0:00 CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Nick Dagan Best, and we’re gonna be talking about Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history. Hey Nick - thanks for joining me. NICK DAGAN BEST: Thanks for having me, Chris. What a cheerful topic - I can’t wait. CB: I know! I thought I wanted to open our cheerful topic with a cheerful opening, and yeah, we have just finished doing a two-week intensive research session going back and researching Saturn-Neptune conjunctions which occur approximately every 36 years. And we took it all the way back in 36-year increments and documented things that we found that happened in history, and we’re gonna talk about that today during the course of this episode. And part of the context is that we have a Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s
0:49 forming this year where it’s gonna come within a degree, I think in July of 2025. And it won’t go exact, but then it’ll retrograde away and come back and go exact in early 2026 in February. So we did a research project in order to understand the current conjunction by looking back and seeing what previous conjunctions have coincided with, and I think we found a lot of things. NDB: We sure did. And let us be clear - the Saturn-Neptune, they come very close together this year. I mean, they are zodiacal minutes apart. So yeah, it’s not a partile conjunction as we call it, but it is very close, so I still think 2025 is quite a Saturn-Neptune year as well 2026 will be one. CB: Absolutely. Absolutely.
1:38 NDB: Yeah. CB: All right. So for data, today we’re recording this on Thursday, March 20th, 2025, starting right at 11:05 AM in Denver, Colorado. Here is our little electional chart for starting today just to show the chart data. We were shooting for Jupiter on the Ascendant; we’re starting a little late, but still with Jupiter in the rising sign, which is excellent. And yeah — NDB: First day of spring for you, first day of autumn for us. CB: Yeah, in the southern hemisphere. And you can see that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Right now, Neptune’s at 29 degrees of Pisces and Saturn is at 23 Pisces, and they are headed very quickly towards a conjunction that, as you said, is gonna come very, very close this summer. So let me actually show a diagram of that which
2:31 Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co made for us. And this shows the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 2025 and 2026 and just how close it gets by July within less than a degree, and then it goes back a bit later in the year and then it comes back and goes exact on February 20th of 2026. So that’s what we’re looking at, and you know, this is important because these are two very slow-moving outer planets. Saturn has like, a 30-year cycle - 29.5 years - whereas Neptune has a much longer cycle, right? NDB: Yeah. What is it? 160 something years?
3:20 Something approximating that. I should know — CB: Yeah — NDB: — the exact number on hand, but something like that. CB: 165 years. And that’s actually the other diagram I was just looking for that Madeline DeCotes made us as well, which is this lovely diagram that shows the Saturn cycle of 29.5 years and the Neptune cycle of 165 years and how as a result of that they’d meet up about every 36 years, give or take. So we’re gonna be paying — NDB: That’s a fantastic diagram. I just wanted to say that’s a fantastic diagram; I hadn’t seen that until just now. CB: Yeah, Madeline actually literally just made it for us last night, so shout out to Madeline from Honeycomb.co that has amazing visualization graphics and other things you
4:06 can download as well as their annual planners that have great astrology graphics as well. All right. So this month I almost did a research project on Neptune in Aries because that’s the other thing that’s shifting this month is Neptune is about to go into Aries on I think the very last day of March. But I decided to focus on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions and do that as the research project for this month, because I think it’s more, it’s gonna speak more immediately to things that are happening right now over the next couple of years, both in terms of changes and geopolitical shifts especially that we’ve already seen happening recently and that are getting more
4:51 intense and that will continue to over the next year or two. But also because Saturn-Neptune conjunctions are a little bit easier to study in history because they have that regular recurrence every 36 years. And with the orb, you get like, a two- or three-year time frame, sometimes longer, if it goes over into two signs and which you can study to see what events really stood out to you in history at those times. NDB: Yeah, exactly. I mean, a Neptune in Aries episode would be great, but it would be an episode that had nothing from the 20th century, nothing from the 18th century, so on and so forth. There would be much larger gaps between the events in the timeline that we’re looking at. So yeah, this is a great one for us to really like,
5:37 start in the present and go way, way back, but at these regular 36-year intervals. So it’s a lot more fulfilling in that way, I'd say. CB: Yeah, for sure. So ironically there’s more to study because it’s shorter than like, you know, Neptune in Aries. However on the other hand, compared to some of our other previous research projects, we’re actually looking at much larger increments of time, because for example, in January we did Venus retrograde in Aries, which occurs every eight years. So we’re looking at eight year repetitions over the past couple of centuries. Then in February we did Mars retrograde in Cancer, which happens about every like, 15 to 17 years, so that was a longer term cycle, and we even got into some 79-year and 47-year repetitions
6:27 with that. Now with this, we’ve got something that’s about 36 years or just, you know, almost every 40 years, so that’s a larger jump where there’s only three of these happening per century. So it gives you like, a much more interesting sort of time frame or time window to look at compared to what we’d been looking at before. NDB: Yeah. CB: Yeah. So in terms of there being three of these a century, I wanted to actually show a diagram for that, because I actually had one. Like, for example, the 20th century, just showing you that there’s been just three of these, where there was one conjunction that took place in the late 1980s, there was another conjunction that took place in the early 1950s, and then there
7:18 was another conjunction that took place around 1917. So that just gives you about three of these conjunctions or three really distinct periods that last anywhere from about three years, if the conjunction just takes place in one sign, or sometimes it can extend to five or even six years potentially if the conjunction extends across two signs in terms of the sign-based conjunction. So three really distinct three- to five-year periods to study in each century is still a relatively like, short span of time, and you can definitely see some distinctive things happening during those periods. NDB: Oh yeah. CB: Yeah. But in terms of like, you know, the Venus retrogrades - because you always talk
8:07 about like, the percentage of time in which Venus is retrograde, and I don't know what the percentage is here. But that at least gives you some idea that we’re not talking about like, huge swaths of time necessarily. NDB: Right. We’re looking at like, roughly a fraction of one out of seven, you know. If you’re thinking three to five years out of 36, you’re somewhere in that range anyway, as opposed to Venus, which is, yeah, you know, it’s quite small. Like, a quarter of the cycle I guess, if you’re including my maximum elongation criteria. CB: Sure.
8:53 NDB: But yeah, it’s quite small. CB: All right. So in terms of our sequence today, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna spend the first part of this long episode - like, this is gonna be a workshop, this is a whole thing that we just spent two weeks studying intensely. We’ve written like, 130-page research notes document and outline which is gonna be available to patrons. But we’re gonna spend the day like, talking through our work and talking through our research and some of the highlights of it, so this is gonna be a long thing. The way we’re gonna divide it is in the first - I think it’s gonna be about two-thirds of this episode, we’re gonna spend that going backwards chronologically through the most
9:38 recent set of seven conjunctions, starting with the current one in 2025, then going back to 1989, and backwards in 36-year increments all the way until the 1770s where in 1773, there was a Saturn-Neptune conjunction right around the time of the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and the beginning of the United States, essentially. So there’s seven conjunctions in between prior to our current one in 2025 and 2026, and we’re gonna go through each of those in a really detailed fashion, talking through each one of them. And then once we complete that,
10:23 we’re going to then go into another section, a smaller section, talk about recurring themes that we’ve noticed that have come up, which includes the eras we just covered but also extends further back into earlier centuries where we actually went back as far as actually like, 500 BCE. So we went as far back as about 2,500 years before now studying every conjunction in 36-year increments. And so instead of going through all of those in order, we’re just gonna jump around to some of the highlights in the later part of this episode. NDB: Yeah. It’s a good structure.
11:08 CB: Yeah. Well, that is the one we chose. We will find out if it’s a good structure — NDB: Fair enough. CB: — as we go through this. NDB: Sure. CB: So some of the events that we discussed are gonna be obviously of the nature of Saturn and Neptune. And it’s gonna be like, obvious how it connects to those planetary significations. But in other instances, we’re gonna learn new things about this alignment that perhaps we didn’t know before or unexpected. And that’s gonna be okay as well. That was one of the things that was interesting as we did this research project, I think, for both of us, right? NDB: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. All kinds of revelations. And “revelations” is a great keyword for Saturn-Neptune
11:54 as well. They’re very often involved. CB: Yeah. And we didn’t really have a lot to go off of in terms of precedent, because it’s like, Richard Tarnas didn’t really cover this extensively in his book Cosmos and Psyche that otherwise has very extensive treatments of most of the other outer planet alignments. But with Saturn and Neptune, he just has a very short sort of like, perfunctory chapter on it somewhere like, later on that has some interesting insights, but is not as extensive as other parts of the book where he researched more thoroughly. NDB: It occurs to me I think Tarnas was born with a conjunction, so it’s an interesting omission, but there you go. CB: Okay. And then later in our research,
12:41 after we’d already done the bulk of it especially in terms of the last seven cycles, I actually remembered the work of Andre Barbault, and that he had done a lot of outer planet research. And I pulled out one of the only translations; I have like, maybe two translations of his works into English. And in one of them, he did outer planet cycles, and it turned out he had covered this, and ironically like, he had covered the same like, seven ones that we did, and he found most of the same highlights. So that was a little annoying, because like, we kind of like, reinvented the wheel by going back through all of that ourselves before I had realized another astrologer had established the outlines of some of that. But he didn’t really go into it with much detail. Like, it’s a very short treatment basically where he does mention the most important
13:31 thing that happened on each conjunction, but a lot of his focus also was looking at the development of each cycle in between conjunctions when Saturn and Neptune would make subsequent aspects. And some of that got a little messy, because he gets into like, focusing a lot on minor aspects and things like that, so there wasn’t as much there that we were able to draw on. But it was interesting to see that there were others who, you know, had come to similar conclusions, at least in identifying some of the main points of some of the major conjunctions. NDB: Yeah. I mean, if anything, it’s kind of encouraging that, you know, separate from us - and we didn’t, yeah, we hadn’t looked at his work until we were close to being done ours. And so realizing that we’d sort of retread a lot of things that he had crossed
14:20 already in some ways is encouraging. Yeah, it may be a bit frustrating that we possibly arguably wasted time, but at the same time, the fact that two independent studies would assemble ultimately largely the same collection of examples also just speaks to what is consistent in this kind of astrological research that two different investigators working at two different times would come up with very similar results. CB: Right. Yeah. And some of it wasn’t like, mind-blowing, because it’s kind of obvious that like, the Soviet Union fell on the conjunction in 1989. World War One happened under the conjunction of, you know, 1917. So some of that’s pretty straightforward. But nonetheless, yeah, it was interesting to see
15:07 that overlapping stuff. But other than that, it’s like, not a lot of astrologers have done this type of work looking at these conjunctions in history and going as far back as we did all the way back to 500 BCE. So we’re gonna create a new foundation here and tread a lot of new ground that I hope will create a foundation for future research and for other researchers. All right. I did wanna give a shout out - speaking of researchers - to some of the different astrologers who contributed to this as research assistants. So most of the research I did for this episode, and then Nick did a ton of research for this episode. We also had some help from other
15:53 astrologers, such as Orla Connolly at OCAstrology on Twitter. We also got help from Lindsey Turner, who’s at BadPaster.me on the internet. We had help from Sam Ogden at BrotherMoonHealing.com. And yeah, those three really helped us with some different pieces of this in different eras, so I wanted to give a shout out and a thank you to them. And we’ll mention some of them in particular when different research topics come up. NDB: Yeah. Thank you to everyone. CB: All right. So I'm gonna release an extensive written outline document, like I said, to accompany this episode to patrons of The Astrology Podcast through my page on Patreon,
16:39 because it’s literally only through their sort of crowdfunding of this research that I was able to literally take like, two weeks of my life and devote it to like, studying this 24-seven to produce as much as I did. So I release those notes to them as a thank you for helping to essentially like, fund this research. So if you’d like to get access to that PDF, you can sign up at Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast and find the entry for this episode, and you’ll find the PDF notes there. NDB: Yeah. And it’s a substantial document. This document we used for this episode is like, over 170 pages long. So it’s, yeah. It’s epic. CB: Yeah. It’s literally a book. And it’s something, you know, maybe we’ll turn into a book at some point in the future. But essentially what we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna do a workshop
17:29 and present essentially a book on this topic, on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. All right. So let’s get started by first - we’ve already done this a little bit, but I just want to define the current era and talk about it briefly before we jump into our first historical period. So our first is the current Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s happening in 2025 and 2026. So this conjunction is a little bit unique because it actually started in Pisces, but it goes exact in Aries. And the exact conjunction’s gonna take place on February 20th, 2026, at the first degree of Aries at zero 45 Aries. But as we said earlier, it’s gonna come within one
18:18 degree by July of 2025, but doesn’t go exact. So by orb, if we’re using a 15-degree orb, which is the orb that we’re gonna use consistently throughout this episode for the degree-based aspect as distinct from the sign-based aspect, it really first comes into orb in the first quarter of 2024 when it first moves into 15-degree range between those two planets. So basically, the first quarter, the first three months of 2024, this 15-degree range begins. And then it’s gonna peak around those two closest aspects in July of 2025 and February of 2026,
19:04 and it’s gonna stay within a 15-degree orb until approximately quarter two of 2027. So those are gonna represent the most intense phase. And then finally, I've noticed that sign-based aspects, especially for conjunctions - like, a sign-based conjunction - that it already becomes operative when the two planets move into the same sign. So when you take that into account, Saturn first moved in Pisces and joined Neptune on March 7th of 2023. So that’s the beginning of functionally like, the conjunction between those two planets starts to build up at that point, and indeed that year we did start to see different world events start happening of
19:52 a Saturn-Neptune nature. So that’s the opening of our range - March 7th, 2023 - and then they build up to the conjunction in Pisces, and then eventually conjoin exactly in Aries. And Saturn will not depart from Aries until April 13th of 2028, so that’s gonna be our final endpoint for this conjunction is when Saturn breaks the sign-based conjunction or otherwise known as a copresence with Neptune by departing and moving into Taurus while Neptune is left behind in Aries. So overall, that gives us about a five-year time frame for this current conjunction from March of 2023 to April of 2028, with it becoming more intense the closer it gets to the
20:43 exact degree-based aspects in July of 2025 and February of 2026. Does that make sense? NDB: Yeah. It’s because this conjunction happens at like, the exact conjunction happens at the very beginning of a sign, this is why this one is a good five years long, because it does wind up spanning two signs. In some other instances, if the conjunction happens to happen somewhere in the middle of the sign, then the period will be shorter probably about three years, because it’s less likely that the two planets will be copresent in two different signs; they’ll just be copresent in one. CB: Right. Like the 1989 conjunction only happened in Capricorn, so then — NDB: Exactly. CB: — like, the sign-based one gets shortened to three years then. Although sometimes you do
21:31 still have to pay attention to if the 15-degree orb becomes operative before the planets have moved into the same sign, then the conjunction already becomes operative at the 15-degree orb. So it’s just a matter of which ones comes first. But whichever one comes first or last, that’s when it becomes operative, whether it’s the degree-based orb of 15 degrees, or whether it’s the sign-based copresence. NDB: Yeah. CB: So just wanted to make that clear from the outset in terms of outlining our methodology. And when we mention different events, it’s gonna typically be because that event falls within that range of either the sign-based conjunction or the degree-based conjunction with the 15-degree orb.
22:20 NDB: Yeah. And we’ll always specify that. CB: For the most part. We might not always specify it, but — NDB: We’ll try to be as clear as possible. CB: Yeah. I just don’t wanna - because we have so many events to mention, like, we’ll mention sometimes, especially early on, but I know later we’re gonna start jumping and go through quickly because we’re literally talking about hundreds, possibly thousands of events. I’m not sure. NDB: Yeah. CB: All right. Any other preliminaries before we get started and jump into things? NDB: No. Let’s do this! CB: Okay. So with 2026, we’ve established some of the things. I’m thinking about just jumping into
23:15 - I'm actually thinking about jumping into 1989 and just like, going straight into that instead of dwelling on current events since some of this is still like, ongoing and developing. And then maybe we’ll refer back to some of the current — NDB: Yeah. CB: — events. What do you think? NDB: Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. I think that’s the best idea. CB: Okay. If that’s the case, then what we’re gonna do - so we’ve, you know, we’ve established the current time frame and that we’re currently in the midst of a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. We’ve been in the midst of one since 2023. So some of the themes that we’re gonna talk about are we’re gonna highlight because they’re already clearly operative and happening in our own time, whereas there’s gonna be other events that might
24:02 be mentioned from the past that could be potential events but haven’t happened yet, and that’s gonna be like, one of the fun little, you know, things we get to find out over the next couple of years is like, which of the historical events are gonna manifest, you know, from the past? And we have some fun ones and some not-so-fun ones. NDB: Yeah. Spoiler alert - bubonic plague. CB: Right. Is that one of the fun ones, or not fun ones? NDB: Well, depends who you are! Depends what — CB: Yeah. NDB: — your kicks are, I suppose, yeah. CB: Depends if you’re the bubonic plague. If you’re the plague, you’re having a great time. NDB: Yeah. CB: Yeah. All right. So all right, let’s talk about 1989. So let me put up the infographic. This
24:51 conjunction was unique because it was actually a triple conjunction in Capricorn between Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. So that does complicate things a little bit because we have the presence of Uranus there at the same time. But nonetheless, there are some important and distinctive themes about this conjunction that we will surprisingly find recur under earlier conjunctions as well. So by degree, all three of the exact degree-based conjunctions - because there were three of them - so sometimes there’s just one conjunction, and other times there will be three. This one, we had three conjunctions, and they all took place in the same year all in 1989, with the first one on March 3rd of 1989 at 11 degrees of Capricorn. The second one on June 24th at 11 Capricorn. And
25:40 the third and final exact conjunction on November 13th at 10 degrees of Capricorn. So by orb, the range was quarter four of 1987 - it came within 15 degrees - all the way to quarter one of 1991. And here’s a little diagram that shows that and shows the build up and the fade away, starting in late ‘87 and going into early ‘91. This one is a little unique because in late 1991, Saturn stations in early Aquarius just 16 degrees from Neptune. So there is a little bit of an argument about whether the degree-based orb should actually extend all the way to late 1991,
26:26 because it’s like, one degree outside of our standardized orb of 15 degrees. But for the most part, we’ll be focusing on this period from 1987 to 1991 as the primary range. NDB: Yeah. CB: By sign, it was a little bit more narrow, because the first Capricorn ingress took place February 13th of 1988 when Saturn first went into Capricorn and joined Neptune. And then Saturn departed from Capricorn for the final time on February 6th of 1991, breaking the sign-based copresence after Saturn went into Aquarius. So that defines our range, and these are some of the major events that we’re gonna talk about that happened during this period and that show up in the history books
27:15 essentially during the course of this conjunction. So the two biggest events and the two main ones, of course, that this time period is known for is one, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then two, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which dissolved at this time, ending the Soviet Union and then eventually from there the new country of Russia emerged as - initially at least - a democracy. NDB: Yeah. CB: Yeah. So that’s huge. That was a huge turning point in history, right? NDB: Absolutely. And the kind of thing that seemed impossible until the moment it was inevitable,
28:05 you know? And in some ways, it was almost kind of an accident in some ways - very Saturn-Neptune. If you know the story of the Berlin Wall coming down, there were East Germans escaping through I think Austria into the West, and some local official was trying to like, stave off the rush, and they were interviewing him on TV and asking about like, you know, when the situation was gonna be sorted, and somehow he blurted out that, you know, people could cross right away. It was all very confusing. It wasn’t what he intended, but just like, sort of like, because of something he said on TV. I'm not getting all the details thoroughly covered, but it was sort of like, an official said something
28:50 on TV that made everyone think that they were now allowed to cross over, and so this rush happened. And yeah. It would - until that very night, it seemed like something that was probably a pipe dream, and then it just happened so fast. CB: Right. So it’s like, the Berlin Wall was that Germany was divided into two parts - into East and West Germany - since after World War Two when the Allies, like US and the UK, got one half and divided one half of Germany, and then the Soviet Union divided and got the other half of Germany after the two invading
29:35 armies in World War Two that defeated Germany like, took over each half and then split it in two. And at one point, what was it, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Soviets started building a wall in order to make it so that people couldn’t leave. NDB: They built it overnight, virtually overnight, in August of 1961 - I think pretty much the same week Obama was born. If I remember the date correctly, it’s August 13th, 1961. Because people were just crossing over before that, and you know, then they had guards and barbed wire. But then, yeah, one morning the wall was just there. So yeah. I mean, it sort of staved off this
30:21 outflux of people from East Germany that they’d been trying to control by other means for the previous 16 years. CB: Right. Because it was, you know, Saturn - which is a wall or like, a physical barrier that separates two things. But there was also like, an ideological component to it, because that literally divided like, the Communist Eastern bloc countries under the control of the Soviet Union versus the democratic like, Western countries like the US and UK and France and everywhere else essentially. So during the course of the 20th century, the Wall becomes like, this symbol also of the Cold War and of the ideological fights between like, socialism versus capitalism and all of these other things.
31:11 And then all of a sudden virtually overnight in 1989, the wall just like, crumbles and disappears, and something that had previously both physically but also ideologically separated people became no more and just crumbled away. And then not long after that, you actually get a reunification of Germany where East and West Germany, which had been separate for so long and had developed over the decades in very separate especially like, economic trajectories all of a sudden were united once again into a single country. NDB: Yeah. I had the privilege of visiting Berlin in the summer of 1991, which was a year and a half after the Wall came down.
31:58 But East Germany still very much looked like East Germany - or East Berlin looked like East Berlin, and West Berlin looked like West Berlin. And it really was like two different worlds in one city; it was really astonishing. Even though you can take the local transit train from one end of the city to the other, the difference in the landscape at that point was really, really something else. CB: Because of the like, economic depression on the eastern side? NDB: Yeah, I mean, the way the buildings were built, the cars that people drove. You know, in East Berlin, people still had these sort of East German or Soviet cars, whereas in West Berlin, people were driving, you know, the same things that people were driving in France, England, the United States at the time. So yeah, it was just, it was a really stark
32:48 difference between the two halves if you will. I was there again in 2016, and you know, it has all sort of somewhat leveled out. But yeah, in ‘91, it was really, it made a huge impression at the time. CB: Okay. Yeah. So that’s one of the themes that we’ll talk about later that I saw as a recurring theme in history, which is sometimes like, the setting up but also the breaking down of walls, borders, and boundaries seems to be one of the recurring themes that we’ll see with Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, with Saturn representing the boundary or the wall, and Neptune representing the disintegration or dissolution of something. NDB: Yeah. Or a reconceptualization sometimes.
33:34 Like, if a border is redrawn or, yeah, you know, Berlin had once been this unified city, and then they put a wall between it, and it was cracked. And so yeah, it’s like a reconfiguration if not as you said. CB: Yeah. And also the merging of two things that were separate was another thing when this wall went down, sort of like two droplets of water that are separated by a border, but then when you remove that border, they naturally like, come back together and fuse and then fully intertwine. NDB: Yeah. CB: All right. So that was a key moment in this that happened relatively early on, very close to the conjunction, actually - like, very close to the third conjunction, I believe, right? NDB: Within days. I think it’s like, four days apart or something of that nature.
34:21 It’s really, really close, that third conjunction, to the fall of the Wall. CB: Okay. So the other more major thing, though, is that this was part of an entire domino effect that was happening at the time, which is the revolutions that were taking place in many Eastern bloc countries that were previously under the control of the Soviet Union at that point started to rise up and demand their independence from the Soviet Union. And over the course of a relatively brief few-year period, essentially between roughly like, 1987, 1988 through 1991, all of these countries broke away and gained their independence from the Soviet Union. And
35:09 then the Soviet Union itself didn’t - it ceased to exist in the form that it was and became for the first time a democracy all of a sudden. NDB: Yeah. And it was amazingly largely a peaceful process, apart from Romania, where the president and his wife were executed very quickly. In every other case, it really was just, you know, popular uprising and popular support that created a momentum that no political machine was prepared to, you know, push back again. And so it was really just a formidable movement, and like I said, largely peaceful. CB: Right. So what are some of the countries then? You mentioned Romania,
36:00 but we also have other countries like Ukraine — NDB: Bulgaria. Yeah, Ukraine, Bulgaria. CB: Ukraine breaks away and gets its independence. NDB: Yeah. Poland. Czechoslovakia, which then would become the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Hungary. Bulgaria. Romania. CB: Got it. Okay. So that’s a pretty short span of time for all of these countries suddenly to have these revolutions. NDB: Sorry, I left out the Baltic states and Belarus and those people would get very upset with me if I did that; I must include them as well. So that’s Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus along with all the other names. Sorry for the omission. CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s just a huge
36:47 amount of countries in a relatively short span of time from the beginning of this conjunction to the end of it, which is just a huge shift and marks the end of the Russian Communist state, which had began at a previous conjunction in 1917 and 1918, which was a conjunction that coincided with the Russian Revolutionary, which is when the Bolsheviks and essentially the Communists took over and then set up the experiment of having an entire state that was based on Communism at the time, which was unique. NDB: Yeah. And we’ll cover that when we get to 1917. But it is — CB: Yeah.
37:34 NDB: — gonna come up, yeah. CB: Yeah. Well, I just wanna mention it, because to telegraph and to give some preview that it’s like, one of the things we found in this research - and we knew going into it because we’d already seen this, but we found it even more extensively - is that it turns out that this was not a one-time event in Russian history, having this Saturn-Neptune conjunction coinciding with such a huge turning point, but in fact, Saturn-Neptune conjunctions come up repeatedly at many, many different important turning points in Russian history going back more than a thousand years. NDB: Yeah. It’s really remarkable. I mean, I was kind of harping on you about it for a long time, but then you went and did the research and you found even things that I hadn’t seen, so it was,
38:20 yeah. I think we’ve both been impressed by just how consistent it is. And again, that’s one of the things I love about doing this kind of work, because some astrologers if they wanna study Russia, they’ll think about, you know, the empire and the chart for the empire and the Soviet Union and the chart for the, you know, so on and so forth. Whereas I love this approach where we can look at all the regimes that have ruled a given area over the course of time and still see these patterns repeat themselves. Like, it’s almost irrelevant that there were different regimes at different times. I mean, obviously not totally irrelevant, but for the purposes of this research, in some ways it is, because no matter what, no matter who’s in charge, you see
39:06 these cycles surface at really relevant times. CB: Yeah. And one of the other things is also when you see an event like this happening, a major event in the history of a country, and it’s clearly coinciding at the same time with a specific astrological alignment, usually you can then take that alignment and go back and study previous times it happened in the history of that entity. And sometimes you’ll find repetitions and like, precursors to that under the same alignment in the past. And that’s one thing that we found very strikingly in Russian history with this conjunction, but also will come up in other areas during the course of this study as well. NDB: Yeah. CB: All right. So
39:52 the last thing about this is that it also marked the end of the Cold War, which is huge because the Cold War dominated so much of the 20th century, really especially since the last conjunction that occurred in the early 1950s especially, which is when the nuclear arms race exploded and the first hydrogen bomb was used, as we’ll talk about when we get into that period. But it’s an interesting bookend, then, you know, that conjunction in the early 1950s versus literally the end of the Cold War at the subsequent conjunction at the end of the ‘80s and beginning of the ‘90s. Yeah. Do you have anything to say about that, or? NDB: Oh, well, I mean, yeah. That’s the stunning
40:39 thing is just the Cold War really, effectively, beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and then the period in the early ‘50s - ‘52, ‘53 - being a sort of, you know, high peak of the overall Cold War with regard to weapons development, with regard to both sides sort of stiffening up their resistance to each other. They had, of course, been Allies during the Second World War, and then things sort of gradually came undone between the alliance once the Nazis were defeated, and certainly by the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union got their own
41:27 atomic bomb in 1949. And from that point forward, the United States, you know, felt like they were in a very different position because they were no longer the only ones with that bomb. And yeah, then the Chinese Revolution happened just after the Soviets got the bomb. So by the early ‘50s, the mood was very paranoid and fear-driven, whc8i is another theme that we’ll see come up frequently when it comes to this conjunction. CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. So that’s important as a turning point and then obviously the relevance to today is important as we’ve reached another really important turning point in terms of like, US-Russia relations that’s happening right now in terms of Russia-Ukraine relations that’s happening
42:18 right now, especially when you think back to this conjunction happening in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and Ukraine gaining its independence versus, you know, what’s currently developing in 2025 and 2026. But obviously today we’ve reached another incredibly important turning point, both in Russian history as well as in Ukrainian history that we’re seeing unfold before our very eyes. And this, the importance of it in a historical standpoint we can understand better by comparing it and realizing what happened the last time one of these conjunctions took place in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. NDB: Yeah. And then by extension, we follow that lineage all the way back to when, you know, Russia was fighting off the
43:08 Mongols nearly a thousand years ago. So yeah, it’s amazing, the whole trajectory, the way this 20th century story has a relationship to a much, much larger narrative in which it’s only one chapter. CB: Right. For sure. All right, so that’s the biggest event that was happening under this conjunction, but I wanna talk about some other events that did come up during this conjunction in the late ‘80s, some of which are relevant today or in different ways. So another one that happened in a completely other area in a different country but had this similar like, feel to it was the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that happened in China,
43:57 which happened in the time frame around April through June of 1989. And this was a series of like, pro-democracy protests in Beijing that ended up being brutally suppressed and crushed by the Chinese government. So this was important, and it kind of like, shocked the world at the time and led to widespread condemnation of the Chinese government at the time. But I thought it was important to note, because it’s an interesting contrast with other countries where their uprisings were successful, whereas in this instance the uprising ended up being put down at this time. NDB: Yeah. China did not go the way of the Soviet
44:44 Union when it came to its relationship to Communism. And this is something we can come back to when we get to the 1950s when Communist China suddenly becomes a thing and Mao has certain feelings about Stalin that are more in line with his own worldview. And then when Stalin dies, Mao’s gonna come to see the Soviet Union in a very different light, and I think that’s when the relationship starts to change. But anyway, that’s a little bit of preview for where we’re going in a few minutes. CB: Right. Yeah. Well, and the thing that unites both of them that we found is that The Communist Manifesto was published on a Saturn-Neptune conjunction back in the middle of the 1800s. So in terms of the, you know,
45:32 ideological influence that that played on both of those separate governments, it sort of ties back into that conjunction at the founding of that new ideological sort of like, structure or outline. NDB: Absolutely. CB: All right. So yeah, so that was important in China. Elsewhere, something that’s, you know, more localized event that didn’t have the same global impact but is somehow becoming relevant again today seemingly at the recurrence is that in 1989, the United States invaded Panama and deposed the leader of Panama, who was General Manuel Noriega. And you know, this is coming up
46:17 again recently because Trump is like, threatening to invade Panama to take over the Panama Canal. So this stood out to me, then, obviously, as I was researching historical events that happened around the conjunction, and then seeing that that invasion began December 20th of 1989, which is not very long after the third conjunction. NDB: Yeah. I remember it well. The US military played the Van Halen song, “Panama,” on blasted it on speakers over and over to torment Noriega, who was holed up in his palace or whatever. Yeah. This was someone who had been, you know, installed by the US government, at one point had been an ally, but just sort of went rogue. And George W.
47:04 Bush felt it was - or H. W. Bush, rather - felt it was necessary to go in there and get him out. CB: Okay. So yeah, so that’s a major one, and we’ll see how that develops, you know, in terms of whatever’s happening between the Trump administration and their plans. Potentially - in the news, it’s been said that they’re drafting plans for some sort of military operation, so we’ll see if there’s a recurrence then of those two things now that there’s a recurrence happening between those planets. NDB: Yeah. CB: Other major news - the Persian Gulf War took place shortly after this time, so this was the first Iraq war, essentially, where initially in August of 1990, Iraq invaded
47:52 Kuwait. And then in early 1991, the United States and coalition invaded Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. So that war — NDB: Yeah. CB: — took place during that time. NDB: Yeah. Jan 15th, 1991, I remember it well. I was shooting pool at a bar with my friend, and we were watching it on TV - which I'll get to in a moment as well, that phenomenon. But there’s one thing we’ve skipped. Prior to the Gulf War, there’s another really big international event that happens — CB: I’m not doing them chronologically; I'm just, I have a — NDB: Oh, okay. CB: — sequence of just ones I was going — NDB: Fair enough. CB: — through. NDB: Okay, fair enough. But I think this is a good place to introduce this. In early February
48:41 of 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. He had been in prison since 1964 for his activist actions against apartheid, and the South African regime knew for some time that he would eventually be released. In fact, for those of your viewers who watched our Venus retrograde episode, when he was released from prison in February of 1990, it was pretty much exactly eight years from when he had first been let off Robben Island, which is this island just off the coast of Cape Town where he was kept for the bulk of those 20-something years that he was in prison. I guess he was there for 18 years, at Robben Island. But in ‘82, they moved him to a prison that’s here in Cape Town,
49:32 actually virtually adjacent to the school where my kid still goes to - a prison called Pollsmoor. And there he had slightly more sort of comfortable accommodations. He could do some gardening, things like that. And then in 1988 during a different Venus retrograde, they moved him to this town, Paarl, which is about an hour north of Cape Town, and that’s where they kept him until the day they let him go in 1990, about 18 months later. I think he had some health issues that needed to be addressed before they let him out. But this was an enormous event, and really shook the world in many, many ways, and it ultimately led to speaking of this sort
50:17 of redrawing of - well, I don’t think boundaries were necessarily redrawn, but the country was, you know, really sort redesigned from scratch, if you will, when it was reinvented in 1994 when they held their first truly democratic elections. CB: Right. Because this is the end, essentially functionally the end of the apartheid state. NDB: Yeah. And — CB: And what was that, for people that don’t know? NDB: Apartheid was a policy that existed here in South Africa from 1948 until essentially you can say Mandela’s release in 1990 or shortly thereafter that was rigorously designed and enforced racial separation that involved
51:07 relocating sometimes large numbers of people from homes that they had lived in for quite some time into areas that had no amenities or transportation. There were sort of like mass deportations into rural drop-off zones where people had to sort of like, survive somehow in the middle of nowhere. And just all kinds of - even relative to American segregation, it was a level of brutality and discrimination that was incredibly dehumanizing. And there was a police state set up to reinforce it. I mean, I'm always talking to people here
51:56 who describe what the police state was like at the time, and it does sound very scary, even relative to say what folks in the Soviet Union might have had to endure. It was really, really oppressive and heavily censored. It’s amazing how many people here - yeah, just like, there was so little real information coming into the country. So you know, for instance, my wife really only learned the truth of things when she was in her late teens and she took a trip to England to be a nanny. And the woman she worked for insisted she sit down and watch BBC and see reports about apartheid in South Africa so that, you know, Anna could really understand what was going on in her own country. And you hear those stories a lot. It’s really, really something.
52:44 I mean, it almost seems unbelievable except for, you know, in this day and age, it becomes easier to believe that media could be that sort of contained and cooperative with dangerous regimes. CB: Right. So that’s another instance of things that were kept separate and artificial barriers in place that suddenly disintegrated and disappeared under a somewhat short span of time. NDB: Exactly. And the interesting thing, not to pivot entirely, but having discussed the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Panama, the collapse of apartheid, and the Gulf War,
53:29 and Tiananmen Square - all these events, one after the other in such a short period of time, culturally speaking, were largely responsible for a cultural shift we had in media whereby people used to watch either the six o’clock news or the 11 o’clock news - a one hour program on television - where they would be informed of the most important stories of that day. They pivoted from that to the culture of 24-hour news. You know, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, any of these events that we’ve just been talking about - these were things that people wanted to sort of watch happen in real time. And it really culminated with the Persian Gulf War, where, you know, whereas certainly in the Vietnam War era, people were watching the war nightly on the six
54:16 o’clock news as it were. But now we went from that phenomenon, which had a huge impact on people’s perception of the war, to this Gulf War thing where we were really watching the whole thing from beginning to end before our eyes on television, with just occasional commercial breaks. CB: Right. So that’s one of your Saturn-Neptune events here is the rise of the and adoption of the 24-hour news cycle. NDB: Yeah. There’s huge - I mean, this is gonna come up again. Thematically, there are always it seems really big shifts in media, media consumption. Like, how media’s consumed or what it’s used for, how it’s delivered, etcetera,
55:02 etcetera, during Saturn-Neptune conjunctions. CB: Right, so this — NDB: And I think that was a big part of it. CB: This will tie it back, because one of the ones you pointed out is that at the previous conjunction in the early 1950s is when television adoption suddenly rapidly took off. NDB: That’s right. The 1952 presidential election when Eisenhower was elected - that was the first election that was televised. And at the same time in Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth was having her coronation. Her father died in early 1952, and her coronation was gonna be in the summer of ‘53. And so people in the United States and in Great Britain and in Canada and Australia, what have you, anywhere where they either wanted to watch the election or the coronation, people went out and bought TV sets in large numbers - something
55:47 that had been really just a novelty luxury item that a few, you know, people in the know had, suddenly became within a few years something that over 90 percent of households had in their home. So it was a major, major revolution. And there are even some Saturn-Neptune things about why people were tuning into these things. Like, if you think about a coronation, you know, a royal coronation in Great Britain, until it was televised, this was something that really only, you had to be a lord or an aristocrat to actually witness this thing, to participate in it at all. And suddenly the whole country and the whole world could see this sort of otherwise mysterious ritual play out before their eyes. So there is - that’s another element that we’re gonna see with
56:33 Saturn-Neptune is being able to see something that has up until that point been blocked from view, not unlike say, the Berlin Wall coming down. You know, suddenly when that happened, East and West Berlin could see each other again. So this is another element of that. Ditto for the American elections. Because the American election was televised in ‘52, the existing model whereby a lot of backroom deals were done - you know, where it was just like, men with cigars in some backroom sort of working out this or that detail - suddenly everything had to be done out in the open, you know, with a huge crowd and seemingly more democratic and participatory than it had been up
57:19 until that point. So that’s another facet of it is just this sort of new level of insight or access or visibility that occurs with Saturn-Neptune, and in this case by virtue of the media and what was suddenly available with television. CB: Yeah. And a different level of immersion and a feeling that you’re actually there witnessing the events, like, is the commonality I've seen between the last three conjunctions. It’s like, you know, television in the early 1950s and all of a sudden, like you were saying, you can actually witness from all the way across the world the coronation of Queen Elizbaeth and the elaborate pageantry of all of that. You’re
58:06 able to witness through television like, in your own home, potentially. That brings like, a new level of immersion and like, feeling like you’re experiencing something there and you can feel what it was like to be there that would have been, as you said, unheard of prior to that point. And then you jump forward to the next conjunction, and all of a sudden, there’s like, all of these crazy events where the world is changing rapidly and all of these boundaries and borders and restrictions and impressions and things that people thought would never go away all of a sudden break down, and you’re seeing it live like, 24 hours being talked about on the news. You’re seeing images coming in from all over the world as they’re happening so that you almost
58:52 feel like you’re experiencing those things as they’re happening. And now, you know, since 2023, we’ve had a similar revolution that’s taking place in terms of immersion and experience with AI-generated images and video where there was this huge ramp-up as soon as Saturn went into Pisces in 2023. And you could see the very beginnings of AI-generated video and how like, janky it was, and like, you could see the potential, but it was just obviously AI-generated, including the images, where it would show images of people and they’d have like, 10 fingers on one hand or something like that. But all of a sudden over the past year, by 2024 and 2025,
59:38 I've noticed as the Saturn-Neptune conjunction has gotten closer, you now - it’s gotten so good that you really in some instances cannot tell the difference for sure with some AI-generated images and now recently even with some AI-generated video. It’s become so good that it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. And that’s, I think, one of the great turning points in terms of immersion that’s happening in our time, in addition to virtual reality has become more common. Like, Apple having released its virtual reality headset last year in 2024. And now more recently, the new keyword is “augmented reality,” where Meta, for example, released a set of augmented reality glasses recently that’s merging the digital world and
1:00:26 the real world in your eyes so that you can see like, a digital display or info about things that you’re looking at in the world through your normal glasses. So that seems to be the turning point in terms of immersion that’s happening in our time. NDB: Yeah. I think another thing is language translation. You know, even in ‘23, I could see videos of like, an American guy speaking English and then they would do a, you know, some kind of AI thing and suddenly he’s speaking French articulately in his own voice with an appropriate Parisian accent or what have you. And his lips are making those words, although this was an American guy who didn’t actually know how to speak French. So you can think like, for instance, future viewers of The Astrology Podcast might before long be able to tune in to watch you and I, but if they’re in Italy
1:01:15 and don’t speak English very well, they could just switch on the “Italy” button and you and I are suddenly speaking fluent Italian to each other, talking about Saturn-Neptune conjunctions as if we were born and raised in Italy. Or, you know, the Zulu language here in South Africa or any language. So there are all these possibilities, too - talk about breaking down boundaries. If we get to a point where everyone can speak to everyone, that can be quite a game changer in ways that we can’t possibly imagine. CB: For sure. It’s funny you mention that, because that’s one of my much earlier events, which is in the - what was it - 1524-ish conjunction — NDB: Yeah. CB: — when Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, which allowed - because prior to that point,
1:02:07 you had to know Greek. You had to know ancient Greek or you had to know Latin to read the Bible, and this tended to be something then that only the clergy could read. But then he translates it into the normal, everyday vernacular language, and this was like, a huge revolution so that people could read it in the original language, and it broke down the barriers that were put up by language. So that’s interesting that you mention that. NDB: Yeah. Similarly, John Wycliffe in 1380 also translated at least parts of the Bible, if not the whole thing, into English, which had a similar temporary effect; it wasn’t quite the effect of Lutherism, but obviously eventually England would be on board as well. CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. So back to our
1:02:53 period. One of the things I was gonna mention about the first, the Persian Gulf War, the first Iraq war is especially in the late 1980s was Suddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, both in the war but especially against Kurdish populations back then. Especially around 1988, there was a particularly important chemical attack, and this was really important because one of the things I noticed was chemical weapons comes up as a keyword for this Saturn-Neptune conjunction. The most notable example and the first one I noticed was in World War One around that conjunction around 1917,
1:03:39 World War One was the first major war where chemical weapons were used, and that was a huge piece of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction. But when I started looking outside of that for other recurrences, this is one of the things that came up that was very famous was Saddam’s use of chemical weapons especially in the late 1980s. NDB: Yeah. There had been some used in their war with Iran earlier in the ‘80s, but certainly like, using it to the scope and to the degree that they did against the Kurds was quite unprecedented, like, even relative to past uses. It was, yeah. Just brutal. CB: Yeah. So and that was also is worth mentioning
1:04:26 just in and of itself that the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War was taking place in like, 1987 and 1988, so that was winding down at that time. So that’s somewhat important, because it brings up Iran, and Iran does come up in some of the earlier ones, like in the conjunction in the early 1950s, right? NDB: Yeah. It was in 1953 that there was this CIA-backed coup to oust, you know, a leader - Mosaddegh - who the Americans would have considered socialist or something like that, but really all he wanted to do was nationalize the country’s oil reserves. You know, countries owning their own resources - a similar thing
1:05:13 happened in Guatemala and the United Fruit Company the following year in ‘54. But yeah, there was a coup to oust a leader who was not as friendly to the US as the US thought he should be, and they introduced this coup to really keep the existing Shah, the royal leader that they had installed in 1941 when they were fighting the Nazis and the Nazis wanted Iranian oil, and so the Brits and the Russians went out and took out the existing Shah, put in his son, and now the Americans had inherited that whole situation. And with Eisenhower now in the White House,
1:05:59 and the people he chose to run the CIA, there was now this new sort of level of interference in countries. And this would be something that would come back to bite everyone when the Iranian Revolution happened a quarter century later. CB: Right. That, the CIA engaging in that coup on the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the early 1950s became the core wound, basically, between the US and Iran, because then eventually later the Iranians would overthrow that leader who’d been — NDB: The Shah. CB: — put into, the Shah who’d been put into place by the CIA. And it would lead to subsequent decades of tensions between Iran and the United States, all the way up and to this day. And then
1:06:49 now we’re seeing the recurrence of that with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction right now, and there’s, yeah. I think Trump has been telegraphing that there’s gonna be an attack on Iran a lot recently, and we basically just been waiting to see if that’s gonna happen and what it’s gonna look like and how bad it’s gonna be. Especially on this conjunction I've been paying attention to that comes up at the end of the month I've been very nervous about and have talked about several times on the podcast recently. But the recurrence of that conjunction, again, potentially could bring into focus the relationship and antipathy between Iran and Israel that goes all the way back to that conjunction in the early 1950s. NDB: Yeah.
1:07:35 CB: Yeah. All right. So moving onto other ones. I wanna start hitting some other ones really fast. One that I noticed that was really striking was under the 1989 conjunction, just after it, Yemen was unified where Yemen used to be divided into two parts - like a North Yemen and South Yemen - and in 1990, they were unified and became like, a single state or a single republic. And that’s, you know, relevant right now because Yemen is in the news because Trump just recently on the eclipse that just happened in Virgo launched what has been said in the news was his biggest
1:08:20 military operation in the Middle East since he was inaugurated in January when they started launching strikes on Yemen. So I thought it was interesting that Yemen came up under this last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the late 1980s. NDB: Yeah. That was a sort of a brief respite for Yemen. They endured a lot of bombing by the British in the ‘60s, and you know, in this instance, Trump is not the first US president to have bombed them even in the 21st century. I think they’ve all done it. So yeah, it’s been going on for a while, but certainly it seems to be going to another level now, particularly because like you said if Trump’s taking on Iran, then Yemen is seen
1:09:06 as their client state, and so yeah, you wouldn’t fight one without fighting the other. Or you are sort of fighting one by fighting the other, even. CB: Right. Yeah. Oh, right, that’s a good point - the connection between Iran and Yemen. NDB: Yeah. CB: Okay. Moving on. Other things that happened in the late 1980s under that conjunction - one of them that started was the first Intifada, which was an uprising among Palestinians basically that started in late 1987. And there’s different arguments about the dating, but it’s said to have gone from late 1987 from December of ‘87 until at least some people date the end to the Madrid Conference that happened in 1991. And if that’s true, then it would fall like,
1:09:53 pretty much perfectly in that orb of Saturn and Neptune which was between late ‘87 and early 1991. Others date its conclusion to the Oslo Accords in 1993, but nonetheless, one of the things that does come up over and over again that we’ll see under the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions is these uprisings that take place. NDB: Yeah. Definitely. CB: I was kind of surprised by that, because it’s something I associate more with Uranus, and one could argue, you know, because this is a triple conjunction happening in the 1980s that
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