THE SATURN-JUPITER CONJUNCTION

Among the signs of the zodiac, Aquarius often carries a positive projection, just as Scorpio often carries a negative projection. The 1967 hit song Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In includes the lines: 

 

Then peace will guide the planets 

And love will steer the stars 

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius...

Harmony and understanding 

Sympathy and trust abounding 

No more falsehoods or derisions 

Golden living dreams of visions

 

Maybe it is not such a bad thing to have these hopes, illusory as they no doubt are. In reality, our vast collectives keep buggering on in the same old unconscious way, with a different flavour from time to time.

 

The Age of Aquarius is a big deal. These ages only change every 2500 years or so, and no-one quite knows when we will back into this one from Pisces. Maybe the fact that we don't know, and that we are going backwards into it, is significant.

 

So I am saying all this because we are about to have a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction right at the start of Aquarius. This is also a big deal. Jupiter and Saturn used to be the outermost planets, before Uranus, Neptune and Pluto came along. In a sense, they still are, if we just mean planets visible to the naked eye. So with the advent of the outer planets, the meaning of Jupiter-Saturn acquires a tighter focus. The outer planets refer to factors beyond our control, to the deeper movements of the spirit. A human life that has depth involves an ongoing process of coming into relationship with these planets, and learning not to try to control them.

 

Jupiter and Saturn are, however, more under our control, inasmuch as these awesome gods ever can be. Maybe this cycle now shows where we humans are responsible for our destiny, the degree to which our problems and opportunities are man-made.

 

And this brings us slap-bang into the climate issue. Aquarius is a sign of the future (which is why we project our hopes onto the sign) and of humanity and technology and democracy. It is a 'progressive' sign (though that can be a politically loaded and subjective term itself.) 

 

Climate change does seem to have a large human-made component. To insist it is just human-made is a kind of inverted hubris, for which we should be punished 🤣 Whatever your views on it, it undeniably highlights our out-of-balance relationship to the natural world. 

 

So it seems very likely that this will be a theme of the coming Saturn-Jupiter cycle, as the US signs up again to the Paris Agreement, and the UK government announces a slew of environmental initiatives around housing, transport, farming and wind farms.

 

This will, however, be a collective at work. The movement towards a greener future is also likely to acquire rigidity and ideology. This is the shadow of the Air element. We saw it with the 1981 Saturn-Jupiter conjunction in Libra: the rise of free market ideology (with its increased propensity towards boom and bust, and rising inequality) and a heightened Cold War polarity and tension. With Saturn-Jupiter now in Air signs for the next 200 years, ideology may be a long-term theme.

 

So take off your rose-tinted Aquarian glasses! (If indeed you were wearing them in the first place.) The madness of collective humanity is not a place to put our hopes and our despairs. It is what it is. Whether it 'improves' over time is imponderable. It depends what you mean by improvement. 

 

As astrologers we can watch the collective and the way in which its themes and directions are reflected in the stars, and learn from that. But, to paraphrase Kipling: 

 

If you can meet with hope and despair 

And treat those two impostors just the same...

 

I think it is a kind of foolishness to place much hope in the collective or even in outcomes within our personal lives. Hope is something we can have for ourselves individually and within. Indeed we need to have it, a basic faith in ourselves and in our unfoldment. We humans are magnificent once we can step outside the collective illusions that give life a certain kind of security and certainty, and take ourselves seriously, look after that thing in ourselves that we are here to look after.

 

So this is Aquarius at its best: the sign of humanity in its magnificence, god-like. That is the injunction of the coming conjunction: have faith (Jupiter) in your god-like nature (Aquarius) and incarnate it (Saturn).