THE MADNESSES OF NEPTUNE and THE SATURN-NEPTUNE CONJUNCTION

THE MADNESSES OF NEPTUNE: NET-ZERO and TRANSGENDER

I am bringing my own views in here quite strongly, so you could say I am declaring an interest :)

The astrologer Liz Greene has suggested Dionysus as a more appropriate figure than Neptune as the ruler of Pisces. Dionysus was driven mad by Zeus's jealous wife Hera. If you reject him, as did King Pentheus, you are liable to be torn to pieces by the train of Maenads who follow him.

Pluto abducts you, and Neptune possesses you. As Neptune comes to the end of his own sign of Pisces, so is the western world possessed by collective madnesses: net-zero carbon and transgender ideology. As well, more broadly, by 'wokeness': the authoritarian, sentimentalised over-protectiveness and over-prioritisation of minorities.

Instead of saying yes, we will need eventually to replace oil with nuclear, and we can adapt to, and probably even benefit from (which we have a genius for) climate change, we are cutting our own throats by attempting in short order to get rid of what has become our lifeblood, fossil fuels, and calling anyone who questions this narrative a 'climate-denier'.

It could be enormously damaging, particularly for the poor and the developing world: indeed, mythologically one could read net-zero as the sacrifice (another Neptunian theme) of the poor and the 3rd world to assuage the guilt of white liberals for their sins against pristine mother nature. There is a hatred of human impact behind net-zero that feels like a leftover from Christianity. It is also, you could argue, the Far Left's version of the Far Right's Gotterdammerung. No politician currently dares stand up to this narrative, though one can discern their private doubts.

As for 'transgender', instead of saying yes, we need to allow men to be more feminine and vice-versa, to even live as the opposite gender if they wish, we are collectively in the grip of a corrupt medical fantasy that says that men can BECOME women and vice versa. Again, no politician dare stand up to to this fantasy, nor directly oppose the resulting mutilation of teenagers, which does not bear thinking about. Even wanting to protect women from predatory 'transwomen' will get you labelled a 'transphobe'.

Transgender surgery, particularly on teenagers, is a Pluto in Aquarius theme. In attempting to help humanity through science, Aquarius can become inhuman: this is the shadow/Pluto side. It is something I find dreadful.

The pushback from questioning either of these madnesses is currently vicious. You can lose your job, your reputation and your friends. I hope it doesn't cost me my Facebook account!

The Chinese and Russians must be scratching their heads and wondering what has happened to the West.

 

(We are, of course, still experiencing the economic consequences of the madness that was Covid, when most of the world shut down over a relatively minor disease. It was like a herd of horses bolting, that could not stop once they had started.)

My hope is that as Neptune enters a new sign - Aries - in a couple of years, and is joined by Saturn, we will start to wake up from these nightmares.

 

 

THE UPCOMING SATURN-NEPTUNE CONJUNCTION

The further a planet is away from the Sun, the greater its transformational power. Pluto holds pride of place in the transformation stakes. On average. But because his orbit is elliptical, he is sometimes the same distance from the Sun as Neptune. As he has been for some decades now. So they have arguably been packing the same punch during that period.

If we look back to the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction, in 1989, we see that it took place 4 days after the Berlin Wall came down, precipitating the end of the Cold War. That event was every bit as powerful as a Saturn-Pluto conjunction – the last of which, in 2020, occurred at the start of the Covid panic. This idea could be tested historically, if someone fancies some mundane research.

Saturn gives the outer planets the ability to manifest. He acts as a bridge, and we see their pure power. The terror of the Saturn-Pluto opposition at the time of 9/11. The bursting of the communist dream (Neptune) in 1989 and the awakening to economic realities (Saturn). The Berlin Wall was built in 1961, and it came down on its Saturn Return. Saturn is walls, you couldn’t make it up.

So we need to be talking about the upcoming conjunction of Saturn and Neptune at the beginning of Aries in 25/26, just as much as if it was Saturn-Pluto. 

 

Politically, you could say we have been living in the post-Cold War World since the last conjunction, and its outcome has been a new polarisation with Russia.

The last time Neptune entered Aries was in 1861, as the US Civil war began. Just as we have a ‘culture war’, so too did the US have one over slavery, that precipitated that war, an Aries showdown, which the North eventually won.

Just as Saturn-Pluto ushered in a new world 3 years ago, so too are we likely to see another new world in 2026, and possibly the year before, when the conjunction will be almost exact. What astrology teaches you is how just unpredictable the future is. Who could have guessed Covid, or the prolonged conflict over Ukraine?

But what we do know as astrologers is that something big is on the way. And probably a new start in some way, because it will be the start of Aries. There are tensions starting to boil: nuclear-armed Russia’s ongoing humiliation over Ukraine; the culture wars over transgender, historical slavery etc and left-wing authoritarianism generally (as in ‘woke’); and perhaps the biggest one of all, net-zero carbon, which I don’t think the average voter is going to stand for once what it entails starts to impact on their lives: that may leave room for a new and pragmatic political vision, based on the material abundance that we actually have. Saturn-Neptune at the start of Aries speaks strongly of a new dream. But that may require wreckage as well.

On a personal level, if you have anything in your chart at the beginning of the cardinal signs, then that aspect of your life will be affected in a big way. You will be possessed, maddened and ultimately re-ensouled :) You will begin to seriously notice it towards the end of 2024, as Neptune and Saturn go Direct and start to move towards their almost-conjunction of 2025.

SATURN-PLUTO in CAPRICORN: 1518 and 2020

I wrote about the next big alignment, the 2020 Saturn-Pluto conjunction, a few weeks ago, and I feel inclined to go at it again, but from a different angle. The conjunction will be in Capricorn in early 2020, and I suggested it would reflect an era of big business, when the multinationals would gradually become the biggest political force in the world, more powerful than national governments.

And maybe there’s another possibility, if you consider this: the last time there was a Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn was in January 1518, 2 months after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg and began the Protestant Revolution.

But firstly, the natures of Pluto and Saturn.

Pluto is death. He is also power. His meanings are quite raw. He is sex. He is taboos. And he is not under our control. We can propitiate him by recognising him, and by yielding to his demands – and they may be to give up everything we have, in the interests of something that is truer about who we are. Pluto doesn’t care if things are comfortable in mere human terms. He is Necessity, that deep impulse in life to slough off the old and to renew itself. It is a process that can take years. It just seems to drag on and on sometimes. And it may not be that we are holding back, it’s that the new isn’t ready to be born, we are in the chrysalis phase.

But when we are ready, it is definitely a new power to live that surges up: something that was always there, but not yet ready to be lived.

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And if you watch your Pluto transits, or recall them, and enter your experience with that lens, you’ll start to understand astrology on your pulses, it’s real knowledge on which you can build. Learning the signs and houses etc is necessary, but it is seeing it work deeply for yourself, that is the real initiation into this esoteric knowledge. And all esoteric means is seeing how things really work, seeing through the illusion of our all-consuming sense experience to the dreaming behind it.

And these transits can occur on a collective, as well as a personal, level.

And then there is Saturn. Saturn is the worldly taskmaster. We often find him difficult when we are young, because he’s a planet of age: patience, discipline, practicality, responsibility, finding your place in the world. These aren’t necessarily easy things when we’re young, and they’re certainly not cool. And that’s why Saturn can seem difficult. But when we’re older, we’re often onside with all that stuff, and Saturn becomes our friend, a planet of abundance: but earned.

So Saturn gives form and shape to things: you put him next to the energy of an outer planet, and things happen. Outer planets, which are not visible to the naked eye (hence their late discovery), aren’t a part of our conscious endowment. They come from somewhere else. They certainly stir the pot. But it can be a difficult process translating that, integrating that into who we are. Put Saturn into the mix, Saturn who lives in the liminal zone between the inner and outer planets – one foot in this world, one foot in the other – and bang, you have Uranus, or Neptune, or Pluto transmitting their vast energies onto this plane.

Bet you hadn’t thought of Saturn as having a foot in the other world? He seems to be so much a planet of this world, in fact he often seems to deny the other world, that is his shadow. “You are what you earn”, rules Saturn.

Saturn needs to be turned into the protector, instead of the denier, of the inner world. That is the task of the US, with her Sun in square to Saturn, her Protestant Saturn that gives no-one a moment’s rest.

But just think about it astronomically. Not only is Saturn’s form-loving nature perfectly designed to be a bridge between the outer and inner planets. But one side of him inevitably faces towards us, the inner planets. And the other side faces fate, destiny, the outer planets. The demands of Saturn, at his best, aren’t just the rules of the world. They are tinged with our destiny, those things we need to do.

So when we put Saturn and an outer planet together, there is an immediate channel for those outer planet energies, you’re not waiting for years for the outer events. At the end of 1989, Saturn conjoined Uranus-Neptune, and the Berlin Wall came down.  In 2001, Saturn opposed Pluto, and we had 9/11. And in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door.

SATURN OPPOSITE PLUTO

Pluto energies either empower, or overturn, the entrenched status quo. Pluto is about new life, a new paradigm. It isn’t necessarily something we attach value to, particularly on the collective level. I think the outer planets show that there ISN’T a collective evolution going on. How would one judge that anyway? Was the world post 9/11 ‘better’ than what came before? This may be the case on a personal level too. We always have the choice to resist the deeper truth that Pluto wants us to live by. America, for example, could have seen 9/11 as its chickens coming home to roost, as Obama’s erstwhile mentor the Rev Wright later put it. That would have been a collective insight. But she chose, by and large, not to see this obvious truth (and this includes Obama):  her response instead was to lash out at Afghanistan.

So because the collective tends to be unconscious in its responses, the events around Saturn-Pluto can just be a swing in the opposite direction. The last conjunction at the end of 1982, in Libra, could also be seen in these terms. It was the beginning of laissez faire economics, the empowerment of (relatively) rule-free capitalism. Essentially that was just a reaction to the rules around finance that had been brought in as a result of the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Libra, losing our hard-earned balance. And of course the result of that was the Great Recession.

But it doesn’t have to be all bad! And maybe the good stuff doesn’t always get seen. Saturn-Pluto in Capricorn can be an empowerment of the rigid structures and hierarchies. But it can also be a revolution against them. This was what Martin Luther did to the Catholic Church. His actions contained a very powerful seed, which is often the way with Pluto.

If we look at the Saturn Pluto conjunctions of 1518 and 2020, they both have the Sun at 21/22 Capricorn. This suggests a connection between the 2 conjunctions, and that the successful opposition to entrenched establishment - in that case the multinational church - could, in 2020, see the beginning of a successful movement against multinational companies whose only interest, like the church at the time, is themselves. Below are the charts for the 2 conjunctions.

So I think the coming conjunction is likely to be both an empowerment of big business – there is no obvious way of controlling it as it gets bigger – but also protest against it.

There is a choice we can all make about what dream we live by. The big business dream is one of them, and seems to be getting stronger. But Saturn-Pluto also gives the chance to create other dreams, and make them practical (this is a very practical conjunction, with both Saturn and Capricorn present.)