Astrology Forecast February 2024
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for the entire month of February of 2024. Hey Austin - thanks for joining me. AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. Nice to be here. CB: We are back again. We’re gonna do a little bit lower of a expectation than we did last time, last month where we forecasted the entire year ahead. This month, we’re just gonna look at the next four weeks, which seems almost sort of pitiful in comparison, but still nice to get back to something a little bit more manageable. AC: Yeah. Right? Well, it’s sort of the
same project but just looking at that one twelfth with greater magnification - with, you know, one more month of data. CB: Exactly. And we’ve got some exciting stuff to go through. So we’re gonna spend the first hour catching up on some, like, news and events that have happened from an astrological standpoint in the past month since we did our last forecast in mid-December and then the second half of this episode, we’re gonna look ahead at february and focus on the astrology of next month and doing a deep dive into that over the course over the second half of the episode. So as always, there’s gonna be timestamps on the podcast website or in the description below this video on YouTube for those watching the video version. So if you wanna
jump ahead to the forecast section, then go ahead and use those timestamps. All right. Let me jump into this and give a quick overview of February first before we get into the news section. All right. Here’s the planetary alignments calendar for February, and right at the top of the month the first thing that happens is that Mercury ingresses into Aquarius or moves into Aquarius on February 5th and then immediately forms a conjunction with Pluto, which has just recently moved into Aquarius in late January. Then we have a New Moon in the sign of Aquarius on the 9th of February, which is square Uranus. The following week, Mars moves into Aqaruius on the 13th,
and then immediately conjoins Pluto in the first degree of that sign on the 14th, in February, so we’ve got a interesting looking Valentine's Day there with Mars conjunct Pluto. Two days later, Venus moves into Aqaruius on the 16th, conjoins Pluto on the 17th, then the Sun moves into Pisces on the 18th. Mars and Venus conjoin in the sign of Aquarius on the 22nd. Mercury moves into Pisces on the 23rd. Then we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Virgo,
on the 24th. Then Mars squares Jupiter on the 27th, and then we get a triple conjunction of the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn all in Pisces on the 28th of February. And that is the sort of quick overview of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about in this episode for February.
All right. How are you doing? How’s 2024 treating you so far? AC: Busy. Busy. The Mars in Capricorn, that Mars-Jupiter trine between Mars in Capricorn and Jupiter in Taurus - it’s just seen a lot of projects. I’ve been working a lot of things,
getting a lot done, but there’s a lot to do. There’s a remodel happening in part of the house; there’s a new kitten; there’s - you know, work, work, work. It’s very martial. It’s all going well. But, you know, I'm reminded that even when Mars is in, you know, a pretty bonafide positioned where it’s trine Jupiter and it’s, you know, in a sign that it exalts, it’s still a pain in the ass, it’s still loud, it’s still tiring. It just means that the things
that you intend to get done actually get done. CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s been interesting seeing the Mars in Capricorn energy lately as well as the Jupiter sextiling Saturn has been interesting as well - some of the balance from that between growth and expansion. And then of course just Pluto going into Aquarius - there’s been this explosion of tech stories. So in the news section here, the majority of my news stories are like, tech stories, but a lot of that’s just reflective of this huge shift that we’re going into here with Pluto going into Aquarius for the next 20 years and some of the changes in the world and in society that are gonna be associated with that. So why don’t we jump into talking about that? First story in the news - flying cars. Like, we’re finally in the flying car era of history now that we’ve hit 2024. It’s a little bit late. Like,
I was told by Hollywood and by like, Back to the Future that we’d have like, flying skateboards by now, so I've been a little bit disappointed until this point. But some of the news stories happening this month is that this is apparently gonna be the year where a bunch of companies are launching EVTOL vehicles, which are electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, which are essentially like, large, electronic drones, except they’re ones that people can ride in. And there’s gonna be a major launch later this year by a company called Volocopter that’s aiming for about the time of the Paris Olympics this summer, and they’re hoping to transport tourists on five different routes with speeds up to 70 miles per hour or 110 kilometers per hour. So this is amazing, not just because of Pluto in Aquarius, but also because Jupiter’s going into Gemini this year, which is something we talked about being associated with like, travel and like, different forms of travel and just like, getting around locally. But here, what we have is an advancement in that in terms of technology, a really tangible one, where people are gonna be getting around their city faster than they used to before. Because the purpose of these vehicles
apparently is to get around short distances, like, cities quicker, than like, a car or a bus would, and I thought that was really fascinating. AC: Yeah, it’s right on the nose. You know, having snuck a peak and contributed to our list of stories, a lot of this Pluto in Aquarius stuff that’s happening just as Pluto re-entered is - how do I put this? - deeply uncreative in the sense that it’s not surprising. It’s like, kind of exactly what we’ve been talking about since we’ve been talking about Pluto in Aquarius, and we are good astrologers but this was not a hard assignment in the sense that it’s almost like, cliche, let’s try all the science fiction things, but for real. And so yeah, flying cars are not a surprise, right? What it is that - they’re EVTOLs, right? And we’ve had VTOL - VTOL’s been a designation for vehicles for some time, but these are electronic and they’re consumer rather than military-facing, or civilian rather than military-facing. And they look very different. They look like - they have the design
of drones. Well, a lot of the drones - some drones look like planes, but these are the ones that look like cute little multi-rotor helicopters. CB: Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, that company’s launching one. Hyundai just unveiled their air taxi at a recent consumer trade expo as well,
and there’s another company that’s also launching like, a self-piloted sort of short distance vehicle as well where apparently you don’t need a pilot’s license as long as you’re flying over a rural area. So they say - like, I was reading a article on The Economist, and they say that this is estimated or projected to be a market that’s gonna be worth over a trillion dollars by 2040, and I thought the timing on that was interesting because of course, that’s when we’ll be getting towards of the end of this 20-year Pluto in Aquarius period. So this is one of the major areas that we can expect some transformation of society and culture in some ways through technology that’s gonna be different by the time we leave this Pluto in Aquarius period compared to when we went into it. And I'm sure that’s just gonna get accelerated like crazy once Uranus goes into Gemini here next year. AC: Yeah, yeah, certainly. This particular set
of technologies begs the same question that - or asks the same question that so many emerging applications do, which is, okay, so that - we can build a thing that does that, but how is that going to work at scale? Right? And what role will it eventually end up having? Right? Because we can imagine a near-future city skyline buzzing with these little air taxis and this and that, because we’ve seen in literally a hundred times in movies. But is that how it actually fits into the world? And that’s a question that all this stuff keeps asking to me is like, okay, that can be done, but how does it fit into the world? You know, it’s not whether - the question is not, “Can that be done?” But “How is that actually going to fit into the world?” CB: Yeah. AC: So yeah. And how - you know, this is the Saturnian part of Aqaruius - what new, in order to fit into the world, what kind of rules or regulations are going to have to be in place? Because right now, yeah, there’s the one that you can fly without a license. If there’s widespread adoption, like, that’s not gonna be the case. CB: Right. AC: Right? CB: Yeah, that’s gonna be a disaster. Well, that’s part of it is that right now, one of the companies - Volocopter’s goal was to have, their goal is to have pilotless, self-flying vehicles, so there you’re talking about basically like, AI being used to like, fly people around the city automatically without human input. But right now, due to current regulations as well as due to like,
the state of AI still being very early on, the government’s like, “No, you can’t do that.” So there has to be like, a pilot piloting these things. But I think that’s one of the Pluto in Aquarius themes that we’ll see in the long term is just as AI gets better and better with self-driving cars and such, like with - you know, Tesla’s doing, that’s gonna be transplanted to air travel as well, apparently, as well. AC: Well, yeah. And I mean, even commercial flights for a long time have had the computer take over for most of the time between takeoff and landing. CB: Right. For sure. AC: You know, we’ll see more of that. But like, some of this that’s presented as completely revolutionary is actually just - well, what if we could do that other 20 percent with a computer? CB: Yeah. Well, and I guess I forgot to mention that in the Pluto in Aquarius episode that I did
this month, because I took your suggestion so that we didn’t spend like, five hours talking about Pluto in Aquarius in the last episode and I did that as a separate episode with Nick Dagan Best where we went through Pluto in Aquarius in history. A point that I forgot to make in that episode towards the end is often times when there was like, a new technology introduced, sometimes it involved just the complete decimation of like, a previous technology that had been used up to that point or a previous method of doing work or doing things. So like, you know, when paper was eventually developed by China and was imported into the West, it ended up completely supplanting the preexisting use of papyrus, which had been used in Egypt as like, the primary writing method for millenia. So we’re seeing a similar thing here with AI where a lot of these new technologies have the potential to just like, not just displace and decimate previous technologies, but in some instances also like, different work forces. There’s already a
lot of people that just are concerned or just know that their jobs are potentially on the line when some of these technologies are fully matured and developed and sort of unleashed. AC: Yeah, definitely. CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s one major area that we’re gonna be paying attention to this year because I think that’s gonna be one of our main keywords by the end of this year is the electric vertical takeoff and landing sort of vehicles. In other Pluto in Aquarius news, Google - an internal memo was leaked from Google recently saying that their primary goal in 2024 is to deliver quote - to quote unquote “deliver the world’s most advanced, safe, and responsible AI,” and they’re expected to release a new state-of-the-art version of their Gemini AI some time very soon. So that’s something I'm gonna be paying attention to, and — AC: Like when Jupiter goes into Gemini? CB: I mean, you know, that’s probably - you know, we wouldn’t be surprised. It might be sooner than that, but certainly by the time Jupiter goes into Gemini, I think that’s gonna be the main thing, because I've been using the sort of early version of that recently, and I really like it a lot more than the other AI that people have been using, which is ChatGPT. So tied in with that, on January 22nd, I thought
this was really interesting, just like, right after, just days after Pluto went into Aquarius on the 20th, a company called Berkeley Artificial Intelligence, their researchers showed off a video of their general purpose humanoid robot that was just like, walking around San Francisco. And for me, this was like, one of the most surreal things to see that I was paying attention to and noticed in the news right after Pluto went into Aquarius is - you just have this little robot. He’s just strolling around town, just walking around. He’s a happy robot. I appreciate that his like, steps, or his gait is kind of short, because I feel like I could outrun that robot. That’s one of the things that makes it less intimidating. But I just thought this was a really surreal image at the very - because remember, we’re at the very beginning of this 20 year period of Pluto in Aquarius, and sometimes - like with BitCoin, when Pluto first went into Capricorn and BitCoin was first developed, sometimes technologies you see just starting to emerge at the beginning of a period like that, by the end, you see them becoming much more common and much more all over the place. So that’s one thing that caught my eye. AC: Yeah, that’s part of the like, near-future,
sci-fi/cyberpunk dystopia checklist that Pluto in Aquarius is doing a really good job of filling out, right? Like, flying cars — CB: Right. AC: — drones, yeah, humanoid robots — CB: We’re in the flying cars and robots-walking-around-San-Francisco era of history. I appreciate that. AC: I’ll let you know whether I appreciate it or not. I’m certainly intrigued. CB: Certainly intrigued. All right. AC: Again, I would like - where’s my
power armor? CB: Right. AC: That’s part of the cyberpunk expansion pack, the DLC for our current civilization that I'd like to see happen. CB: Yeah. Where is your like, mech suit? That’s what you’re looking for. AC: Yeah. Well, no, just like, powered armor - it
can be human - like, a powered exoskeleton. CB: Okay. I like that. Well, I mean, honestly, like I'm not - nothing is off the table at this point. So we’re joking about that, but you know, we’ll see how it goes in the next few years. AC: Oh, I'm half-joking about it. I mean, it’s been in development for well over a decade - or several companies and militaries have been working on for well over a decade. They just haven’t worked it out yet.
CB: Yeah. All right. So other things that happened - CES, which is the Consumer Technology Association Trade Show, happened in Vegas this past month in the middle of January. One of the most interesting things I saw astrologically was one company unveiled the world’s first transparent glass panel that also contained a micro-LED screen. So it was really wild, because it was like, a transparent like, wall, a glass panel, but images could be viewed on it like a television so that you can both see through it but also see images projected onto it at the same time. And I thought that was like, very Saturn conjunct Neptune, because it’s like, a wall with an ambiguous boundary that you can see illusory stuff in.
AC: Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s Project Samsara. CB: Yeah. So that’s gonna be a major Saturn conjunct Neptune theme, and that’s something that we had talked about. Here’s a - let me see if I can actually show that actually really quick for the sake of those watching the video version. Here it is. So it’s just like, a piece of glass, but then all of a sudden you’re like, watching stuff projected onto it while still being able to see through it. So again, we’re at the very beginning
of this, so just imagine once this technology starts becoming, having greater societal like, penetration, it’s kind of like, all over the place, then you’re again getting into other sort of like, cyberpunk sort of futuristic type things that we used to see in like, movies and things, but this is like, actually happening. Yeah, so that was really interesting. On a similar Saturn conjunct Neptune note, Apple has finally released their virtual reality headset called Vision Pro. It's coming out February 2nd, but they’ve been releasing to the media and doing a huge media blitz over the past week or two ever since Pluto went into Aquarius. And they’re pushing really hard to call it “spatial computing,” which I thought was interesting in terms of the Saturn conjunct Neptune theme that we’re talking about this year and that’s relevant for this, and they’re actually avoiding calling it the more standard designations of augmented reality, virtual reality or mixed reality even though that’s what it is and what category it falls into. And they’re calling it spatial computing and a spatial operating system
because part of the thing is they have different apps that you’re supposed to use that you can put this on and then have like, 10 screens in front of you in different places if you wanted to in order to increase productivity. But — AC: That does not sound particularly — CB: Yeah. AC: Does having 30 windows open on your computer increase productivity? CB: I mean, I do have a lot of tabs open, I have to say. But having them all in front of me at once may be a little bit distracting. You’ve got a point there. But it is interesting that it has this dial where you can dial up the virtual reality or you can dial it back into like, seeing your surroundings in front of you, and I think that’s gonna be — AC: That’s really interesting.
CB: — one of our keywords, I think, for this year in retrospect is gonna be like, with Saturn conjunct Neptune, is like, you know, turning up or down the tuning in and out of like, this world and being connected with reality versus being in some other place where suddenly you’re not in reality. AC: That’s really interesting, both as an actual technology but also just metaphorically. Like, being able to find that knob and adjust how much of an overlay you’re getting - that’s really interesting. CB: Exactly. I think we’re all, by the end of this year, gonna wish we had one of those knobs just for everything in terms of just all the crazy events happening this year, especially like, politics and other stuff that’s gonna ramp up and wanting to tune out of that and that might be also just part of the general theme as well in a more, I don't’ know, philosophical or almost like, spiritual sense in terms of that. AC: Yeah. That’s funny. It’s like, your gnostic adjuster. CB: Right. So the last thing about
that is just the killer app to me that’s part of this Vision Pro that I think could be a bigger thing in the long term is it has the ability to use your iPhone to take a panoramic picture, like a still image that’s panoramic, or to record a full 3D vision using your iPhone. But then you can use this Vision Pro headset to watch it later as if you were there, and it will give you the sense of like, being there in person and being able to like, look around in a full 360 view of what you were able to see at that time when you were present there. And I think that’s really interesting because it seems to represent like, a evolution in terms of originally we had, you know, pictures, like still images, like a single image that you can just see a frame of what could be seen in the frame of that picture. Then eventually we had video, which is like, still restricted to the frame of what you could see, but it’s like a moving picture. But now this next new version is like having that, capturing a moment in time in a set of images or video, but being able to move your head and like, look around at what was in the vicinity at that time as well. So I think that’s something else that’s emerging in terms of both the Saturn-Neptune conjunction as well as some of the Pluto in Aquarius like, technology things. AC: And you can see that having a lot of
entertainment applications. It seems like it’d be really good for real estate, for you know, the buying and selling of real estate. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Maybe engineering? Who knows. CB: Yeah. And it’s like, obviously the downsides are gonna be there as well because we already have increasingly like, you see those pictures at concerts and like, if you see an audience at a concert, there’s just like, hundreds of people holding up phones in that way being somewhat like, disconnected from the moment or being more disconnected from it, but then in another sense capturing the moment and preserving it in some ways. So there’s an
interesting tension between those two that we’ll have to pay attention to as a continuing theme of both immersion in a moment or virtual immersion in a moment, but also a stepping back or a disconnection from the moment at the same time. AC: Yeah, and so again, this brings up the same question that all of these do, which is sort of both how does it work in practice when it’s deployed, and then the second part of that is how do people act around it? Right, because — CB: Right. AC: — you know, you can see a cultural reaction where people become more disconnected from, you know, normal reality, or you can, you know, sometimes when things move too far in one direction, then that finally provokes a rejection culturally. You know, the - yeah, it’s all really interesting and it all begs these questions, right, like what - so this can be done, and then what happens when we do it? Right? And that - you know, the reason - so this keeps getting brought up to me, and this also speaks to a very core part of Aquarius, which is the power of the experiment. CB: Yeah.
AC: You know, this is, you know, when I teach Aquarius in Astrology one-oh-one, one of the sort of paradigms I always try to get people to bring to it is it’s experimental, and you know, you want Saturnian data. Like, you have to see whether it works, how it works, whether there are unforeseen consequences, whether there are benefits you didn’t even imagine, but there’s always a certain risk in experiment. In a sense, every experiment always works because you always get data. Right? You always move from the unknown to the known. But there, you know,
there’s a reason why an empirical component is necessary to any would-be scientific method. But you have to see what actually happens, and part of that is cultural as well as practical, economic, and physics-based and all of that. CB: Yeah. And I love that because Aquarius more than any other sign loves to experiment for the sake of experimentation and the sake of like, knowledge, and just like seeing what works and like, seeing what would happen if I did this or like, combined these two things, and just a fascination for technology. But
sometimes it sort of like, stops there or that’s the extent of it where it’s like, there’s other signs where you start thinking about or dealing with, “But what are the implications of that, or what’s the implications for society?” AC: Yeah. And I would say as a Venus in Aquarius, the joy of discovery is one of Aqaruius’s principle pleasures, right? The joy of discovering something that’s real, that’s part of the real, that you had no idea about. Right? And it’s like, you know, that’s its own irreplaceable flavor of pleasure or joy. It’s one of the 31 flavors. CB: Right. And then the last thing is with Pluto, though, moving into sign, one of the things with Pluto transits is like, Pluto stuff - it just tells you, it’s like, “This is happening one way or another.” Like, this is happening, and this isn’t something you can change. And I think that’s the state that we’re gonna find ourselves in increasingly with some of these technologies like AI is like, all this stuff is happening, and it’s not something that you can put the brakes on and bring to a full stop because so many different people - there’s so much momentum and so many people are trying to develop different things that it becomes a thing that to some extent with some of these technologies you end up having to go with - I don’t wanna say because you don’t have a choice, but just that with Pluto, there’s often a sense of like, compulsion — AC: Yeah. CB: — there, if that makes sense.
AC: The experiment is happening, right? There’s no opting out of all this stuff getting deployed and then being part of the dataset for what happens. CB: Yeah. Well, and I saw somebody say like, recently in a discussion about AI stuff, that AI stuff is happening one way or another and he said it’s a race - it will be a race to both the quote-unquote “good guys and bad guys” will be developing AI, and so the good guys just need to have better AI than the bad guys is the only way that that race is gonna be won. And I thought it was interesting that some people were framing it in that way or that was their mindset at least. AC: Yeah. I think that’s probably not enough dimensions. CB: Right, yeah.
AC: That would be my suspicion. I would say — CB: Sure. AC: — there’s also the incompetent and the competent, and the incompetent but well-intended may do more damage than any other faction. CB: Yeah. All right. So, related though, going back to the VR thing, you actually had noticed a story that was relevant to that, right? AC: Yeah, in my class forum, somebody put up a link to - right after Pluto went in Aquarius - to a Japanese high school that is going to do an experiment with a completely virtual high school where all the students will attend via their computers and they will have anime avatars, and we’ll see what happens. CB: Wow, that’s wild. I mean, yeah, I guess that’s an inevitability and like, makes sense, but it’s interesting that we’re already there at this point. AC: It’s all so on the nose, right?
CB: Right? AC: So looking at my cyberpunk dystopia checklist, the only thing I'm not seeing in our rundown is bio augments, which I know are being worked on, but like — CB: Yeah. AC: — brain-computer interfaces and limb or organ replacements, which we probably just didn’t look hard enough, but that’s — CB: Right. AC: — another essential part of that, of what was imagined then. And let me just say something - like, it sounds like I'm kind of joking and I am kind of joking, but what’s interesting about all of these like, near-future visions, which I’m abbreviating as cyberpunk dystopia, is that that genre and those visions really all happen during Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto in Libra, right after the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in the early ‘80s. And what’s interesting about that is from a 200-year
long cycle, Jupiter-Saturn cycle perspective, that was a jump ahead into the 200 years of air before we were actually done with earth. And so that was - and it just so happened that Pluto was in the same sign, air sign, as that little bit too early Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Libra. But we got all of these quite prophetic fictional landscapes from that period about now. And a lot of them are dated from like, now - a lot of them, they start like, late ‘20s and then they run, you know, into mid-century. But that was the perfect time for a fictionalized early vision of this phase
to come through; it’s really interesting. CB: That’s really - and I love that, yeah, because you have that conjunction in 1980, but then you have the back - it went back to earth signs in 2000, but then in 2020 we’re back permanently to air signs. AC: Yeah, and so there was this sort of this preview or this sizzle reel of the future. I just wanna add one more thing about that - one of the sort of principal architects of that vision or a number of sort of seminal cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, when asked about - when people started seeing his stuff come true with the internet launching and being widely adopted like, I don’t know, 15 years after his books got popular, they were like, “Oh, how do you think so well about technology? You know, how are you making these predictions?” And he said he doesn’t think about technology; he thinks about and observes how people act around technology. And that was his principal focus. CB: That’s a brilliant insight, yeah,
because people dynamics are often very similar. That’s one of the things I was surprised about and it’s fascinated me about studying ancient astrology is we think about ancient people, ancient life being so different, but in fact that’s the reason why Western astrology and the system that was created 2,000 years ago still works, because a lot of the fundamental dynamics of life are still very similar. AC: Yeah. I mean, there’s the - right, there’s a new technology which gives an advantage in this field, how do people act around it? Right? CB: Right. AC: You know, whether it’s agriculture or warfare or you know, whatever. CB: Yeah, for sure. So you had noticed a story I had missed about that is a nice preview of some of the things we talked about in the year ahead forecast that I was bringing up a lot about potential use of some of these technologies, especially the Saturn-Neptune stuff, to deceive people when it comes to like, politics and some of the election stuff that’ll probably happen, which we saw last time there was a Saturn-Neptune alignment in 2016. But it seemed like you had noticed like, a little early preview of what we were kind of anticipating there. AC: Yeah, just this week there was a story that
was run about the New Hampshire primaries. Apparently, there was a robo-call that was going out to registered Democrats that had a faked version of Biden’s voice who was telling them that - this fake Biden was telling them that their votes were so important that they shouldn’t use them up in the primary by voting for him. They should instead “save their vote” for the main election, which is of course not how voting works. But you know, it was, you know, “This is a message from your president,” et cetera, et cetera, and it wasn’t. And so that part of the - not the cool, cyberpunk checklist, but the 2024 checklist that, you know, how do people act around technology? They will leverage technology to win political power or to prevent people from obtaining political power. So it was nice
to see that that’s already started. CB: Yeah. Big quotes, air quotes — AC: Yeah. CB: — yeah, it was astrologer good “nice” when you see something terrible happening but you’re so impressed that the astrology’s lining up well that you’re almost not even mad, except we’re gonna see a lot more of that this year. On a more - I don’t know - positive note but a similar vein, I saw there was some photos like, going viral, and they were these AI-generated photos that looked lifelike of like, Trump and Biden hanging out together and they were like, baking cookies and just like, being best pals, and that was a similar sort of thing in terms of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction this year in just the use of AI to generate photos and to try to influence things politically by creating misinformation basically is gonna be so prevalent this year. Because it’s not just happening with photo, but it’s also increasingly happening with video, and I think people are gonna be shocked by the end of the year at how fast the AI-generated video component of things develops and how lifelike it starts to end up looking. AC: Yeah, we’re gonna have to - excuse me - we’re
going to have to get a lot sharper quickly, which probably won’t happen — CB: No. AC: — you know, at least statistically. I saw a mildly convincing AI-generated version of Biden and Trump and George Bush, Jr. And Obama playing Dungeons & Dragons. CB: Nice. AC: On YouTube. It’s pretty good. CB: Yeah. That’s pretty entertaining
I feel like at least. All right. AC: I think Obama was DMing. Anyway. CB: Yeah. Maybe in an alternative world - I mean, I kind of like that use of it to create like, alternative, happier timelines when politicians are, I don’t know, friendlier to each other or not as jerks to each other. AC: That’s what’s actually
happening behind the scenes in the secret societies is they’re just playing D&D. CB: Okay. That’s what happens at like, the - what’s the one in California? Like, the grove place? AC: Oh, Bohemian Grove, right. CB: Yeah, Bohemian Grove. AC: I mean, Bohemian Grove seems pretty LARP-y. CB: Yeah. From what I hear. All right, so moving on to other Saturn conjunct Neptune things. There was another major thing in the news that was really evocative of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is that over the past month, global sea trade has slowed down dramatically due to the Houthis in Yemen attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea, and this is now forcing ships instead of going through the Red Sea with cargo to instead go all the way around Africa and all the way around the Cape of Good Hope in order to carry goods and other stuff. So something like 12 percent of all global trade then has been
disrupted. And it’s really interesting how that fits the symbolism, that you literally have like, a slowing down, which is Saturn, of sea trade and things like that, which is Neptune. AC: Yeah, and of course it’s Saturn, so it’s targeting a choke point or a narrowing. So do
you know what the name of the entry point into the Red Sea, the southern entry point not the Suez Canal, do you know what that entry point is called? It’s pertinent. CB: No. AC: It’s the Gate of Tears, which is — CB: Oh wow. AC: — such a Saturn in Pisces thing. CB: Yeah. AC: And so yeah,
that - so that started, that got going while Mars was in Sagittarius squaring Saturn in Pisces, and recently with Mars’s movement into Capricorn and sextiling Saturn in Pisces, we’ve seen retaliatory action from the US military and you know, as I was telling you, as I’ve been watching this, it just makes - it feels like it’s just leading towards whatever happens during the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, which is late March. It’s perfect in mid-April, but it starts late March. Because that Saturn in Pisces screams restriction of trade by waterways, and then with the configuration of Mars, right, conflict around that. And so the square gave us the increased attacks, the sextile gave us retaliatory action, and then where will we be, right? In a few months when we have the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, which is course - because it’s a conjunction - sets the stage for another two years of Mars-Saturn action being sort of like a New Moon for difficult things. And then — CB: Yeah. Which we talked about being related to
the ocean because we’d seen an early preview of that in like, June, when Saturn first stationed in Pisces and we saw the explosion of that story about the submarine that sank as well as other disasters that were happening in the ocean at the time. So it was one of the things we like, talked about on the year ahead forecast just last month, and it was interesting seeing just such a literal version of that here. AC: Yeah, and you know, it really struck me that the Gate of Tears thing - you know, there are Pisces - we’re prone to melancholy. And so having Saturn a gate - what is the Pisces Saturn gate called? Oh,
it’s the Gate of Tears. And just reminding me that Saturn rules gates and choke points, right? It’s not the open ocean so much as it is this like, this fluid corridor where it matters a lot whether things can pass through or not. And then it brought up, to me, another Pluto in Aquarius tech point, and so this point again - this point’s relevant to a lot of these concerns, but in this case, it was the economics of expensive and sophisticated weapons systems versus effective weapons systems. So there’s a lot of criticism because in order to shoot down some of the drones which were used to attack shipping vessels, those drones cost about 2,000 dollars, and some of the missiles - the incredibly sophisticated missiles with their great guidance systems - in order to nullify them, you know, they were spending a million dollars a pop for interceptors. Right? So that’s, I don’t know, what? Is that a 50,000 to one? No, 5,000 to one cost differential. And so you know, we’re really seeing a lot of these Pluto
in Aquarius technologies at the “This can be done” stage, and there’s the human reaction and there’s, you know, scaling as challenges, but then there’s also the economics. Right? Like, with the robots, it’s like, even if you know, a terrifying and efficacious robots can be made, if they cost 70 million dollars apiece, that’s never going to be part of the real for most people, right? And that’s not an estimate of how much they’re gonna cost; I'm just saying for example, you know, if something incredibly sophisticated and expensive can be nullified extremely cheaply or is in competition with something cheaper, even if something miraculous can be created, then it doesn’t really become part of the world if there’s a vastly cheaper alternative, and that’s part of all of this stuff, all of these new technologies or new applications. CB: Yeah, that's a great theme to pay attention to as an emergent theme during this time. Good point. And you know, of course, part of the scary thing about this is whether this is touching off like, a larger regional war, which seeing an escalation of all of this stuff in that area is a little scary, so we’ll have to pay attention to it and keep an eye on it. Julie in the comments says - a patron in the live audience who’s joining us today - says, “I work in the fishing/US government sector and commercial quota and allocations have been greatly reduced.” So I thought that — AC: Oh, Saturn in Pisces. CB: Yeah, exactly. So I thought
that was great. All right. So moving on to other stories. The last like, major one I saw was like, a social media story but it was one involving like, a timed birth chart, so I thought it was interesting. So there was this story about a woman named Gypsy Rose Blanchard who was recently released from jail, and this was really big a few weeks ago, but it happened after our last forecast, so I thought I would mention it because the astrology was just stunningly striking. So here’s a little summary where her - Gypsy’s mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is a mental illness in which a caregiver fabricates or exaggerates an illness in a dependent person for attention or sympathy. So in this case, the mother convinced the daughter that she had a number of medical conditions, including muscular dystrophy, leukemia, and asthma, and the daughter was subjected to unnecessary medical procedures and surgeries throughout her life, which is this really crazy story, and eventually what happened was the daughter got together with like, a boyfriend online, and they ended up hatching a plot to like, murder the daughter’s mother, which they did, and then both were caught and sent to jail. But I think partially due to
the circumstances of what the mother had put the daughter through, she received a lighter sentence of like, a decade in prison, and then eventually was just released after only eight years in prison after being convicted of second degree murder. So what’s really interesting is I just happened to glance at it and noticed we had a timed birth chart. And first off, the daughter’s birth chart is just incredible because she was born with Libra rising and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, and Venus is at six degrees of Virgo in the 12th whole sign house, very closely conjunct Mars at seven degrees of Virgo in a day chart. So I thought this was amazing symbolism just in and of itself, both because the 12th house represents sometimes like, sickness or illness, but also it can represent like, imprisonment or being imprisoned or captive, and unfortunately for like, a large part of her life, for like the first 20 years, she was pretty much held a prisoner and was made sick, basically, by her mother due to whatever mental issues were going on at that time. And then additionally, Mars is the ruler of the 7th house of relationships, because she has Aries on the 7th house, and so the ruler, Mars, is there in the 12th house conjunct Venus, bringing in that other component where it was the partner who ended up murdering her mother, and he’s actually now in prison for life, whereas she was released after only eight years. So there was some really interesting like, natal indications
there, just to start with I think, right? AC: Oh yeah. When you have, you know, the ruler of the 1st and the 7th - the person and their partner right there together in the 12th, right? Plotting secretly and then also both imprisoned. CB: Right, exactly. And so two other things - so I did a whole episode of The Casual Astrology Podcast with Nick Dagan Best on this just a few weeks ago just for patrons through our page on Patreon, and we noticed two other things immediately in her chart that are super striking. So one - Venus is actually slowing
down and is just four point eight days from stationing retrograde in this chart. So Venus, actually, when she was born, was stationing retrograde in Venus; it was just days away from stationing retrograde in Virgo. So that’s point one. Point two is the Moon - actually there was just a lunar eclipse in the sign of Aquarius conjunct Saturn the day before she was born. So in addition to that like, interesting 12th house stuff, she was also born on Venus stationing retrograde and she was also born on a lunar eclipse conjunct Saturn. And both of those
two themes I think really emphasize and bring up the themes with the mother, since both the Moon as well as Venus are traditionally associated with the mother in a person’s birth chart. And what’s interesting about that is - so get this, this is we found, and Nick saw this after just like, 10 minutes of research - so the daughter was born four days before Venus went retrograde in Virgo, right? Get this. So the mother was born in 1967, which was the same year as Venus went retrograde in Virgo just like, not too long before the mother was born. So the mother was born essentially in the same year as the same Venus retrograde in Virgo, which recurs every eight years. So that’s not all, though. In 2019, there was like, a biopic that was made about this story, and the woman who played - the actress who played the daughter, whose birth chart we just looked at that was born when Venus stationed retrograde in 1991 in Virgo, the actress that played her was born the day that Venus stationed retrograde in Virgo in 1999. So she was born almost exactly
8 years later. On top of that, the murder itself occurred in 2015, just 45 days before Venus went retrograde in Virgo in that year - so another eight-year increment. And then finally, the daughter was released from jail in 2023, just months after Venus had gone retrograde in the same series, in another eight-year increment. So there’s crazy Venus retrograde tied in here, but there’s also crazy eclipse stuff. So the daughter was born the day of a lunar eclipse in Aquarius;
it turns out that the mother was born a few days before a solar eclipse in Taurus. Then the actress that played the daughter - whose name is Joey King - she was born two days after a lunar eclipse in Aquarius just like the daughter she was playing. And then finally, the actress Patricia Arquette, who played the mother in the biopic, was born just before a lunar eclipse. So there’s like, crazy Venus retrograde and eclipse stuff happening with all of the people involved, not just in the family itself and the events surrounding it, but also even in the charts of the people playing them. AC: Yeah. CB: Wild?
AC: It’s totally wild. It really goes to show that the two most interesting things that were happening in the sky when she was born were, oh, Venus is just about to station retrograde and there was just an eclipse. Right? And like, those - and then when you follow like, the movement of those in time - like, follow the eclipses and follow that Venus retrograde cycle, you get the timeline for the most important story in her life. CB: Exactly.
AC: Or at least from the outside. Hopefully there are other stories that we can’t see that are more important for her, but. CB: Yeah, exactly. Well and it just, it illustrates so much stuff, like you have to then see - because we saw so much of that last summer, like, you know, I saw that with Barbie where Greta Gerwig - we saw Barbie released when Venus was stationing retrograde and then turned out Greta Gerwig was born the day that Venus stationed retrograde in the same cycle, so there’s a repetition of when you see a natal signature in somebody’s chart, you just look for the repetitions of that as coinciding with the key moments in their life. But there’s also just this separate phenomenon that other astrologers
have noticed from time to time, which is that sometimes the people that play real-life people, sometimes the actors or actresses they have similar signatures in their own birth chart or some sort of connection between their birth chart and the person that they play. But I've never seen an example as striking as this one in terms of that. AC: Yeah. That’s a good one. CB: Yeah. So I think that would be a great episode to do. So if anybody has any other examples of like, actors that have really
impressive charts relative to the people that they’re playing or interesting correlations in terms of that, send them in because I might like to do an episode on that at some point here soon. AC: Yeah, for sure. CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s actually I believe the end of the news segments, unless you’ve got anything else that you noticed. AC: Not in particular. But somebody brought something up in the comments that this illustrates - the number of times you see people playing someone in a biopic with a very similar chart or at least a piece of the chart that is, you know, replicating the original story - it makes me think about being a casting agent. Right? I’d be like, “Well,
let me see your chart.” You know? So you’re going to play Theodore Roosevelt or, you know, whoever. CB: Right. AC: Like, let’s take a look at the chart. Do you have the right stellium? CB: Yeah. You’re like, “Oh, you have the same Sun, Moon, and rising - you have the job.” AC: Yeah.
CB: Something like that? AC: Well, yeah. It seems like there are two kinds of actors. There are actors, and then there are people who are fun to watch who are just like this thing, and you just wanna see that. CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right. I’m definitely gonna do an episode on that; that’s a fascinating topic and now I'm interested. AC: It’d be fun. CB: Yeah. All right, I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the CHANI App, which is the number one astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. So the CHANI App is this amazing app that
I've been using for the past few months since it came out for Android, and it’s also available for iPhone. So it’s designed to make astrology both accessible as well as useful, and the app combines a brilliant blend of ancient as well as modern astrological techniques along with other things like meditation and mindfulness to help you foster your relationship with the sky and support your personal growth. From personalized readings to real-time updates on how the current astrology’s impacting you, it features everything you need to navigate life’s ups and downs. This includes detailed birth chart breakdowns, daily horoscopes, current sky horoscopes, transit readings, intel on the current Moon phase and sign, weekly sign specific audio readings by Chani Nicholas, year ahead forecasts and more. For me personally, as I've said the past few months, the things I
enjoy about the app the most is one, that blend of modern and traditional astrology, so it makes it actually very close to my personal approach so that if I was to design an app it would probably be similar to this even though it’s way better than anything I could’ve designed myself. But two, it’s one of the only apps that uses whole sign houses by default, which again matches my technical approach here on the podcast. Three, it sends you notifications when the transits in the sky go exact, which is very helpful. And four, I really appreciate that it’s now available for android in addition to iPhone. So the app is free to download on iOS and Android app stores; just search “Chani” - C H A N I - in the app store, and you’ll find it. Or otherwise visit
app.chani.com for more information. All right. So thanks a lot to Chani for sponsoring this episode. All right. So let’s transition into talking about the forecast for February at this point and what the astrology is gonna look like and breaking it down here. So let’s talk about big picture things. What are you excited about, what are you not excited about about Aquarius? What are some of the main signatures that we can look forward to when it comes to this month? AC: Yeah. So the big thing that stands out is that there’s just a stampede of planets - or a flock of planets? - that coalesces in Aquarius. The month begins with just the Sun, Pluto in Aquarius, but as we move steadily through the month, we get Mercury into Aquarius, which then hits Pluto. By the middle of the month, I believe the 13th,
we get Mars into Aquarius, which hits Pluto, and then a few days later, we get Venus into Aquarius, which then hits Pluto, and so there are two sides of this that excite me. Or maybe “excite”’s not the right word - that interest me. One is just that this is a lot of planets in Aquarius, and so whatever the Aquarius sector of a person’s chart is is just getting lit up. It’s the Sun, and then all three swiftly moving planets - of course, we also get a New Moon there, so we’ll also have a New Moon in Aquarius with these planets. And so it’s just a ton of emphasis, and it’s not decidedly positive or negative for most people, right? We have Venus - yay! We have Mars - grr! We have Mercury - buzz! As well as the Sun and Pluto. And so — CB: Can you say “grr” more often any time you mention a malefic transit from now on? I would appreciate that. AC: Well, that was for Mars, right?
CB: Okay. AC: I don’t think Saturn is “grr.” I’ll have to come up with an appropriate sound effect for Saturn. I mean, icy silence might — CB: Right, just death stare. AC: If I could make my silence icier, then maybe that would be good for Saturn. CB: If I could weaponize my
awkward silence, that would be — AC: Yeah. Why you gotta be so awkward, bud? CB: Yeah. AC: So there’s that, right? It’s just a lot in Aquarius, which will just light up the Aquarius parts of all these charts. And then there’s the
fact that we’re getting - for the first time in, I don’t know, since the late 18th century - Mercury conjunct Pluto in Aquarius, Mars conjunct Pluto in Aquarius, Venus conjunct Pluto in Aquarius. Because even though the Sun and Pluto moved into Aquarius together, their exact conjunction was in the last minutes of Capricorn, right? So they didn’t actually perfect their conjunction. And so from - and this is from like, the “astrologer good” perspective, right? Is “ooh, what does it do?” Right? What does Mercury conjunct Pluto in Aquarius - what does it do in the world? Also, what does it feel like? From my perspective, I have Venus very early in Aquarius, so I wanna know what Pluto going over my Venus is going to do, and so seeing it activated by all of these planets is, you know, gonna give me a much better idea of what to look forward to, what to brace for, what to dread silently, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, forewarned is forearmed or whatever. And I'm just interested, you know, that’s part of my relationship to astrology
at this point. I think a lot of astrologers’ relationship to astrology - it’s like, okay, I see a thing - it comes in this timeframe, like, let’s get on with it. Let’s see what it is. Right? And so there’s a lot of getting to see like, getting - how should we say - a better look at what Pluto in Aquarius is going to do, right? Because there’s Pluto by itself, but you know, we’re here to understand Pluto being in a place for 20 years. It’s really how does Pluto being there interact with everybody else? Like, we’ve got a new member of the ecosystem. Right? How does the, you know,
mad scientist or whatever the Terminator Cyberdyne systems model whatever - like, how does that interact with everything else? Like, that’s the answer we - or that’s the set of answers that we need in order to — CB: Yeah. AC: — think about the future accurately. CB: And this is gonna be our first time seeing that because a year ago, Pluto went into Aquarius but it went in in like, March or something, so some of the planets had already passed through Aqaruius and we didn’t get the same set of conjunctions, whereas this year we’re gonna get those conjunction and it’s gonna be a preview of conjunctions we’re gonna be experiencing for the next like, 20 years, especially with these inner planets where once a year the Sun’s always gonna conjoin Pluto and Mercury’s gonna do it and then Venus every, what, year and a half or something, and then Mars every couple of years. This is the first time that we’re gonna see those conjunctions in Aquarius, and it’ll be really insightful as a preview into a lot of energies we’re gonna see expand and unfold over the next 20 years. Because it’s kind of like the first time you hear like, on windchimes, like if you strike a windchime and here just like, one note, but then you imagine over a long enough period of time hearing that same note struck, you know, 20 times over the course of the next 20 years. And
by the end of that, you’re really familiar with what that sounds like. But this time, this is our first time like, hearring that note struck, especially in that specific part of our chart in terms of looking at it personally, like what house does Aquarius coincide with and what house are all of these planets gonna be transiting through. But then on a mundane level, you know, what does that sound like in terms of world events the first time that that note is struck? AC: Yeah, and you know, during that preview period last year Q2, the only planet that conjoined Pluto while Pluto was in Aquarius was the Moon. It’s all we’ve had. We had no Mercury, no Venus, no Mars, obviously no Jupiter or Saturn, no Sun. Like, we haven’t had - we’ve had one planet do a conjunction. So there’s like - yeah, it’s one note being played, one of the seven notes on the instrument of Pluto in Aquarius or, I don’t know, one of seven players picking it up and toodling on it. CB: Yeah. Toodling, that’s a good word.
I haven’t heard that - that’s a first time on the podcast, but I like that. AC: Well, it’s a wind instrument, obviously. Right? Maybe it’s — CB: That’s true. AC: — like one of those deep, resonant, like, doom-y horns? CB: Yeah. I’d like that, okay. Well, speaking of that, that’s actually really good imagery for basically our very first transit of the month, which is Mercury basically within just the first few days makes that ingress out of Capricorn and goes into Aquarius where it immediately conjoins Pluto. So Mercury is the first of the bunch that’s gonna hit Pluto on the 4th and the 5th of February and form that conjunction. So it’s
the first one where we’re gonna really start to get an idea of what that energy is all about. So let’s talk a little bit about Mercury-Pluto conjunctions and what some keywords are when it comes to that. I know in the past we’ve seen events like investigations, like Pluto’s good at digging in deep and getting into the bottom of things and Mercury has a natural curiosity of wanting to like, look into and understand and report things. So I know in the past with different Mercury-Pluto combinations we’ve had like, exposes of reporters doing a deep dive into something and like, revealing something where there’s been like, an uncovering of something. AC: Yeah. It’s very, Mercury-Pluto’s very like, info dump, secret documents, you know, declassified or leaked. There’s also, you know with Mercury-Pluto, there’s this obsession with
like, secret pathways and hidden connections. And you know, obsession of course is always a Pluto word, but there’s, you know, with Mercury it’s that finding the real truth or what’s really going on or finding proof of the thing. And as with other, you know again, as with Pluto generally but especially with Mercury, there’s this dynamic of trying to - of going deeper and deeper to try to find out what’s really happening, or maybe in Aquarius’s case with Pluto in Aquarius what will really happen and getting totally lost in you know, the catacombs, the labyrinth of service tunnels and wires and routers and you know, like, getting lost in the depth, the complexity of the depths. CB: Yeah. That impulse of Mercury-Pluto to delve
into hidden truths and to see the deeper meanings in things. You know, in its highest expression, it’s like that reporter who’s like, following a case or like a trail for like, 20 years, or that like, police detective that’s like, trying to solve a case for 20 years and has this hunch and just like, follows it through until eventually they’re vindicated and it turns out they’re right, and all of
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