The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 556, titled:
Overlapping Planetary Periods in Astrology
With Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best
Episode originally released on November 3, 2026
Original episode URL:
https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/11/03/overlapping-planetary-periods-in-astrology/
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released November 5th, 2026
Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be talking about overlapping planetary cycles where a repeating cycle of one planet lines up with a repeating cycle of another planet.
Hey Nick. Thanks for joining me.
NICK DAGAN BEST: Thanks for having me back, Chris.
CB: Yeah. So you are the long-standing master of this technique and of the idea of both short-term and long-term planetary periods and cycles. I myself am a relative newcomer, just like, really trying to get into this over the past decade, obviously, but especially over the past few years getting deep into the Venus retrograde ones, which have always been your speciality. But I wanted to talk to you today because I’ve been super focused on the eight-year repetitions of Venus, but I keep seeing some eight-year repetitions of Venus being more important than others, and I’m realizing in some instances that’s because they’re overlapping with other planetary cycles like Mars or Mercury or other planets like that, right?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. The eight-year cycle of Venus over the course of a human lifetime will have interactions with the cycle of Mars at the ages of 32 and 64, or with Mercury at the age of 40, Jupiter at 24 naturally. And then Saturn is quite old. I forget the age, but I want to say it’s like, 96 or something.
CB: Let’s start with our baseline one and the diagram I’ve been showing lately, which is just the current Venus retrograde in Scorpio cycle and the fact that Venus goes retrograde every eight years pretty consistently over the past century from – right now it’s like, the last three to four months by sign in 2026, and then 2018, 2010, 2002, 1994, and so on and so forth. And those have been just stunningly amazing. So I just did one news episode just collecting a bunch of the recurrences of events in people’s lives or historical events that are being repeated, and it’s just really stunning. There was a funny one I found – did you see this – where Amelia Earhart was declared dead back in the 1930s just after a Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and then they just sent out a search party and she was in the news where they thought they found the plane or something basically, and it was back in the news essentially on a Venus retrograde in Scorpio repetition.
NDB: Yeah. She disappeared in 1937 shortly after the retrograde in Aries, I guess, in the spring – the Taurus to Aries in those days.
CB: Yeah. And then they declared her – her husband pushed to have her declared dead like a year-and-a-half later so he could continue her business affairs or something like that. But yeah, so we know, though, through this cycle that events echo or repeat or you get very similar events happening when the Venus retrograde cycles recur. But then that kind of happens with all planetary periods in different ways, and that’s something you and I have explored; it’s something Patrick and I did a whole episode on the Babylonian goal year periods where evidently they were focused on much more long-term cycles. But one of the things you and I did a lot of work on last year and that you clued me in on is that some of the Venus cycles will coincide with other planetary ones, and that becomes a really powerful way of narrowing down both in mundane astrology and also personal astrology really important years and narrowing down intersecting threads that will repeat in a person’s life from different eras. And one of the more powerful ones that you and I talked about a lot last year was the 32-year period where Venus will go retrograde in the same sign and Mars will go retrograde in the same sign about every 32 years, right?
NDB: Yeah. Mars will be close. Sometimes it’ll be the adjacent sign because of the warped nature of Mars’s orbit, but it comes down to the same thing. The cycle of Mars isn’t as symmetrical and tidy as Venus, so the returns don’t always happen at the same zodiacal degree like the way they do for Venus, because Venus’s orbit is almost perfectly circular. It’s not an ellipse. Whereas Mars’s orbit is very elliptical, which is why, for instance, you get retrogrades in Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces only happen every 47 years, whereas they’ll happen in Cancer, Leo, and Virgo every 15 to 17 years. So it’s just the nature of that. In order to get a Mars return that’s similar to our idea of the eight-year Venus return, you have to go the full 79-year goal year, at which point it’s about four degrees away from the natal position. But if you’re just talking in a human lifetime, it’s harder to get the Mars return in a tidy, zodiacal placement like we’re talking about. You get a close one at 47, and then 79 is really on.
CB: Right. Yeah. The 47 and the 79 were the two Babylonian goal year periods, and those are pretty close. And you said – I know you talked about before, but the two smallest increments of Mars is it has, like, the 15 is the standard ancient minor period of Mars where there is a broad recurrence every 15 years. But you also said there’s a 17-year one as well, right?
NDB: Yeah. Basically, I mean, for the tidiest Mars returns, you do alternating sums of 15 and 17. So the first return being at 15, the next one, 17 years later at 32, the next one 15 years later at 47, the next one 17 years later at 64, the next one 15 years later at 79. But having said that, both 15 and 17 – Patrick actually just gave a really good talk on this at UAC. When you look at it more broadly, really, both 15 and 17 are Mars returns because you get the sequence of Mars returns that’ll happen in the same sign three times in a row at a biannual interval. So it winds up playing into that anyway. But for the really tight returns, yeah, the first one is 15, the next one is 32, then 47, then 64, then 79.
CB: And with Mars, so like, a way to visualize that now is that two years ago – or I guess it was like, last year – no, like two years ago we had a Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo. And now about two years later, we’re about to have the next Mars retrograde in Virgo and Leo. So it’s like, it touches one sign that’s the same in two adjacent ones, and that’s an example of the 15 and 17 years, right? Because if you go back 15 and 17 years, there would have been a similar repetition of first a Mars retrograde in Cancer and Leo one year, and then exactly two years later, a retrograde in the sign of Leo and Virgo two years later.
NDB: Yeah. Because we’re on this side of the zodiac. If we were at the other side of the zodiac, you know, you could have a Mars retrograde in Aquarius and then two years later it’s in Aries. And then two years later it’s in Gemini, which was the case going from 2018 to 2020 to 2022. So then it isn’t as even as the ones, like I said, Cancer, Leo and Virgo. The reason you’ll get the overlap between 15 and 17 on this end of the zodiac is because Mars retrogrades and conjunctions to the Sun happen more frequently in these signs.
CB: Okay. Let me put up Solar Fire and let’s just like, maybe we should animate charts to visualize this to show people, and maybe that’ll ground it a little bit more. What do you think? Good?
NDB: Sure. Yeah. You know, it helps to have a visual aid.
CB: Yeah. While we’re talking, I – go on.
NDB: I’m trying to be as simple and concise. Mars isn’t necessarily complicated as such. Only complicated when you think of it relative to Venus because Venus cycles are so even and tidy and zodiacally —
CB: Right.
NDB: — predictable. And you’re just not getting that with Mars over the course of a human lifetime. To get that kind of tidiness, you have to go 47 years minimum, but really 79.
CB: Okay. So here’s Venus, and let’s go – I put it at like, October 11th, 2026 – so I’ll start with Venus just to show its repetition. So Venus is retrograde here in Scorpio; it’s recently stationed retrograde on October 3rd. I’m gonna change the animate chart feature to an incremented eight years, which Patrick showed me you could do. It’s bizarre that I didn’t know you could do that, but that blew my mind like, a year or two ago. And then I’m gonna —
NDB: Really?
CB: I really didn’t! Well, I always just set it to, like, day or hour, and then moved it back and forward. I was never, like, doing much with long enough increments of time to need to jump forward like, a hundred years or what have you, you know, in terms of repetitions.
NDB: Right. I mean, if you really wanted to be precise with the Venus cycle, it’s 2,920 days, which is two days less than eight years, but you know.
CB: Okay. Well, let’s keep it simple with the eight-year jump.
NDB: Fair enough.
CB: I like speaking in simplified, round numbers. Okay, so October 2026, and we jump back forward eight years to October 11th, 2018, and we see that Venus is again retrograde in Scorpio and has recently stationed retrograde, and it’s the same part of the year which is what’s really important because it’s mapping not just Venus’s cycles, but its relationship with the Sun and the Sun is part of what dictates the part of the year and the months. So the fact that this retrograde always happens in the last few months of these eight-year periods.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. And then same thing 2010 – Venus was retrograde in Scorpio. 2002 – Venus is again retrograde in Scorpio. And so on and so forth. And it just drifts by, like, two degrees per – or two days per – eight-year period.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: So one of the ones I wanted to mention – actually, where to start? Okay, so now should we try to do Mars? I’m trying to think if I should segue. Because one of the things I kept seeing the 40 come up so important with Venus, and I wanted to talk —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — to you about that, but I know that takes us into a different planet, which is Mercury, right?
NDB: Yeah. Yeah, Mercury is 40 and Mars is 32. So if you want to do chronological, I would go with Jupiter at 24 and then Mars and then Mercury. Or if you want to go to what’s most dynamic, I’d guess go to Mars. You know, whatever you want.
CB: Okay, yeah. Maybe you’re right. Let’s start with the Jupiter, because that is simple because Jupiter everybody knows is just, like, you have a 12-year cycle of Jupiter and that’s how long it takes it to go around the zodiac. And so that repeats every 12 years, like, really regularly. And one of the early repetitions is at 24 years old. And since 24 is a division of eight, you have a recurrence there where Venus and Jupiter will line up in the same signs around that time.
NDB: Yeah. Except – I mean, that’s true in the first half of life. But as you know, the goal year of Jupiter is 71. You did that episode with Patrick. And you might wonder, 71 – how does it wind up there when the Jupiter cycle is 12 years? Well, actually the Jupiter cycle isn’t a perfect 12 years. I forget if it’s 11.8 or 11.7, but it’s shy of a perfect 12 years. So what happens – this is the miracle of really – this is why Jupiter actually is a really good place to start, actually, with this. Because so your first Jupiter return is at the age of 12, and then the next one is at the age of 24 where it aligns with Venus at 24 for the reasons you explained. And then the third one will be at 36. But by the time you get to 48, if you look at the solar returns between the ages of 47 and 48, you’ll see that Jupiter is actually closer to the natal Jupiter at the 47th birthday than it’s gonna be at 48. That’s where the shift happens. That’s where you have the first solar return where the natal Jupiter and the return Jupiter are closer; they’ll still be a good 10 to 15 degrees apart, and sometimes in different signs, but cyclically speaking, that Jupiter will be closer at 47 than it’s gonna be at 48, which is really amazing because 47 is already a Mars return. And so whereas Jupiter aligns with Venus earlier in life at 24, later in life at 47, Mars and Jupiter – their cycles wind up aligning. Like, for instance, if you look right now, we have the Mars-Jupiter conjunction coming up. Go ahead and look at the chart of someone who’s turning 47 these days; they also have Mars and Jupiter close together, both getting ready to go retrograde within a couple of months’ time, just like they both are now.
CB: Right. So here’s the Mars and Jupiter in Leo right now forming that conjunction, and then I’ll jump back from October 2026 47 years and yeah, you see Jupiter’s in early Virgo and Mars is in Leo coming up on that conjunction.
NDB: Yeah, and they would both go retrograde. So that’s the beautiful thing about Jupiter is – so at 24, it aligns with Venus. At 47, it aligns with Mars. 12 years after 47, you get to 59. The second Saturn return is also a Jupiter return and a Mercury retrograde. 59 is this really golden one where you get three planetary returns in one birthday.
CB: Okay. I think we gotta build to all of that, because we’re starting out simple and then building to more advanced before we get to all of that. So can we take it back to 24?
NDB: Sure. Yeah, just to go back to the Venus. So to start off with, yeah, early in life at 24 you get that return between the two.
CB: So 24 – well, I guess we’ll get there, but Steven Spielberg is a really interesting example. Like, I was looking at a lot of the people around the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in ‘46 because Jupiter was there that year, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Here’s the Venus retrograde that was later that year, and it ended up stationing conjunct Jupiter in late 1946 by December of 1946. And what I thought was weird about this – I mean, it ties in with the other one, but basically if we take a person’s chart who was born at this time with Venus conjunct Jupiter in 1946, if we jump forward 24 years, we have a recurrence where we see Venus is in Scorpio and Jupiter is in Scorpio at the same time. So there’s a recurrence of the two benefic planets at 24 years old.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Okay. So and that’s ‘70 and then that’s the retrograde in ‘70. So it’s like, can we say basic things about that? Like, can we say in some instances, like if a person has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction, that we would know that 24 years old may be a particularly benefic or positive year that’s tinged with some positive things because it’s activating that relatively positive alignment in their chart, assuming it’s not terribly afflicted or placed poorly in the chart or what have you?
NDB: Yeah. It’s getting a big kind of Venus-Jupiter break.
CB: Right. And an activation.
NDB: Kind of – yeah, and there’ll be something abundant about it. Like, it’ll be like a feast to famine kind of thing.
CB: Okay. All right, so that’s 24. And —
NDB: Or famine to feast. Sorry.
CB: So that’s one of our earliest double planetary cycles, right?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Okay. So the next one that shows up then is eight years later when you get – so let’s jump forward eight years I guess from there. So eight years after that when a person’s 32 years old, they get another Venus retrograde, but at that time – how do you phrase that? If Mars was retrograde at that time – or no, Mars will repeat its position at 32 —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — whether it was retrograde or not, although it’s certainly more special if it was also retrograde.
NDB: Yeah. It’ll be very close to the natal position. And this was the period when he released Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg was just about to turn 32 when that movie came out.
CB: Oh, nice. Well, that’s a funny repetition, then, because he would release in the 2026 earlier in the Venus retrograde in Scorpio year, Disclosure Day. So it’s like —
NDB: Right. And during the Venus retrograde in Scorpio 1994 is when he cofounded whatchamacallit – the big company with Geffen and —
CB: DreamWorks.
NDB: DreamWorks! Yeah, DreamWorks is Venus retrograde in Scorpio 1994.
CB: That is the one I was building to when we get to 47 years old for him.
NDB: Sorry! Oopsy.
CB: This is 32, though, so 32 kept coming up over and over again last year because it seems especially important when there are overlapping Venus and Mars retrograde years, which doesn’t always happen but when it does, you know that exactly 32 years before that there was a Venus and Mars retrograde around the same signs, and you know that exactly 32 years after that that there was a Venus and Mars retrograde in the same two signs, right?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: So let me show that in the context of the current one to – so it’s like, here’s Venus. Venus is stationing direct. What’s the best way to show – maybe while Venus is still retrograde and Mars is in Leo, I guess that would show it basically?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: So I’ll put it around the cazimi, which is like, today. We’re recording this October 23rd, 2026, which is something in and of itself to talk about, but we’ll save that for later. I’ll change it to 32-year increment by years, and I’ll jump back from October 23rd, 2026, when Mars is in Leo slowing down, getting ready to go retrograde in Virgo and Leo, and Venus is retrograde in Scorpio. So that takes us back to October 23rd, 1994; we see Mars is in Leo, getting ready to slow down and station retrograde in Virgo and Leo, and that Venus is retrograde in Scorpio, having stationed retrograde not long before that – 10 days earlier. So that is an exact repetition, and that ties us back to late 1994 much more closely than other Venus retrograde repetitions would, I feel like, right?
NDB: Yeah. They do bring up these sort of similar patterns to some degree, you know? This one in 1994 with the Venus retrograde and being squared by Mars in Leo, it reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis 32 years earlier, which occurred during a Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And then when Mars went retrograde in Leo at the end of the year, that was when the US and Cuba traded prisoners – did a prisoner exchange – as a kind of goodwill gesture after the whole Cuban Missile Crisis. Because Cuba was holding a bunch of Cuban-American prisoners from the Bay of Pigs thing, and so there was a prisoner release sort of sign of goodwill, you know, taking the weapons away, et cetera, et cetera. And that happened as the Mars retrograde followed the Venus retrograde.
CB: Okay.
NDB: And of course the Bay of Pigs had been the previous Venus retrograde. So yeah, there’s something to that, that rhythm that every 32 years we’ve been getting the Venus retrograde in Scorpio followed by a Mars retrograde in Leo.
CB: And this one in the 1994 one, there’s two repetitions that have come up recently. One of them was the OJ Simpson trial; they were doing jury selection during this period in late 1994, and that trial was just, like, all over the news in terms of themes of domestic violence and the circus surrounding that. And then just recently in the news, did you see the thing that just came out recently where The New York Times ran a story saying that there was good evidence that he may have actually had an accomplice which had long been theorized, but that there was somebody who talked about their brother admitting it or seeing him coming out with blood covering his hands or something like that so that it sort of filled in a missing piece where I think when he did one of his interviews when he was doing the, like, If I Did It book tour, he talked about having an accomplice. But nobody really understood why at the time, but it kind of filled in that piece.
The last thing was that apparently the prosecutors —
NDB: If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit. But the glove could fit the other guy’s hand, right?
CB: Oh, right.
NDB: That was the famous Johnny Cochran line – “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”
CB: Yeah, I didn’t even think about that. Well, but what The New York Times article was saying was that the prosecutors may have gotten evidence that there was an accomplice late in the trial, but they had already made their closing arguments or something like that. So it’s like, they couldn’t do anything with it at that point, which is wild if that also turns out to be true. But anyway, so that’s a whole repetition with that coming up.
And then, yeah, you mentioned Spielberg founding DreamWorks. It was on the day that Venus stationed direct in Scorpio in 1994, and then we just had that huge merger with SkyDance basically creating a huge new conglomerate after buying Warner Brothers recently.
NDB: I think it was the day it stationed retrograde, not the day it stationed direct. I’ve got it October 12th that they announced it, and Venus stationed retrograde on the 12th, 13th.
CB: Okay, October 12th, 1994. But that one stood out to me – and I guess we’re jumping the gun here, but – because Spielberg was 47 years.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: And so October 12th, 1994 – yeah, there it is. Okay. So Venus is stationing retrograde, but it’s like, exactly conjunct Jupiter, but he has a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in his birth chart in the 5th house, and Venus is coming out of that retrograde in Scorpio. So it was like, kind of a crazy recurrence for him at 47 years old, not just of Venus retrograde in Scorpio but also of a Venus-Jupiter conjunction which is so highly beneficent for him in his chart.
NDB: Yeah. If you did his solar return – because, of course, his birthday’s at the end of the year. His birthday’s like, two months after the deal was signed. If you look at his solar return for when he turned 47, you would see Mars very close to the natal position; you would see Jupiter about 10 to 15 degrees earlier than the natal position, but again, like I’m saying, closer at that age, and it’s making a return along with the Mars. So and then, of course, he’s born after the Venus direct station in his own chart, and the DreamWorks thing was happening as the Venus retrograde transit was initiating. And that’s what’s funny about the DreamWorks project is you have these three big egos, and it kind of worked for a little while, but it was, you know, it was too small for the three of them, I suppose. Obviously —
CB: So —
NDB: — hits along the way. So yeah, basically – yeah, 47, almost 48, you can see how the Venus retrograde, the Venus-Jupiter recurrence transit, the fact that Mars and Jupiter make that return at 47 at his prior solar return all coming together.
CB: And the solar return thing, so here’s the solar return chart. And what are you saying about the solar return chart from 1993, right?
NDB: Yeah. You can see the Mars is in Sagittarius very close to his natal Mars. Right with his natal Mars. And then Jupiter is about 10 to 15 degrees earlier than the natal Jupiter at 47.
CB: Okay.
NDB: If you put it on the biwheel with his natal chart, yeah.
CB: Got it, okay. So here’s his natal chart. Yeah, because that’s bringing up something I wanted to ask you and talk to you about, but here’s his chart again just with Cancer rising, Venus at 19 Scorpio conjunct Jupiter at 17, and Venus is moving slow because it literally just stationed 10 days before he was born – or stationed direct 10 days before he was born. So that’s crazy starting that studio in 1994, because that was the first time that a big Hollywood studio had been started in like, decades at that point. And they very quickly went on to – they had, like, three Best Picture winners in 1999, 2000, and 2001 all in a row, and then they also ended up launching the animated division that created Shrek for example. So it did a lot of really important stuff, and that was a pretty notable thing that keeps standing out to me as a recurrence. And that’s even aside from mentioning that, like, ‘94 was a pretty crazy year for him aside from that, wasn’t it?
NDB: Well, I mean, he had all that stuff going on. He had already just done Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, right? Like, kind of back-to-back if I remember correctly. That was leading up to this.
CB: Okay.
NDB: And yeah, I mean, he would make – The Lost World would be made two years after this. But yeah, I don’t know, because I think starting the company with Geffen and Katzenberg was part of the hard thing because of the personalities involved. But obviously, like you’re saying, they did some really important work for a stretch of time.
CB: Yeah. I guess I was just trying to understand why this recurrence was so important to him, and what I was seeing was just that it was a repetition of his natal Venus retrograde in Scorpio and that also Jupiter was there as well, and it was also a recurrence of a conjunction between Venus and Jupiter. But it was like, an amplified one, because Venus was stationing at the same time.
NDB: Yeah. I think that the idea is, like, you know, remember – he’s George Lucas’s friend, and George Lucas is the guy who started an effects company when he’s making Star Wars because the effects people he hired weren’t good enough. And so he had to start his own effects company, and he’s juggling all that stuff – so much so that Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi aren’t directed by George Lucas because he’s so focused on all this technological stuff. And Spielberg is with him; he’s his pal all the way through this. He’s the only friend who’s encouraging about the rough cut of Star Wars when Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese think he’s lost his mind, you know, George has lost his mind and Coppola.
So Spielberg, like, DreamWorks means everything’s sort of consolidated. He’s just done the Jurassic Park thing. He’s just done the Schindler’s List thing. And so now he’s, like, he’s a lover of old cinema and having a studio of that magnitude that can have the versatility and the resources that the old-fashioned studios had. I think there was something about him that really wanted that, you know? There’s a part of him that is, of course, very sort of old-school, right? You know, even though he was part of this pack of new cinema icons with your De Palmas and your Coppolas and your Scorseses, he was always kind of more family-friendly, and well, I don’t know if Jaws is family-friendly, but still, it’s about family! And so, yeah, he’s got an old-school view of cinema, of the cinema world, you know, and a kind of innocence. And I think there was something about having DreamWorks that was giving him the feeling that he was gonna have all of that. And I guess he did. I mean, more than anyone else has.
CB: Right. Yeah. And then he won his first Academy Award earlier that year as well for the 1993 movies, for Schindler’s List. So let’s see – Best Director and Best Picture. And that’s something that keeps coming up. I don’t know if you have any insight into that I’m struggling with, which is I’m seeing obviously around the time of the – if a person who is born with let’s say Venus retrograde in Scorpio, I’m seeing when Venus goes retrograde in Scorpio – like, actually goes retrograde again during that specific month or two or part of the year in the eight-year increments, often the most important things happen. But sometimes I’m seeing things happen in their chronology that show up earlier in that year that are still obviously quite important. And sometimes you can kind of explain that because there’s still lingering things coming out of it, but it’s like, sometimes the effect seems to be encapsulating that year for some reason that I don’t fully understand. And I don’t know if you have any insight into that, or if that’s just part of the phenomenon. But as I’m studying recurrence transits of these in particular, it stood out a lot.
NDB: Yeah. I think some of the answer comes down to which other planets are interacting with the given Venus retrograde on what schedule, you know? Like, in 1970 and 1994, Jupiter’s in Scorpio at both those times with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio. Or in 1978 and 2010, you have Mars in Scorpio along with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio. So there are these subdivisions of them. And if you really know someone’s timeline, some of these things that are happening before the Venus retrograde – like, earlier in the year – might tie into how one of the other planets aligns with the Venus retrograde Scorpio as a combination of some kind. Not even necessarily as a conjunction, but there might be some kind of recurrence transit involving Venus and another planet that also plays out for that person.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That could make sense. I don’t know; there’s still something there sometimes that shows up earlier that year, and I would like to understand that better somehow at some point.
All right, so let’s move on. So we did 32. The next one’s probably, like, 40, right?
NDB: Yeah, in terms of big coming together, yeah, absolutely.
CB: So 40 – I keep seeing 40 in doing the Venus retrograde research come up really strongly as a repetition with the Venus retrograde in Scorpio ones, which because every 40 years – like, if you’re born with Venus retrograde in Scorpio, then when you’re 40, Venus will go retrograde again in Scorpio in that year. But one of the things you’ve pointed out is that that overlaps with another planetary cycle as well, right?
NDB: Yeah, it overlaps with Mercury, because you’ll get a Mercury return at 40 years. That’s one of the return years. And, you know, 20 being a Mercury year – an actual Mercury return is a little wider than at 40, but you know, that is used in time lord systems. But 40 is where it aligns with Venus, because Venus doesn’t fit into – you know, eight doesn’t fit into 20, but it fits into 40. So at 40, you get Venus and Mercury both having returns simultaneously.
CB: All right, since we’re using Spielberg, why don’t we just use his chart again even though it’s not retrograde or something like that. But he’s born December 18th, 1946; Venus is in Scorpio. Mercury is in Sagittarius. And if we jump forward 40 years, that brings us to December 18th, 1986, where Venus is just coming off of a retrograde in Scorpio just like it was when he was born. And Mercury’s there in Sagittarius again. And actually, if we do that in the present, it’ll actually be more impressive probably because we have a simultaneous Venus and Mercury retrograde happening right now, right?
NDB: Yeah. Exactly. Spielberg was making Empire of the Sun. It’s a good movie, but it wasn’t a big hit. But it has a very young Christian Bale making his first big movie role in it as a boy. It’s worth checking out.
CB: Nice. Yeah, I’ve been meaning to see that. Okay, so if I – so October 23rd, 2026, today, we see Venus is conjunct the Sun in the middle of the retrograde and Mercury’s stationing retrograde in Scorpio. If I jump back 40 years to October of 1986, we see that Venus is retrograde in Scorpio and Mercury is like, nine days from stationing retrograde. So we’re about to have a Venus and a Mercury retrograde in Scorpio, or if we go back to 2026 if we jump forward 40 years to 2066, we see Venus is getting towards the end of a Venus retrograde in Scorpio and Libra, and Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio. So that’s pretty good, at least across one or two increments. Because some of these obviously across long span of time will drift a lot when we’re talking about signs, right?
NDB: Yeah, I’m talking about in a human lifetime, you know. I mean, yeah, absolutely, when you’re trying to plot it along in mundane astrology over longer periods of time, it is a little more complicated. But there is a logic to it, and there is a way to follow those cycles over longer periods of time. But in a human lifetime, the age of 40 is where Venus and Mercury make a return no matter where they are in your chart – whether they’re retrograde or otherwise. Obviously, with the retrogrades, they wind up being, you know, it’s a little sort of wonky. Like, you showed 40 years from now; the Venus retrograde in Scorpio isn’t gonna be in Scorpio at all. It’s just gonna be in Libra, you know.
CB: Right. But yeah, that makes sense for like, a human life.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Because like, 40 kept coming up as being a big one with the repetitions with movies and stuff where – like, you know, one of the cool historical ones when I was researching Venus’s retrograde in Scorpio in history was the first James Bond film coming out around that Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1962. And then what was weird is like, most of the other Bond films didn’t really come out on recurrences. There was maybe some behind the scenes or other stuff happening in terms of the series that were happening around those, but the only other main one that really came out – and it came out very closely on the repetition – was the 2002 Bond film that was exactly 40 years —
NDB: Right.
CB: — after the first one. And that was the one that Halle Berry was in, and that was the last one I think that Pierce Brosnan was in before they just rebooted the whole series with Daniel Craig.
NDB: Yeah, that all sounds very familiar to me. And yeah, I mean, I remember looking into the Bond movies and indeed, while the first movie comes out in ‘62, at least in Britain, during that Venus retrograde, none of the others do. The only other thing I know about that’s James Bond related and coincides with Venus retrograde is George Lazenby, who would only be in one movie which came out in winter of ‘69, On Her Majesty’s – whatever that one is with Diana Rigg – and he was sort of this controversial choice. And then I think after the movie came out, he grew his hair and became kind of a hippie and didn’t fit the James Bond mold. But that’s really kind of, you know, the only thing. And even like most of the actors, you know, Roger Moore was born a little bit after a Venus retrograde, but a little out of the range. Ian Fleming was born somewhat close to a Venus retrograde in Cancer. Yeah.
CB: So 40 – so I saw that repetition with James Bond at 40. I saw another one with Halloween where they did the first Halloween around the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in 1978 and then 40 years later, Jamie Lee Curtis comes back and they do another Halloween movie in 2018 during that Venus retrograde in Scorpio. And they decide to ignore all of the sequels and any other movies that had happened in the interim and just doing a direct sequel of her, now 40 years later, as a grandmother and all of the things associated with that and teaching her family to fight Michael Myers, who shows up again, and doing a sort of like, almost a soft reboot in some sense.
NDB: She’s born with the Sun-Venus conjunction – like, not retrograde, but the flipside to it. She’s born at the exterior conjunction, the superior conjunction of Sun and Venus in Scorpio.
CB: In Scorpio? Okay. I’ve seen a bunch of those. Like, one of them that’s in the news right now is – who did Verity? Anne Hathaway, I believe, is the direct Sun-Venus conjunction in Scorpio and is having a big moment with that movie that dropped. I think it came out within a few days – Verity – earlier this month of Venus stationing retrograde in Scorpio. And then the book was written exactly eight years earlier under the previous Venus retrograde in Scorpio.
NDB: Yeah. No, there is a correspondence between those exterior conjunctions and their interior counterparts, which of course happen four years apart from each other, right? Anne Hathaway and Jamie Lee Curtis were born four years after a Venus retrograde in Scorpio, and four years before a Venus retrograde in Scorpio.
CB: Yeah. So let’s explore that, because that’s been really important and I would like to understand it better – the interrelationship between the interior conjunction and the exterior conjunction, or inferior versus superior conjunction or whatever you want to call it. The direct conjunction versus the retrograde conjunction. Because yeah, that does seem to sometimes mark the people that have the direct conjunction as then having important stuff happen at the retrograde conjunction.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, they’ll already have the planet in that same path, and there is just this kind of counterpoint to the rhythm. And you know, think about it this way too – presuming babies are born nine months to term, someone who’s conceived during a Sun-Venus exterior conjunction will be born during a Venus retrograde and someone conceived during a Venus retrograde will be born with the exterior conjunction.
CB: Oh, okay. Interesting. So that could be relevant in terms of tying things together.
NDB: It sure can be, yeah.
CB: Okay. All right. I don’t have Anne Hathaway – we don’t have a birth time for Anne Hathaway, right?
NDB: I don’t think so.
CB: Do you have her in your files? So here’s her chart for just a random noon one. And yeah, it’s like, Sun at 20 Scorpio, Jupiter at 20, and Venus at 20 Scorpio – all direct – November 12th, 1982. And she’s just been doing this, like, huge press run for this movie that came out earlier this month at the beginning of the year. And what’s funny is like, her other costar in it is Dakota Johnson, who’s also having a huge moment, who also has Venus in Scorpio. And the theme of the movie is also, like, very Venus in Scorpio as well. But it’s a notable instance, like we were saying, that she doesn’t have a retrograde Venus in Scorpio, but she just has the natal placement, and she’s very close to the conjunction. And so I’ve been seeing instances of that, as well as instances of just, like, either people that have Venus in Scorpio just on its own – like Dakota Johnson – coming into the news more, or in other instances, people that have, like, Scorpio rising, for example, in their chart becoming more prominent at this time. You’ve used that for, like, rectification, right?
NDB: Oh sure. Yeah. I use all the planetary cycles for rectification. That’s the beauty of knowing them is you can – you have a better sense of their placement, you know. Where those returns are gonna happen; when they’re gonna happen.
CB: Right. Yeah. And that sometimes if you don’t know a rising sign, but if you have a prospective rising sign – I mean, that’s how you – you were the one of the people that figured out Hillary Clinton’s rising sign correctly based on, what was it? A Mars retrograde in that sign?
NDB: Mars, yeah. The Mars retrograde. I thought she was Gemini rising. The Mars retrograde that went from Cancer to Gemini, closer to her Ascendant. I think it was just in – yeah, Cancer to Gemini in 1960 when she was disillusioned, living in Chicago and seeing how the Kennedy election was rigged in Chicago. You know? That there were untoward practices leading to Kennedy’s victory, and she was disillusioned by that. And then it was at the next retrograde 15 years later that she married Bill Clinton in 1975 when Mars was going retrograde from Cancer into Gemini. And there might have been something – oh yeah, 2008. Mars was going retrograde from Cancer to Gemini in 2007, 2008, right when Obama sort of started to take the lead in the campaign. And so it was those three, those were the three times that Mars went retrograde from Cancer to Gemini, and those were three clearly important events in her life. And I was like, “Okay, that’s likely the Ascendant then.” Because the dispute was always this AM/PM thing, but I said, well, those Mars transits just make me think that that’s the right rising.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. And that turned out to be right when the birth certificate came out, so that was impressive. So that’s good for 40.
After that, 47 is, like, the next basic cycle, right?
NDB: Yeah. 47 is Mars and Jupiter.
CB: Okay. So Mars and Jupiter – and the Mars one is especially strong because that’s one of the Babylonian goal years periods, and you know that pretty closely by sign and somewhat by degrees that Mars will retrograde in the same spot in the zodiac every 47 years.
NDB: Yeah. It can still be about 10 degrees off or so, but for Mars, that’s still pretty good.
CB: Okay. So here is the – let’s bring it up to the present time. Like, I don’t know, I guess October 23rd, 2026, and if I switch it to 47 years and I take it back, that takes us back to October 23rd, 1979, and Mars is in Leo getting ready to station retrograde in Virgo 84 days later. It’ll retrograde at 15 Virgo. And yeah, so that’s 47, but then that’s —
NDB: And if you go to 1932, you’ll see the same thing again. You’ll see Mars and Jupiter are both gonna go retrograde in Virgo. It’s always a little bit later in the zodiac, as you see; it’s gradually moving backwards. But you can see that Mars headed towards the Jupiter again, and they’re both gonna make those retrogrades.
CB: There we go. Okay, yeah. So October 1932, and Mars is getting ready – yeah, I was looking at this the other day. I guess you and I talked about it on the casual podcast. I’m not stoked about that recurrence right now of the ‘32, early ‘33 Mars retrograde and especially the line-up of Mars, Jupiter, South Node, which is repeating now. But okay, so 47 is important, though, not just because of Mars, but you’re saying it’s also important because of the 12-year slippage of Jupiter shortens it —
NDB: Exactly.
CB: — so that instead of 48, it starts being 47 by this point in the life?
NDB: Exactly. 47 is where it switches. This is why it eventually winds up having the goal year of 71, because instead of going to 48 you go to 47, then to 59, then to 71. And that’s how that 12-year rhythm keeps repeating after the one diversion at 47 of making it just 11 years, if you catch my drift.
CB: Okay, got it. Because I see it’s like, a little off, but I see, just of the drift in degrees, it’s like, Jupiter’s in Leo here in late 2026. Jupiter’s in early Virgo in 1979 at this time. And then before that, Jupiter was in mid-Virgo in 1932 around this time.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Although it looks like 47 years from now in 2073, Jupiter will be in Leo and Mars will be in Leo getting ready to go retrograde in Leo and Virgo.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, again, it’s a cyclical return. So you’re not gonna – you know, it’s not like it’s gonna be right on the money. At 48, it’s gonna be even further from the natal Jupiter than it will be at 47, which is what pulled me into the 47 thing, because I realized you don’t – once you get that far out, you have to make the correction for it to still be in range of a return.
CB: Got it. Okay. And that correction is what the Mesopotamian astrologers realized was really significant for all of these planets in long-term cycles?
NDB: Exactly. I mean, that’s the thing. As you and I have discussed before, I had a vague idea that what I was doing was somewhat Babylonian, but you know, I just went out and looked! you know, it is as simple as that. You know, you rediscover something that probably all of the ancient skygazers noticed of their own accord. There was once a Chinese astronomer who did it, and once a Person, and once a Mayan. You know, they all would have known this; this would have been fundamental astrology.
CB: Right. Yeah. Because especially if you’re just going out every night and you’re observing the movement of the stars in the sky and then you also have your regularly reading and copying these – especially in Mesopotamia – like, hundreds of years of records of skywatchers noting where the planets were, and then just seeing those patterns and realizing the repetitions. But what I realized that’s missing in the academic discussions about this is I’m seeing everything happening in the world and in the news today is the ancient Mesopotamian astrologers, they weren’t just seeing that the cycles repeated in the sky. But they were seeing events on earth repeating and echoing and similar themes coming up with Venus every eight years that were connecting periods in the past with events in the present. And that’s the missing piece that if you think about it and now that I’m paying attention to it and we’re all paying attention to it today and seeing how striking the eight-year repetitions are, you know, they would have been even more hyper-aware of some of those things and writing some of them down.
NDB: Yeah. And at some point, not even writing them down because they’re almost second nature. I think there’s part of the reason we don’t see it really mentioned in a lot of astrological texts, because this would have been just fundamental material. Like, you’re not even on the astrological playing field unless you know your planetary returns; you’re not even picking up an astrology book if you don’t already know this stuff. You know, back in the day.
CB: Right.
NDB: And this would have existed before they – they would have noticed this before they came up with a horoscopic system. Like, you would have to know this in order to do it.
CB: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is sometimes you’ll see when the traditional revival happened and we discovered time lords, there was the idea of, like, the Hellenistic astrologers would use time lords first and then transits are a lower level or last level timing system and have been – but there was kind of like, an overcorrection in that movement so that sometimes, like, contemporary traditional astrologers will diss transits or say that that’s not really even a focus of ancient or traditional astrology. But in a Mesopotamian context, that’s completely false, because of this focus on not just transits, but also recurring cycles which eventually became the basis of planetary periods and then planetary periods became the basis of most of the time lord systems themselves, like zodiacal releasing and decennials and other stuff like that that are like, using planetary periods in different ways.
NDB: Yeah. And on my part, it was kind of ironic that it was learning Hellenistic astrology and learning those time lord systems that got me interested in going back and looking at this more essential material. This original astrology. So yeah, I kind of retrofit my way to this position, thankfully through learning Hellenistic astrology.
CB: Right. So with some of the things, though, the periods we have up to this point, that means that there’s certain things where if people have certain combinations of planets, then we already know certain years that are gonna be particularly important for them because they’re gonna experience a recurrence transit during those years, such as, for example, let’s say somebody has a Mars-Jupiter conjunction. Then we know that at like, 47 years old, they’ll have a recurrence of that Mars-Jupiter conjunction, right?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah. Or people with Venus-Mars conjunction; at 32, they’ll have that conjunction again. Absolutely. And again at 64.
CB: At 64.
NDB: Yeah. At 56, you get a Venus and nodal return, which is interesting, particularly in nocturnal charts. And then at 59, as I was saying earlier, you get Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn all in one.
CB: Okay. Yeah, let’s get there in a second. But just like, so as a predictive technique, it means any ancient astrologer could know – and this can be the basis of some mysterious predictions – that it’s like, you know, some of that’s still in some of the traditional texts and some of the ancient texts, but that you could go through and write out a series of delineations. Like, if you have this combination, then at this year in your life, such-and-such will take place, which is one of those almost sort of mysterious, legendary type astrologer things. But this actually does provide a really solid technical basis for doing that.
NDB: Absolutely.
CB: Nice. Okay, I like that. I want to work that out more, and that’s part of the purpose of this episode is I want to build a foundation of just going through some of the cycles, but then yeah, being able to construct something like that. Because I know you added another piece to it, which was annual profections. And it might be too much to go into that fully today because I wanted to finish a few of the other cycles, but that is another piece that you’re adding into this as well that is allowing you to identify certain years in particular ways, right?
NDB: Yeah, and it’s in a manner that’s approaching what you mention, you know, seeing in these ancient texts. People saying if you have this combination, this’ll happen to you at this age. Yeah, it’s my contention that annual profections were always used with planetary cycles. You know, they’re probably part of the same technique, really. You know, like, it’s not like you use this with that; it’s like, no, they go together. They absolutely go together. And there are a bunch of very interesting – you know, we can call them shortcuts, but not in the cheating sense, but there are certain house placements for a planet where you know it’s gonna be making a cyclical return in the profected sign at a certain age. And that can give you such a jump in terms of being able to absorb a chart, being able to think of a person’s life in a more sort of macro context. Even if you’re seeing them on one particular afternoon in their life, you know, you can look at a chart and have some sense of these different periods that they’ve probably gone through.
CB: Okay. I like that.
NDB: Yeah, we can definitely cover that in depth in another episode.
CB: Yeah. All right, everybody in the YouTube comments, let us know – drop us a comment if you want us to do a follow-up episode where Nick shows how to integrate annual profections with the planetary periods techniques. And we’ll see what people say.
Okay, let’s quickly run through the other ones that you had mentioned. So we got up to 47. What’s the next important year after 47?
NDB: 56. Venus and the nodes. It’s the 3rd – yeah, you get a Venus return because it’s a multiple of eight, but you also get a nodal return, the 3rd nodal return.
It’s a huge birthday in history. It’s a birthday where people finally become the version of themselves that they’ve always tried to become. If you look back in history, you’ll see both Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson became president at 56. Well, Nixon turned 56 like, a couple days before his inauguration. George Washington also became president at 56. Both Lincoln and Hilter – not to compare them, but – both Lincoln and Hitler died at 56, shortly after turning 56. There’s this whole thing to the birthday with the Venus return, the nodal return, of a kind of self-actualization, of becoming the person you’ve been trying to become.
CB: I like that. So it’s a repetition of Venus in that year, like a Venus retrograde, but also the eclipses would be repeating in the same signs in that year, essentially.
NDB: Yeah. With the nodal return and the solar return.
CB: Okay. So let me animate a chart. All right, animated chart – so this is right now. Venus is retrograde; we’re in the middle of the cycle in October of 2026, and the nodes have just changed recently, so it might not be a great example. But the South Node’s in late Leo at 27 degrees, and the North Node’s in late Aquarius. And if I jump forward 56 years to 2082, we see that Venus is just coming off of the retrograde in Scorpio and Libra and the nodes are again in the same positions with the South Node at 24 Leo and the North Node at 24 Aquarius. So that’s pretty solid, as long as you take into account the drift of Venus at this point, like, 56 years into the life.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, it’s more drastic if someone’s born during the Venus retrograde – less so if they’re not. But you’ll see in the solar return, at 56 you get this nodal return and a Venus return. And I see it time and again in people’s lives. It’s kind of like – one theory I have is that it might be a kind of like, Saturn return for nocturnal charts. You know? The second Saturn return is at 59 for the diurnal charts; it tends to be really strong for them if everything’s in good measure. But nocturnal charts – 56, because it’s Venus and the nodes, there is something that kind of – I mean, I think it’s a magical year for a lot of people. But that’s sort of one of the thoughts I’ve had about it, because it does involve Venus and the Moon.
CB: Yeah. I mean, just knowing that not only is Venus gonna go retrograde in the same sign, like in Scorpio, and so you’ll already have that really tight series of echoes of energy, but also that the eclipses are gonna be taking place in the exact same signs – that would be really strong and powerful as a predictive technique, especially if you were able to develop a strong sense of what that eclipse series or cycle was about.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: What was the one —
NDB: I’m fascinated with 56.
CB: Yeah. That sounds like it could be worth exploring as a whole episode unto itself from some of the examples you mentioned.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: It’s like, the older version of the 27 club with what were the two that you mentioned? Like, Lincoln and Hitler.
NDB: Lincoln and Hitler, yeah. He was 56; he turned 56 like, 10 days before he met his end – let’s just put it at that – and make of it what you will. And Lincoln died less than two months, right? Like, five, six weeks or whatever after he turned 56.
CB: Right. Okay. Yeah, but it’s like, Lincoln successfully wins the war, and then like —
NDB: Sure.
CB: — you know, ends slavery, whereas Hitler has —
NDB: Yeah.
CB: — his country burned and is destroyed around him, and he’s completely ruined his entire country immeasurably at that point. But it is interesting, and it’s like, both of them die at that time in weird ways.
NDB: Yeah. I mean, everyone turns – or, not everyone, but if you do turn 56, like, good people turn 56; bad people turn 56. Failures turn 56; successful people turn 56. But you can see how for both of them, there is this moment, I suppose. You know, like, for those two particular people, yeah – one guy wins and is murdered. The other guy loses and takes his own life. And not to mention all the other humanitarian questions involved. But yeah, there’s something about 56 that you can see it in all of them.
CB: Yeah. I mean, the culmination of both of their destinies happened basically in that year around that time you could say for both of them.
NDB: Yeah. And like, Nixon and Johnson both becoming president at 56 – these are both guys who wanted to be president since they were little boys and thought of nothing else and like, everything they did was to get to that moment. And you know, they both arrive, and then of course they’re both gonna have it blow up in their faces. You know, they’re an interesting pair in that way.
CB: Right. Yeah, that would be —
NDB: And then George Washington became president at 56; it wasn’t something he could have aspired to, but he is someone else who, you know, really had to fight and struggle to reach a level of respectability that he thought he needed to have. And I think becoming president, if nothing else, famously it wasn’t this big rewarding thing for him or anything, and he kind of wanted to be doing other things. But there is this sense of he’s reached this level of respectability. So yeah, there’s something in it there for him as well. And I could go on and on. But 56 is a really, really interesting one.
CB: Okay. Yeah, that is cool; I’d like to study – because that’s really the intersection of the two major research projects I’ve been doing and you and I have been doing over the past few years, which is like, eclipses and Venus retrograde. So that and seeing if there were any other intersections of, like, half-intersections or other things prior to that might be interesting to see the build-up or the intermediate point, you know, prior to those or what have you.
NDB: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Let’s see, 56 – there was something else I was gonna mention about that, but maybe that’s good.
NDB: And then there’s just 59.
CB: What’s 59 again?
NDB: 59 is Saturn – the second Saturn return. It’s a Jupiter return. And it’s a Mercury return. Tends to be, in diurnal charts in particular, it can be pretty good.
CB: Got it, okay. Yeah, and that one is – what was the – yeah, the Babylonian goal year period is 59 for the ancient Mesopotamians, so it’s like, they were really focused on that one for Saturn. But then that was one of the things that’s always raised questions that you and I and Patrick have talked about is how some of these really overlap with other things so that there may have been either additional reasons why they were focused on certain years, or there may have been hidden reasons, perhaps, even though they didn’t even know about that they were focused on certain years.
So 59. Okay. So 59 Saturn but also Mercury and Jupiter at the same time.
NDB: Yeah. Mercury and Jupiter – Mercury, it makes a pretty close return. Jupiter makes a return. Because it’s 12 years after 47, but 12 years before 71.
CB: So that’s interesting, because it’s like, if somebody had a special combination between those three planets in their chart, then you would know that 59 is gonna be a particularly powerful year. Like, if they had a Mercury-Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in their chart, then you know at 59, that’s gonna get fully activated by a kind of crazy recurrence transit.
NDB: Exactly.
CB: Okay. This is good.
NDB: I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen with clients, absolutely.
CB: Okay, so this is starting to get us into a whole other area then of like, it’s like, one planet recurrences, two planet recurrences, and then three planet recurrences.
NDB: Yeah. To cap it all off.
CB: Well, and I found those ones that were showing the thousand-year ones earlier this year when you and I did the triple conjunction episode where we were getting into some of those triple conjunctions recurrences. But then I found that, like, thousand-year Babylonian goal year period where it was showing a recurrence of four planets that was incredibly precise.
NDB: Yeah. It’s wild.
CB: All right. What’s next after 59 years? Is there anything? I mean, I know there’s goal year periods.
NDB: There’s Mercury and Mars at 79.
CB: Okay, so Mars – yeah, because 79 is the closest repetition of Mars where it will go retrograde almost to the degree every 79 years. But you’re saying that’s also a completion of a Mercury cycle?
NDB: Exactly, yeah. The cycles of Mercury and Mars come together at 79.
CB: Okay. So that’d be particularly important if somebody had a Mercury-Mars conjunction, for example.
NDB: And Saturn and Venus, I remember now – it’s not 96; it’s 88. And my apologies. I blanked on it. Venus and Saturn are 88. But Mars and Mercury are 79.
CB: Mars and Mercury, okay. Yeah. So if somebody had, like, any Mars-Mercury aspect, 79 would be really important for better or in some instances for worse. And Venus – you said Venus and Saturn is what? 88?
NDB: 88, yeah.
CB: Okay. So that’d be good for Venus-Saturn aspects, although presumably not that great once you’re getting to that stage in life.
NDB: Presumably.
CB: Yeah.
NDB: Some people live that up.
CB: Until – yeah, our longevity – most of this is gonna be blown out of the water as human life starts getting extended past normal stuff will be an interesting new avenue of astrology at some point before too long.
NDB: Yep. Can’t wait.
CB: Yeah. Okay. And then Jupiter is like, its goal year period is 71 and 83. Mars we already mentioned is 47 and 79. Are there any other periods to mention, or is that pretty much it?
NDB: That’s pretty much it for these combos, you know. The next thing – yeah, we’ll do an episode later on annual profections and using these, and it gets really interesting.
CB: Okay. Cool. All right. So are there any other things like that that are worth mentioning in terms of then now that we’ve identified some of the overlapping ones? Obviously we can use this in mundane astrology and a lot of what you and I have been doing and a lot of research I’ve been doing over the past few years is going back – if a planetary alignment is coming up that we’re curious about, going back and seeing what happened the last time that alignment happened over the past century or the last times, and especially some of these repeating years when the alignment was exactly the same or when it was aligning similarly with other planets. And certainly, the last Venus retrograde that we had when Venus was retrograde in Aries and Mars was retrograde in Leo and Cancer, we saw that those 32-year increments were the ones that had some of the most stunning repetitions. So I do feel like part of the trick to this is that when there’s one planetary repetition, you’ll see echoes and similar themes coming up. But when you see two planets repeating, you’ll see even stronger echoes and repetitions of things coming up. And then it may even build from there, if we’re talking like, three or four planet combinations.
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that is then, yeah, like we’re saying, one of the oldest predictive tools presumably.
NDB: Absolutely. And I use it all the time in consultations. I think it’s immeasurably more useful to have these under your hat when you’re in a consultation situation. It really feels like you’re always walking on a floor; you’re never just sort of floating, wondering, like, you know, what’s the big picture that you’re missing out on? I hope that’s a useful description, but that’s how it really feels for me. The difference between knowing these cycles sort of as a consulting astrologer was the difference between operating with confidence and operating in a, you know, waiting for some kind of magic to happen or something. It really helped me understand how astrology reflects different people’s lives in different ways.
CB: Yeah. I’ve been going back and looking at old charts of ones that I knew that were close to me or important and just like, seeing so many new things now that I’m paying attention to these cycles and I know once you’ve memorized the years of Venus’s repetitions, it just unlocks a huge secondary layer of information that you wouldn’t see otherwise. Especially if you’re only narrowly paying attention to the retrograde period and if you’re not paying attention to that period around it, that like, three or four months around a retrograde that’s still so potent. And it’s really recontextualizing a lot of old charts now that I have the periods memorized. And that’s gotta be one of the first steps is like, starting to get familiar with the cycles – like, using an animated chart feature or an ephemeris or something – and just start to internalize those cycles and how often they repeat as much as possible.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s definitely really, really worth learning the Mars cycles even though they’re not as easy as the Venus years – quite the contrary. Having Mars under your belt is the perfect counterpoint to Venus. In all the ways that it’s exactly the opposite in its design and reliability and what have you. Like, the difference between symmetry and asymmetry is really the difference between the Venus and Mars cycles. It’s a part of what they are astrologically and mythologically, but even just as orbiting bodies they’re so different from each other in precisely that Venus-Mars way that you would expect.
CB: Right, which is funny because then it’s like, this contrast between harmony and dissonance basically. And you get that reflected in their cycles where Venus has this very nice, neat, recurring cycle that’s every eight years with very little drift, but then Mars has this more like, jagged one that jumps in this 15 and 17-year cycle.
NDB: Yeah. And also, you know, every 250 years, Venus will have been retrograde in all 12 signs equally. Over long periods of time, Venus retrogrades are distributed evenly fairly amongst the 12 signs of the zodiac, even if not in one human lifetime. But with Mars, that’s simply not true. Mars is always, you know, more frequently in Leo and least frequently in Aquarius, and presumably as long as its orbit has been that way for however many millions of years or whatever the answer is, that would be the case. That is its rhythm. So it’s very different; it never sort of reaches some other stage where then, oh, you know, Mars retrogrades in Aquarius are happening a lot and not in Leo. It never does that the way Venus does. So that’s something interesting in and of itself when you think about, yeah, bigger picture astrology as well.
CB: What was the rule then? Like, it goes retrograde in Leo more frequently and Aquarius much less frequently?
NDB: Yeah. And therefore it spends more time in Leo and the least amount of time in Aquarius, you know, mathematically. But that’s perpetual for all time, presumably.
CB: Right. So it’s like, some people only experience one Aquarius retrograde in a good chunk of their life?
NDB: Yeah.
CB: Like, how often?
NDB: 47 years. There was one in 2018 and before that it was in 1971.
CB: Okay, as opposed to the like, every 15 to 17 years that we’re experiencing the Mars retrograde in Leo?
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Wow, okay. That’s crazy.
NDB: Ditto – like, Mars went retrograde in Aquarius in 2018. Before that, it was 1971. Mars went retrograde in Pisces in 2003; before that, it was 1956. You know, it’s a really long gap. And so sometimes when I see someone with a Pisces rising, oh, I think the summer of 2003 when that Mars retrograde happened or ditto for Aquarius risings, I think of the Mars retrograde in Aquarius – that might have been – you’re Aquarius rising. That’s the only year in your life that Mars went retrograde in your rising sign.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s like, that also serves the function of why modern, 20th century astrologers often get hung up on outer planets is sometimes their transits are so rare where you only get, like, one of these transits in a lifetime of a certain thing. Like, let’s say Uranus traveling through a certain house or making a conjunction. But then some of this you’re talking about with Mars, you’re talking about very rare transits that only happen once or twice in a lifetime.
NDB: Yeah. And it’s always a hit with whoever I’m speaking to. You know, whatever the rising sign is, I know – especially if it’s one of the more rare ones, which is most of them. Really, Cancer, Leo, and Virgo are the ones that are super regular, but even once you get to Gemini and Libra, they’re once every 32 years, generally, with a few anomalies here and there. So yeah, you know, depending on the rising sign or if there’s a certain emphasis of planets in a given sign, if you know the Mars cycle, you can really pinpoint some really meaningful things for that person. It’s a repeated success in all consultations.
CB: Nice. All right, I love that. Well, then I guess that’s step one is just starting to memorize some of those cycles and see how they work and starting to see how some of those repetitions play out in your life, and then starting to research some of those – especially in the present. Like, when stuff’s happening in the present, like the Venus retrograde, it’s such an amazing opportunity to study the phenomenon and then to connect it with previous repetitions. And I can’t believe how much you can learn just from doing that, that it really pays to take in as much as you can during those times and observe as much as you can and sort of like, internalize it.
NDB: Yeah. Absolutely. It really – it tells a story, you know? It really does. And yeah, understanding these return combinations helps you understand something about the relationship between any of these two or sometimes three given planets. You know, Mars and Jupiter – no matter what you have them in the chart – it’s always about 47, you know? There’s some kind of – 47 is some kind of fulcrum around which that relationship revolves.
CB: Right. Yeah, whether it’s like, a harmonious relationship or a disharmonious one, which is really interesting then that you’ll have a tension between that war and peace tendencies in some charts if it’s like, an opposition or something. Whereas you might have instead the taking bold action that pays off if it’s like, a Mars-Jupiter trine, and then you get a recurrence of that.
NDB: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that starts getting into some really deep powerful predictive stuff right there. So that’s very exciting. And yeah, we’ll do a follow-up episode then to do the annual profections layer, because I know that’s how you even further specify and identify some of the most potent years.
NDB: Yeah. It works like a charm.
CB: Cool. All right. If people want to learn more about this, you’re doing consultations, and you apply it to people’s charts and their personal lives like, every day all the time, right?
NDB: Constantly, six days a week. Sometimes seven, yeah.
CB: All right.
NDB: It’s what I do, and it works beautifully.
CB: Yeah. The astrologer that never sleeps. So you’re at NickDaganBestAstrologer.com or just Nick Dagan Best?
NDB: It’s NickDaganBestAstrologer.com, correct.
CB: Cool, okay. People can go there for consultations. You have also been doing a lot of livestreams recently on different platforms, right?
NDB: Yeah, I’m livestreaming and doing little mini tutorials, sometimes little mini readings and stuff like that. Having fun exploring the new software and showing it off, and so yeah. Subscribe to any of my – I’m on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram. So yeah. Find me where you like to watch that kind of thing.
CB: Cool. Yeah, people should check it out. I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video or on the podcast website for this episode. But otherwise, thanks a lot for joining me today and helping me to explore this, and I look forward to doing that follow-up.
NDB: Thank you, Chris.
CB: Cool. All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time!
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