TAP Ep. 542 Transcript: August Astrology Forecast 2026

August 12, 2026

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 542, titled:

August Astrology Forecast 2026

With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock

Episode originally released on July 29, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/07/29/august-astrology-forecast-2026/

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

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released August 12th, 2026

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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 Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be talking about the astrological forecast for August of 2026. Hey Austin. Welcome back.

AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris.

CB: Hey. We are back again. We’ve got a lot of news to catch up on in the first hour of this episode, and then in the second hour, we’re gonna dive deep into the astrology of August, which features an eclipse season with eclipses in Leo and Pisces. We’ve got a Venus retrograde that’s gonna start kicking up as we get the pre-retrograde shadow and Venus moving into one of the signs it will retrograde back to, as well as a bunch of other stuff. So as always, there’ll be timestamps if you wanna jump ahead to the forecast section. Otherwise, let’s do just a quick overview of the astrology of the month, and then we’ll get into the news section.

All right, so here is the planetary movements calendar for those watching the video version of this episode that shows where the planets start at the beginning of the month and then how far through the signs of the zodiac they’ll get by the end of the month. And like I said, we’ve got eclipse season basically encompassing the entirety of August with a solar eclipse on August 12th in Leo and a lunar eclipse on August 27th in Pisces. And the effective range for eclipse seasons begins about seven days before the first eclipse, which brings us to August 5th, and then it ends about seven days after the second eclipse, which will take us into the first week of September.

We also, as I said, have Venus moving into the sign of Libra starting on August 6th already, which is the sign it will later retrograde back to during the course of the fall. And Venus actually enters its shadow degree on August 31st once it passes 22 degrees of Libra, since that’s the degree it will retrograde back to and station direct at on November 13th. So the Venus retrograde stuff is already starting to heat up in some ways that we’ll talk about later.

All right. And finally, here is the planetary alignments calendar that lists all of the major alignments and aspects this month, which I’ll just read off quickly. We’ve got Venus going into Libra on the 6th of August as I said. Mercury entering Leo on the 9th. Mars moves into Cancer on the 11th. Solar eclipse in Leo on the 12th. Mercury conjoins Jupiter on the 15th. Mars squares Neptune on the 17th. Venus opposes Saturn on the 21st. Then the Sun moves into Virgo on the very next day. Mercury joins the Sun and moves into Virgo on the 25th. Then there’s a Sun-Mercury conjunction or cazimi on the 27th. Second eclipse of the month on the 28th with that lunar eclipse in Pisces. And then finally at the very end of the month, we have two aspects that go exact almost simultaneously; one of them is that Jupiter exactly trines Saturn at this time, but also at the same time we have Mars squaring Saturn, which goes exact slightly in the next day on September 1st. But effectively, it’s basically going exact on the final day of August at the same time as Jupiter trines Saturn. So that’ll be our third major aspect that we’ll be talking about this month is that building, especially Mars-Saturn square.

All right. So those are some of the things we’re gonna be talking about later in this episode in the forecast section. But first let’s do some news and other things and catching up.

So first things first, welcome back, and checking in, Austin. You got hit kind of hard this month by the Mars-Uranus conjunction that was happening in your 12th house while you’re in a 12th house profection year, and you got sick like, twice, right?

AC: Yeah. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten meaningfully sick twice in one month in my adult life. So that was cool. My —

CB: Yeah. I always remark with Jupiter in the first, you have like, surprisingly good health. Like, almost I might say, from my perspective, annoyingly good health, but yeah, this was a rare exception for you.

AC: Yeah. It was – and what was fun was, so the month was bookended by week-ish long sicknesses, which I’m still not entirely over, but good enough. But between those two, we have a 15,000 acre wildfire about 20 miles north. And so every time the wind shifted, we would get blanketed with smoke. So even after I got over the first sickness, I was still coughing my brains out.

CB: Yeah. That’s terrible; that sounds terrible. Well, you sound way better than you did even like, a day ago. I think you took some cold medicine, but I promised you I’d keep the news section briefer to like, under an hour today just for your sake since you’re hanging in there, powering through this.

AC: Yeah. Hopefully my voice and lungs’ll hold up. I promised you that I wouldn’t do any productive coughing into your or the audience’s ears.

CB: Okay. Yeah, you’ve got that mute button; you’re gonna use it liberally throughout the course of the episode. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for powering through and joining me for this, both because it was a big month last month to cover news-wise, but also because we got a lot to talk about in the forecast with eclipse season coming. It’s gonna be a really big one.

AC: Another big one.

CB: Yeah. All right. So let’s get into the news. So like I said, I’m gonna try to keep this like, not short, but shorter than usual. There were so many news things that I’m not gonna be able to cover them all, so I’m gonna cover some of the highlights and then save whatever I can’t get into here for an episode of The Secret Astrology Podcast which is gonna be available to patrons through our page on Patreon.com where I’ll do all the other news stories and interesting astrological correlations I noticed that didn’t make the cut here. But let’s go ahead and jump into the first one. And a lot of the initial stories I wanted to talk about focused on the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, which went exact early in the month in July around July 3rd and 4th, but then continued to be in effect and intense for quite a while after that. And still as of this recording today on – what is it – July 28th is still copresent. So we’re still seeing some of the sign-based conjunction sort of stories that coincide with that.

But the biggest one that coincided with it related to the war between the United States and Iran where I didn’t know that this was gonna happen, but then all of a sudden the funeral for the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ended up happening from July 3rd through the 9th, which very closely coincided with the Mars-Uranus conjunction. And this was really striking from an astrological standpoint because Khamenei was killed, of course, earlier this year on February 28th right on the exact Mars-Uranus square at the opening of that war. And we’ve noted a few times how the initial war between the US and Iran and Israel happened last year in June, the so-called 12-day war, and that also started on a Mars-Uranus square. So what ended up happening is you had those two previous squares between Mars and Uranus that coincided with those two wars starting, basically, as well as the death of the leader of Iran. And then at the conjunction which also represents the closing of one cycle and the beginning of another, we saw this major funeral with millions of people there in Iran that were mourning the death of the leader happening months after it had occurred.

So that was really striking. And then there were a lot of like, images that came back and news reports of that, of people mourning and calls for vengeance, and it also seemed like a very seed moment. Because we have to remember that a conjunction is always the closing of one cycle, but it’s also laying the seeds for another cycle at the same time. Did you – were you following some of that reporting, Austin?

AC: A little bit. I think you make a great point there. You can see the recognition of what happened during the cycle that is now closing and that contemplation or feeling of what has happened turning into the motivation and plans for what will happen. Right?

CB: Yeah.

AC: And that’s – you know, it’s the New Moon dynamic, but with a different pair of planets than the Sun and Moon, where we close out one cycle and begin another. But in the case of Mars and Uranus, we have a much more upsetting, violent, table-turning, game-changing pairing than the stable Sun and Moon.

CB: Yeah. Exactly. And yeah, it’s a good demonstration of how that can work out with those long-term cycles. So it also means that whatever seed moments were planted at this time, especially in July of 2026, we’ll see important turning points with respect to what was initiated at the other hard aspects that Mars makes to Uranus, which will be the next one will be the waxing square or the opening square when Mars makes it there. And that’s gonna be tied in with that Mars retrograde next year in Virgo, right?

AC: Yeah, it’s interesting, because instead of one waxing square, one opposition, and one waning square for hard aspects, this upcoming cycle will triple down on the waxing square. So we’ll get meaningfully more hard Mars-Uranus aspects during this coming cycle than we usually do.

CB: Yeah. And that’s gonna be really important. Both you and I are paying attention to that eclipse season, because that retrograde and that square with Uranus by sign, at least, I think coincides with an eclipse that looks especially potent and problematic.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah.

AC: I believe we made worried noises about it on the yearly.

CB: Yeah. Well, we’ll be making a lot more worried noises in the next year ahead for 2027. But we’ll save that for later.

More immediately, it’s like, that funeral was happening, and then all of the feelings or other things surrounding that were happening, and then all of a sudden the war between the US and Iran had been temporarily – ever since shortly after the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in June, which saw a temporary peace deal and a memorandum of understanding, all of a sudden starting on July 6th, the war exploded again and suddenly restarted, starting when on July 6th Iran began shooting oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. And then all of a sudden, the US started shooting back and targeting Iran, and then they started going back and forth so that eventually the US did 13 straight days of heavy strikes on Iran. The Strait of Hormuz was closed. There was a threat or possibly a – I guess an accomplishment – of potentially partially closing the other strait by the Houthis so that all of the issues with oil are coming back very strongly. Basically the war re-exploded again to a level of violence that we hadn’t seen since April during the course of July. And I was just writing down headlines all month which I’m not gonna completely summarize here because it would be too many. But one of the – I mean, that in and of itself, were you following all of that? I know you’re like, sick and dying basically during all of this, but were you seeing —

AC: Yeah.

CB: — just the explosion that took place after July 6th?

AC: Yeah, absolutely. I was, you know, I was just curious, so I was like, “Okay, is Mars-Uranus gonna restart the war?” Like, how long does it – really, the question probably for me was, “How long does it take for Mars-Uranus to restart the war?” Do we get it on the conjunction itself, or do we have to wait a couple days? And so we waited a couple days. And then it got moving again.

CB: Yeah. But after July 6th, basically, it ramped up dramatically. And at this point now later in the month, it’s like, the oil reserves of the US have fallen to the lowest level since the early 1980s. And when these stop – when that hits bottom, basically, which is projected to happen soon – as soon as this month in August – the ability to offset the price of oil will be significantly hampered, and then all of a sudden the price of oil will shoot up. And this has put the administration into obviously like, a very difficult position ahead of the eclipse, because both Trump and I wanna say Vance both said at once point in June or July that the main reason they signed the memorandum of understanding was because of the oil reserves being depleted and them wanting to refill it or something like that. So obviously they weren’t able to accomplish that, because the peace did not last for very long.

And we are now headed into eclipse season, which is really, really important, because our entire prediction – not the entirety, but the initial basis of our prediction that the war with Iran and the US would take place in the first place was because we started noticing in 2023 that every six months during eclipse seasons, there would be another escalation between the US and Israel and Iran. And that eventually culminated about six months ago in February and March with the eclipse season that saw the full-fledged war between those two countries or three countries as well as the assassination of the leader of Iran who was born the day of an eclipse just like the other two leaders; Netanyahu and Trump were also both born the day of eclipses. And so now we’re at the six-month point where the next installment and next escalation of things should take place under this eclipse season which we’re heading into now.

AC: Yeah. Yes. All of that is true. We’re on that particular locomotive. Let’s see, I was gonna add earlier that, yeah, with the oil, it’s not just the United States that’s been tapping their oil reserves. And of course, if the price of oil goes up, then the price of every good that needs to be transported goes up, as well as everything that has any petroleum in it, et cetera, et cetera, which ties into economic concerns which we’ve expressed.

CB: Yeah. Yeah, just the entire world economy potentially taking a nosedive if this continues as it seems to be on the current trajectory. While at the same time, it’s also turning into a regional war where Iran keeps striking back against different – striking different Gulf states in retaliation for some of the US strikes to put pressure on them. And then at the same time, we also see just recently this week, like, Ukraine shot down or sunk a boat, an Iranian —

AC: Yeah, Iranian cargo ships that were suspected of carrying drones to Russia.

CB: Yeah. So all of a sudden, now we have like, a crossover threatening to happen between what we usually conceptualize as like, two different wars over the past few years, which is the Ukraine-Russia war, and now the US-Iran-Israel war. But now all of a sudden we’re seeing crossover there in a way that’s making everything sort of like, spiral into a much larger confrontation in different ways, or much larger war.

AC: Yeah. And that’s the concern. That’s how you get what get dubbed in retrospect world wars, right, is when regional conflicts coagulate into larger, multi-regional conflicts with teams of players.

CB: Right. Yeah. And that’s one of the things that we’ll pay attention to in retrospect is this was the first of four Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, and so there were several many different seed moments that took place over the course of the past month and probably will still continue to until Mars departs from Gemini in early August that we’ll look back on as being the foundation for larger subsequent conflicts to come.

AC: Yeah. And so those Mars-Uranus conjunctions or those cycles last about just a little bit more than two years. And so we’re still in, you know, if this was a lunar cycle, we’re in the first day of the lunar cycle. Right? We’ve maybe done one day, and we have 29 to go. And that’ll be – in Mars-Uranus time, that’s gonna be two years. So this is all seed moments for the cycle; this is just getting moving.

CB: Yeah. Definitely. So in terms of other Mars-Uranus seed moments, I noticed like, three different at least distinct stories. There were several where nuclear discussions of either nuclear weapons or nuclear energy were coming up this month. Two of them were very near the conjunction. The first was on July 5th, just a day after the exact conjunction. China test-launched a long-range, submarine-based ballistic missile in the South Pacific, and it carried a dummy warhead. But it actually marked the first time that China has fired such a weapon into international open waters, and it sort of confirmed their second strike capability and the expansion of its nuclear deterrents beyond just like, their land-based silos that had already been demonstrated. So that caught my eye, because specifically it came up in the news as a first – that it was like, the first time China had launched what like, a nuclear-capable missile from a submarine, basically, into the Pacific. So that’s not great news in terms of like, seed moments.

Similarly, there was a discussion, a news story, on July 9th that came out about a warning that China made to Russia about nuclear weapons where Zelenskyy speaking at a NATO summit stated, I guess based on intelligence sources, that Beijing had delivered its strongest message to Moscow regarding its recent nuclear rhetoric and basically saying that China had issued a redline to Russia demanding that Russia stop making nuclear threats and that it rule out the use of nuclear weapons in the ongoing war with Ukraine. So while this wasn’t a, like, event-event in terms of a specific thing, again, if we’re looking for symbolic seed moments, having this big story right on a Mars-Uranus conjunction which previously the only time nuclear weapons have been deployed in war took place on a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini in 1945, seeing stories like this come up again when we think about them as seed moments is not like, super reassuring.

AC: No, and it’s a concern we expressed, I don’t know, starting expressing years ago about this period. And it’s that nukes are going to try to sneak back onto the table. Right? And obviously along the way, there’s discussion of like, hey, let’s keep these off the table, but things keep moving them closer to the table. And the fact that it needs to be publicly stated – like, “Hey, stop trying to sneak nukes onto the game board” – you know, is a testament to the fact that they are moving towards the game board.

CB: Right. Absolutely. And then finally the last one that may be end up being significant but on July 22nd, there was a news story where the Trump administration signed a multibillion dollar civil nuclear cooperation framework with Saudi Arabia. And this allowed for the US to export American nuclear technology and reactors to Saudi Arabia, basically, in order to boost the nuclear industry there and supposedly to strengthen strategic ties. But again, like, nuclear non-proliferation groups sort of like, raised concerns over it as well as the precedent it sets as well as the potential for other long-term problematic things that could come from that. So that was another news story that I was tracking for those reasons.

AC: Yeah. Yeah. And you could sum a lot of this up as tracking the nuclear proliferation trend which has —

CB: Yeah, exactly.

AC: — been on the rise and seems to be increasing.

CB: Well, and also just it was the realization I made, like, a year or two ago that the Uranus in Gemini period in the 1940s wasn’t just the birth of atomic weapons, but it was really the birth of the atomic age, including nuclear power. And seeing a return to nuclear power becoming popular again recently, especially due to data centers and things like that, is something that will probably continue to be a major part of this Uranus in Gemini period.

AC: Yeah, I would expect it to be a consistent theme.

CB: Yeah. All right. So moving onto other things. There were three instances where people who were born with Mars-Uranus conjunctions came up in the news during the course and very close to the current Mars-Uranus conjunction which then were examples of what I call a recurrence transit where if you’re born with a Mars-Uranus conjunction, then sometimes some of the most important events in your life will happen when Mars and Uranus again conjoin in the sky. And one of them that happened was on July 11th, shortly after the Mars-Uranus conjunction, a very prominent senator, US Senator Lindsey Graham, died suddenly at the age of 71 from an aortic dissection right after he got back from a trip to Ukraine. And this was shocking and striking from an astrological standpoint just because he was born with, like, a very close Mars-Uranus conjunction; I believe it was in Cancer, I wanna say. And then he died just like, days after a Mars-Uranus conjunction quite suddenly.

AC: Well, and worth noting also that it was a sudden death, as Mars-Uranus does not denote slow, gently accumulating issues. If there is some gentle accumulation or movement, it climaxes in a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere moment of rapid, often stunning action.

CB: Right. Yeah. So that was the first one.

The second one was on July 10th, shortly after the conjunction, Progressive candidate Graham Platner abruptly withdrew his campaign for the US Senate in Maine following a sexual assault allegation, and then his like, late sort of 11th hour dropping out of the race left Democrats scrambling to find a replacement candidate, basically, in time for the ballot deadline. And this was another striking one, because a listener pointed out – actually, a few listeners pointed out – to me that he was born on a Mars-Uranus conjunction. And the sudden dramatic sort of fall at that time very late in that campaign in Maine was very surprising and very shocking.

AC: Right. Out of nowhere.

CB: Yeah. And then the third one I noticed was just another Mars-Uranus conjunction was there was a story about the payout for E. Jean Carroll where following the Supreme Court’s decision in 2023 to let civil verdicts stand between her and Donald Trump, a federal judge ruled on July 8th that Carroll could collect the initial five million dollars in damages that were awarded to her, which had been held in an escrow account after this sexual abuse and defamation case against President Trump. And all of a sudden, she got the money finally this month, the five million or 5.8 million it had grown to with interest. And she was born on a Mars-Uranus conjunction.

AC: It’s nice that there’s a positive version of that. Of —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — the Mars-Uranus return.

CB: Yeah. I mean, to some extent, although it was based on a very negative thing.

AC: Right. Right, you still have the shock and damage that Mars and Uranus bring, but you have some recompense for that at least.

CB: Yeah. Well, and in two of those cases, it’s interesting that it was like, Mars and the negative side of Mars being tied in with matters related to sex or sexual assault or sexual scandals or other things like that, which there was like, a whole debate about in the community this month that we don’t have to get into, but at least in those two cases, there were some challenging things obviously that came up there.

AC: Well, and it’s worth noting that for much of the month, Mars was also in a square with Venus. And so it ties in the Mars-Venus sex scandal theme which we’ve seen a bajillion times, especially with conjunctions, but the squares and oppositions between Mars and Venus very often bring sexual scandals, which of course are based on episodes of sexual misbehaviour or assault.

CB: Yeah, that’s a great point, because yeah, Venus just ingressed into Libra right before both of those two stories happened. Like —

AC: Virgo.

CB: — Platner was on the 10th – yeah, Venus went into Virgo and began the sign-based square with Mars overcoming it.

Okay, I almost forgot to mention there were three countries that were born on Mars-Uranus conjunctions that we were paying attention to for this as a potential recurrence transit from late June to July when Mars and Uranus again conjoined in the sky. And all three of them had stuff that happened. So one of them that was born on a Mars-Uranus conjunction around 1810-ish was Venezuela. And on June 24th right as the Mars-Uranus was coming into alignment and applying, there were two major earthquakes that struck Venezuela, leaving over 5,000 people dead and thousands more injured by this time in July. And that’s still an ongoing situation, and the ramifications of that are still ongoing. So that was one of the major ones.

The other major one that we were paying attention to was Lebanon, which Leisa had pointed out was also born on a Mars-Uranus conjunction in terms of the current government in the 20th century. And on June 26th, the US, Israel, and Lebanon signed a framework of agreement following some sort of mediated negotiations. And while we’ll still see, like, how well that holds up and everything else, that was a notable turning point that happened, again, right as the Mars-Uranus conjunction was coming into alignment.

And then finally, the third country we were paying attention to was Cuba, and Cuba at this time is basically facing a severe economic collapse that has extreme food shortages and energy shortages and constant daily blackouts of which there were some really major ones across the entire island this month. And this was also starting to cause and lead to some protests that started to break out in Cuba this month. And you know, it’s hard watching the US media because I don’t know – it’s hard for me to like, judge from here what’s genuine and what’s not or what’s propaganda. But nonetheless, one of the things that did happen is Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, announced a new legislative push imposing even stricter targeted sanctions on Cuban officials and also providing uncensored satellite internet access directly to demonstrators. And it became pretty clear this month if like, basically if not for the Iran war, the US would probably already be in Cuba, but that that situation and the attempts to put pressure on the Cuban government and potentially to overthrow it is still essentially ongoing and is a slow motion thing that we’re seeing happen over the course of this year.

AC: Yeah, and that’s a great reminder, because understandably, the Iran war steals the – takes the spotlight. But the Russo-Ukrainian war is still ongoing, and there are a number of other conflicts that are very near exploding or are beginning to get hot. And you know, it’s not that malicious astrology is only for headline stories, right? It happens for all of us as well as for all nations. It’s not just the thing that grabs the headline.

CB: Yeah, definitely. And that there’s a lot of, also as we keep repeating, seed moments that you won’t realize the implications of until later on, especially during conjunctions where something is started at that time and sometimes you can catch it if you’re paying attention, but sometimes the implication of something isn’t fully clear until retrospect when you realize how significant that starting point was.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. It’s difficult, especially when other things are louder at the same time. It’s hard to hear the softer beginnings.

CB: Yeah. Absolutely.

All right, moving on. Do you remember last month we were talking about the Jupiter-Pluto opposition —

AC: Pluto opposition.

CB: And the very first – I did some historical research into this, and the very first story that I highlighted was a Jupiter-Pluto opposition in the 1920s where Mussolini announced that he was basically doing away with the last vestiges of the democracy in Italy at that time during the fascist takeover of Italy. And I used that as one of my historical examples.

Well, get this. Like, on July 20th, right next to the opposition between Jupiter and Pluto, there was a headline from Reuters that said, “Ortega Says Nicaragua Will No Longer Hold Elections,” and basically Nicaragua’s long-serving president Daniel Ortega said that in Nicaragua they would no longer have elections basically and eliminate the possibility of any sort of electoral challenge to his term, which is supposed to end next year, which then just further entrenches him, obviously, in terms of his dictatorship of this country at this point.

AC: Yeah. Well, your historical example ended up being bang-on.

CB: Yeah.

AC: That’s pretty nice. I mean, it’s not nice that that happened, and it’s not nice that it happened with Mussolini back in the day, but that was an excellent example to choose for that – that undercutting or subverting or, in this case, just negating the Jupiterian aspiration to have free, open, liberal-minded principled governance. You know, Jupiter’s ever the optimist and believes that things can be free, open, just, fair, and can get better. And the oppositions and other hard aspects with Pluto often see that brutally undercut or reversed or subverted. So yeah, perfect example.

CB: Yeah. It’s just the importance of looking at historical cycles sometimes and seeing what happened close to those, and then sometimes being able to make an inference that similar things will come up in the future when that aspect recurs.

All right. So in unrelated news, on July 3rd, Trump gave a speech at Mount Rushmore where he said that he was urging people – the Senate – to pass the SAVE Act, and he said that if this legislation was passed, then Republicans would “will not lose an election for 100 years.” And then, let’s see, on July 9th, Trump abruptly terminated all the remaining members of a bipartisan federal election assistance commission just months ahead of the 2026 midterms, which then raised widespread concerns about, you know, different things involving the midterm elections.

AC: Yeah, the integrity of the elections to come.

CB: Right. On July – what was the exact date of the Jupiter-Pluto opposition? Was it the 16th or the 18th?

AC: I don’t remember. I just remember it creeping throughout the first half of the month.

CB: Let me find – okay, it was July 20th. Yeah. July 20th. Okay. So on July 16th, Trump gave a major primetime address pushing the SAVE Act and talking about election security. And in this, he announced and he made an allegation that China illicitly acquired voter files related to the 2020 presidential election and said that China had somehow been involved in helping to – he alleged – steal the 2020 election.

And then finally later in the month on July 24th, the White House Correspondents Dinner took place, and in that, Trump gave a speak where he joked about running for a constitutionally prohibited third term and started – and he put on a hat that said like, “Trump 2028” where he was “joking,” or starting to float the idea, basically, of running for another term in 2028.

So those were some of the things that happened around the Jupiter-Pluto opposition this month. And then I thought there was another one that happened also right on the Jupiter-Pluto opposition that I thought was crazy because it was released the same day as Trump’s speech, but I don’t know if it was meant to – they must have been producing it for a while. So I don’t know if it was meant to coincide with that, but PBS released this whole video interview titled, “How Conspiracy Theories Have Shaped America” on July 16th. And I thought that was incredible, because if you remember 2020, that was one of the major things I picked up on on 2020 is I saw when that aspect kept going exact the sudden proliferation of conspiracy theories like, spiking around those times when the aspect was going exact. So I was really interested here in this instance that PBS released that right on the exact opposition. And this is the description, because it was actually really interesting; it said, “From the American Revolution to today, conspiracy theories have been part of the American story in ways that may surprise us. In this episode of Judy Woodruff’s In Pursuit of Happiness, she sits down with Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, to explore how conspiracy theories take shape and what they tell us about who we are.” And part of the reason I’m bringing this up is I noticed and I realized this month for the first time that in the US birth chart at the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776, you actually have a sign-based Jupiter-Pluto opposition in that chart where Pluto is in late Capricorn and Jupiter’s in Cancer. So Jupiter-Pluto oppositions are kind of like, baked into the birth chart of the US, and that also means that Jupiter-Pluto oppositions are recurrence transit for the US whenever they take place again. And I wrote down this one note that this guy she was interviewing who was like, a Libertarian historian said in this interview. He said,

“What people often forget is that the Declaration of Independence also calls these abuses a design, and they say that the purpose of that design is to bring us under absolute despotism. The founding fathers were in many ways driven by a conspiratorial vision of what Great Britain was up to. The idea not just that they were taking away Americans’ liberty and self-government, but that they were aiming to impose tyranny.”

And I just thought that was such an interesting thing as I was reflecting on how that was coming out on a Jupiter-Pluto opposition, how Jupiter-Pluto opposition was built into the US birth chart, and then how we were seeing some of those other things happening. Like, for example, you know, Trump giving the speech about the 2020 election the same day. There was just a lot of, like, interesting crossovers there.

AC: Yeah, a lot of Jupiter-Pluto hits. It’s also worth noting that in the Declaration chart, we have an extremely tight opposition between Pluto and Mercury. Right? And Mercury-Pluto is something that – is a pairing that we also see with big disclosures as well as in individuals going deep and potentially get lost down research rabbit holes, or going in pursuit of the truth and maybe finding it and also maybe, I don’t know, maybe merely encountering madness. But the Mercury-Pluto in the Declaration chart is very complementary to the Jupiter-Pluto. And with the Jupiter-Pluto opposition there, the sense that – with Jupiter, right – that the fair, the just, the high-minded, the principled is in fact a facade, and so what lies beneath? Which is a pretty classic Pluto question, right, which is Pluto is like, “Yeah, but what’s underneath that? What’s buried there? What underground complexes?” And to the degree that power is opaque, it leaves people wondering that. And the United States being and having been a place of great power for the last couple hundred years has always had some big things happening behind opaque screens. And so all that, yeah, all that makes sense. It’s very much part of the United States’s astro DNA, as it were, that it’s there in the Declaration.

CB: Yeah. Because I mean, Jupiter is the search for truth, and it is what is true. And Pluto, when you combine that with Pluto, Pluto likes to dive deep and get to the bottom of things. And sometimes that search can be or like, also with Mercury-Pluto, as you and I have talked about many times over the years, is like, the investigative reporter or the person who’s like, digging deep to get to the bottom of a story. And sometimes that can be the uncovering of things that were hidden or a disclosure of things that people in power wanted to hide. But in other instances, sometimes the people that dig down at those levels, you hit another level where something is seemingly disclosed, but then it turns out that that itself is just another level of control of like, attempting to let you in on a secret that’s supposed to be like, what’s really happening, but it turns out that the people in power are really just manipulating the truth there in order to get people to believe or to go in a certain direction with things. And that’s one of the tricky things sometimes is you never know what’s a real conspiracy theory versus what’s a made-up like, attempt to manipulate people, basically.

AC: Yeah, or you know, often you see like, symbolically accurate projections into the empty space where knowledge is not, but where you want to know. And so you get like, lizard people, for example. Right? Lizard people, when interpreted as a dream, makes a lot of sense. Interpreted literally, it makes considerably less sense. But yeah, you have – but that’s like, when there’s a big blank space that you want – that a person desires or even needs, feels that they need knowledge of, it’s very difficult to put together facts, especially ones that are intentionally concealed, and those sort of very often like, dream-shaped projections come to fill those spaces. And dream-shaped projections also tend to have a story structure which makes them appealing.

CB: Right.

AC: And a lot of times you get —

CB: Nightmare-shaped projections.

AC: Yeah. But anyway and so a lot of times you get a mixture of those, like, those phantasmagoric nightmare stuff with actual facts, right? And sometimes every now and again, it ends up that the two are one and the same, such as with the Epstein materials that were released. But and then in other cases, such as literal lizard people, we can comfortably confine those to the dreaming rather than the waking. But that’s what happens when you have that void that Pluto brings up where you would like truth. Like, the mind – like nature – abhors a vacuum and tends to fill it with stories and images and ideas. And those mix with facts or maybe facts.

CB: Right. Yeah, definitely. Well, and also just to tie it back into like, the planetary cycles of conjunctions and then subsequent hard aspects like we were talking about with Mars-Uranus, it’s like, Trump’s thing about the 2020 election started on the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in November of 2020. That was a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, and he first made the allegations that the election was stolen. And now we see at the Jupiter-Pluto opposition halfway through that cycle that started in 2020, it’s like, he gives within a day or within a few days of the Jupiter-Pluto opposition going exact, he gives a primetime speech alleging, again, reiterating basically that that idea that the election was stolen. So even on a very simple, basic level, you can again just see seed moment versus later full-fledged —

AC: Yeah.

CB: — development at a subsequent aspect.

AC: Yeah. That’s a nice concrete point.

CB: Yeah. All right, that’s actually all I got for news stories, at least in terms of ones that will make the cut in order to keep this short. I might just mention briefly I did a big episode on the US birth chart this month. I recorded, actually, like, three really major episodes in July, but the electional charts were so crummy, and these episodes felt so important that I wanted to hold off on releasing them until I had a better electional charts in August. So those are available in a rough cut for early access right now to patrons; they have been for weeks now.

But I’m really excited about this, because you – you know, I had a slightly better Mars-Uranus conjunction than you did. I did have a couple of not-good things with it happening on my IC, but there was one positive thing, which is on July 4th on Twitter, I saw this account that was like, that tweeted a picture from a journal that Thomas Jefferson kept, and it turned out that he was writing down the temperature like, three or four times a day as well as the time that he took the temperature. And I had never seen that before, and I’d never seen any astrologer factor that into things before. But it led me to this whole odyssey of like, researching the actual historical documentation surrounding the Declaration of Independence and when it was completed and eventually finding out and coming to the conclusion that there was more historical evidence that indicated that it was probably completed earlier in the day, like in the late morning, of July 4th, 1776, probably with Libra rising than I ever realized before. So I’m super excited about that episode; it was a really interesting one. I’m excited to put it out there and see what people think.

AC: Yeah, it’s really interesting. You make a good case, and it’s interesting to think about a Libra rising for the United States. I’m very used to thinking in terms of the Sag rising, and I think there’s a lot to support that. But you know, you make a strong enough case with the Libra rising that I think it needs to be considered.

CB: Yeah. Well, one of the things I didn’t know that was a new discovery for me even though I guess other people knew it was that apparently like, the Sibley chart was never meant to be a timed chart for Philadelphia, but instead it was like, an ingress chart using a mixture of like, the rising sign from the Cancer ingress that happened prior to the Declaration of Independence set for like, London. So that was like, a weird discovery in and of itself that the basis for the Sibley chart was far weaker, that it had been misinterpreted by a lot of astrologers, than had ever been recognized before. And then on top of that that I found that the Congress – the Continental Congress – wrote journals of everything that happened that day each day that year in 1776, as well as the order in which they did it. And on July 4th, 1776, they opened up the day at like, nine AM – it says when they started – and that they did one order of business at the beginning of the day. But then immediately they got into finalizing the Declaration of Independence so they could send it out to the printer that day. And then after they completed that order of business, they did like, 14 other orders of business the rest of that day, which then really pushes the completion of the Declaration to much earlier in the day, potentially in a range between 11 AM and 1:30 PM, which would all be Libra rising basically. So that was one of the major conclusions that I came to that was really stunning to me, because I had always thought that we didn’t have enough historical evidence from that day to really approximate a rectification. But it turns out that we do.

AC: All right. Well, looking forward to it.

CB: Yeah. You’ll have to let me know once you see it.

All right, my friend. Anything else – news or otherwise – before we take a break?

AC: No. All I have is a litany of complaints about July.

CB: Yeah. And 12th house stuff. All right. Well, let’s —

AC: Actually, I have one anecdote that is complain-y, but I think is interesting astrologically.

So I have my Moon at 16 and stuff of Gemini. And so I was waiting for Mars to complete the conjunction to my Moon at 16 and stuff in Gemini. And nothing in particular happened as Mars hit the degree and approached the minute.

But then at about three in the morning, I was awoken because my darling little son, Lucian, was having a crazy coughing fit. He had the croup. He was fine when he went to bed, but for those of you who’ve had a toddler with the croup, it is like, a terrible death rattle, extremely concerning cough. Some children have a really hard time breathing and they turn blue. He didn’t turn blue! But we did – we didn’t know that the croup was like there where there was an extremely sudden onset where the symptoms went from negligible or nonexistent to seemingly life-threatening. And so that was the exact hit of Mars to my Moon by the minute.

And what’s interesting is – I keep an eye on his chart as well as mine and Kait’s and others – but it showed much more clearly in, like, his illness showed much more clearly in my chart than in anybody else’s chart. Which makes sense – it is my Moon. He is like, the creature that I am most devoted to caretaking and nurturing, which are traditional lunar activities. But I still thought that was striking, that that showed an illness. And it doesn’t rule my 5th house; it doesn’t rule the house of children, although Mars does. And so yeah. And so that happened; I just thought that was surprising. And he was fine; we’re all fine. We got less sleep than normal, which isn’t much, but yeah. That was a little lesson for me.

CB: Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the more interesting and mysterious things is seeing something happen in a person’s life in the charts of the people around them and how that can be leveraged in different ways sometimes for the purpose of prediction. Like, you know, presidential elections – sometimes that comes up as an avenue. But also just that’s one of the more interesting things showing how each of our lives are intertwined and like, interlocking in this mysterious way.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, it was interesting because my Mars’s affliction for me for various reasons throughout the month was upper respiratory, which is the region of the body that Gemini has long considered to rule or show its effects within. And so even when the Mars transit was showing through my son rather than me, it was still upper respiratory.

CB: Okay. Yeah, that’s interesting in terms of the body parts and things like that. Yeah. I was getting really into Hermeticism and stuff and they really are so focused on the microcosm-macrocosm and the internal body and its planetary and zodiacal assignments being a small universe and a mirror of the external world and the larger zodiacal and planetary and other assignments. And it’s interesting sometimes seeing that in a very literal way in people’s charts like you were talking about.

AC: Yeah, it has a lot of implications, one of which is that Mars in Gemini hates your lungs. And it hated the lungs of everybody in my region too. I told you we had a 15,000-acre wildfire that just burned for weeks and weeks.

CB: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, I mean, one of my observations about the Mars-Uranus this year in Gemini on the 250th anniversary of the US is that it was like, there were fires all over the country due to this crazy heatwave, but then also internally there were hundreds or maybe thousands of people getting sick by this virus on produce – like, what was causing explosive diarrhea and like —

AC: Right.

CB: — gross stuff like that. And I was just like, how fitting of an internal omen or symbolism about the state of the country right now that on the anniversary like, there’s all these people getting sick due to a virus that has to do with cuts to government programs that would otherwise have filtered out stuff like that that’s now making the populace sick.

AC: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I did pull the lettuce off a club sandwich during that period.

CB: Yeah, I just avoided it. Because some of the people were sick for like, three weeks and stuff like that. So there was no way I was going down for three weeks just to eat some salad, you know?

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah.

AC: It was always —

CB: All right.

AC: — a bad idea.

CB: Yeah, you’re anti-salad to begin with.

AC: I’m not, but I think it’s fun to be anti-salad.

CB: Okay. Well, team anti-salad. All right, my friend, I did a good job in keeping the news section short.

AC: You really did!

CB: You, my friend, though, are extending it. So I’m gonna cut it off —

AC: I’m done!

CB: — right now. Okay!

AC: Shall we talk about —

CB: Let’s take —

AC: — the croup?

CB: All right. Let’s take a break.

All right, I don’t have a sponsor for this month, so I just wanna plug my patreon and Hellenistic astrology course, because like I said this month I didn’t release any of the episodes to the public because I didn’t have good charts. But I released every episode I recorded, which was like, three of them, to patrons for early access as soon as I recorded them. And these were like, big episodes – not just on the US birth chart, but I also did one on the origins of the so-called Chaldean order that was like, a major historical contribution pointing out that astrologers may have first introduced or at least popularized the system of aligning the planets so that the Sun is at the center in a sequence of planets based on orbital speed. And that was a huge episode that I’m excited to release in August.

And then finally I did an interview with the scholar and academic David Litwa who’s a scholar of Gnosticism and Hermeticism, and we talked about the connection between Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and astrology in a really interesting episode. So people can check that out as well as other bonus content – I did a little short 10-minute video just for patrons this month – by going to my page at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.

And finally, if you want to learn more about my approach to astrology and reading charts, my Hellenistic astrology course is really the place to do that. We did a webinar this month with students of the course where we looked at the ruler of the Ascendant and I interviewed different people about that had the ruler of the Ascendant in different houses and how that tells you something about the overall direction and focus of the life in really significant ways. And I love doing those webinars with people each month with students of my Hellenistic course. So you can learn more about that or sign up at TheAstrologySchool.com.

Austin, what do you got going on?

AC: Well, I am opening enrollment in Year One of my Fundamentals of Astrology program on August 7th. It’s a limited enrollment, and if you’re interested, sign up for my mailing list which you can find at my website – AustinCoppock.com – the enrollment email will go out on the 7th. And in addition to that, Sphere and Sundry is still around, still kicking, still being a seed library of nearly every planet’s best moments over the last eight years. Sphere and Sundry is a project that involves the creation and then vending of talismanic materia, oils, incenses, perfumes, and other such things made in strict accordance with the principles of traditional astrological magic.

CB: Brilliant.

AC: And that’s —

CB: And what’s the —

AC: — SphereAndSundry.com.

CB: Brilliant. Well, I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. So if people wanna find out about any of the stuff we mentioned, they can find the links there.

AC: Thank you.

CB: All right, my friend. Let’s transition into talking about the forecast for August.

So as we said, we got a big month coming up. Let me share some of the graphics again just because that is a good way to visualize quickly some of the things we have happening. And the main things we have this month from my perspective are three things.

So one of them is eclipse season pretty much dominating and being the main thing that’s happening this month with that solar eclipse on the 12th in Leo and then the lunar eclipse in Pisces on the 27th. And the eclipse season starting seven days before the first eclipse, and then ending seven days after the second eclipse, with the most intense range being that two weeks in between those two eclipses between August 12th and August 27th. So that is one major thing we need to talk about today.

The other thing is the Venus retrograde sort of sequence of events that will unfold over a several month period of time, starting on August 6th when Venus moves into Libra, which is the sign it will eventually retrograde back to. And when you look at Venus retrogrades from a sign-based perspective as an extended stay that Venus takes where it sort of sits in these two signs of the zodiac – in this instance, Libra and Scorpio – for like, six months, then you start to realize like, why Venus going into Libra already on August 6th is already setting off the series of things that we’re gonna be dealing with for quite some time.

And then finally the last thing that happens by exact aspect late in the month, but it already starts to ramp up early in the month, is the Mars-Saturn square, which begins by sign as soon as Mars goes into Cancer around August 10th and 11th. But then it will build up slowly during the course of the second half of the month and eventually culminate right on the last couple of – last day of the month. On August 31st and September 1st, Mars hits 13 degrees of Cancer and exactly squares Saturn at 13 degrees of Aries. And weirdly at the same exact time, Jupiter hits 13 degrees of Leo and completes an exact trine with Saturn at 13 Aries. So we have a dueling, like, really tough aspect between Mars and Saturn, a really frustrating aspect. But then at the same time, a really positive aspect happening at the same time between Jupiter and Saturn.

So those are my three main aspects this month, although in between there’ll be other interesting ones, of course, like a Venus-Jupiter sextile is probably our most positive aspect of the month, as well as other things.

AC: Yeah, those are the three big ones.

CB: Okay. I wanna give – because I wanna make sure I get some main keywords in for the main aspects of the month.

AC: Okay, so you wanna do big themes. We can do that.

CB: Yeah, I just wanna make sure we check off some of the major keywords, because if we don’t, even though it’s like, repeating keywords that we’ve said at other times when these aspects happen, then that thing’ll happen and people will be like, “Why didn’t you say that?”

So one of the things I wanna do is I just wanna reiterate some eclipse keywords, because these are gonna be our dominant themes this month. Like I said, with the full eclipse season pretty much from the beginning of August until the end of August, although certainly peaking in close proximity around those days when the eclipses go exact.

So the keywords that we’ve developed and that I’ve developed about eclipses in the past few years is they also signify major beginnings and major endings when it comes to our personal lives as well as world events. We often see the fall of prominent figures at this time, as well as the rise of previously obscure people who suddenly are thrust into the limelight.

We often see the death of notable celebrities happening during these times, which is sometimes like, you know, a notable people in entertainment, for example, is common – like, I don’t know, Matthew Perry under that eclipse a few years ago. But more recently with all the major world events, we’re seeing sometimes more prominent people passing away under eclipses, such as the leader of Iran in the March-February eclipse, or six months before that the Charlie Kirk assassination took place during eclipse season. So oftentimes like, really stunning and major deaths of prominent figures.

We also have this feeling of many significant events and shifts happening all at once during eclipse season is very common. Like, a lot of stuff starts happening and swirling around as if you’re in sort of like a storm or you’ve just sailed into a storm essentially and you’re just hanging on for dear life.

We also see a continuation of events that started or happened during the previous eclipse seasons, especially those six months ago in especially February and March; we will see the next installment of events that took place then coming to fruition now in August. But even potentially further back to 12, 18, and 24 months ago since this is the end of the Pisces eclipse series that started in September of 2024.

And then finally, the last point is just that this is a new beginning and a seed moment especially for Leo, because this is the first in a series of eclipses in the sign of Leo. And so for some people, there may be something that seems small that will begin at this time that you won’t recognize until later how momentous that new beginning was until you look at it in retrospect. And this is even more so for each of us personally in the Leo sector of our chart since this is the start of that new series which will go from this year all the way until August of next year of 2027 will be the final eclipse in Leo.

So those are some of the overview things I wanted to make sure we checked off.

AC: Yeah, and I would add to that that a lot of the significations of eclipses can be extracted from the very simple, very dramatic visual phenomenon. You know, the eclipses are the most dramatic thing visually that happens in the sky on a regular basis. You either have the Moon on the night where it’s supposed to be brightest disappearing or reddening or being obscured significantly, or you have the Sun disappearing or dimming significantly in the middle of the day. And so this contrast between light and darkness and that happening very quickly is a very important thing to keep in mind. And so you have things and people coming out of nowhere, right, from “I’ve never heard of them, can’t see them, never seen them before,” to suddenly they’re everywhere. And then you also have the opposite, where that which was very luminous, bright, dominating the vision, easy to see, somebody who was everywhere just completely disappearing, right? And Chris, as you said, you have like, wrenching change almost of the quality of Uranus where the changes brought about by eclipses often happen so quickly that there is not time to adapt to them while they are happening; they are not slow processes. And I’ve often used the imagery of a rollercoaster where you’re up and you’re down, and you feel the G forces, and what’s nice about the dragon-coaster is that it actually tracks or maps to the movement of the Moon above and below the ecliptic, which is what the nodes are showing us.

And then finally in that the nodes and therefore the eclipses are about the phenomenon of light being eclipsed, they very often bring situations where important things are obscured; you can’t see something that you should normally be able to see. And therefore they very often provoke states of confusion. Because when you can’t see what’s going on in front of you, or if you can’t see something that’s usually easy to perceive, it’s confusing, and you may end up further confusing yourself in that void. And in general, sneaky or invisible factors playing a bigger role than normal. Again, that light and darkness play, which the eclipses do literally and visually, gives rise to a lot of these things.

CB: Nice. Yeah, I like that rollercoaster analogy that you use. I’ve been using the, you know, you’re on a ship sailing into a storm – especially in an electional context. Like, when you have to do something during an eclipse month, like, you can do it and you can pull it off sometimes, but you have to be prepared that there’s gonna be this storm around you that’s gonna attempt to blow you off course. And sometimes you’ll be able to maintain and stay the course and accomplish what you need to accomplish. And sometimes, especially people born on eclipses tend to do really notable or momentous things during eclipse seasons. But there’s gonna be so much swirling around at the same time that you’ll be tempted, potentially, and in some instances successfully blown off course from hitting your intended destination during those times.

AC: Well, and it’s nice because a storm also obscures. It’s much harder to keep your bearings. Like, you can’t see; you don’t have your normal field of vision. And so you might make bad decisions without realizing it.

CB: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes you just gotta lash yourself to the boat and just like, try to get through it.

The last point is people – something that’s really emerged in the research on eclipses that I’ve been doing over the past few years is that people born near eclipses or during an eclipse season within seven days of an eclipse tend to have some of the most important events in their life happen during eclipse seasons, because then eclipses represent recurrence transits for them. And sometimes those can be really challenging things, and other times they can be really important things. Like, some of the most important things of their life. But that’s also one of the reasons why we sometimes see prominent people either rising into prominence or falling down during eclipse seasons, because they then act as a pivot point and a recurrence transit for those natives.

AC: Yeah, absolutely. In a class I taught a lot time ago on eclipse returns and transit, one of the principal things that I had everybody do in addition to just look at their returns and oppositions was how eclipse-y is this chart? Right? How tied into the eclipses is a given chart? Because if you’re —

CB: Yeah, absolutely.

AC: — very eclipse-y, then they always matter. And some charts just aren’t as notable. And I would add that in addition to being born on, right before, right after, or between eclipses, I’m born between eclipses – are you heading into eclipses, Chris? Or are you between?

CB: Yeah, both of us are eclipse people. I think I’m heading in, I believe?

AC: Yeah, if I remember correctly, you’re heading in, and I’m between the two. But also people who have lots of planets on one or both nodes, which are the eclipse points, will also respond more.

CB: Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, so that’s one major thing is eclipse season happening. The other major overview thing I wanna make sure to mention some keywords for is the Venus retrograde that we’re heading into, because this is another thing that especially for people where this is a recurrence transit we’re gonna see overlapping activations of important natal signatures, which for some people will indicate an extremely important turning point or pivot point in a person’s life which can be positive or can be challenging, depending on how it’s situated and how that cycle has gone for you in the past.

But with Venus retrogrades, our keywords are always especially people and situations from the past coming back into the present. Revisiting past glories or in the last Venus retrograde cycle, one of my favorite keywords was “reheating your nachos,” which was from like, Lady Gaga going back to her roots and kind of like, revisiting a style from when she first got popular and being somewhat successful in doing that. Like, people viewed that positively at the time.

Sometimes there can be relationship matters that go awry or issues that come up during this time.

For people with night charts, oftentimes it’s a period of positive development in the relevant houses, especially the two whole sign houses that Venus will be spending about six months in. So paying attention to some good developments in that area of the life.

It’s usually not just a singular event, but oftentimes there’s the unfolding of a sequence of events that takes place over an extended period of time, especially over a six month period that will begin in August if you pay close enough attention, even though some of the most pivotal or intense events may be just the 40-day period when Venus is actually retrograde in October and November.

And the last two things are important issues related to women and to femmes in general often come up during Venus retrogrades.

And finally one of the things I found during the last Venus retrograde that was really exciting was there’s often an overlap where Venus, when it retrogrades between two signs, will connect the topics of those two whole sign houses in your chart. So paying attention to overlaps and ways in which those two areas of your life that are usually separate can suddenly come into contact with each other will be extremely important starting in August.

And the final thing is just this will be a repetition of Venus retrogrades that happen in Scorpio and Libra every eight years. So both people should think back to what happened during those previous eight-year periods and the potential for revisiting some of those topics now in your life. Or if you’re actually born during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio or Libra in the past, then this could be an even more important turning point for you as it acts as a recurrence transit. And those past Venus retrograde in Scorpio years are 2018, 2010, 2002, 1994, 1986, 1978, 1970, 1962, 1954, 1946, and so on and so forth all the way back to the early 20th century.

So those are some of the Venus retrograde things to get to frame people and get people ready to start paying attention to this. Obviously, you know, we don’t wanna like, jump the gun, because the most intense part of this is gonna be October-November. But from what I saw from the last Venus retrograde in Aries and Pisces, as soon as it makes that ingress, some of those circumstances really start to percolate in people’s lives.

AC: Yeah. I think that if you pay attention, you may see certain Venusian areas, certain relationships, certain things connected to the sectors of your life which Venus is responsible for beginning to develop complications. Like, very often you can see things kind of getting denser and more complicated and slowing down in anticipation of having to spend a lot of time on one or two things in order to untangle them, in order to right a relationship, in order to be able to make a decision based on what you really want rather than what you think you want or have just gotten into the habit of thinking that you want. But it’s that slowing down because it’s getting harder to make simple progress and clear decisions in the area that’s usually the indicator that that’s the space where you’re going to have to slow down and do three circles around it with Venus.

CB: Yeah, that’s a good point – that sometimes things come up that give you an option to revise things, an option to not just revisit, but an option to make a change. And sometimes people decide to go with that and to make a major, permanent change, whether it’s in relationships or – which can be romantic or other types of relationships in a person’s life. But other times, they go through this process of like, questioning and internal dark night of the soul and questioning what they truly want for themselves. But then in the end, they emerge from that and decide they actually wanna stick with whatever their current relationship is, or they want to stick with those other relationships, depending on what house Venus is transiting through. But the process itself is part of what the experience is.

AC: Yeah, and that questioning is important. In addition to paying attention to what looks like it’s getting knottier or tangled or harder to make progress in, growing uncertainty or ambivalence about a relationship to a person or your passion for your work or one of the other Venusian things is another good indicator as to what the Venus retrograde is going to be about.

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. So I mean, in the long term, I mean, this Venus retrograde is gonna sit right on the US midterm elections, and that’s primarily what this is gonna be about. And it starts off, as we said in the year ahead forecast, like, really nasty in October, because like, Mars comes up and squares Venus exactly as it’s going retrograde in Scorpio, which is just not a fun combination and a fun way to start the actual Venus moving backwards for 40 days period. And I was trying to do some research about what that meant historically, and I’ll save most of that for a full episode. But you know, in the midterms, I think everyone knows, but typically it’s like, there’s a presidential penalty where there’s a shift in the Congress like, after the president’s first term, and a shift from the opposition often gaining more seats typically during these Venus retrogrades. Although there have been exceptions to that when, for example, there was like, rally around the flag exceptions, which happened in 2002 with Bush after 9/11 or that happened in 1962 with JFK after the Cuban missile crisis.

But there’s also periods in which the shift is sometimes more pronounced. Like, especially after – one of the things I noticed was like, economic and policy wave elections where sharper recessions or depressions can sometimes cause massive seat flips. Like, in 1914, 1922, 1930 with the Great Depression, or even in 2010 with Obama and the Tea Party movement was partially due to the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession that was happening at that time.

There can also be policy backlashes and other things like that, but basically people should look back and research the past century of midterm elections that happened under this eight-year cycle to get a preview of some of the stuff that’s gonna come up during the course of this one.

AC: Yeah, this really is the midterm Venus retrograde. 2018, 2010, 2002, ‘94, et cetera.

CB: Yeah. So but it starts with such a weird thing. We’ll take about more next month when it actually gets started, but with that Venus stationing in Scorpio and then Mars coming up and overcoming it is gonna be —

AC: Oh, and it’s a T-square between Mars and Pluto for weeks. And Mercury does the same thing as Venus, but later while still during the Venus retrograde. It’s got a very nasty beginning.

CB: Yeah. Yeah. So we’ll talk about that more next month.

Okay, thank you for allowing me to get that overview out of the way. Let’s do the chronological breakdown, shall we?

AC: And Mars and Saturn. Can’t forget —

CB: Mars and Saturn.

AC: — Mars and Saturn!

CB: Okay. So Mars and Saturn…

AC: Mars and Saturn, not unlike Venus, take until the end of the month to get really loud. And so it’s a square between Mars and Saturn; it is a hard aspect between the two. This is the first hard aspect since the conjunction in April. And this will see Mars in Cancer squaring Saturn in Aries. Yeah, the exact square between the two isn’t until the very, very end of the month, and there are a number of other aspects that kind of pad it, and prohibit it from being as loud and nasty as it will eventually get, until it is very near perfect. But with Mars and Saturn, we very often use the metaphor of hitting the brake and the gas at the same time. Saturn is the planet of heavy, obstinate “no,” and Mars is the planet of pushing forward with all of one’s might. It’s very much the unstoppable force meets the immovable object. And that conflict, that dynamic, can play out inside, and it feels like being incredibly frustrated where half of you is trying really hard, and the other half of you just won’t move or is dead set against something. Or you can be trying to push very hard while externally the world is standing in your way like, a hundred ton boulder. Or you can be the one trying to stand still while you’re being pushed as hard as possible. And so all of these are frictive, right? And anything caught between these two forces gets squished. And because they’re frictive, they’re also likely to strike sparks. And so it’s frustrating externally. When we look at what happens in the larger world, there are often peaks in violence and in disease as well. Mars and Saturn together by hard aspect as the two malefics have a variety of ways of harming the human. So to have that aspect continuously growing from the 11th when Mars enters Cancer until their perfect square at the very end of the month while we’re doing eclipses is a pretty nasty addition to what is already I think a very challenging month.

CB: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad that you mentioned the Mars-Saturn and outbreaks, because that was one of the things that we noticed was very significant in April was those two different outbreaks – one on the cruise ship, and then the other of ebola – that really exploded at that time and were like, all over the news as long as those two planets were in the same sign. And then seeing something about that sort of coming back up again, either related back to those, or perhaps something new. So I’m glad you mentioned that.

But then the other thing was that Mars is the planet that excites other planets into motion, whereas Saturn is the planet that holds them back and slows and makes things stop in their tracks. And in this – when we saw those two planets come together in March and April, that was like, the Strait of Hormuz coming to a stop and all of a sudden the oil crisis starting at that time that was threatening to literally slow everything down and slow all naval traffic down at that time in the Strait, as well as just like, the gasoline and the oil around the world, which is like, one of the things that makes everything go. But here I think we’re gonna see a return to that, because Saturn is in the superior position where Saturn is in Aries, and it’s overcoming Mars in Cancer. So somehow the principle of Saturn, of slowing things down and things grinding to a halt and things that otherwise want to move forward or break free being restrained on some level, and how as soon as Mars goes into Cancer on – what is it – like, around August 10th and 11th —

AC: Yeah, it’s the —

CB: — that —

AC: — day before the first eclipse.

CB: Like, that starts becoming more prominent at that point. But then it just like, continues to increase all month until eventually you get to the end of the month and it culminates on the first day of September.

The only part about – so I think that will, again, probably be a grinding to a halt of things, and I’m especially paying attention to, since the oil crisis really got going and the fear surrounding it sort of peaked around the Mars-Saturn-Neptune conjunction around March and April, that being one of the primary things that we’ll be paying attention to peaking in August and early September especially. But it’s weird that Jupiter trines Saturn at almost the exact same time, which normally indicates that we’ve got something really negative, but then we also have a mitigation going on that’s offsetting things in a more positive way. And that’s kind of a tricky thing to factor in here – how we can have both something really bad or challenging as well as something really positive and expansive that’s attempting to help at the same time with that energy at the end of the month.

AC: Yeah, it’s tricky. So Jupiter trining Saturn is supportive or helpful for Saturn. Right? Jupiter affirms what other planets are trying to do, especially by a soft aspect like the trine. So Jupiter is helping Saturn, and Saturn is already in the superior position to Mars. So that would suggest that Jupiter helps Saturn keep a foot on Mars. And yet, we also have this additional complication of Mars being the ruler of Saturn. Saturn is in a Mars-ruled sign. Right? And so Saturn is in a position to be responsive to and connected to the martial, which is a further complication. And so it’s also interesting to note that the very beginning of this by sign is day before the solar eclipse, and then it is this aspect, this Mars-Saturn aspect, finishes its last several days of getting super tight and the pressure being very much on just after the lunar eclipse. And the lunar eclipse is configured so as to be very supportive of Mars in Cancer. And so I think that this Mars-Saturn square and its development, it appears to be tied to what each of these eclipses have in store. And it’s worth noting —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — that it will still be active in September. It’ll be just barely beginning to be past peak, but if you look outside the day at night – the day after a Full Moon, you’ve still got a lot of Moon, right? And so we’re still gonna have a lot of Mars-Saturn going into the first week of September.

CB: Yeah. That’s a good point, though, that because eclipse season ends, like, around here around September 4th once the Moon passes the square with the Sun. And by that point, Mars is three degrees separating from Saturn. So it’s like, after the first week of September, we start to get a bit of an exhale from whatever that sharp inhale and clenched breath was all throughout August that peaked at the end of the month and then leading into the first days of September. But then there’s eventually a break and an exhale that starts to happen after the first week of September.

Yeah, I just – I feel like if – it’s like if Mars and Saturn, if this is like, for example, the war re-exploding and becoming escalated to a new level, which is what we expect with the eclipse season on its own, then and then it also relates back to the world oil supply and everything grounding to a halt and that peaking especially later in August and early September, then the trine from Jupiter is also probably people scrambling or countries scrambling to find a resolution and trying to offset the damage and fix things at the same time.

AC: Right. Which in that context, which suggests that some successful strategies for mitigating or offsetting the squeeze exist and are enacted, which doesn’t negate the squeeze. And you know, I think that squeeze – like, that squeezing, crushing, space-depriving quality of the Mars-Saturn, which is always relevant for a Mars-Saturn hard opposition, is going to be probably quite literal in that we see a vice slowly tightening or channels of transportation or communication grinding closed or squeezing closed day by day.

CB: Yeah. Absolutely.

AC: And on an individual level, a lot of times, Mars-Saturn just feels like pressure. Feels like the pressure is on. There’s a lot to do, and there’s not enough time to do it.

CB: Yeah. Pressure, frustration. Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling held back. Feeling slowed and like, everything just taking forever to accomplish.

AC: Yeah. Or if this was all I had to – if I could just do this, I could get it done, but now I have to deal with this other thing in this other area that’s also crisis and that I have to spend a lot of my time doing. Sometimes especially when they’re in two different signs, sometimes you have multiple things squeezing each other, and you’re squeezed between multiple difficulties as each malefic in and of itself can signify a separate difficulty.

CB: Yeah. I saw so many stories when Mercury was stationing direct square Saturn in the middle of July of people just having like, delays and having something scheduled and then suddenly having it like, canceled and pushed a week out or something like that, just with Saturn overcoming and squaring Mercury as it was stationing direct.

AC: Yeah. And this may expand the discussion beyond its proper scope, but it is worth mentioning that this is Mars’s first return to Cancer since the lengthy retrograde there, which —

CB: Oh yeah.

AC: — took place largely in the first quarter of 2025.

CB: Ugh!

AC: And so we will likely —

CB: I forgot about that.

AC: — check back in with some of the distasteful things that happened during that time.

CB: Man, I am not excited about that. That is a good but —

AC: I thought —

CB: — stark reminder —

AC: — you’d love me reminding you of that.

CB: Yeah.

AC: But also on a personal level, right, it’s interesting, because if you live in Crab Town, as I do, with the Crab Town rising, we endured that, and then Jupiter went into Cancer, and there was a year of Jupiter in Cancer. And things likely got easier. Maybe not as easy as you desired or hoped, but easier. Now Jupiter is no longer in Cancer, and Mars is back. Hello, old friend. I miss thy pinches.

CB: Yeah. Well, hopefully, as you were saying, Jupiter in that one year interim was able to clean up some of the mess that Mars had made in the retrograde enough that we’re a little bit more prepared and better able to deal with a more short-term and hopefully less significant transit of Mars, a faster transit of Mars, through Cancer this time.

AC: Yeah. And this is a normal transit of Mars. It’s six-ish weeks, rather than months at a time. But it’s —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — it’s definitely, it’s a stress test for planets in Cancer and Cancer rising charts.

CB: Ah. All right. All right, let’s do the sequential breakdown.

AC: Okay.

CB: Let’s get into just – I think we’re like, 30 minutes into the forecast section. If we could do like, a 20, 30 minute sequential, we will be in a solid possibly two-hour episode.

AC: Unbelievable.

CB: I know. All right, let’s do this. So I’m gonna take it back to August 1st. Orientation. We’re coming off of the Sun-Jupiter cazimi that’s separating at this point in Sun and Jupiter in Leo. Finally getting away from the stupid oppositions with Pluto that were so prominent for the most part with the Sun and Jupiter last month in July. But really the first major thing transit-wise, I believe, that happens, which I already mentioned, is just Venus going into Libra on the 6th of August and that being our first major sort of notable shift, I think, in August, right?

AC: Yeah. Yeah, it is.

CB: Okay.

AC: And —

CB: So… Go ahead.

AC: Well, one – so as we’ve discussed, this is the sign in which Venus will retrograde back into. Venus isn’t near the degrees that it’s gonna be retrograde in, but this is the place. This is the house of your chart; this is the Libran vibe that will be explored in depth and turned upside down and then rightside up again. And it’s worth noting that this ingress into Libra comes about a week after the perfect Mars-Venus square which occurred at the end of August. And so – and also sees Venus moving from Virgo, which was the sign where Venus is in fall or depression and struggles quite meaningfully with a variety of things, into a homecoming. Into Libra, into domicile. And so it’s initially a somewhat positive – no, initially it’s a bit of a positive ingress. But it is also busy and complicated by Venus over the next couple days making a set of aspects to Neptune and Uranus and Pluto nearly simultaneously when Venus moves from four to five degrees.

CB: Yeah. No, I – this first part of August, Venus gets a break where it gets away from Mars temporarily, and I think that’s gonna be very positive for Venus for the most part, aside from the opposition with Neptune. But it’s gonna be applying to the sextile with Jupiter then for the next week in Leo, which when it culminates will be our most positive aspect of the month. And so you get this brief period where, between like, August 6th and from then until like, Mars goes in on the 10th and 11th into Cancer and starts overcoming Venus again, but Venus is just getting a breather from some of the not-as-pleasant divisive energy of Mars that became so prominent later in July.

AC: Yeah. It’s one of the relative lulls.

CB: Yeah. Relative lulls. That looks like Venus-Jupiter sextile completes around August 16th, August 17th, which is tricky, because on the one hand, that’s our most positive aspect of the month. But on the other hand, it’s like, sextiles are exceedingly weak in terms of accomplishing major things. And that’s right in the middle of – we’ve already had our first eclipse, so there’s already so much stuff that’s swirling around at that point that I want to highlight that as being the most positive aspect of the month, but I also don’t wanna oversell its ability to bring about major structurally positive things. Because one of the things I’ve noticed really strongly over the past year is just sextiles coming up, but them being pretty ineffectual sometimes in world events in terms of the ability to fix or restrain things. And that’s always been like, a traditional doctrine in the Hellenistic texts that sextiles are weak. They’re positive, but they’re very weak in accomplishing things. But I’ve really just seen instances of that lately. Like, for example, this month we kind of expected the Mars-Saturn sextile to indicate some restraint after the explosiveness of the Mars-Uranus conjunction, and that kind of happened where the Mars-Uranus conjunction happened, the war in Iran exploded again from the 6th forward. And then eventually like, later in the month after the Mars-Saturn sextile, there were attempts to pull back a little bit, and the US eventually stopped after a 13-day straight bombing campaign, and Qatar was attempting to bring both sides to the table again, but either both sides or Iran at least was definitely like, no, like, we’re not negotiating at this time or at least publicly that’s what seems to have happened. So it just reminded me how sextiles, while they sometimes can attempt to restrain things, they’re not always as successful in doing that as we might like.

AC: Yeah, they don’t drive world events. But you know, if you don’t expect them to change the plot or the main story, in this case with both benefics it’s a nice moment or a nice series of moments in the midst of an otherwise challenging time. Like, they don’t quell the dragon storm, right? Like, we’re still on our boat. But maybe while you’re tied to the mast, somebody brings you a nice refreshing beverage and pets your head. You know —

CB: Right.

AC: — it’s a moment of kindness, chill, and low pressure sort of moments and the kind in which ease proliferates just, you know, sprinkled in amidst larger challenging cycles. But if you have the option to have that or not, it’s a definite yes; it just doesn’t turn the hurricane off. Right? It doesn’t change the dragon plot. It’s still nice, though. I think —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — in some ways, it’s easier to appreciate the opportunity for a little ease and kindness if you don’t expect more than that from it.

CB: Yeah. I like that. Like, it brings a nice, like, pina colada. Like, nice refreshing drink right there in the middle of the month like you said.

AC: And if you like pina coladas.

CB: Yeah, I don’t know! But one of the characters in Obsession, that was what he ordered, and it was like, a joke in the movie. You still have to see that movie; this movie has —

AC: I do!

CB: — taken off everywhere. Everyone is raving about it. I finally saw it; it was really good.

AC: Yeah, I’ll see it. I’ll see it.

CB: All right. So that’s Venus, which it starts that sextile with Jupiter as soon as it ingresses on the 6th.

Along similar lines, the next major ingress that happens is Mercury, which moves into Leo on the 9th, and this is important because then Mercury begins building up to our second possibly most positive aspect of the month, which is a conjunction with Jupiter in Leo that goes exact around August 14th and August 15th.

So that’s also a positive aspect, although it has to get through this one day that is kind of tricky where I noticed that there’s like, three alignments that happen at once. And this all takes place about August 11th when you have Mars goes into Cancer, so that already is just a huge vibe shift when Mars completes its transit in Gemini in the Gemini sector and house of our chart, and it goes into Cancer. And that same exact day, Mercury exactly opposes Pluto from three degrees of Leo to three degrees of Aquarius. And Venus has just completed an opposition with Neptune from about four degrees of Libra to four degrees of Aries at the same time. So that’s a lot – that’s two notable oppositions that are taking place and sort of like, coinciding with this loud ingress of Mars into Cancer. And I feel like that’s gonna be a loud day or two there on the 10th and the 11th.

AC: Yeah. Yeah, the solar eclipse doesn’t come out of nowhere, right? Mercury, which is a bit of a megaphone by nature, is configured to Pluto and Neptune and Uranus; you know, this trinity of still relatively new outer planet placements which are working in perfect concert with each other and mutually reinforcing each other to create the swiftly tilting planet that we are standing on. And so the configuration of Mercury to all three of these, right, is thinking about and talking about kind of all three of these at once or in quick succession and the way that they’re all mutually reinforcing as Venus is also doing the same. Right? And we have like, a pretty close Mercury-Venus sextile at the same time as Mars enters into this – returns to Cancer after two years. And we’re the day before an eclipse. Like, it’s very loaded.

CB: Yeah. Yeah, and the Mercury-Pluto we often see when major investigative reporting takes place or major disclosures. On a personal level, it can oftentimes – an opposition can manifest externally as communicative power struggle with another person where you’re both pulling in different directions, or when one party is using manipulation to attempt to control another person.

The Venus-Neptune opposition is usually a tension between a lack of clarity in relationships and an over-idealized picture of somebody, especially when manifested externally through an opposition so that you don’t have a clear idea or there’s something nebulous or not fully honest or truthful in a relationship dynamic with another person.

And then all of this is just like, setting the stage for the very next day. That solar eclipse in Leo drops right at 20 degrees of Leo on August 12th, and we have the epicenter of, yeah, a major, major shift where Leo’s already been activated a little bit for some of us with like, the South Node moving back there in July, with Jupiter moving back there at the end of June, and the first Aquarius eclipse having taken place six months earlier in the middle of February. But now all of a sudden, the Leo sectors of all of our charts and in terms of all national charts and mundane charts suddenly gets this huge concentration and focus with that eclipse taking place there on the 12th of August.

AC: Yeah. And so this being our first eclipse in Leo, having had the first eclipse in Aquarius in February, now not just the individual signs but the Leo-Aquarius axis with both of the nodes there now is active. And that’s a big – that is a crucial part of the dynamic eclipses bring is that they bridge two opposing signs, two opposing houses in any individual chart, and rearrange things significantly between the two. And so this one, you know, this one is – the phrase significant beginnings is extra important here, because this is our first eclipse in Leo, and it will not be our last. And Chris, did you notice that you can see the shadow over Greenland again?

CB: Oh, oh right. So —

AC: Yeah. Greenland gets eclipsed again.

CB: Nice. Yeah. We saw that in a previous time with an eclipse over Greenland when Vance visited, I believe. And then —

AC: Yeah, it was basically I think the day before the visit. It was like, the day before the plane landed, it was very tightly configured.

CB: All right. That’s not ominous at all!

Then yeah, well, and also just in Leo, we’re gonna see the aggrandizement, I said in the last forecast episode, I think, of a lot of people with Leo placements or prominent Leo placements rising up and becoming much more important in world events in different ways. And that’s partially through the, you know, thrusting into prominence and into the limelight those who were previously less prominent factor that happens during eclipses, but also I’ve already seen in some like, different stories of people I’ve been tracking how there was some event that took place six months ago when the first eclipse in Aquarius happened. But I can already see the gravitational well that’s drawing in important sequence of events that’s about to take place on the other house axis in Leo in everybody’s charts in August and how this will be like, the second shoe dropping where there was already like, one shoe dropped in February, but it wasn’t really clear in many instances what the implication of that was. But now all of a sudden in August, the implication is fully clear when the interaction between those two houses and the dynamic that they have in each of our charts becomes obvious.

AC: Yeah. It’s almost as if you could only see one half of the dragon in February, where you couldn’t tell what the tail was doing. And it’s a long tail, and what it sweeps across will remember that passage. And so this the other half of the dragon revealed, which should give you a better sense of what sequence you’re in for individually in that pair of houses.

CB: Yeah. And I think you and I actually on a forecast a year ago during eclipse season ran through each of the 12 houses and what it means when eclipses are in there. And I think I clipped that and put it on YouTube, so instead of —

AC: Oh, that’s good.

CB: — forcing us to do that over again, I’ll direct people to search for that. I think it’s called like, “Eclipses in the 12 Houses” or something like that. So people can check that out.

So yeah, this is the epicenter of eclipse season, but I should point out the date because I pointed out ingresses, but just to reiterate, eclipse season begins really as soon as the Moon goes into Taurus here on the 4th and 5th of August. And that was something I came to empirically after doing the “Eclipses in History” episodes with Nick Dagan Best. But I actually later learned that, like, on Wikipedia apparently, the astronomers define eclipse season as basically starting a week before an eclipse and ending a week after. So I didn’t know that that idea, that there was already some sort of idea of a month of eclipse season being some sort of astronomical thing for some reason. But people will notice on August 4th and 5th that events in the news really start to pick up. Like, a lot of news starts happening, a lot of major beginnings and ending, and the weightiness of like, world events will start becoming just obviously more significant.

AC: Yeah. I noticed a long time ago just personal vibe-based experience that there was – it felt like there was an event horizon that got passed when we were on our way to an eclipse where it was as if there was an inescapable gravity sucking towards some event of great density that hadn’t occurred yet when I would get in. And again, I’m a very eclipse-y nativity, and so yeah, my personal folklore around it was the event horizon, and that crossing of the bendings or of the Moon crossing the bendings a week before is very much where I feel it. I know in some schools of Vedic astrology, there are slightly different numbers that are given for number of days before and after eclipses, but that idea that, yeah, that I’ll just stick with event horizon. Or you’ve gotten caught in the edge of the maelstrom, and you’re going into the center of the whirlpool. That idea is very commonly attested, both in astrological traditions, and that’s interesting that it’s also in astronomical traditions, and it’s also something that if you tune into you can feel.

CB: Yeah. I always conceptualize it sometimes at this point like those diagrams of a black hole, where it’s like, you have the black hole and the point of singularity or whatever it is. But then around that, the black hole is just warping spacetime so that it looks like a funnel or like a drain that drains out at a certain point, but on the periphery of that, like, spacetime is already being distorted. And —

AC: Well, and that is the event horizon is when you get close enough to that that it’s impossible to escape the black hole.

CB: Right. And like, light can’t escape or what have you. Yeah. So that basically is when the Moon hits Taurus and both hits the sign-based square as well as the degree-based square to the Sun in early August. And then that will peak here on August 12th with that solar eclipse in Leo, and then after that moving forward, we have a few days later the Mercury-Jupiter conjunction goes exact around the 15th. So we see Mercury hitting Jupiter at 10 degrees of Leo, which is a positive aspect for communication and for maybe successfully making, approaching somebody with a proposal or a project or something like that that could be fruitful in terms of the coming together and the confirmation of something good that Mercury wants to accomplish.

AC: Yeah, Dorotheus is very clear that if you want to ask a favor, Mercury-Jupiter should be in your elected chart. And it’s interesting, because this Mercury-Jupiter conjunction is the one that was promised at the end —

CB: Right.

AC: — of Cancer. It looked like —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — it was gonna happen at the end of Cancer, but in fact it happens in the middle of Leo, approximately, I don’t know, 50 days later. And so I’m wondering if there might be some things that looked like they were going to happen at the end of June that actually happen here, but under very different circumstances. And I personally find myself wondering to what degree their proximity to the eclipse in both time and space is going to interfere with what is otherwise a pretty nice-looking conjunction. It’s also supported by that sextile to Venus. And so if it wasn’t the middle of eclipse season, and if they were just a little further from the Sun, it would be an almost unmitigated good, and an unblemished, positive moment. But they’re in the middle of this complicated time period, and they are right next to the solar eclipse, which was a prime complicator only days before.

CB: Right. It’s like, we would be otherwise thinking about, like, peace deals and negotiations and things like that – not just with Mercury-Jupiter, but also with Venus at the same time coming up and completing the sextile just two days later on the 17th of August – and it’s sort of like, reminiscent of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction in June and the almost Mercury-Jupiter conjunction which the two of those together ended up coinciding, for example, with the temporary peace deal – the memorandum of understanding, so-called – between the US and Iran. But then because that was slowing down and stationing retrograde and averted, we didn’t expect that to last, which it obviously didn’t; it didn’t last past the Mars-Uranus conjunction.

But this is just weird, because the fact that it’s taking place so close to that eclipse season and there should be such a maelstrom we would expect of things surrounding that and swirling around that, it seems also just from a practical perspective, like, unlikely for that to be as positive as otherwise it might be if it wasn’t taking place in the middle of all those eclipses.

AC: Yeah, it’s definitely irradiated. Right? It’s a nice thing, but it’s really close to something luminous and somewhat toxic. And so to what degree the health of that conjunction’s effects will be preserved is something I’m gonna find out. Because we can’t wait months for everything, it’s right around there that a lot of kind of prime or a lot of electional charts are gonna end up falling, because you don’t – even though it’s complicated, it’s still at least starts with something good. And so, you know, I think a lot of people will be forced to act in accord with this Mercury-Jupiter-Venus configuration, which again is very nice by itself, but in the midst of such a complicated, perhaps poisonous period of time.

CB: Absolutely.

All right, so speaking of good alignments, I wanted to give our electional astrology chart for this month, which is set to August 16th, 2026, at around 3:55 PM local time with Sagittarius rising. And if you cast a chart for that date and set it for about the same time in your location, you should get a chart that looks about like this with Sag rising, Jupiter ruling the Ascendant is placed in Leo in the 9th whole sign house in a day chart. This is just after the Venus-Jupiter conjunction has gone exact and – or sorry, the Mercury-Jupiter conjunction has gone exact and is still very close. And Venus is over there in Libra at nine degrees, applying very closely to a sextile with Jupiter. We also have the Moon in Libra with Venus, and in our location it’s not still applying to Venus or Jupiter, but it is applying to a sextile with the Sun, which is good enough. Yeah.

So this opens up – I’m really excited about this month and the electional options that are so much better than last month, because as soon as Mars departs from Gemini and moves into Cancer, it just opens up the Sagittarius rising elections again and allows us to get some good mileage out of Jupiter in Leo, especially now that Jupiter has gotten some distance from that opposition with Pluto. So this would great for 9th house activities because it’s so focused on the 9th house that relate to education, travel, the study of different religions or philosophies or just views and beliefs of the world and expanding those, especially in a positive way because it’s Jupiter doing good things and doing expansive things in the 9th house. It also brings in some positive 11th house components having to do with friends and groups and alliances as well due to that nice sextile between Venus in the 11th house of friends sextiling Jupiter in the 9th house of education and travel and beliefs.

So this is the best electional chart, the favored electional chart, that Leisa Schaim and I were able to find this month on our electional astrology podcast. But we also found I think it was like, between eight and 10 other charts this month that people can use if they have to start other things during the course of August. And you can get access to those through our page on Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast, and you can access the tier of that that has access to that podcast to get I think it’s like, an hour-long podcast for this month.

So yeah, that’s the chart I wanted to highlight, though, in terms of the best one this month. What are you thinking, Austin? Are you gonna use a lot of Sag rising charts this month?

AC: Oh, I was so excited to look at the Sag rising options this month.

CB: Yeah. I’m —

AC: Because they were off the table in July.

CB: Yeah, absolutely. That was a rough, rough stretch. And like, I ended up doing – like I said – like, three big episodes last month that I just like, because they were good episodes and really important, I couldn’t bring myself to release them under bad charts. So I’m gonna end up using I think one Libra rising chart at the beginning of the month for the US birth chart episode, and then ironically, like, one of the bigger episodes which is about the Sun and how astrologers introduced the Chaldean order probably in the 2nd century BCE and then set up a paradigm where the Sun was at the center of the order of planets for over a thousand years – I think ironically, I’m gonna end up using a chart like this to release it with all those planets in Leo.

AC: Yeah, or unironically.

CB: Yeah, quite perfectly or fittingly.

All right. So that’s the electional chart. I think that’s good for that. So let’s move onto other alignments chronologically where the next major thing is, let’s see, August 17th. We have the Mars-Neptune square going exact, which is not ideal. That’s taking place between around four degrees of Cancer and Aries. And we’ve seen that in the past have to do with actions that are taken, especially aggressive actions that are misdirected or taken under a false pretense for some reason, sometimes due to things like the fog of war. But generally just making a decisive action that’s improperly placed due to a lack of clear information or due to something like making the lens foggy, so to speak.

AC: Yeah, it presents difficulties around action, either being in a state of indecision, or not having the correct or enough information to move forward with something as well as the consequences of moving forward without clear sight of what is ahead.

CB: Yeah. And I guess in a way that’s like, reactivating the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in general and also harkening back to that triple conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Neptune that happened in March and especially April and probably in some instances will reactivate events that were started back at that conjunction. So it makes me think of obviously the oil things which we’ve mentioned since that was such a focal point at the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. But potentially other things. There was like, those random things that I noticed back then, like the – what was it? It was like, sacrilegious or what was the term for that that came up at the time? It was like, really striking.

AC: Blasphemy, heresy —

CB: Blasphemy.

AC: — heresy.

CB: Yeah, like themes of blasphemy and heresy were coming up that was really fascinating at that time. So that’ll be interesting if we saw similar things in terms of this Mars now hitting Saturn and Neptune and those themes coming up again in different ways for some reason.

AC: Yeah.

CB: Yeah. All right. So that is Mars-Neptune, and that’s gonna be tricky to navigate in terms of, like, you know, be careful not to lash out at somebody at that time, especially on that day, because you could be misplaced.

Then a few days later, we get Venus moving into – it completes the sextile with Jupiter at this time around the 17th, which is a lightly positive aspect that’s happening in that time that’s really good. But then after Venus clears that sextile with Jupiter, it then heads into this opposition with Saturn which eventually culminates around August 21st where Venus hits 14 Libra and opposes Saturn at 14 degrees of Aries. And typically, this is a challenging combination because Saturn has a tendency to really cool off the relational aspect that Venus wants to promote, which can often lead to some distance or coldness or sudden shutting down of relationships or partnership dynamics for some reason.

AC: Yeah. Saturn contracts and doesn’t leave space for ease or a sense of the luxurious. And as you said, is cold, right, which reduces the relationality of a given pairing or interaction. There’s often the harsh imposition of necessity, which it’s like, well, it’d be nice if we could go have lunch together but we both gotta work. Or “I’ve gotta go to the doctor because my infected foot is starting to stink.” Like, something has to happen that preempts or interferes with what might otherwise be a fun potential, and if we’re still in Venus sextile Jupiter mode, we will be disappointed as we move into the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st as Venus abandons the sextile with Jupiter and moves into this opposition with Saturn.

CB: Yeah. It’s like, sequentially, it’s like there’s something that’s lightly promising that’s happening earlier that week when Venus sextiles Jupiter and Mercury conjoins Jupiter and the potential for the promotion of peace or resolutions or positive communication dynamics between people. But then immediately a few days later, Venus runs into problems and has to start setting boundaries and realizes the obstacles and restrictions that are involved that make things much more limited than it might have hoped for just a few days earlier. And while that’s happening, the Mars-Saturn is also starting to build up at that point with Mars already getting to six degrees of Cancer and Saturn being at 14.

AC: Yeah. This is tricky terrain for Venus, and it’s interesting that Venus does all this in preparation for the retrograde.

CB: Right. The gauntlet.

So after that date, we just have some stuff moving into Virgo, where we have the Sun moving into Virgo by the 22nd of August, 22nd and 23rd. Then we have Mercury entering Virgo shortly after that on the 25th. And then the two of them meet up, and there’s a nice Mercury cazimi in Virgo that takes place around this time; I believe it completes like, the day before the eclipse. So the cazimi, I think, is at like, four degrees of Virgo on August 27th, and then the very next day, we get the Moon moving into Pisces and hitting the opposition with the Sun to create the lunar eclipse in Pisces, marking the culmination of our second half of eclipse season.

AC: Yeah. And so this eclipse occurs at four, almost five Pisces, and it’s the – and we have the Moon in Pisces staring – the I guess bloodied Moon in Pisces – staring across the sky at the Sun and a tightly conjoined Mercury in Virgo. And this is our farewell eclipse in Pisces. This is – we’ve had eclipses in Pisces for two years now, and the first of which I believe happened in September of 2024. And so this finally closes things out on the Pisces eclipses. We have one more Virgo eclipse left, but we are almost done with the almost unnaturally extended series of eclipses in Virgo and Pisces. Usually eclipses don’t last two-and-a-half years in a pair of signs, but in this case, they have.

CB: Yeah. And so that first one was September 18th of 2024. I remember all the floods that happened in the US with that eclipse. And then the next one was September 7th of 2025, a year ago. That was the one where things went crazy in the US just a few days later after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and then all of the media clampdown and all the things that happened after that. And now we have this final eclipse in Pisces on August 28th. And each of us can think about that in terms of our birth chart and what house that keeps activating over and over again, and in some ways it’s interesting, because this is almost like, the last of that series of transits that we had for so long going through Pisces, especially when Saturn was in Pisces from – what was it – like, March of 2023 until just earlier this year when Saturn finally departed from Pisces and moved into Aries for good —

AC: Yeah, it was just February this year.

CB: Yeah, of 2026. And in some ways, this is like, the last final major change and pivot to complete the sequence and the series of major changes and developments that’s been happening in the Pisces sector of our chart since 2023 all sort of like, comes to a culmination and a close at this point with this eclipse in late August into early September.

AC: Yeah. One last thing. And it’s, I believe, a total lunar eclipse. And it also happens to be very tightly square Uranus in Gemini. And so, eclipses have enough disruptive power on their own. I actually likened the rapidity of the change that they often bring to Uranus earlier in the podcast, but in this case, it’s literally the eclipse Moon is tightly square Uranus. And of course, the Sun and Mercury are also square Uranus. And so this second eclipse, yeah, is poised to be very disruptive. And it also is worth noting that the Moon is in a very strong position to support Mars in Cancer. The Moon will be moving from that square to Uranus into a nice strong trine with Mars in Cancer, which it rules because in Cancer, Mars is ruled by the Moon. And so Mars should be perfectly poised to express that crimson Moon’s power, and Mars, of course, at this time is very, very close to completing that square with Saturn, which has been sort of creeping and tightening in the background for the last several weeks at this point. And so this eclipse really looks ready to set things off.

CB: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really glad you emphasized that square to Uranus, just because that’s gonna bring such an unexpected, disruptive quality to the nature of this eclipse, and it just really reminds me of that one in early September one year ago where you had something similar, which is just this sudden event. In that instance, it was a really violent event that came out of nowhere, and then all of a sudden just disrupted and put so many things into motion and caused so much craziness in the public consciousness at that time, especially in the US. There’s something about this one that’s similarly disruptive of an event that comes out of nowhere that’s almost like, unpredictable. And then it sets off and sets off a sequence over the next week of that Mars-Saturn and the tensions and everything grinding to a halt as a result of that or subsequent to that in some ways. It’s really gonna be quite a, like, couple week period there.

AC: Yeah. It’s really – yeah, it’s such a tsunami or flood. I wonder, you know, it’s literally an eclipse off the Node Node in the water sign of Pisces ruling malefic Mars in another water sign. And I wonder to what degree we’ll literally just have damage by water or destructive overabundant surge – an overabundant and destructive surge of water around and following this time. You know, I think we’ve both found that underestimating the potentially literal effect of configurations is a mistake that it’s easy to make and important to remember to not make. Like, sometimes it’s just too much water and the water wrecks stuff.

CB: Yeah. That was certainly the case two years ago after the first Pisces eclipse was when there was those heavy rains and all of those floods and all the damage that happened in the east coast of the US during that time very close to that eclipse, whereas a year ago it was more metaphorical in terms of the – because the other thing is this is like —

AC: Yeah, it was a flood of emotion and sentiment, and it was a psychic flood rather than a physical one.

CB: Right, exactly. And this is like, Uranus is 13 days away from stationing in Gemini at the same time. And that was the thing that made that eclipse a year ago so significant is that the eclipse happened, and then Uranus stationed for the very first time in Gemini at that time. And so you could see the way that it was activating the Uranus return of the United States and a heightening of internal political tensions and some of the political machinations and things like that that started happening surrounding it. And this one is similar in that regard, not just because it’s square Uranus in Gemini, also because Uranus will station in Gemini again just like it did a year ago in September of 2025.

AC: Right, over the next fortnight.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Yeah. And that eclipse last year as far as its proximity to Uranus in Gemini, one of the things Uranus in Gemini does historically is it increases the polarization within the United States.

CB: Yeah, both externally in terms of external wars, but also especially internally which we’ve seen like, every time, you know, that happens. And that that seems to have been – that’s obviously like, emerging as the major theme of this Uranus return in Gemini over the next seven years is the heightening internal political not just tensions, but also the transformation of the country in terms of the way that things have always been done up to this point, and then entering into what increasingly obviously seems to be a new era in which things are done much differently than they’ve ever been done before.

AC: A brave new world.

CB: Yeah. I don’t know if “brave” is the way I would put it, but —

AC: It’s the name of a dystopia.

CB: Yeah. A dystopian new world I think would be a good or literal rendering in terms of the way that the checks and balances and the different ways of what was set up as a democracy was supposed to operate. And the stress tests, I guess, is one of the keywords we’ve been using to that system, and if that system can survive those stress tests.

AC: And we get to find out.

CB: Yeah. Well —

AC: Likely the eclipse of August 28th will not help, but we’ve got another seven years of Uranus in Gemini. But yeah, it’s a disruptive eclipse. This is – I was almost fooled into giving a half-positive delineation for an eclipse once last year during the Pisces eclipse because of its configuration with Jupiter. Never again, no matter how much cold medicine I’ve had. This one —

CB: Oh yeah.

AC: — this one looks like a doozy.

CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s gonna set up and tee off the one that we talked about that looks so crazy early the following year. Let me skip to that really quickly, just because in retrospect —

AC: Six months later.

CB: — the connection between this eclipse season in August of 2026 and then the one that happens six months later in February of 2027 in Aquarius and Virgo, especially the Virgo one. You and I keep —

AC: Especially the Virgo.

CB: — zooming in, yeah.

AC: Yeah. So bring that Moon all the way back.

CB: Set it to, ugh, I can’t put it – there, I’ll put it there, because then at least it’s by the Ascendant and angular. But look at this. So it’s a lunar eclipse at two degrees of Virgo, and it’s exactly – not exactly. It’s very closely conjunct a retrograde Mars in Virgo and both of those are squaring Uranus at one degree of Gemini at the same time so that you have an overlapping Mars-Uranus square at the same time. And what’s crazy about that is that it was always the hard aspects especially when Mars would go retrograde in Gemini while Uranus was in Gemini during previous cycles ended up being really important, because that was like, the culmination of the Civil War, basically, towards the end of it. Or in World War II, it ended up being the expansion in like, ‘43 of the ground European war and the Americans fully entering that war theater, especially from the south and Italy. But this time we don’t have a Mars retrograde in Gemini during the Uranus in Gemini period, during that seven years. The closest thing we get is this Mars retrograde that like, exactly squares Uranus right on top of an eclipse. And so that is gonna be one to pay close attention to, and it will be closely and intimately connected with events that occurred six months earlier in August of 2026.

AC: Yeah. It’s a doozy. I would —

CB: Yeah.

AC: That might even be a double doozy.

CB: A double doozy? That’s your —

AC: A doozy rating system.

CB: Yeah.

AC: If the one at the end of August is a doozy, this one – yeah, this one coming up in February in about six months is, yeah, is a double doozy.

CB: Yeah. All right. So —

AC: Only one configuration every two years gets the Double Doozy rating, so. It’s pretty important.

CB: All right. I’ll put together a ranking – an Austin ranking system.

Okay, well, that brings us to the end of the month where our final major configuration takes place, which is besides everything else one of our more important configurations, which is Mars on August 31st and September 1st hitting 13 degrees of Cancer and squaring Saturn, so that weird like, grinding to a halt of the Saturn principle overcoming and dominating Mars in some way and restraining it and the frustration that usually arising in those combinations comes to a head. But then weirdly, at the exact same almost simultaneous time, Jupiter hitting 13 degrees of Leo and that attempting to balance out and soften something that Saturn is doing. And that’s hard to reconcile, because on the one hand, it seems more like Saturn is forcing Mars to go slower, but then Jupiter is offsetting Saturn and trying to lighten its control and its restrictions on things at the same time.

AC: Or, I mean, if we see Jupiter as aiding Saturn. Like, helping Saturn keep things under control, because keeping this Mars under control, especially once it’s full of lunar eclipse juice, is going to be no easy thing. You know, we have – Mars is in the inferior position, but doing everything possible to squirm out of whatever restraint – whatever hold Saturn has put Mars in. And so I think Saturn probably will very much appreciate the support from Jupiter and the offset of the damage or cost of trying to suppress the martial.

CB: Yeah. I mean, I guess one way that we should look at it is just I can see Saturn has retrograded back within 10 degrees of Neptune now, so the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is getting fully re-engaged. And so that the Mars aspect to Saturn and the Jupiter aspect is relating back to that somehow. And you know, one of the things about that Saturn-Neptune that was relevant last month that we talked about briefly but just I think got overlooked in some of the discourse about the so-called Barbault basket and that outer planet configuration is that his discussion of that was very much about – was framed in the context of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And anything he said was kind of like, stuff he said around that, and around the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. And while there was a discussion about like, it opening up a new chapter in terms of the future, part of the context of that discussion also with Saturn conjunct Neptune was the collapse of the old world order, which is so evident if you go back and study previous Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. And that collapse is still very much part of what is emerging from that Saturn-Neptune conjunction at this time, and a lot of old structures in the world that we used to previously rely on falling apart when put under huge amounts of pressure. And while some, you know, interesting and hopefully good things will eventually emerge from the collapse of some of those structures, the immediate aftermath of the collapse of some of that is not pretty and is not experienced very positively. And this square from Mars, even though it’s being offset by the trine from Jupiter, represents another one of those severe shaking moments where some of those structures will continue their process of collapse.

AC: Yeah, and probably would if not for the assist from Jupiter. Jupiter’s —

CB: Right.

AC: — probably just keeping some things in business just a little bit longer, some of the Saturn structures that are past their expiration date.

CB: Right. Yeah. So…

AC: Yeah. So hobble on. Let’s all hobble on another couple months!

CB: Yeah, hobble on. I mean, I did find it interesting – I mean, I had, you know, for me, like I said having some of those outer planet aspects all aspecting my Midheaven and my IC, like, some really interesting things did happen for me, at least in terms of my personal life that I thought was interesting that a lot of that energy got channeled, and having that big US birth chart episode and then having that big planetary order episode of making a major historical discovery and recording that were actually really notable. And it made me realize that there were some individuals, if they had personal placements around five degrees of certain signs – four or five degrees where all of those outer planets were channeling something – where there were really important events happening. But otherwise, yeah, I think a lot of the – it’s weird how a lot of the astrological discussions this days are getting overblown by either clickbait-y or overly idealistic positive spins on things that don’t take into account some of the more challenging ongoing things, like the collapsing process of Saturn-Neptune, for example.

AC: Yeah. One of the things that I saw – or two things that I saw – that are directly related to trends that we’ve been discussing around the so-called Barbault basket is one, I discovered a bunch of AI clickbait videos about the Barbault basket, which is interesting, because that basket is literally connecting all of these planets that have tracked perfectly with the development and profusion of AI and AI slop. And so an AI slop video about the trends that have brought AI slop into everybody’s life was kind of a double down or a redoubling that I thought was interesting.

And then I was looking at the comments on some of the videos about the Barbault basket as it was obviously not bearing the – it did not have the delightful picnic that some interpreted it as promising. And what I saw – and this is classic Neptune-Saturn – is I saw that a lot of people seemed to be using the Barbault basket as the latest convenient thing to project utopian or spiritual fantasies of ascension. Where, you know, it was like, “Oh, well, you’re not gonna see it because everybody’s just gonna be waking up at the same time.” Right? You can’t —

CB: Right.

AC: — see the awareness. It’s the same – it’s exactly the same line or paragraph that you’ve gotten around a number of other astrological configurations that have attracted that utopian spiritual thinking where nothing happens or bad things happen, and it’s like, “Well, that’s because it was invisible! Consciousness is invisible; you can’t weigh it, so you can’t see that everybody’s awake now.” And —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — with Neptune being a huge part of that configuration, it’s interesting that it’s literally drawing those Neptunian projections.

But to be fair, I do – I’ve been – my chart has some stuff that’s pretty close to those basket angles as does Kait, my wife. And I think that there may be some good things that were somewhat delayed or couldn’t be seen while Mars was interfering with all of it. Because Mars, you know, problems almost always take up – the negative takes up more space mentally than the positive. Right? Like, if I just, you know, if – I don’t know – let’s say my career is going really well; I’m invited to do a thing. And then somebody hits my toe with a hammer. I’m just thinking about my toe, right? I’m not thinking about the positive developments in my career, or you know, whatever. The bad very easily occludes the good, if only temporarily. And so I’m looking forward to Mars getting a little further out and seeing what the variety of charts that look like they should have prospered at least in some way, you know, what those lives look like.

CB: Yeah.

AC: Does that make sense?

CB: For sure. Yeah. I mean, it was reminding me what you were saying in the first part of that was just reminding me of like, we kind of went through this in 2012 where there were people initially it was like, largely outside of the astrological community that started hyping up something that had a quasi-astrological basis. But then it sort of got jumped on and like, overhyped by different people for different agendas. Sometimes like, new age adjacent stuff that was like, wanting to ascribe a lot of significance to it. And then sort of sometimes astrologers coming along and attaching themselves to that, and then hyping it and saying like, “Oh, we should make this a big astrology thing,” or there was people at the time that were saying we should make it the year of astrology of 2012. And I just remember being like, “No, we shouldn’t. This is not gonna be a really significant thing, and this is obviously being overhyped on a tenuous astrological basis.” And I sort of felt like I was having deja vu a little bit this month with some of the way that that went.

AC: Yeah, that was exactly my encounter. I was like, “Oh, I remember exactly people’s – this line of thinking.” And you know what’s interesting is I actually had a conversation sort of accidentally with John Major Jenkins who wrote Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 in 2011, because we had a friend in common and we were introduced. And he was —

CB: Who like, started the 2012 thing functionally.

AC: Yeah! And it definitely went in a direction that was not in accordance with his research or thinking. But I remember him telling me about it, and he was like, “Well, you know, the period of time that follows that, according to my best understanding of the Mayan calendrical structure is” – he described it as “the age of Seven-Macaw,” which was basically a demon parrot which is just filling the air with fucking noise. And I’ve thought back to that; I was like, “It has definitely been an era of demon parrots endlessly repeating and filling the air with noise.” But anyway.

CB: Yeah. I mean, some of that had a quasi-Mayan basis with the Venus retrograde cycles and the cazimis and the ending of a cycle in 2012. But then there was an attempt to connect it with like, procession, which was like —

AC: Which is a different thing.

CB: Which is completely, like, unrelated to Mayan astrology and is just tying it back in with traditional century-old like, theosophical attempts to predict the New Age and like, a golden age of spirituality and all this other stuff. And that attempt to blend and merge those two was where – wasn’t entirely when it went awry, but it was just obvious that it was tenuously based on something that was, yeah, more genuinely coming from Mayan astrology and those Venus cycles.

AC: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and just yeah, I would also – it just seems like a lot of that thinking which has been projected onto a number of astrological configurations is a like, transposition of rapture thinking. That like —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — “God’s gonna come save us. Like, the good people will get what they deserve, and the bad will get what they deserve, and everybody’s gonna be awake,” but like, reframed in a post-theosophical new age way where the —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — spiritual will save us from our circumstance.

CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And like, apocalyptic thinking and that humans are always constantly either idealizing the future and a future golden age, or they’re idealizing a past golden age that we have to go back to. And it’s always this extreme tension of different groups or people having different propensities to be pulled in one direction or the other. But sometimes when that thinking starts getting projected on astrology, you get weird stuff that isn’t as based on the astrology and the study of repetitions or cycles, which ideally is the most empirical part of astrology, but then instead you’re getting more of a religious or ideological or idealistic sort of projection onto what we would like the astrology to be saying. And it really —

AC: Yeah.

CB: — reminded me of like, you know what – remember in like, the 1400s there was like, that Pisces pileup, and apparently a bunch of astrologers starting predicting that there would be floods, but then it didn’t really flood or anything? Like, some of that stuff with the Barbault stuff reminded me of that, because it just reminds me like, sometimes when somebody presents – like, sees something and then starts speculating about what it means, and then all of a sudden, lots of people start discussing it and even people that are skeptical about it, they discuss it, which then ends up contributing to the promotion of it on some level, even if they’re expressing restraint over it, so that it just becomes this whole cycle, this like, reinforcing cycle. It sort of reminded me of that and made me understand better for the first time what that’s been like in the past when things like that have happened.

AC: Yeah. A hundred percent. It also just makes me think of how astrology inevitably – like, once astrology gets some foothold in popular discussion, it will inevitably be embarrassed by something like this. Which isn’t necessarily the fault of astrology, but it’s, you know, like, the astrology picking dates that are historically significant opens it up to being latched onto by a variety of bad or just confused actors. And you know, we were both waiting for this Neptune-Saturn period to see what sort of embarrassments would occur with astrology, and this seems very much in line.

CB: Yeah. Well, and the signature I had found a few months ago of like, waves of anti-astrology or skepticism or stuff coming up at the time, but that probably working in tandem with it reaching a period of heightened popularity so that there’s a greater amount of different mid- to like, low-level astrology that’s sometimes being overhyped at the same time as well, which then causes a reason for greater pushback when there’s stuff that gets overhyped for different reasons.

AC: Yeah.

CB: I’ve also been —

AC: It’s really —

CB: — noticing like —

AC: — it’s really fun to be doing astrology about the rise and fall and embarrassment and rebirth of astrology. Because a good astrology should be able to see itself in the stream.

CB: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and to go along with that, one of the things I’ve been seeing lately I think is coinciding with the Saturn-Neptune is after some of the alignments, some people are being quicker – like, far too quick – to jump on and say nothing big happened or something like that. Like, I saw this after the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, but then like, a day later, people are like, “Well, nothing happened,” but then a few days after that, the memorandum was signed, and the Iran war suddenly came to, like, a temporary halt. Or the Mars-Uranus conjunction happens, and people are like, “Nothing happened,” and then a couple days later like, the Iran war kicks off —

AC: Back on.

CB: — again, and suddenly people are dying and the Iran is being bombed for like, 13 days straight and vice versa. It’s going back and forth. I’m noticing a tendency for while there’s a proliferation of astrology, there’s also greater – people are being a little bit more quicker on the trigger to criticize or jump on it than instead of like, waiting to actually see what happens first before rendering the critique or the judgment.

AC: Yeah. Yeah. Right. It took all of two days beyond the exact Mars-Uranus conjunction for us to – “us” – for America to reignite hostilities. And it’s like, you don’t think that those decisions were maybe made a day or two earlier? Like, you don’t always have the most visible from a global distance action at the exact moment that the things are conjoined; it might take a day or two, which is nothing.

But yeah, I think that rushing to judgment with a minimum of reasonably expected patience is also part of the time.

CB: Yeah. Or not paying attention to the significance of the smaller seed moments that are happening that in retrospect we’ll look back and realize this was a major starting point and turning point that led to something bigger later on, where for example it was just me and you – it was like, when I started noticing these two eclipse seasons where all of a sudden the news started reporting that Iran launched missiles at Israel directly for the first time, and that this hadn’t happened before in history as a direct altercation rather than an indirect one. And I noticed like, two of those, I realized that these were important seed moments that were building to something more significant. And that allowed us – or that was part of what allowed us – to make the prediction about the war that came true before it happened. But now we’re having other seed moments, and we just saw a bunch of them that we noted in this episode in July, which in retrospect will look much more significant and make a lot more sense. But for those that are too quick to wait for and not pay attention to those things, they just assume nothing’s happened at all, and that’s like, a shame I feel like.

AC: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is what it is. We’ll deal with this. I mean, it’s part of, I don’t know, part of studying astrology and having that as part of your life is sort of a tacit commitment to try to figure out how to do whatever you’re doing under any and all circumstances. Right? Like, the planets and the winds are in your favor one year or month, and they’re blowing right in your face the next, and then they die down and there’s a lull. Like, yeah. Astrology under all astrological circumstances.

CB: Yeah. Or just recognizing sometimes you have a transit and you only see a little thing happen in your life, but nothing big happens. But then you realize like, oh, that little thing that I thought was inconsequential that I met this person on this day later turns out to be more significant. But at the time, you don’t have any practical reason for thinking that, for example, you just met somebody that you’re gonna end up marrying, like, later on. But the astrology for some reason is telling you that something important just happened. And becoming a more advanced astrologer is sometimes recognizing when the astrology’s telling you something significant just happened, even if it doesn’t seem like it did at the time and that later you’ll understand better what that was. That’s, you know, one of the things I think we’ve learned a lot here in the forecasts over the past 10 years.

AC: Yeah. And in our own private practices. But yeah, it’s —

CB: Right.

AC: — getting accustomed to that, and then also being able to live with that without … paranoid.

CB: Yeah. And without overly reading into things or yeah, doing the opposite, which is like, seeing all sorts of minor things everywhere or something like that.

AC: Oh, you just cut out for a second. I think Zoom is trying to tell us to wrap it up.

CB: Yeah, sorry. It’s cutting out. I was just agreeing that going the opposite direction too much of seeing – or reading too much into everything everywhere can be equally detrimental is what you were saying?

AC: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You gotta learn to carry the often confusing, subtle, spiraling configuration of planets as they attest to the direction and nature of time in your brain, while also being normal-ish.

CB: Yeah. All right, my friend. I think we did it; I think that’s it for this forecast. I don’t think we kept it to under two hours, but we tried our best and hopefully we did pretty close. You seem to have held up pretty well, so thank you for that. How are you feeling internally?

AC: I’m okay. I’m melting?

CB: Yeah.

AC: My – I think I’m at the edge of the efficacy of my cold medicine. But yeah, the coughing wasn’t too bad, which is good. I did my horking on the breaks.

CB: Excellent. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for joining me for this forecast episode. I guess we will be back again next month. That’s actually gonna be hilarious that we have to record basically right around the time that second eclipse is dropping, so that’ll be a fun electional tricky thing to schedule.

AC: Yeah! That’ll be awesome. I love —

CB: Yeah.

AC: — that eclipse is on the degree of my Mars. So hopefully I am not destroyed by water? And hopefully I’m not destroying anyone by water.

CB: Yeah. All right, well, I will pay attention to how you’re doing; we’ll check in again next month.

Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks to all the patrons that joined us in the live chat. And we’ll see you again next time!

AC: Take care of yourselves!

[END CREDITS]

CB: If you’re a fan of the podcast and you wanna get access to bonus content, then become a patron through my page on Patreon where you can get early access to new episodes, attend live recordings and webinars, access the monthly electional astrology podcast, The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. Find out more at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.

Special thanks to the patrons on our Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, Berlynn West, and Nicki Crawford.

If you’re looking for good dates to do things this year, then be sure to check out our 2026 Electional Astrology Report, which is a guide to the most fortunate dates in 2026. You can get it at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2026Report.

If you’re really looking to take your studies of astrology to the next level, then consider signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus live webinars and Q&A sessions each month. And at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.

If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, then check out the new consultations page on the podcast website where I have a list of astrologers I recommend for birth chart readings and other types of consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.

The astrology software we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, and you can get a 15% discount on it by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.

For Mac users, we recommend the program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount at their website, which is AstroGold.io.

And shoutout to our sponsors for this episode, including the Northwest Astrology Conference, which is happening in Seattle and being livestreamed online May 21st through the 25th, 2026. Find out more information at NORWAC.net. As well as the United Astrology Conference, which is happening in Chicago this year September 3rd through the 9th, 2026. Find out more information about that at UACAstrology.com.