The Astrology Podcast · Selected Episodes

Chris Brennan introduces the show: his training at Kepler College, the Project for the Recovery of Ancient Texts, and why he wanted a programme that could move between ancient and modern astrology.

With Benjamin Dykes: elections versus inceptions, the medieval sources in Choices and Inceptions, and why not every event chart is a katarche.

With Nick Dagan Best: whether “astrologer” is a professional title, what someone should know to claim it, and how certification and belief enter the question.

With Patrick Watson: Obama and Romney nativities, convention inceptions, Mercury retrograde on election day, and the January 2013 inauguration chart.

With Patrick Watson: what the 2012 election taught political astrologers, then the end of the Maya calendar, the Age of Aquarius, and Venus’s eight-year cycle.

With Kelly Surtees: what the three-week apparent retrograde actually correlates with, and what belongs to folklore rather than the symbolism of Mercury.

With Kelly Surtees: whole-sign versus quadrant houses, why the debate flared among professionals, and how the two systems can be used together.

How ancient astrologers derived the meanings of the twelve houses — a conceptual apparatus quite different from the modern one — and when the two paradigms can be reconciled.

With Leisa Schaim: the roughly twenty-eight-year cycle, why the return is a two-to-three-year phase rather than a single exact hit, and how sect changes what Saturn actually does.

With Robert Hand: the diurnal/nocturnal distinction, why it is one of the first filters of traditional analysis, and how a planet's condition changes by hemisphere.

With Mark Jones: how much a natal chart implies is predetermined, and why no school of astrology actually claims one hundred percent free will.

From Valens’s lists of planetary meanings: how the seven traditional planets were derived as a set, and which significations come from a single archetype versus a contrast with another planet.

With Kelly Surtees: a day-for-a-year timing method, how to calculate and read progressed planets, and where progressions sit next to transits and time-lords.

A solo lecture on the basic Hellenistic time-lord: one house per year from the rising sign, the activated lord, and how profections open the rest of the chronokrator toolkit.

With Leisa Schaim: releasing from the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of Spirit, the periods and sub-periods, and how the technique times peaks, troughs and career chapters.

How a solar or lunar eclipse opens a six-month window in the houses it occupies and opposes — beginnings and endings, read from the house pair rather than from aspect-by-aspect micro-timing.

With Leisa Schaim: the most widely used timing method in depth — orbs, ingresses, retrograde stations, and how to read a transit against the natal promise.

With Chani Nicholas: what actually differs between the solar sign, the lunar sign and the rising sign, now that most people know all three rather than only their Sun.

With Kira Ryberg: lots as mathematical points that mark a whole sign with extra topics, how Fortune and Spirit are calculated, and how they double or import meanings into the house they fall in.

With Camille Michelle Gray and Lindsey Turner: tracking Saturn's thirty-year cycle through six signs via Billboard eras and musicians' own Saturn returns — Marvin Gaye, Mariah Carey, David Bowie, Elton John and Freddie Mercury, Pink, and more.

With Camille Michelle Gray and Lindsey Turner: the second half of the zodiac — Beyoncé, Michael Jackson's Thriller, Donald Glover's handwritten Saturn-return notes, Lady Gaga, Demi Lovato, Doja Cat's Saturn return in real time, and more.

With Nick Dagan Best: dozens of historical eclipse charts, from Alexander the Great and Constantine to Lincoln's assassination, the British royal family, the atomic bomb, Einstein, the UN Charter, and Nelson Mandela's extraordinarily eclipse-saturated life.

With Nick Dagan Best: the real history of Ronald and Nancy Reagan's use of astrology, from Carroll Righter's decades-long relationship with the couple, through Joan Quigley's electional charts for debates and inaugurations, to the 1987 INF Treaty signing delayed on her advice and her disputed guidance during Iran-Contra.

With Jenn Zahrt: the life and prolific twenty-year career of early-twentieth-century German astrologer Elsbeth Ebertin — a pioneering figure among the first prominent women astrologers of the modern era, and the broader history of women entering the profession after Hypatia.

With Kenneth Irving, co-author of The Tenacious Mars Effect: the life and statistical research of Michel and Françoise Gauquelin, whose studies of Mars's position in champion athletes' birth charts became one of the most rigorously tested claims in the history of astrology.

With Kenneth Irving: the continuing story of the Mars effect research, including the Belgian Comité Para's attempts to debunk it and the decades-long scientific controversy that followed.

With Nick Dagan Best: Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler, born four days apart under Venus retrograde, as a study of time twins and Venus’s eight-year synodic cycle at the turning points of both lives.

With Patrick Watson: the birth-data controversies surrounding the 2016 US presidential candidates, including the competing rectifications for Hillary Clinton's birth time and how zodiacal releasing was being used to track the campaign in real time.

With Patrick Watson and Nick Dagan Best: the years-long mystery over Hillary Clinton's true birth time, the competing rectifications astrologers had relied on, and what her finally-obtained birth certificate revealed.

Chris Brennan reviews a prediction linking a Mars-Uranus conjunction to Donald Trump's chart, checking it against the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt and other events it was said to coincide with.

With Nick Dagan Best: how Uranus's ~84-year return to Gemini has coincided with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, and what that pattern suggests about the next Uranus return, arriving in 2025.

With Richard Tarnas: the archetypal meaning of the ~14-year Jupiter-Uranus cycle, and the historical examples that built his research for Cosmos and Psyche — the Moon landing, Kepler and Galileo in 1609, Newton's gravity, the storming of the Bastille alongside the mutiny on the Bounty, and Grof's research linking the cycle to sudden birth and rebirth experiences.

With Patrick Watson: a follow-up survey of Jupiter-Uranus examples — the 83-year Babylonian goal-year recurrence (from the American founding to Trump's birth), the 1941 parallels to today, Nat Turner's rebellion and the Arab Spring, Stonewall, the birth of the internet, and Steve Jobs's Think Different campaign.

Richard Tarnas on his intellectual biography and the ten-year anniversary of Cosmos and Psyche — his awakening to astrology with Stanislav Grof at Esalen in 1976, the archetypal-astrology method he developed, and examples like Frida Kahlo's Mars-Uranus opposition.