Astrology Forecast for December 2024 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Astrology Podcast

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Astrology Forecast for December 2024) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Astrology Podcast) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: The Astrology Podcast

Episode: Astrology Forecast for December 2024

Author: Chris Brennan
Duration: 02:45:55

Episode Shownotes

In episode 469 astrologers Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock discuss the astrological forecast for December 2024, and talk about news and events from the past month through the lens of astrology. For the first 90 minutes of the episode we talk about news that happened since our last forecast, starting

with the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election, and then in the second half of the episode we do a deep dive into the astrology of December. The astrology of December opens with the second half of a troublesome Mercury retrograde in Sagittarius, plus a contentious Mars retrograde period beginning in Leo. The middle of the month features some favorable aspects, such as Mercury stationing direct, and an auspicious trine between Venus and Jupiter. December ends with major tensions building, as Mars and Pluto move into a difficult opposition, which will culminate at the very beginning of January. This episode is available in audio and video versions below. 2025 Year Ahead Electional Astrology Report We just released our annual report on the most fortunate dates next year!

We're running an initial launch sale where you can get it for 20% off:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025report/ 2025 Astrology Calendars We also just released our annual astrology calendar posters that show next year's transits at a glance:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/merch/ Honeycomb Collective Honeycomb Collective creates astrological almanacs and calendars that are personalized to your natal chart:

https://www.honeycomb.co Austin's Website AustinCoppock.com Our Patreon https://www.patreon.com/astrologypodcast Timestamps

00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:50 Quick overview of December 00:03:22 News segment begins 00:04:34 US presidential election 01:01:58 Other news stories 01:27:00 December astrology forecast 02:43:06 End cards

Watch the Video Version of This Episode Watch the video version of this episode on December's astrology on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obJPzljK5v0

– Transcript A full transcript of this episode is available: Episode 469 transcript Listen to the Audio Version of This Episode Listen to the audio version of this episode or download it as an MP3:

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Koppik, and we're going to be looking at the astrology of December 2024.

00:00:09 Speaker_01
So we're recording this on Saturday, November 30, 2024, and we're going to spend the first hour reviewing news stories and things that happened in the news over the past month since our last forecast.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Then in the second hour or so, or the second half of this episode, we're going to jump ahead and look at the astrology of December and do a deep dive into what the planets are looking like over the next four weeks.

00:00:33 Speaker_01
So before I, as always, there's going to be timestamps in the description below this video if you want to jump ahead to the forecast section. Austin, hello, quick hi. Hello. Welcome back. Thank you. Yeah.

00:00:49 Speaker_01
And so before I get into the news, let me give a quick overview of some of the astrology of December that we're going to be talking about during the course of this episode.

00:00:58 Speaker_01
So here is the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets will start at the beginning of the month and how far through the signs of the zodiac they'll get by the end of the month.

00:01:08 Speaker_01
Then we have this lovely astrological transits graph that was designed by Madeleine de Coats of honeycomb.co, where they carry a bunch of graphics and ephemerides and different things just like this that shows some of the peaks during the course of the month.

00:01:25 Speaker_01
One of which, my favorite, the most positive aspect of the month is this lovely Venus-Jupiter trine that goes exact towards the middle of the month, especially around December 19th.

00:01:37 Speaker_01
We also have another graphic designed by Madeline, which is the Mercury retrograde.

00:01:42 Speaker_01
We're opening only a week into this retrograde at the very top of the month, and we're going to see Mercury continuing its retrograde, hit the halfway point, and then eventually stationing direct on December 15th.

00:01:54 Speaker_01
We also have a Mars retrograde that is finally, finally getting started, where it's going to station retrograde on December 6th, and that's going to be one of our most important transits this month.

00:02:06 Speaker_01
We've had several months of buildup to that aspect, which is finally going exact now.

00:02:12 Speaker_01
And then finally we have the planetary movements or alignments calendar that shows ingresses, lunations, and other things this month where we open with a new moon in Sagittarius on the 1st.

00:02:22 Speaker_01
Then we get the Mercury-Kazemi halfway through the Mercury retrograde cycle on December 5th.

00:02:27 Speaker_01
Mars stations retrograde in Leo on December 6th, then Neptune stations direct in Pisces on December 7th, the same day Venus moves into Aquarius and the Sun opposes Jupiter.

00:02:41 Speaker_01
Then we jump forward to the 15th, where we finally get Mercury stationing direct in Sagittarius, and the same exact day we get our second lunation of the month, which is a full moon in the sign of Gemini.

00:02:53 Speaker_01
Then later that same week the Sun moves into the sign of Capricorn on the 21st.

00:02:57 Speaker_01
Jupiter squares Saturn for the second time this year on the 24th and then finally we get our final lunation of the month which is a new moon in the sign of Capricorn on December 30th. All right.

00:03:12 Speaker_01
So those are some of the planetary alignments we're going to be talking about later in this episode. But first things first, we have to transition into talking about the news. So first, hey, welcome, Austin.

00:03:24 Speaker_01
It's been a crazy month, but it's good to be back with you again. Yeah, ditto.

00:03:29 Speaker_00
Quite a bit has happened.

00:03:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, I was re-listening to our year ahead forecast, and we did pretty good lining up some of the most important months of the year and talking about some of the astrology.

00:03:42 Speaker_01
And it's striking going back, listening to some of that now in retrospect, now that so much of 2024 has played out at this point.

00:03:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think there are unique advantages to looking at things at different time scales and with different proximity. Like sometimes you can actually call things easier from further out than you can close up. And the reverse is also true, right?

00:04:05 Speaker_00
You can see some things up close that you can't see from far away, but there's the old fog of war is not present when you're looking a year, nine months, 10 months in advance.

00:04:17 Speaker_01
Yeah, for sure. I'm thinking about that a lot because now we're starting to prepare for our 2025 year ahead forecast that we're going to record later in December on the 20th.

00:04:28 Speaker_01
Going back and reflecting on predictions last year has been an interesting part of that. So in terms of the news, obviously November is a huge month for news. At the top of the list is the results of the U.S. presidential election.

00:04:40 Speaker_01
So Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 5th, and it was a pretty decisive victory where he won all seven swing states that were needed to win the electoral college, basically.

00:04:55 Speaker_01
So there were some demographic shifts in his favor, with more people voting for him compared to previous elections, and Harris ended up calling him to concede and gave a concession speech on November 6th.

00:05:10 Speaker_01
There's been so much analysis and hot takes about it over the past few weeks that we're not going to do that here. But my goal is instead just to highlight some of the astrological correlations that I noticed.

00:05:23 Speaker_01
And I'll only mention certain pieces if I have a direct astrological thing to tie it into.

00:05:29 Speaker_01
So the purpose of this, as we always do each month, is to record some things that we learned from the past month, but also things we learned from just watching the astrology of the election play out, partially to record that for posterity, to hand it down to future generations of astrologers, to let them know some of the things that astrologers learned from this election cycle.

00:05:50 Speaker_01
So some of the long-term implications will have to wait for the year ahead forecast that we're going to be recording next month where we'll talk about the astrology of December 2025. And Austin, you're already deep into your research on that, right?

00:06:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, I spent a lot of the month trying to get ahead. I've got a busy December and I knew I would. So yeah, it started as prep for 2025 and it's really the 2025 to 2033 prep with a focus on 2025.

00:06:24 Speaker_00
Um, your comment earlier, um, about the, the yearly and just thinking about different distances, um, different levels of proximity to what you're talking about makes me want to actually write up some of the stuff I'm seeing for like 2028, 20, 2030, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:41 Speaker_00
Um, because I've been like, usually I'm like, oh, well, let's, you know, get a little closer. It makes me wonder now if I'm not able to see things a little bit more clearly when they're not right in my face. But interesting to think about.

00:06:57 Speaker_00
Worth noting that Mercury is retrograde right now as we record this. And so I'm like, well, maybe I should do the opposite of what I was thinking.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
All right. Yeah, we almost had to record this right on the Mercury retrograde station, but we actually found, I found an election at the very end of the month we could do instead a few days into it.

00:07:15 Speaker_01
So we'll see if this is a little bit, a little bit better than it would have been.

00:07:20 Speaker_01
So, in terms of the election, we didn't issue predictions for this presidential election, which has kind of been our standing policy, and we didn't issue presidential elections in 2020 either.

00:07:30 Speaker_01
I didn't personally want to put in the work necessary to do that well this year, because anytime I try to do something well, I think listeners of the podcast know, you know, I put a lot of energy into it, and that becomes my thing, like the seven

00:07:45 Speaker_01
hour or technically, I think, 14 hour if you take both parts into account, like fourth house episode that I just released. Sometimes in order to do things well, you have to really dig into it and do it thoroughly.

00:07:57 Speaker_01
And I did not want to spend the entire year like eating and sleeping and breathing politics in order to be able to put together what would be necessary to do those predictions well, rather than just doing it like sloppily.

00:08:09 Speaker_01
I think you were in a similar place, you said, right, Austin?

00:08:12 Speaker_00
Oh yeah. I mean, if we're going to, if I'm going to put a hundred hours into something, I want the best possible case to be something more valuable than getting a coin flip. Correct.

00:08:24 Speaker_00
You know, some of it's like the wind, like, what do you, what do I get for all that work? If I win people like, ah, you got a coin flip, right? If you lose, if you're wrong, then astrology is fake and you're a Charlton and you should probably.

00:08:38 Speaker_00
go flagellate yourself in the corner wearing a demeaning hat of some sort.

00:08:45 Speaker_01
Sure. Yeah.

00:08:46 Speaker_01
Well, and it's like the other part of that, it's like that's a piece of it that it takes a lot of work to like, like if I had done it, I would have sit down and like researched Trump's entire biography and like Harris's entire biography and then Waltz's biography and Vance's biography and everything else.

00:09:01 Speaker_01
So you have a complete picture of what their past transits have been like, and then can project that out in the future. But I just wanted to do astrology this year and focus on the houses series. So that's what I did instead.

00:09:12 Speaker_01
I also the other reason I don't do haven't been doing presidential predictions the past couple of cycles is because I think it's also dangerous for astrologers to get involved in politics.

00:09:22 Speaker_01
And I actually did an episode on this earlier this year talking about that and how that's worked out historically, going back to the 17th century with William Lillian, some of his contemporaries during the English Civil War.

00:09:34 Speaker_01
And you can listen to that episode. It was titled Prophecy and Power with the historians Patrick Curry and Nicholas Campion.

00:09:40 Speaker_01
So that's actually more the reason why I actually used to write a blog called the Political Astrology Blog with Patrick Watson that we started in 2008.

00:09:50 Speaker_01
But we ended up actually closing it down in 2013 after successfully predicting the 2012 presidential election. because I could see that politics was going to get more divisive over the course of the next decade.

00:10:05 Speaker_01
So instead, I decided to get out of politics because I didn't want to be involved in that. Instead, I started this podcast around that time in 2012.

00:10:13 Speaker_01
So nonetheless, we've been tracking obviously some things related to this election since we've been doing the news segments each month. So we've been noticing things that were in the news.

00:10:24 Speaker_01
And I think it's interesting now to note some of the things that we kind of learned in retrospect, as we do each month and sort of reflect on what astrologers could take from this election in terms of things we learned astrologically, where there's always a lot of things like that, I think, right?

00:10:40 Speaker_00
Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah. Yeah. You can watch an election unfold. There's a lot to look at without necessarily, yeah, without over-investing in the coin flip. And there's a lot to learn. There's a lot that's been observed. There's a lot

00:11:01 Speaker_00
I think there's a lot about this election that tells us a little bit more about this next sort of era that we cross into in 2025, which we've been talking about for a while.

00:11:14 Speaker_00
I think there's a lot of, yeah, there are a lot of little gems to mine or flowers to pluck, if you want to put it. Things of value worth focusing on.

00:11:25 Speaker_01
Right. And four years ago, Lisa and I did a post-election analysis after the 2020 election to just talk about some of the things that we learned from it privately.

00:11:34 Speaker_01
I decided to fold most of that into this forecast episode, although I may still do a bonus episode going into technical stuff in more detail, just as a little video for patrons at some point.

00:11:45 Speaker_01
So at the top of the list, one of the primary things for me was being fascinated by how the Zodiac releasing played out because this was tied in with some long-term predictions that I made going back a decade ago.

00:11:55 Speaker_01
So one of the things I've said pretty clearly in the past few forecast episodes is that the Zodiac releasing in this election wasn't decisive because both primary candidates were in

00:12:07 Speaker_01
peak periods, and it was showing that both of them had reached high points in their career during this time.

00:12:13 Speaker_01
So I had said on one of the previous forecasts that I didn't think then that you could use zodiac releasing to make a decisive prediction for either one, since they were both essentially equivalent or canceling each other out.

00:12:26 Speaker_01
So I did release an old clip of Lisa predicting that Kamala Harris would become more eminent in the 2020s that she had made back in like 2018 or something like that. But this is not an election prediction, and I wouldn't have released it if it was.

00:12:42 Speaker_01
But instead, it was just meant to take credit since she indeed did become more eminent, even more eminent, in 2024 as she became the nominee for a major political party, basically, and reached the newest high point in her career?

00:12:58 Speaker_00
Yeah, 100%. Like, she's much more eminent now than she was six months ago, right? Like, that's a huge jump in what that technique is tracking.

00:13:08 Speaker_01
Right. And then that clip specifically cuts off before talking about the 2024 election.

00:13:16 Speaker_01
So for me, though, in terms of the Zika releasing, it's interesting to finally see Trump's 25-year peak period beginning now, because this is something I'd been waiting to see how that would work out for over a decade now.

00:13:28 Speaker_01
And it was very tied into 2016 when I was involved in presidential predictions back then. I didn't think that he would get into the presidency then because we could see that his peak period wouldn't begin until 2025. And so we assumed that

00:13:44 Speaker_01
if he got in in 2016, that he would do two four-year terms and he would be leaving office in 2024, 2025, if he won in 2016.

00:13:53 Speaker_01
So we didn't anticipate a scenario where it's like he wins in 2016, he loses in 2020, and then he makes this stunning comeback in 2024, essentially.

00:14:02 Speaker_00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the first time that's happened? with presidents in the United States or is there a previous instance?

00:14:12 Speaker_01
There was like one other president like Garfield or somebody like that that made a comeback, but it's otherwise extremely rare and not anything we've seen anytime in like modern times. Okay, Garfield.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
So that was interesting, because I ended up being wrong in 2016, then due to that, about my presidential prediction back then. But now eight years later, I finally know why.

00:14:35 Speaker_01
And Nick Digenbest and I discussed this two years ago in an episode on the Uranus return of the United States, where he was in a similar position in terms of seeing that Trump would hit a major

00:14:46 Speaker_01
career peak in 2024-2025, but then having a hard time squaring that back in 2016 with whether he would get in at that time. So now we know why he begins his biggest career peak in 2025, and

00:15:03 Speaker_01
It was interesting because Patrick Watson and I actually had debates about this after the 2016 election, where we were trying to figure out what went wrong and why he had won and what the technical reason for that was.

00:15:16 Speaker_01
And different solutions were proposed, and we had debates about it. But I told Patrick, I was like, we just have to wait because we need to see how things play out. We need to see what happens in 2025.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
So I've been waiting for eight years now to see if this is indeed what would happen. And it's been pretty surreal to see it all play out like this.

00:15:36 Speaker_01
So just imagine everybody as an astrologer waiting eight years to find out if something that you predicted would actually come true or something that you were anticipating as a potential scenario would actually play out.

00:15:49 Speaker_01
And that's kind of what my experience partially of November has been like. you had any long-term predictions? I mean, you're just talking about doing some long-term predictions, but it's a big one.

00:16:01 Speaker_01
I mean, I guess we all have personal ones like that essentially.

00:16:03 Speaker_00
AC Yeah, I really tend to focus on sort of the macro environment and what the world looks like. I really don't follow individual biographies to the same degree when I'm thinking about the future.

00:16:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. And that one was unique just because we were so focused on the presidential election and trying to trying to predict it. Yeah. So in other astrological things that I learned about this, there were a lot of omens and repetitions.

00:16:35 Speaker_01
So there were eclipse repetitions, I think, first and foremost, where the great American eclipse that occurred earlier this year seemed like a repetition of the one that happened back in 2017, which is just months into Trump's first presidency.

00:16:51 Speaker_01
And I had always associated that eclipse with him back in 2017 because it happened in Leo right on his Ascendant degree. And it was like,

00:17:01 Speaker_01
I sort of saw it at the time as an omen of his ascendancy, essentially, because it was right on his ascendant, and it happened a few months into his presidency.

00:17:10 Speaker_01
But then we had an interesting repetition of that, of course, where there was another eclipse where the path crossed America, and millions of Americans witnessed it earlier this year. And we only got two eclipses like that that occur any time

00:17:27 Speaker_01
in our recent timeframe, and they both happen to be in those two or around those two election years, around the time of Trump's wins now in retrospect.

00:17:37 Speaker_00
Well, and it's important to note that he's in eclipse nativity. We have Rahu or the North Node on the Sun in his chart, and then the Moon is on the South Node. And he's born the day of an eclipse.

00:17:52 Speaker_00
I believe it had just ended of visibility, but his chart is very eclipsy. And so that's a nice tie-in.

00:18:03 Speaker_01
CB Yeah, for sure. So he responds strongly to eclipses, which is one of the things that we've discovered over the past year with some of the intense

00:18:12 Speaker_01
eclipse research that began in late 2023 is that people born on eclipses tend to have very important turning points in their life happen under eclipses as well, and that continues to be true for him.

00:18:24 Speaker_01
Other omens, there was this visible comet that we talked about last month in October, just before Election Day,

00:18:30 Speaker_01
And I thought this was striking because some of the comet research I did a year ago for the Year Ahead Forecast in 2024 and talked about back then, one of the things I learned last year is that the ancient Chinese astronomers and astrologers called comets broom stars, and sometimes they were taken as an omen of sweeping away whatever the current government is at that time.

00:18:55 Speaker_01
And there's other deeper implications of that, but I think that continues to intrigue me in terms of comments and some of that ancient wisdom surrounding that.

00:19:02 Speaker_01
There were some statistics this year that came out after the election that it was like that this was the first election or first year since like the early 1900s or something like that, since they'd been tracking this, where every incumbent government lost in the elections

00:19:22 Speaker_01
compared to any other year in recent times. And I think there's something striking about that, and it might be relevant in terms of those two comets that we saw take place that were visible this year.

00:19:34 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's interesting. That makes – if we're using that as a frame, the one in April could potentially be interpreted in hindsight as the removal of Biden or the withdrawal of Biden as a candidate. Yeah, that's a good point.

00:19:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, because it would have been shortly after that that the first debate took place, and that was what led to his downfall, basically.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
All right, so moving on other there's been other repetitions as well though with both nativities of candidates as well as Venus placements in the Venus cycle so one of the things I thought was so striking as soon as Harris became the primary candidate and that I realized right away is that Harris and Hillary Clinton were both born with Gemini rising and Mercury and Scorpio and I thought this was an incredibly striking repetition that the two

00:20:35 Speaker_01
The same two candidates that went up against Trump in 2016 and 2024 were both women with Gemini rising and Mercury in Scorpio.

00:20:45 Speaker_01
And of course, since it happened eight years apart, that's one exact Venus cycle, so that Venus was roughly in the same degree on Election Day in 2024 that it was eight years earlier in 2016 when Hillary lost to Trump.

00:21:04 Speaker_01
And then there was this weird repetition of that with Harris losing to Trump eight years later with Venus in the same position.

00:21:09 Speaker_01
And then, of course, Venus will also be in roughly the same degree and the same zodiac sign on inauguration day, coming up here in January, as it was eight years earlier, when Trump was first inaugurated.

00:21:22 Speaker_01
So sometimes in astrology, we see these repetitions come up and there's this question of like, are events going to repeat or will something like break the cycle?

00:21:33 Speaker_01
But here so much of the repetitions in this instance, this year seemed to be really repetitions of astronomical phenomenon really closely coinciding with repetitions of what the actual events or outcome were in these cycles at the same time.

00:21:50 Speaker_00
Yeah. It's really interesting. A few points. One, just pause for a second and think about how unlikely it is that the two people Trump ever runs for president against both have the same rising ruled by the same planet and the same degree.

00:22:08 Speaker_00
That's roughly one in 144, which is significantly less than 1% chance. Um, that's really interesting. Um, makes you want to think of the sinister, like what is his, like, what is the relationship that he has with Gemini ruled by Scorpio?

00:22:26 Speaker_00
Um, and then second on the Venus. You know, it's interesting because, uh, that, that Venus and Leo, which we talked about extensively, um, before, during, and after it happened, uh, last year.

00:22:43 Speaker_00
you know, for him that went over his, that like was right near his ascendant. And seems to, you know, seems to have taken him from underdog status to a surprising victory in both cases.

00:22:59 Speaker_00
And just as you're talking about it, as we're talking about it now, it's bringing me back to the kind of figures that we saw during the Venus retrograde in Leo.

00:23:09 Speaker_00
And so one of the big events that contained and channeled that energy was the Barbie movie.

00:23:18 Speaker_00
But in addition to that, when I was doing research, I also saw a bunch of Hulk Hogan and Arnold Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding stuff, as well as I think that we can also see that retrograde as inaugurating Taylor Swift's

00:23:37 Speaker_00
complete dominance of the human world. And the way I was abbreviating that, I was like, oh, it's these big blonde American winning machines. And it's that kind of energy.

00:23:52 Speaker_00
And I didn't think about that with Trump, but that looks a lot better a match in retrospect now.

00:24:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I want to talk about that more a little bit because I also think there's a connection between that Venus retrograde in Leo from last year and the Mars retrograde in Leo that's happening now.

00:24:13 Speaker_01
But I'll circle it back around to the points that you just made, which are good. So there was also repetitions that we talked about a lot over the late summer with 1968 and repetitions with eclipses plus the Venus cycle.

00:24:29 Speaker_01
So we talked about a lot of this around the time of the DNC because we could see that there were all these like bizarre repetitions with 1968.

00:24:39 Speaker_01
And that was tied in with the fact that there was a solar eclipse in Aries in both years and also Venus was in an exact repetition based on those eight-year cycles so that Venus was transiting the same degrees and the same signs roughly.

00:24:54 Speaker_01
that summer. So we had, in both years, it's like Biden stepping down, the president stepping down and not seeking re-election, just like we had Johnston stepping aside and not seeking re-election in 1968.

00:25:06 Speaker_01
We had a tense Democratic convention taking place over the summer in both years. We had assassination attempts on candidates' lives in both years. We had a Kennedy running in both years, and etc. There's probably more correlations

00:25:21 Speaker_00
Let me just add one thing to the assassination attempts. MLK was killed on April 4th of 1968, right around a solar eclipse in Ares. right.

00:25:37 Speaker_00
And we've been, you know, we've been seeing assassinations both within the United States, but just as, uh, as an instrument of, I don't know what you'd call it. Um, conflict, um, on the rise all over the world.

00:25:50 Speaker_00
And a lot of these comp, uh, in a lot of existing conflicts during, um, this North note in Aries period. And it's a little shocking to see, um, you know, one of the most famous and tragic assassinations had exactly that same signature.

00:26:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, and it's like the Sun is in its exaltation in Aries, and sometimes it's the singular figure who has this exalted status because it wasn't just MLK, but also not long after MLK was the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

00:26:20 Speaker_01
And interestingly, it's like that assassination, as we noted in previous episodes, partially had to do with

00:26:27 Speaker_01
his stance on, I think it was like sending arms to Israel, and there was a Palestinian man who ended up killing RFK partially as a result of that, supposedly.

00:26:38 Speaker_01
Although there's lots of weird mysteries surrounding it, like there are a lot of those assassinations in the 1960s.

00:26:45 Speaker_01
So the final repetition that I was waiting to see once we had established that all of those repetitions were happening is that the disarray essentially in the Democratic Party that occurred in 1968 eventually resulted in a sweeping victory for Richard Nixon, which brought him into the presidency by the end of that year.

00:27:06 Speaker_01
And then that's basically what happened here, where there was a sweeping victory later in the year for Trump that brought him into power, basically.

00:27:16 Speaker_01
So yeah, a lot of interesting repetitions with that just based on the Venus, the coincidence of the Venus and the eclipse cycles.

00:27:24 Speaker_01
So in other news, we had anticipated delays, and the anticipated delays ended up being the House, which was undecided for quite a while, where while the election itself was called quickly by that night or the next day, November 6th, the control of the House was actually up in the air for a week or so.

00:27:45 Speaker_01
And this ended up coinciding with the application of Mercury to square the planet Saturn. What was fascinating about that is that it was eventually resolved around November 14th, just after the Mercury-Saturn square completed.

00:28:00 Speaker_01
This was important because some of the elections were extremely close and it took a while to count the votes, but it mattered in terms of whether Republicans would end up controlling all branches of government.

00:28:14 Speaker_01
And in the end, they ended up taking the House as well, so that they secured the presidency, the House, the Senate, and have a majority on the Supreme Court.

00:28:24 Speaker_01
So that was interesting that that coincided with that, in terms of just some of the Mercury-Saturn delays. You actually had made an interesting statement that with, after the election, that there would be this weird period of what did you say?

00:28:44 Speaker_01
But it ended up being like strikingly true of just like, things were oddly calm for like a week or so after the election, where everybody was kind of like, waiting to see what happened or something.

00:28:55 Speaker_01
And there did end up being like this eerie, sort of like silence, not just from from the Harris campaign, but also from the Trump campaign and like the week after election day, before things like started really, really moving.

00:29:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, I don't remember what I said, but that was the gist of it. And that I, as well as you, are interested in seeing what happens when Mercury comes back to those degrees, which is yet to happen.

00:29:23 Speaker_01
CB Yeah, that and the Mars station, and we'll come back to that in a minute.

00:29:29 Speaker_00
AC Yeah, we're going to talk about the Mars station kind of all day. Uh, like once we get to the past, that's about, I don't know, 60% of the future we're going to discuss.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, for sure.

00:29:43 Speaker_01
In other news, all astrologers, the Pluto-Sun conjunction in the inauguration chart, every astrologer that looked at this election noted this extremely close applying Sun-Pluto conjunction on Inauguration Day, now that Pluto has gone into Aquarius.

00:29:59 Speaker_01
Because the Sun on Inauguration Day, it's always on January 20th, so the Sun is always at like one degree of Aquarius. first degree of Aquarius or so.

00:30:07 Speaker_01
But now Pluto is there so that there's this close alignment of those two planets, which is one of the most striking features of the 2025 inauguration.

00:30:17 Speaker_01
And I think this is important and striking and makes a little bit more sense now because the Sun is traditionally the king or like the leader of a country. whereas Pluto is about power and the consolidation of power.

00:30:31 Speaker_01
And I think what this is, is that it's about the centralization of power in the executive branch with the president and the moves that may happen to consolidate unilateral power under the office.

00:30:47 Speaker_01
So it's also probably about one party being in control now of all branches of government, which is, as I said, the presidency, the House, the Senate, and essentially the Supreme Court. So our entire government for the past—

00:31:03 Speaker_01
200 years has been based on the idea of checks and balances between the different branches. But now, because of the sweeping nature of the victory, there's almost unchecked power in the hands of an individual as well as a group. And

00:31:20 Speaker_01
Now, we sort of wait to see what they're going to do with that.

00:31:23 Speaker_01
I tried to look in the past where other majorities like that happened, and the Democrats had something close to that in the 1960s, and they used it to pass the Civil Rights Act and to really push that through Congress.

00:31:38 Speaker_01
So now, Trump and the Republicans will have that power to achieve whatever their goals are and whatever that ends up being, basically.

00:31:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, and it's it's worth noting that there that whenever that we're heading into the Uranus and Gemini years and that the Uranus and Gemini years consistently show a peak of executive authority for the president.

00:32:04 Speaker_00
If we go back, it was FDR and then Lincoln and then Washington. And so it makes sense that we're heading into period where the executive branch is very strong and is potentially able to command or align other branches in accord with it.

00:32:24 Speaker_00
It's also worth noting that that Uranus and Gemini period runs till 2033, and we just get a taste of it next year. It extends well beyond the next presidential term. Right. Yeah.

00:32:38 Speaker_01
And Yeah, the extension of that period.

00:32:41 Speaker_01
And then, you know, you had talked about in previous episodes about how there had always been this like central figure in the Uranus and Gemini periods, which had been like FDR or Lincoln or George Washington in the first one, and whether there would be the arising of this central figure again during that time.

00:33:00 Speaker_01
And Nick Degan Best, I was talking to him about this, and he pointed out that the difference this time is that in all previous of those three previous periods, Jupiter has come through Gemini and conjoined Uranus at some point there, coinciding with this Great Man

00:33:16 Speaker_01
or centralized figure, basically, who's in charge of everything and leads the country through a conflict of some sort.

00:33:23 Speaker_01
But what's weird about this cycle, Nick pointed out to me, is that Jupiter, because it hit Gemini early this year, it won't conjoin Uranus during this cycle.

00:33:33 Speaker_01
So this will be our first time experiencing, as a country, a Uranus return in Gemini, which has traditionally involved a conflict, but having it without Jupiter transit through Gemini at some point during that

00:33:45 Speaker_01
that seven-year period that Jupiter transits through that sign or that Uranus transits through that sign.

00:33:49 Speaker_00
AC Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting point.

00:33:54 Speaker_00
Likewise, it'll be interesting to see whether Jupiter's sextile from Leo to Uranus and trine from Libra end up getting the job done and if they do, what that looks like and if it's meaningfully different.

00:34:10 Speaker_00
It's worth noting that 2028 has a Jupiter-Uranus trine. Yeah. Which is basically the most love that Uranus is going to get from Jupiter during that period.

00:34:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff interesting in 2028 and 2032. as I've started to look forward, but we'll save that for another time. Other things, the Mars retrograde in Leo ended up being decisive for Trump.

00:34:38 Speaker_01
So what's interesting, if you go back and listen to our year ahead forecast, I discovered this 79-year cycle where Mars always repeats almost to the degree where it's stationed retrograde every 79 years.

00:34:51 Speaker_01
So that means when it stations retrograde in Leo this December, if you go back 79 years before that, you'll find that Mars stationed very close to the same degree in Leo.

00:35:03 Speaker_01
And this cycle, I discovered this like right before the year ahead election last year, the year ahead forecast last year, and you can see me be kind of startled by it in that recording because I just discovered this.

00:35:16 Speaker_01
where I found that that 79-year cycle goes all the way back in American history, and it goes all the way back to the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 and 1788, when there was a similar Mars retrograde period that was happening in Leo.

00:35:33 Speaker_01
And what was happening then is they were having debates as they're trying to ratify the Constitution about the federal government, and how much they should even create a centralized federal government versus how much the power should be in the hands of the states.

00:35:47 Speaker_01
And so somehow there's a resonance with that original debate about the Constitution and the creation of the Constitution and the tensions within it, compared to something that's happening that's being unlocked now.

00:35:58 Speaker_01
And then, of course, weirdly, if you go back 70, just 79 years from now, you go to 1945 and 1946, where you end up with Trump. And Trump was born with Mars and Leo just after it came off of that Mars and Leo retrograde period.

00:36:16 Speaker_01
So this Mars retrograde then acts as like a recurrence transit for him, activating something that was built into his birth chart since the beginning, coinciding with this Mars retrograde period.

00:36:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's really interesting.

00:36:30 Speaker_01
Yeah, so that discovery began me on a whole process of researching Babylonian Goliar periods, which actually resulted in some other successful predictions in May.

00:36:40 Speaker_01
So it remains to be seen still whether any challenging first house themes arise for Trump when Mars stations in his first house next month.

00:36:51 Speaker_01
But I think right now the main lesson is just that the retrograde signified his win because he was born just after the same retrograde cycle in 1946.

00:37:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, that would have been, I think that would have, in retrospect, we can see that signifying the win, but it's like, it signifies Mars, right? Like it's a full match or it's like the full, it's a complete Mars cycle.

00:37:18 Speaker_00
And Mars so often brings difficulty. I would have had a hard time saying that the full maturation of that Mars cycle would mean that he wins. It would mean that we would see Mars' significations, which in this case was a win.

00:37:34 Speaker_00
But I think that's more difficult in retrospect. Yeah, it comes down to a fundamental issue. It's easier in retrospect. It's much harder in foresight.

00:37:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, it comes down to a fundamental issue we have as astrologers making predictions based on the recurrence of malefic transits because we so often

00:37:58 Speaker_01
see the negative side of that subjectively, where something subjectively negative happens to the native.

00:38:05 Speaker_01
But then in other instances, it's like we do see that there are some people, in the same way that some people respond to Venus retrogrades and really important turning points happen in their life under those, there's other people that respond to Mars retrogrades.

00:38:19 Speaker_01
and we'll talk about one of them actually in just a moment. So more broadly, this Mars retrograde in Leo seems to be connected with men in a broader sense.

00:38:29 Speaker_01
And it almost seems like, as you were saying earlier, Austin, like the counterpart or an inversion to what happened last summer when we had the Venus retrograde in Leo. And it seemed like the summer where

00:38:44 Speaker_01
where women and women's themes were being talked about more, in that sign that the Barbie movie was released when it stationed Retrograde in Leo.

00:38:57 Speaker_01
And then you had these massive concerts that year by both Taylor Swift, but also Beyonce, as well as other themes that were coming up at that time.

00:39:07 Speaker_01
So now that Mars is slowing down and stationing Retrograde in Leo, a lot of the post-election analysis is talking about men.

00:39:15 Speaker_01
And the way that Trump was partially carried to victory by men, where exit polls were showing that something like 55% of men voted for Trump versus 53% of women voted for Harris.

00:39:30 Speaker_01
And there was also a major role in terms of male influencers who took on a major role in terms of this election cycle, especially in the rise of the male podcasters and things like that, and the way that that influenced this election.

00:39:46 Speaker_01
The most important and striking one of which was Joe Rogan, who actually, as we've talked about in previous episodes, started his podcast 15 years ago under a Mars retrograde in Leo in 2009.

00:40:01 Speaker_01
So it's the same exact Mars retrograde cycle 15 years ago is when he started his podcast. And then his success has influenced all similar podcasts today and has spawned so many other imitations or other people using that format for different things.

00:40:21 Speaker_01
So he ended up, of course, playing a notable role in this election, where he ended up interviewing both Trump and Vance towards the end of the election. And then he ended up actually endorsing Trump at the very end.

00:40:36 Speaker_01
There was also some drama over whether Harris would go on Rogan's podcast, and there was this weird week or two where it's like, she might do it, she might not do it, where they were trying to negotiate something, but ultimately she didn't end up doing it.

00:40:51 Speaker_01
But regardless, it seemed like Rogan in particular became a central figure in this election, as well as in part of the broader, almost like rightward shift in the country.

00:41:04 Speaker_01
And although he's obviously just like one piece of a larger phenomenon, but this Mars retrograde was clearly significant to both him personally, as well as like his role and impact on the country in general.

00:41:18 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, it's really interesting that this year is like the 15th year of the podcast. It kind of feels like it's just Eubrogan's been around forever. When I saw that in your notes, I was like, really? It was only 2009.

00:41:33 Speaker_00
know, which is two universes ago. But like that timing increment, like that 15 years being Marshall and looking at his chart, you know, he has an angular Mars and Scorpio, right? Like that is a Marshall chart. Like the

00:41:52 Speaker_00
People move, people not only act in a way that is consonant with the nature of the planets that are dominant in their chart, especially if there's a super strong one, but they also move at the pace and along with the time scales of the planets that they're really tied to.

00:42:12 Speaker_00
And that angular Mars in Scorpio just ties him to Mars' timeframe. And if you're looking at one complete cycle of Mars, right? Could the podcast, could Rogan's podcast, how should we say, have

00:42:33 Speaker_00
matured any further to like, you know, from like whatever sort of like stinky sweatpants basement shit to like being, being the talk of the town in like in the days leading up to a presidential election where, you know, interviewing one candidate and maybe interviewing another that it's, yeah, it's just so, it's just so obviously like the maturation of a Mars thing for someone who's got a really strong Mars.

00:43:02 Speaker_00
And of course, he has Sun, Jupiter and Mercury in Leo that are square to or angular to that Mars.

00:43:11 Speaker_01
CB Right. So he's a good example of that then in terms of malefics needing to account for that in the same way that we've done such extensive Venus retrograde studies.

00:43:22 Speaker_01
And we can see how those repetitions coincide with turning points for people that are keyed into that cycle. There's other people like Rogan that are

00:43:29 Speaker_01
very closely keyed into Mars retrograde cycles for him because he has a night chart and because he has Mars in Scorpio and he has a Leo stellium we can understand why that's so key for him as well as tends to be more subjectively positive for him personally in terms of starting his podcast or now becoming almost like a like a kingmaker during this presidential election like just you know random guy that just started a podcast having such a oversized influence on

00:43:58 Speaker_01
presidential election.

00:44:00 Speaker_00
Having any influence is extraordinary. And just as another Mars note, another part of Rogan's rise is that he started doing the commentary for the UFC when it was like nothing being, when it was two guys fighting in a cage in a barn.

00:44:20 Speaker_00
Um, and that his profile also, um, also rose as UFC became a sport rivaling, um, and in some cases exceeding a lot of the established sports. Right. And that's like with, you know, that's a movement that's riding along with Mars.

00:44:37 Speaker_01
CB Right.

00:44:37 Speaker_01
So it's like we can see in his case how those periods have worked out and how it's worked out in a subjectively positive way, but we need to then reflect on that when it comes to Trump, for example, where sometimes malefics, when they're prominent in a chart like Mars, sometimes when Mars is prominent in the chart, it just means the person will

00:44:53 Speaker_01
sometimes respond to and have some of the most important turning points in their life happen when that natal Mars placement is activated.

00:45:00 Speaker_01
And there may be some challenging stuff that comes along with that subjectively, but it will also coincide with some of the most pivotal turning points in the person's life. And I think that's part of what we saw here.

00:45:12 Speaker_00
Like getting nearly missed by a bullet in Trump's case. With Trump's Mars is more ambivalent. in terms of its beneficence towards the native, whereas Rogan has like a great Mars in a night chart. Sure.

00:45:29 Speaker_01
Yeah. So all right. So moving on, because we'll come back to Mars in the forecast where it's like the gravitational pull of this Mars retrograde is already dragging us into talking about it. For sure.

00:45:39 Speaker_01
So I want to talk about Jupiter and Gemini because I talked about this on the last forecast episode, but it came even more strikingly clear by the end of the election, which is that with Jupiter and Gemini this year, this really did become the podcast election.

00:45:55 Speaker_01
where long form discussions became key. And I think that's such an amazing delineation of Jupiter in Gemini is long form discussions. That's a really polite way to put it. That's a polite way to put it.

00:46:08 Speaker_01
Well, you should be very polite because guess who started their podcast under Jupiter in Gemini 12 years ago? This guy.

00:46:16 Speaker_00
And people have politely referred to you as long form.

00:46:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, very polite. And me as well. Right. So if you needed any better demonstration of that, you have me.

00:46:29 Speaker_01
But then, of course, in a year in which Jupiter is in Gemini, I was very taken by the fact that these podcasts and the long form discussions involved in them actually potentially became really key to the presidential race as one major factor in terms of its outcome.

00:46:47 Speaker_01
And in a way that they were not up until this point, that this was actually a turning point or a sort of watershed moment.

00:46:54 Speaker_01
So part of that is that, as everybody knows that's like listening to this or has been listening to this podcast for a long time, you really get to know people better by listening to extended discussions involving them.

00:47:06 Speaker_01
And one of the issues is that Harris seemed to avoid or seem to not be comfortable, for the most part, doing some of these long-form podcasts, whereas Trump fully embraced it. And I think this ended up being major contributing factor in the election.

00:47:24 Speaker_01
So especially at first, she seemed to be avoiding doing some of this.

00:47:28 Speaker_01
And I think part of what happened, if I can give an astrological spin to it, is I think that with Mercury and Scorpio as the chart ruler, that she was attempting to do more controlled settings and just like to stay on message and to avoid mistakes as much as possible.

00:47:45 Speaker_01
And you can actually see a similar thing that Clinton did eight years ago

00:47:50 Speaker_01
before this, also with Mercury and Scorpio, where she also avoided doing what existed as the long-form format at that time, which is she had an offer to go on Howard Stern in the 2016 election, but she didn't do it.

00:48:04 Speaker_01
And in a later interview, she said that she regretted that, actually. So that was one of the few longer interviews that Harris made sure that she did do this year, I'm sure trying to correct that mistake that was identified from eight years ago.

00:48:18 Speaker_01
But nonetheless, I think the Harris campaign, I'm assuming, viewed long-form discussions as more dangerous because it's harder to stay on message and there's more opportunities for error.

00:48:30 Speaker_01
And then even the bigger ones that she did do later in the cycle, like when she went on Call Her Daddy,

00:48:37 Speaker_01
they kept it short to an hour-long discussion, which is a little short for some of those formats where some of the episodes can go to two hours or even three hours. So it gave people less opportunity to get to know her.

00:48:51 Speaker_01
And ultimately, she also didn't do Rogan, even though that could have happened. And I do think that that was a major mistake. It could have been challenging for her to go on to that platform and have

00:49:04 Speaker_01
whatever debates would have happened with him, but it would have been a huge audience that she could have spoken to, but instead she didn't, or it didn't work out for whatever reason.

00:49:14 Speaker_01
So obviously, this is not the only factor in what happened with the outcome of the election, but I still think it's important in a year with Jupiter and Gemini,

00:49:21 Speaker_01
And by contrast, it's like Trump, on the other hand, embraced podcasts from very early on, and it was clear that that was a major part of his strategy starting in the late summer, where he went on not just shows like Joe Rogan, but also on comedy podcasts like Theo Vaughn.

00:49:38 Speaker_01
and others like that. So one of the transits for him is that Jupiter was transiting his 11th house in Gemini and conjoining his son.

00:49:46 Speaker_01
So he ended up getting supported by this wide range of allies in the male, especially podcasting sphere that had built up over the past decade.

00:49:57 Speaker_01
And I thought it was also interesting because at one point in some of those interviews Because I tried to listen to both the ones Harris and Trump were doing to see if they would drop like biographical facts that were useful for astrology and Trump like I think shouted out his son Baron at one point and Baron may have been giving him tips for like as a younger person like what podcast to go on and I thought this is an interesting manifestation of Trump having Jupiter as the ruler of his fifth house of children in his third house of communication and that was of course also getting activated this year

00:50:27 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's a nice insight. Yeah.

00:50:30 Speaker_01
So just to give you context, though, and some numbers, there was this amazing video that was like a post-election analysis on the YouTube channel by Colin and Samir that was titled How YouTube Podcasts Predicted the 2024 Election.

00:50:45 Speaker_01
And this is from a channel that usually just interviews YouTube creators and like has like the pulse on what's going on with YouTube. And they did this post-election analysis where they said that Trump went on

00:50:56 Speaker_01
15, he went on 14 podcasts that got 124 million views on YouTube. Whereas by contrast, they said that Harris only went on five podcasts that only got four 4 million views on YouTube.

00:51:08 Speaker_01
So those are just like staggering numbers in terms of the number of people that Trump was able to reach with that versus Harris, not being able to reach such a huge audience. And I think

00:51:20 Speaker_01
The crucial difference is that Harris was focusing more on like traditional media and was spending a lot of money that had been raised on like, you know, advertisements and stuff like that.

00:51:29 Speaker_01
Whereas Trump, basically, those are like free advertisements just by going on and doing a podcast for a couple of hours, and you reach millions of people.

00:51:38 Speaker_01
So I think this will be remembered as the podcast election to some extent, and it will be seen as a watershed moment that both sides will use and account for next time in 2028. where they won't make the same mistakes.

00:51:52 Speaker_01
And I think astrologers should remember that it happened under Jupiter and Gemini.

00:51:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, 100%. And I would also add to that, that Jupiter doesn't conjoin Uranus and Gemini this time around, but it does precede it, right? Uranus actually moves into Gemini right after Jupiter leaves Gemini.

00:52:17 Speaker_00
And so we have this baton passing rather than a conjunction this time. And there's been a lot of talk since the election about the, how should we say, the viability and power of, I guess what people are calling legacy media or

00:52:37 Speaker_00
quote unquote, mainstream media, but you know, news, news from like, whatever News Corp, CNN and MSNBC, Fox, blah, blah, blah. But like that, that news that is produced in that way, versus the the power of podcasting platforms and more

00:52:58 Speaker_00
Oh, how should we say, um, more amateur, um, more bottom up versus top down stuff. And if we're thinking about the, if we like a number of people are thinking about the future. of legacy media, we call it like top-down versus bottom-up stuff.

00:53:16 Speaker_00
Uranus is about to move into that next, is about to move into that space. And so, you know, I think that this election will be cited when we start seeing a lot, when we start seeing significant movements there.

00:53:32 Speaker_00
You know, we don't, when we look at the history of Uranus and Gemini, We tend to focus on, I don't know, kind of significant things like, I don't know, World War II, civil war.

00:53:43 Speaker_00
But, you know, what we haven't done that might be worth doing before next time is looking at the information environment in the country. right? Because it's Gemini, right? It's pretty important.

00:53:55 Speaker_00
If we were not sort of stunned by these historical landmarks that occurred during that period, we might look at what did the information environment look like? And did that actually change significantly? And did that play an important role?

00:54:12 Speaker_00
My guess is yes.

00:54:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, totally. That's a really great point. Let's do that for the year ahead forecast. Yeah. All right, moving on, because I want to nail a few of these other things. I know this is going on a few things to talk about. I'm sorry.

00:54:25 Speaker_01
But yeah, I want to you know, well, I want to wait, you know, because last four years ago, I did a separate episode, but I wanted to wait and see how some things played out.

00:54:34 Speaker_01
And I'm glad I did, because a few of the next few points were things that happened after the election. And if I had done a whole separate episode, few days after I would have missed.

00:54:42 Speaker_01
So one of them really quickly is inflation was a major motivating factor according to a lot of the polls in the election and why people voted the way that they did.

00:54:52 Speaker_01
And I thought this is interesting because remember, inflation originally happened a few years ago.

00:54:57 Speaker_01
during the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction and there were some amazing graphs that we shared back then towards the end of that about how some of the inflation peaks perfectly coincided with the alignment of Jupiter and Neptune in Pisces.

00:55:10 Speaker_01
So I thought this was interesting because of course this year we've talked about in the past year in the Yearhead Forecast, we've come to the square between Jupiter and Neptune once Jupiter went into Gemini.

00:55:22 Speaker_01
And so this is the opening or the waxing square between those two planets. So of course, this square ends up referring back to what happened or what started at the conjunction.

00:55:33 Speaker_01
And I think that's really striking then that what happened a few years ago impacted this election so closely.

00:55:39 Speaker_01
So it's a good lesson about how the relationship between a conjunction and a waxing square works in some instances and connects two points in time.

00:55:49 Speaker_00
Yeah. And then Saturn being in the mix makes it a more damning thing. Where people are wanting to, with Senate, it's like, who do we hold responsible for this thing? Whose fault is it? Let's look at the damage.

00:56:04 Speaker_01
For sure. All right, next point. This is the one that I discovered afterwards. This is one of the most stunning correlations I saw. Biden and Trump met at the White House on November 13th.

00:56:15 Speaker_01
And there's a video of them sitting there in front of the fire talking after or before their meeting. I don't know which it was. But this was incredibly striking, because this occurred

00:56:24 Speaker_01
on November 13th, which was two days before Saturn stationed direct in Pisces. And why that is striking is because their first debate back in June happened two days before Saturn stationed in Pisces.

00:56:39 Speaker_01
So it was an extremely close and stunning correlation where that first debate that was so devastating for Biden and led him to drop out of the race, and then led to Harris taking over and everything else, happened as that Saturn was stationing.

00:56:59 Speaker_01
And then months later, at the next Saturn station, we get the outcome or the result, essentially, of that first station happening at the second one, exactly two days before.

00:57:12 Speaker_01
So that was both connecting those two events, but of course had deeper meanings because Saturn is transiting Biden's fourth house, which is like his home and living situation, and he was essentially meeting with the person who would be moving into his home.

00:57:27 Speaker_01
And then the reason why he was moving into his home connected back to an event that occurred at the first station when Biden lost that debate and had such a difficult performance due to his age.

00:57:39 Speaker_01
So this is a really good demonstration that astrologers should take note of how stations work. And sometimes that's really hard to articulate because they happen over such long spans of time that you have to track.

00:57:50 Speaker_01
But in this instance, we have a really, really striking demonstration of that. Yeah, that's a gem. Yeah. Lastly, transits.

00:58:01 Speaker_01
Trump had Jupiter conjoining his sun on Election Day, whereas Harris had Mars squaring her Mercury, which is the ruler of the Ascendant and the Lord of the Year.

00:58:10 Speaker_01
And I think those two transits proved to be the most decisive in terms of transit analysis for Election Day itself.

00:58:19 Speaker_01
Uranus and Gemini is also a factor for Trump, and this is one of Nick Dagan Best's major factors going back two years ago that he predicted for Trump.

00:58:29 Speaker_01
I guess we've already talked about this, though, in terms of the question about a leader during this cycle, and we'll see how that plays out. Other transits, Saturn stationed in Harris's 10th house the week after the election.

00:58:42 Speaker_01
For months, I'd been wondering if that Saturn transit in her 10th house, since she has a night chart and that transit would normally be interpreted as very difficult, like a major setback in terms of one's career, if that Saturn transit would counteract the 10th house eclipse that occurred in September, which normally would indicate an elevation for somebody,

00:59:04 Speaker_01
and normally is for presidential elections, tends to push things in a person's favor if it's happening in a person's angular houses. So that eclipse happened in September around the time of the debate.

00:59:16 Speaker_01
So we had thought that the debate was like a good sign that the Saturn transit wouldn't be as bad for her. But in the end, it wasn't.

00:59:25 Speaker_01
And it turned out the answer was yes, that the Saturn transit can counteract the eclipse or even cancel it out in some sense entirely.

00:59:34 Speaker_01
So it just ended up being that the debate was her greatest moment of importance in terms of what she had to do during this election cycle and her greatest moment of elevation, as well as just the fact that she had been elevated at all, whereas Biden's political career with the eclipse happening in his fourth house essentially came to an end during that same timeframe.

00:59:54 Speaker_01
But then she was essentially elevated and then suffered a very public defeat. So in some ways, it was like a very classic Saturn in the 10th house transit, where sometimes we're kind of raised up at some points in our life so that we can fall.

01:00:08 Speaker_01
And that's not always the most, you know, positive scenario. But sometimes that is a scenario that happens to people. Yeah, like Mike Tyson, like Mike Tyson, who was also on that Saturn station, exactly like another major parallel with that.

01:00:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, I don't know if you want to get to that right now, but that's sad. That's perfect Saturn station material. And also equally Mars, just about retrograde material. Let's save it.

01:00:36 Speaker_01
Cause I'm going to finish this section and then I want to take a break. One of the things that happened is now the Mercury retrograde has started to take place.

01:00:46 Speaker_01
What happened is right when Mercury Station, at the end of the month, the Harris campaign leadership went on one of the main liberal podcasts, Pod Save America, on November 26th, the day after Mercury Station retrograde.

01:00:59 Speaker_01
recounting and reflecting and reviewing on what happened, which are all Mercury retrograde keywords, although it didn't seem like it was super well received and they were often criticized, it seemed like, in terms of accountability for that.

01:01:14 Speaker_01
In terms of the presidential election going forward, it remains to be seen still what some of the other transits are about that are coming up.

01:01:22 Speaker_01
Is Mars stationing in Trump's first house just a general omen of his ascension, or are there any other things that come along with that that are problematic?

01:01:31 Speaker_01
Is the Mars Pluto opposition in early January just a general omen of the new Congress coming into power? Or what's the deal with that? How does the third opposition between Mars and Pluto tie into things around April?

01:01:44 Speaker_01
We're going to have to wait and see for a lot of this. And we'll revisit some of these questions in the year ahead forecast next month, which we're going to be recording with patrons on December 20.

01:01:55 Speaker_01
So that is where we're at with the presidential election. I want to transition to talking about some other news stories that happened in November really quickly besides the presidential election.

01:02:05 Speaker_01
Around the Mars-Pluto opposition, I noticed there was a couple of terrible Mars-Pluto stories that were little blips in the news, but they nonetheless fit the symbolism of that alignment.

01:02:19 Speaker_01
So one of them was on November 1st, there was this squirrel that had thousands of followers on TikTok and social media. It was a rescue squirrel this guy had raised. And somebody called the authorities saying that he was raising a wild animal.

01:02:35 Speaker_01
And then the authorities busted in, took his squirrel. And then over the next few days, they were fighting about it and having a legal battle. And then the authorities decided to just

01:02:46 Speaker_01
kill the squirrel basically Out of nowhere before that had been wrapped up and it was just like a really bizarrely he described it the owner is like an over-the-top or overreaction or like going way too far and Yeah, it was pretty brutal.

01:03:02 Speaker_01
So there was like that and then there was this other news story in late October Where there was this woman who tried to poison her boyfriend Because she was mad that he had broken up with her or something like that

01:03:15 Speaker_01
And she poisoned his soup, but then he ended up sharing the soup with four of his friends. And then all five of them ended up dying, including two of them who are brothers.

01:03:26 Speaker_01
So it was another like, just like weirdly brutal story that was like right on the Mars Pluto opposition and manifested some of that energy.

01:03:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, I saw a lot of that. And my mind was drawn towards like the, like the monstrous, cruel, grotesque and inhumane, like that was the vibe.

01:03:44 Speaker_01
for sure. In other very sad news, the astrologer Michael Lewton passed away on November 11th. And Michael had written this. He did many things. One of them is that he was the resident astrologer for the magazine Vanity Fair for many years.

01:04:03 Speaker_01
And as part of that, he wrote this famous article about Pluto and Capricorn and how it would transform the country for Vanity Fair back in 2006.

01:04:12 Speaker_01
It was titled Vanity Fair Special Alert Horoscope USA, and it got a lot of coverage back in 2008 when the financial collapse happened, I remember, because he had talked about some things related to that and how that would tie in with Pluto and Capricorn.

01:04:28 Speaker_01
But then it was striking seeing it passed around again when he died just days after the election. And also, interestingly, Nick Digg and Best had learned about recurrence transits from Michael originally as one of his students.

01:04:43 Speaker_01
And this was striking to me because the Venus-Saturn recurrence on Inauguration Day was one of Nick's arguments for Trump winning.

01:04:52 Speaker_01
And so it was very striking that Michael passed away right after the election, and Nick had learned that technique from him that made him more confident about the outcome. and just a sort of full circle thing there. But you knew Michael, right?

01:05:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, I wouldn't have been able to make it to UAC in 2012, where I met so many astrologers and began a number of now 12-year long relationships.

01:05:22 Speaker_00
One of them, I met Kelly Sertis for the first time at UAC 2012, and I absolutely wouldn't have been able to get there without Michael's help. Nice.

01:05:32 Speaker_01
Yeah. Michael hosted a astrology library for NCGR in New York, and he also hosted workshops at the NCGR.

01:05:40 Speaker_01
I went out there and I stayed with him a few times in order to give lectures and workshops, including a Zodiac releasing workshop in 2015, where I got to connect with people like Sam Reynolds and Cheney Nicholas.

01:05:55 Speaker_01
Yeah, I'll always remember some of those times like going out to New York and my exposure to that city was really as a result of Michael and getting to hang out with him and talk astrology and talk some of the like institutional history of like what it was like working for Vanity Fair and doing astrology for so many prominent people as a result of that.

01:06:13 Speaker_01
So yeah, it was a sad loss for our community. Yeah. Other news what this group of stories?

01:06:21 Speaker_01
There was a huge group of stories that all clustered around Saturn which stationed direct in Pisces on November 15th So at the top of the list the funniest one and also very striking I'm not even joking about this, but suddenly in the news that week.

01:06:36 Speaker_01
I started noticing that red lobster the seafood famous seafood restaurant in America in the United States was attempting to revive itself with a new CEO and menu, and they did a media blitz that week.

01:06:53 Speaker_01
They launched a new menu on November 11th, just days before Saturn's stationing, and then their CEO did a media blitz with tons of interviews that week.

01:07:01 Speaker_01
One of the things he said is that he would never bring back all-you-can-eat, quote-unquote, in-blitz shrimp. due to the significant financial losses that it caused the company in the past.

01:07:11 Speaker_01
And he said, quote, unquote, I know how to do math when he was discussing this decision. I thought that was such a hilarious Saturn and Pisces manifestation.

01:07:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, Saturn bringing limits, infinity. And so, yeah, the downfall blamed on the not limiting the shrimp. Saturn says that everything has its limits, especially shrimp. And shrimp, of course, being from the ocean, I see in symbolism.

01:07:41 Speaker_01
Right. And I didn't go back and check this, but I know we talked about the downfall or the bankruptcy of Red Lobster under one of the previous Saturn and Pisces transits. So it'd be interesting to go back and look at that at some point.

01:07:53 Speaker_01
In other news, Coca-Cola created its annual holiday Christmas season ad entirely using AI this time. And this ad went viral on November 15th, which was the very day of the Saturn station in Pisces as well as the full moon in Taurus conjunct Uranus.

01:08:10 Speaker_01
So I thought that was an interesting manifestation of that.

01:08:14 Speaker_01
There was also a virtual reality thing where I kind of wondered whether the virtual reality thing like died out after, you know, some of the stuff earlier this year and some of the things I had said about in the year ahead forecast, but then I looked up news and that week,

01:08:28 Speaker_01
Apple collaborated with the music artist The Weeknd to release his new music video in virtual reality, and they're calling it a quote-unquote immersive music experience where you can put on this headset and then literally go into the music video and have this sense of being there and being present in it.

01:08:48 Speaker_01
So they launched this on November 14th, which was literally the day before Saturn stationed. So it's another striking blurring the boundaries between what's real and what's not real under that Saturn transit, co-present with Neptune in late Pisces.

01:09:06 Speaker_01
A big event or spectacle that occurred around that time, the very day of the Saturn station on November 15th, there was the Mike Tyson boxing fight against Jake Paul.

01:09:21 Speaker_01
It ended up being this huge spectacle because it was live streamed on Netflix, which many people already have subscriptions for, so a lot of people watched it.

01:09:31 Speaker_01
I thought that's really striking that it occurred on the Saturn station because there was this weird parallel with the Biden debate that occurred under the first station in June, where Biden's age

01:09:45 Speaker_01
Became very apparent as well as like his inability to do some stuff that he had previously been able to do much more effectively in terms of debates and stuff and there was a similar thing with Tyson where it became really clear pretty early on in the match that like he was not doing well that his age was

01:10:04 Speaker_01
significantly hampering him fighting this guy who was like 30 years younger than him. And I think a lot of people had these realizations of like the hard limitations of age and time as a result of that fight.

01:10:20 Speaker_00
Yeah. So what was funny is I was teaching elections about maybe a week before that fight. And I was teaching Dorotheus's principle that in every election, the rising matters, the moon matters.

01:10:35 Speaker_00
And then the planet that is the natural ruler of the kind of activity that you're doing matters. And I said, for example, if you have a shitty Mars,

01:10:44 Speaker_00
in a chart and you were trying to promote a fight, that's always going to be a problem, even if you de-emphasize it. Because that's the sphere, that's the planetary sphere in which you're operating.

01:10:54 Speaker_00
And someone said, oh, that's funny, the Tyson-Pol fight is in a week. And I was like, oh, well, that makes sense. That's going to be a grotesque spectacle slash money grab. And it was even worse than that.

01:11:08 Speaker_00
And so it was interesting because it really gave us sort of the worst of Saturn. Not only getting older, almost 60 in his second Senate return, but also recently almost died of illness, Mike Tyson, right?

01:11:28 Speaker_00
Destroying everyone's hopes that they could still be good at anything once they pass middle age. It made me just kind of want to lie back and abandon

01:11:42 Speaker_00
Abandon any efforts that i'm making to preserve myself in hopes that i will be functional in another fifteen years was like oh just let. The Lords of Decay ravaged me. So it was like profoundly Saturnian and demotivating.

01:11:56 Speaker_00
It was interesting to see the Mars, right? Cause it was Mars and Leo. And we talked last month about how Mars and Leo is great at spectacle. And it was great at spectacle in the sense that a nearly unprecedented number of people tuned into this fight.

01:12:13 Speaker_00
So all of the previous Jake Paul fights and almost all fights, big fights are pay-per-view, but this was just through Netflix.

01:12:21 Speaker_00
And so a staggering, I believe it's something like 60 million households or something, not people, households tuned into this fight. And yet the reaction to it was, I never want to see anything like that again. Right?

01:12:35 Speaker_00
So we have like the Mars and Leo doing the good job promoting, but it's even then, which is almost two weeks ago, Mars was barely moving. It was going to move another degree and a half over like three and a half weeks.

01:12:48 Speaker_00
Like this isn't going anywhere except backwards.

01:12:51 Speaker_00
And so you have the, I thought it was a really profound lesson in not just the position of the planet, but like with Saturn, the motion is like, like there's not going to be another Jake Paul Netflix thing like that. That event has like, uh, has been

01:13:07 Speaker_00
So we say condemned and reacted to with disgust in real life or IRL as well as all over the internet. It was like an anti-spectacle.

01:13:19 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean,

01:13:22 Speaker_01
I was noticing there's a lot of millennials who are going through their Pluto square right now, and a lot of them grew up watching Mike Tyson just be the best fighter in the world and being undefeated during the height of his career in the late 80s, early 90s.

01:13:39 Speaker_01
Many of them went into watching this thinking, of course, Mike Tyson is going to crush this YouTuber, but then realizing something about the limitations of age and time and that being a really heavy feeling.

01:13:52 Speaker_01
And it was just so striking to me that we got two incidences of a similar experience that people had seeing the limitations of age and time and the impact and how that can sometimes, you know, stop a person from being able to do things that they used to be able to do.

01:14:08 Speaker_01
That both of those instances this year happened right on those Saturn stations. There's something incredible about that.

01:14:14 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, as they say in fight sports, um, the only undefeated champion is father time.

01:14:21 Speaker_01
I like that. All right. So other news, right on the Saturn station around November 16th, there was this video of a popular TikTok food reviewer who went to a new city and he was eating sushi on camera.

01:14:35 Speaker_01
And he ate a piece of sushi, and he didn't see it, but the camera picked up that there was a worm or a parasite on it, and then he ate it. And it wasn't until later that a bunch of viewers pointed out to him that he was eating this

01:14:49 Speaker_01
Sushi that was tainted that he realized what had happened and I thought that was incredible as again just happening on the Saturn station and we had talked about all these themes of like tainted water or other things like that and there it was like tainted seafood basically, which then Sort of like psychologically a lot of people were freaked out about that and just realizing that that's a potential issue Sometimes when you're eating raw fish Yeah

01:15:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, things that the ocean is dangerous, right? It will bankrupt your seafood restaurant. It will poison you, right? Saturn and Pisces. Exactly.

01:15:28 Speaker_01
Last Saturn and Pisces news overlap with Saturn and Pisces, Saturn stationing and Pluto going to Aquarius, but there were these news stories of undersea cables being cut in the seas around Europe.

01:15:40 Speaker_01
On November 19th, there was a story of a second submarine telecom cable that had been cut in the Baltic Sea. and it was a cable between Sweden and Lithuania. And the previous day, news had broke that a cable between Finland and Germany had been cut.

01:15:57 Speaker_01
So this is kind of like Saturn and Pisces, like ocean stuff with cables being cut, but also potentially because it occurred the day of or the day after the Pluto ingress into Aquarius, a sort of preview of the future and some of the Pluto and Aquarius

01:16:11 Speaker_01
ways that conflicts and wars will happen in terms of information and telecommunications cables being attacked or being cut in order to cut off the flow of information.

01:16:27 Speaker_01
All right, so next we move into there's a string of stories that occurred on the historic Pluto ingress into Aquarius, which occurred on November 19th.

01:16:36 Speaker_01
The biggest one was that immediately after the presidential election, the price of Bitcoin began to skyrocket.

01:16:45 Speaker_01
And this was really wild to watch because it also coincided with the end of Pluto and Capricorn and the beginning of Pluto moving into Aquarius, where within days of Pluto moving into Aquarius, the price of Bitcoin nearly hit $100,000 per Bitcoin for the first time ever.

01:17:05 Speaker_01
And this is really striking because the beginning of Pluto and Capricorn in 2008 and 2009 began with this anonymous person publishing a paper that proposed the very idea of a digital currency and the argument that it could have value partially due to scarcity if there was a limited number of those coins that would ever be created.

01:17:27 Speaker_01
So we go from that at the beginning of Pluto and Capricorn to it's accomplished and it's done.

01:17:33 Speaker_01
By the end of Pluto and Capricorn, we saw that digital currency hitting a price of $100,000 per coin, which is just incredible when you step back and look at that from a broad standpoint. It wasn't just that, but more importantly, perhaps,

01:17:51 Speaker_01
There were also crypto companies that poured money into the U.S. presidential election and created lobbying or super PACs, basically.

01:18:02 Speaker_01
It ended up impacting the outcome of the election, especially some of the Senate races, where they ended up supporting pro-crypto candidates.

01:18:16 Speaker_01
Not only both presidential candidates ended up endorsing cryptocurrency, especially Trump, and that was one of the factors that gave him an edge, but also, for example, in Ohio, a crypto PAC spent $40 million in order to get victory for one candidate who was pro-crypto, and they ended up being successful.

01:18:37 Speaker_01
So we've gone from this place in the span of a Pluto transit where this new industry surrounding digital currency has emerged and is now beginning to wield huge amounts of power and influence in elections.

01:18:50 Speaker_01
And I tie that in with Pluto and Capricorn, which was then accelerated by Uranus transiting through Taurus over the past several years. Yeah, it's pretty striking. Yeah, other Pluto and Aquarius news.

01:19:02 Speaker_01
On November 18th and 19th, right as Pluto ingressed into Aquarius, all of a sudden Kim Kardashian started showing off her new Tesla robots.

01:19:11 Speaker_01
And it was clear there was some sort of partnership where she was being paid to promote that, and there were these bizarre videos.

01:19:17 Speaker_01
bizarre videos of her assistant walking around a mall with a string of robots walking behind her carrying like packages and like groceries or whatever. And it was striking to me that that was happening on the Pluto ingress into Aquarius.

01:19:32 Speaker_01
And I think as a preview of a scene that we're going to start seeing as much more prominent over the course of that transit in the next decade or so. Indeed. Another important one, Australia banned social media for children under 16.

01:19:46 Speaker_01
This happened on November 29th.

01:19:48 Speaker_01
That's also probably a Pluto in Aquarius thing in terms of attempts to control social media or now that it's been around for more than a decade, like, you know, starting to understand the impact of that on people and then people debating, you know, the extent to which that should be controlled or regulated or not.

01:20:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, it folds in very neatly under the Pluto and Aquarius theme of technological terror, right? Like the form of the form of the Destroyer taking on, or excuse me, the Destroyer taking on the Aquarian form, right?

01:20:25 Speaker_00
The robot form, the, oh, it's the technology that is the site of fear, anxiety, terror, et cetera, et cetera. It's like the conclusion of the first Ghostbusters. The Destroyer takes on a different form every time Pluto changes sign.

01:20:44 Speaker_01
Right. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in our time is a Tesla robot. Yeah, for sure. Nice. Good times. Not good. Not great times, but we'll see. We'll see. All right.

01:20:55 Speaker_01
Last last transit that happened in November that was big was Mercury Retrograde started on November 25th. We're still early in that.

01:21:02 Speaker_01
One of the things that happens, Caitlin Kopik pointed out to me, which is great to point out that Drake announced a lawsuit where he was like suing Kendrick Lamar's music

01:21:14 Speaker_01
publisher that he was with for the debate, the rap battle that happened earlier this year. He initiated this lawsuit on the 26th, which is the day after Mercury stationed, and then it seemed like it was roundly criticized or mocked.

01:21:28 Speaker_01
So we'll have to see how that goes with Mercury retrograde as he initiated that action.

01:21:35 Speaker_00
We know that Kendrick has a very prominent Mars in Cancer, and that we have a lot of Mars in Cancer to do next year.

01:21:44 Speaker_01
Right. Yeah, that was a great point that Caitlin made. So in other news, when Mercury Station, as I said earlier, the Harris campaign leaders did that podcast the day after the Mercury Station, and it was sort of roundly criticized. And then finally,

01:22:00 Speaker_01
On November 26th, there was an announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, but this was right on the Mercury station.

01:22:11 Speaker_01
Already in the past few days, it's been in question whether that will hold after there's been airstrikes just a couple of days later. They say it's tentatively holding, but it seems very fragile.

01:22:23 Speaker_01
We'll see how it goes since it started on a Mercury retrograde.

01:22:27 Speaker_00
Yeah, it makes you wish they had a better election for a ceasefire.

01:22:29 Speaker_01
CB Right, exactly. Yes, so that is the news section. All right, before we jump into the forecast, I wanted to mention that we just released our 2025 Year Ahead Electional Astrology Report, which we put out every year.

01:22:45 Speaker_01
It's basically an astrological forecast that identifies the most fortunate dates next year using the principles of electional astrology.

01:22:55 Speaker_01
So in the report, Lisa Scheim and I start by giving an overview of the astrology of 2025, and then we go through each month and identify the most favorable date for taking actions, and we provide you with an auspicious electional chart or astrological chart that you can adapt to your location.

01:23:13 Speaker_01
So these fortunate dates can be used for taking actions like major things like starting a business, getting married, or launching a creative project, and it can help to improve the chances of success in those endeavors.

01:23:26 Speaker_01
So the report comes with a three-hour video workshop that we recorded a couple of weeks ago where Lisa and I talk about the astrological weather and then go through the best dates in 2025.

01:23:38 Speaker_01
There's also an audio version as well as a PDF write-up for quick reference, plus PDF copies of all 22 charts that we discussed in the report for the 22 best dates and times that we found this year.

01:23:52 Speaker_01
So this year we found some really great charts and we also discussed the general astrological weather for the year more than we usually do, so the report doubles as a nice little preview of the astrological forecast for 2025.

01:24:04 Speaker_01
So we're running an initial launch sale where you can purchase the report for 20% off if you get it now. So you can find more information at theastrologypodcast.com slash 2025 report.

01:24:18 Speaker_01
And people have been asking me about the posters this year, and we just released a few days ago our annual astrology calendar posters that show the astrology of the year at a glance.

01:24:31 Speaker_01
So this includes planetary ingresses, lunations, retrogrades, and aspects. And it's the same calendar graphics that we use in the monthly forecast episodes, but it's a poster that shows all 12 months of the year at a glance.

01:24:46 Speaker_01
So this year we're experimenting with incorporating showing more inner planet aspects each month, which is kind of interesting and fun to do so that you can highlight not just the major ingresses and stuff, but also know when major inner planet aspects are going to take place as well.

01:25:03 Speaker_01
So you can order the posters now at theastrologypodcast.com slash merch.

01:25:09 Speaker_01
And then finally, I also wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is our friends over at the Honeycomb Collective, which creates astrological almanacs and calendars that are personalized to your needle chart.

01:25:22 Speaker_01
So most astrology planners only show mundane transits that apply to everybody, but each of the Honeycomb almanacs is uniquely programmed to display transits to your actual birth chart.

01:25:34 Speaker_01
so it's uniquely programmed to you and printed specifically for you. So each honeycomb almanac can be customized to any time zone in the world so that you'll always know what time the planets are aligning relative to your location.

01:25:49 Speaker_01
In addition, every honeycomb now includes a section where you can preview planetary sign ingresses for the year ahead, which is an amazing new feature.

01:26:00 Speaker_01
This year Honeycomb has also added a free secondary progressions option so you can track your progressed lunation phases, changes in sign or direction of your progressed planets, as well as other progressed natal chart events.

01:26:15 Speaker_01
Prices start at just $27 for a six month printed almanac with a free digital copy that comes with it, or you can buy the digital PDF on its own for just $10, which is super well priced.

01:26:28 Speaker_01
So if you're looking for holiday gifts, please place your order right away to ensure enough time for printing and delivery. Or alternatively, you can purchase a digital gift card that you can pass along to your favorite astrologer.

01:26:42 Speaker_01
So you can learn more at honeycomb.co. All right. So thanks to Honeycomb for sponsoring this episode and this big forecast that we do. Definitely check out their website because, yeah, it's really nice having a personalized almanac like that each year.

01:27:00 Speaker_01
All right, so let's transition into talking about the astrology of December. So my synopsis of December is that the month opens kind of rough.

01:27:10 Speaker_01
We're just a week into the Mercury retrograde and then Mars stations retrograde in Leo towards the end of the first week of December. So it starts kind of rough and then December ends pretty tense.

01:27:24 Speaker_01
when the Mars-Pluto opposition comes into very close alignment by late December and then goes exact again at the very beginning of January.

01:27:33 Speaker_01
So it's tough on both ends of December, but then the middle of the month is actually kind of nice and features a very auspicious looking Venus-Jupiter trine between the signs of Gemini and Aquarius that is very positive and will open up

01:27:49 Speaker_01
nice little window of some good things that will happen this month in between the sort of bookends at the beginning and end of the month. Is that your feeling or what's your synopsis of December?

01:28:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, I would go similarly. The second week, like six to the 12th, I would say is my least favorite. And it's not fantastic at the end of the month, but it's better than the beginning.

01:28:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, I would agree that there's a sweet spot sort of halfway through, because we get Mercury stationing direct. We'll get into the Mars-Pluto opposition and Venus getting tortured by the Mars-Pluto opposition, which is my least favorite thing.

01:28:41 Speaker_00
But yeah, all of the bad things center on the Mars retrograde opposite Pluto and then other planets getting sucked into that rather negative dyad.

01:28:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, for sure. Which as we can see, the next Mars-Pluto opposition goes exact on January 3rd. So it's like by the end of December, we are just fully back in that again. AC.

01:29:09 Speaker_00
Oh, I mean, we're going to be back in that by the second week. They're not very far apart. And once Mars station's retrograde, they will be mutually applying, right? Mars will be backing up to Pluto and Pluto will be racing forward into that opposition.

01:29:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think that's true.

01:29:27 Speaker_01
But there's at least counterbalancing aspects that are positive in the middle of December that I think will be good for some people with the Venus-Jupiter trine that's applying roughly from like the 12th till the 19th when it goes exact.

01:29:41 Speaker_01
And that provides a nice reprieve, whereas by the time you get to the end of the month, that's sort of absent and we've just got full-on intense Mars-Pluto opposition action going on.

01:29:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, I don't think it's a reprieve because it doesn't stop Mars and Pluto, but it means something else that's nice is happening while something not nice is happening.

01:30:01 Speaker_00
The nice doesn't fix the not nice, but it's nice to have a mixed bag rather than just a bag full of turds.

01:30:12 Speaker_01
Yes, that is an eloquent way of putting it, my friend.

01:30:17 Speaker_01
So, here's the Mercury retrograde periods that Madeline de Coats of Honeycomb.co designed with her brilliant illustrative capabilities, just to give you dates on the Mercury retrograde, which started on November 25th and then stations direct and sort of ends on the 15th of December.

01:30:38 Speaker_01
But I wanted to actually open up and let's pull up charts and let's start with that new Moon that occurs. on the 1st of December. It's either late on the 30th or early on the 1st of December, depending on your time zone.

01:30:52 Speaker_01
But this lunation that we open the month with kind of bakes in initially some of those aspects that we have at the beginning of the month.

01:31:02 Speaker_01
And to me, this is kind of a somber lunation because the Sun and Moon conjoin at 9 degrees of Sagittarius, and then the next aspect that the Moon will make is that it's applying to a square with Saturn at 12 degrees of Pisces.

01:31:17 Speaker_01
So one of the things we've

01:31:18 Speaker_01
I've learned, at least over the past several years, is just whatever the next aspect is that the Moon makes after a lunation often tends to really imprint strongly the energy and vibe of that planet with whatever that lunation is supposed to be about.

01:31:33 Speaker_01
So we open up with that square with Saturn, which is somber. And also, we're only a week into Mercury having stationed retrograde, and we can see it retrograde there in Sagittarius at 20°. So that's still very potent as well at the same time.

01:31:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's also a pretty ferocious component to this. We have the sun and moon, both in a trying with almost just about to station Mars, and they're also conjoined.

01:32:04 Speaker_00
right on top of the fixed star Antares, which is a very bright red star, which forms the heart of the Scorpion. And its name, Antares, is often translated as the rival of Mars and can act almost like a very strong replacement Mars in a chart.

01:32:27 Speaker_00
It brings It brings fierce and it can on a positive level, it can bring in the enduring will to struggle and to contend. but it does not guarantee that that tolerance for conflict will be used wisely, right?

01:32:52 Speaker_00
It's an ability to wage war for a long time, right? Which is easily misplaced. It's basically, it's almost as if the sun and moon were conjunct Mars, the star's Marshall quality as such. And then being in a trine with Mars,

01:33:10 Speaker_00
on the eve of Mars' big station. And of course, with the Sun, Moon and Mars all being in fire signs, there's a lot of smolder going on. But as Chris, as you said, the Sun and Moon are both checked

01:33:31 Speaker_00
by the frigid undersea Leviathan that is Saturn, right? So there's all this fiery energy and what would like to go forward, but is actually about to go backward and that has like, again, this sort of glacial Saturn and Pisces in front of it.

01:33:55 Speaker_00
There's a lot of tension there. little story of ice and fire. CB.

01:34:02 Speaker_01
Song of ice and fire. That's a good one. Yeah.

01:34:05 Speaker_01
Stuck between the fieriness of Mars, which is heating up, but the coldness, the somberness, the slowness of Saturn hitting that lunation for some reason of two otherwise fiery, the Sun and Moon and Sagittarius trying to form an otherwise optimistic or adventurous conjunction in that sign, but running into some sort of obstacle.

01:34:29 Speaker_00
purposeful. Sedge likes a serious mission as well as a silly mission. There's a quest, and even if it seems silly like in a video game, part of the fun of a quest is that you take it seriously.

01:34:46 Speaker_00
Sedge likes that serious mission fun as well as the optimistic fun.

01:34:53 Speaker_01
Yeah. One of the things I did in the year ahead forecast is I was reading Tarnas' description of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction.

01:35:03 Speaker_01
He was writing in 2005 or 2006 or something like that, and so he talked about the Saturn-Neptune opposition that happened after the 2004 election and the sense of like,

01:35:14 Speaker_01
disillusionment and despair that people on the left fell into after that election.

01:35:21 Speaker_01
And I thought there was an interesting parallel now with that Saturn-Neptune being so close, and how we had Saturn's station right after the election in the middle of November.

01:35:30 Speaker_01
And now the other side of that is having Neptune's station at the beginning of December, at the same time as this Mars station is ramping up.

01:35:41 Speaker_01
as Mercury hits its halfway point through the retrograde cycle and hits the Kazemi at the same time functionally.

01:35:48 Speaker_01
So that idea of disillusionment, he describes it as this general sense of dis-ease as something that comes along with Saturn-Neptune as well.

01:36:03 Speaker_00
Oh, yeah. And an easy example of that is the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction, right? Everybody just sort of gave up on the dream of building a new society. Everybody's ready to give up.

01:36:21 Speaker_00
There was no shattering blow. It just sort of everybody gave up at the same time and suddenly the whole structure wasn't there.

01:36:29 Speaker_01
it's interesting you mentioned that because then that's also part of what seems like it's happening as well, which is with Saturn, you get structures, but with Neptune, you get the disillusion of structures and the taking part of things.

01:36:42 Speaker_01
And there's a lot of things potentially that are going to start being taken apart, basically.

01:36:50 Speaker_00
It seems like there's a lot of… AC like things that are held up by belief. It works if we all believe in it. What is it? At the end of Peter Pan, But it works if we all believe and then everybody stops believing it once and the thing falls apart.

01:37:04 Speaker_01
CB Yeah, for sure that, but also things like actual physical things like should we have a national department of education or should that be taken apart, for example, and different people's reactions to that potentially being some of what we're seeing here in terms of both a literal disillusion of things as well as a metaphorical one.

01:37:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, like institutional dissolution.

01:37:31 Speaker_01
Right, exactly. So that's getting us into the Mars retrograde. Let's just talk about the Mars retrograde. Let's just do the elephant in the room, the spiky elephant in the room.

01:37:47 Speaker_01
Let me just put the December calendar up one more time because it just shows how if we're talking about that station

01:37:54 Speaker_01
Like I said, there's just a few things that happen all around the same time, which is like Mercury hits its halfway point in the cycle and has the retrograde Kazemi, Mars stations on the 6th and Neptune stations the next day, and then Venus goes into Aquarius where it runs into like Pluto and Mars.

01:38:11 Speaker_01
So one thing I wanted to emphasize that I've been thinking about a lot lately with the Mars retrograde is how this is a repetition of a

01:38:21 Speaker_01
Mars retrograde period that happened 15 years ago, when Mars went retrograde towards the middle of Leo in December of 2009, and then it stationed direct in Leo in March of 2010. So for some people, because that's

01:38:39 Speaker_01
a 15-year repetition of that planetary period of Mars, there's going to be some events that happen in some people's lives that are going to hearken back to events that occurred during that period 15 years ago.

01:38:51 Speaker_01
And sometimes if you'd like a preview of what's going to happen now, you might just look back to that period and think about what house that transit coincided with in your chart and what topics may have come up in your life at that time.

01:39:03 Speaker_01
Because one of the things about retrogrades is that Mars retrogrades can actually be reminiscent of Mercury retrogrades or even Venus retrogrades in that whenever a planet turns retrograde, it has this backward-looking component where it turns its gaze.

01:39:19 Speaker_01
And instead of moving forward in the signs of the zodiac and moving towards the future, it turns around and starts moving backwards. But it also starts looking backwards. And sometimes that looking backwards

01:39:32 Speaker_01
theme can cause things from the past to come back into the present in your life for some reason. I think that's going to be a significant theme here in terms of people's personal experiences of this retrograde in some instances.

01:39:44 Speaker_00
Yeah, absolutely. And so just a little bit backing out a little bit, what is a Mars retrograde? What do they all have in common? What are they like? What is this phase?

01:39:54 Speaker_00
On a simple physical level, which has implications, Mars retrogrades are Mars's closest pass to the Earth. Mars is much closer during the retrograde phase than any other phase. Mars is also much brighter.

01:40:11 Speaker_00
Mars is also visible in the night sky for the most amount of time.

01:40:16 Speaker_00
At the heart of the Mars retrograde, Mars will rise as the full moon rises, meaning that the second that the sun sets, Mars rises, and Mars will be at maximum closeness and brightness. So we have this like red king of midnight sort of energy.

01:40:38 Speaker_00
And so we have, we don't, it's not that when Mars is retrograde, we have less Mars. It's actually maximum amount of Mars, but it's not moving things forward, right?

01:40:51 Speaker_00
And that's, that's the source of a lot of frustration and confusion during the period, during Mars retrograde periods. Cause Mars is so,

01:41:02 Speaker_00
so constant a companion, and martial topics are a close companion, and yet it is very difficult to make discernible forward progress on those martial topics.

01:41:16 Speaker_00
And though every planet has some, to some degree, does not enjoy a retrograde, it's frustrating to not be able to move forward in every sphere. Mars is,

01:41:32 Speaker_00
at that meaning at that core significations level, the most interested in getting things done in moving forward Mars is like pragmatic and accomplishment oriented. And so there's like, so that planet, they're like, let's get it done.

01:41:48 Speaker_00
Let's move forward. Let's either win or lose the contest, et cetera, et cetera. That planet being retrograde and refusing to make forward progress has its own unique species of frustrations that it breeds.

01:42:04 Speaker_01
of slowing things down, of hampering things, of causing things that should have been quick to take longer, especially if you're trying to get something started.

01:42:14 Speaker_01
We do sometimes see people create a new and important foundation in their life under a Mars retrograde period, because sometimes a retrograde just signifies an important turning point in a person's life with respect to that planet and the house that it's stationing in.

01:42:30 Speaker_01
But sometimes things that maybe if you're starting something new that you think are going to move quickly can actually end up taking much longer and move much more slowly or take much more effort in order to come to full manifestation at that time.

01:42:48 Speaker_01
Sometimes we do see people, as we were talking about earlier, like Rogan, for example, starting his podcast under the Mars retrograde in Leo 15 years ago.

01:42:56 Speaker_01
So you see sometimes people starting a foundation that's subtle at first, but then builds up into something more significant later on. And then sometimes at the subsequent 15-year period, like we're seeing now, we see

01:43:10 Speaker_01
the returning back to and reviewing the foundation that you started 15 years ago in that part of your life, but also leveling up and taking it to the next level, which is obviously something that he's doing now in that instance.

01:43:26 Speaker_01
And sometimes, though, there can be a process of going back and reviewing it.

01:43:30 Speaker_01
There can be challenges that come up in that process where you're forced to contend with sometimes decisions or actions or circumstances from the past, but sometimes in pushing through that, it can be somewhat constructive, albeit frustrating and taking extra time.

01:43:49 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, like there are always exceptions to everything, but trying to get something up and off the ground and moving is the opposite of what Mars retrograde is.

01:44:00 Speaker_00
Because Mars is not only, Mars is not only going backwards, it's very slow, right? It's much slower than normal. And it's not going to get out of this set of degrees until May. And so, but like with

01:44:17 Speaker_00
a Mercury retrograde or a Venus retrograde, often the way forward is back. Very often it's returning to a problem or a challenge that actually didn't get solved, right?

01:44:33 Speaker_00
And that you can't really move forward until that issue is worked through, which may take longer and be more aggravating than you had hoped.

01:44:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's like you have to untie the Gordian knot in order to move forward from this period.

01:44:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, although I would recommend not defaulting to Alexander's answer to the Gordian knot, which was to just cut in half. Occasionally, that's the right move, but a lot of times those knots involve people and relationships.

01:45:07 Speaker_00
And part of Mars being so close and so bright, literally Mars is up all night. at max volume during the retrogrades.

01:45:18 Speaker_00
And so figuring out what to do with the, how should we say, the supersized portion of Mars being served every day, like figuring out how to not damage things that don't need to be damaged, right? Because Mars energy is great, but it's a malefic.

01:45:38 Speaker_00
And just like the knives in my kitchen, they are not evil, but I have to be more careful with what I do with them than I do with the spoons.

01:45:47 Speaker_01
I mean, yeah, that is a downside of the bull in a china shop type scenario where you're just destroying everything in a certain part of your life in a way that's reckless or careless and not good and not constructive.

01:46:02 Speaker_01
But then sometimes when you have a Mars retrograde, sometimes there are things that do need to be cut from your life. sometimes things that need to be burned down so that you can build a new foundation.

01:46:14 Speaker_01
And sometimes that can be a manifestation, a necessary, albeit sometimes difficult or even painful one, in order to move forward. So that is definitely a scenario in terms of you want to do it carefully and conscientiously.

01:46:28 Speaker_01
But sometimes, you know, we do need to cut things or situations or even people out of our lives in some instances. And that can happen under a Mars period where the notions of severing and separation are more prominent.

01:46:41 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:46:42 Speaker_00
And a lot of times I see that around the direct station, but like with other retrograde planets, what you very often see with Mars retrograde with people is that there's a huge ambivalence and a back and forth throughout the retrograde portion, where it's like, do I just cut them out?

01:47:02 Speaker_00
let's go to the Gordian Knot, is this something that I can actually like unfuck? Or is it something that I just need to cut in half? And usually that takes a while. It takes a while to figure that out.

01:47:17 Speaker_00
I mean, it takes a while because usually we're of two minds around anything. Any knot that ties us to something that's actually important to us is not something that we would just sever willy-nilly because there's a cost to that.

01:47:32 Speaker_00
And so again, with retrogrades, like with Mercury, like with Venus, there's this like, I don't know, like hem and haw and kind of both sides of the scales getting an additional item or thought placed on them every day for a while.

01:47:48 Speaker_00
And like with Mercury and Venus retrogrades, I find letting that process occur.

01:47:56 Speaker_00
If there is some sort of, do I do this or do I do that, both of which have consequences, letting the rich or letting moors make the case for both of those things before prematurely deciding. Because

01:48:15 Speaker_00
The only thing worse than cutting the knot, as painful as that might be, is cutting the knot prematurely and then being like, actually, I don't want to cut the knot. Let me tie that back together.

01:48:25 Speaker_00
Or committing wholly to not cutting the knot and then being like, actually, I was wrong. I'm totally going to burn that down. Like giving yourself the time to make the closest thing you can do a wise decision.

01:48:42 Speaker_00
Letting Mars set the timeframe is very often worth it.

01:48:47 Speaker_01
That's a really great point. Yeah, I agree.

01:48:50 Speaker_01
I do think there will be a tendency, especially with Pluto being in the mix and this not just being a Mars retrograde in Leo, but Mars retrograde opposite Pluto and that Pluto tends to go to extremes as we've seen with Mars-Pluto aspects over the past year or two.

01:49:05 Speaker_01
And there will be this tendency to want to just burn it all down or for

01:49:10 Speaker_01
people trying to burn things down and going to extremes in that where you're not just burning things down, but you're then demolishing the very foundation and sort of pounding it to dust.

01:49:27 Speaker_01
But then, yeah, there could be situations later in the retrograde where you're like, maybe I shouldn't have burned it down or- Maybe I shouldn't have salted the earth. Yeah, exactly. So nothing could grow again.

01:49:41 Speaker_01
where there might be this question of once those structures are burned down, do we realize that they were actually holding up other things that we didn't realize in terms of not thinking through the long-term implications of removing or cutting certain things out of our life?

01:49:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, 100%. And especially just your point about Pluto. Pluto just like puts more pressure on it. Instead of just like, oh, do I do this or do I do that? It's like being pushed really strongly in both directions.

01:50:14 Speaker_00
And yeah, like not to merely sever the Gordian knot, but to like douse it in gasoline. And yeah, I think that's a good read on Pluto's input. It makes it easier to go way extreme, or I'm never giving up this knot. This knot, I'm keeping this knot.

01:50:35 Speaker_00
Nobody touches it. It's fine the way it is. Like Pluto can also be like maniacally defensive, right?

01:50:43 Speaker_00
It's like the horror story motif of like, or it's like, excuse me, Weekend at Bernie's, but they're like, no, we're, you know, like it's pet cemetery, right?

01:50:55 Speaker_00
It's the not letting go of something, even though it's way obvious that the cost, that it's already gone. and that the cost of not letting go gets higher with every scene.

01:51:06 Speaker_00
But that like, yeah, like that kind of obsessive action on one side and then the salting the earth on the other. So no victory over Carthage and salting the earth and no Pet Sematary holding on at all costs.

01:51:24 Speaker_01
Yeah. So the focal point for us this month is going to be the Leo sector of our chart and whatever house that is.

01:51:32 Speaker_01
But this retrograde is unique compared to the one 15 years ago because it's going to station retrograde in Leo, but then it's going to return back to Cancer.

01:51:40 Speaker_01
One of the things that I learned and really saw happening vividly in the last Venus retrograde

01:51:48 Speaker_01
previous Venus retrograde cycles is that when a planet crosses two signs, it can sometimes connect the topics of those two houses in your chart if it crosses over a sign boundary.

01:52:00 Speaker_01
So there may be something about a major topic that is opened up or like a fire that has started this month in December in the Leo sector of your chart.

01:52:10 Speaker_01
But then when Mars retrogrades back into Cancer next month, we find that part of the resolution is returning back to another topic that ties things together in that area of your life in some way that matches the Cancer area of your chart.

01:52:26 Speaker_00
Yeah. A hundred percent. Like just as an example, like, so I'm a cancer rising.

01:52:32 Speaker_00
So in Leo something with let's say, let's say with the second you see diet among other things, like the stuff that you put in your body and then that and then that coming back to the first and affecting health or could be money, right?

01:52:50 Speaker_00
A second house thing, like how you're dealing with possessions, money, how you spend, how you save, et cetera, et cetera. And then that coming back to the first to change the way you think of yourself or the way that you conceive of yourself.

01:53:03 Speaker_01
CB Yeah. Or if it was between your 11th and your 10th, there could be a connection between friends and your career that the Mars retrograde brings into focus or ties together in some way.

01:53:15 Speaker_00
Yeah. Yeah. Or 10th and ninth, right? Like for a Scorpio rising, like, Oh, there, this is what's going on in my career, Mars in my career, I'm really frustrated or excited or whatever.

01:53:25 Speaker_00
But then it comes back to cancer and it's like, Oh, it's really about like my direction in life and what's meaningful, like ninth house, like spiritual philosophical topics.

01:53:34 Speaker_00
And once I get that sorted, then I can go back into the 10th and my, the, the shape of my career makes more sense now.

01:53:43 Speaker_01
Yeah. As we talked about earlier, Venus and Venus retrogrades have often been associated with women or femmes. traditionally, whereas Mars is traditionally associated with men or sort of masculine or whatever you want to call that energy.

01:53:59 Speaker_01
And I know in some previous Mars retrogrades, you've coined a phrase, I think it was about Mars retrograde, talking about like the doodering effect and just like Venus retrogrades can bring in relationships with like fems or women from the past or just relationships in general.

01:54:15 Speaker_01
Sometimes people have like a Mars retrograde and there can be masculine type figures that come back into your life from the past.

01:54:22 Speaker_00
Yeah. The deutering was a, was, it was a phenomenon that I was observing. Maybe that was 2012 retrograde. Um, but people were just like, oh God, my ex-husband keeps like, won't fucking leave me alone. Like I haven't heard from that guy in a month.

01:54:37 Speaker_00
It was just like 30 versions of that. And I was like, oh, it's the deutering. Um, and my mind I was calling it like, I was like, oh, it's Captain Boomerang. And then I found out that that was a real superhero who was a villain.

01:54:52 Speaker_00
But yeah, the Captain Boomerang effect, like masculine people that you've had previous relationships with that got cut off for some reason, kind of boomeranging back into the life for a period of time, especially if this Mars retrograde

01:55:09 Speaker_00
is in a relational sector or aspects like the ruler of the seventh, it's a very common thing. And the advice is always like, don't catch the boomerang. There are probably exceptions. I've had many doodering anecdotes and sequences described to me.

01:55:33 Speaker_00
No one has ever said, I caught the doodering, and I'm so glad I did. I've heard a lot of, I caught the dune ring, and boy, I wish I hadn't. There are always exceptions. I'm just reporting what has occurred and what people have told me.

01:55:49 Speaker_01
CB All right.

01:55:50 Speaker_01
Well, yeah, I mean, I could see it going not well as a retrograde a lot of times, but I could also see it going okay sometimes, especially because it's always just like men, but sometimes it's people that have Mars prominent in their chart for some reason.

01:56:03 Speaker_00
AC Yeah, it's that Mars figure.

01:56:07 Speaker_01
Right, yeah. We were talking about the Venus retrograde and how the Venus retrograde was like the Barbie movie last summer. But I think about this Mars retrograde and Leo as the inversion of that. It's kind of like the

01:56:23 Speaker_01
in the Barbie movie when the Kens take over and then it turns the Barbie dream house into the Mojo Dojo Casa house, basically like that, that that's kind of like the energy of this Mars retrograde and Leo is like the counterpart to the Venus retrograde.

01:56:40 Speaker_00
Yeah, the Leo part. Yeah. It's worth noting that the majority of this retrograde is actually in Cancer. We've got the first six degrees in Leo, but then we have 13 degrees of Cancer that we're going to cross.

01:56:54 Speaker_00
And even though this as a cycle will connect both, probably in interesting and surprising ways, we have two very, very different signs, like the lunar and the solar.

01:57:09 Speaker_00
And so the like the Leo portion, which is what we're living, we're going to live through in December is very loud, like loud, brash, flashy, like it's the Jake Paul of Mars's.

01:57:24 Speaker_00
But this same cycle has like very different Mars energy for actually more than it has this Leo stuff. And so, yeah, it's gonna be real studying contrasting things that are annoying? Contrasting bad flavors?

01:57:44 Speaker_01
CB Yeah. Well, it's interesting that 15 years ago, this particular one was fully in Leo, but this one's in Cancer. So it's tying together those two different areas.

01:57:55 Speaker_01
And I was doing some work on the longer term planetary periods to see periods in the past that this is a repetition of. Historically, the 79-year repetition was late 1945 through early 1946.

01:58:10 Speaker_01
That was a retrograde Mars that started in Leo and went back into Cancer. So the closest parallel is that, if people want to look to historical parallels, and that's the one that Trump was born just after, once Mars had stationed direct in Leo.

01:58:27 Speaker_01
Then there was another closed repetition that was 47 years ago, and this is from December of 1977 to March of 1978, when it again, it's stationed in Leo and went back to Cancer.

01:58:38 Speaker_01
So for some older people, you might look back to that period and see what topics were activated in your life or what topics were activated in history.

01:58:49 Speaker_01
One of the things that's interesting about this cycle is that Mars will go retrograde in Leo and it'll station direct in Cancer.

01:58:56 Speaker_01
But in two years from now, we'll actually get another Mars retrograde that will go retrograde in Leo, where in January of 2027, it'll start retrograde in Virgo, and then by April of 2027, it'll station direct at 20 degrees of Leo.

01:59:14 Speaker_01
So this is actually a weird cycle that we'll have to pay close attention to each of us in terms of what Mars retrograde in the Leo sector of our chart coincides with, because it's going to be a preview of another transit we're going to have two years from now when Mars again goes retrograde in that sign.

01:59:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, 100%. I would also add that the Mars retrogrades being delineating a portion of the sky and the portion of our lives that Mars spends an absolutely inordinate amount of time in.

01:59:48 Speaker_00
Remember that Mars is usually clicking through a sign about every month and a half. Whereas Mars during this retrograde, for example, or during most retrogrades, spends about eight months in a 30 degree wedge.

02:00:07 Speaker_00
We're not talking about twice as slow or three times as slow. It's more like five or six times as slow in terms of How much time does Mars spend in an area? And so that area gets a shitload of attention, right?

02:00:22 Speaker_00
And so what I often see is that as a natural consequence of that, there's a lot of really rethinking the power dynamics. and the challenges in that area that often sets a tone for the next couple of years.

02:00:41 Speaker_00
Because it really, it's like, okay, well, how do I, how do I rise? Like, how do I address the challenges? that are present in these areas right because Mars, the Mars always, you know, reveals challenges reveals tasks, etc etc.

02:00:58 Speaker_00
And so it's like this, this new, this new battlefield, or new new conflict and new struggle. Struggle's a better word. And a lot of times we don't have all of the tools and training to excel and to meet those challenges just ready for this.

02:01:22 Speaker_00
And so there's often a sort of like getting the lay of the land and like, what do I need to, how should we say? do I need to become competent at? Where do I need to place my bravery? Where do I need to be brave? Where do I need to be strong?

02:01:43 Speaker_00
What do I need to train for? What skills do I need for this part of life?

02:01:47 Speaker_01
CB Yeah, and to go through that training during that time.

02:01:53 Speaker_00
Yeah. And sometimes I think about it on a very, sometimes literal level. And for people who are, I don't know, like workout people, this might be useful.

02:02:02 Speaker_00
But during the cancer portion, cause I like modify my routine all the time because I have Saturn Virgo in the third. So coming up with schedules is a strange delight for me, but I'm like, Ooh, I've really neglected grip and finger training.

02:02:18 Speaker_00
And so I just ended up doing this huge, deep dive on all these different ways of training grip and finger. And it ended up connecting with a lot of themes.

02:02:29 Speaker_00
And I was like, oh, did I literally just study how to pinch better during the Mars shadow in Cancer? Because anyway, that's a very literal example.

02:02:47 Speaker_00
Um, in order to get good, uh, at an area of life, that's become challenging with important rewards and important negative consequences.

02:02:55 Speaker_00
Often we have to retrain or we have to train ourselves to be good at that thing, or to have the strength that's required in that area of life. If anybody wants my pinching things, hard routine, you know, email me at.

02:03:10 Speaker_00
Mars is going to be in cancer forever.com.com slash org.org. Um, dot CA.

02:03:19 Speaker_01
Thea in the chat mentions having getting a shoulder injury under the last Mars retrograde in Gemini, and I actually had that as well, and I remember it was like this.

02:03:28 Speaker_01
initial injury that turned into a long thing for a few months that I didn't work out towards the end of it, but that even now, two years later, even though I've got it under control, I still have to do stretches so it doesn't reactivate it.

02:03:38 Speaker_01
And it reminds me that sometimes during Mars retrograde periods, while sometimes it can be like a singular event, like I saw one person that had Gemini rising with that last Mars retrograde that the day Mars stationed.

02:03:51 Speaker_01
they got in a car accident and they wrecked their car. So there was something that was permanently taken away and they had to get a new one without a car for the majority of that retrograde subsequent to it.

02:04:02 Speaker_01
There's other instances where sometimes Mars retrogrades. It can cause a metaphorically, like a wound or an injury in one part of you that eventually heals, but that you're still left with a scar from that period.

02:04:17 Speaker_01
So sometimes things can get ruffled in your life in that specific area, and eventually you can work through it or overcome it in some sense.

02:04:25 Speaker_01
But sometimes we all carry the scars of whatever past battles that we've had, and that makes us who we are later in the present or in the future. and sometimes that can be good and necessary because we learn things from our past battles.

02:04:39 Speaker_01
But nonetheless, we rarely emerge without scars from some of our greatest conflicts or challenges that we have to overcome.

02:04:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, absolutely.

02:04:53 Speaker_01
Yeah, so I want to talk about Venus because Venus is in rough shape and starts being in rough shape right around the time that Mars stations retrograde.

02:05:04 Speaker_01
We see that Venus ingresses into the sign of Aquarius on December 6th, so it's literally at the same time.

02:05:11 Speaker_01
And when Venus goes into Aquarius, it's going to immediately conjoin Pluto, which is still in the first degree of Aquarius, having recently ingressed.

02:05:19 Speaker_01
And then Venus, from that point forward, from December 6th, once it completes the conjunction with Pluto, then begins applying to an opposition with Mars, which doesn't go exact until around the 11th or 12th.

02:05:34 Speaker_01
So Venus is effectively then kind of enclosed between the really challenging rays of both Pluto and Mars.

02:05:42 Speaker_01
And that's going to add an additional component, especially in terms of relationships and relational dynamics that I think is going to be very intense during that week and kind of difficult to resolve because it's going to surface a lot of like buried tensions that might have been buried deep up until that point.

02:06:02 Speaker_00
Oh yeah, yeah, I've been not looking forward to that for a while. As someone who has their Venus at 2 Aquarius, not looking forward to their return this year.

02:06:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's not that long in the, not just the grand scheme of things, even in the monthly scheme of things, but Venus is just, yeah, just getting tortured for like a week.

02:06:24 Speaker_00
And so negative feelings will likely arise, and it will be very easy to see the worst facets of relational dynamics.

02:06:40 Speaker_01
CB Right, because it's like Pluto has this obsessive quality to it when it's combined with Venus there under that transit as well as this controlling quality, whereas the Venus-Mars opposition has some of those tensions between action and restraint or even relational dynamics or even physical dynamics and sometimes tensions that can come up within that context.

02:07:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, and you know, Venus is often responsible for providing an important portion, or important, yeah, Venus is often responsible for providing some chill, right?

02:07:21 Speaker_00
They're like, yeah, all this is going on, but there are things to enjoy, like life isn't just a meaningless hellscape, like, and Venus's chill is temporarily off the table. Venus is not able to provide that salve, balm, or chill for about a week.

02:07:44 Speaker_00
But it's only a week, and Venus' aspects afterwards are much better.

02:07:48 Speaker_01
Yes, and that's what I want to transition into now to give people some hope and optimism because once Venus clears that opposition with Mars by about December 12th, it starts separating from the opposition with Mars.

02:08:02 Speaker_01
And then what happens is it immediately forms a sextile with that retrograde Mercury, which is getting ready to station direct, which is positive and helpful in terms of heading towards a resolution with some of the Mercury retrograde issues that Mercury kicked up.

02:08:17 Speaker_01
starting at the end of November.

02:08:19 Speaker_01
But then once it completes that sextile with Mercury, from that point forward, Venus, which then is at 6 and 7 degrees of Aquarius, starts applying to this lovely trine with Jupiter, which at that point is at 15 degrees of Gemini.

02:08:35 Speaker_01
and we just see after that point the Venus-Jupiter trine getting closer and closer and closer all the way up until when it eventually culminates here around December 19th when Venus hits 14 degrees of Aquarius, trines Jupiter at 14 degrees of Gemini, and by that time Mercury has stationed direct and is moving forward and is starting to come out of that period of

02:09:01 Speaker_01
of chaos and delays in communications and revising or going back and revisiting things from the past and everything else. So I like this little span of time right here in the middle of the month when at least we get some positive aspects happening.

02:09:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's the creamy center. right of the not good tasting sandwich, which is the, yeah.

02:09:26 Speaker_00
Oh, I'm, I I've just been binging great British bake off. So it was a dessert in my mind. Um, the judges were not a fan of what was presented the December showstopper.

02:09:37 Speaker_00
Um, the, uh, the habanero and feces pastry, uh, like the, the crust on the outside, um, Paul Hollywood was not a fan, but the, uh, the center is good. Well baked.

02:09:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, Venus. I don't know what to say there. I'm gonna, I want to highlight actually at this point, the monthly election because our month ahead. Now that with that, that's a nice segue.

02:10:06 Speaker_01
That's a nice transition point into highlighting the the monthly election. Yeah. Yeah.

02:10:12 Speaker_01
you're the no habanero or feces in the monthly election right the s s sandwich um so our monthly election for this month our most fortunate date is december 14th 2024 starting at 11 20 a.m with pisces rising so let me adjust our chart here to get pisces rising for those watching the video version

02:10:38 Speaker_01
Basically, you want to set your chart for that, but change it to your location and set it for about 1120 AM, and then adjust the Ascendant until you have around the early degrees of Pisces rising.

02:10:50 Speaker_01
Let's say the Ascendant around 3 degrees of Pisces rising, you should end up with a chart like this. So this is our most fortunate electional chart for the month for starting new ventures and undertakings and just taking actions in general.

02:11:04 Speaker_01
It has Pisces rising, with the ruler of the Ascendant being Jupiter, which is in Gemini in the fourth whole sign house, in a mutual reception with Mercury, which is slowing down and is one day from stationing direct.

02:11:16 Speaker_01
So Mercury is basically already in the process of doing that U-turn and moving forward again.

02:11:20 Speaker_01
And this is one of the first dates that you can start really using auspicious electional charts again, since we'll start coming out of the Mercury retrograde shortly after this point.

02:11:30 Speaker_01
So this date has a very auspicious looking Moon-Jupiter conjunction around 15 degrees of Gemini that we take advantage of.

02:11:38 Speaker_01
And we also start getting Venus, which finally, as we said, is separating from Mars and now is applying to that trine with Jupiter. We do have some mitigations where Mercury is in the 10th house sextiling Venus.

02:11:52 Speaker_01
So even though Venus is in the 12th house, it's helping to mitigate Venus's 12th house position.

02:11:58 Speaker_01
This election is very much focused on the fourth house with the ruler of the Ascendant there, so it can be good for basic fourth house topics having to do with the home, the living situation, one's family, or things like that.

02:12:09 Speaker_01
But the fourth house is also a good place for things having to do with privacy, things having to do with doing work behind the scenes.

02:12:18 Speaker_01
There was one listener, I think it was a patron, I can't remember their name right now, who, after I released the first part of the Fourth House episode, pointed out that we had highlighted a number of famous directors that had the ruler of the Ascendant in the Fourth House.

02:12:31 Speaker_01
The point that they made is that these are people that are in charge of things, but they're doing so from behind the camera. It's like they're not the person that is

02:12:40 Speaker_01
know, on film in their actual movies, and yet they're still the one in charge on the movie set.

02:12:46 Speaker_01
I thought that was an incredible observation and a great insight into how fourth house placements can still be powerful since it's an angular house, but it's also something that's not typically like

02:12:59 Speaker_01
as visible as it could be otherwise, as let's say a 10th house planet. But despite that, because it has a mutual reception with Mercury, the ruler of the 4th in the 10th house, there are still some great 10th house things going on here.

02:13:11 Speaker_01
So it doesn't necessarily have to be completely invisible or not focused on 10th house matters. So this is our electional chart. What do you think, Osmond?

02:13:25 Speaker_00
Yeah, I like the point you made about the ruler of the first being in the fourth and seeing that in directors, right? Who are, you know, the fourth house being the actual physical location.

02:13:38 Speaker_00
A lot of the time it's like this whole scene is because that's what they wanted. The set is there, the people are arranged that way because it is the, you know, at the command of the director. And that, you know, it's by,

02:13:54 Speaker_00
having control of the foundations of something that then everything is resting on that. And that the fourth is an angular house for a reason. So I really like that moon Jupiter down there.

02:14:07 Speaker_00
And then, yeah, the sun's up there in the 10th, and Mercury's got some good stuff. But that's nice. I want to use that for

02:14:20 Speaker_00
either work on establishing something or work on that foundational level, like what is supporting other things, which could literally be something in the house. Maybe my office will take its final form on December the 14th.

02:14:36 Speaker_00
Because that eclipse in my fourth, tore up my office and it's been somewhat rearranged. But I have just large pieces of furniture sort of strewn next to, I don't know, waist-high stacks of books. It's not done yet. CB.

02:14:57 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, and there was a loss for the community because we had the loss of your peacock background in the monthly forecast, but we gained an otherwise pretty impressive new background for your video.

02:15:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's me sending coded messages to the faithful. What does the disappearance of the peacock mean?

02:15:16 Speaker_01
Exactly. There'll be books written about that. All right.

02:15:20 Speaker_01
So that was their best electional chart for the month, but we actually, Lisa Scheim and I found, I think, a dozen other electional charts for later in December, including some that take even better advantage of the Venus-Jupiter trine that happens

02:15:32 Speaker_01
days later. So you can get those access to those other electional charts if you need other good dates for December through the Electional Astrology Podcast, which is you can find out more information about at theastrologypodcast.com slash elections.

02:15:45 Speaker_01
And of course, if you need longer term elections, then we have our year ahead electional report, which is 20% off right now at launch. So you can get that at theastrologypodcast.com as well.

02:15:58 Speaker_00
Yeah, there are a lot of little moments to make use of that Venus-Jupiter trine.

02:16:02 Speaker_01
CB Exactly. All right, so let's jump ahead. Mercury goes direct on our second lunation of the month, which is that full Moon in Gemini on the 15th.

02:16:13 Speaker_01
The full Moon is not without issues though, even though Mercury is stationing direct because the full Moon, its closest aspect is that it's squaring Neptune in Pisces.

02:16:22 Speaker_01
So there's this nebulousness to that full Moon, even though otherwise we would be thinking that communications are starting to move forward again with Mercury stationing direct.

02:16:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, and the contrast is really clear between the Sagittarius Sun and the Gemini Moon, which are so action-oriented. Those signs are so moving around, saying stuff, doing stuff. And with the tight square to Neptune, you're just left wondering like,

02:16:55 Speaker_00
So there's all that sound and fury, but what does it signify? So what does that mean? Does that mean anything? Is this real or what kind of real is it? Neptune has these sort of troubling and deep ontological questions which riddle our time.

02:17:15 Speaker_00
It's like, okay, so all that happened. What does it mean? Is it going anywhere? CB.

02:17:21 Speaker_01
Right. Yeah. What does it mean? And sometimes Sometimes we look into the meaning of things and we find deeper meanings and purpose from things, and other times we find things that just confuse us or blur the picture even more.

02:17:37 Speaker_01
And as we move forward after this Mercury retrograde, I think that's going to be one of the questions that we have this month on that lunation, which is like, is communication improving or are there still things that are casting a shadow over things that are making things unclear?

02:17:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, things are being said. Yeah, what does it mean? Where does this mean things are actually going? There's a lot of that in December, because we begin with the Mercury retrograde where it's like, oh, it's obviously retrograde, but even as you said,

02:18:11 Speaker_00
after the direct station, there are still questions about that. And we've got Mars very retrograde. So where's Mars going? And we get the first chapter of that in December, but Mars has lots of other things to do in January and February and beyond.

02:18:30 Speaker_00
There's a question of where are we headed? Where is this thing headed? don't get resolved this month. Although we get, you know, we get some, we get more clarity than we did with Mercury's direct station.

02:18:47 Speaker_00
Cause at least it's a piece, but it's not the, it's not the whole thing.

02:18:53 Speaker_01
CB One of the positive things I like after Mercury stations direct and once it starts moving forward again after the 14th and the 15th is Mercury being in Sagittarius, it starts applying to Jupiter. And what's interesting is if you look at the chart,

02:19:10 Speaker_01
Once Mercury stations direct, it looks like it's applying to square Saturn first at 13 degrees of Pisces, but because Jupiter is retrograde at 14 Gemini and Saturn is direct, what ends up happening is that Mercury applies and perfects that opposition to Jupiter first before it completes the square with Saturn.

02:19:30 Speaker_01
And that's an interesting change-up that happens around December 26th, when the Mercury-Jupiter opposition with reception goes exact, which, especially because that's a mutual reception, I consider to be a little bit more positive.

02:19:46 Speaker_01
it's an opposition that has some resolution. And then immediately the day after that, on December 27th, Mercury squares Saturn.

02:19:54 Speaker_01
So in some ways, Mercury this month, once it moves direct, it activates the Jupiter-Saturn square between Gemini and Pisces, which this is the second exact hit of in December in terms of the tension between those two planets.

02:20:11 Speaker_01
And we'll see one more of those squares next year.

02:20:16 Speaker_00
Yes. Yeah, all of those things. Yeah, I like the mutual reception between Mercury and Jupiter quite a bit, especially with them being an aspect they can help each other. They're staying in each other's houses.

02:20:30 Speaker_00
They're staying up all night on the phone, gossiping, trying to instruct each other as to how to Sagittarius and how to Gemini properly. It's good for Mercury-Jupiter things.

02:20:44 Speaker_00
And I think it helps think about, as you were saying, the Saturn-Jupiter square, which is a slower thing, right? We got the first one several months ago, this is the second.

02:20:56 Speaker_00
The third will not take place until Saturn and Jupiter have both entered new signs. But this is the first quarter in the Saturn-Jupiter cycle, which is almost exactly 20 years, right? This is the waxing half moon, but at the scale of 20 years, right?

02:21:20 Speaker_00
We began this at the very end of 2020. And yeah, this is where things are, and the action is still rising.

02:21:33 Speaker_01
Right.

02:21:33 Speaker_01
So somehow this refers back to partially the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction that happened in 2020 and the new foundation that that laid in terms of a realignment of so many different things, of economic things, of governments, of public health and so many different things since that conjunction occurred in December of 2020.

02:21:58 Speaker_01
Somehow this waxing square refers back to that. And and the next evolution of some seeds that were planted at that time. And I think we should see some picture into that here, especially when Mercury perfects and helps to accentuate both of those.

02:22:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, I'd been curious about and thinking with the first square that it would relate partially to the economy because it's like we have the tendency of Jupiter which is to grow versus the tendency of Saturn to contract and that these two planets are coming into some sort of tension with each other so that it would be a tension between those forces of growth and contraction

02:22:39 Speaker_01
And I'm curious if that's part of what we'll see in terms of that square.

02:22:44 Speaker_01
And then, like with most of these retrogrades that have three exact hits, sometimes it's not until the third and final exact hit that you see the final outcome of what that transit was all about. And that will not hit until June.

02:23:00 Speaker_01
But here at the second one, I would expect us to really start to see and understand what that square is all about.

02:23:06 Speaker_00
Yeah. And it's kind of nice that it occurs. at the very end of the year when people are naturally inclined to think about time on a bigger picture level?

02:23:18 Speaker_01
Yeah, for sure. And more of the stuff, because by late December, it's like the government will be getting ready to change over the following month, and more of the things will be in place.

02:23:28 Speaker_01
So I think, presumably, then some of that stuff will start being factored into the economy more, and we'll get a picture of how things are going to go. or at least what the market is anticipating things are going to be.

02:23:41 Speaker_00
AC. Yeah, right. We've got those pieces. Again, we've got the Mars piece is still unresolved and going somewhere. But yeah, that helps bring clarity to that slower moving Jupiter-Saturn picture.

02:23:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, so that brings us then, I'm glad that you mentioned it, because we can clearly see looking at this chart that by the end of December, the Mars-Pluto opposition is so close. Mars gets back to by December 31st,

02:24:14 Speaker_01
2 degrees of Leo into 1 degree of Leo, and it's very closely opposing Pluto at 1 degree of Aquarius. And that's when we get our third and final lunation of the month, which is this Sun-Moon conjunction that occurs at 9 degrees of Capricorn.

02:24:35 Speaker_01
and that lunation is going to really bake in that Mars-Pluto opposition to the following lunar month that will take place over the next three to four weeks, basically. AC.

02:24:48 Speaker_00
Yep. And so, the Sun and Moon themselves are not in very dramatic condition. Like they're not really getting, how should we say, shown upon by the benefics, nor are they getting devastated by the malefics.

02:25:05 Speaker_00
Like there's a sextile to Saturn, it's in a Saturn ruled sign. It in and of itself is not very dramatic, but the tightening vice of the Mars and Pluto is right there.

02:25:19 Speaker_01
CB Yeah, it's interesting that the lunation is in Capricorn and applies to the sextile with Saturn after it completes.

02:25:29 Speaker_01
So somehow it's emphasizing that Saturn there in Pisces, but it's like the most dramatic aspect that's happening is just that Mars-Pluto opposition there and that tendency

02:25:40 Speaker_01
On the one hand, as we've seen, to do Mars-type things, which can have this severing or separating component, but to take them to their utmost extreme or sometimes to take things too far, that tendency will be there again at this time in late December and early January, especially when that aspect is completing.

02:26:01 Speaker_01
And the other thing, I went back and I was listening to our year ahead forecast recently over the past months just to see how we did and check in, and

02:26:10 Speaker_01
You actually said some really brilliant things about the Mars-Pluto opposition in the year ahead forecast where you're talking about power being influenced from behind the scenes and associating that with the Mars-Pluto opposition.

02:26:24 Speaker_01
And I thought that was such a brilliant point to make in retrospect because of especially just the influence of the billionaire class on this election cycle seemed more pronounced than at any other time in history.

02:26:40 Speaker_01
One of the most stunning things right before the election was when Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, stopped the Washington Post editorial board for issuing an endorsement for Harris.

02:26:54 Speaker_01
That happened, I think, a week or something before the election as that Mars Pluto opposition was going exact.

02:27:01 Speaker_01
So it's like you see that, you saw over the summer, you had, what's his name, from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, reached out to Trump after the assassination attempt and said some positive things about him, despite their years of having this more combative relationship over Facebook and accusations of censorship of Trump's previous campaigns, like in 2020.

02:27:27 Speaker_01
And then, of course, you also had Elon Musk and the oversized role that he played in the lead up to the election day in really becoming Trump's primary, one of his biggest supporters, with the biggest person and the most richest person in the world, at least publicly.

02:27:45 Speaker_01
And there was something about that that was really striking that I think you did a good job of calling in the year ahead forecast.

02:27:51 Speaker_00
Well, thank you. remembered that when we were talking about this last month and the month before. But you pointing that out just makes it almost like a Homer Simpson Doe moment of like, how did I miss that when I didn't miss it earlier?

02:28:14 Speaker_00
If we're looking at who are Pluto's people, how about the plutocrats? Like maybe the foremost members of the plutocracy maybe have something to do with Pluto.

02:28:27 Speaker_00
And yeah, like it was a pretty dramatic sort of shift of political allegiances among the plutocracy. Um, like in retrospect, it's like, Oh, like there, there it is. And you describing that, um, you know, just all at once.

02:28:45 Speaker_00
Um, and that like, it's not just the Mars though. It wasn't just one Mars Pluto. Right. We saw it leading up to the first one. Um, but that is like a, just a shift that like the, the Mars, like that active, um, that

02:29:01 Speaker_00
Mars being the planet which actively attempts to influence and shape, going retrograde opposite Pluto in that indicating a shift of the plutocracy's interests. And that happening so visibly seems hard to remove from the Mars and Leo side of things.

02:29:21 Speaker_00
right? Cause those weren't just like, that wasn't all that was like, those things weren't behind the scenes, right? Like those are, those are all huge stories.

02:29:28 Speaker_01
Well, it's like some of it, like the outward effect of some of it was in front of us, but I feel like there were conversations that happened behind the scenes that led to some of those sudden shifts, like 100%, you know, Bezos, it's like, who knows what was said or what he

02:29:44 Speaker_01
anticipated if he decided to make that decision so late in the process. Up until that point, he could have said months earlier to his newspaper, basically. You're not allowed to endorse, but he did it at the very last minute for whatever reason.

02:30:00 Speaker_01
So yeah, who knows what happened behind the scenes, but it was interesting.

02:30:05 Speaker_01
That was a good call on your part in terms of sometimes things in astrology that we see happen publicly and visibly, but other times there's a lot of stuff that we see that relates to things going on behind the scenes. And

02:30:19 Speaker_01
more than at any other time recently after researching the 4th house episode, where that's a major component because the 4th house is hidden and is literally under the Earth where you can't see the planets, and getting a sense of how important sometimes things are that happen behind the scenes.

02:30:34 Speaker_01
Like with those directors, for example, I mentioned who were running the show, but they're not the ones on camera. So you wouldn't know that if you just look at the movie itself until you just read the credits at the end.

02:30:46 Speaker_01
There's something similar about Pluto when it comes to that here, and it's interesting to explore that component further.

02:30:51 Speaker_00
AC Yeah. And I hope we remember, I think we will, to bring that lens to our second and then third Mars-Pluto opposition.

02:31:04 Speaker_01
CB Yeah, although there's so much stuff going on in March and April.

02:31:07 Speaker_01
Like the astrology, I'm starting to research that for the year ahead forecast and that Neptune ingress that happens within like 24 hours of the eclipse in Aries, that whole time period just looks so crazy. AC Yes, it does.

02:31:22 Speaker_00
And we will spend probably too much time in the yearly talking about it because it's so very dense.

02:31:31 Speaker_01
Yeah. And it's like, we need to come up with, because it's like, we're laughing about it, but it's going to be crazy.

02:31:36 Speaker_01
But it's just like, as astrologers, intellectually, it's the same thing we've talked about for years, where you have like, what we've been calling astrologer good, which is like when bad stuff or difficult stuff is going on your life, but like, you're so impressed by the transit sometimes that you're- It's perfect.

02:31:54 Speaker_00
Of course, it manifested that way. You couldn't make this up.

02:31:58 Speaker_01
like you just wrecked your car. It's like that story of that astrologer from the 1800s who Uranus had just been discovered, and he's trying to figure out what it means.

02:32:08 Speaker_01
He thinks he's figured it out, and he has this transit coming up on this day that's going to go exact, so he just sits around all day waiting to see what happens. Then at that moment, something happens accidentally and his house catches on fire.

02:32:21 Speaker_01
And he's so excited that he runs outside and he starts writing it down, what Uranus means while his house like burns to the ground.

02:32:29 Speaker_01
It's like that's astrologer good, as we've been saying, but we kind of need a bigger version of astrologer good when you're kind of like watching just like historic events happening.

02:32:39 Speaker_01
And you're seeing the sometimes the destruction or crumbling of structures that have always been around. And it's in some instances, going to be really, really rough.

02:32:52 Speaker_01
But sometimes you're intellectually so impressed by the astrology that you almost disassociate.

02:32:58 Speaker_01
And we've been thinking about, you had said, may you live in interesting times, which is supposed to be that ancient Chinese curse, that maybe that's the hashtag for that when you're dealing with the historical version of that.

02:33:12 Speaker_00
Yeah, hashtag interesting times. Yeah, I mean, Yeah, having paid more attention now to history, both as it's unfolding and as it has unfolded, history, at least half of the time, is like a horror genre interest.

02:33:34 Speaker_00
Like if you like uplifting stories and happy endings, like history's not for you. And you know, that's, That's even during the good times. But yeah, my guess is that that is not an ancient Chinese curse. That sounds- It's not.

02:33:52 Speaker_01
It's actually not. Somebody pointed that out in a YouTube comment recently.

02:33:55 Speaker_01
I didn't know that, that it's thought to be like in America, like an ancient Chinese curse, but that there's not really a trace of that existing in China and that it may have been invented by an American guy or something like that in the past centuries.

02:34:09 Speaker_01
So that's actually interesting.

02:34:12 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, it has that, it has that flavor. But that's the idea, right? That it is, to be in interesting times is by no means a blessing. But yeah, hashtag interesting times.

02:34:29 Speaker_00
I agree that the astrology good is better on a personal level when it's something that's not devastating, right? Like, oh, Mars can join my Ascendant and I totally stubbed my toe, right?

02:34:43 Speaker_00
Or little things, maybe more intense than that, but like- Like cut yourself or something, but it's like a little cut or burn. Yeah, right.

02:34:53 Speaker_00
Like when I entered my sixth house perfection and I slammed my thumb on the door and the thumbnail turned black and fell off, right? Like some sort of easily born, but a commiseration inducing suffering.

02:35:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, I agree that we need a different term for scaling that up.

02:35:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, we'll have to workshop that.

02:35:17 Speaker_01
But there are the more extreme versions of that that we all experience as astrologers sometimes where in the most extreme version, if you have the loss of a loved one or you have some sort of traumatic event, and I do think as astrologers, we sometimes find solace in

02:35:35 Speaker_01
looking at the astrology and seeing that the astrology correlated with these important movements in our life, and that that's part of our process of astrologers sometimes, even when we're going through difficult times, is

02:35:49 Speaker_01
not just intellectualizing it, but understanding how even difficult events are integrated into the larger narrative of our lives and our life story and our, in some instances, our fate or our destiny. So that's part of our process.

02:36:06 Speaker_01
And yeah, sometimes we get excited about seeing the astrological correlations just as an intellectual exercise unto itself. Yeah, that's sort of separate from almost like your personal feelings and experience of things sometimes. Yeah.

02:36:26 Speaker_01
All right, buddy. Thank you for doing this episode with me. Thank you for doing such a long recap of the presidential election portion of this with me. I appreciated it.

02:36:36 Speaker_01
I could have done that as a separate thing, but I wanted to do it with you because you and I have been on this journey for so long now of checking in the monthly forecast episodes and seeing mundane astrology play out over the past decade that, yeah, I wanted to have that conversation with you.

02:36:50 Speaker_01
And I'm glad we did it and that we combined it with looking at the astrology of December.

02:36:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, me too. Yeah, it is coming up on a decade. I think we're six months away from a decade. Yeah, that's crazy.

02:37:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's wild. I think it was like a Venus retrograde in Leo or something like that.

02:37:10 Speaker_00
I want to say it was before it went retrograde. I remember it was a Jupiter, Venus and Leo election that you had because it was right when you started the Patreon. And it was June.

02:37:25 Speaker_00
I was in, I was visiting Denver because I was speaking at a tarot conference. Yeah. My book that had just come out, 36 Faces. Oh my God.

02:37:36 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, that'll be fun. I'm looking forward to that. And then, yeah, I started the podcast under, it wasn't just Jupiter in Gemini, but also I think there's like a Venus retrograde in Gemini. So it was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini.

02:37:49 Speaker_01
And that's why I have a lot of words on this podcast. What do you have coming up? What are you doing? What are you working on in December?

02:37:56 Speaker_00
Oh, I've got a couple of things. One, at the very end of the month, I'm actually doing the last year one intake for my astrological education program. So that's going to open up on the 28th. It will probably close down a few hours later on the 28th.

02:38:17 Speaker_00
They fill up really quickly. If you'd like to be involved in that, Sign up for the mailing list. It just goes out to the mailing list. I don't put it out publicly. And there should be enough time.

02:38:30 Speaker_00
If you've already got a background, if you sign up for year one, you should probably be able to qualify for year two by the time it starts in April. If you already have a background. Let's see what else is going on.

02:38:43 Speaker_00
I think I'm going to write an article. for the first time in a while. I used to do that. I've literally written thousands of articles.

02:38:50 Speaker_00
I think I'm- I think I'm going to actually write up some of the macro stuff that I've been doing astrologically, some of the 2025 through 2033 stuff, because it's already

02:39:08 Speaker_00
There's too much there, it would be an hour and a half long digression in any podcast. And it's nice to have as much time as I want to find the right words. So I'm actually probably going to put out an article.

02:39:23 Speaker_00
He says while Mercury is retrograde, look for it around the direct station. And then there is a series produced through Sphere & Sundry that not only did I elect, but I actually did all of the ritual work and the construction for.

02:39:43 Speaker_00
that's coming out, I believe, first week of December. And it makes use of one of the spicier Mars and Capricorn elections that happened at the beginning of 2024. If you remember, Mars and Capricorn, once upon a time, was trying Jupiter in Taurus.

02:40:06 Speaker_00
And so I actually made a lot of Mars and Capricorn stuff. And this is inspired by the Hoodoo classic, Fiery Wall of Protection. So it's sort of an astromagic Mars and Cap take on that.

02:40:21 Speaker_00
So look out for Fiery Wall, the first week of December from Sphere and Sundry. And then finally, the website, as always, a lot of recorded lectures and classes available if you want to stuff your stocking with those.

02:40:41 Speaker_00
And you can also find a list of my three-year program graduates to book with if you would like a reading. Brilliant. And what are your websites again? It's austincopic.com and sphereandsundry.com.

02:40:59 Speaker_01
All right, I'll put a link to those in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. As for myself, so just a reminder that 2025 Electional Astrology Report with the lucky dates for next year is 20% off right now.

02:41:14 Speaker_01
So get it while it's on that launch sale at theastrologypodcast.com slash 2025report. We're going to be recording the 2025 year ahead forecast on December 20th live with a group of patrons.

02:41:28 Speaker_01
So that's gonna be my focus next month is getting prepared for that. I'm pretty excited about it. Austin.

02:41:33 Speaker_01
I have both begun our research As prep for that I'm planning to record year-ahead horoscopes in early December if all goes well and I'll release those for early access To patrons as soon as I can and then they'll be released to the general public not too long after that so I'm looking forward to doing those just because it's really good prep for the year-ahead forecast to like personalize it based on

02:41:56 Speaker_01
everybody's rising sign for the year ahead. And other than that, I'm also getting prepared and starting to research with my team, the fifth house episode.

02:42:06 Speaker_01
And we've already recorded a live chart reading session with patrons where I interviewed several patrons about their fifth house placements.

02:42:13 Speaker_01
And we just had some incredibly stunning stories that really got me excited for the fifth house episode, doing that. So that episode is already available for early access through Patreon. And

02:42:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, we'll see what happens and how research goes before I eventually put together and record the full episode on the fifth house here before too long Otherwise, I think that's it

02:42:35 Speaker_00
That's going to be amazing. I look forward to it.

02:42:37 Speaker_01
For sure. All right, buddy. Thanks a lot for joining me for this. Thanks to our audience of patrons that joined us in the live chat for this episode. I appreciate all of you for your comments and for your support.

02:42:49 Speaker_01
Thank you to Austin for joining me for this forecast. And yeah, we'll be back again next month when we do our year ahead forecast for the entirety of 2025. So otherwise, thanks for watching, and we'll see you again next time.

02:43:07 Speaker_01
you're a fan of the podcast and you'd like to support the production of future episodes, then consider becoming a patron through my page on patreon.com.

02:43:14 Speaker_01
In exchange, you'll get access to a bunch of benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, access to the monthly electional astrology podcast, access to another exclusive podcast called the Secret Astrology Podcast that's only available to patrons, or even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode.

02:43:35 Speaker_01
For more information, visit patreon.com slash astrology podcast.

02:43:39 Speaker_01
Special thanks to patrons on our producer's tier, including Christy Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandy Ray, Angelique Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeannie Marie Kaplan, Melissa Delano, Sonny Bozboz, Kwatsi Alibarrahu, and Annie Newman.

02:43:56 Speaker_01
If you're looking for an astrological consultation, then we have a new list of recommended astrologers on the podcast website. These astrologers offer birth chart readings, synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions, and more.

02:44:10 Speaker_01
Go to theastrologypodcast.com slash consultations.

02:44:15 Speaker_01
The astrology software that we use on the Astrology Podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, and you can get a 15% discount on the software by using the promo code AP15 when you purchase it through alabe.com.

02:44:29 Speaker_01
For Mac users, we recommend the program AstroGold for macOS, and you can also get a 15% discount when you use the promo code astropodcast15 at the website astrogold.io.

02:44:43 Speaker_01
If you'd like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then you should get a copy of my book titled Hellenistic Astrology, the Study of Fate and Fortune, which is available in both print and now ebook forms, where I've started selling a PDF copy of the book through my website at hellenisticastrology.com book.

02:45:01 Speaker_01
If you're really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then check out my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology.

02:45:09 Speaker_01
It's perfect for beginner and intermediate students because I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts.

02:45:18 Speaker_01
There's over 100 hours of video lectures, including monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And at the end of the course, if you complete the final test, you'll receive a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me.

02:45:30 Speaker_01
You can find out more information at theastrologyschool.com.