Astrology Forecast for February 2023
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you're listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, we're going to be looking at the astrological forecast for the month of February of 2023. Joining me today are astrologers Austin Coppock and Bear Ryver. Hey guys, welcome. AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey. BEAR RYVER: Hey, thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah, thanks for joining me today. All right, let me give a little overview of the astrology of February here at the beginning, then we're going to transition to a talk about some news stories that have happened over the past month and the astrology associated with them, before eventually jumping into the forecast for February. So I'll put timestamps below this video in the description for those that want to jump ahead, as well as on the podcast website entry for this episode. All right, so here's the planetary alignments calendar from our wall poster for 2023. February starts off pretty early with a full Moon in the sign of Leo on February 5th as our first lunation of the month. Then later in the week, Mercury ends its very long trek through Capricorn because it's
been retrograde in that sign for like a month now, and it finally ingresses or moves into the sign of Aquarius on February 11th. Then the following week, we get a Venus-Neptune conjunction in Pisces on the 15th just the day after Valentine's Day, followed by a Sun-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius on the 16th of February. Then a couple days later, we get the Sun moving into Pisces on the 18th. Venus moves into Aries departing from Pisces on the 20th, and the same day there is a New Moon in the sign of Pisces on February 20th. So there's some other aspects and other minor things
going on this month that we'll talk about, but that's basically the broad or general outlines of the things that we're going to be getting into in our forecast for this month. All right. So hey, welcome both of you. Bear, thanks for joining us. It's your first time doing a forecast with us. BR: It is. Thank you so much for having me. CB: You and I just recorded the Aquarius episode in the Zodiac series a few days ago with Aerin Fogel, and that was a lot of fun to do so I thought it would be great to have you on for this episode since it's still Aquarius season. BR: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It feels like a
fitting treat as an Aquarius Moon person and I think that was actually my exact precise lunar return, maybe like an arc minute off when we started recording so, keeping the trend going. CB: I love when stuff like that happens. Austin, how have you been doing since we last saw you at our forecast which we recorded in what? Mid-December? AC: Yeah. Well, so immediately following that, I went into a nine-day coma in order to restore myself. I was awake and walking around, but I remember nothing and was exhausted. CB: That was a long recording day. AC: That was our longest podcast ever.
But I don't know, I've been on a sort of trite New Year grind. I've just been doing my exercises and doing my mantras and working on my book and teaching my classes, and I've been a very orderly fellow. It's boring, but the useful kind of boring. CB: Yeah, I think there's little delay to getting the year started because of those retrogrades that were just finishing up in January. First, the Mars retrograde finished like a weekend to January and then Mercury, the following week stationed direct finally. And I've felt the
shift as both of those have stationed direct, and it seems like we're moving forward into new territory finally after a long winter season here. AC: Yeah. I tried to take that into account for getting back to work and doing New Year's things. I set some parameters for like, "Oh, you're going to do this on these days of the week for this many hours," but then made sure to leave it open to tweak on the Mercury direct station. And I'm glad I did because what I initially set out was kind of unrealistic. And so I was like I've got two weeks in, now I know that, and I was able to tweak it into something that was workable. CB: Yeah, for sure. For sure. BR: Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the image of-- if you've ever driven in the snow-- getting
stuck where you don't have traction and having to get one foot out the door and rock the car until you really do get enough friction, and thinking about the slow slow slow chuck out station of Mars; like, still at eight degrees, still at eight degrees but as soon as we get into February, I think we'll finally feel the momentum pick up. AC: That's funny that you mentioned that because during the Mercury retrograde, we had somebody deliver food to our house like a DoorDash person. And they got stuck in the snow and so I had to go out and literally help push them out. And there
was some nice rocking, and like that image because when you're not that stuck, you can just do a straight push out. But other times you do have to kind of get a little back and forth, go in, and then go on it. You know? BR: Yeah, yeah. CB: For sure. Yeah, so we're coming out of that. Why don't we talk about and do some review at this point about the astrology of the past month and any news stories that have come up, and just some of the things that we've seen manifest in world events over the course of the past few weeks since we did the last episode. Were there any major news
stories or personal experiences or client stories that either of you had that come to mind in terms of stuff that you saw over the past month? AC: I have a really simple personal one. I started a particular long-term workout plan the end of last March, and it just so happens that I finally finished the criteria of that, I completed that on the day of Mars direct station. And that was not planned at all, it just so happened that that was the case. I was like,
"Hold on, isn't this the Mars station?" And yeah, so that's kind of nice. It just shows you that each planet is a clock for its sphere of activity. BR: Yeah, I had my astrologer good experience of my Profection playing out back when Mars stationed retrograde. Got hit super hard in the elbow, like of course Gemini so it's down between the fingers and the shoulders, and got a contusion to my ulnar nerve. So the nerve itself is injured, and with the station coming up I was like, "Okay, it's either going to magically resolve itself or it's going to peak in intensity and get even worse." Which did, unfortunately, but that was also when I finally got the various claims and
stuff in motion to get the first actual treatment for it. So seeing that kind of timing of like, "Yeah. Oh, still no appointments, still no appointment," and then the station directs, and seeing that finally get some progress. AC: Well, it's good to hear that that's improving. I know somebody who also had an ulnar nerve issue that was aggravated and made them leave work right after the Mars station. And then speaking of the sphere of Mars and MMA, right around the Mars Retrograde season there was this rash of crazy shoulder injuries that ruined title fight after title fight. And I just heard-- and Mars is direct now-- that the one that was Jiří Procházka (I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly) who was the 2005 champion went out during the Mars Retrograde station. And it was reported that he had one of the worst shoulder injuries ever
seen in that sport, which is saying something, right? And that he wouldn't be able to defend his title for over a year. But Mars just stationed direct, and now he's like, "Yeah, I can fight." BR: That's really lucky. AC: Yeah. And who knows whether it was overestimated dot dot dot dot, but the physical quality and the number of shoulder wrist forearm injuries that I've seen with this Mars Retrograde in Gemini is pretty wild. It really shows you that almost silly-looking Zodiac guy with the sign breaking into the different body regions.
That's science. CB: Yeah. Because you look at that and you're like, "Oh, that's quaint," and you see illustrations of it like medieval manuscripts, but yeah, now my shoulder. I messed up my shoulder literally on the Mars station in October November doing push-ups and yeah, that's been annoying. BR: Last little thought about that with Mars, which is Mars being related to inflammation and the shoulders and elbows and wrists and all of the tendons and nerves through there being particularly susceptible to being put out of commission by inflammation itself. Even if the injury isn't that bad, the inflammation will pinch a nerve or impingement and put you out. AC: I mean, that's what arthritis is. Right?
CB: Right. AC: That's tennis elbow, that's... Yeah. CB: Yeah, good point. All right. So other news stories and stuff since we last checked in... Where do I start? So one of the things that happened, because this happened right out after we recorded the last forecast, but it was something that we'd actually talked about in the previous Year Ahead forecast for 2022, which was the release of Avatar 2 in theatres when Jupiter retrograded back into Pisces and did its last conjunction with Neptune in Pisces. And weirdly, because we had noticed that the first Avatar movie was really released under a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius way back in 2009, it was weird that it just happened to be that 13 some odd years later, James Cameron ended up finishing and releasing his follow up movie, Avatar 2, on another Jupiter-Neptune conjunction this time in Pisces, and the movie was centered around water and being in the ocean, and there was a lot of innovative use of technology in order to depict computer-generated ocean scenes essentially. So, weird story about that. But the day that
the movie came out, and it was under that Jupiter- Neptune conjunction with Mars widely squaring it, and Austin you had used the metaphor of a bubble popping for many months during that time and a lot of that was also tied in with inflation and the attempts for the government to get control of inflation and things like that. Weirdly the day that Avatar was released, this happened; where this aquarium at a hotel in Berlin that was holding 1500 fish just exploded and just burst that day and flooded this entire hotel with fish with this gigantic fish tank, and it was like this weird piece of simultaneous symbolism overlapping on the same day that I thought was kind of weird. Where sometimes even though that stuff seems kind of comical or weird, stuff comes up in the news that sometimes plays out the astrology in these very bizarre ways, roughly sort of coinciding with the transits. AC: Yeah, when you watch this kind of
thing for long enough especially against astrology, you see that reality itself has metaphor as part of its language. And that humans can do metaphors, too, but the metaphorical is a naturally occurring phenomenon which I think when people start to notice that, it does drive some of them mad if they don't have recourse to astrology. People begin to believe that all of this is planned by human intelligence because they don't think of the mind of the world doing metaphor, it's got to be a human mind.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it's just that all of these transits and stuff are manifesting in a multitude of different ways in hundreds and thousands and sometimes millions of people's lives in different ways, but occasionally when we see something that pops up in the news stories that fits that symbolism archetypally, it's really just showing you the tip of the iceberg. But that's one of the reasons why it's okay sometimes to note those one-off news stories because they're actually representative of a lot of other stories that you're not seeing that are happening at the same time. AC: Yeah, totally. Yeah, it stands in for other events. Yeah. BR: Yeah, if we're looking at the kind
of microcosm-macrocosm, then if we had enough information we should in theory be able to look at any one moment and then tell the story of everything through just the metaphor of that moment. It's impossibly inaccessible 90% of the time, that's a Jupiterian everything and that's the part of Pisces that gets out of control and hard to name and when you talk too much about Neptune and your brain goes foggy. But in theory, yeah that's there. Whether it's the friction of not getting friction and seeing oh, okay. That's expressed with Kevin McCarthy and everything that was going on with Congress, it was just kind of laughing about that like, "Yeah, there's no friction to be gained to move forward yet." CB: All right. Was that during the Mercury Retrograde still? I think Mercury is still retrograde when that was all, and Congress was up and everything was up in the air and they couldn't pick a speaker of the house for days. Yeah. So that was happening. I saw Avatar 2, it was actually surprisingly... He was able to
pull it off. I think everyone was surprised about whether somebody could do a sequel 13 years later that would be worth not just doing a sequel, but also setting it up because apparently he's also written two or three other movies after this, one of which is already in post-production. So it's like this is like a whole cinematic universe, but somehow he was able to pull it off making this interesting enough and continuing the story enough to make it worthwhile, but especially like with the first one, primarily in terms of the technology and just taking the technology another leap forward, both in terms of the immersiveness of the 3D effect, which is really what this movie and the previous one was about; was making a movie that feels immersive and gives you a sense of presence of being there, which is a very Jupiter-Neptune thing. But also I noticed afterwards, we had had this whole discussion in the Year Ahead forecast about the upcoming Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus this year and talking about different technological innovations with that, as well as people in the past who've had that conjunction and have really focused on pushing forward and pushing the limits of technology, and growth and expansion through technology. And one of the examples I used was Steve Jobs who had a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and he was the founder of Apple computer and helped promote the personal PC revolution of everybody having a computer in their home, as well as eventually the mobile phone revolution with the iPhone. Interestingly I realized afterwards that
James Cameron, the filmmaker and director of Avatar 2, also has a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. And I just think that's really fascinating not just because of that movie, but because he's just been known for pushing the limits of technology and especially CGI in filmmaking for many years going back to some of his early movies with, you know, Terminator, Aliens 2, The Abyss and stuff like that. But also his first gigantic blockbuster, Titanic which was released in 1997, and some of the CGI and stuff they used in order to recreate the Titanic. It turns out Patrick Watson noticed this, that that movie was also released under a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1997. So the same time that Steve Jobs was releasing his Think Different ad campaign
under that same Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that was kind of tied in with his natal signature, James Cameron with that same natal signature was also doing something big and innovative in terms of technology. I thought that was kind of interesting, kind of weird. AC: Yeah. Yeah. CB: So you saw the first Avatar. Right, Austin? AC: I did, it was a long time ago. CB: Yeah. Are you still... I think
everyone has a vague memory of it being kind of immersive and that 3D experience being kind of unique at the time. AC: Yeah. Yeah, it was a big deal. People were talking about it non-stop. I was actually living in LA then, so I heard a lot of disreputable people talking about how they've got a technology similar and it's going to change this and they're going to do a movie. You know, in LA everybody's trying to pitch you something all the time even if you have no power influence. They can at least absorb your power of belief and try to use that for some purpose. But yeah, I remember it was quite a lot of unasked for and nonconsensual pitch meetings ended up happening as a result of that. [laughs] CB: Yeah. Well, then there were so many... That
started the whole 3D trend for several years where a bunch of movies after that quickly ran to make 3D versions of their own movies, which is often not as good and didn't work out terribly well. AC: I saw one of the Pirates of the Caribbean, I don't know which one it was, that they did in 3D. And it gave me a terrible headache and wasn't enjoyable at all. I remember it ruined the movie. I don't think it was supposed to be 3D, they just kind of added that. Maybe it was Pirates 4. I watched the movie eight years later and I was like, "Oh, I actually kind of like this movie." But I didn't at all in the 3D, it ruined the experience.
CB: Sure. Yeah. Well, it's worth checking out just for the sake of experiencing a transit. This is literally like a Jupiter-Neptune transit and it's like that's what that's like. It's weird immersiveness which transports you to a different world in some sense. So that was one of the news stories that happened recently. Other similar news stories is I feel like the Saturn-Neptune conjunction next year is coming in real fast, and I'm already starting to see where that's headed. And one of the keywords that seems like that's going to happen for next year is the blurring of the boundary or the distinction between what's real and what's not, and also sometimes augmenting reality. And the technology of augmented reality seems like it's one of the
main things that's coming up over the next year, because remember we were doing the forecast episodes back during the Saturn-Neptune square back around the 2016-2017 timeframe, and that summer was like the summer that the Pokémon GO craze took off where people were using their mobile phones where you could see little creatures running around digitally around parks and stuff, and people were chasing them and there was this interesting blurring between what was real and what wasn't. So, Facebook just released a new headset that focuses on augmented reality and supposedly, Apple is getting ready to release their own VR headset that will have both a virtual reality as well as an augmented reality component. And if that happens, then that's going to be a really interesting way to kick off the Saturn-Neptune co-presence in the same sign that's going to last for five or six years, if one of the biggest tech companies in the world really moves into the virtual reality space. That may be a sign of something that's going to become a much bigger trend than it is up to this point. AC: Yeah, definitely. Quick note, the first Pokémon game came out Saturn in Pisces, so this will be the Saturn Return. And already having shown an interest in doing augmented
reality-- Pokémon GO was really successful-- it would be surprising if we didn't get the next iteration of that during the Saturn Return. And that is a thing about both January as well as February which we'll come to is that this is the end, these are the drags, the results of Saturn in Aquarius, we're just about done. And so yeah, there's a little bit of a retrospective quality. It's almost an epilogue, I would say at this point. You know, , we've had these sort of
big dramatic, climactic, fixed T-Square fixed opposition configurations, but we're coming up on a conjunction of the Sun and Saturn in Aquarius this month, and it'll be the last for a long time. But this is the epilogue, this is the results. This is the raising of the shire. Hopefully not. [laughs] In terms of epilogue. CB: Well, for some people it's more positive than that. It's been interesting seeing some of the Saturn and Aquarius people finishing up their Saturn returns and getting to that final stage like you were saying, the epilogue stage, where they've kind of made it at this point and it's winding down. And some of the ones that were success stories where it went relatively well, you're seeing the results of that at this point now that Saturn's getting ready to depart from Aquarius here in the next month or two. One of the ones that I had been paying attention to since 2020 was Miley Cyrus, because she has this just amazingly placed Saturn in the 10th house of career. And back in 2020, I made a tweet just sort of trying to call it and just being like,
Miley Cyrus is going to be a Saturn Return success story. Because when I looked at her chart, she... Here, I'll pull it up for those watching the video version of this. She has late Taurus rising with Saturn at 13 degrees of Aquarius conjunct the degree of the midheaven at eight Aquarius, and it's in a day chart. It's in its own domicile, it's in the 10th house, and it also has this very nice Trine from Jupiter which is at eight degrees of Libra trining both the degree of the midheaven as well as Jupiter and thus [bonafying] Saturn, while Saturn is also in aversion to Mars which is down there in Cancer. Anyway, she just released a new single titled Flowers last week and it's debuted already on the Billboard like number one, and I think has quickly become one of her most successful songs I think ever. So she's enjoying wild success
right now and the music video for it which kind of went viral just shows her dancing gleefully while also expressing coming out of this long-term relationship that didn't go well for her but that she's happy to be free of. And I thought that was such a great metaphor for a Saturn Return. BR: Or even the fact that I guess that that music video she filmed at the location where her ex was persistently cheating on her, and so there's this kind of like, "All right, yeah. This Saturnian shitty thing that happened, I'm gonna turn that to my advantage and then just put it right there in the 10th house for everyone to see. Maybe there's something there too about the... I know this for Venus in Capricorn would have the double whammy Venus return because of those retrogrades on [unintelligible] 2022.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And just making something positive out of something that was difficult. Or being able to showcase one's challenges or trauma or hardships but then to overcome them and still come out on top in the end, that's a real positive version of the Saturn Return story or manifestation. AC: Yeah. It is, Chris, a really good example of just a positive Saturn placement and then a return on that. Because when you have Saturn's favour, you're confirmed. Right? Your success is confirmed, you're established. It confirms that she is an established fixture in the music industry. Saturn ensconces, enthrones, enshrines. It puts you in a fortified position, right? A position that's not easy to assail and that is not fragile or as temporary as most success is. CB: That's actually a really good point that's
even more relevant for her, of course, because she was a child star and so many child stars have that struggle sometimes of having success earlier in life when they're super young. But then sometimes that situation happens when sometimes people peak earlier or like what happens in the scenario where the height of your popularity is earlier in life and then you're never able to like recapture that. Or in some instances, there's an extreme drop off where a person really struggles in adulthood to find what to do or what their purpose or focus should be, or what have you. So her having a more positively placed Saturn both had that experience of success very early on, but she's now been able to reinvent herself and continue to stay relevant in her chosen career field in a way that probably feels fulfilling, I assume. AC: Yeah, it's better than most alternatives. Sure. BR: Interesting that you
use the word 'reinvent'. One of the things I was noticing as I was watching the video was that it was giving me Madonna the Vogue video vibes. The structured shoulders, definitely, and it's like, "Okay, there's a little fashion trend coming around there and I'm sure we could deconstruct that." But it just felt like this very clear statement of, "Yeah, there is enough command of my identity that I can claim it and reshape it and mould it and then present to you this new edifice of my identity." And that reinvention just felt like it was harkening back to the archetype of the person who can reinvent themselves, I think that's what felt super Madonna-like to me in watching that. CB: Yeah, for sure. That's a really good point.
Has either of you noticed either any other Saturn Return stories lately that have come up with the Saturn in Aquarius people? Or does that make you think of any anecdotes from your own Saturn returns? Did you have good Saturn returns or bad Saturn returns? BR: I had a great Saturn Return. CB: Yeah, what was the setup versus what was the finish? BR: The setup was as Saturn entered the sign, I ended on my bicycle, broke two teeth, and ended up not moving far away. And as a result-- Saturn rules my seventh house and is in my sixth house-- as a result, I ended up taking a random job that really sucked and I immediately realized I wanted to leave it. But I ended up meeting my partner
there. And so met somebody through unfortunate circumstances, hated the job, really liked the person, ended up getting married, traveled abroad for the first time... So by the end of that Saturn Return I was like, "Oh, all these other qualities of Saturn is L seven in the sixth ruling my lots, doing other things infigured to everything. CB: Yeah, that's great. That's classic Saturn Return. AC: Yeah. I also have Saturn
ruling my seventh, and so Kate and I got together. We got together just before my Saturn Return, but we moved in together I think within a week of Saturn's ingress into Virgo. And then I think I tried to get the jump on my Saturn Return because six months earlier, I had made a solemn vow to myself that I was going to be a full-time astrologer and I was going to make a living doing that. And I wasn't going to take any other jobs, I was just going to make this work, you know, burn the boats. And that was really hard for the time
that Saturn was in Virgo. It was depressing, I was super broke, a lot of financial anxiety and shame. But by the end of it, I was doing it. So you know, I got a future wife and a career out of it, so not too bad. CB: Nice. That's pretty good. BR: What about you, Chris? CB: I mean, I had a lot of stuff I don't want to go into, but it was a Saturn Return. I have Aquarius rising and Saturn's up in my 10th so it was a lot of things tied in there at once. But I am excited now since it's getting towards the end of Saturn in Aquarius, one thing we traditionally do on the Astrology Podcast is we do a Saturn Return retrospective. So I may put out an open call soon for people if they want
to share their Saturn Return stories, if they're finishing up a Saturn Return in Aquarius whether it's their first or second or potentially even third, just to sort of do some field research to see how that went for everybody, and to understand the full range of different experiences now that we're coming to the end of that transit and we can kind of learn something about it from hearing different people's stories. AC: One set of Saturn Return that's almost self-explanatory is a lot of the former Soviet bloc nations are having their Saturn Return and the European Union, the chart that I favor, is also a Saturn in Aquarius. And I would say that Europe, both East, West, North and South, has gone through a lot recently. And things are definitely different moving forward. CB: Yeah, for sure. As well as we've talked a lot over the past few years about the Saturn Return of the worldwide web and the internet and some of the different things that have happened with that over the past few years, and the sort of turning point that it's reached. Go ahead. BR: This may be an odd Saturn Return
after our Aquarius episode, I was looking into the My Stroke of Insight TED Talk that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presented back in 2008, and was realizing that Saturn and Neptune were conjunct when Neptune was discovered 25 degrees of Aquarius, so we're about to have a Saturn Return of Saturn's position when Neptune was discovered. It's kind of like a weird thing but it does feel like there are some Neptunian themes around that augmented reality, blurring of reality like Austin- Like that power of belief, I think Jupiter-Neptune conjunction kind of highlighting it, but also almost a self-conscious awareness of the ways in which technologies redefined the limits of what's possible, redefined the limits of what we can imagine. The way that Titanic and the submarine that was used to film that movie did, the way that multiple movies that James Cameron has released have done that. And so it feels like in this time in this year, the way in which-- at
least as astrologers but I feel like even the cultural zeitgeist has its finger with a little bit more self-awareness and to the blurring of things to the alternative facts and all of that. People are more aware of that propagandizing quality of narrative of belief as more structure and solidity to that. AC: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's interesting. As you were talking, I was just thinking about the Saturn in Aquarius years. I mean, the Saturn in Capricorn and in Aquarius is just the extremely strong Saturn where the things that are heavy and solid and onerous are very clear in a lot of ways. People's explanations and ideas about them diverge wildly, but there's this core of hardship, or a core made of many hardships that was actually pretty solid. And I'm wondering as Saturn goes into Pisces and joins Neptune if
even that sort of disperses. Not like the center cannot hold, but even moving into a phase where there's not even a clear thing to argue over. If that makes sense. When you were talking about, especially when you mentioned the submarine, I just imagined being under the water. And one of the things that Saturn when it's strong does is it orients you by gravity, right? Like a scary thing, a dangerous thing, an onerous thing... Centre your consciousness. Like, "Oh, I have to do this or else. Or I have to do this, but I don't want to do this." It's very clear cut in its own way because it has a center of gravity, but I was just thinking about being in the ocean or any other large body of water where gravity still exists but its influence is far less.
And you can get confused. People get confused when they're deep down between up and down. Which, you know, is one thing that kills deep sea divers. I don't know, that kind of feels like where we'll be in not very long. BR: Yeah, something there made me think about Ender's Game but also this; I was talking with my partner earlier this morning about like, okay, I'm trying to find a bunch of news and isn't it strange that back when we didn't have the internet and 24-hour news cycles, it was a little bit easier to access a broad collection of many news events over a certain period of time. But because there's so much, there's a deluge of data that you drown in it. And it's kind of hard to constantly be digesting or swimming in every single life and
death consequential, harsh reality all day every day. Eventually even if that's true, even if it's important to know about, you still have to go do some grocery shopping and make dinner. You can't just try to solve all of the problems all of the time. There's other stuff that has to get done. AC: Yeah, it's funny that you say that because I had that exact same experience over the last couple of weeks. I literally found myself being like, "You know what? There's a real hole in the market if somebody could just tell me about events that have happened" Because every time I would go to try to learn about a thing that had happened, it was two minutes of reporting and then 15 minutes of fucking opinions and trying to match it to various narratives. I was like, "I don't care about your mid-level
fucking interpretation, just tell me what you could have told me about eight stories in the time that you gave me a bunch of repeated opinions." I mean, there's still... Reuters is useful but Reuters doesn't do a good job of ranking the consequential and the inconsequential. The Economist actually used to be really good for that, they used to be my go to. I feel like they've just been sliding and are much more editorial than they were like five
years ago. If you find something, let me know. BR: Yeah, I will. I've been trying to find those sources of information but also having this like... Well, it tracks and it makes sense given Neptune being in Pisces, that we would have this casting of the net so broad and so wide that... There's that, I don't know who the quote belongs to or who to attribute it to, rather, but that quote lamenting that in this day and age, somebody's opinion is viewed just as widely as another person's facts or another person's collection of real evidence. Until we
end up in this weird echo chambery bubble. AC: Yeah, I want to jump in on that image of the net, right? If we talk about casting a very broad net, if we look at where that's actually done which is industrial fishing, when these boats cast the gigantic dragnets, I'm sure they'll get some of the actual creatures they're looking for but you get tonnes of other shit. You know, you have dolphins and whales and all sorts of species, and it's very wasteful and confusing. I feel like that's definitely a Neptune in Pisces thing. I was like, "Okay, I wasn't really paying attention the news last week, what happened?" And there were some of the actual stories, but I believe dolphins were killed in making many of those YouTube videos. [laughs] I felt like a dolphin being killed watching some of them. CB: Yeah, I think we're gonna look back on
this period. I've been reflecting more and more over the past few months this period of Neptune in Pisces and how it's been like the Wild West in terms of this early stage of the internet, especially with YouTube channels and podcasts and everything else that's allowed on the one hand... The complete likely unrestricted nature of it has allowed a lot of cool things to flourish including astrology and some of the other metaphysical or cool things lately that have exploded over the past decade, but it's also allowed for the flourishing of a lot of not great things. And I think when Neptune goes into... When it leaves Pisces and it goes into Aries, I think we're going to look back on this period and realise that there were some really positive ways that that sort of Wild West thing allowed some great things to flourish, but then also looking back on it and realizing what we lost a little bit in that as well. So I guess we're talking- That's like what? Two, three years from now, Neptune in Aries? AC: Yeah. I don't know. Neptune in Pisces, it's almost more like that mid phase when
corporate interests started moving into the partially organized... There was enough known about the West like, "Oh, there's a lot of money." And then you had the Pinkertons come in, and a lot of the very much-- how should we say? Grassroots isn't the right term, but the people there just doing things without a central authority. But you had big interests kind of moving in, tentacling in, but it wasn't the phase where it's just America now. It's sort of that weird middle phase where you have larger, more organizing
powers. You know what I mean? You also have that sort of wild whatever that was left over from the first decade. Does that make sense? CB: Yeah. AC: It makes it more confusing than if it's, you know, than the first phase or the phase that followed. CB: Yeah, I noticed in the last two episodes I did, we talked a little bit about skeptics of astrology and that whole community. And it's been
interesting that for whatever reason over the past decade, during this time where there's been this simultaneous rise in the popularity of astrology, there was also an unrelated decline in the skeptic community, where the skeptic community is much more all over the place and not organized and had a whole loss of leadership over the past decade. I feel like a lot of that somehow connected to this Neptune in Pisces transit. I remember, Austin, you talked about the last time Neptune was in Pisces coincided with that period of interest in spiritualism and stuff like that in the 1800s. AC: Yeah, the first year we got the famous Seance sisters. And then doing seances, talking to dead people became a cool respectable thing to do on a Saturday night. AC: Yeah. I mean, that is still your Saturday nights I think, last time I heard. [laughter] AC: Yeah, that's probably the most
appropriate night. CB: Yeah, I agree. BR: It's interesting thinking back to the last Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces which I talked about at ISAR. And looking at that period of westward expansion, that is when the Lewis and Clark Expedition happened and one of the things I talked about at that lecture and I've been thinking about even today is that whose perspective grounds the story changes very dramatically almost entirely what's going on, to the extent that it could even be one reporter talking about two different worlds-- Lewis and Clark Expedition in particular. Like, if you recenter and you tell that story from the perspective of the indigenous folks who are experiencing the contact that never stops if not the first contact, then it becomes a very different story.
Even though it's still about waterways and expansion and redrawing borders and whatnot. AC: You almost get more of the tsunami quality of oceanic Pisces. And one of the things that's really interesting to me that I've seen in my own life and read about is that when people dream of floods and it corresponds to events in the world, it often means a big restructuring of society, a massive and disruptive change coming that usually isn't a flood. For example, Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist dreamed of a giant flood sweeping over Europe right before World War One. And
I had all of these weird flood omens right before COVID started. And I didn't understand. I understood that I was like, "Okay, that's the third out-of-nowhere flood thing directed right towards me." Anyway, I'm just thinking about that. You know, like the westward expansion as a devastating flood. BR: Yeah, there are a lot of tsunamis to track
and other mass disasters. And even just in terms of the astrology of the last couple of weeks, I've been here in California where it felt like a bad storm relative to my memory of living up in Washington as a kid. Flood from the sky, essentially. There has been massive flooding and huge storm surge that went upriver down in Santa Cruz and people being evacuated and stuff in ways that isn't normal and doesn't really have a prior context or precedent. CB: Yeah. Yeah. So going back to some of the technology talk and the Saturn in Aquarius stuff, to follow up on something I talked about that I just started to discover and which just started happening when we recorded the Year Ahead forecast in early to mid-December, was the whole AI thing. Artificial Intelligence thing has just been blowing up like crazy, especially through this company OpenAI and their product ChatGPT, which is just coming up in news stories over and over again at this point. I kept messing with it. I kept playing with it basically
after we did the forecast episode and trying to get it to do different things to see what it could do. And I kept getting it progressively what I thought were harder and harder things to do, but it kept impressing me. At first, and I think I may have shown this on the Year Ahead forecast, I told it to delineate Venus conjunct Mercury in a birth chart and it gave a pretty nice little delineation. So a few days later after the Year Ahead forecast, I was like, "Okay, do a delineation of Mercury conjunct Venus, but put it in the form of a poem." And I was like
it's not going to do that very well. And then I asked it to do it, and it did it! And it spit this poem out that is actually pretty good. So I posted this on Instagram with the image that made it look like I had written it at first. It says, "Mercury and Venus, conjunct in the chart, bring together communication in the heart. A harmonious blend of words and feeling, diplomacy and understanding, a rare and special healing. A love of beauty, aesthetics, and art. An eye for detail, a creative heart. Luxury and indulgence, the finer things in life.
With this placement, so much joy and beauty rife." So I posted that and I was like, "And that was written by an Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the future." And half of Instagram was really impressed and the other half was very horrified, basically, which I think is going to be a recurring reaction over the next several years as we continue to see this technology expand more and more. So I gave it that challenge and I thought that was really pretty impressive. Then I was just like, "What's something absurd to take it to the next level?" And so I said, "Okay, delineate Mercury conjunct Venus, but put it in the form of a rap song by the rapper Eminem."
And about five... It thought about it and five/ten seconds later, it produced this rap song and it says verse one, "Yo, what's up, y'all? It's your boy, Eminem. I'm here to drop some knowledge on the astrological scene. Got a question about Mercury conjunct Venus in the
birth chart? Well, let me break it down and give you a fresh start." And it starts the chorus. "Mercury conjunct Venus? Ain't that some shit. It's a cosmic alignment, yo. You can't miss it." And it just keeps going on and gives two verses and a chorus. "It's a cosmic alignment, you can't miss it. It's all about communication and love, ain't that combo you're thinking of?
So, what does it mean when these two planets align? Well, it's all about the way you communicate and shine. You're natural at expressing yourself and your love life is sure to be off the shelf." And then it repeats the chorus, and later the bridge is, "But it's not all sunshine and roses, there can be challenges and challenges. It's important to find
balance and harmony and not let the ego get in the way of unity." And then it continues with the chorus and it just keeps going on. So I laughed. My initial reaction was I laughed hysterically when I saw that because I did not expect it to actually produce that, but this AI having taken in and searched a huge part of the internet in 2021 when it was trained, of course has access to all of the lyrics of all of the Eminem songs. So it just tried to match and use that to inform while combining with the delineation of Mercury conjunct Venus. I just thought that was wild. We're in some weird futuristic stages if stuff like that's true, especially if this is just the beginning. If
this is the initial phase of this, where is this going to be in five or 10 or 20 years, you know? AC: I don't think ChatGPT is a very dope [MC]. I think [Chuck D] can rest easily and safely, I think it'll be a while. But one of the things that's interesting is it does... A lot of this AI output really shines a light on how formulaic a lot of human expression is. There are rules governing their syntax, there's rules governing a lot of this stuff that is quote-unquote "artistic". CB: And in astrology in particular. I think that's why it's actually doing so well with astrology, it's because astrology is a language, and this AI is specifically designed for language models. That's why it's actually
able to do things relatively effectively. AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. Right. And so in some ways, I think it will do a nice job of framing what the human is uniquely capable of, right? Because a machine can replicate patterns that it has had input into it. It's good. I think in some ways... Because people, if we are talking about works of art, to be trite and derivative is for something to be a not good work of art. Which means that you're
just repeating a formula that was previously established, right? And so it seems like there will increasingly be less room for trite and derivative human artists or would-be artists, which is okay because they weren't creating the good stuff. They were literally just ChatGPTing better works anyway. It also reminds me of-- have either of you read the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin? CB: No. AC: It's the lesser-known sibling of 1984 in Brave New World. It was dystopian fiction from the first half of the 20th century. I remember, I don't know, 20 years ago. I read Brave New World
in 1984 and I was reading something and I was like, "Oh, you really... You've gotta read We." And what's interesting is We-- which is a more Eastern European sort of take on it-- in that dystopia, all of the music is basically produced by AI. He doesn't use the term AI but it's the same thing that scooped up and sorted through all of the great works of music, and then just creates music that has the structure to evoke whatever specific emotional effect it's supposed to have. Because you can easily teach using that. Okay, so minor key blah blah blah. This will make people feel melancholy, this will make major keys. I don't know much music theory but you know, this will make people feel good. And I believe there's literature that's also
done that way in We, it's been a long time. But that's the dystopia that got this piece. It's a short read, it's a short good read if you want to complete the classical dystopia trilogy. We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. CB: All right. Yeah, we'll check it out.
Anyway, so that was wild. It was in the news. Interestingly, at the beginning of the Mars Retrograde in Gemini, there were all these different instances in the news of accusations of cheating in chess or in poker and other stuff like that last fall. The more recent one as Mars was stationing direct was stories about students starting to use this AI in order to cheat and write exams or write papers for them, basically, and teachers starting to panic over how do we tell if a student has actually written their term paper versus if they just asked an AI to write it in five seconds. It was an interesting continuation of that with Mars in Gemini in that whole retrograde, but I feel like this whole AI thing it's not going anywhere. This is basically the
future, so I feel like astrologers have to learn how to adapt to and work with and deal with this. Because I think even if we don't like it, it's not just going to go away because we don't like it. So that's going to be part of the future and especially in terms of the astrological community. AC: Yeah, a hundred percent. A few more things about that Mars now that you mentioned it, one big deal in January. Mercury in Gemini is the natural place for games, right? Mercury's playful, likes competitive games. You know, competitive collaborative, whatever. There
was a huge hullabaloo around Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons, part of the reason it's so successful is that they've had basically an open licence-- the Open Gaming Licence, the OGL-- which allows any other company to make adventures and content for the game for free. Like, we could write a D&D adventure using that rule set and publish it and not have to pay D&D anything. That's been ensconced for decades and it's part of the reason there's so much D&D content. So Hasbro now owns Wizards of the Coast which owns Dungeons & Dragons. And Hasbro is
a very typical giant corporation and they tried to revoke the open licence, so that anybody doing anything with the D&D rules would have to pay them. And there was an unprecedented and massive revolt against this. The entire tabletop Internet came together and Hasbro was forced to retract the retraction. This is the beginning of the month, retrograde Mars ruled by the retrograde Mercury. They're like, "Oh, we've heard the players and blah, blah, blah, blah. We're not going to do this, we'll come back with something else." So there was that.
There was also, again, Mars in Gemini were looking for twinned or doubled forms, and so on season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race which premiered during this time, for the first time ever there are a pair of contestants who are twins. Who are identical twins who perform together sugar n spice. And spoiler alert... All right, that's enough time to turn it off if you're just catching up. Early on in the season, they were the bottom two and were forced to compete against each other and one got sent home. This was filmed during the Mars Retrograde,
you know, Mars in Gemini Mars Retrograde, and premiered right around Mars direct. And so for the rest of the season or for as long as they last, we will see one twin cut off from the other. That's like Mars trouble in twin town. I'm very excited to see if they rise to the occasion and understand themselves as an individual better, or if they just bleed from their second half or their other half being torn away. Also with Mars in Gemini going direct looking at the sphere of Mars looking at the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, I talked last month on the Yearly about Mars stationing direct on Aldebaran and how Aldebaran is about big, heavy, substantial things from big trains slowly leaving the station, the movement of lots of material and what that's ended up being. Or unprecedented shipments of heavy equipment from NATO allies to Ukraine. We have Bradleys and strikers and I believe there's some European
main battle tanks, but it's just a tonne of heavy equipment that's literally loaded onto heavy trains moving into the Ukraine theatre. And then I suppose if we're talking of big, heavy, slow things, Russia's conscription or mobilization which happened around right as the Mars Retrograde was starting or getting ready to start has sort of reached the front line, so you have the massive heaviness on that side as well beginning to move forward. You have Russia right now slowly encircling Bakhmut, and so that big heavy substantial starting-to-move-forward quality is present on both sides now that Mars is direct and conjunct Aldebaran. But that was just very literal. CB: Yeah, that's amazing. Leisa Schaim pointed out to me last night that Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, when Jupiter went back into Aries in December not that long ago, that was Jupiter going back into Zelenskyy's 11th house. And he came to the US and gave a speech in front of Congress. And now, of course, we're into the 11th house of friends and now of course a lot of different countries in Europe as well as the US are re-doubling their efforts to send aid and send military assistance and things like that recently over the past several weeks.
That's kind of interesting like an 11th house transit, positive transit from through the house of friends, and literally having allies sort of supporting you, essentially. We'll see how that goes in the future. All right, very last news story that I had before I get on the forecast, there's this funny social media exchange that happened a couple of weeks ago where the actor Andrew Garfield was on the red carpet and he did this really quick interview with a journalist named Amelia Dima Oldenburg. And they were kind of flirting, but there was some astrological lingo dropped during the course of their little brief exchange that went viral. And I thought it was really striking if you watch the exchange, I don't think I can play it here for copyright reasons, but just to sort of summarise it, he ended up asking her her Sun sign and she replied Aquarius, but then he gave a reaction to it. He was like, "Oh, Aquarius," sort of a facial reaction. And she says, "That's your Moon sign?" almost with a question mark. And
then he looks at her surprised and he starts to say how did you know that, basically? And then he looks at her knowingly because he realized that it meant that she had looked up his birth chart. Because he only know somebody's Moon sign if you've looked up their actual chart. So it was a funny little astrology flirting exchange by a couple of nerdy Aquariuses, or an Aquarius Sun and Aquarius Moon. He mentioned astrology and people have posted other links where he's talked about Saturn returns and Sun Moon synastry and other stuff like that. So one of the subtle news stories of that is that Andrew Garfield seems to either know quite a bit about astrology or actually maybe be a part-time amateur astrologer himself, it seems almost, if we can say that. If
his knowledge of astrology sort of raises to that level which it almost seems to, which is kind of interesting since he's a pretty well-known actor for his work in the social network a decade ago. He was one of the actors that played Spider-Man before the current one who's been Spider-Man for the past few movies. So, funny little exchange. Have either of you done any astrological flirting like that where your astrological skills have suddenly become very useful for having that sort of exchange with somebody? I know, Austin, are you both in relationships with astrologers or people that are astrology friendly? AC: Yes, I am. BR: My partner knows what the symbol for Chiron looks like, and I'm very proud of them for achieving that. CB: Nice, that's good. That's a good start.
Yeah. Well, and there's pros and cons-- we've talked about it on the podcast before of astrologers either dating or having relationships with other astrologers versus not. And there's definitely pros and cons either way. But this is a very funny and interesting high-profile exchange with astrology. And I think it's just shown also just how far astrology has come lately in the public consciousness where it used to be just everybody knew their Sun sign but that was it, but now people are exchanging Moon signs and rising signs and all sorts of stuff and it's kind of interesting the level that it's gotten to. AC: Yeah, it reminds me of the 60s where astrology came back into intersection with the counterculture which would become the mainstream shortly. And you know, with Neptune in Pisces, we expected this to
some degree but not to this degree. But we may be at the end of the crest of the wave, but there's a certain level of saturation which will just be here for a while. Like, people just know about it in the way they haven't for decades. BR: Yeah, it makes me think about what you said about the rise of spiritualism when Neptune was in Pisces back in the 1800s. And then at some point most people were like, "Oh, yeah, seance. I've heard about that. Let's organize a seance for
dinner party!" People are like, "Yeah, let's have astrology-themed everything; tote bags, blankets, shawls, journals." CB: Right. BR: We are, of course, astrologers. Yeah. CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, and that reminds me of a few days ago Jenn Zahrt was recently-- shout out to Jenn Zahrt just got elected for the ISAR board, and is now a board member on the International Society for Astrological Research. But she was doing like a literature review because she wanted to know more about the institutional history of ISAR, so she started going back and reading their old journals at her astrological library that she has been building in Oregon, the Kaylee Institute which I'm actually giving a talk for next month which I'll plug at the end of this episode. But she found this funny old 2004 article in the ISAR journal by Moses Siregar titled The Future of Astrology, where he's talking about the Association for Young Astrologers which was recently founded at that point. And he has this interesting little
anonymous tidbit from some 19-year-old punk who he doesn't name at the time, but it sounds very familiar. But listen to this paragraph. It says quote, "I just found out about this group today, the Association for Young Astrologers. I'm 19
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