: Yeah, it collapsed almost exactly 47 years after it officially opened. So it was pretty much a perfect — 

CB: Baltimore. 

PW: — Sun-Mars return. Oh, Maryland, right. Not Pittsburgh. I don’t know what I was talking about. Yeah, that was a really, really good one. Another one that kind of — 

CB: Let me show that one before you — 

PW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

CB: — move on just because I wanna… So this bridge, it opened – let me share the actual chart – on March 23rd, 1977. So March 23rd, 1977. And then what was bizarre is that the bridge just suddenly collapsed. It was hit by a ship and then collapsed, I think, right? 

PW: Right. 

CB: And that happened on – what was the date? On March 26, 2024. So almost exactly to the day with just a few days of slippage, 48 years later. 

PW: 47. Yeah. 

CB: Or sorry, yeah, 47 years later. And so Mars was almost perfectly repeating the position of being in early Pisces in the first degrees of Pisces as it was when it opened. 

PW: And I think what is especially weird about this is, I mean, what sign is Mars in? Like, where would – in what element would the destructive thing happen? You know, Mars is in Pisces, you know, a water sign. And so it is interesting that this happened in the water, that this was a kind of watery infrastructural disaster with Mars and Saturn there in this watery sign. So you know, could we have predicted ahead of time this was gonna happen? Well, maybe not. Who’s paying attention to the inceptional charts of bridges? Like, not many people. But yeah, I think this is an interesting clue, though, that this might be a way you could potentially make some projections about like, what a given planetary return could be about or what some of the themes might be surrounding the activation of that planet or when it gives up in some respect. 

CB: And I can’t remember – didn’t you find like, the birth time of the opening ceremony or something originally? Like I — 

PW: Yeah! There was actually, there was kind of an eclipse thing too alongside it. 

CB: Right. 

PW: But there was a newspaper article which actually had the date and time of the official opening of the bridge, and that ends up providing this exact 47-year interval between the opening of the bridge and the destruction of the bridge. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: So — 

CB: Because I thought it had like, Mars rising or something like that. Like, Mars was doing something in the chart. 

PW: It might have been culminating, I believe. I think Mars might have actually been angular in the chart. I think it was something like that, because this was like, mid-day, and the Sun – you know, Mars is like, rising ahead of the Sun. You know, who knows? Maybe Mars might have been close to its astronomical heliacal rising. I’d have to run it through my program to see. But because Mars usually is much further than 15 degrees from the Sun before it becomes visible, depending. But yeah, that’s definitely an interesting case. 

And I actually did find another bridge example – the Isabella Causeway also had a 47-year interval for which it stood. It actually, yeah, I think it’s called the Isabella Causeway. There’s a Wikipedia article about it. That was one of the other 47-year ones. It wasn’t exactly 47; it was like, maybe a couple weeks off, but still. Kind of – what’s that quote? It’s, you know, strange that there’s two. It doesn’t seem like enough to make a pattern, but it is odd that there’s just even more than one. So — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — thread to pull on. 

CB: Yeah. So my point with that is just in some instances, we’ve seen instances like that where something is created and then something comes to an end with the completion of some of the long-term planetary cycles. And I think that’s really important in terms of what the nature of the repetitions can be and what they can do or what they can show sometimes. And that gave me some insight into what some of the Hellenistic astrologers were trying to do with some of the so-called greater years of the planets, although I don’t know why they moved away from using these goal year periods, for example, which are pretty close, but seem more astronomically useful to me than the greater years do. 

So yeah, we’ll sort of circle back to that when we get to some of the example charts, which we should perhaps move into if there’s not anything else to mention in terms of preliminaries. 

PW: No, I think that’s good. 

CB: Okay, cool. Well, why don’t we start talking about some examples then and some different things that we found. Where do you wanna start or do you wanna go through planet by planet, or do — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — you want to go through like, best examples that stand out the most? 

PW: I think going planet by planet might be fine. 

CB: Let’s hold on, because we were just doing Mars so much, why don’t we — 

PW: Okay. 

CB: — do a little bit more Mars? 

PW: Okay. 

CB: Because that one tends to be so striking. Because one of my most stunning ones is another Mars example. 

PW: Okay. 

CB: So one of the ones I noticed is that the 1929 Wall Street crash happened in late 1929, it started playing out basically during the fall and the winter of 1929. And then exactly 79 years later, there’s a 79-year Mars period, and then what starts happening is that in the fall and winter of 2008, the housing market crash happens. And this is the onset of the – what’s it called? The depression or the economic collapse that happens at that time in 2008. 

PW: Yeah, that is pretty interesting. Yeah, an exact 79-year interval between two of the worst economic downturns ever. I mean, it is an odd coincidence and probably isn’t one. I mean, even technical analysis traders would probably say the same thing. But yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: Yeah, I thought that one was striking as well, and I also did include that in my talk as well. At the time, I believe the Sun and Mars were like, moving towards a conjunction with each other that ultimately perfects in Sagittarius, I believe. But I think during the timeframe of both those crashes, you had the Sun – you had Mars, like, ahead of the Sun with the Sun and Mars in Libra, and then they like, kind of moved ahead to the Sun and Mars being in Scorpio, and then finally they meet up in a conjunction in Sagittarius. And so Mars was making that same passage into the beams of the Sun basically in both of those autumns – or, for Americans, falls.

CB: Yeah. That’s what I wanna show. Here, I’ll put it up on the chart for those watching the video version where, you know, we can anchor it with the Sun-Mars conjunction which goes exact as you were saying in November and December when those two planets catch up in Sagittarius. So here’s like, for example, November of 1929, and if we jump – we see a Sun-Mars conjunction in Sagittarius. And if we jump forward 79 years, it takes us to November of 2008 where there’s again a Sun-Mars conjunction in Sagittarius. But it’s not just that conjunction. As you were saying, it’s the process of what was happening where the exact same phase relationship of the Sun and Mars moving through Scorpio together in October, and moving through to some extent like, Libra together in September. So there was like, this exact repetition taking place in this really crazy way in the sky in the months of like, August, September, November, December of 1929. And then the exact same thing happened in the sky in the months of like, August, September, November, December of 2008 in basically two of the biggest financial crashes in US history that both led to subsequently like, a great depression. 

PW: Yeah. I mean, there’s something there, right? That’s gotta be – there’s something definitely there to that. 

CB: Yeah. I mean, it’s a great, it’s a perfect, stunning correlation and repetition. So that’s one that I wanted to point out, because it’s one of the most stunning ones to me, and it’s also it’s tied in with Mars and it was something sort of problematic happening, which may be important in terms of Mars that sometimes Mars can be kind of tricky. It doesn’t always have to be. Obviously, we know Mars can be constructive in night charts. But at least for these two, it was something destructive that was like, repeating on a massive scale exactly 79 years apart. 

PW: Right. I think what’s interesting, too, is weirdly how close Mercury seems to be to both of these alignments, because we know that like, the Lehman bros news – you know, that broke in September – that basically was at the Mercury retrograde conjunct Mars. Or like, Mercury station retrograde conjunct Mars in mid-September in Libra. And I know you’ve talked before about like, Mercury-Mars conjunctions and how sometimes you get these like, extended chains of them, and of course it hits kind of interesting we think just if Mercury represents commerce, you know, then Mars being aligned with Mercury potentially in these sectors of the zodiac would be like, commercial panics or commercial sort of fears or reactivity. And so it’s interesting to see how Mercury’s sort of present with the Sun-Mars conjunction at both of these. I don’t know – I haven’t put together the mathematics of that, if there’s potentially a Mercury connection to this same cycle or something. But you know, I think — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — regardless, Mars seems to be the main driver here. 

CB: Well, it’s – if I remember correctly, because I did a lot of work on that, I mentioned a lot on the forecast episodes like, last year, it’s that rarely – every 15 to 17 years, Mercury will make five conjunctions in the row with Mars. And I believe this was two of the ones that happened because of the Sun’s proximity to Mercury where I believe it was 1929 and 2008 where Mercury and Mars conjoined five times in quick repetition, starting in the fall of the year and going into the early part of the following year, which would be early 1930 and early 2009 in that cycle. And yeah, Mercury does have a bunch, in ancient astrology, mercantile contexts of like, the market according to Vettius Valens and money and other things like that. So that — 

PW: Right! 

CB: — does add another layer to things. 

PW: Yeah, that is interesting. And I just figured it out, because you get – we have the 46-year goal year period of Mercury, and then on top of that, you can add a 20-year minor period of Mercury, which brings you to 66. And then if you add seven and another six, that takes you to 79. So it’s not oriented around Mercury as a whole return, but Mercury just happens to coincide with 79. So I think it’s more like, a – it’s along for the ride. I still think Mars is the primary driver. Like, this is a destructive event, you know? But Mercury is just kind of hanging out basically. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. 

Okay. So that was one of my biggest – that’s one of the more impressive long term of why you can see this could be really impressive in using it for mundane astrology to track, you know, events that affect lots of people, especially if you find cycles that are keyed in with major events in terms of mundane astrology. But it can also work in natal astrology. Do you have other good Mars — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — examples in terms of natal or mundane? 

PW: Right, yeah. One of them that is still really sad is David Lynch passed away like, right at his 79th birthday. And it’s interesting, because he wans’t just born at an arbitrary point in Mars’s cycle; he was born essentially during a critical Mars phase, which would be if you wanna bring up the chart for David Lynch. It’s just interesting because I remember when we talked about this before, you were kind of mentioning that this is probably linked to – oh yeah. He’s born with the Sun opposite Mars, so when Mars was extremely bright in the sky with this conjunction with Saturn. Interestingly, he’s a director whose films often show these really surreal and often very nightmarish scenes. And so I think it’s funny that he has like, you know, both malefics in the house of dreams. And Mars is even the ruler of his Ascendant. So if we know that Mars is the planet that represents him on some basic level, then reaching this major return period of Mars at 79, you know, being essentially his farewell to everyone is really, yeah, it’s kind of sad. And I don’t know – I never really looked into what like, was really going on with his chart in terms of like, length of life techniques or anything beyond this. But it’s just very, you know, I think this partly where you started circulating around the idea that the length of life technique and things like Babylonian goal years are kind of circulating around the same goal or something. 

CB: Yeah. I mean, if – well, two things – in this instance, we can see Mars is ruling his Ascendant and his 6th house, so it ties it into themes of longevity with the Ascendant and with health or illness with the 6th house as well as, you know, just bodily things as well as the overall life direction. And then he passed away was it on his birthday exactly 79 years later? 

PW: It was, we can get the exact day. It was… 

CB: So Mars is at 20 degrees of Cancer, and it’s retrograde in his chart on January 20th, 1946. 

PW: He died on January 16th, 2025. 

CB: Got it. So six days before his birthday, so Mars was almost at an exact repetition where 79 years later it was again retrograde in the last decan of Cancer on January 16th, 2025, at 26 Cancer. 

PW: Also note that on that day, he would have had a lunar return. So it’s like, I don’t know if there’s like, other factors that potentially nudge the exact day one direction or another. But on that day that he died, he would have had a lunar return during the timeframe where he was going through this Mars phase. If he had died three days later, it would have been just as impressive, but the fact that the exact day he dies is during the timeframe also of the lunar return simultaneously – you know, these are the kind of things that I sort of think about. Like, how would you have been able to know, you know, even more precisely which way it might have gone? So. 

CB: Yeah. I mean, we’re focused on this technique in isolation, but obviously — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — it’s overlapping with a lot of other techniques — 

PW: A lot of other stuff. 

CB: — that are relevant like — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — annual profections as we’ll see in a little bit. Like, zodiacal releasing. Other transits and other things like eclipses that might be happening simultaneously. But just to isolate one example, like, to focus on the Babylonian goal years technique for the purpose of this, it is striking — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — in this instance. And this is, again, so this is not like, a bridge like we were talking about earlier. This is not a Wall Street collapse, but this is somebody who had a planet that was tied in with the vital sector in his chart ruling the Ascendant, and then he happens to pass away very close to the exact Babylonian goal year period of Mars. 

PW: Right. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So that’s what I mean when I say like, sometimes Valens’s statement about giving something up or something coming to completion or to end when a planetary period is activated made me think of examples like this and can be evocative sometimes. 

PW: Sure. 

CB: All right. What else do we got in terms of Mars? 

PW: So I have a few other ones that I’ve mentioned before. Let’s see. So one of the ones that I thought was really weird just because of how it’s such a kind of literal callback is if we look at the day that Napoleon crowned himself emperor. That was on December 2nd, 1804, and the Sun was at 10 degrees of Sagittarius and Mars was at 17 degrees Leo, which was just a couple of weeks before its Mars retrograde station in Leo. So you have someone assuming power in a very imperialistic way; he literally snatches the crown out of the pope’s hands on December 2nd, 1804. And exactly 47 years later, Napoleon III – his nephew – stages a coup to stay in power. And so this is Mars just, again, a couple of weeks before it would station retrograde in Leo, and you again have someone named Napoleon in France doing something kind of outrageous to assume control or to take back power. And that just seems a somewhat improbable coincidence. You know, two Napoleons basically doing the same kind of action in the same sort of manner, and it’s very Mars in Leo-ish. And what do you think? 

CB: Yeah, that’s really good; I like that repetition, especially with the Mars retrograde being in Leo and those themes of like, kingship and you know, I like that image of attempting to snatch the crown. 

PW: Right. One wonders about other Mars retrogrades in Leo recently where there might be like, a figure who kind of comes to power and does things that maybe are, you know, somehow beyond the mandate that they have or something like that. A sort of Napoleon-ish sort of character or something like that. I don’t know. Something’s ringing around in there; I don’t know what it is, but. 

CB: Yeah. I don’t think we’ll have to — 

PW: The name almost comes to mind. 

CB: I don’t think we have to… Certainly, yeah. We’re in between Mars retrogrades in Leo, because that’s one of the things about the Mars retrogrades is they tend to happen back-to-back in those two-year increments. So we’ve got one that we had, you know, last year, and then one coming up next year. 

So what else do you have? 

PW: So not to put too fine a point on it, but and I don’t know – we didn’t actually discuss this ahead of time, so if this isn’t too, I don’t know, untoward. Because this is sort of stacking multiple goal years on top of each other to reach an even larger one, so I don’t know if we wanna like, save that for another time, but basically I thought it was interesting that when you start counting from March 4th, 1789, which is the date associated with the US Constitution, that if you stack three 79-year periods on top of each other, it happens to coincide with 2026. And if you stack four 59-year Saturn periods on top of each other, it comes out to 2025. So you basically get this 236-year, 237-year kind of coincidence of stacked Saturn periods and Mars periods on top of each other. But it basically points to potentially a time of one might say crisis for the US Constitution then at that 236, 237-year period after its development. And so that would point to, yeah, the current year basically and the past year as these sort of major return periods of both of those malefics. And so naturally, I think that’s not completely ridiculous to say that that is unfortunately playing out in some ways. So that is – that was another one that I thought was pretty wild. But maybe I’m being too opaque here. 

CB: Yeah. No, that’s definitely – I mean, we’ve seen a lot of that stuff come up, because there was like, some stuff with the birthright citizenship as well that was tied in with the 79-year Mars cycle — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — where it was like, the — 

PW: Yeah! That’s great. You did a good job finding that. 

CB: Yeah, so that one was like, in 1867, the 14th amendment is ratified by most of the states during like, a Mars retrograde. And it established birthright citizenship, and it also had a provision – the insurrectionist ban – who banned those who engaged in an insurrection from holding office. But the part that was important was that that same Mars retrograde in a few Mars retrograde 79-year repetitions later repeated in 2025. And then all of a sudden, you had this challenge to birthright citizenship — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — where the Trump administration started actively challenging the 14th amendment, which is the amendment that means that if somebody’s born in the United States, then they’re automatically a citizen here. And that was really striking, because again, it was like, a challenge or attempt to unravel something that was created around a Mars retrograde in 1867. But then when it repeated centuries later in a 79-year repetition, there was an attempt to remove or dissolve that thing. 

PW: Right. Yeah. That’s, it gives you chills. Yeah. Nice job, Babylonians! Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: You did it! You figured it out! Good for you! 

Yeah. So I think is that good for Mars, then? 

CB: Yeah. I’m looking to see if there’s any others. I mean, I know we found a ton of others, but maybe — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — that is good for Mars for the sake – we can come back to it if we remember any other, like —

PW: Save it for the sequel. 

CB: Yeah, save it for the follow-up. All right. What planet should we do next? 

PW: What about Mercury? 

CB: All right, hit me with Mercury. So Mercury’s Babylonian goal year period is 46 years, right? 

PW: Yeah. And so what I like about the 46-year return, my two examples – we’ll sort of roll them into one, because I feel like they’re a strange complement to each other and they kind of happen in the same timeframe. Basically, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both turned 46 in October – sorry, in 2001, and it was in those years after they had just had birthdays basically that both of them released the operating systems for their respective companies that would kind of become the standard bearer operating systems for a long time. 

So for Steve Jobs, who was born in February of 1955, he turns 46 February of 2001, and he releases MacOSX in March of 2001. And then Bill Gates, I believe he releases Windows XP in like, October or November of 2001, and he’s a Scorpio. So his birthday has gotta be around there somewhere. So I just think that’s really interesting, because Mercury is supposed to be the planet of inventions and technology. And so you have both of these guys who are kind of the sort of emblems in some ways of, you know, this American incarnation of technological progress in the ‘90s and 2000s. And they sort of come up with the uniquely mercurial sort of developments at their respective Mercury goal years. 

Also worth noting is that around the same time that he would have been releasing MacOSX, Jobs would have been still involved in the development of the iPod, which wouldn’t come out until a little later that year. So I don’t think it’s just MacOSX; I think that just happens to align closest with his actual birthday. But you know, Jobs was kind of on a tear of coming out with these Apple gadgets basically that would transform the music industry and have this huge impact on culture. And so I think that’s a pretty cool sort of duo of Mercury goal year completions in 2001 from Jobs and Gates; what do you think? 

CB: Yeah. Especially I like that with Jobs, because the release of the iPod – the first generation iPod – in that year was, I feel like, a critical turning point for Apple where – because he was just like, digging Apple out – he had just come back a few years earlier as president after being —

PW: Right. 

CB: — fired years earlier and going on this whole odyssey. And Apple was in debt and it had to take out like, do a deal with Windows with Microsoft in the late ‘90s to get bailed out. And then but the iPod was definitely like, a turning point where they innovated technologically with something that other people weren’t doing. And it was like, a game changer that started launching Apple on this trajectory, this stratosphere, you know, trajectory upwards again, which then really culminated with the release of the iPhone in, what, like, 2008, 2009. But the iPod was like, the stepping stone towards that. 

PW: Yes. And but the way that we might have bee able to predict that for Jobs, that something like this could happen or something amazing could happen potentially around 46, is because he was born with Virgo rising. Which means that the ruler of his Ascendant is Mercury in Aquarius, which I believe he was born close to a station. Like, he has kind of a standout Mercury even though it’s in the 6th house, he has this kind of standout Mercury because of the way that — 

CB: Right. 

PW: — it’s configured, I guess you could say, with the Ascendant – bit of a wide trine there, but still, yeah. It’s right on the station.

CB: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah, it’s right – he has Virgo rising with Mercury at 14 degrees of Aquarius ruling not just the Ascendant but also the 10th house and his Midheaven in Gemini. And Mercury is literally stationary there – stationing — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — direct at — 

PW: Right! 

CB: — 14 degrees of Aquarius. 

PW: So 2001, you know, age 46 kind of ends up becoming his year of Mercury, you know, in a really profound way. 

CB: Yeah. That’s brilliant. 

PW: So yeah. 

CB: That’s really good. Okay.

PW: Which makes me wonder what’s gonna happen with Sam Altman when he turns 46. He’s only a couple years away, I think, from that. Oh actually, let me just double check. Sam Altman… 

CB: Yeah, well, we don’t know his birth time, but. So — 

PW: Yeah, we don’t know. Yeah. 

CB: So — 

PW: He’s 41.

CB: Okay. 

PW: So we’re still a few years off. 

CB: Yeah. So what – so that’s good for – do you have other Mercury ones?

PW: Yeah. So the other Mercury one, which I just thought was such an improbable sequence of Mercury-related coincidences is this one. Let me find it. So all right, I know you have your chart there, so you should be able to hopefully bring these up.

So on April 7th, 1927, Mercury stationed direct at 11 Pisces 11 days earlier. And this is the day of the first video call in the United States. Or in the world, indeed. It’s basically the first Skype call. 

CB: Wait. What day? 

PW: April 7th, 1927. So this just — 

CB: Not video call? Aren’t you inverting it? 

PW: A video call! Yeah, a video call with Herbert Hoover in New York. It was the first like, video call in the world. It wasn’t very good, but. 

CB: I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding; what do you mean – there was no video back then. So are you inverting something? 

PW: No. I can bring up the – exactly what I’m talking about. April 7th, 1927, Herbert Hoover, video call. 

So yeah, here we go. So April 7th, 1927, “then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, took part in the first intercity long-distance television broadcast in American history transmitted by AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories.” 

CB: Wow. 

PW: “With 200 miles of telephone lines, Hoover’s live video and voice was successfully sent from Washington, DC, to an audience in New York City.” 

CB: Okay, wow. 

PW: So this is the first essentially, yeah, first sort of video call. 

CB: So it’s — 

PW: First video broadcast. 

CB: So Mercury has just stationed direct in Pisces conjunct Jupiter in Pisces? 

PW: Yeah. All right. But here’s where it gets weird, is if you advance the chart 47 years later – sorry, 46 years later. Not the Mars period, the Mercury period. 46. And you correct it to April 3rd just four days earlier, then this is the day of the first cell phone call. 

CB: April 3rd? 

PW: April 3rd, 1973 is the first day that is the – yeah, the day of the first cell phone call. Let me give you some little more information about that, because I learned all this stuff for the presentation, then you know, forgot about it a year later. First — 

CB: Yeah, that’s what I’m struggling with as well. 

PW: “First public mobile phone call was made on April 3rd, 1973, by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper on a Midtown, Manhattan street. Using a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC, he called his rival at Bell Labs to announce the breakthrough.” Which is hilarious, because it was Bell Labs 46 years earlier as well. So —

CB: And Mercury’s again, it has just stationed direct in Pisces. So again, we have Mercury stationing direct in Pisces in an exact in this instance 46-year repetition. 

PW: But then — 

CB: So this is the first cell phone call. 

PW: But then if you advance it 46 years after that to April 3rd, 2019, this is the day that the world’s first 5G network goes live.

CB: Oh wow. 

PW: So you have Mercury, again, slowing down in Pisces, and I wondered why is it Pisces? You know, what’s – like, this is not a great sign for Mercury. But interestingly, it is within the bounds, I believe, of Mercury within Pisces. So it’s like, in the one spot within that sign where it’s maybe doing a little better. But yeah. I thought this was pretty strange that you have three events separated by almost exactly 46 years – the Babylonian goal year of Mercury – and they’re all communication-related firsts. The first video call, the first cell phone call, the debut of the world’s first 5G network, which of course, you know, radically accelerated the amount of data you can send over long distances. So Mercury is showing us that it still is the planet of messages and communications, and you know, there’s probably a lot more than this that we’re not even aware of. You know, it took a while to find these needles in the haystack. But I mean, this is pretty peculiar, wouldn’t you say? 

CB: Yeah, that’s incredible for tying together communications and it being connected with Mercury. It’s also interesting that Mercury’s stationing direct, and it also means that it would have stationed retrograde three weeks earlier in all three instances. And I can only imagine the like, behind the scenes stuff that was happening of the engineers like, scrambling to get the technology together and make everything good and work out the kinks in the lead-up to these three events. 

PW: Yeah! Actually, that’s kind of funny, especially with the 5G story, because I guess there were like, it was kind of a race between United States and South Korea who was going to launch it first. I think South Korea won. So there was kind of a – there was some intrigue, you know, behind these events leading up to final moment. 

Now I’m not sure to make it a fact that Mercury is conjunct Neptune; maybe this is just like, you know, the endless streaming amounts of data that can now pour forth or something. Mercury gone global. Mercury gone virtual. I don’t know how to tie that in, or — 

CB: Well, I mean, I was thinking — 

PW: — how that makes sense, but. 

CB: I was thinking about how all the like, conspiracy theories surrounding like —

PW: Oh, yeah! 

CB: — 5G and like, and how — 

PW: Of course! Oh my god, how did I overlook that!

CB: Yeah. 

PW: I literally wrote an article about Mercury-Neptune and conspiracy theories, so that’s hilarious. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: Wow. Great call. 

CB: Good times. So that’s really good. I like that; okay. So Mercury and communications. And in this way, I think this is also important because there especially you can see an access point for understanding what the planets mean that ancient astrologers could have started to understand and notice what the planets mean, not by resorting to mythology or symbolic interpretations or other things like that, but instead, what arises naturally over long periods of time when the planet has repetitions and does the same thing. And in those three instances, you can clearly see that what emerges is a theme archetypally that has to do with communications. And I have to imagine that the ancient Mesopotamian astrologers having this long-term scientific research project that lasts for at least over 500, 600 years also would have seen things emerge as they’re building up these huge libraries and archives of recorded events and other things that happened over centuries. 

PW: Yeah. I mean, this is like, so retro, you know? This is like taking it way back to really just – this is how it was originally done, weirdly. We got fancier tools, obviously, to work with, but it’s incredible, you know, that we’re sort of doing basically the exact same thing. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and also how powerful that is. Like — 

PW: Right! 

CB: — predictively that then it’s like, some of the ancient legends about predictions or long-term predictions or other things like that. With this, you can actually start to see the feasibility of some of that, of like, oh, they actually may have had a technology that allowed them to make long-term predictions about both people or world events or mundane astrology or other things like that that could have been actually reasonably correct and predictive in a real concrete sense. 

PW: So April 2065 – you heard it here first – there’s gonna be some new breakthrough with communications networks. I have no idea what it will be. Maybe you’ll be able to just like, port over some thought from your brain directly into someone else’s brain, but you’ll probably already do that. But you know, there’s – for anyone in 2065 watching this, we called it first! April 2065, Mercury’s gonna station direct in Pisces, and you’ll get something along this line. There’ll be a new first in communications. 

CB: I like that. Yeah. I’ve been trying to do that more deliberately lately as I’ve been working on some of these repetitions is then once we find the historical patterns, then say like, what then predictively in the long-term what that should theoretically mean. 

So we’re talking about what date? April 2065? 

PW: Yeah, so 2019 plus 46 – 2065. 

CB: And what’s funny about that is that’s the like, shorter – well, no, that is the Mercury period. So what’s interesting about this one, so let’s look at it on the charts, is it looks like Mercury is not with Neptune like it was last time, but instead it’s stationing with Venus, which is weirdly like, stationing at that time — 

PW: Which is also retrograde, yeah.

CB: Yeah, it’s stationing direct. So it’s like, Mercury and Venus station direct together at the same time. So as a result of that, you then would wanna look at like, overlapping repetitions with Venus in order to make a truly more specific or to specify the prediction by looking at overlapping cycles. And all of that could be specified by looking at other planets and what they’re doing and what their repetitions are. But — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — purely with Mercury based on the pattern you’ve just identified, we would say there would be an important turning point and development and specifically an advancement when it comes to communications technology around this time around March and April of 2065. 

PW: Yeah, that’s pretty funny. And actually it just occurs to me that like, you also get a Mercury-Venus return like this every 40 years. So you’d be able to look back actually 40 years earlier at that, which would be the Mercury-Venus conjunction of April 2025. That just happened, so we could actually look back to the Mercury-Venus conjunction in 2025 for another example of a Mercury in Pisces with Venus retrograde in Pisces as a way to further that prediction for, you know, the 2065 astrologers listening to this. But yeah. That’s a great point. It won’t be like the Mercury-Neptune one; it would be distinctly Venusian in some way, so it would relate to design or some kind of artistic or social sort of dimension, not just – you know, maybe this is teleportation or something. World’s first teleportation. So you can, you know, you never have to miss your kid’s recital ever again, you know. Just show up. Who knows? 

CB: Right. Well, you’re – yeah, and I don’t know, you’re joking a little bit; we don’t know — 

PW: A little bit. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. So okay. I think that’s good. There’s stuff — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — we could go into more there, but do you have any other Mercury ones? 

PW: I hesitate, just because it’s kind of – it involves getting into like, the sort of sub-periods and stuff. But basically, you know, you said something that the Babylonians did – what did you say about Babylonians looking at like, prices of things? 

CB: They were paying attention to commodities in the market. There were several different like, commodities that they were tracking, which essentially means they were paying attention to like, yeah, market —

PW: The economy, basically. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah, like sort of financial astrology basically. 

PW: So I won’t go into huge amount of depth. Basically in the talk, I did go into greater depth about oil prices. When Mercury goes retrograde in Scorpio, it often happens around the times that OPEC is meeting up to basically decide what oil prices will be, and sometimes these meetings result in huge changes. Other times not so much. But you do get a 46-year return basically from the Arab OPEC Embargo of October 17th, 1973 versus the Riyadh Summit, which is basically when Russia more or less joined OPEC sort of as a way of creating a kind of joint economic alliance in a way against, I guess, the West. And I show the different sort of sub-levels of Mercury returns. You get these other kind of important inflection points in the price of oil. And actually, at the time, I predicted that, well, there would be some significant development with the price of oil then in October of 2026 because it’s gonna be another Mercury retrograde that sort of fits into the same cycle. Of course, I wasn’t taking into account all the other things that go into the history of oil like the Saturn-Neptune cycle as you talked about, Chris. There’s a lot more, obviously, going on. But I think it’s just interesting in terms of like, Mercury and again having that kind of mercantile or commercial sort of connotation, that it makes that Mercury’s phases in different signs might have a particular significance for certain sectors of the economy or certain areas where people are doing commerce. And so I wouldn’t be completely surprised to see like, these Mercury periods and indeed including the Babylonian goal year to sort of show up. So that was the other kind of 46-year cycle I found is, although it’s kind of completed – the picture’s sort of completed when you have all those sublevels filled in – the 46-year return I found is, you know, that time basically from the start of the embargo, October 17, 1973, which is when Mercury would be gearing up to go retrograde in Scorpio, versus the Riyadh Summit with OPEC and Putin — 

CB: Nice. 

PW: — 46 years later. So that’s the only other one I got. 

CB: Yeah. That reminds me – Austin’s actually doing – Austin Coppock, our friend, is doing some really good work on the 47-year Mars cycle and metals and the price of metals. 

PW: Oh wow. 

CB: And he’s found some really compelling things that are happening right now connecting this current period with what happened 47 years ago. Although it’s — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — tricky, because sometimes, some of those are like, byproducts of other global events that are taking place like the 47-year repetition we’re in right now is lining up with the Iranian Revolution, you know —

PW: Right. 

CB: — in 1979. And now we’re in an exact 47-year repetition of that, so that like, the Sun-Mars conjunction that happened in January in Capricorn in January of 1979 when the Shah, I think it was like, the day the Shah fled Iran during the Iranian Revolution, that repetition happened with a Sun-Mars conjunction in Capricorn in January of this year. And at that time, there were those protests in Iran that were suppressed, and all of a sudden, the son of the Shah reappears and starts giving speeches and is trying to influence things. And yeah, we’re having some interesting things with oil that are also repeating in that 47 years. But it’s like, sometimes I’m not sure yet if it’s because the cycle is tied in with the commodity, or if it’s because the cycle is tied in with other geopolitical events which are having impacts on the commodity. And there’s sometimes ambiguity for me. 

PW: Yeah. Gosh, there’s a lot more I could say on that, but I don’t wanna spin us off into a whole other direction. But yeah, that’s fascinating. 

CB: Yeah. Okay, let’s take a little break. 

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All right, so we’re back. Let’s talk about the Venus retrograde cycle and the Venus eight-year repetitions for a little bit. And I did a huge amount of work on this last year, especially with Nick when we had that Venus retrograde in Aries and Pisces. And Nick and I did an initial episode towards the beginning of the year called I think “Venus Retrograde in Aries in History” where we just went back just before the retrograde started, and we went back in eight-year increments and we just researched like, what came up around those times when Venus was retrograde in Aries going back over a century to like, 1905, I think, was the first time that it went retrograde in Aries. Because with the Venus repetition, every eight years it shifts slightly by two degrees or by two days roughly. But the repetition is otherwise very close. 

But so we did that initial one, and then after doing that initial historical episode where we identified patterns and we established what major events we saw had occurred during the Venus retrograde during previous time, what was wild is over the next few months, we just started seeing so many things that we had talked about by looking at it in history coming back into the news in different ways.

PW: Yeah. 

CB: It was truly stunning. And I did a series of episodes after that where I kept checking in periodically and updating, you know, some of the weird correlations we saw, and I did at least three installments of I think I was calling them like, Venus retrograde repetitions in the news in order to note all the correlations that I was finding. So that it’s truly stunning, like, when you do that and when you pay attention.

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: I feel like I almost feel strange, because like, yeah, we’ve already talked so much, and you guys have talked so much about Venus and the eight-year cycle. It’s like, what else is there to even say, you know? It’s the eight-year minor period and the goal year period. It just ends up being the most convenient unit of time to associate with Venus. But it is astounding how often it comes up, and not always for things you’d expect, either. But nevertheless, it also lives up to its reputation as well. 

CB: Yeah. So we won’t do an extensive treatment of it here, but I just wanted to run through some of the repetitions I saw last year —

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — that I thought were the most compelling, just because I’ve covered it so much elsewhere — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — but I did wanna have a little segment here to tie this in with the goal year periods. So — 

PW: Yeah. Absolutely. 

CB: — one of the ones I found last year was weirdly with Nintendo, where Nintendo’s corporate history weirdly aligns with this specific Venus retrograde cycle that happened in Aries and then kept repeating every eight years. And what was crazy is here’s the breakdown. In the year 1889, Nintendo, the Japanese company, was originally founded as a playing card company in Japan. So we’re talking about 1889. And then if you keep jumping forward in a bunch of successive eight-year Venus periods, it takes you to 1977, where there was a Venus retrograde in Aries, and Nintendo released its first video game console, which is called the Color TV Game in Japan. So that’s in 1977. And then if you jump forward eight years after that, it brings you to 1985 when the company unveiled its groundbreaking Nintendo Entertainment System. So that’s like, the first console in the US by Nintendo that everybody’s familiar with and became wildly popular. 

If you jump forward eight years after that, you get to 1993, and the live-action Super Mario Brothers movie was released in theaters. And then if you jump forward a couple of eight-year cycles – I’m skipping some of the intermediate ones even though they had stuff that happened, but this was the one that was cool that tied it in in our time, which is that in 2017 around a Venus retrograde in Aries that year, the original Nintendo Switch console was released to like, massive success. And then exactly eight years later in 2025, Nintendo released its follow-up, the Switch Two, which was unveiled and released, immediately breaking global sales records.

So in our time, even just looking at those two repetitions of like, 2017, they released the successful Nintendo Switch, and then exactly eight years later they released the Switch Two was stunning in and of itself. But then realizing that it was actually tied in with a series of other really important turning points in Nintendo’s history going back to the founding was really fascinating. 

PW: Yeah. I mean, it’s – yeah, this is wild. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: So that was a good one. 

PW: Definitely. 

CB: Another one was the Oscars. And this is one that Nick had originally researched and pointed out that we fleshed out and ended up being a really stunning and great example where the Academy Awards, basically, there’s a continual recurrence on Venus retrogrades in Aries because in 1929 was the very first Academy Awards ceremony. And that was when – that was a Venus retrograde in Aries, and what keeps happening is every Venus retrograde in Aries in eight-year increments, it often ends up being a really important Oscars where there’s a bunch of firsts that takes place, but also there was often some like, chaotic or broadcasting snafus that happened sometimes as well. 

So to give you the quick one, it was like, 1929, Venus retrograde in Aries, the very first Academy Awards ceremony takes place in Hollywood. 

Then you jump forward a couple Venus cycles to 1945. The ceremony was broadcast on the radio for the very first time during that repetition of Venus retrograde in Aries. 

Then eight years later in 1953, the ceremony was broadcast on television for the very first time. 

Then sometimes one of the themes that came up, because it was a Venus retrograde in Aries, was sometimes like, an actress would win for a risque role or like, a scandalous role or something like that. So for example, in 1961, Elizabeth Taylor won Best Actress for playing a call girl in the movie Butterfly Eight, which was like, a highly scandalous and provocative role for that era. And keep that in mind, because what — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — what would repeat, basically, later when that repetition happened in 2025 is Anora won. 

PW: Yeah.

CB: And the film was centered around a sex worker, and it swept the awards, which basically echoed Elizabeth Taylor’s controversial 1961 win. 

PW: Wow. 

CB: But then going back, in 1993 during a Venus retrograde in Aries, a completely unknown comedy writer, Conan O’Brien, was suddenly selected to host The Late Night Show. So he had a personal almost virtual like, overnight… It was kind of a trial by fire, but he suddenly becomes a household name sort of overnight by being selected to host The Late Night Show. And then the repetition from 1993 to 2005 when Venus repeated again is that Conan hosted the Oscars to universal acclaim and hit this sort of like, career high point, both with the Oscars but also he was given I think like, a Mark Twain award or something else? There was like, a bunch of really important things that happened with Conan around that time as well. 

So going back. In 2017, Venus retrograde in Aries, the legendary fiasco happened where La La Land and Moonlight, one of them — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — won for Best Picture, but the wrong movie, La La Land, was announced as the winner on stage. And the cast came up on the stage, but then they realized there had been a mistake and that actually Moonlight had won best picture. And it was all like, it was just like, this —

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — disaster that played out on television.

PW: And the lead character’s called Chiron from Moonlight. 

CB: Okay! 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Right. 

PW: So poor ol’ Chiron! Again getting the shaft! 

CB: So — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — and then — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — the repetition is like, eight years later, there was an interesting repetition where in 2025, the Oscars were streamed live on Hulu for the first time. But the feed disastrously crashed right as the Best Actress winners were being announced, which was funny because it tied together like, a first in the same way that — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — like, the first radio and television broadcast were under a Venus retrograde in Aries in separate years. But then also there was a bit of like, a fiasco in terms of the feed failing right towards the end of the culmination of the night, which is sort of — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — similar to the Moonlight fiasco. But then it was funny, because also I was watching it live on Hulu, and they cut out like, right before the Best Actress was announced, which is like, funny because it was Venus and for — 

PW: Venus retrograde — 

CB: — Best Actress.

PW: — yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: It’s almost like Venus has something to do with, like, showing who is being conferred favor or something. And so when Venus is retrograde, it’s going to confer its favor or social approval upon someone who is maybe less typical or something, or somehow subverts a kind of standard. Because not only is Venus retrograde, but then it’s also Venus in Aries, which is sort of its opposite sign. So it’s going to act in a sort of counterintuitive way or confer its favor upon someone who maybe might not otherwise be recognized, or that isn’t who you’d sort of expect. So I think that’s really appropriate, I think, for what’s happening. Obviously for an awards ceremony that center around the arts, you know, that’s another very clearly kind of Venusian sort of a thing. So yeah. I think that’s a — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — slam dunk, as it were. 

CB: Well, and then, of course, like, the actress that won the Oscar for Best Award right after it cut out – the feed cut out – was Mikey Madison who won it for Anora for playing — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — her role as a — 

PW: There you go. 

CB: — Annie, as a sex worker basically in that movie. So yeah. Really stunning stuff where you can start to see how you could use those Venus retrograde repetitions for prediction. But then we started to see also when you combine those with other planetary things, there were sometimes even more highly specific things would happen. 

PW: Right. Like if Venus was, yeah, sort of conjunct a different planet in one year that it’s not with another year, then that would provide some more specificity to the projection. And that’s something that I thought was so funny in some ways about the last Venus retrograde when it was conjunct Saturn, because I was like, hmm. Venus in Pisces – that can tend to represent like, I almost think of the elevated Venus. Like the princess or the royalty, you know? But it’s with Saturn, which is this more harsh or sort of degrading type of quality. And I saw that they were gonna release the new Snow White movie at that time, the sort of remake, the live-action Snow White, and I was like, oh no. This is gonna bomb. And so you literally have, you know, Snow White represented as Venus in Pisces, but with Saturn eating the poison apple and of course the movie was not very well-received. And it’s really funny, because you tend to get a Venus-Saturn recurrence every 88 years, so you go back 88 years, and of course, what comes out 88 years before the live-action Snow White? The original Snow White! The animated one. 

So these — 

CB: Wow. 

PW: — are, this just, you know. It just keeps kind of happening like that. I don’t think it’s an exact 88-year recurrence, but I think it is 88 years. I think there was a Venus retrograde in proximity to Saturn at some point that spring. But obviously the closer return, you know, the closer sort of encounter was the poor treatment that Rachel Zegler received in the aftermath of this film. And of course, it was conjunct Neptune, so there were a lot like, deep fakes kind of further making fun of the film. So she became part of this meme in, you know, mocking the film. So it was very much like Venus getting kind of dragged, you know, by Saturn during — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — that time period. So — 

CB: For sure. 

PW: — that was kind of after the Venus retrograde in Aries stuff. The tail end of it was in Pisces, and yeah, that’s what I kind of got out of that. 

CB: Nice. Yeah. And in terms of like, overlapping cycles, one of the things that came up just to mention an example of what I mean by that is there were some – there was a 32-year cycle where a Venus retrograde would happen in the same place, and then Mars would go retrograde in roughly the same place. And so in some instances, one of the repetitions of that in two 32-year increments was 2025 back to 1961. And for example, in February of 1961, there was this tragic plane crash that wiped out the entire US figureskating team — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — as they were traveling to the world championships. And then the repetition was in early 2025, a plane carrying the US figureskating team, there was a crash, and there was like, the death of some people —

PW: Oh my god!

CB: — on the figureskating team. Do you remember that? 

PW: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I never put that together that there was a Venus-Mars recurrence. Geez. 

CB: Let me just look up, because I’m spacing out the – but it was almost, it was very close also in terms of the dates. It was January 29th, 2025. There’s a mid-air collision in Washington, DC, and it killed 67 people, including 28 members, coaches, and family members of the US figureskating community. And the victims were returning from an elite national development camp, basically, in Wichita, Kansas. So in that instance, it was not just a Venus retrograde, but it was overlapping with the Mars retrograde being — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — similar. And as a result of that, it was something more highly specific. 

PW: Right. 

CB: And that was part of what I took from that was something when you have overlapping cycles that intersect, sometimes the outcome can be more specific. And one of the things when you step back from it that you realize in the larger term and the realization I came to was there’s, at any time in history, there’s like, multiple planets, a bunch of planets that are all repeating and converging at different points that are probably creating more highly specific outcomes. But sometimes even just noticing two intersections can be very stark and very compelling. 

PW: Yeah. That is really compelling. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah.

PW: That’s wild. I hadn’t heard that one. 

CB: So and that’s what I mean about that axiom that I’m really coming to much more strongly over the past few years, which is repetition is the key to prediction. 

All right. Do you have — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — any Venus ones you wanted to share? 

PW: So you know, one thing that I thought was pretty wild – and I don’t know if you have, the graphic to share about this – but basically some empirical validation of the eight-year pattern can be found in US census date. In a report basically done analysis – a meta-analysis – of multiple like, 50 years’ worth of US census data from the 20th century, we have this pattern basically which shows that the average length of a marriage is eight years – 8.2 years for men, and 7.9 years for women. 

CB: Wow. 

PW: And so I thought that was a – I mean, you know, you would think that if this is a real phenomenon that the number would show up somewhere. It would show up as some kind of average amount. And here we have it. You know, the average length of a first marriage is eight years long, and the average length of a second marriage is also eight years long. And they also give the ages at which people tend to get married as well, and those tend to cluster as well around like, Jupiter years or other Venus return years. And so it’s not like, something that necessarily would account for every instance, but it seems to be present enough that it’s actually showing up in the averages. And in practice when I’m like, working with clients, it may not necessarily be that it’s from the marriage to the divorce that it’s eight years exactly; it might be from a different anchor point. Sometimes it will be from the time you first met, you know, and thus you might have a slightly – maybe someone got married to someone that they’ve been with after three years or something. Then you would say, “Well, it’s only a five-year marriage.” Yeah, but they were together for eight. You know, the eight-year pattern usually shows up in some ways. Difficult to tell what you should use like, as your anchoring point, but typically, you know, it’s Venus that is the planet implicated in explaining how two people are being brought together, especially if it’s in a romantic context. But it doesn’t even necessarily have to be – you also see Venus cycles in friendships as well, and in other types of connections as well – some of them even adversarial, you know, in terms of dealing with someone with whom you have to deal with even if you don’t necessarily want to. It can sometimes show up in these sort of flashpoints between groups of people as well. 

And so it’s both a kind of broader social phenomenon, but it’s also I think highly specific and personal as well. And I think it’s just crazy that the US census data actually reflects this exact periodicity of all of them, you know. It’s eight. Eight years is the average. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: I imagine you might — 

CB: That’s incredible. 

PW: Yeah. You might have some people who ask to see the links to that. So I can provide that, because, you know, I’m not just BS’ing you here. Like, you know, that’s – it literally what it says, but. 

CB: Right. 

PW: Yeah. Wow. 

CB: Yeah. So Venus and some of the traditional associations with like, love and relationships, and that’s pretty striking. Even more recently, like, social media came up as an interesting one with the Venus retrograde in Aries specifically, and sometimes social media sites closing down was a weird thing – like, repetition – that I noticed where TikTok briefly closed down and reopened during in early 2025 as that Venus retrograde was ramping up in Aries. And what was weird is that exactly eight years earlier in 2017, the short-form video app Vine was officially shut down like, eight years before that. And then if you go back, I found in 2001 two cycles before that, a website called Six Degrees, which is widely considered the first social media website, shut down in early 2001. And then — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — the middle one in 2009, what I found was the founder of MySpace left the company as the site went into freefall and as everybody started flocking to Facebook, basically, at that time. 

PW: Well, and to speak of Facebook, that started in February 2004, and the period of its most explosive growth when it was opening up to other colleges in the sumer of 2004, that was during the timeframe of the Venus retrograde in Gemini, and that was a very special one because it was when Venus was actually aligned with its heliocentric node. So you could actually see the Venus actually cross the face of the Sun itself as like, a dot moving across the face of the Sun; you don’t see that very often. That only happens when Venus retrogrades happen to coincide with its heliocentric nodes in Gemini and Sagittarius. Those are like, hundreds of years apart. So we just happened to have a very, very rare set of them in 2004 and then again in 2012. And what happens in 2012? Well, Facebook releases IPO. It sort of reaches this point of completion and actually kind of strangely, too, if you look at the Sun-Venus conjunction in Gemini – the direct one that happens four years in between those two retrogrades in the middle – that was during the point of its translation project to become international. So you kind of see these, you can kind of divide up that eight-year cycle into four-year hemicycles where the four-year, the first half of that Venus period that sort of is inaugurated with the Venus retrograde from 2004 is like its domestic growth, its national growth. And then after the Sun-Venus conjunction 2008, it sort of enters this international era. And it’s so funny that it happens, of course, in the sign of Gemini. They recruited the users to create translations of the site during that Sun-Venus conjunction in Gemini. So then that begins the next half in the sort of international growth. And then it kind of stabilizes in some sense after the IPO. It’s now a – it’s not in a rapid growth phase anymore necessarily, but it’s sort of remained relatively constant, I guess, after that point. It’s not in that aggressive friend-making period as it was during those, you know, you can almost look at Facebook as like, when the world became friends, basically, you know, bookended by these very unique Venus retrogrades in 2004 and 2012 in Gemini. 

CB: Nice. That’s really good. Brilliant. All right. 

Some other ones I found were – and this one is crazy – like, in 2025 during the Venus retrograde, the construction began on the White House rose garden where they ripped up the grass to pave it entirely with concrete, and Trump started all of the construction around there that just sort of destroyed the rose garden. What was crazy is that the rose garden itself was installed in 1913 during a Venus retrograde in Aries when they put the very first rose garden was put in by First Lady Ellen Wilson in the Venus retrograde in Aries in 1913. And then get this – under a Venus retrograde in Aries repetition, an eight-year repetition in 1961, the garden underwent a massive structural overhaul when the First Lady Jackie Kennedy basically did a whole famous overhaul of the rose garden in 1961. 

So sometimes like, redesigns or things like that can come up these Venus retrogrades, especially if it’s built into the basic natal chart of what was initiated at that time. 

PW: Right. You touched on this with like, the Venus-Mars combination adding up of 32. And there’s other ones. You know, like, I said there’s Venus-Mercury 40, Venus-Mars 32, Venus-Jupiter 24, Venus-Saturn 88. But one of the things I thought was kind of interesting in terms of the Babylonian goal years is we also have not an exact coincidence, but like, a sort of close coincidence with the 71-year goal year of Jupiter and 72 years, which is nine Venus cycles stacked on top of each other, so that you get this kind of window between 71 and 72 years where you have a major Jupiter goal year return and a kind of stacked Venus return. And one example of this that I kind of found where they seem to be acting cooperatively kind of blew my mind, and it relates to women’s rights, which again is a very Venus-Jupiter kind of combination given the sort of traditional association of Venus with women and then Jupiter with like, political ideals, expansion of political rights, et cetera. 

So if we look at like, the Seneca Falls convention, which is often considered a sort of seminal moment in the history of women’s rights and women’s voting rights especially, you can see that that actually happens at a Sun-Venus-Jupiter conjunction. They’re all conjunct towards like, the end of Cancer and Leo. If you wanna bring up the chart, you can. That was on July 20th, 1848. I mean, it actually takes place over the course of a couple of days. But the – yeah, July 20th, 1848, you get this Sun-Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer and Leo. And so this sort of tells us that what was started at this time, you know, ultimately would have this sort of potential to kind of reach its sort of fullest extent or its fullest range of possibilities when Jupiter will have its goal year return as well as when Venus will make subsequent returns. 

Now when you track the eight-year cycles from this event just by itself, those are very, very interesting. But for the purpose of keeping this more rooted in Babylonian goal years, we’ll just skip ahead to 71 years later. So 71 years later happens to be – if we go to July 20th, 1919, there should be a Sun-Jupiter conjunction in late Cancer. Now, what’s happening at this point is this is happening in the middle of the first spurt of states that are ratifying the 19th amendment. Between like, Congress passes the 19th amendment on June 10th, and then so between — 

CB: Which gives women the right to vote. 

PW: Well, the states have to ratify it, though. There’s a process. So it doesn’t finalize the process; the states have to ratify it in order for it to finally go through. So — 

CB: Yeah. Just contextualizing — 

PW: Oh, yeah, yeah. 

CB: — what you’re talking about. 

PW: Right. Yeah. So essentially what we’re talking about is there is approximately a year-long window in which it would take for this law to be introduced versus when it becomes ratified. Which, as you probably can guess, coincides pretty well with the timeframe of the Jupiter goal year at 71 years and the stacked Venus return that occurs just one year later. The timeframe between the Jupiter goal year and the stacked Venus goal year ends up encompassing this window of time where enough states ratify the 19th amendment to actually make it law. 

So although – so Congress passes it initially June 10th, 1919, and there’s like a spurt of states – just like, a huge swell of states, like 14 states ratify it pretty quick succession through to about August 2nd. And the actual date of the Sun-Jupiter conjunction itself is July 20th, 1919. So you can sort of see that as Jupiter’s like, moving through that conjunction with the Sun that this is like, as you get this first spurt of states ratifying this law. But it doesn’t, but it — 

CB: And that’s the 71-year goal year period from —

PW: Exactly. 

CB: — the Seneca Falls convention where — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: At the Seneca Falls convention, they famously got together to talk about women’s rights. 

PW: Exactly. And to sort of make a plan for making this happen. So at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, the Sun was in late Cancer; Jupiter was in early Leo. So we can see that at the 71-year return, it’s not quite back at the same sign; it’s a slight degradation, but – a slight slippage, I think that’s the better word, slippage. So yeah. We can see that that is still a very close approximation of that relationship. And this is happening during the center of this incredible movement of states ratifying this law. But it takes a while for it to reach the number that they need, and they don’t get to the number that they need until the next summer. So that’s when we get to the 72-year stacked Venus period. 

The final state to actually ratify it officially is August 20th, 1920. So you can see as you advance through the days up to August 20th that Venus and Jupiter are again coming back into a conjunction as the Sun is also moving towards that same conjunction. And yeah, August 20th is the final day that it actually happens, and with the next Sun-Jupiter conjunction. 

So we can see that there is something going on here with this sort of stacked Venus cycle sort of being considered alongside the Jupiter goal year that occurs one year earlier. It creates this window of time where the initial promise of the Sun-Venus-Jupiter conjunction that happened at the Seneca Falls convention actually can somehow be sort of realized as this big project to bring equality into the political system. So — 

CB: Yeah. And to enshrine that legally — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — in law, which is Jupiter. 

PW: Exactly. Yeah. So — 

CB: So that’s really good. So it’s like, Seneca Falls convention happens, and that’s a Sun-Venus-Jupiter conjunction. And then exactly 71 years later, which is the Jupiter repetition, the law is in the process of being passed basically. But then – and that’s 71 years later – but 72 years later when it’s completed, that’s a Venus repetition of an eight-year one stacked up basically. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Okay. Nice. 

PW: Yeah, and that ends up happening in the timeframe where basically it’s – this is gonna happen, you know. So — 

CB: Right. 

PW: — I think this is a good example of how when two – you could almost have this as like, a general principle because we kind of talked about how the Mars-Saturn stacks also kind of seem to correspond with these sort of times of crisis. So you could almost say there’s a similar type of window that exists between 71 and 72 years where especially I think in this case it makes a special amount of sense because the actual anchoring event is a simultaneous Sun-Venus-Jupiter conjunction. You know? 

CB: Right. 

PW: I don’t know that you would have this necessarily happen every 71 to 72 years; I think it would only make sense in the context of like, a Venus-Jupiter conjunction where you’re kind of something is being started where those two planets are being so linked together. So I haven’t looked for many other examples, but that one I thought was really striking just because of how clearly it relates to Venus and Jupiter. And I think that the timing is also uncanny. 

CB: Absolutely. Yeah. So I’ll just take it back to show the original chart again. So here’s the – so Seneca Falls convention, July 20th, 1848, and we see the Sun at like, 27, 28 Cancer conjunct Venus at 27 Cancer. Mercury, interesting also, is retrograde at 26 Cancer, and then Jupiter is very close at zero going on one degree of Leo. So it is a close triple conjunction of Sun-Venus-Jupiter, and then it is – that sort of creates this seed moment, interestingly, which then eventually comes to full fruition at the completion of first Jupiter’s goal year period and then secondly a repetition of Venus’s goal year period. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. I like that also because that’s the flipside of the coin in terms of like… You know, we talked a lot about Mars, because the Mars ones can really stand out, and can sometimes be kind of rough or be kind of terrible. But then the flipside of that is sometimes the benefics doing benefic and positive things sometimes — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — that can be very good. 

PW: Yeah. And also remember Venus-Jupiter also has that kind of 12-year cycle, so – or sorry, 24-year cycle where after 24 years, Venus and Jupiter come back to the same place roughly. So 24 years after the Seneca Falls convention is when you have Victoria Woodhull announcing her presidential campaign. She’s the first woman to run for president before women even had the right to vote, and that was in July 1872. So an exact match to the month where we know just mathematically that Venus and Jupiter were again back in a similar relationship with the Sun in the same part of the zodiac, and you have kind of the inkling of the intention of the Seneca Falls conference to reach the sort of next step. And then something sort of similar happens 24 years after that, and then of course, 24 years after that we get to the ratification. So there’s…

CB: I have another 24 one. It’s not a positive one, but it was one that happened recently I thought was really compelling. 

PW: Oh, the NACW was what happened at the next – at the 48 years after the Seneca Falls convention. That was the National Association of Colored Women. 

CB: Okay. 

PW: So a significant organization for African-American women emerged from the merger of the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the National League of Colored Women and became the largest federation of Black women’s clubs. So again, it was like this women’s rights, you know, theme. And then also integrating sort of racial justice themes into Venus-Jupiter as well. So it goes, it just keeps going. But what were you gonna say? 

CB: No, that actually brings up another thought, which is I had done an episode on the Venus retrograde in Aries in queer history with Elly Higgins, and Elly had done a bunch of amazing research about how that showed up in some really important Venus repetitions in that specific cycle that were pretty stunning. So I’d recommend people check out that episode for more about that, because it was really — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — important some of those, both in instances where there was sometimes progress made in civil rights issues, but then in other times, there was pushback and progress lost in some instances. But then sometimes those period of pushback ended up being – where things where lost – sometimes ended up being the precursor to setting up further victories in the future. 

PW: Yeah. Yeah. That’s – I remember like, the Venus-Jupiter conjunction that happened in Leo in 2015 coinciding with the legalization of gay marriage. I remember at the time thinking like, “Oh, we’re gonna have the Venus return of that in 2023; this should be great!” And like, that ended up being like, a really not-so-great Venus return for gay rights, because the Supreme Court, I think, at the time came out with a bunch of things that were very dumb… 

So that’s something to keep in mind is that sometimes returns – you can’t just look at the return. You also have to consider what else is sort of happening, because that allows you to make more specific projections. Obviously, with Venus and Jupiter, you know, it’s gonna be expansion of the rights. But if Mars is involved or Saturn’s involved or there’s some other kind of complicating factor, then it can, yeah. It sometimes brings the theme back, but maybe in a minor key. 

CB: Yeah. Valens says at one point that Venus – or that the malefics, Mars and Saturn, can indicate the taking away of good things, whereas the benefics are oftentimes the opposite. It’s like, furnishing good things. 

PW: Right. 

CB: And yeah, that summer when gay marriage was legalized in the US, that was a Venus retrograde in Leo conjunct Jupiter in Leo. So it was like, there was a specific reason why that was more affirmative. 

PW: Yeah. Exactly. That links — 

CB: All right. 

PW: — it to the same effort, you know, as women’s right to vote. You know, that was the same one, right, from Venus in Leo. 

CB: Right. Okay. 

PW: Or it might be. The same sign, at least, yeah. Maybe, yeah. 

CB: Okay. Got it. 

PW: I’ll have to check that. 

CB: There was one other – there was one 24, because you mentioned the 24-year repetition. So I just wanted to mention this briefly that I noticed one last September where if you remember last September, it was an eclipse season, but it was… 24 is a repetition of Venus, but also Jupiter being in basically the same signs during the same month in a 24-year increment. And what happened is in early September of 2025, the Charlie Kirk assassination took place. And then Jimmy Kimmel, who is the host of one of the late night shows, made some inflammatory statements about it basically or some jokes, and then was kicked off the air. He was taken off the air. And what was – by ABC – and what was crazy about that is exactly 24 years earlier, I believe it was to the day, was September of, yeah, 2001. And in September of 2001, earlier in the month, 9/11 happened. And then later that month on a late night show on ABC, Bill Maher made some statements that conservatives thought were inflammatory, and then he got taken off the air by ABC. And what was funny about that is the person who then replaced him the following spring was Jimmy Kimmel. 

So there was this weird, like, exact 24-year repetition of let’s say a terrorist act or a tragedy or something like that, and then a late night host saying something that was viewed as inflammatory that they were then taken off the air for, basically, at least temporarily. And I thought that was a pretty stunning repetition because it happened almost to the day, and even at the time, I think it was like, Bill Maher or Jimmy Kimmel noted that this was happening to the day. 

PW: Yeah, that’s – I love that. I love it when non-astrologers are like, picking up something that’s like, way more mind-blowing than they even realize, you know? 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s the deeper implication of all of this is like, people in normal life do notice these things. Like, normal people sometimes – especially when you’re the one experiencing it subjectively and you see that some repetition is happening either to the day or very close to the day separated by a number of years, people see that that’s important but they don’t know why. And what we’re finding here with these planetary periods and these repetitions and these Babylonian goal year periods is that it’s because there’s some deeper patterning that’s happening in nature naturally that’s happening sort of below the surface of reality that we don’t usually see or we don’t usually have access to. And what I find interesting about that is that’s actually one of the definitions – it’s the main definition – of fate in the ancient world that the Stoics used was that fate is the reason underlying the interconnection of events according to a broader plan or like, purpose of some sort due to the cosmos being alive and having a sentience that connects events in time that otherwise seem disconnected. And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing here is we’re seeing something about the existence of fate underlying reality and tying events together. And we’re seeing like, an echo or a show or a glimmer of that happening through the planetary repetitions that are tied into it through time and through meaning. 

PW: Wow. That was profound. That’s a clip! Yeah, that’s good. Nicely done. 

CB: All right, I think that’s good for Venus. We started talking a little bit about Jupiter, so why don’t we get into Jupiter next and do a few example of Jupiter’s goal year periods? And just to refresh on those, we’re talking about Jupiter has two; there’s a 71-year period, and there’s also an 83-year period of Jupiter. 

PW: Yeah, that 83 years sounds so tantalizingly close to another planet’s period, but we’ll talk more about that at another point. 

CB: Yeah, let’s not spoil it. What’s your best example of Jupiter? 

PW: I think one of my favorite examples that I found so far is Nelson Mandela. He was born with Jupiter in Cancer. And after he turned 71 in – it was early 1990 when Jupiter entered Cancer again – he was freed from prison. And Jupiter is a planet traditionally associated with liberation from bonds, freedom from bonds. I believe that’s like, one of the, you know, if you look at the Valens list of significations, I think that’s definitely one of them in there. So I just think that’s a really – obviously, like, that’s one of the main things that people know is that he was a political prisoner for so long, and then you know, had this dramatic release from prison and became the president of South Africa. And you know, I feel like that’s a pretty excellent Jupiter return. And apparently, you know, there’s something special about the 71-year one, you know? This didn’t happen at one of the other Jupiter returns, you know; this happens at this particular one where it’s especially close. Now, of course, there may be other reasons for this, but yeah. You can see here – oh yeah, he was born with Jupiter even in a conjunction — 

CB: Wow. 

PW: — with Pluto. So it’s like, an even more dramatic type of Jupiter as well. 

CB: Yeah. And this looks like it’s marked as dirty data, so I don’t know if we know the time for sure. But we can say that he was born with Jupiter in Cancer, and yeah, like you said, it was conjunct Pluto and then Venus is kind of like, in Gemini coming up on it. It’s within 10 degrees; it’s not like, super close, but. So then you said his was at 71? 

PW: Yeah. So what’s really interesting is when you advance the chart to 71 years exactly, you’ll see that Jupiter is actually still in Gemini. It has not actually reached the degree-based return. But — 

CB: Right.

PW: — it just so turns out that if you go to February 11th, 1990, which is like, the official day that he was released – this is still while he is age 71 – that that is after Jupiter has entered the sign of Cancer. So if you go ahead to February 11th, 1990, then yeah, we see that Jupiter is back in a very close degree-based conjunction with his natal Jupiter. 

So I think it’s significant enough potentially just that he is at this, you know, this particularly sort of important Jupiter return period, but the actual sort of moment of sort of release, I guess, you know, the big moment is still when Jupiter is in that close degree-based conjunction with his natal Jupiter. And — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — this is like, the Jupiter event of his life.

CB: Yeah. One of the things, because I mean, one of the things that brings up is about like, the solar return chart and because the goal year periods will, if you’re timing it based on a person’s natal indications, then that means the goal year period will happen basically around the person’s birthday in that year, which then also in some ways will bake that configuration into their solar return chart for the year. 

PW: Right. 

CB: Which in some instances may make it active for that entire year, basically. And I know Nick does a lot with like, solar return charts and thinks that that’s some important in terms of how that like, baking something into a solar return can be important. 

PW: Right. He also likes to combine the… There are certain combinations of planets in houses that mean that at the same time that you’re coming to a goal year period, for example, that planet could be like, in the particular house which is activated for that time, for – so 71, for example, is a 12th house profection year. And one of the themes of the 12th house is imprisonment. Now, we don’t know exactly what Nelson Mandela’s 12th house is like, but it’s interesting to note that those are like, two themes that are kind of present for this Jupiter return, both the profected house as well as the liberation from it with Jupiter entering that return. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, and I’m gonna do a whole episode with Nick about that, because he’s found some really interesting things with — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — how profections can line up with planetary periods and goal year periods and things like that that’s really cool. 

Okay, so that’s great with Nelson Mandela and the goal year period. And it does bring up a larger issue that I was seeing sometime with the Venus eight-year periods is sometimes that entire year or like, long spans of time were getting marked by things, because sometimes – even though sometimes we’re focused on like, an individual singular event, more often than not, the things that happen in our lives are part of like, a sequence of events. And especially when it’s involving a retrograde – retrogrades we saw are often the unfolding of a sequence of events that happen over several months. So that was one of the main takeaways I got from a lot of the Venus retrograde research last year, and that may also apply here when we’re talking about some of the Jupiter periods and other things as well. 

PW: Yeah. Time kind of functions, I guess you could say, like a particle and like a wave. It can be sometimes sort of wave-like, and I think, you know, I don’t think that’s just a fudge factor. I think legitimately that there can be periods of time that do sort of function more as – it’s irreducible, you know, from the wave-like nature it’s sort of behaving. But then other times, there are like, these sort of almost like, lightning strike type events where they are very, very distinct. And sometimes I think we generally have this problem when we’re talking about, for example, national charts. This is another area of Nick’s approach that I really appreciate, which is that, you know, rather than necessarily tying ourselves down to one single chart to hinge, say, the entire history of a country onto, that if you are researching enough about a country you can sometimes see the recurring patterns that allow you to be able to make useful astrological observations about the history of a place that are not necessarily tied to any particular foundational chart. And the foundational chart just becomes another important point in a broader continuum of the history of that place. And so it doesn’t make those charts unimportant, but it just means that in some ways, it might be a flaw in our approach to think that it’s only gotta be one chart. Even with a person’s life, I mean, it may not necessarily just be the natal chart. You know, there could be other charts that sort of matter or other contexts in which to understand – I mean, for example, in traditional astrology, you’re supposed to look at the prenatal lunation or even like, the prenatal eclipse, and sometimes that can even be kind of informative, you know. If you know that you were cooking basically while you were gestating during a certain eclipse series, you know that those are gonna come back at a certain point in your life, and you are kind of related to them because even though you weren’t out in the world yet, you were still there in some sense. And the — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: You know. So you’re gonna respond potentially to sort of the broader transits of the timeframe that you came from, you know, not necessarily just the immediate ones that happened right at your birth, although I think that is primary. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: So — 

CB: Or to go to like, another part of your point that you just made, one of the things I was seeing in the recurrence transits episode I did with Nick was sometimes somebody would take an action or start doing something new under a certain alignment of planets – let’s say a conjunction – and then the recurrence of that at some later point would indicate some important turning point with respect to that thing. Like, I’m trying to remember what the one was for me; there was one for me that was like, I started studying Hellenistic astrology under an alignment of two planets – it might have been like, Mercury and Pluto or something – and then at the recurrence of that, I had the same alignment come out when my book came out basically, on my book on my Hellenistic astrology. 

PW: That’s awesome. 

CB: I’ll have to look that up and see what that was again just to refresh myself. But the point with that was that sometimes by taking actions at certain points in time, it creates a new foundational chart or base chart which then reacts to subsequent activations and planetary periods or recurrences or what have you. 

PW: Yeah. You’re creating a new pattern kind of, yeah. Or a new sequence or locking into one or surfing one. That’s cool. I like that. 

CB: Yeah, which then interestingly, like, it makes electional and the power of electional even more interesting in terms of the potential of that. When you create something in time, you’re capturing something about that moment in time, and there is something like, almost quasi-magical about that that we don’t think about enough with electional astrology but which in the ancient world I think they may have tapped into and realized was much more important than we realize today. 

PW: Yeah. Sometimes that gives me a little bit of anxiety when like, something seems like it’s absolutely like, for sure gonna go through or something seems like there’s nothing that could possibly disturb it, but it’s happening under a horrible alignment. I’m always like, what’s going on here? Because like, this doesn’t seem wrong. And then usually, you know, time will pass and the kind of critical flaw will reveal itself or the problem that was sort of hiding underneath will eventually make itself known, but it wasn’t visible at the moment. But the cosmos seemed to know about it, because well, it said it right there. 

So yeah, I think that’s a great point. 

CB: Wait, what was the point? So just to reiterate that sentence again. 

PW: Oh, I was just saying that – I was reacting to your point about elections and that this sort of, you know, you end up sort of creating a new pattern potentially when you start something at a particular alignment. And so I was just reflecting on that by saying that if I’m starting something under a malefic arrangement where like, all around me it looks okay – there’s no reason for me to suspect that it would not turn out all right – but that after enough time passes, I eventually will see the critical flaw, the problem that was actually being created at the time that I thought everything was all right. 

So sometimes the malefic qualities of the things that you start don’t always make sense at the outset. There isn’t necessarily like, a logical reason even to think that like, oh, you know, these are problematic transits, but this seems all right. It’s fine, you know? But it makes itself —

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — known eventually. 

CB: Yeah. That’s something I struggled with a lot, because Zoller used to say that. Zoller used to say like, “The astrology is always right.” I struggled with that early on, but then as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand that he was right, that — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — oftentimes the astrology is telling you what’s going on, and sometimes you don’t – you can’t see how it’s accurate at the time. 

PW: Right.

CB: And yet it’s still telling you something that’s important. And obviously, with that, you run into some issues about like, the astrologer’s interpretation and your ability to interpret it correctly could be off. But sometimes it can tell you things that you’re not able to see or you’re not seeing at the time that you later will realize in retrospect. 

PW: Yeah. Absolutely. I relate to that a lot. 

CB: All right. And really quickly just to clarify, I looked it up, and it was a Venus-Mars conjunction. What was weird is I started studying Hellenistic astrology – I found the day I started studying it with Demetra’s — 

PW: Wow. 

CB: — course in Kepler in like, the beginning of December of 2004. And there was a Venus-Mars conjunction in Scorpio in my 10th house. And then what happened is when I published my book on Hellenistic astrology on February 10th of 2017, there was a Venus-Mars conjunction in Aries in my 3rd house. So it was a funny recurrence there, but it wasn’t a recurrence based on my natal chart; it was like, a recurrence based on basically when I started studying Hellenistic astrology. 

PW: Yeah. That’s nice. I like that. 

CB: Yeah. All right. What other – do you have any other really good Jupiter ones you wanna make sure we mention? 

PW: Yeah, sure. So another one that I thought was kind of interesting is like, you know, this one’s especially interesting if we just think about the fact that like, it’s 71. You wouldn’t necessarily – I mean, I don’t wanna sound ageist or something. Like, you know, obviously people are capable of great things at advanced ages; sometimes really surprising things can happen at advanced ages. But I thought this was kind of a good one that like, Martin Scorsese who was born November 17th, 1942, he turned age 71 in November of 2013 and under a month later, he released The Wolf of Wall Street, which ended up being obviously this big critical success for him. So it’s just interesting just because it’s like, maybe you wouldn’t expect someone to still put out such a heavy-hitting movie at a sort of later stage in their career. But like, you know, he obviously showed that he absolutely still has kind of this magic gift, you know, being able to make great films. And so I thought that was a kind of cool 71-year pattern. 

CB: Nice. So he was born November 17th, 1942. 

PW: 1942. 

CB: And then when did The Wolf of Wall Street come out? 

PW: Wolf of Wall Street came out like, it was just under a month later. Wolf of Wall Street release date… Okay, it was December 25th, 2013, actually. So it was just over a month. 

CB: Got it. So it was like, he was born with Jupiter in Cancer very close to a station. 

PW: Station. 

CB: And so 71 years later, Jupiter around his birthday basically is in Cancer again, and it’s very close to stationing. So yeah, that is interesting and sets up some interesting things. 

PW: Right. Well, yeah, it was nominated for a bunch of awards. He didn’t actually end up winning any, but this is still interesting that he had this big Jupiter return at a time like where there’s renewed focus and attention on his work and his ability to create these amazing experiences at the movies. Although I personally found the film pretty long. I don’t know – I was entertained! It was good! I don’t know how many times I wanna watch it. But it’s definitely, you know, a good one. 

CB: I mean, it’s kind of interesting that one of the themes of the film was like, excess — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — and the main character living a life of extreme excess in every way possible. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: And some of the problems that came along with that was like, the point of the movie. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Were there any other – did you have another Jupiter one that was good? 

PW: Oh, so I had a couple of sort of have a kind of broad Jupiterian sort of more like, I guess you could say they had – this one has a sort of theme of like, political expansion. Interestingly, in the same way that the Seneca Falls convention comes from 1848, so do we have the 1848 Communist Manifesto which 71 years later leads to 1919. So in the same year that the 19th amendment starts becoming law, we get the First Congress of the Comintern, which is essentially the kind of like, international attempt to spread Communism and Lenin at the time. And so I just thought that was kind of an interesting parallel to, you know, a completely different cause which is being taken up in 1848 and reaches a similar sort of point of actualization with reaching this goal year of Jupiter in that time. 

So I thought that one was pretty cool. I don’t know if we wanna go any deeper into that. But another Jupiter one that I thought was really interesting that kind of relates to the other planet that is potentially related to that 83-year cycle of Uranus is the fact that if you take the date of the 1903 Wright brothers’ first flight — 

CB: Of Jupiter, you mean. You said Uranus. 

PW: Oh yeah, so yeah, Jupiter has an 83, yeah, goal year, and Uranus has an 84-year cycle roughly, so there’s a rough coincidence there. But we’ll get more to that in just a bit. But I just wanted to point out that the Wright brothers’ first flight, which was… 

CB: 1903?

PW: 1903. It was December 17th, 1903. So if you wanna bring up December 17th, 1903. Oh yeah, forgot I had it in here. I could have just done that. 

CB: December 17th, 1903. We see Jupiter at 15 Pisces, and it is, yeah. That’s where it is. 

PW: Okay. And then we also have… So then 83 years later on December 14th, 1986, we have what is called the Rutan Voyager, which was — 

CB: Okay. 

PW: — the first nonstop flight around the world. So it’s kind of interesting that we have Jupiter essentially we have like, the moment of the first flight followed 83 years later almost exactly to the day of like, the first nonstop flight around the world. So we like, got off the ground on the first one, and then like, we got off the ground and didn’t get back to the ground until like, you know, you went around the whole world. So I thought that was an interesting pair across that 83 years. And — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: And of course, Jupiter has to do with some degree of like, adventures or long voyages potentially. You know, the sort of associations people draw between Jupiter and Pisces in the 9th place in the Thema mundi or if you do the astrological alphabet put Sagittarius in the 9th. 

CB: Well, we don’t even have to go there. It’s just Jupiter is associated with travel as a general signification. 

PW: Sure. Sure. So yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting. And also at those points, Jupiter would be in an alignment, too, with Uranus. And of course, Uranus is almost at a return by the time you get to 83 years. So I think that’s one way that we can probably draw a distinction between the 71-year Jupiter goal year versus the 83-year Jupiter goal year, because the 83-year one is going to coincide with a general return of Uranus, whereas the 71-year one will not. 

CB: Yeah. That is something I wanna introduce in our final section. 

PW: Yeah. Well, that’s just a preview. Yeah — 

CB: Sure. 

PW: — it’s just a preview for that. 

CB: Okay. Do you have any more Jupiter ones? Should we do Saturn to round this out? 

PW: Sure. One other one I’ll mention very briefly just to round it out is on May 20th, 1927, we had the first nonstop Atlantic flight, which opened up commercial air flight. This is, I believe, the – I forget his name, the name of the pilot who did it. May 20th, 1927 – yeah, that’s the first nonstop Atlantic flight. So we can see Jupiter there is converging on a conjunction there with Uranus in Aries. And then exactly 83 years later – or not exactly 83 years later, just a little off – June 4th, 2010. So just over 83 years later on June 4th, 2010, is the first Falcon Nine launch which opened up commercial space flight. So we have — 

CB: Wow. 

PW: — like, the flight that – so the first one makes commercial airflight possible, and then the next one makes commercial space flight possible. So you have these kind of breakthroughs or firsts for travel in a way that opens up a whole new domain of commerce across the skies, and then, you know, above the atmosphere itself. So I thought that was pretty interesting. And of course, Jupiter is not too far off from its alignment with Uranus there for both of these events. 

CB: Yeah. That’s incredible for travel; I like that. That’s really compelling. 

PW: Yeah. So that’s Jupiter goal years. You know, that’s what you kind of get. 

CB: Awesome. Let me see. I know I had a Jupiter one I just remembered that happened a few years ago that was like, a notable geopolitical one that was coming up. And it was, yeah, the whole like, Arsenal of Democracy thing. So — 

PW: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That thing. 

CB: Let me see which side of this should I start with? Basically I noticed it because in like, April – in the spring of 2024, President Biden at the time signed a major foreign aid package into law after months of delay. And it authorizes 61 billion dollars in military aid and economic support for Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion. So the theme was like, the US reinforcing its role as the primary supplier of material support to an ally who’s fighting an aggressor. And what was interesting about that is exactly 83 years earlier, which is the Jupiter repetition, brings you to March and to the spring of 1941. And at that time, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act into law famously, which is like, one of those things that we would learn about in school basically – one of those major events where the US starts supplying military aid to foreign allies like Britain and the Soviet Union without officially entering the war or demanding immediate payment. So it was basically like, the US acting as a logistical lifeline to fight a proxy war against an aggressor, which in that instance was Nazi Germany as World War II was unfolding, basically, while still technically attempting to maintain neutrality and avoid direct boots on the ground. 

So the repetition of that I just thought was incredibly powerful at the time, and like, all of these events when you notice them at the time, it’s much more powerful because it’s like, we were sitting there watching Biden pass this legislation, and then realizing that it was an exact 83-year Jupiter repetition of a president who was doing the exact same thing right before like, World War II. And then we had another president essentially doing the exact same thing before what, you know, is sort of like, turning into World War III at this point. So I thought that was incredible. 

PW: Wow. Yeah, that’s good. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: That’s good. 

CB: All right. 

PW: Yeah. Wow. So yeah, Jupiter doesn’t disappoint. It does the same thing in the same way in the same place, basically, which is exactly what it’s doing sort of astronomically. 

CB: Yeah. So providing material support and — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — things like that. Okay. What do you got for Saturn? So Saturn’s Babylonian goal year period is 59 years. And this one’s – this is different than some of the others, because you know, that’s very close to what is basically the second Saturn return. 

PW: Right.

CB: But this is the Saturn one, and you found some – at least one – interesting statistic for that, right? 

PW: Yeah. So one kind of sad and weird thing about that age is according to that same set of census data that I found, the average age that someone becomes when widowed is 59.4 years old. That’s — 

CB: Wow.

PW: — for men. And then for women, it’s 58.6. Even for a second marriage, it’s 57.3. So like, we have this clustering of ages around which someone becomes widowed right at 59. Now, if any 59-year-olds are watching this, I’m not saying that’s gonna happen to you if you’re with someone special to you. Obviously there’s gonna be individual factors here. But it’s interesting just in terms of Saturn can represent sort of grappling with the finiteness of life and with endings of various sorts and sort of encountering sort of the hardest or most bitter things in life. And so obviously the loss of someone that you love is the, you know, one of the hardest things probably that you can go through. And so it’s just interesting to see that life stage kind of coinciding with not like, necessarily the 29- or 30-year sort of general Saturn return, but like, the 59-year one where it is in a more similar relationship with the Sun in the same general part of the zodiac than it is, say, at 29. Because the orbital period of Saturn is like, 29.6 or something like that. So it’s not going to – even if it recurs to the degree, it’s not gonna be in the same position relative to the Sun. But at 59, you do get a general sign-based return with a similar phase with the Sun, and that’s why 59 gets the designation of being the proper goal year. So — 

CB: Yeah. Let me show that. So here’s like, let’s say the Sun-Saturn conjunction that occurred earlier this year on March 25th, 2026. If we jump forward – at that’s at four degrees of Aries is the Sun-Saturn conjunction – if we jump forward 59 years, which is the goal year period of Saturn, we find on that same exact day, March 25th, 2085, the Sun at five degrees of Aries and Saturn at six degrees of Aries. So there’s a very close Sun-Saturn conjunction recurrence about exactly 59 years apart. And if we back it up – so let’s go back to March 25th, 2026, and then let’s back it up 59 years before. That takes us to March 25th, 1967. We see the Sun at four degrees of Aries conjunct Saturn at two degrees of Aries. So once again, that’s a very close repetition. 

PW: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Some other Saturn ones that I found, like, seem to have to do – like, the other ones I found were like, mundane primarily. They seem to relate to times when institutions or organizations are checked. They encounter a limit on what they can do. So for example, we have – here, let’s find a good one. So for example, oh yes, so the CIA/the DOD was founded on September 18th, 1947, if you wanna bring up that chart. And 59 years after that date takes us to September 2006. And what’s happening in that month is the Military Commissions Act was passed. And what this did is it provided the first sort of oversight of these CIA black sites, because there was a lot of atention being brought to the fact that there was torture being perpetrated at these sort of extra-legal or extrajudicial zones, these black sites. And at that time in that same month, the first DOD field manual was released which officially banned torture. 

Now, some people might dispute that maybe this was just like, public-facing and maybe this was just all for show. But it is interesting that like, there was enough public pressure at the time and enough outrage against these abuses that were happening that it did lead to a kind of formal reprimand of the agency and attempt to contain or limit the damage or harm being done. And it happens to coincide with the 59-year return of the beginning of those agencies. 

So I thought that was a fairly decent sort of reckoning, I guess, a Saturnian reckoning for this institution. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And thinking about that, because I’m looking at the degrees. It’s like, September 18th, 1947, the Sun is at 24 Virgo and Saturn is at 17 Leo. And then when you jump forward 59 years, it’s like, the Sun is at 25 Virgo and Saturn’s at 20 Leo. So you have that exact repetition of the phase relationship between the Sun and Saturn, which is what all of these planetary periods are tracking. But then to have some limits or like, some boundaries or some rules – like, some hard limits – put on the organization at that time is kind of interesting, and then is reminiscent of what you were talking about earlier in terms of sometimes in personal lives the second Saturn return experiencing a hard limit, and one of those can be the loss of a loved one or the limit – the end of a relationship or what have you.

PW: Right. Another one was the NSA, the National – I forget what it stands for. It’s the surveillance one! It’s the one that reads all your texts and sees every email. The NSA was founded on November 4th, 1952, appropriately during Scorpio season, I might add. And yeah, so that was November 4th, 1952. And so when you advance the chart 59 years later, it takes you to 2011. So we can see Saturn — 

CB: November 2011? 

PW: Yeah. So in November of 2011, so there’s nothing that’s really exactly on this date. But something that is interesting about this date that kind of happens at the midrange, it sort of happens at the midpoint between two important events, which is that on October 3rd, 2011, just one month earlier, the Supreme Court declared that the NSA actions were unconstitutional, and that they basically established that the NSA would have to reform by – they’d have to institute these reforms by November 30th, 2011. So November 4th, the exact date of the goal year, happens to sort of be at the exact midpoint between the formal reprimand from the Supreme Court as well as the mandate that the court gave the NSA to reform their processes by November 30th, 2011. 

And so again, we see a very similar theme here of like, a reckoning. You know, a hard limit for the organization being levied at the goal year of Saturn. 

CB: Right. It’s like that Saturn principle of sometimes being told “no,” basically, but on a larger organizational level. 

PW: Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s… Yeah! That seems to be sort of the common theme. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: Having to —

CB: Nice. 

PW: — reform. 

CB: Right. Well, yeah, and then we all experience that with like, the first Saturn return and hitting sometimes some walls in life where some doors — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — are like, closed to you, but then it opens some other doors. And that’s in the late 20s, but then you get your second Saturn return around this time. And sometimes there’s some much firmer walls you hit, but also then opening up a new chapter for that last Saturn cycle of your life, basically. 

PW: Yeah. I’m trying to remember – there was one Saturn – there was a few people at their second Saturn returns during Me Too that just are coming to me. I’m trying to remember like, when that was. 

CB: Was — 

PW: Oh, Kevin Spacey! Yep, that’s right. Yeah. So he was — 

CB: Oh yeah. 

PW: — just about to turn 59. That’s when he first got hit by these allegations, and his life has been very tenuous since that point. So yeah, when the allegations first became public in October 2017, he was 58. So over the course of that year as he was sort of fighting back against it and dealing with the fallout of that, you know, losing his show House of Cards, et cetera, that would have all been — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — during the timeframe of his second Saturn return and the 59-year goal year. 

CB: No, I remember that one, because very close to that, he was in a movie. He had filmed like, an entire movie and it was about to come out, and then it hit, and then they basically removed him from the movie and completely recast and reshot all of his scenes and then replaced him with somebody else and the movie came out. And that was like, one of the very close transits I wanna say that happened with that Saturn return. Yeah.

PW: So that was just like, one natal one that occurred to me. 

CB: Right. 

PW: While we’re on the section. 

CB: Yeah. There’s definitely a lot of other Saturn ones that could be brought up, but I know just due to time, we’ll probably — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — skip them and that’s sufficient just to give a little preview and a little clue of that. But since that one’s so close to like, the second Saturn return, since it doesn’t stand out as weirdly, as foreignly, let’s say, as some of these — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — other planetary periods that are a little bit more exotic for modern astrologers, maybe that’s sufficient in terms of — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — in terms of that. Unless you had — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Do you have any other really good ones, or? 

PW: No. And not that aren’t just like, general second Saturn return type ones. No. So — 

CB: Okay. 

PW: — I’m excited for this part, though. 

CB: Okay. Well, let’s take one last break, and then let’s come back — 

PW: Okay.

CB: — and we’ll — 

PW: All right. 

CB: — we’ll conclude with our rousing conclusion to this where we have some lovely, some really good final words. 

PW: Yeah. Absolutely. 

CB: All right. So I think we’ve reached the last final section of this talk today on Babylonian goal year periods. And I wanna touch on just like, a few final points before we do some conclusions. But one of the most striking observations actually that you made about this when we first started researching it a few years ago, maybe two years ago, you made a point about the outer planets that I thought was really stunning. So what was your main observation about that? 

PW: Well, basically the 83-year Jupiter goal year is almost equivalent to the Uranus 84-year cycle.

CB: The 83-year period of Jupiter is very close to the 84-year cycle of Uranus, and so in a couple of the Jupiter examples you already showed, the Uranus return is happening roughly at the same time as the Jupiter return, so that especially if there was like, let’s say a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, then they end up returning to the same place around the same time, around 83 —

PW: Right. 

CB: — 84 years. So one of your observations about that is that like, the Babylonian astrologers, they were picking up on the Jupiter return at 83 years, but they may have also been picking up on something else that they couldn’t have known about, which is that there was this invisible outer planet that was doing something at the same time as well. 

PW: Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? Like, they would have some inkling that there would be something somehow something particularly unusual perhaps about the 83-year Jupiter return. I mean, the 83-year Jupiter return is closer than the 71-year return; it’s more precise. But I still – it does make you wonder if in a way they were inadvertently aware of and tracking, without knowing it, the cycles of Uranus. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah. I think, no, I think that’s such a brilliant observation that because they narrowed in on that 83-year cycle which is a strong Jupiter repetition as we’ve shown, every 83 years on almost the exact same day, the Sun and Jupiter will recur very closely. So that in and of itself creates a strong repetition. But it’s like, they were putting especial importance on this 83-year thing, and they might have been noticing that really important events were happening around that time. And they may have been picking up on that partially because there was another very important planetary cycle that they couldn’t have known about. And this is important, because like, sometimes skeptics or other people say, well, you know, if the ancient astrologers were so good, then why didn’t they know about the outer planets? This is actually – the Babylonian goal year periods are the strongest evidence that the ancient Babylonian astrologers may have been picking up on the existence of the outer planets empirically without fully knowing what they were picking up on, I think. 

PW: Absolutely. And I think you can even take it a step further. Because of the way that Uranus and Neptune and Pluto are related to each other, not only does one 83-year Jupiter cycle approximately equal one Uranus cycle, but two stacked 83-year goal years is close to 165, which is the Neptune cycle. And if you stack three 83-year Jupiter cycles on top of each other, you get close – not exact, but close – to 248, which is the Pluto orbital cycle. So you could say if they were tracking multiples of 83-year cycles that they would be aware of and paying attention to the same rough intervals of time that correspond to outer planetary returns. And so yeah, I think that this is a way that you can respond to that argument. You know, if you even hear that in your own life, you know, if you’re dealing with a skeptical friend who asks you a very good question, which is, you know, how did people do astrology without knowing about the outer planets? And I think this is one way of being able to answer that that makes sense and is somewhat defensible. At least in general that they would be aware of this interval, that 83 years and its multiples would be significant. Now obviously, they’re only send it through Jupiter, but it just so happens that it does roughly coincide with Neptune and with Pluto even. So it’s kind of a cool effect of that sort of two-to-one ratio from Uranus and Neptune and then the three-to-one ratio between Uranus and Pluto, and the roughly two-to-one ratio of, well, it’s actually not a two-to-one ratio between Neptune and Pluto but there is, yeah. They sort of fit together like nesting dolls. And because Jupiter can roughly equal Uranus, then it kind of fits into the same pattern, so. 

CB: So let me show just the math written out for a second, because I think this is how we did it in the Casual Astrology Podcast and it worked out really well. So okay. So let’s write out some basic addition. 

So we have the 12-year cycle of Jupiter. So Jupiter is one 12-year cycle. Every 12 years, Jupiter goes through the zodiac and comes back to where it started. And then how many —

PW: Seven times. 

CB: Seven, okay. So seven Jupiter cycles equals 83 — 

PW: 83. 

CB: — years. So then we have the 83-year goal year period of Jupiter where the Sun and Jupiter recur on roughly the same day every 83 years. And what’s weird about that is 83 years is very close to the 84 years of Uranus. So roughly the Jupiter goal year period also coincides with a return of Uranus, which makes that special because then we have two planetary periods completing roughly at the same time. 

But then if we add two Jupiter periods, which is 83 years plus 83 years, it comes out to 166 years. So then at 166 years, you’re gonna have Jupiter returning on roughly the same day to roughly the same spot in the zodiac. And weirdly, Neptune’s cycle is 165 years. So that means that just like with Uranus in the first cycle, Neptune will return roughly at the same time to the same spot in the zodiac, right? 

PW: Yeah. Yeah, it’s roughly in the same place. 

CB: And then if you add three Jupiter cycles, 83 plus 83 plus 83, it comes out to 249. And weirdly, Pluto’s cycle is 248. So that means when you stack three Jupiter cycles together, it will roughly return to the same spot in the zodiac on the same day around the same time that Pluto is also doing the exact same thing. 

So one of the points that you made that’s brilliant and I think is incredibly important is just they found a cycle of Jupiter that is not only powerful as a recurrence with the Sun in and of itself, but when you stack it up, the two cycles would coincide with Neptune returning at the same time, and the three cycles would coincide with Pluto returning at the same time. So they picked up on a cycle that also would have overlapped with the outer planets and therefore empirically, they may have been noticing really important events happening with this cycle that were even more important than they realized for reasons that were like, slightly visibly out of their grasp. But nonetheless, by identifying it, you could argue that they were actually picking up on the existence of the outer planets astrologically. 

PW: Yeah. That’s cool! 

CB: Yeah. That’s really incredible. So here’s your diagram where you showed it like, nested. 83, 83, and 84 for Uranus, and then 83, 83 for Neptune, and then 83, 83, 83 for Pluto. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: Very cool. 

PW: Yeah, that was one of the slides from the NORWAC presentation in 2025. Yeah. I think this is, it’s… I’ve never been so excited by simple addition before, you know? Just because the implications are so profound about that and how the awareness in some ways of these other cycles have not been, you know, they’ve always been kind of with us and we’ve known about them for a long time. Longer than we even knew about the planets themselves, so, yeah. I think that’s really mind-blowing. 

CB: Yeah. Because even with the basic ones, occasionally that’s exactly what would have happened is that sometimes they would have seen a recurrence of a certain planet and they would have expected a certain thing. But then there would have been this – and that recurrence would have happened and the events that coincided with the planetary period. But then there would have been this extra added like, flavor to it that they couldn’t really articulate through the – or they couldn’t see coming from factors that were known to them. But they would have picked up on like, something weird was happening that was an additional admixture of something.

PW: Right. 

CB: And even if they couldn’t fully put their fingers on what that was, they would have been picking up on something that was showing up in the events that was making the completion of that period more special than it might be otherwise. 

PW: Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, the only time you can actually see Uranus with the naked eye is when it’s at opposition. And only if you knew exactly where to look. I mean, even before William Herschel discovered Uranus, there had been sightings previously where it was sort of mistaken for a star or something. I know there’s at least a few cases of pre-Herschel sort of sightings. But it wasn’t ever put together that like, it was a planet. And so you know, given that they did have the longest running skywatching program in human history, I’m sure they must have seen it at some point or another and maybe wondered what that was, and never to see it again. You know, it’s only visible there for a few days or so right around the opposition with the Sun for Uranus. 

Of course, they would have had no hope of seeing Neptune, but yeah. Uranus is sort of right at that boundary. You know, it’s usually not there, and only under very certain circumstances can you find something that will actually unlock your sense of the scope of the cosmos, you know. So they were knocking on that door for a long time.

CB: Yeah. Well, and I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’m working on an episode on ancient gnosticism and Hermeticism. And they had this notion of the seven-zoned sphere and the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres prior to birth where the soul like, descends through the spheres and picks up qualities from the planets. And then after death, the person dies, and their soul ascends through the spheres and gives back those qualities. And I think this was tied in with the ancient notion that shows up in the myth of Inanna where she goes into the underworld and she has to pass through seven gates, which is an interesting precursor to that later notion that would later become so prominent in Hermeticism and some forms of gnosticism and gnostic — 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: — Christianity. 

PW: Wow.

CB: But then what was weird about that is in Hermeticism and some forms of gnosticism, they talked about there being an 8th and a 9th sphere and other planetary spheres, which implicitly would be like, you know, beyond the seven planetary spheres. And while that probably had like, other meanings and there’s other ways that they took that and other stuff, it makes me wonder sometimes about whether they weren’t picking up on something else being out there and different levels and sort of like, attempting to relate that back to the framework that they understood. But that’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, because that even shows up in the Sefer Yetzirah and the Tree of Life, which gets assigned and is based on the planetary spheres and the ascension of that through there. But then I think there’s like, two spheres that aren’t assigned to planets or something like that. 

PW: Wow. Yeah, that’s really amazing. It’s so, wow. So yeah, people were trying to figure this out then potentially. They — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — knew that there was something they didn’t know. There was — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — some mystery beyond visibility. 

CB: Yeah. A mystery and sometimes some of the mystical traditions were almost like, alluding to a knowledge perhaps of something. And some of the practical astrologers would have been picking up on something empirically, but yeah, that full discovery would wait ‘til later centuries. 

Yeah. So yeah, and that’s a whole other thing. But the point is just… What is the point? The point is just that the planetary periods are powerful in and of themselves. 

PW: Yeah. 

CB: When periods overlap with other periods, that creates more specific predictions. The Mesopotamian astrologers may have started to pick up on, without knowing it, that there were other outer planet overlapping cycles that they couldn’t have known about, but it’s cool that they were picking up on something. And I think that starts to demonstrate something about the empirical nature of astrological research. 

And as a separate, final section and final tantalizing bit, the goal year periods were like, longer term ones within the span of a human life potentially. But they had even longer term planetary cycles called the ACT periods, which were – some of them were very long. Like, there was a 1,151-year cycle of Venus, and it’s crazy because Venus will repeat like, at that timeframe very closely. But what I was noticing was that when I did in January of 2025, there was a bunch of planets conjoining in Capricorn, and if you put it forward 1,151 years, multiple planets repeat at the same time. 

So the Babylonians may have been tracking even longer term planetary cycles than we can even imagine, which is another very tantalizing future avenue of research. 

PW: Wow. Very, very cool. I don’t wanna ruin it with that; I’ll leave it at that. I don’t wanna ruin it! 

CB: I mean, let me – here, I’ll animate it really quickly just to give a little tantalizing bit. So here’s a chart. Let’s take it back to January. Let’s say, like, early January when you have all these planets in Capricorn that were conjoining the Sun that was very unique because it was like, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Sun conjoining. So this is let’s say January 8th, 2026. And one of the long term periods I just said of Venus is 1,151 years. So let’s go years and let’s jump forward that number. 

This is jumping forward from 2026, from January of 2026 to January of 3177. And we see that the Sun, Mars, Venus, and Mercury are again all conjoined in Capricorn. So that means it’s not just a recurrence of Venus in that instance, which is very close, but it’s actually a four-planet recurrence in a more than 1,000-year cycle to give you an idea of some of the longer term that they were tracking. And when you think about that in that context, that’s just like, a crazy amount of time to study in terms of the implications, in terms of studying longer term periods of world history. 

PW: Wow. So you’ve heard it here first! January 31, ‘77 – shifting military alliances. That seems to be the theme of that one from our observations from earlier this year. 

CB: Yeah. What was happening in January? It was like, stuff was going on with Iran and the US, and things were happening with the US and NATO. Like, NATO’s alliance — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — was being seriously threatened due to repetitions there. 

PW: Well, and NATO itself was started at Sun-Venus-Mars conjunct in Aries from 19 — 

CB: Right. 

PW: — ‘49 or eight? So yeah. In fact, I think NATO will be having a 79-year goal year coming up in… Well, I think it might be like, 2027 maybe. We’ll have to – it’s soon. It’ll be in the springtime. But yeah, I just think of like, Venus as alliances, you know, and then with Mars obviously for common defense. And so you have a military alliance, you know, forming at a Sun-Venus-Mars conjunction. And so I think, yeah, what you’re pointing out with the problems recurring with world politics and with NATO between the United States, et cetera, that all seems to be kind of evocative of these sort of shifts in alliances and military alliances in particular. Because any planet which conjoins the Sun is close to changing its sides of the Sun. And so there’s always a sense in which a planet is going to sort of change its appearance or who it sort of bestows its favor or who it is empowering after its conjunction with the Sun. 

I kind of talked — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — about this during my combustion lecture at NORWAC 2026! So yeah, that’s — 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: — really interesting. 

CB: And like, you know, NATO is the largest military alliance in the history of the US. And so if we’re talking about a thousand years in the future, we’re talking about a military alliance that ties together what will then be like, a multi-planetary species, if not even — 

PW: Right. 

CB: — beyond that if we’ve become a multi-solar system species by that point a thousand years from now. And you think about that compared to, you know, whatever happened 1,156 or whatever years earlier before that, which would have been in the middle of the Middle Ages, and I haven’t tracked that. But whatever kind of like, alliances and how impossible it would have been for somebody that long ago to think about and conceptualize what was happening a thousand years later compared to us today attempting to conceptualize what will be happening a thousand years from now. But one way, if we can get to the basic principles of astrology by just thinking about the basic meanings and about alliances and military and war and things like that, we will probably have gotten somewhat close to saying something specific. But we’ll have to check in again in a thousand years — 

PW: Yeah, check in again in a thousand years — 

CB: — and find out. 

PW: — yeah. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. 

PW: All right. 

CB: All right. All right, my friend.

PW: That was great. 

CB: Let’s make some final thoughts and final things about Babylonian goal year periods. 

You know, repetition is the key to prediction. Overlapping cycles help to narrow down the range of prediction. This shows the importance of studying history when you start talking about like, long-term periods here, and that’s one of the tricky things is you have to be good at not just astrology, but also the study of history and other things like that. 

This also gets into the heavy empirical component of astrology, which I think is really important, that the study and development of astrology is not just all about interpreting things symbolically or psychologically or other things like that. Like, that is an element. But I think underlying everything, underlying the myths of astrology and the meanings and the built up tradition, there is fundamentally an empirical component which has to do with studying repetitions between celestial movements and earthly events. And in that, astrology is fundamentally based on a type of empiricism, and that’s one of the points that I wanted to make in this episode. 

PW: Yeah. Couldn’t put it any better than that. 

CB: Cool. All right. I’m trying to think – any final thoughts about Babylonian goal year periods? 

PW: Just that I feel like we just scratched the surface, you know? I think if this is the first time you’re learning about this, like, this is your sign to play with some blocks and look out for – just memorize those intervals and be aware of when someone says they’re turning 47, or when you hear someone you love is turning 71 or 59. Like, even just the eight-year cycle by itself is mind-blowing, you know. And we haven’t even gotten into the recurrence periods with like, the Sun and the Moon! That’s a whole other – you know, there are no Babylonian goal years for those bodies, but I feel like we can sort of extrapolate sort of similar return periods for those bodies as well. So this is an area that I think is really ripe for exploration and research, and I think I’m excited to see what comes out of it. And yeah. So I’m really glad we finally got to do this, Chris, and yeah, thank you so much for having me. 

CB: Yeah. Thank you for doing this with me. We’ve been wanting to do this episode for a few years now, and we finally just decided to like, let’s do it today. Shout out to our friend Nick Dagan Best who is like, lightyears ahead of everybody else in terms of the work and research he was doing with the recurrence of different planetary periods. And when you and I started getting into goal year periods, obviously some of his suggestions were really important, and he, even though he was coming at it from a different angle, like, understood immediately and helped to explain to us some of the significance of some of these. I’ll do a follow-up episode with him and some of the work he’s been doing on annual profections and how that ties in with different planetary periods, which is really fascinating. 

PW: Yeah. I mean, you know, I also owe a huge debt to Nick in my work; he’s been a huge influence on me, as have you. And he’s helped me become a fellow human ephemeris, and that… Yeah. He definitely has been such a huge influence and a – this is right up his alley, because this is basically what he was already kind of studying. He was just doing kind of the groundwork in some ways of building up to these really large cycles. So yeah, if you haven’t seen his work yet, you definitely gotta check him out. 

CB: Yeah. So Nick specialized especially in the Venus and Mars retrograde periods, and we’ve done previous episodes with him on that. So you can check out his work. 

As for yourself, where can people find out more information about you? 

PW: You can find out more about me at my website, PatrickWatsonAstrology.com. I am also becoming more active on social media, so you can find me on most social media platforms at PWatsonAstro. And I am also working on a really cool software called Nechepso, and so you can check that out at www.nechepso.com – that’s N E C H E P S O. And if you contact the customer service on there, it’s me responding! So you know, live support’s available, and yeah, it’s a cool program. But I’m not gonna turn this into a huge ad. Just yeah, check it out if you want. 

CB: Definitely. Yeah. I’ll put a link to your website in the description page for this episode or in the description page below this video on YouTube so people can check out your work and some of the lectures you have available as well. 

And yeah, as for myself, thanks – shout out to all the patrons that support this work through our page on Patreon.com. All of them got early access to this episode. And if you wanna learn more about my approach to astrology, check out my Hellenistic astrology course at TheAstrologySchool.com where I teach people the principles of ancient astrology and we do live webinars each month applying some of these techniques, including some of these recurrence periods in practice. So you can find that at TheAstrologySchool.com. But otherwise, thanks for doing this with me, Patrick, today; this is a big deal and big episode. I’m glad we finally got to do it. 

PW: Yeah. Me too.

CB: Yeah. All right. Well, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time. 

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