Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to the Astrology Podcast.

Today is Tuesday, January 19, 2021, starting at 1.30 PM in Denver, Colorado,

and this is the 287th episode of the show.

In this episode I'm going to be presenting a solo lecture titled

Reception, a Mitigating Condition in Natal Astrology.

So this is a really important technique, it's kind of an intermediate technique, but it's a really helpful and really useful one, so I'm actually pretty excited to finally present it here on the podcast today.

This lecture is based on one that I gave at the Northwest Astrology Conference

I think a couple of years ago now.

So let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Here's my title slide on reception and mitigating condition in natal astrology. So to set up the problem, in modern astrology we can tell, we can see that sometimes hard aspects like squares and oppositions or sometimes even conjunctions between certain planets can be very difficult, whereas other times the same squares or oppositions or conjunctions can be much more constructive,

and it creates this interpretive problem where we have this question of how do you know which way it's going to go?

Like how do you know if it's going to be really hard in that person's chart for whatever that square or what have you represents versus how do you know when it's going to be something that's more workable or a little bit more constructive in their life.

So modern astrologers oftentimes

will kind of chalk this up to just levels of consciousness

and they'll kind of say, well, it's up to the person to, you know, choose or to decide how that's going to work out in their life, and it'll work out more constructively if they're more spiritually evolved, or it'll work out less constructively if they're more spiritually evolved or it'll work out less constructively if they're less

spiritually evolved or something like that.

So they kind of write it off as an issue of like free will or spiritual evolution or something

like that.

And that's usually the modern approach is just to deal with it that way.

However, in ancient astrology, ancient astrologers in traditional astrology in general took a number of other considerations into account as mitigating factors which could push the interpretation of certain placements more in a constructive manner or constructive direction

or more in a less constructive direction.

So basically there were different technical factors that you could

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