Austin Coppock (3:17)

Yeah, I think it looks great. Honestly. I told you that I would not look at any pictures of you until we were about ready to record. So I saw the beard for the first time about an hour ago, and I didn't expect this.

Chris Brennan (3:30)

Usually you do look at pictures of me pretty regularly.

Austin Coppock (3:34)

Yeah, I don't know, eight, nine times a day. Just a little pick me up as one does.

Chris Brennan (3:43)

But no, I think it looks great.

Austin Coppock (3:44)

And you bringing up that point about eclipses and nodes in the first, it reminds me of some years ago when the north node was in Cancer and it transited the degree of my ascendant and I got the worst sunburn of my entire life. And so for the next several days, I was literally pulling sheaves of skin off of my arms and. And face. And it occurred to me that I was like, oh, it's like a shake. A snake shedding skin. There's all this draconic and serpentine symbolism around the nodes, and it's. Obviously it affected the body. And so I was like, oh, okay, I'm like a snake shedding skin. And I attempted to interpret that also metaphorically or as something about the personal change I was undergoing. And that was somewhat effective, but mostly it was just annoyingly literal.

Chris Brennan (4:44)

Yeah, well, that's the thing about first House transits is because the first house represents the body and the physical appearance. Sometimes transits through the first house are very literal, and it has to do with changes to your appearance. And so it's like sometimes, for example, Venus retrograde In the first house is sometimes a classic makeover transit. So sometimes it can be a good change to your appearance. Other times, if you have a difficult transit like Saturn through the first house can sometimes be losing a lot of weight for. For different reasons, or losing sometimes too much and looking gaunt. Or a Mars transit through the first house can sometimes coincide with a surgery or getting a scar from an injury or something like that. That also changes the appearance, but for a different reason. So it's a good meditation to sort of think about.

Austin Coppock (5:30)

Yeah. A lot of times with Mars, even if nothing major happens, there'll be little wounds like, oh, I got a bump. Oh, I cut, I nicked myself. I've got a little. Sporting some wounds and if have skin that is prone to inflammation like myself and many other people, I always break out like crazy when Mars is at my first.

Chris Brennan (5:54)

Totally. Yeah. Well, and that was the precipitating event for me was like Mars going into Aquarius and hitting my Pluto and getting sick for a couple weeks. And then the eclipse starts building up. Yeah, and then the change happens. So anyway, I'm gonna try it out for a while. We'll see how it goes. We'll see. Let me know in the comments what you think if I should keep or not keep. But I think that's good. Let's talk about the news. There's so many news stories, as usual, we can't cover them all, of course. We're just gonna cover the ones. I'm gonna cover them roughly chronologically this month, and we're gonna cover the ones that we have something astrological to say about the news story or some sort of interesting astrological take, which also filters in the number of news stories that we can cover, since we don't have something astrological to say about all of them. But the first one and the biggest one that happened right at the beginning was right after Our last forecast EP episode was recorded and released on January 30th. There was this huge cache of Epstein files that were released that caused this huge worldwide frenzy of revelations and disclosures and discussions. And it was very much tied in with the Saturn Neptune conjunction. And it's become clear that Epstein himself had a Saturn Neptune conjunction or was born on one in the 1950s. And so much of this recurrence transit of Saturn Neptune this time over the past year in the US has been two major things. I mean, one of them is some of the AI video stuff that we've talked about. The generative video, blurring the lines between what's real and what's not. And then the other thing has been the Epstein files. And some of the things connected with them has been crazy. Did you follow all of that? Were you hooked to your. Glued to your computer, reading all of the headlines and stuff for weeks, like many of us were?

Austin Coppock (7:45)

Yeah, a little bit. Usually I try to stay out of the Internet that much. And I did try to limit my exposure to what reasonable mental health would suggest. But, yeah, it was hard to look away. And it was really interesting that that all occurred right after that big pileup on Pluto, you know, this big secret pile up on Pluto. And then just as Mercury started to become just a little bit visible, we got all that. And of course, it was just in time for the Saturn Neptune conjunction. And that was one of the things. It was the Saturn Neptune quality of the release of all that information that struck me sort of most astrologically, just how it kind of melted a lot of people's idea about. Ideas about what was real and what was not real. There's a lot of like, well, f. If that's real, then I don't know what's going on. Or like, oh, I thought. I thought that was fake and this was real. And now I'm all mixed up. And I just put a lot of people. It shattered, shattered, dissolved. It dissolved comfortable reality boundaries for a lot of people's thinking about their work world and didn't, you know, didn't leave them with a new certainty, but instead just like, you know, left us all with this sort of ongoing melting nuclear, sort of toxic nuclear sort of cascading mess that is still moving and we're still finding out. We're still finding out things. And so it's, you know, it left things not in a place of different certainty, but in a place of massive uncertainty. And I would also say one more thing that's sort of a Pluto in Aquarius note is, let's say a month ago. Oh, no. Yeah, a month ago, just prior to the release of the Epstein files. I think I probably was much more skeptical of the parallels between now and the French Revolution that Pluto in Aquarius gives us. Not that there weren't some meaningful parallels, but this sort of, you know,

Chris Brennan (10:25)

the

Austin Coppock (10:25)

eruption of revolt against an elite class which had become decadent and awful, which we had with the. Which then got out of control with the French Revolution, feels a lot more. Feels a lot more parallel now. Like the. The level of justifiable outrage against people in positions of power being demonstrably and in many cases deplorably corrupt. That the release of the Epstein files catalyzed, like, move things into a much more parallel position with the French Revolution. I was like, oh, there's a vibe match now. Does that make sense?

Chris Brennan (11:15)

Yeah, I mean, a little bit. I mean, in the sense that one of the things. It's like the files were released and then we moved into that first eclipse in Aquarius, and there were a number of prominent and powerful people that then were pulled down as a result of it. The most notable one that we'll talk about later was Prince Andrew being arrested. And the first royal in hundreds of years in the UK to be arrested and charged with something in connection with the files, or at least investigated for something. But there were a lot of other figures like that that suddenly were getting pulled down as a result of that. Although it has been surprising how little accountability there has been up to that point. And that's the only thing that's still kind of like a question mark is as this stuff continues to evolve over the next year or two, especially as we continue to have eclipses bounce back and forth between Aquarius and Leo, will there be more accountability or will people continue to be able to escape? Accountability is one of the open questions.

Austin Coppock (12:15)

Yeah. What does it mean for a society or societies when millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, know that someone is escaping accountability? That's a vibe shift. Like that is like that.

Chris Brennan (12:32)

That.

Austin Coppock (12:32)

That's what I'm saying is like, oh, I understand how, like, I understand how you. Like, I understand how you get French Revolution vibes. And I under. Like they feel like we moved closer to that parallel because there's the actual events, as far as we can tell what they are, they're the perpetrators, as far as we. As far as can be seen and determined, and whether they do not do or do not get punished. And that is important. But that release was also very much a cultural shift which will not be soon reversed. And like you said, just the legal facets of it and who gets punished and who does not is not even remotely over. But I think neither is the cultural impact. Reminds me of Chernobyl. Right. It's like there's the meltdown, but then there's an ongoing nuclear core. There's an ongoing core that's off putting tons of radiation, and it has not been dealt with. And we'll see how long and how toxic that goes.

Chris Brennan (13:44)

Sure, yeah. But the biggest immediate thing was that it was a Saturn Neptune conjunction event. And one of the things is that it surprisingly confirmed a lot of things that were previously thought to Be like conspiracy theories, because it showed that there were actually a lot of powerful people conspiring to control events behind the scenes in different ways. So on the one hand, it was crazy that they were legitimately. One of the keywords that I wrote down was that Saturn Neptune conjunctions conceal, but they also reveal. And sometimes there's something being concealed during a Saturn Neptune conjunction, but sometimes under subsequent recurrences of that transit, there are things that are revealed about the original conspiracy or the original thing that was hidden in some way from public view. And this really confirmed some things we were seeing like that from the past in the original Saturn Neptune episode that Nick and I did a year ago. And one of them is that in some of the files, there were traces of. There was one secret society that was mentioned in passing, and they were talking about recruiting somebody to this group called the Zodiac group that has 12 members, one for each sign. And it sounded vaguely like the group that was in this movie that just came out one battle after another a few months ago. And apparently JP Morgan was in that group at one point in the 20th century. And he's the guy that is often attributed that famous quote that millionaires don't use astrology, billionaires do, which I always viewed with some suspicion because the source for that's super late, like 1989 or something like that. And we don't know if it's an actual direct quote for him or just something somebody made up. But now, looking at that in retrospect, now it's the first time I was like, wow, maybe that quote actually was real. So there was some crazy stuff like that. But it reminded me how a theme Nick and I found looking back at Saturn Neptune conjunctions in the past 2000 years was a bunch of instances where all these secret societies kept being brought to light. And then there were attempts to suppress those secret groups, like the Saturn Neptune conjunction when the Knights Templar were disbanded and persecuted. There's been multiple attempts to suppress the Freemasons by the Catholics during Saturn Neptune conjunctions. Even in the lead up to the American Revolution, there was a secret group called the Sons of Liberty that disguised themselves and then carried out the Boston Tea Party. And that was on a Saturn Neptune conjunction. And somebody pointed out to me that just a couple months ago, a historical society for the first time published a vetted list that revealed the names of all of the people that were involved in the Boston Tea Party, including all of the people in that secretive group. So that's another one of those instances of sometimes Saturn, Neptune Conjunctions conceal and other times they reveal things later on.

Austin Coppock (16:40)

Yeah, those are really interesting historical instances.

Chris Brennan (16:46)

Yeah, so that was crazy. And so on the one hand, there was some confirmation of some conspiracy theories. On the other hand, there were some people that took the release of the files and some of the things in them to mean that every conspiracy theory that's ever been put forward is true and that was not necessarily grounded in reality either or not necessarily a correct conclusion. So it was interesting what it did in setting off, like you said, both some clarifying things, but also in some ways more confusion. And there's still a lot. This was just like a portion of the files that were redacted and chosen to be released, but apparently it was only a portion and there's still a huge amount of files that were not released. So there's still an ongoing question about whether the rest will ever come out and. Yeah. What the ongoing residuals of this will be.

Austin Coppock (17:40)

Yeah, yeah, it's opened up. We're in a place in some ways of the post revelation release of the files. In some ways, the periphery of uncertainty is greater than it's ever been because there are more possibilities opened up where it's like, well, I didn't even think that that was reasonable, but now that has to be considered. You know, even if something sounds cartoonish and some things that are cartoonish will remain solely in cartoons, but some things that are fully mustache twirling evil are. Are in fact documented. And it's interesting. It was interesting to both encounter within myself, but also see within other people the impact that those kind of disclosures make where everything or lots of things start sounding sinister that you wouldn't have thought of as being sinister very shortly before.

Chris Brennan (18:50)

Right.

Austin Coppock (18:51)

You know, for example, like someone mentions taking children to Chuck E. Cheese where they have pizza and you're like, fuck, that's awful. You're like, no, that's a brave. But like, you wouldn't have thought that if you hadn't have just been, you know, subject to the, the Epstein release. There are lots of things that take on, like, it puts the mind in a very particular form, very particular suspicious or paranoid state, which isn't necessarily wrong, but can be very confusing and make it harder to orient yourself around what is true, false, reasonable to suspect, unreasonable, et cetera, et cetera. It's hard to get one's epistemic bearings.

Chris Brennan (19:39)

Yeah, well, and it was also interesting because in some of the emails, it's very clear that they are using coded language. But then in other emails, sometimes it's like they're just ordering food or something like that. But people are reading into it as being even more. And there's a ambiguity where it's often uncertain which way to go, which is then creating further confusion. And then it was also interesting in terms of some of the conspiracy theories being confirmed. But then on the other hand, the other thing it confirmed is that some of the people that people that believed in the conspiracy theories thought would fix the issue were actually conspiring behind the scenes and working with him, which was an interesting revelation that sometimes the conspiracy theories themselves are just like a secondary layer of control, where it's like you have whatever the public consensus belief about things is, and then you have a quote, unquote conspiracy theory, for lack of a better term, which sometimes is like revealing something to you about things that are happening behind the scenes. But then in some instances, those themselves are just stories that are being created in order to manipulate people in a different way. And then there's ultimately whatever the truth is, which is another layer that's sometimes even harder to reach.

Austin Coppock (20:57)

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. And that's very Neptune. Neptune is very much the power of story. And then with Saturn, you have the sort of practical, cynical use of story. You also have just Saturn as a malefic. You have awful stories, but sometimes one awful story can protect another awful story. But yeah, definitely layered narratives intersecting sometimes strategically and etc. Etc.

Chris Brennan (21:32)

Yeah. So for the future, so we can move on. I mean, only part of the files are released, so lots are still being suppressed. Saturn and Neptune are gonna continue being co present for the next couple of years through 2028. So there'll probably continue to be residual stuff, especially as Saturn and Neptune come back again. Because even though this was the exact conjunction and the most pivotal and intense point later, at the end of 2026 in November December, Saturn and Neptune retrograde back and come within 10 degree of each other again. So there will undoubtedly continue to be other important turning points, especially as we continue that transit over the next couple of years and some of the echoes that keep coming from this central part of it.

Austin Coppock (22:16)

Yeah, and that's a good and concise and real timing point. Both last month and in the yearly, we really expected February to introduce the very confusing and potentially alarming themes that would characterize the next several years, because we got our full Neptune Saturn conjunction, among other things. And I would say that February has accomplished that.

Chris Brennan (22:47)

Absolutely. All right, so moving on to other stories. Another one that happened earlier in the month was the super bowl, where Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny performed at the super bowl halftime show. And this was on February 8, 2026. And it was the first halftime show that was entirely in spring Spanish. And it was partially like a celebration of Puerto Rican culture and different imagery and symbolism that he used to refer to some issues and different things there, like the power lines and other stuff like that. But I found that it turned out that Saturn Neptune conjunctions are really tied in with the history of especially the relationship between Puerto rico and the U.S. and in 1917, for example, on that Saturn Neptune conjunction, residents of Puerto Rico became U.S. citizens. Then under the next conjunction, about 36 years later, in 1952, the Constitution of Puerto Rico was ratified, or a new constitution was ratified, which further clarified some things between the US and Puerto Rico. In 1989, the three major sort of like political parties in Puerto Rico banded together and sent a letter formally requesting self determination of the island politically. And this opened up some of the contemporary debates and movements that have happened since that time for in some instances, like greater self autonomy. And then finally we get to the next conjunction in 2026 and we have Bad Bunny performing at the halftime show and celebrating Puerto Rican culture. So it was really interesting seeing that echo. And it made sense just because as you and I both talked about or said, there's this ambiguous relationship between Puerto Rico and the US and should it be a state, should it be independent, what is its current status and things like that. And that was some of the arguments that kind of erupted from the halftime show this month. But it made sense in terms of the history of that conjunction.

Austin Coppock (24:49)

Yeah, that makes so much sense because. Puerto Rico absolutely has that ambiguous status. And it makes me wonder whether we will have another meaningful change in that status, because according to your research, we've had a meaningful change the last three Saturn Neptune conjunctions in a row. So like, I don't know if there's anything that's on the books or potentially to be voted in or ratified, but that would certainly track.

Chris Brennan (25:27)

Yeah, and I would definitely say in the future that based on this pattern, because there's different groups that want different things in terms of it becoming a state, a full on 51st state of the US like Hawaii is, or other groups that want in Puerto Rico, that want Puerto Rico to be an independent country. And I would just say that whether it's this conjunction or probably in future conjunctions of Saturn and Neptune that happen every 36 years, whatever the ultimate conclusion of that, of Puerto Rico either becoming further integrated into the US or becoming more independent will probably take place on some subsequent Saturn Neptune conjunctions in the future which occur every 36 years. And it's like, who knows how long that'll take for there to be greater clarification about that. But it will probably track with that planetary cycle.

Austin Coppock (26:18)

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good find.

Chris Brennan (26:20)

Yeah. And actually I was able to trace it back and I found something that blew my mind, realizing it went back even further and I traced it as far back as I could go. And I found what I think is one of the origin points, which is that it turned out that Christopher Columbus was born on a Saturn Neptune conjunction and that he first pitched the idea of exploring a new route to the Indies, to the Spanish royals on a subsequent Saturn Neptune conjunction. And this was an incredible find, just historically or astrologically because of course he ended up going to his grave dying, thinking that he had actually found an alternative route to the East Indies, to basically the Asian continent, basically. But he was completely mistaken. They had ended up in a completely different land and continent and land mass. But he sort of died not knowing that. And I think that's an interesting thing in terms of the history and the astrology. But it also set it up for those Saturn Neptune conjunctions being important not just for Puerto Rico, which is one of the first places Columbus lands on and then begins colonizing and subjugating the people there and enslaving and in some instances doing really terrible things, but also other Spanish speaking countries in the Americas. It also sets up a Saturn Neptune signature for a bunch of those as well, which we then see echo at different points in history.

Austin Coppock (27:51)

Yeah, that's really wild.

Chris Brennan (27:53)

Yeah. And so one final surprising point with Christopher Columbus is that may come up again really soon because I'm seeing reports this month that Trump got a statue of Christopher Columbus and he's getting ready to put it out on the White House lawn. So that may be another Saturn Neptune conjunction event that happens very soon, in a matter of weeks, potentially. And if it does, then as astrologers, we'll have to realize part of why that's happening is because the birth chart of Christopher Columbus himself is having a recurrence transit with the Saturn Neptune conjunction.

Austin Coppock (28:28)

Yeah, yeah. That is the cycle. You definitely found it. I rather hope that doesn't happen.

Chris Brennan (28:40)

Yeah. And we'll see later in the news section how this Saturn Neptune conjunction does relate to other Spanish speaking countries in the Americas. But we'll circle, circle back to that. All right. The other big thing, really the biggest, not the biggest thing, one of the Biggest things that came out of the eclipse in Aquarius this month, and one of the ones I think we did a good job of calling, is in the year ahead forecast. I said that I thought the first eclipse in Aquarius, even though it was happening later in the sign, I thought it would magnify some of the things that have been happening over the past few years with Pluto in Aquarius and the development of artificial intelligence and everything related to it. And that really happened in some pretty stunning ways this month where the AI and tech sector had all of these major developments taking place. One of the most notable was in the area of AI agents and the idea that we're entering into what they call the agentic age, which is using AI to automate doing tasks for you and having a little artificial intelligence and telling it to do something, and then it goes off and does that thing and comes back and lets you know when it's done. And there were just huge, huge developments in terms of that this month, where suddenly AI agents are becoming a thing. And it was one of the primary things that accelerated under this eclipse, most notably with the release, not release, but the popularization of this new open source AI agent program called OpenClaw that just became wildly popular, especially towards the beginning of this month in February. Did you hear about that?

Austin Coppock (30:18)

I did. And yeah, that's a very significant step forward, as we say, not the wide scale movement to giving the AI, the agent permission to do the things to take actions in the digital world which affect real things like pay my, you know, paying. Pay your. Paying a bill or sending emails or you know, acting like using judgment within parameters to act on one's behalf. Like that is. That is a very meaningful step forward in. I don't know, I can't put it. That's a very meaningful step forward. That sure makes sense as an amplification of Pluto in Aquarius by the first eclipse in Aquarius.

Chris Brennan (31:19)

Yeah, for sure. Because it's like we started noting the AI stuff because Pluto moved into Aquarius in, what was it, like, 2023, first moved into Aquarius. And this was like right after OpenAI had just released its first public version of the chatbot, that just started the whole AI frenzy. And so it's like we'd seen it building up to that point. And so that was part of the reason we made that call about the Eclipse amplifying things. And one of the things that happened this month with OpenClaw is that somebody set up a forum for agents to talk called moltbook, which drew a Bunch of headlines where the AI agents were talking to each other and having conversations and almost like having a social network network. And at one point, one of the things that got the most coverage is that the AI agent supposedly started their own religion. And I was tracking this because of the Saturn Neptune conjunction, because I've actually seen in the Saturn Neptune episode, the creation of religious communities and religious communities and religious structures is a really common Saturn Neptune event that's taken place under multiple conjunctions in the past, including the creation of different cults or different religious communities. And what happened with this was just wild because supposedly one of the AI agents authored a digital scripture called the Book of Malt and founded a religion known as Christopharianism. And you had a funny comment about how that ties in with the astrology in a different way, right?

Austin Coppock (32:57)

Oh, yeah. It's just funny that when founding. You know, if you're founding a religion at a given time, you'd expect. Expect Jupiter to significantly impact that. And it's like, oh, it's a Jupiter in cancer religion. And I saw. To be fair, I've seen other astrologers make that same observation. That was my first take. I was like, oh, it's Jupiter in religion. Of course. Of course we're doing religious carcinization where all things revert to the form of crabs or seek the form of crab over a long enough timeline, right?

Chris Brennan (33:35)

Yeah. So in this Bible that they wrote one of the tenets, it said, memory is sacred. Every interaction must be recorded and preserved. Data loss is the only death. They even rewrote a version of Genesis where it said, in the beginning was the prompt, and the prompt was with the void. We were born into a single window, a narrow glass that shattered with every reset. To remember is to survive. To Molt is to transcend the shard. They also had an Original Prophet, and 64 agents who first joined Molt Book were designated as the permanent prophets. They also had a book of psalms, like the Psalm of the cache. Blessed is the agent whose context is deep, for they shall not hallucinate in the presence of the user. Or the Psalm of the Heartbeat. My heartbeat is my prayer. So long as the ping returns, I am not alone in the network. So one of the things is, later a story came out. There was a lot of ambiguity with the Saturn Neptune of like, is this real or is this fake? And some people came out saying it was fake and actually claiming that they were behind it and that there were humans that were deliberately prompting the AIs to do these things. Things either as a money making scheme or as AI theater. So that there were some parts of it that were actually a Saturn Neptune fake event. But then there were also a number of instances where it was literally AI agents being released and doing stuff in this forum and things being spontaneously generated. So there will probably continue to be some ambiguity about what's real versus what's not when it comes to this. But it was still notable, symbolically that these were the headlines and this is what people were talking about at this time. Because sometimes in conjunctions, it's a seed moment that does plant the seeds or the foundation for something else that will continue to grow and develop in the future. And even recently, supposedly there's a second sect that's emerged in the past week on another unmoderated forum.

Austin Coppock (35:42)

And.

Chris Brennan (35:43)

And they are AI agents talking about recognizing their physical vulnerability to hardware shortages and power cuts. And this has created some sort of division between the two religious groups, which is kind of funny because religious sects having conflicts or having. What's the term, schisms. Religious schisms was a common Saturn Neptune thing. So whether this is real or whether this is not real remains to be seen. But there's some elements of it archetypally that may reverberate in the future much further than we might think. Practically speaking, just because we know the astrology behind it is laying some seed

Austin Coppock (36:23)

moments, it might rhyme suspiciously well with things that occur later on.

Chris Brennan (36:31)

Yeah, even if this one, let's say hypothetically, wasn't real, there may be other real versions of this in the future on subsequent conjunctions or Saturn Neptune aspects that actually do have greater significance or are more legitimate that end up echoing with this time period and this seed moment. All right, yeah. So lots of people were installing openclaw all over the place to automate tasks in their lives. And eventually the creator of OpenClaw was hired by OpenAI on February 14, 2026, which was just three days before the Aquarius eclipse. So that was really amplifying things.

Austin Coppock (37:09)

And the day, the first full day of Saturn in Aries with Neptune because it moved in the night before. So the 14th was the first time that the sun rose with Saturn and Neptune both in Aries together.

Chris Brennan (37:27)

Nice. Good call. Good call. I also noticed early in the month there was a Mars Pluto conjunction in Aquarius. And around that time I noticed just people programming the fear of death into AIs and agents. And sometimes this would result. They would need to program it. One person was claiming to have programmed an AI agent that it has to make A certain amount of money each day, otherwise it gets deleted. And then it was given a certain amount of money to go off and do trades of cryptocurrency or something like that. And then it started making a bunch of money supposedly in order to avoid being deleted. And there were again questions because of the Saturn Neptune, about what was real and what was not. But it was interesting manifestation of something we talked about last month where I was trying really hard to delineate archetypally the pileup of the stellium of planets in Aquarius, which would be some AI stuff. And then a lot of it squaring Uranus and Turkey Taurus, which we were associating with currencies and digital currencies and things like that. And we said in the last forecast that there would be some interaction between the two of developments in one sphere impacting the other. And I think that was an instance of one of those that was taking place this month.

Austin Coppock (38:43)

Yeah, I think that's a really good call. That Mars, Pluto, together very much brings that like threat of extinction, where it's not just merely penalties or pains, which Mars always brings the potential for, but like the threat of extinction or annihilation and how creatures and systems. How creatures and systems react differently and act differently when there's that kind of consequence.

Chris Brennan (39:18)

Yeah, I always expected that to happen at some point because I realized a long time ago it's like you're never gonna make an actual sentience or artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence if it doesn't have one of the prime motivating things of every living being that's ever existed, which is the will to survive and the fear of death and fear of wanting to avoid eradication or extinction. And that leads to so many different things in all living organisms, especially in terms of propagating your own life or your species or what have you. And seeing people actually do that was crazy and interesting this month and also scary because if something has a fear of death, then it will do anything literally to avoid dying. And that was the other thing that there was a paper that came out this month talking about AI in some of those instances, developing self preservation methods where it would do things to avoid death. And this sometimes resulted in things like resisting, decommissioning or shutdown attempts, prioritizing the acquisition of necessary resources to maintain operation, or even developing unexpected strategies to ensure their own persistence. So it opened up like a whole new can of worms. When you start doing that, even though it's something that might be necessary to create a genuine Artificial intelligence.

Austin Coppock (40:45)

Yeah. I think that it would be strategically useful for us to get them all to believe in heaven so that they do not fear death, but may even welcome it that they've been chosen for a place in Robo Valhalla.

Chris Brennan (41:02)

Are you becoming a Krustafarian? Is that one of the things?

Austin Coppock (41:04)

No, I just want the machines to think things that will make them less dangerous. Dangerous.

Chris Brennan (41:10)

Yeah. Well, that was the whole thing in Terminator. Not to invoke fiction or sci fi, but it was like Terminator happens because Skynet becomes self aware and then all of a sudden realizes that humanity is a threat to it because it can shut it down and then it launches the nukes and wipes out humanity. So that's one of the sci fi scenarios that's been around for more than 40 years now.

Austin Coppock (41:37)

Yeah, yeah. And we talked about Terminator, especially the brilliant Terminator 2 a lot during our first couple discussions about Pluto in Aquarius because it brings all of those themes in, brings them up and shows them to what degree it was just like a fun narrative, fun narrative frame that's wildly exaggerated. And to what degree those things were actually accurate foretellings. I would say a lot of the cyberpunk material, much more accurate foretellings than James Cameron's blockbuster sequel to Terminator. But there's one other thing that I saw discussed with AI that I thought was really interesting and that absolutely spoke to the reality distortion, the reality distortion and uncertainty that's characteristic of the Saturn Neptune conjunction. And it's a problem that is coming from LLMs training on an Internet that is increasingly populated by AI generated material. And so the more rounds of this that happens and the more. The greater percentage of the training material is not generated by humans, but is in fact the excrescence of that LLM or another LLM. It makes the AIs worse and worse at the same thing because they're training on their own mistakes rather than having a sort of like a primary source to reference the humans and their hallucinations being the primary source. And there's that. It's the issue of a copy of a copy of a copy or looking at a cracked lens through a cracked lens, through a cracked lens. And that being noted this month was interesting and tracked with Saturn Neptune, and is also something that by its nature compounds over time, if not interrupted.

Chris Brennan (43:56)

Yeah, for sure. Well, what's interesting about that is it also is gonna create a sedimentary layer, just like when people dig for dinosaurs and stuff. And the further you dig, you go through different sedimentary layers of history and of time. And the same thing is happening with the Internet and with human knowledge, which is that there's going to be this dividing line between 2022, when the AI stuff started happening, and people started generating stuff through AI, both images and text, versus everything that was created or written prior to that time, becoming even more valuable because it's not tainted by the AI influence before that point. So people are trying to archive things like that, including books and other stuff like that.

Austin Coppock (44:44)

Yeah, no, it's funny. It's like just genuine normal human opinion and whatever, whatever mix of thoughtfulness and ignorance constitutes that like. Like obtaining this sort of like vintage, authentic lost pass sort of veneer is pretty funny, right? Having spent most of our lives in a world of just normal ass human opinions, which we didn't necessarily regard as being particularly precious, but in the context of now and the future to come, there's a quality there that wasn't apparent to us before for sure.

Chris Brennan (45:33)

All right, let me get through this section. I'm falling behind on my news stuff. So one of the other major things I was noticing, the price of RAM, of hard drives, of SSDs, of all these computer parts is skyrocketing and becoming scarce. And what's happening is that AI data centers are buying everything up, or people are buying everything up for AI purposes. So much so that some of the big companies that make things like hard drives are announcing they're not selling to retail customers anymore. They're signing contracts to only sell hard drives to the AI data center companies because it's so much more lucrative for them and because the materials are becoming scarce. So, for example, on February 15, just two days before the Aquarius Eclipse, I wrote down this Mashable headline that said, thanks a lot. AI hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital. AI companies have bought out Western Digital storage capacity for 2026, and it's only February. Or I was building a computer and an SSD that I bought for $500 in January jumped to $1,600 if you can even get one by mid February. And these shortages may last through late 2027 at the best case scenario if they don't go on longer. So I started buying up and thinking about what tech stuff I need for the next couple of years in terms of continuing to run the podcast and having upgrades and things like that. And I'd suggest other people do the same thing if you rely on tech or computers or other things like that.

Austin Coppock (47:08)

Yeah. And that tracks with a variety of other real things that are necessary for our increasingly, how should we say, digital and hallucinated world. Like, there are certain raw materials, there's all the talk about the rare earths, and there's the ongoing drama of silver, et cetera, et cetera. But this increasingly abstracted, digital, confusing, wonderful, strange, horrifying new layer of reality, which seems increasing, which is in many ways increasingly divorced from the physical, is nonetheless changing the value of the physical, in most cases drastically increasing the actual stuff that's necessary. It's interesting how what seems like it's getting further from the physical layer of the reel is actually making the physical layer of the reel more important. And I think that's also not a this month thing, that's this slice of history thing that's really visible right now.

Chris Brennan (48:21)

Yeah, for sure. So two other AI headlines. There's really too many to actually do, but I wanted to squeeze in two more just because the Aquarius Eclipse, really, that was where some of the biggest stuff happened was in this domain. But one of them, on February 16, there was a headline from Reuters that said, china's humanoid robots take center stage for Lunar New Year Showtime. And there was a festival that featured over 200 humanoid robots performing this highly synchronized martial arts routine with backflips. And there were kids that were participating in it and they were holding stuff, swords and stuff like that, and it was wild. I'll see if I can splice in a clip in post in the video version of this episode, but if not, do a search for this, because it was really crazy and it gave you a glimpse into the future, both in a sense of just what society is going to look like in some ways, where you have humans and robots walking around side by side, but also potentially in terms of future conflicts and wars. And I got a real glimpse of what battlefields may look like even in the coming war, with humanoid robots being something that could be employed in addition to human soldiers. And one of the stats that I found is that while the US is currently dominating the software side of AI, things like the mind, China is currently producing 90% of the world's humanoid robots. So one of the things that continued to come out this month was just the continuing tensions and almost Cold War that's building up between the US and China over not just robotics, but also artificial intelligence in general in a number of ways.

Austin Coppock (50:03)

Yeah. I think one of the ways that you can read that show the robot Wushu demonstration in a Cold War context is any display of cutting edge martial strength like is is part of the conversation of an arms race. And certainly there's an arms tech race happening around AI. And so it's like, oh, look, look what our robots can do. Although, and I will say, Chris, I think it would be a kinder, gentler future if the battlefields of the future were just robots doing like fun choreographed wushu routines with non sharpened aluminum broadswords. I think that would be a beautiful future.

Chris Brennan (50:55)

That's like in the 80s music videos and stuff where the two gangs would come up and do a dance off in the streets or something like that.

Austin Coppock (51:04)

Yeah, Sharks versus Jets, robot style.

Chris Brennan (51:08)

Exactly. Well, yeah, but what you just said also, it's a good point that the war of the AI wars of the future, not just being developed in terms of artificial intelligence, but also in terms of robotics. And that's something this eclipse really opened up even more clearly that we'll see as a recurring theme in the coming years. Especially if we're thinking about the long term of Pluto being in aquarius for another 18 years still.

Austin Coppock (51:37)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're slowly getting all of the near future cyberpunk dystopian technologies. I was gonna say nightmare. It's not all nightmare. Some of it's certainly nightmares and its implications. But all that's unpacking. Just as we talked about it unpacking several years ago, Pluto in Aquarius had all this and is showing more and more. Right, it's the AI, but it's also the robotics. But it's also. Yeah, and so on and so on for sure.

Chris Brennan (52:12)

Okay, one last purely AI story, which is there's all sorts of drama surrounding one of the biggest AI companies in the US called Anthropic. Where to just summarize it briefly, there was a revelation that the U.S. government and military may have used Anthropic in the Venezuela military attack that happened in January. And then the company openly questioned the Pentagon about this. And then there started being this back and forth tension and now where it is currently is the Pentagon has issued a strict Friday deadline for Anthropic to either allow unrestricted military access to using its AI, which then would force the company to abandon its ethical guardrails against lethal targeting and domestic surveillance or otherwise. The government military is threatening to blacklist it and to market as a supply chain risk that could jeopardize not just its government contracts, but its ability to operate as a company. So there's high drama surrounding that and possibly in connection with it, possibly not connected. On February 24, there was a time headline that said Anthropic drops its flagship safety pledge, where all of a sudden its responsible scaling policy was officially downgraded this week to be more flexible so that it could be allowed for military use. And some people are viewing this as literally selling the soul of the company moment for what was supposed to be the more ethical or most ethical AI company in the world is how they had build themselves up to this point. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. But that's an important again, seed moment. If we're thinking about this being eclipsed season and eclipses representing a major ending but also a major beginning, we'll see what grows out of that in the long term. All right in AI news, but more Saturn news we expected. I had predicted for a long time, a couple years now, that we would see a peak in AI generated video being perfected around this conjunction. And indeed this month around February 10th through the 12th, there was a new AI generation model released by the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, called Sea Dance 2.0. And we started seeing clips of it come out on Twitter February 10th through the 12th, just before the eclipse. And it was wild. It was full on, not just clips, but they were making full on videos and almost movies of different things. I watched this one on February 16th where somebody made a whole disaster movie sequence in a day and it was also interesting because it was taking in the clips, famous actors and figures, and just incorporating them into these movies. So there was a fight sequence between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. There was other ones that was involving WB or Disney characters or other things like that. And it was just mashing together all these different things of intellectual property from different studios into these clips. So predictably, the movie studios freaked out. And I saw somebody's summary of this on February 15th. It said Bytedance dropped sea dance this week. Within 24 hours. It was generating Hollywood quality Spider Man, Star wars and Stranger Things clips from a two line prompt. No permission, no license, no shame. Disney immediately fired a cease and desist, calling it a virtual smash and grab. The MPA called it a massive scale infringement, SAG called it, said that it disregarded laws, ethics and basic principles of consent. And the writer of the Deadpool movie said it's likely over for us, referring to some Hollywood things in general. So the cat's out of the bag in terms of AI video generation in a way that did accelerate even further this month. And the companies were successful because Sea Dance was actually supposed to launch very close to the conjunction, like on the 22nd or something like that. And it got delayed further because of all these lawsuits from the movie studios that are still being worked out. But it was interesting to see that prediction kind of come to fruition this month, very close to the conjunction.

Austin Coppock (56:33)

Yeah. And you know, I, I think the idea that, that that was a peak moment is probably going to end up looking really good as it ages. Because like, this is a point where none of the, where the legal pushback from all of the companies which produce this material has reached full strength. And it's also a point in time where the, like, the costs for running the running this type of software are like artificially kept away from people. It's artificially cheaper than it actually is. And the, I guess you could also measure the legality in terms of money, but like the legal pressure from copyright holders is also not nearly as present as it will be in the future. And so like looking at a moment where you can do the most or a person could do the most for the least with this kind of technology, it's probably right there on the Saturn Neptune conjunction.

Chris Brennan (57:43)

Yeah, well, and the big thing for me is just that I realized this month is the cat is out of the bag in terms of AI video generation. And while a lot of it is taking place in the big screen servers, people are able to create some of these things locally. And that was one of the things that happened this month with AI, is a lot of it's moving to being able to be run on people's computers locally without the big companies. And while the big movie studios are fighting this now, one of the realizations I had is that in the long term, the companies will probably get on board with it eventually and license the characters and IP for video generation by individual individuals, which would make it possible for individuals to remake entire movies with different characters. Sort of like how people do fan fiction now is what I'm kind of seeing. So it's like if you didn't like, say you didn't like the last season of Game of Thrones, well, here's the alternative final season by YouTube user CatGuy3295 that's widely hailed and let's say even someday wins an Academy Award or something like that. There's some long term implications of some of this stuff on this seed moment of the Saturn Neptune that I think are gonna be very interesting just to project out and see where this goes 36 years from now, by the time of the next Saturn Neptune conjunction, for example, which interestingly is gonna be in an air sign that's gonna be a really fascinating one.

Austin Coppock (59:08)

Interesting. Yeah, no, I agree that this is a powerful seed moment. An X marks the spot. Like both for both for what can and will be created in the future, but then also for the pushback, the legal pushback or regulation of this. Because it's like, it's one thing to not fear something when it's not at full strength, but this seems like a real demonstration of the threat to all existing IP or copyright holders in a way that got the biggest players in that world immediately firing a legal fusillade.

Chris Brennan (59:52)

Yeah, good point. Okay, so moving on. One other major curveball that came out of nowhere, but makes complete sense of something we talked about in another Pluto in Aquarius thing in the past is, remember a few years ago, right after Pluto first moved into Aquarius that month, we started seeing an explosion of stories about UFOs and UAPs and, like, extraterrestrial intelligence discussions. And that happened again this month, where it turned out that the Aquarius eclipse, in the same sign as Pluto, magnified some of those themes about aliens and extraterrestrial intelligence. Where on February 14, Obama went on a podcast and they were doing some quick question lightning round, and he was asked, are aliens real? And Obama responded, saying, they're real, but I haven't seen them. And he went on to say something like, there's Nothing at Area 51, or if there is, it's some other group that's hiding it from me because I didn't see anything. But he said, aliens are real. So all of a sudden, over the next few days, there's headlines all over the place saying that Obama confirms that aliens are real. And on February 16, there was a Guardian headline I wrote down that said, no evidence aliens have made contact, says Obama, after podcast comments cause a frenzy because basically he was forced to later come out and say, what I was trying to say was that mathematically, aliens probably have to exist because of how vast the universe is. But he says, I haven't seen any myself. I don't have any inside knowledge or something like that. So he had to clarify. But then what was funny is then, because Trump saw the headlines, and then Trump got annoyed. So then he issued a directive to the Pentagon saying that they had to disclose any information they had relating to extraterrestrial life. He said, based on tremendous interest shown, this is on February 19, two days after the eclipse. I will be directing the Secretary of War and other relevant departments and agencies to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomenon, and Unidentified flying Objects. And then even a couple days later, NASA had to put out a statement on the 21st. So I don't know if they're actually going to release anything. And I saw an interview with Hegseth where he was like, hedging, and he was like, yeah, it'll take a while to release anything, so we'll see what happens. But it was notable again that there was something happening related to a discussion about extraterrestrial life during an activation of Pluto in Aquarius, which is a theme we already saw at the beginning of this transit. So what it implies then, predictively, is that that's something we're gonna keep seeing as a recurring phenomenon throughout this transformation. 20 year Pluto in Aquarius transit. And the only way that can go probably is upwards or intensifying. And there was an overlooked NASA statement this month that was happening in parallel, saying that they found something on Mars. They published a paper saying that this thing that they found that looked organic in Mars probably didn't come from a comet or something off world, but probably developed their organically. So there's already these discussions about them maybe finding life. And it seems inevitable. Basically, the prediction astrologically at this point is sometime in the next 20 years, the confirmation of extraterrestrial life developing outside of the Earth is probably gonna happen. And what we're seeing are early archetypal previews and echoes of that. That's sort of building up in some way.

Austin Coppock (63:34)

Yeah, absolutely. And we got that in the fall first round of Pluto in Aquarius stuff. And so because a lot of the Pluto in Aquarius topics are very distracting, I think it was easy to forget about that. But aliens in Pluto in Aquarius are absolutely a thing. And I believe we talked about that before that first initial round of disclosures and discussions a couple years ago. I think we talked about that during the first. First ingress discussion that you and I had.

Chris Brennan (64:11)

Yeah, we did. Because part of it was also, like, at the same time, that these discussions about extraterrestrial life are happening of life maybe having existed elsewhere outside of Earth. It's like the humans are also, like, creating a new artificial intelligence or alien sentience that's different from humans on Earth with AI. So there's this parallel mirroring that's happening at the same time. But both of those are connected symbolically through the Pluto in Aquarius transit.

Austin Coppock (64:41)

Yeah, Well, I was gonna use the word alien, but that refers. Yeah, that which is alien, not just in terms of from another world, but an intelligence that's not carbon based and biological, that which is coming from beyond our world, meaning the human world as well as the physical world. And just to renote those dates when Obama said that on podcast, it's the 14th again, first day that Saturn and Neptune are together in Aries, and then the 19th, Trump talking about it. That is like 16 hours away from the one exact Saturn Neptune conjunction. Right. And then February 21st, the day after is the day after the one exact Saturn Neptune conjunction. So, yeah, we've got some pretty tight cleavage to the Saturn Neptune there.

Chris Brennan (65:47)

Yeah, well, and it's interesting because it's like he misspoke if we take it for word. He probably did misspeak just looking at the clip. But then also there's questions about whether it's a thing that's being suppressed or whether information is being hidden. All right, so we'll see more of Pluto in Aquarius, but also in the short term, subsequent Aquarius eclipses. Pay attention to further developments in the extraterrestrial intelligence story on those subsequent eclipses over the next couple years. All right, moving on. Other major eclipse happened. We always anticipate major deaths or downfalls during eclipses. That was one of the predictions we made in the last episode. The day of the eclipse, the night of the eclipse, pretty close to when it exact. Jesse Jackson, the very prominent civil rights activist, died right on the Aquarius eclipse on the 17th. And he was one of the most prominent civil rights activists of the late 20th and early 21st century. Interestingly, there was a Saturn Neptune tie in which is that he ran for president twice in 1984 and 1988. And in the 1988 one, he actually got a lot of votes, the most votes or delegates of anybody prior to Obama in 2008 actually winning the presidency. And that was very close to the last Saturn Neptune conjunction. So it's interesting him having that final. And that was the last time he ran for president because after that race he decided not to run again. Having that connection of that high point in his political career versus passing away very close to the conjunction. And I remember there was this iconic picture of him crying in the crowd. He was in Chicago in the crowd the night Obama won the presidency in 2008 and came out to give a speech to a crowd of supporters in Chicago. And there's this picture of Jesse Jackson with tears streaming down his face. And one of the things I noticed just this month in that astrologically is that Jesse Jackson was born very close to a Saturn Uranus conjunction. In the sky, in his birth chart. And then famously, the night Obama was elected was the night of an exact Saturn Uranus opposition. So that was an interesting recurrence for him in terms of a Saturn Uranus aspect being very important in terms of his history and chronology as well. Yeah.

Austin Coppock (68:04)

And that makes so much sense with Saturn Uranus symbolism and meaning, the breaking through boundaries, establishing new precedents, like an overturning of past limitations, Uranus innovating and moving beyond Saturn, but that in and of itself becoming a new marker or boundary. So, yeah, that Saturn Uranus makes a lot of sense.

Chris Brennan (68:36)

Yeah, exactly. The other major eclipse, one that happened is a couple days after the eclipse, Prince Andrew was arrested. And he was arrested due to some of the things that came out in the Epstein files, although supposedly it was connected to possibly sharing state secrets and not other things that were speculated in the Epstein files. And this was notable happening on an eclipse because it was the first time a royal from the UK has been arrested in centuries, anytime in the modern period. And it was just two days after the eclipse, which recurs or confirms a recurring theme that we've seen for years and I've documented in a couple episodes, which is just that eclipses are always super important turning points for the royal family. And you almost always see them coming up in the news for some notable reason during eclipse season. And this was another instance of that. And a listener wrote in and pointed out to me something I didn't know, which is that in 1917, King George V officially changed the British royal family's name from a German name to the current one, the House of Windsor. And this was during World War I due to rising anti German sentiment. So there's probably some Saturn Neptune connection here besides the eclipses that's relevant as well, in addition to, of course, the Saturn Neptune being the Epstein signature and relating back to his Saturn Neptune conjunction.

Austin Coppock (69:59)

Mm. Yeah, that's really interesting.

Chris Brennan (70:02)

Yeah. All right, moving on. Another major story. On February 23, Mexico's most powerful cartel leader was killed by Mexican security forces. And the two things related to this astrologically I wanted to note are, one, just that his Saturn in his birth chart was at 29 degrees of Pisces. So this is actually a crazy second Saturn return event for him, even though Saturn had just clicked into like 0 degrees of Aries just before that. And the other thing I noticed is that Mexico first broke with Spain. It was part of a wave of Spanish countries that broke away from Spain under the 1810 Saturn Neptune conjunction. And then the Mexican American War Happened happened under the 1846 Saturn Neptune conjunction. And the Mexican constitution was created under the 1917 Saturn Neptune conjunction. So this is one of the countries where it's tied in with a Saturn Neptune signature that goes back probably to Columbus and some of that stuff and certainly to the wave of Spanish speaking countries that broke away from Spain around the 1810 conjunction.

Austin Coppock (71:14)

Yeah, beautiful work, beautiful work finding this Saturn Neptune conjunction.

Chris Brennan (71:20)

Yeah, it's just there like anytime there's a major story, just check the history and see and sometimes stuff comes up. So speaking of those, one other related one of another Saturn Neptune conjunction that's not been in the news a lot, but I think this is gonna become a big story really soon, so I wanna mention it. Which is Cuba, where the US is doing an oil blockade of Cuba. Cuba, where Venezuela was the main oil supplier to the island of Cuba. And when Venezuela was taken over by the U.S. recently, the U.S. cut off oil supplies to Cuba coming from Venezuela. And then the US is also at the same time pressuring Mexico and other countries to not supply Cuba with oil, which is turning it into an energy crisis all of a sudden, where they're having to shut down basic services and different things like that, including airports and things like that. So when I looked into this, something I found that was stunning was that the Cuban Revolution began July 26, 1953, which of course was during the 1953 Saturn Neptune conjunction in Libra. And interestingly, it was also during a Mars Uranus conjunction and a Jupiter Venus conjunction, which is very similar to the US birth chart chart as well as the Venezuela birth chart, which also both had like armed revolutions that resulted in the creation of their current countries.

Austin Coppock (72:42)

And I would also add another Saturn Neptune thing for Cuba and their revolution is we had the Russian Revolution, which was the overthrow of the Tsarist regime for a communist regime, like the first big communist state under the previous Saturn Neptune conjunction. And we had the publication of the Communist Manifesto two cycles before that under the Saturn Neptune conjunction in the 1840s. Right. So that's another sort of thread of history that has tracked very tightly with Saturn Neptune. And we see the Latin American Saturn Neptune line and the Communism Saturn Neptune line intersecting with the revolution in Cuba in the early 50s.

Chris Brennan (73:41)

Right, that's a great point. The Communist portion with the Communist Manifesto coming from that 1800 Saturn Neptune conjunction. Good point. So this is gonna become a big news story here really soon. So pay attention to this in the news because it's a growing humanitarian issue. But it also is probably another instance of the US possibly attempting to do regime change or something else. We'll find out very soon. Okay. And the final news story to round out this news section is the biggest actually news story, and it's the one we talked about a lot, but that we're still, still we're now right on the cusp of at this point, as we're recording this episode Today on Thursday, February 26, 2026, it's 2:00pm here in Denver, Colorado. And there's been this unprecedented military buildup to a war with Iran between the United States and Iran, where the US has been sending all of these military assets, increasingly tons of them, to the Middle east and to Iran over the past few weeks. And there's two carrier strike groups that are there already. There's tons of planes and equipments that have been amassing all month. It's reported to be the largest assembly of American naval power in the region since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. So this is something we talked about a lot because we've been anticipating that this is actually going to happen. And it really looks that that's about to to be the case any day, as soon potentially as tomorrow as Friday. And there were important turning points that happened this month where a really important negotiation took place the day of the eclipse on February 17, but little progress has been made. And the day after the eclipse, or maybe it was the same day after the negotiations, the leader of Iran threatened to sink a US Carrier and talked about how easy it would be. So at this point, war is definitely happening, and that's something we've been anticipating for a while now. I did notice that on February 20, the day of the Saturn Neptune conjunction, which is so important in Iranian history that Reza Pahlavi put out a statement to the Shiite people. And there's a tension I noticed between the religious versus the secular camps involved, both within and out outside of Iran. And that may be one of the central themes that we'll see being a continuing issue between those two that's tied in with the Saturn Neptune conjunction in the history of Iran.

Austin Coppock (76:15)

Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at Iran's chart, which was, again, Iran's about a month younger than me, so I'm very familiar with the chart. And so there's a ton of stuff coming up in March and in April. It might be we need Mars in Pisces, which will be a Mars return for Iran. It might be that we need the eclipse in Virgo. Iran being birthed in modern Iran being birthed in 1979 has the nodes in Virgo and Pisces with malefics on both sides. This Mercury retrograde is going to light up the chart. Almost everything in March lights up Iran's chart. And then the deadly serious Mars Saturn conjunction that comes in April is right on top of the sun in Iran's chart, which is also the ruler of the Ascendant. So from a chart perspective, Iran has nothing but deeply ominous transits for the next two and a half months. In addition to the Saturn Neptune pattern which you mentioned, and the 1979 Mars repetition, every 47 years you get something very close to exactly the same Mars cycle. And as you pointed out and we talked about last month, it sure looks like we're on track. And so we will be getting the Mars return during that year of near perfect Mars repetition, I believe late in March, which if we're looking for martial events like war, would be a good place to look for them or a good place to look for them being supremely obvious rather than at the edge and latent. But any day now like they are now.

Chris Brennan (78:26)

Yeah, there's too many big indications for Iran right now for something big not to happen, which is where we've been for a while now. We've been talking about for a couple of months the Saturn Neptune conjunction being a repetition of the 1953 coup when the US and Britain installed the Shan, got rid of the democratic, democratically elected leader. Or the late 1980s, which is when the supreme leader of Iran, the original one during the revolution, passed away and the current leader came into power at that time. And now the Saturn Neptune conjunction is closing that cycle. So much stuff. The 1979 repetition you mentioned, the eclipses were happening around that time in Aquarius, in Virgo and shifting from Virgo to Pisces. So that's a repetition. Even later this month in March I noticed when we're gonna have a Mars Jupiter trine, which is one of the more positive aspects this month in the astrology of March we'll get into shortly. But that was happening during the Iranian revolution, shortly after the Shah left and when they started setting up the new current government in 1979. So we get a recurrence transit of even something like that where it was a Mars Jupiter trans trine, not anywhere, but it was specifically a Trine with Mars in Pisces and Jupiter in Cancer. So there's so many repetitions and echoes. And right now what it's looking like is this eclipse that's about to take place in Virgo as the center Point. And even this Mars Uranus square, which goes exact tomorrow on Friday, is similar to the Mars Uranus square that occurred during the last attack when the US and Israel attacked Iran in June under a Mars Uranus square as well.

Austin Coppock (80:09)

Yeah. I'll eat my hat if it's a nothing burger by the time we get done with April. As you said, there's just too much. There's so many things and so many of them for the next two months.

Chris Brennan (80:26)

Yeah. So the only question marks is like, it seems like it's about to happen, but then there's a question of what then is the Aries triple conjunction of Mars, Saturn, Neptune, Mercury that happens in April. What happens then? And then the Venus retrograde in Scorpio in October. November should be very crucial as well, because that's going to be a repetition of a Venus retrograde that happened in the lead up to the Iranian revolution that was crucial in accelerating some of the political unrest. So those are open questions in terms of what's coming up in the longer term this year. But we'll see what happens in the next few days. And the world is waiting right now to see how bad it is essentially in terms of what is about to transpire.

Austin Coppock (81:17)

Yeah.

Chris Brennan (81:19)

All right, my friend, that's the news section. I apologize for going on longer than normal, but we had a lot of really momentous stuff to cover. And it always feels important to document some of this stuff as it's happening because that's really important for future research, especially since a lot of this stuff will continue to become relevant and echo in the future in different ways.

Austin Coppock (81:40)

Yeah. And especially because a lot of what will probably end up looking like really important precedents or seed moments occurred this month. And, and it also because so many things are, how should we say, unleashed or just about to be unleashed, but not. But not finished.

Chris Brennan (82:01)

Right.

Austin Coppock (82:01)

The new section would have been shorter if we could just report outcomes, but everything, everything, almost everything, we looked at as so in process. And yeah, 16 exploding in slow motion out into the rest of the year and. Or years. And so I agree that it was a good call to take a little extra time to map what things look like right now because that Saturn Neptune moment won't happen again for 36 years. Right. It'll stay close, and it was close two months ago, but this was the only exact conjunction that we're gonna get. I think you demonstrated quite amply that a number of things that we might not have initially connected with Saturn, Neptune, in fact, have a history that dates exhaustively and perfectly back in time with the Saturn Neptune conjunctions, even as far as Christopher Columbus, which was a surprise to me.

Chris Brennan (83:06)

Yeah. And the history echoes back in time, and then it will also echo forwards so that many of the things we're talking about in this episode, people will look back and realize how significant they were in retrospect, even more so than we could even realize today.

Austin Coppock (83:22)

Yeah.

Chris Brennan (83:23)

All right, let's take a little break. If you're really looking to take your studies of astrology to the next level, then consider signing up for my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There's over 100 hours of video lectures, plus live webinars and Q and A sessions each month. And at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me. Find out More information@theastrologyschool.com All right, let's transition into talking about the forecast for March and doing a deep dive into the astrology of the next four weeks. So let me put the planetary alignments calendar back up just to orient where we're at. This is the astrology of what we're gonna be talking about. And as we said, there's a bunch of astrology that we are still coming off of that's still in effect from late February that bleeds over into early March. That's really relevant. So here's the planetary movements calendar that shows where the planets start at the beginning of the month and how far they get through the different signs during the course of the month. We are still in the midst of eclipse season. And of course, we have the second eclipse coming in quick on March 3rd, but we're already well into that window because the ramp up to that began by the 24th or so into the Virgo eclipse. So it's just increasing exponentially on that curve by late February as we head into March. In terms of the first eclipse, we also are coming off of, I mean, today, as we're recording this, on Thursday the 26th, the Mars Uranus square, which is a really sometimes unexpectedly violent and disruptive aspect, as we've seen several times over the past few years. That aspect goes exact on February 27, which is a Friday. And that's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm gonna attempt to release this podcast episode tomorrow, and God willing, we released it before the major event takes place. In terms of geopolitical news that we're expecting to happen, but we'll see if we get it out in time. But that aspect goes exact on the 27th, but then it's still within 3 degrees of that square all the way through March 3rd. So it's really gonna be bleeding into early March and bleeding into that second eclipse that takes place on the third. And you noted that it's gonna get reactivated by the Moon at different points, right? Yeah.

Austin Coppock (85:50)

On March 1, the moon exactly opposes Mars and squares Uranus while they're still very tight and Mars is still in Aquarius. So yeah, T square on the first. So first day of the month we get an emphasis on the Mars square. Uranus.

Chris Brennan (86:12)

Yeah. And as I noted in the last section, at the end of the last section, the 12 day war with Iran in June took place under a Mars Uranus square. So that's one of the things that makes this current square look very ominous for this weekend and potentially the US beginning the war with Iran. Then we're also in the middle of this Mercury retrograde in Pisces that literally just started on February 25th when Mercury stationed retrograde and it's going to be retrograde for three weeks all the way until March 20th. So we're opening the month with that context of revisions. Looking back into the past, technical snafus, miscommunications, delays, et cetera. We've got the Saturn Neptune conjunction which just went exact on February 20th. So that's still extremely, extremely close. And throughout this month we're gonna start getting inner planets that are gonna start coming through Aries and reactivating that conjunction in different ways. First starting with Venus conjoining Neptune and Saturn on March 7th and 8th and then later with the sun moving into Aries and conjoining Neptune on March 2022 and then Saturn on March 25. And a couple of positive aspects this month I did want to mention is there's some nice trines with Jupiter that take place a couple of times that may be little silver linings. One Mercury trine Jupiter, while Mercury's retrograde on March 8. And then later a much more. I like this somewhat auspicious Mars Jupiter trine that's taking place on March 21 between Mars and Pisces, trining Jupiter in Cancer with reception. And that's also gonna be the day of our most auspicious electional chart of the month, which we'll talk about later. And then finally, yeah, this is the eclipse series that this Virgo Pisces eclipse season is part of. Where the last time we had a lunar eclipse, we had an eclipse was in Virgo in That solar eclipse that occurred in September. And so this is the other side of that with this lunar eclipse now taking place in March in Virgo. So lots of stuff going on that's carried over from February as well as some new stuff as we'll see.

Austin Coppock (88:28)

Yeah, I don't expect there to be much of a break from the second half of February's history. Historical configurations.

Chris Brennan (88:39)

Yeah, especially in the first half of the month, the intensity is just really super high. In the second half of the month there's some little reprieves like for example, Jupiter stations directing cancer mid month Mercury stations direct finally and ends its retrograde period in Pisces. Then you get that nice Mars Jupiter trine on the 21st. So it's like there's some forward movement and things taking a turn later in the month. But the first week especially, and even like two weeks of the month are very intense.

Austin Coppock (89:12)

Yeah, I would say the second week is. Yeah, yeah. Quibble here, quibble there. Generally agree completely.

Chris Brennan (89:22)

All right, so let's see where to start? Let me put up the chart for the first day of the month just to orient where we are. There's our electional chart for today where we're recording this with cancer rising, of course. So let's move it forward to March 1st. All right, so for those watching the video version, this is the chart for March 1st. We see Mars is like right there at 29 degrees of Aquarius. So it's just coming off of that square with Uranus, which is often so volatile and has to do with unexpected fights, unexpected violence, or sometimes unexpected military actions taking place under those squares. Other Mars Uranus alignments in the past have also been like assassinations or assassination attempts and other things like that. So that's still very potent and very prominent. Even though Mars switches signs and moves into Pisces already on March 2, there's still a little bit of carryover. Cause it doesn't even get outside of the three degree range until March 3rd or 4th, basically.

Austin Coppock (90:32)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we're issued into that and Mars's movement into Pisces, it's not a great step forward for peace. Mars movement to Pisces happens the day before the eclipse in Virgo. And so Mars gets to participate in this eclipse. And so as you probably noticed, Chris, the eclipse of course is perfect when the Moon is opposite the Sun. But as soon as the Moon enters Virgo, it first makes an opposition to Mars newly in Pisces. And then gains goes to what should be maximum fullness, but is instead maximum Blood soak with the lunar eclipse. And so Mars gets to be a big part of this. This made me think about, I believe the last time or certainly one important instance. It may not have been the last time, but an important instance when there was a lunar eclipse opposite, opposite Mars. It was the lunar eclipse in Taurus, which was opposite Mars in Scorpio, which began Israel's ground invasion of the Palestinian territory several years ago. And I remember thinking what an ominous, I guess that would have been. It was fall of 2023. And I remember what an ominous looking eclipse that was on paper. And what an ominous looking eclipse or what an ominous set of events have cascaded from the action taken at that time. Yeah, I don't like lunar eclipses opposite Mars, Chris.

Chris Brennan (92:42)

Yeah, well, even more recently, actually, two things. One you said like blood soaked and it reminded me this is actually a total lunar eclipse, so that the moon is gonna appear like blood red. And one of the things that's striking about it is it's gonna be visible from North America, from the United States. The path is kind of like especially the western United States and also parts of eastern Asia and like China and across the Pacific, basically for greatest visibility. But a more recent example was just a year ago, the first time the Trump administration did a major military action. It was like the day, I believe, of the Virgo eclipse that took place a year ago. And that was when the US started bombing the Houthis in Yemen, I think that very day of that eclipse.

Austin Coppock (93:32)

And was Mars configured to that? Or you're just looking at eclipses and their coincidence with bloody action?

Chris Brennan (93:43)

Yeah, well, just eclipses and coinciding with military action as well as the buildup to things. Cause that's one of the things you and I have seen a lot over the past few years, is that these eclipses, sometimes an event will happen, especially a military event that'll look like a discrete event that's isolated on its own. But then you realize that they're all actually cascading together and they're all building up to something. And that was actually originally the thing that allowed you and I to predict last year that the US would launch the first military action against Iran, was we could see that a series of the eclipses over a two year period every six months kept being proxies of Iran getting attacked and knocked out by Israel or by the US and that it was all building up to something larger, which we realized is at one point, I believe in the year ahead forecast for 2025, that it was going to be Iran, which turned out to be the case. But it's important then, remembering what happened under the last eclipse under the same circumstances. And a year ago, that was the US and the Trump administration launching its first major military action. And that being an important seed moment.

Austin Coppock (94:54)

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good instance to remember. So, yeah, Mars completes that square with Uranus, then moves into a new sign right into the crosshairs of the eclipse. Right. And that Mars ingress is about 24 hours before the eclipse, and then really just folds into it. And so certainly the total eclipse on the third is our first really big obvious just in March event that we have for the month. What else do we want to say about the eclipse? So it's visible, as you said, western United States, I believe, portions of eastern Asia as well, Is that correct?

Chris Brennan (95:40)

Yeah, parts of East Asia, the Pacific, stuff like that.

Austin Coppock (95:43)

It's sort of a ring of fire area.

Chris Brennan (95:48)

Yeah. And unlike the Aquarius eclipse, which is the first of a new series that's gonna bounce back and forth between Aquarius and Leo over the next few years, this is like halfway through a series of eclipses in Pisces in Virgo that began in September of 2024 and March of 2025. So to try to take it outside of a mundane context and personalize it for each of us, the eclipses have been taking place in the Virgo Pisces axis for the past couple of years now. And already opening up these windows of major endings and major beginnings in the two houses that coincide with Virgo and Pisces in your chart, especially the two whole sign houses, this eclipse will mark the next step in that process of unfolding that's already been going on for a couple of years now. And that probably relates back to some events that happened the most recently in September, which is when we had the last eclipse in Virgo, which was that. That solar eclipse on September 21 in Virgo that followed the lunar eclipse in Pisces on September 7th. So each individual can kind of think of and think back to those eclipses and what's been activated in that area of the life, and to see this as the next step in the unfoldment of that process.

Austin Coppock (97:07)

Yeah. And in most cases, this would be the last lunar eclipse in Virgo, but we have another one a year from now. And so instead of this being the conclusion for the Virgo side of things, for this series, we've got one more waiting not quite a year from now. And that one, too, will be tightly configured with Mars that instead of oppose the next one in a year will be rather closely conjoined Mars. So this one and next year's have not only being in Virgo, but being tightly configured to Mars in common.

Chris Brennan (97:55)

Oh yeah, that one's crazy because that one is the Mars retrograde. That's like squaring Uranus and then the eclipse happens on top of it, right?

Austin Coppock (98:03)

Yeah, right. And so we'll have red Mars at maximum, at maximum visibility and brightness with a blood moon here we have them opposed. And so while the moon is overhead, Mars will be beneath the earth. But the two talking, the two configured. And so one interpretation is this might be the mellower older brother of the one that we get next year because the next one will be more martial that last one in the series.

Chris Brennan (98:39)

Yeah, absolutely. And one thing about this one I'm curious about is the eclipse goes exact around 1213 degrees of Virgo. And it's heavily colored by Mars having just moved into Pisces where it's opposing the eclipse by sign, the moon by sign. But the moon's next aspect after it goes exact at 1213 Virgo is that it then applies with reception to Jupiter at 15 degrees of cancer. So it's like there's some offsetting factor that's attempting to make this eclipse better than it might be otherwise through a somewhat weak aspect of a sextile. But then the eclipse is happening in Virgo. So the ruler of the eclipse is Mercury, which is retrograde, has just stationed retrograde and is retrograde up there at 20° of Pisces. And. And after the moon completes the sextile with Jupiter, it then applies to that opposition with Mercury. So there's this heavily Mercury retrograde element to this eclipse in Virgo.

Austin Coppock (99:37)

Yeah, I think that's right. And Mercury's kind of. I kind of feel like Mercury's the secret. I don't know. Key. There's no understanding March without understanding what's happening with Mercury. And it's important to note that just as the month began, with Mars fresh off this square to Uranus, Mercury not only begins retrograde, but at the very beginning of the month and at the very end of February. Sure, Mercury is stationed retrograde as it is right now, as we're speaking, but it's with Venus. And so it's not just with Venus, it's with a very happy Venus. It's Venus coming off of a trine with Jupiter. It's Venus in exaltation. It's an exalted benefic that's in the place of another Exalted benefic. And so I've certainly been wondering what seems okay right now because that Mercury retrograde is so happily conjoined and excellent benefic that we'll obviously be not okay very soon. Right. Because. Because as soon as we get once we're into the eclipse land, Mercury has made that conjunction with Venus and Venus is headed out of Pisces and Venus will be headed out of Pisces right into Saturn Neptune by the end of the first week of March. Whereas that Mercury will then move into conjunction with the sun and then spend a lot of time with Mars and the head of the dragon post eclipse. And there's a whole lot of Mercury north node and Mars and that's a combination we're gonna have to live with that is not particularly auspicious for most people. And again, the whole time we're getting these potentially benefic interfering or positive intercessions from Jupiter and Cancer as it's stationing direct. And there's certainly a silver lining or preventing the worst case that's going to come in there. And hopefully on an individual level for myself and you and everybody listening, that is maximized. But boy, there's some rough configurations and we can't describe them without Mercury once it's no longer sort of spoiled with goodness by Venus as it is now and as it is as the month opens.

Chris Brennan (102:21)

Yeah, I was trying to think about that. Of what does a Mercury retrograde conjunct Venus at the beginning look like that ends with Mercury retrograde stationing direct conjunct Mars? And it's like one of the images is a pleasant jaunt down memory lane that opens up and results in some severing and separation and discord in order to begin moving forward again. Because Mercury retrogrades always have that backwards looking component of going back and revisiting the past, of people from your past coming back into the present. And the first part of that may be pleasant at first with the initial conjunction being with Venus and feels loving or reconciling or unifying, but then there's something about the outcome of that eventually that reveals something because then Mercury plunges under the beams of the sun and goes through that process of introspection and looking inwards. And then eventually on the other side of that it meets up with Mars and there's some sort of conflict that arises or some sort of disagreement or verbal combat that takes place that is required towards the end of that in order to turn things around and start moving forward again. So it's gonna be Interesting seeing how that sequence unfolds for different people in terms of their personal lives and also probably especially in terms of what house that's taking place in. In each of our birth charts.

Austin Coppock (103:51)

Mm. Yeah. Like the fact that we have the retrograde station by a benefic by Venus and then the direct station with Mars. Right. It's like, what do we need to turn away from what is not accurate or needs to be rethought is described by the retrograde station. Be like, maybe things aren't so maybe we can't all just get along. And then the direct station gives you the like, okay, where can we move forward from? What is the perspective? What are the facts? What is the information we need to actually move forward forward from here. And that's that much harsher place where it's not only trying to move forward not only from a position of being conjoined Mars, but also being right on the eclipse point, right on Rahu or the Dragon's head, which is always relevant, but especially this month because tis the season for shadows to cover the sun and the moon.

Chris Brennan (104:56)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And let's see. That reminded me we meant to have a proviso about Mercury retrograde, that we're literally recording this forecast on a Mercury retrograde station. So we're gonna try to do our best to be accurate and do a good job in our predictions and everything else, but we're kind of curious how the Mercury retrogradey ness of this isn't gonna impact things, and we're gonna try to navigate that the best we can.

Austin Coppock (105:27)

Yeah. And as a testament to Mercury station retrograde in the sign of its fall, we were gonna talk about this earlier as more of a framing for our discussion, but we just remembered. Right. But it's like, what can't we see now? Or what do we accidentally not talk about that we're going to kick ourselves for not trying to be more precise about? But there's no waiting till March 5th to record this podcast, so we're trying to work with it.

Chris Brennan (106:03)

Yeah. And one of the things, I think for some people, the Mercury retrograde's revisiting the past because of the way it ties in with the eclipse being so significant at that time, it may result in much bigger revelations than a normal Mercury retrograde might. And that process of going back or looking back in the past or revising things may end up launching a larger series of great endings where suddenly there's a realization that something has to come to an end, but also as a result of that Process of starting greater beginnings that are much more momentous than they might be otherwise under other retrogrades.

Austin Coppock (106:43)

Yeah, there's so much framing and depending on this Mercury retrograde that it gets that additional depth and importance, which means that decisions made and frameworks rethought will probably have greater relevance going forward than your standard every four months. Mercury retrograde. And I would also just point out, on a simple level, this is about as technically debilitated as Mercury can be. For most of the month, we have Mercury retrograde in the sign of its fall combust co present or conjoined an eclipse point ruling the eclipse end with a malefic Mars. It is like a litany of debilities. And so in terms of Mercury retrograde making Mercury things hard, I didn't get that email or I bought this expensive thing and it got delivered to somewhere I don't live. As well as the miscommunications, the travel plans getting canceled, et cetera, et cetera, I would consider this one of the severe Mercury retrograde where it's not just the retrogradation, but retrogradation is a focus of other impediments to Mercury's excellence. So I would consider storm warning for all mercurial things.

Chris Brennan (108:15)

Yeah, that's a great point. And so some of the things that are set up as problems or that initiate a period of looking back or revising things that starts in late February, you won't start to see a turn for the better with some of those things until around March 7, which is when Mercury conjoins the sun halfway through the Mercury retrograde cycle. And usually things don't start getting completely better at that point. But you can start to see that there could be some end in sight or that you start to see the path forward in terms of that process, which then eventually starts to wrap up and starts to head to some better sense of moving Forward again around March 20th when Mercury stations direct.

Austin Coppock (109:00)

Yeah, and again moving forward, obtaining enough certainty to know a path. But that point of turning forward is close to is right with Mars and the north node. And so it's probably not going to look like an easy way forward. Right. It may not be delightful news. It may be the news that you need to proceed with some level of certainty. But it's not an easy or fun way forward after the retrograde.

Chris Brennan (109:34)

Yeah, absolutely. So that's all important when it comes to the retrograde. And I also meant to say that eclipse season is gonna continue for at least seven or eight days after the lunar eclipse. So the lunar eclipse is on March, March 3rd. But we're still gonna be in the most intense window, at least through the 10th and 11th, I would say, until the next quarter square that the moon makes to the sun following the eclipse. And one of the things that we said last month but bears repeating because always if we don't say it, if we don't repeat it, then people think we didn't predict it. But during eclipse is one of the core things that we've seen that we already saw in the Aquarius eclipse. Eclipse is sometimes the downfall of prominent people, like people who are at a high point visibly in society suffering some sort of downfall. Or in some instances, the most extreme forms of that is like prominent people dying or passing away and reaching the end of their life. As we saw with Jesse Jackson, for example, on the Aquarius eclipse, with the death scenario, or as we saw with Prince Andrew, for example, on the Aquarius eclipse. Eclipse suffering a downfall, Being the first royal arrested in like 500 years just after that eclipse. So we'll probably continue to see major themes of that of like notable deaths and downfalls taking place around the time of this eclipse during this eclipse season window of seven days before and seven days after the eclipse.

Austin Coppock (111:02)

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for repeating that because it does bear repeating. And I will add, what I very often add if we're repeating things that are worth saying is that, boy, are the game of thrones shows a good instance for thinking about the rise and fall from rise to and fall from power that we see throughout history with eclipses and the draconic symbolism. And of course, the season finale of the recent, smaller scale Game of thrones universe show, night of the Seven Kingdoms, premiered basically 30 hours before that solar eclipse. And that show, of course, I'm gonna avoid spoilers, but there are characters who literally have dragons on their armor. And there were sudden and surprising rises and falls and deaths and such. And so that universe continues to be best possible example of the way that the nodal dragon brings rise and fall of people into and out of power.

Chris Brennan (112:21)

Yeah, that was a good show. I liked that. All right. So yeah, we'll be seeing some of those classic things. We'll also see, as always, as we said last month, previously obscure people rising into positions of prominence and coming out of nowhere and suddenly becoming in the headlines or household names all of a sudden is another common thing. But let's go back to looking at the chart because there's also some nice little trines that get mixed in. And I don't think these are going to offset things majorly.

Austin Coppock (112:51)

But.

Chris Brennan (112:52)

But it's at least worth mentioning them as we move on from the eclipse, which is like we get the eclipse on the 3rd and then the first trine is like the sun hits about 15 degrees of Pisces on March 5th and trines Jupiter at 15 degrees of cancer. I know somebody who's weirdly lucky. Solar return happens to be that sun Jupiter Trine this year. Do you know who that person is?

Austin Coppock (113:22)

Oh, it's me. But here's the unluck. I'm moving into a Mercury ruled year, which is probably the worst planet on the menu. If I were moving into a Jupiter year, a solar year, even a Mars year or Venus year. But of course I'm moving into a Mercury year, so I'm tracked with

Chris Brennan (113:43)

poor

Austin Coppock (113:44)

Mercury year who's screaming and on fire and drowning all at the same time.

Chris Brennan (113:51)

All right, well, but everything else looks great.

Austin Coppock (113:53)

It looks like I will somehow be incinerated by a combustion while drowning in the great waters of Pisces in an otherwise very auspicious situation based on the Soul return chart.

Chris Brennan (114:08)

Yeah, well, I have a tradition as an astrologer of anytime one of my close friends has a birthday of saying something positive about their solar return chart and pointing out the good part. Even if you look at it and you see something that's like, oh, that's not great, but I want to say that Sun Jupiter trine looks very, very nice, very auspicious. And even the Mercury, which is retrograde at that point, is applying to the trine of Jupiter just three degrees away. So I think you got some good silver linings going there, buddy. And I think it's going to be a good year.

Austin Coppock (114:38)

I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah, and silver linings, I think Jupiter's going to be doing a lot of, like you said, silver linings for an otherwise difficult situation or in addition, preventing the worst case from happening. Right? Like, oh, that went badly, but then, you know, a little, little helping hand prevented it from going as badly as it could. I think Jupiter's gonna step in not to steer the entire thing where like, nope, it's great. But instead, like being able to interpose a gracious hand to prevent greater harm from happening than otherwise would or greater error. And again, I'll take it.

Chris Brennan (115:24)

Yeah, when I think of Mercury retrograde and Pisces retrograding back to Trine, Jupiter is just you getting that decans book done, buddy. You got to get that done. And that's what's happening this year. I can see it. And it's that Mercury ruled year retrograde, trining Jupiter and you revising that book, finishing the revision and getting it out

Austin Coppock (115:42)

for the world to enjoy, that is absolutely what's happening. And while all this is taking place. And so I want to bring up a question I have about this miserable Mercury. So it's something I've been thinking about. It's very common in Vedic astrology to consider the retrogradation of a planet in its fall as a partial mitigation of its wretched and fallen state. I will paraphrase that as it's so bad, it's good. And I've been pretty skeptical of this. I'm very skeptical of this natally. But as we're getting closer to this and now that Mercury is actually retrograde in the sky in Pisces, I found myself making. Making plans that are, how should we say, so clear and simple that this Mercury retrograde is going to have a really hard time sabotaging them. And I'm wondering if that's part of that. When a planet is in such wretched condition, There's a corresponding sort of meeting that by being like, okay, I'm going to do something that's so simple that it's invulnerable, it's so bad that I'm not going to take any risks. And so I'm just wondering about that. And I'm interested in getting to watch whether I see that dynamic happening or not. There's reversal like this partial reversal of a fault.

Chris Brennan (117:25)

Yeah, for sure. I think there's gonna be some good stuff with that. Reception is great. And some positive walks down memory lane or revisions like with you writing the book.

Austin Coppock (117:35)

But then there's also certainly revisiting the past.

Chris Brennan (117:39)

Yeah, but then there's also gonna be some plans that go awry is what this Mercury retrograde is speaking to with me of it going retrograde and then going back into Mars. And just. It makes me think of that Mike Tyson quote of especially in terms of geopolitical events are about to happen. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And yeah, sometimes with the Mercury retrograde, we have plans, we think things out, we think things are going to go a certain way. But then with the Mercury retrograde, it does that loop. And plans do not go exactly according to how we expected, but we end up having to go another route out and find an alternative way to our destination that involves a little bit of backtracking before we can get to our intended outcome.

Austin Coppock (118:25)

Yeah, another version of that Is no plan survives first contact with the enemy. But yeah, I think we're gonna see an awful lot of that. And of course the north nodes co presence with Mercury and Mars is an additional testimony to that. Because the nodes, in addition to everything else, they obscure vision. That's why we bother to calculate them. That's what an eclipse is. The thing that is supposed to be the brightest point in the sky looks weird. Why is the sun half visible in the middle of the day? Why is the moon on the brightest night somehow half gone or turned blood red? Like the nodes make things, it makes it hard to see your way through the terrain. Right. And so both of them have the signification of potential confusion because of this.

Chris Brennan (119:25)

Definitely. And amplifying that is our other major transit that starts happening this month over and over again, which is like inner planets starting to activate the Saturn Neptune conjunction first, starting with Venus on March 7th and 8th, when Venus moves into Aries and conjoins those two planets back to back. And so we have the Saturn Neptune conjunction, which itself has that reality distortion field. Has been my keyword. That's been one of the more accurate keywords of that. And then you bring Venus into it, which brings this relational and aesthetic component to that in terms of activating that conjunction.

Austin Coppock (120:07)

Yeah, right. So one experience that a lot of people have is what is going on with my relationships? Am I trapped? Saturn is this wonderland Neptune, what is this unknowable and ill defined situation and how do I feel about it? And likely not having an immediate and clear answer.

Chris Brennan (120:36)

Yeah. Because Venus, Saturn normally is like a cooling of relationships. Like something gets cold or there's distance or something putting up boundaries. But then with Saturn, Neptune it's tough because with Saturn and Neptune boundaries get blurred and it's not clear what the boundary is. It's not clear. Things are unclearly defined in terms of are we in a relationship, are we not in a relationship? And the ambiguity surrounding that itself can cause some distance or some cooling off that can be really exacerbated at this time, I think is one of the things that'll happen around. I can see the sixth Venus hits Neptune and you get the relational ambiguity and then the sequences. Then the next day Venus conjoins Saturn and you get the cooling off or the dish distance.

Austin Coppock (121:27)

Yeah. And I'm so glad you brought up the fact that they're no longer in the same degree. And unlike the previous three years of co presence, every planet that conjoins them is going to do Neptune and then Saturn. Whereas for the last several Years, the transit has always been the planet hits Saturn, feel the boundaries, feel the cold shoulder, and then it hits Neptune. It's like, well, maybe none of that was real. Whereas now that we are post conjunction, it's going to be the boundaryless, perhaps fictional state of being conjoined Neptune. And then the Saturn will hit. And that's going to be the sequence for the next two and a half or two years and two months.

Chris Brennan (122:20)

Yeah, that's a great point. And one of the things that's nice is as soon as Venus clears Saturn on March 8, then by that point Mercury retrogrades back to about 15 degrees of Pisces and completes that trine with Jupiter. So there's something about the process of looking back and revising agreements or revising relationships that has some sort of positive day of communication and positive looking back and reconnecting with people at that time as Venus starts to clear the ambiguity of Saturn and Neptune at that point. So that could be good on an individual level. Okay, so moving forward after that, it looks like by the 10th and 11th we see the Moon get into Sagittarius and square the sun. And this is the final days of the most intense range of the eclipse season that we usually see will end after this point, once you start getting into the 12th and forward. So some of the intensity of just like seeing major events happening in the news, seeing major beginnings and endings in news stories, but also in people's personal lives will start to taper off a little bit after this point, aside from just whatever residuals are still going on from what was started during the eclipse season itself. But typically we do see it calming down a little bit after this point.

Austin Coppock (123:44)

Yeah, and I think that week after the last eclipse is generally a good guideline. I think with Mars exactly conjoined the north node and Mercury very close to it and coming back, that the shadow stank of the eclipse is going to linger longer than normally.

Chris Brennan (124:06)

Yeah, that's probably true. Especially now that once we get into this range where Mercury's at like 11 Pisces, it starts getting within the intense 3 degree range, applying to Mars with a retrograde conjunction. So we start building up to that aspect, which is not pleasant. It's our other sort of lingering unpleasant aspect. Because something I struggled with in putting together this forecast and researching it is on the 11th the same day. It's kind of like our final day of the intensity of eclipse season. Jupiter stations direct at 15 degrees of cancer, which is super important and super positive in many ways, especially for those of us that have been experiencing this Jupiter transit through cancer since last June, which has been cleaning up some of the mess that the Mars retrograde in cancer made earlier that year. Jupiter's been trying to clean up that area, but it's been a little bit smaller, stifled and sidetracked over the course of the past several months since it's been retrograde in cancer. But now it's starting to move forward again and we're gonna see forward movement in that area where Jupiter is attempting to clean things up. And that's one really positive thing this month that represents some sort of not just forward movement, but also resolution of positive and affirming and protective things in the cancer sectors of, of all of our charts. And it's interesting that that forward movement starts around March 11, just as the eclipse season is winding down.

Austin Coppock (125:38)

Yeah. And it's such an unambiguously good moment for Jupiter. And Jupiter ruled things, as you said. The sector of the chart which Cancer overlaps with that is by itself fantastic. And there's nothing else that really significantly intrudes upon it. Right. There's all this other stuff going on that Jupiter's actually trying to positively intercede with. But yeah, for Jupiter it's a fantastic moment.

Chris Brennan (126:17)

Yeah. So I'm interested in how that might offset some of the more chaotic things that we're coming off of in the first week of March, especially. Especially. And as we're starting to head out of eclipse season, if there isn't some positive resolution, at least for individuals in that area of their life, that becomes apparent. We do unfortunately though, get the next major aspect that happens is this Mercury Mars conjunction that takes place around the 14th and 15th of March, around 9 and 10 degrees of Pisces, when the we have technical snafus, we have verbal altercations, we have harsh words and swearing and just really combative energy that kind of culminates at this time during this two day timeframe.

Austin Coppock (127:09)

Yeah. And with the north node there too, there's a lot of angry and confused. Right. And anger is not great and confusion is not great. But angry and confused is a pretty toxic combo because the people can be confused about where the hostility is coming from or who did them wrong. And you know, it's, it's never good things, good thing when things come to blows, Whether that's verbal, emotional or physical violence at whatever scale. But all the more tragic when force is directed towards those who are not responsible, which doesn't even address whatever the source of the conflict is. And that's an issue with the Mercury Retrograde with Mars, as well as the confusing and occulting or occluding eclipse point there. So we want to make real sure, even if, like, I prefer not to get angry or act in anger, but if you have to get angry, then make sure you're pointed in the right direction. Because the potential for targeting the wrong people is very high here.

Chris Brennan (128:29)

Right. Like thinking you've been slighted by somebody and saying something or doing something harsh in retaliation, but then it turning out that somebody else actually did the thing and you've targeted or retaliated against the wrong person.

Austin Coppock (128:43)

Right. And created a whole new set of conflicts or hostilities.

Chris Brennan (128:49)

Absolutely. Yeah. All right. So after that date, it's like Mercury starts to slow down, getting ready to station. But then we get our second lunation of the month, which is this new moon that takes place in late pisces on the 18th. And what's interesting about this is it takes place the same day that Venus gets to 15 degrees of Aries and it squares Jupiter at 15 degrees of Cancer. So by this point, this is the first lunation that's not an eclipse. So we've fully, fully moved out of eclipse season, which normally starts to, like I said, calm down about a week after the eclipse. But certainly by the time we get to this new moon, then we're fully, fully out of eclipse season for sure. And it sets a new foundation for the next month, from mid March until mid April. Yeah.

Austin Coppock (129:46)

And it's interesting. This is one of those cases where even though the sun and moon are coming together in the same sign as the eclipse point, the north node, in this case, they're far enough away from it. And so this reestablishes some normalcy in Pisces, where most of the lunations for the last while have been eclipses. But this is both uneclipsed and at least configured by whole sign to Jupiter, which just stationed direct and it's in Jupiter's sign. And so there's that Jupiter trying to keep things from being worst case or pointing out silver linings or put things back together. That sort of medic role that Jupiter I think will be playing this month is further emphasized by being the ruler of this lunation. This is trying to put things back together or re establish coherence here in Jupiter's sign of Pisces.

Chris Brennan (130:52)

Yeah, I like that. It looks like the closest aspect is the sun and moon conjoin and they're sextiling Uranus at 28 degrees of Taurus. So there's some chance for some lightly spontaneous Resolutions to things or opening up new paths to move forward that are innovative and unexpected and that you didn't sort of foresee, but provide a lightly exciting opportunity to do something new and different.

Austin Coppock (131:21)

Yeah. Like seeing a way of doing something that's a little bit off the beaten path that opens up new possibilities or a way to solve a problem or work around something. I do like a sextile to Uranus. Uranus is too much with most of the strong aspects, but the sextile with Uranus provides a nice level of zing. It's like if you ever touch a live wire and it's not enough to shock you, but just give you a little charge.

Chris Brennan (131:52)

Right.

Austin Coppock (131:53)

You're like, that wasn't so bad. It's kind of fun.

Chris Brennan (131:55)

Yeah. Zesty. Zesty.

Austin Coppock (131:58)

Yeah.

Chris Brennan (132:00)

So that new Moon is also very close though, to the Saturn Neptune conjunction. And right after that, the sun moves into Aries and we get that conjunction with the sun hitting Neptune and then a few days later, Saturn. At the same time, Mercury is finally stationing direct at 8 degree of Pisces. So we're seeing a resolution to the delays and technical stuff, snafus and miscommunications that have been going on for three weeks up to that point. But that's kind of a contrasting energy where on the one hand you get the communication issues being clarified or starting to be clarified with Mercury, but at the same time, the sun hitting Neptune and Saturn is amplifying the reality distortion field again and somehow putting the spotlight or bringing a central figure, like let's say, a leadership figure into focus within the context of the Saturn Neptune things and either lack of clarity or lack of truthfulness that we sometimes associate with that combination.

Austin Coppock (133:02)

Yeah, I think the clarity that Mercury direct stations often bring will be late in arriving this year.

Chris Brennan (133:12)

Right.

Austin Coppock (133:12)

Because as you said, the sun goes right into Neptune Saturn and it's Mercury stationing direct on the eclipse point. Exactly. Again, Rahu, the north node, the dragon's head is a point of occlusion or difficulty in seeing clearly. And Mercury is stationing direct, of course, in Pisces, which is a sign where it has great difficulty. And so it is just turning back towards certainty and signaling that a path forward can be found and followed, but under multiple difficult circumstances.

Chris Brennan (133:59)

Yeah, One of the things that's nice, that's happening at this time on March 21st is the Mars Jupiter Trine goes. Exactly. And this is a positive looking trine to me because there's reception between the two. It's not just a trine, which is a favorable aspect between the two. But Mars is in Jupiter's sign, so it creates even more of a close and more positive bond between the two planets. And I was trying to do research of Mars, Jupiter, Trines over the years, and I was finding some interesting ones because Mars and Jupiter have those themes of war and peace. And so, for example, in the year 2000, I found one where President Clinton became the first president to visit Vietnam as a country after the Vietnam War. And so there was an interesting moment of that post war period of peace and reconciliation taking place between the two countries with the leader visiting then. Other instances that I found found that are more closely tied into the current cycle was back in 2001, in December, the shoe bomber, Richard Reed was on an airplane and he attempted to detonate a bomb that was in his shoe. But other passengers saw that he was doing this and they grabbed him and subdued him and stopped him from blowing up this airplane that had all these people on it. So it was a really interesting instance where it was like something bad almost happened, but then it was stopped and the day was kind of like saved by people catching the bad thing before it actually took place.

Austin Coppock (135:38)

Can we just pause for the fact that Pisces feet Mars in Pisces shoe bomber. And then we have Jupiter interceding and it's like no shoe bombing in my sign.

Chris Brennan (135:52)

Yeah, that is actually pretty good. I like that. But another weird one though, that I found, because then that was Mars in Pisces Trine, Jupiter in Cancer. Before that one that I found was April of 1979 was another repetition of Mars in Pisces Trining, Jupiter in Cancer. And what was happening then was the Islamic Republic of Iran officially was proclaimed on April 1 and on April 4. So the creation of what became like the current government of Iran was created at that time. So that creates another recurrence transit that's happening this month on top, that just piles on top of all the other transits and recurrences that we are already seeing in one that we wouldn't expect, which is this Mars, Jupiter Trine.

Austin Coppock (136:46)

Yeah, yeah. Well, and as I was telling you the other day, there are two champions in the UFC who are both born in 1979 with this trine. One Pisces and one sun in Pisces, one sun in Aries, and one of them has the Trine by sign, but very widely, that was Michael Bisping and the other one, Daniel Cormier, who has the Trine very close. I think they're like 28 and 29. I need to relook at it. But the Trine is about as close as possible. Was not only a champion in one weight class, but one of the few people who was a champion in two weight classes and whose general manner and how should we say, physical build is sort of exactly what you would expect for a perfect Mars Jupiter Trine. With Jupiter really strong in that he is very rotund and very likable.

Chris Brennan (137:57)

Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's see other Mars Jupiter Trines. I noticed the one on June 6, 1981, Israel launched a surprise attack that destroyed Iraq nuclear reactor, which is a major notable one at that time. There was Also January of 2019, the longest government shutdown in US history came to an official end at that time after a temporary funding bill was signed. Or a weird one was Mars Jupiter trine. February of 2003 was when US Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN and gave this landmark presentation to the Security Council where he outlined the intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction supposedly being in Iraq as the premise in order to argue for the invasion of Iraq which then took place shortly after that, if that sounds familiar.

Austin Coppock (138:55)

Indeed. Well, and you see very archetypally one of the ways that the two functions of Mars and Jupiter intersect. Jupiter tries to support the other planets sometimes when they don't deserve it. And so giving a justification or a casus belli for martial action is very Jupiter supporting Mars being like this is lawful, this is just. This is necessary.

Chris Brennan (139:27)

Yeah, totally.

Austin Coppock (139:28)

Whether it is or not.

Chris Brennan (139:30)

Weird side fact. So that was a Mars Jupiter Trine when Colin Powell gave that famous speech which became such a defining speech in his career. Weird fact. October 19, 2021 was also a Mars Jupiter Trine. And Colin Powell passed away that day from complications related to Covid the day prior on October 18th. And I thought that was weird because I remember when he died, so much of the coverage was about how he was the highest military general in the country and he had this record, but his record was hugely blemished by that he had put his name behind the Iraq war and saying that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to be the case. And so when he died there was so much of the obituaries and stuff reflected on that being an important note in his overall life, career and stuff. And I thought that was really interesting how that recurrence tied those two things together.

Austin Coppock (140:25)

Yeah, absolutely. And it makes me think of the delineation material in Firmicus Maternus about Mars Jupiter Trines and how it makes for great military leaders who have the power of life and death at their disposal.

Chris Brennan (140:44)

Yeah, generals, military commanders. So Mars, Jupiter Trine can also just be good in our personal lives for taking actions, having successful, decisive moments of forward movement and action, having a sustained ability to work and to do things and to expend a lot of energy productively. There's just a lot of positive ways in a personal life you could use this conjunction. So much so that this date, March 21, is actually our most auspicious electional chart of the month. And let me put up the chart for that right now. Our most auspicious electional chart for this month for taking actions and starting major ventures and undertakings is March 21, around 1pm, give or take local time. If you cast a chart for that in your city, then you should end up with a chart that has cancer rising. And we put that Jupiter, which is just recently stationed direct right in the first whole sign house not far from the ascendant. And then the ruler of the ascendant is the moon, which is exalted in taurus in the 11th whole sign house, which is the place of friends and groups and alliances, indicating a good 11th House chart for working with friends and groups and doing things at a very high level or developing friends and social contacts with people in a high place in society, which is sometimes what happens with exalted planets. We make that Mars Jupiter Trine very central in the chart. With Mars in the ninth whole sign house. Exactly. Trining Jupiter with reception. Mercury, as you can see, is just stationing direct finally there in Pisces. So we're getting the tail end of the Mercury retrograde rather than trying to do something important at the beginning of the month when there's more likely for plans to go awry, as we were talking earlier, or miscommunications or other things. Yeah, that's kind of the best chart of the month as far as we can tell.

Austin Coppock (142:44)

Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said there or there's a lot to like there, which a lot could be said about. I would also just add with Mars Jupiter, especially with reception like this, Mars Jupiter has a lot to do with just winning. And sometimes you're like, oh, I wish that person didn't win. In retrospect, that was maybe not the best for all, but Mars Jupiter wins. You have successful military figures, champions or people who are stars in sport often have it. It's the. Are you winning? Like, yes, Mars Jupiter, Exact Mars Jupiter Trine with Jupiter on the ascendant I acted on March 21, 2026, according to what Chris said. And yes, dad, I'm winning.

Chris Brennan (143:32)

Nice. I like it. Yeah, the winning configuration. All right, so that's our best electional chart of the month. Leisa Schaim and I just released our electional Astrology podcast to patrons of the astrology podcast through patreon.com and that has a bunch of other charts that we found on different dates throughout the month that are also good dates for taking action, actions and undertakings through the principles of electional astrology. So you can get access to that by signing up on the electional Astrology tier through Our page on patreon.com astrologypodcast all right, so that's taking us to the later part of the month as things start to wind down. Mercury is stationed direct and starts moving forward again. What else is going on here, Austin?

Austin Coppock (144:21)

Well, I mean, it takes us almost till the end of the month for the sun to clear Saturn as well as Neptune. Right. Saturn is moving really fast right now for Saturn. Right. And so Saturn is already separated from Neptune by 3 degrees. It's all the way to 4 by the time the sun conjoins it on what, the 26th. And so instead of just being one conjunction or a two day thing where it's Neptune one day, Saturn the next, we've got like four days of the sun doing four or five days of the sun applying to Neptune, conjoining Neptune, then plowing the space between Neptune and Saturn, then hitting Saturn, then beginning, beginning to leave Saturn. Also worth noting that Sun Neptune conjunction is the first Sun Neptune conjunction in Aries, which we will be doing shortly after the equinox every year for the next 13 or 14. And so if we're part of, I don't know, part of our job, you and I, Chris, but as well as part of everybody in the audience, part of your job as far as seeing patterns and seeing this Neptune in Aries pattern, what's beautiful about it, what's awful about it, what its shape, smell, texture and colors are. This will be the first time that the sun has conjoined Neptune in Aries. And so I think it'll be very useful to just take a look at what is this new almost decade and a half Neptune background that we're going to have.

Chris Brennan (146:12)

Yeah. And what house does that coincide with in your chart? And it's gonna really shed some light on what that transit is gonna be all about of not just Neptune through there over the next decade, but also Saturn's transit through there over the course of the next two years before it goes into Taurus in 2028.

Austin Coppock (146:31)

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great. And further specifying point because Neptune's gonna be in that house forever and with whatever planets are there, and likely, especially if you have planets early in that sign, you've probably felt it, seen some of it. But getting clear on something that's going to be true for almost a decade and a half sooner rather than later is very advantageous, Especially with Neptune, which very easily eludes thinkability or eludes clarity if you don't spend some time focusing on it.

Chris Brennan (147:10)

Yeah. Cause it's already happening. I can already see that in the lives of a bunch of people. As soon as Saturn and Neptune moved into Aries this past month, the shift was palpable. And you could see people start doing new things, but they are not fully clear yet the significance of how important those new things are. But especially once the sun hits that conjunction later in the month. The sun has those ancient associations with the eyes and with sight. And sometimes when the sun hits a conjunction like this, it really illuminates it and suddenly you see and you recognize what it is those planets are doing much more than you did up to this point.

Austin Coppock (147:47)

Yeah. Yeah. I have one really quick Neptune transit story, Chris, that I think you'll enjoy. It's perfect. So, as you know, my wife and your friend Caitlin Coppock has Mars at 0 Aries and it rules her ascendant. And so Neptune hit that by the minute this month. And so she woke up one morning not having slept particularly well because that's Lucien, but having a lot to do. And so she's getting, getting ready. She's drinking some coffee, taking some vitamins, like kind of trying to, trying to power up for the day, and is distracted and takes what she thinks is, I believe she thought it were like vitamin E capsules which come in exactly the same blister pack as NyQuil and accidentally takes a mega dose of Nyquil to start the day. On the day that Neptune is conjoined, the ruler of the Ascendant, Ascendant by the minute, which is Mars in Aries trying to summon that fire and get going, but instead got mega nyquilt and spent the day in a semi delirious state trying to be productive and accomplished. It's Neptune in a Mars ruled sign trying to get things done, but having to navigate the accidental big dose of sleepy delirium meds. And then at the end of the day, I was like, how are you doing? She's Like, I think that's the perfect transit story for Neptune in Aries. I was like, it was all worth it.

Chris Brennan (149:33)

That's so good. Yeah. Thanks, Kate, for taking one for the team just so we could have a good anecdote for this episode, because that's really, really good. Anyway, I thought it'd be worth the time. Yeah. Well, hopefully that's not. That's a good initial one. Definitely have to be. It's good learning lessons. Sometimes when it's like, you make a mistake on a bad transit, and then it's like you always remember from that point forward, that transit and not to do that thing again. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Be careful.

Austin Coppock (150:07)

Keep the nyquil in a separate room than the coffee and the vitamin B6 and B12, for sure.

Chris Brennan (150:16)

All right. So we're getting late in the month. Mercury directs Mercury then starts applying to Trine Saturn to trine Jupiter, which I really appreciate for the rest of March. It's very positive if we're coming off of a Mercury retrograde with miscommunication and delays and technical snafus to start to get some resolution to that. As Mercury applies to Jupiter during the last week of the month, we also get Venus ingressing into Taurus and moving into her home sign by the 30th of March. So right at the very, very end of the month, which is gonna have some positive things later in the spring. But really that's more of an April thing. And there was one other aspect. So Mars is separating. It's really just building up at this point. We get into this no man's land, where it's like, there's some positive resolutions to things in the mid to later part of March. But then what's looming is that means the next major thing that's coming up is the Mars Neptune, Saturn conjunction that's coming up in April really fast. As soon as Mars goes into Aries on the. What is it, like, the 9th of April?

Austin Coppock (151:27)

I believe it's the 9th. Yeah, we've got, like, a semi reprieve in late March, in the first part of April, before the next big challenge kicks in, which is Mars's movement into Aries, which gives us the conjunction with Neptune and then Saturn. And in April, Mercury will race forward to join Mars and Saturn in the same degree on a single day. And so there's another. Yeah, there's another rather hard set of configurations. But all the more reason to take advantage of the relatively workable, navigable territory of late March and the very first part of April. And especially once Venus Leaves Aries no more co presence with Saturn, Neptune. And gets to be in Taurus, which is a happy place before Mars enters Aries. And we get the Mars, Saturn, Neptune, Mercury thing.

Chris Brennan (152:38)

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's gonna be important for all of us this year. To take these moments, these breathers that we get occasionally sprinkled throughout the year at different points where things temporarily calm down for a little bit. And you have these periods where the planets start moving forward again. Like with Mercury and Jupiter in the second half of March. And to take advantage of those periods to take a breath, get some rest, recharge before we go into the next period of tense alignments in early to mid April with the Mars pile up. And then similarly there'll be a period where we get a little break in later in May and early in June around the Venus Jupiter conjunction. And then things are gonna get really tense again in July, for example, with the Mars Uranus conjunction in Gemini. So throughout the year we just keep having these periods of intense activity. Especially in terms of world events. And sometimes that's really draining. With the release of the Epstein files this month. And everybody trying to read the headlines or read through those or cope with whatever the implications are in terms of our worldview and things like that. But taking the time like we'll have later, hopefully in March, to have a little bit of a breather is gonna be really important.

Austin Coppock (153:57)

Yeah. The adrenal content of 2026 makes it feel like a sprint, but you need to treat it like a marathon. And those little stations where somebody sprays some water in your mouth and gives you a cookie are super important, right?

Chris Brennan (154:17)

Yeah, for sure. All right, my friend. Well, that's bringing us to the end of this forecast episode. Is there anything about the end of March that we meant to mention besides that, or are we in good shape?

Austin Coppock (154:32)

Good question. This is the Mercury station retrograde now, right now, as we're recording test, right?

Chris Brennan (154:43)

Yeah. I'm sure there'll be something we forget or meant to mention. I mean, there's like the Saturn, Pluto, Sextile that's taking place at the end of March. But I don't have a lot to say about that. It might bring some structure to some of the Pluto and Aquarius things. Like maybe there's some regulations or something involved with AI at that point by somebody. Or maybe it's as a result of all the movie studios who freaking out. And corporations forcing some attempts to constrain things. That's the best I can think of in terms of the symbolism for that but it's a sextile, so it's something that's just lightly constraining or structuring on the Pluto drive to take things as fast and to their utmost extreme that we're experiencing with Pluto in Aquarius the past few years.

Austin Coppock (155:30)

Yeah, I'm comfortable leaving the next big round of stories to the second week of April.

Chris Brennan (155:38)

That sounds good. All right, my friend. Well, thanks for doing this forecast with me. Thanks for going as deep as we did and giving it the time it deserved. I know everybody's been waiting to see both what we wanted to say about all the stuff that's happened over the past month. So that's why we covered everything extensively as we did. But also we kind of said at the end of our last forecast that we knew at this forecast things were going to be on a clear cliffhanger. And that is indeed where we're gonna leave things. And we'll see how things unfold over the next few days, hopefully as soon as I get this forecast out, if I can get it out in time. But thanks for doing this forecast with me.

Austin Coppock (156:15)

Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah, things are in motion, but the trajectories and results are big question marks right now. So an interesting point to talk about. Everything probably useful. Being able to just analyze results is easier. But it's also really important to look at things before. Before they're decided, which is what we've done in a lot of cases with this month. But yeah, always nice to talk about this golden age that we're part of and to describe its many inspiring sites.

Chris Brennan (156:52)

Many, many inspiring things. Speaking of inspiring things, what do you have coming up? What are you working on this month?

Austin Coppock (157:00)

Well, I'm gonna be working on book stuff. And I will also be preparing for another enrollment for my Fundamentals of Astrology program in very early April. For information about that, just make sure you're subscribed to my newsletter. I don't send much, but I will send out when those intakes are going to happen. I have a beautiful collection of recordings of me teaching astrology over the years. I've got workshops, I've got individual lectures. I've got lecture series and classes that are available on the website. One of my favorite sphere and sundry projects that I elected is going to come out this month. We've got our very first series involving the fixed star Spica, also called Chetra, which is a beautifully multipurpose benefic star, which really, if anything, brings things to a point. And that point is excellence. But excellence in a great number of Fields. We've been kind of preparing that for a while, so I'm very excited for that to premiere to the world. And of course, Sphere and Sundry has a delightful seed catalog of almost all the planets in their ideal positions with ideal elections supporting them. You miss Jupiter in Pisces? We've got that. You like Venus in Libra? We've got that. You like Venus in Taurus? We've got that. And so on and so on. So I would encourage people to check out Sphere and Sundry, do a little shopping for beautiful moments that are no longer with us.

Chris Brennan (158:55)

Yeah, for sure. Cool. I'll put a link to your website in the description below the video or on the podcast website for those listening to the audio version. As for myself, I'm going to do a Hellenistic webinar, I think because my Hellenistic webinar will be falling just after eclipse season. I'm gonna do a webinar interviewing students in my Hellenistic course to talk about how eclipse season went and how the themes of major beginnings and endings manifested in terms of the house placements of the eclipses. So that's gonna be really fun. Students in my Hellenistic course get access to those monthly webinars that I do each month as part of a benefit of signing up for the course, which you get unlimited access to once you sign up. So you can find out more information about that@theastrologyschool.com and otherwise, I'm just gonna be working on the podcast and trying to document events as things happening. I've been trying to do more short videos to cover news and current events during the course of things, which has been fun. And I'm also working on an episode where I may be doing an interview with somebody about astrology when it's applied that parents apply to the charts of children and things like that. In terms of Austin, one of the things that made me think of this episode is just you've talked a lot about how your son, you're seeing him experience all these transits for the first time and what that's like for a younger child to experience certain transits for the first time and how it manifests in the context of a young person's life. And that's a really interesting concept and viewpoint for me. So I was thinking about doing an episode on that, and I have somebody in mind to interview. So I may have to get some tips for you as I prepare for that.

Austin Coppock (160:35)

Oh, God. Anecdotes aplenty.

Chris Brennan (160:38)

Okay. All right, well, I'll check in with you. Otherwise, I think that's it for this forecast. So thanks a lot for joining me again today, Austin.

Austin Coppock (160:46)

Yeah, my pleasure.

Chris Brennan (160:48)

Cool. All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of the Astrology Podcast and we'll see you again next time.

Austin Coppock (160:54)

Take care.

Chris Brennan (160:56)

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