This podcast episode is brought to you by AstrologerConnect, your premier source for quality Astrology readings. Hi there and welcome. This is Amanda, the founder of Astrology Hub, and you’re listening to our week ahead snapshot with world class astrologer, historian and author of the Cosmic Calendar, Christopher Renstrom. This show is designed to give you a quick overview of the week ahead,

enabling you the gift of choice and how you navigate and weave these energies into your daily life. Enjoy. Hello, my name is Christopher Renstrom, and I’m your weekly horoscope columnist here on Astrology Hub. And this week I wanted to talk to you about three upcoming oppositions. The first one is between Mercury and Mars retrograde on November 20, Ninth, the second opposition that’s between Venus and Mars retrograde on December 1st.

And the third, the third opposition will be the Sun and Mars retrograde. And that will occur on December 8th. Now, when I was thinking about these three oppositions, these three ideas of the Mercury Venus and the Sun, all three being in the Zodiac sign of Sagittarius, all opposing retrograde Mars and Gemini, I got to thinking, I got to thinking,

what did that remind me of? It somehow sounds vaguely reminiscent, somehow sounds vaguely familiar. And aha, I thought of it. What it reminded me of was an old biblical story that I had heard when I was a kid going to Catholic school. And this was the story of St. Peter and the three times that he denied Jesus Christ. Now,

when I was going to Catholic school, I, I was so into Catholic school. I mean, if I could just take a moment here, I was so into Catholic school, I, I I, I was devoted. I I saw myself as becoming a priest when I grew up. I mean, other kids wanted to be astronauts and football players and,

and military generals and things like that. But I, I wanted to be a priest. It was something that was such a passion for me. But unfortunately, unfortunately, I was a little bit over restless when I was a child in Catholic school, often talking to neighbors, speaking out in class, laughing a little bit too loudly at a joke that had been whispered in my ear.

I mean, it wasn’t really the makings of a famous career in the priesthood. And I remember, I remember this nun once saying to me, well, actually, she said it to the group of kids that were all lined up. She would line up all of us kids and we’d be talking and, and, and jabbering and things like this. And she would,

would be like, lock your lips. You know, her name was Sister Virginia. She was like sort of battleship sized nun, you know, cloak. I mean, everything you would think of with being a very formidable nun. And she would be like, lock your lips. And then she would peer through all the different faces, and of course,

I was still, and she would like lock eyes with me, and she would be like, you, you throw away the key. Well, that was basically how I was not going to end up becoming a priest when I was a kid in Catholic school. Anyway, one of the lessons we learned, and I remember her teaching it to us when we were kids,

was the story of Peter denying Christ three times. And I remember it left such a, a, a, a mark on me. I mean, it was such a powerful story. And it’s one that I actually wanted to share with you this week as an illustration of the three oppositions between Mercury Venus and the Sun in Sagittarius and retrograde Mars in Gemini.

And it goes something like this. I looked it up Luke 22, 31 to 34. This part of the story is Peter’s denial on repentance for told. So this is happening right at the time of the last supper. I think they’re kind of like picking up the dishes and maybe cleaning them afterwards or something like this. And, and, and Jesus and Simon Peter,

we always had to remember it was Simon Peter, not just Peter, but Simon Peter, Jesus and Simon Peter are kind of like having this moment. And so Jesus turns to Simon Peter, and actually in this part, he calls him Simon, and he says, Simon, Simon and Simon Peter looks over and he’s like, yes. And he says,

Satan, you must know, has got his wish to sift you all like wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon. I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And once you have recovered, you in turn must strengthen your brothers. All right? And so Simon Peter says to him, Lord, he answers, I would be ready to go to prison with you and to death.

And Jesus replies, I tell you, Peter, by the time the cock crows today, you will have denied three times that you know me. You know? So it’s like this little exchange that they have. I remember when I first heard it, it’s kind of suspenseful. It’s kind of like, well, what’s that all about? You know? And,

and, but, but it stays, it lingers. You, you remember it. And then you have this whole unfolding of the story. You know, it’s, it’s after the last supper. And, and, and they, and Christ goes to prey on Mount Olive or, or Yosemite, or maybe Jem is a garden in Mount Olive. I don’t know,

know. It gets so confusing. But he goes to pray and he asks his apostles to stay awake with, with him, and they can’t, they’re exhausted. They fall asleep, you know? And, and, and he prays earnestly. And so they’re asleep when the guards come, the guards and, and a group of people come because Jesus has been betrayed by Judas,

and now he’s going to be taken to punches pilot and, and, and, and stand trial. And so and so the guards come and there’s this, this ro you know, and they, and the apostles get up and, and they sort of like, you know, come to Jesus’s defense. But you know, they, they carry, they,

the, the guards take away Jesus anyway, after Jesus tells them, you know, don’t, don’t pull a sword. There will be no violence. Let them take me. And the apostles are all like, but we’d fight for you and, and things like this. And, and Jesus is like, no, no. And so the apostles back off,

they back away where the guards take Jesus away. And so they follow, they follow cautiously at a distance from, from, from, you know, traveling down different roads, you know, trying to follow the, the guards and, and the torches because it’s late at night. And so this part comes from Luke 22, 54 to 62. It’s called Peter’s Denials.

And it says they seized Jesus and led him away. And they took him to the high priest’s house. Peter followed at a distance, they had lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard. So these are like the guards and the people that were accompanying the guards who, you know, were laughing or cheering or, or just maybe Passerbys, who had been taken on in,

they had lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard. And Peter sat down among them and has, he was sitting there by the blaze. A servant girl saw him peered at him and said, this person was with him too. But Peter denied it. Peter said, woman, I do not know him. Shortly afterwards, someone else saw Peter in the darkness by the candlelight,

by the firelight, and said, you, you are another of them. But Peter replied, I am not my friend. About an hour later, another man insisted saying this fellow was certainly with him. Why he is a Galilee. My friends said, Peter, I do not know what you were talking about. And at that instant, while Peter was still speaking,

the cock crowed, and Peter remembered what the Lord had said to him before the cock crows Today, you will have disowned me three times. And Peter went outside and Peter wept bitterly. Now, I remember that story, hearing that story as a child, and of course, as a kid, you know, I was like, I would never have let that happen.

I would’ve sprung into action. I would’ve saved Jesus myself. I would’ve stood between him and the guards and say, nothing’s happening here. You can’t have this man go away. You know, those things you tell yourself when you’re young and silly, okay? And I remember as we had learned this lesson from Sister Virginia, she had her own sort of thing to add to it her own moral to the tale.

And it was always sort of like, see, when you deny Christ as your savior, this is what happens. You, you, you, you are cowardly, you fumble, you know? So this is what happens, and you’ll, and you’ll weep bitterly about it. Did you, did you hear that part about weeping bitterly? You’ll weep bitterly about it,

and, and you’ll be full of remorse. So don’t deny Christ as your savior, ever. Okay? So it was really sort of like hammered in as that it was like, oh, wow, don’t deny Christ as my savior ever, you know, sort of thing. And so, so it was always kind of like remembered as kind of, you know,

a failing on the part of Peter and, and Peter feeling really guilty. And, and Christ may be guilt tripping a little him a little bit by, you know, peering into the future and saying, you’re gonna deny me three, and then it happens. And, you know, so it was always kind of like this, this story of like guilt and feeling horrible.

And you just remember Peter weeping bitterly at the end of it, you know? But when I’ve come back to this story older as a person, you know, and not as a, as a, you know, enthusiastic child ready to spring to Christ’s defense against an army of centurian, I don’t know what I was like. Anyway, when I come back to this story older,

what strikes me so much is the humanity of it. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s this moment following this last supper, you know, following, you know, when, when Jesus says, you know, Judas is going to betray me, and the other apostles are like, no, no, he can’t possibly, and Judas kind of like SLS away or whatever,

and they’re kind of like, you know, as I said, cleaning up dishes, you know, and Peter’s with, with Jesus. And, and, and he says, you know, and, and it’s a great line. Satan, you must know, has got his wish. Satan, you must know, has got his wish to sift you all like wheat,

okay? But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. Okay? So, so basically Satan, you can really take as Saturn. I mean, you can take as, I mean, you know, Satan has taken from the word Saturn is going to sift you all like wheat, you know? So what is Saturn? The planet of Saturn is the planet of fear.

It’s anxiety. So Saturn is going to sift you all like wheat, you know, you’re gonna be full of fear and you’ll be separated from one another. You’ve stood strong as a, as a brotherhood and as a group. And you’re going to be separated from one another by fear and by anxiety and fear for yourself and fear for your lives. You know?

And he says, but I, and I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail, okay? I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail, and once you have recovered, you in turn must strengthen your brothers. Okay? So what you’re getting here is really the division, the opposition between Gemini and Sagittarius, okay? And Gemini,

of course, you know, it’s 12 signs away from Sagittarius. And Gemini is really a sign that deals with the day to day life, okay? With, with the way that you behave or interact with other people. You know, it’s the sign of siblings. So of course it’s going to be connected to friends, and it’s gonna be connected to this kind of fellowship,

you know, your buddies. And so the apostles are like buddies, okay? And, and what’s opposite, this is what’s opposite. The Gemini is Sagittarius, and Sagittarius is a zodiac sign of faith, okay? It’s a, it’s a sign that’s, it’s a zodiac sign that’s long been associated to churches and to philosophy and to belief, you know,

and belief in a divine agency that is larger than you, you know? So, so it’s, it’s God or it’s god’s or, or whatever you worship or, or at least regard in some way as being divine in your life, whatever that might be. You know, it doesn’t have to be religiously defined, but that’s what it stands for. And so you have this,

this, this, you know, you know, Saturn is going to sift through all of you like wheat, but I’ve prayed for you, I prayed for you that your faith may not fail, but this is the important line here. And once you have recovered, you must strengthen your brothers. So that speaks to sort of like the Mars retrograde in Gemini.

I mean, what’s Mars retrograde, but it’s a loss of courage, you know, it’s, it’s a loss of, of courage and, and, and, and, and doing something active that’s strong and stands up for things. So, so Mars is retrograde. It’s a, it’s a loss of courage. And the line is, and once you have recovered,

you must strengthen your brothers. So what’s already seen in that line is Jesus knows that Peter is going to fail, that Peter’s faith is going to fail, you know? And he says, once you know, the fear is going to why fear is going to run through you all, you know? And, and, and I’m praying that your faith may not fail,

not fail in the moment, but may not fail, because once you have recovered it, you must in turn strengthen your brothers, okay? It’s a, it’s, it’s such a lovely friendship moment. You know, I just, I adore it. It’s so intimate and it’s so human and it’s so friendly. It’s, it’s what you would say to a friend.

And of course Peter, you know, is like, I’m ready to go to prison and go to death for you. You know? It’s like, woo, you know, I will not fail. I will be there. You know, it’s like the way we all hope that we would react in a moment. Like that is the way I reacted when I first heard this story.

You know, I’m gonna let you know. It’s like we, we all wanna be that, right? And then Jesus says, I tell you, Peter, by the time the cock crows today, you will have denied three times that you know me. And this is so fascinating when you apply the imagery of Gemini to this, you know, Gemini,

as you know, is Mercury ruled. Well, what is the beloved animal? You know, what is the animal that sort of stands in for Mercury, Mercury’s or hermes’s sacred animal? But it’s the rooster, okay? It’s the rooster, which is the bird that heralds the dawn. You know, the rooster crows, and it heralds, it announces the start of a new day.

So you see that Gemini imagery there, and then in case you’re just sort of thinking, well, okay, that, I guess that’s interesting. It’s followed up with the number three, okay? Three times, okay? And of course, Mercury’s number is three. You know, TRIBErs is three faced, you know, her’s, TRIBErs is three faced.

So the idea of three is very much a Mercury number. And it shows here you will have denied me three times, okay? And then we move into the season of, of, of Jesus. And, and, and, and he’s taken to the high priest’s house. I guess he doesn’t go to punches, poll right away it goes to the high priest.

You see why it was a failed Catholic. I mean, it just wasn’t, I, you know, just wasn’t gonna happen. But anyway, he’s taken to the high priest’s house. And, and so Peter follows at a distance, you know, he’s, he’s timid. He, he follows at a distance, he wants to help, you know,

but he’s also frightened now by, by this show of, of force that is surrounded his friend, you know? And so he follows at a distance, and so the soldiers take him to the high priest’s house, and that’s where Jesus is gonna be cross-examined. And so to wait, you know, it’s late at night, they start a fire in the courtyard,

and there’s just sort of like hanging around, you know, wearing their armor. And, you know, there’s some, there’s some serving people, you know, who are walking by and some passerbys who have also joined. And, and this is a very famous scene. You see it a lot in paintings, and it’s beautiful. And I think the reason you see it in paintings is,

first of all, it’s a very famous Bible story. But secondly, painters love depicting the play of light, you know, the play of light of, of, of the courtyard fire that’s going on here. And of course, like there, there’s that famous painting by Rembrandt and by Caravaggio. But for me, my favorite one is Gerard Segers, who’s a Flemish artist.

And just the way he captures the bewildered expression of, of, of Peter as he’s being accused, and the way that the others in this play of light, it’s almost like there’s a candle that’s moving around this circle of people in which the light comes up from underneath them. And it’s, it’s just such a beautiful and a gorgeous painting, you know?

And then you get the first, you get the first serving woman who peers at him and says, this person with, with was with him too, you know? And he says, you know, woman, I do not know him. And then a second one says, you know, a second fellow says, no, you, you were another one of them.

You were there. And I love this. Peter says, you know, you are another of them. You know, this fellow says, and Peter says, I am not my friend, and I love that because I am not my friend, you know, so it’s, he’s, he’s a be he’s saying, he, he’s calling this man friend,

you know? And, and, and, and, and, and this really talks to the changing landscape, the changing social landscape of this scene. You know, Peter, you know, and, and it can happen to all of us. We can, we can be with people, and then all of a sudden there’s a feeling of ostracization or suspicion,

or the temperature in the room changes. And so your landscape changes. You’re no longer welcome, but you’re suddenly not welcome, you know? And so there’s this, this my friend, and again, Gemini, I want you to hear the, my friend. And then what Peter’s also saying, I am not my friend, you know, I’m not one of them my friend,

you know? But then if you take away the, it is, I am not my friend, you know, it just change the emphasis. I am not my friend to, I am not my friend, okay? I mean, this is what I love about the Bible, you know, with some of the stories in it. It’s just the way that you can play with these lines and you can sort of tease out,

you know, what’s being said, but then sort of the subtext, what’s going on underneath as, as well. You know? It, it, it’s, so, I I I find it so enriching. And so, you know, the third one says really quite definitively, this fellow was certainly with him, meaning was certainly with Jesus, why?

He’s a gale, you know, he’s one of that gang. And, and, and Peter says, my friend, I do not know what you are talking about. So he’s putting out this friendship, this Amy ability, my friend, I do not know what you were talking about. And at that moment, he hasn’t even finished the line. The cock crows,

the cock crows. And Peter remembers before the cock crows. Today, you have denied me three times. And it, it’s in that moment, and it’s a moment that I think we tend to skip over very quickly. This is the last time that Peter was ever going to see his friend Jesus alive. I mean, we know that there’s a resurrection,

all these sorts of things, but we don’t know that at this moment, you know? And so the cock crows and it reminds him of friendship, and that this is the last time he’s going to see his friend, and that he has denied his friend three times, and he weeps bitterly. It’s not, you know, guilt and feel bad or shame.

He weeps bitterly for the loss of his friend and for the loss of himself in his friend. And it’s just such, it’s such a stunning moment. You know, we, how many of us as a matter of convenience, or we didn’t wanna be seen the wrong way, or because the stakes were high, didn’t speak up for a friend, or we didn’t speak up for a colleague,

or we didn’t speak up, you know, in a room. Have you ever been in a room on a bus, in a subway, you know, where all of a sudden someone is being verbally accosted, you know, and did you speak up or did you, were you quiet? Did you pick up your things and maybe move to the end of the subway car?

I’ve seen that happen many times in New York. You know, these, these things were, all of a sudden the landscape shifts. And what I loved so much about this story is that it depicts that without judgment. And that’s why I wanted to share it with you in terms of illustrating an opposition. One planet is in one place, another planet is in another place.

They are as far away as they can be from one another. You know, let’s, let’s take Peter as the Mars retrograde in Gemini and, and, and, and, and Jesus, you know, as the Sagittarius, or better yet, let’s take Peter’s faith as the Sagittarius. You know, he wants to have faith. He wants to be that good friend.

That’s the Mercury. Let’s take the Venus. He wants to be with his Fred. He, he’s, he’s, okay. So there’s the, and then there’s the son. This is like, you know, I’m, I’m supposed to be the leader of these apostles. I’m supposed to be the person who, who, who leads them all. So,

so his aspiration is far away from him. His, his friend is far away from him. And, and, and his speech, him being a spokesperson for is far away from him. You know, he’s not coming out with an incredible thing to say or, or, or Witticism, he’s not taking action. He, he is as far away from the Sagittarius as possible.

He was as far away from his faith as possible. Peter was against himself. Okay? So, so the person that I wanna be, the friend that I wanna be with, the or, you know, that, that, that I’m called upon to be is as far away from me and what I am experiencing as it can possibly be. You know,

it’s, it’s beyond my grasp. It’s beyond my distance. I am not that now in this moment. And that’s why I love this line. And once you have recovered and once you have recovered, you in turn must strengthen your brothers faith can be lost. Faith can allude our grasp. We can fail horribly humiliatingly in the moment. But the line is,

and once you have recovered, you must be there for your brothers. You must be there for others. There’s a faith that the faith will come back, that the faith will be restored. So we aren’t judged, you know? And remember, Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter. And Jupiter can have a very strong judgmental quality. You know, we aren’t judged or what’s not,

what’s happening in this moment is that Peter isn’t being judged. Peter is being consoled and told by his friend, once you have recovered, I need you to do this for me. And it’s so beautiful because it testifies to human fear. It testifies to wanting to be that person, but not being that person in the moment. And it testifies to the fact that,

okay, it didn’t work out for you in that moment, but it will at some point, you know? And so that’s what I want you to think about during these three oppositions, these three upcoming oppositions. Now, now, I doubt you’re going to find yourself denying someone three times and somewhere the background to Rooster growing. I don’t think that that’s what this is about.

But what I think it may be about is that you may experience on these three dates, November 20, Ninth, December 1st, December 8th. You may experience a loss of faith, a loss of conviction, something in which you didn’t stand by. What you, what, what you really know is true, or you didn’t stand by the person that you really know that you are,

or you didn’t stand by a friend or a colleague or someone. You know, there may, these may be incidents that are associated with these transits where you didn’t stand by or you didn’t stand up for. You know? And if that happens, this isn’t about guilt, this isn’t about humiliation. This isn’t is about humanity. This is about the fact that we’re not always our best selves at the times when we need to be.

But that doesn’t mean that we will never be our best selves. And to keep in mind that once you have recovered, you must be there. You must be there for the people in your life. My first Astrology reading literally changed my life. I was in the midst of a significant dark night of the soul. And that reading gave me the hope and confidence that I needed to continue on my path.

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