DONALD TRUMP and THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

How does one write astrology at such a politically charged moment? It's probably when we need astrology more than ever, for this craft requires that we haul ourselves away from our personal responses in order to see what the planets are saying. The planets are not left or right wing. They are not promoting humanity's 'evolution' by favouring who we consider to be the 'good guys'. Their perspective is bigger than that, it is infinite. The best we can hope for is to catch awed glimpses of that infinitude - especially, perhaps, at times when our merely human desires and preferences as to what 'ought' to be are frustrated.

Trump's re-accession to the US Presidency can be seen as the first event in the coming Saturn-Neptune conjunction, both of which planets will have entered Aries by late May 2025. The last conjunction was in 1989, and it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A seismic, world-defining event.

This election seems similarly seismic. This Saturn-Neptune conjunction will not have Uranus sitting alongside it as in 1989. It will, however, sextile both Pluto and Uranus. This suggests a powerful transformation that also has an ease to it. The world does not have to fall apart for it to happen.

The US Sibly IC is at 1 Aries, so the US is entering a particularly transformational time, comparable to the Civil War period, when Neptune was also in this place (and, as is soon to come, Uranus conjunct Uranus). At that time, 2 different visions of the US brutally fought it out. I think that gives a clue to the meaning of the current, upcoming transit.

My interpretation is that it is the end of progressive, post-war liberalism as we know it. The battle between left and right has been particularly intense in the US in recent years. In the US, and across Europe, we have been seeing the political right making considerable gains. It has been practically illegal to be right wing in Europe since the war, but all that has been changing, most notably in Germany. Note I am not saying 'far right', because that term is a judgement that comes from the left, and I am trying to be descriptive.

Saturn-Neptune in Capricorn was a collapse of the structures (Capricorn) of the redemptive ideology (Neptune) of Communism. Saturn-Neptune in Aries is a new vision (Aries) of redemption (Neptune) through a move to the political right. Note I am not saying it IS a redemption, I am saying that is how it is seen by those who are voting it in.

Human societies move between left and right over time, when they feel that one has gone too far. The right is like the centre of a wheel, that holds it all together, that unifies. The left is like the perimeter of the wheel, that allows for diversity and creativity. Both have their places, both are necessary.

The next few years will not be pretty in many ways. Think Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s. She effected a profound transformation from the political right, but there was much misery along the way, and many came to detest her.

I think we will be seeing epoch-making change of that kind in the US under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. I suspect that Trump will not serve a full term, as he has no major transits propelling him through, and Pluto is entering his 6th House of Health. JD Vance will finish the job, as Pluto empowers his Leo Sun.

All this, however, may not be what long-term history sees as the most significant event of this Saturn-Neptune period. What it may remember most, if Elon Musk has his way, is the first unmanned spaceship landing on Mars in 2026, followed by people in 2028. Now there's an Aries redemptive vision for you!

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-Neptune and the post-fact era

The underlying transit that the world is experiencing is the Uranus-Pluto square. A new world is being born, whose form is not yet clear, but Trump and Brexit are indicators of where things are going. Away from globalisation, towards protectionism and border controls. And maybe an economic crisis along the way.

At present there are overlays of Uranus conjunct Eris, and Saturn square to Neptune. Uranus-Eris describes the game-changing shocks to the system, the earthquakes, of which there are more to come.

And Saturn-Neptune describes the ‘post-truth’ world which we are, for now, entering. A world in which politicians win elections by telling bigger whoppers than usual, which then get whirled around social media. That is what it amounts to. 

But it's not that simple. It is right-wing politicians who are telling the whoppers (in the cases of Trump and Brexit), and the liberals are fighting back using their own cultural weapons, promoting the concept of ‘post-truth’ to describe their political enemies.

I don’t like the cold-heartedness of many right-wing politicians. But if the liberals had won by telling bigger lies, I don’t think the Republicans/Tories would be promoting a word like ‘post-truth’ and getting it put in dictionaries, as if it were a description rather than a weapon. When Tony Blair lied about WMD, we weren't told we were entering a new era in which politicians told big lies. And what he (and GWB) did was lie in a much more serious way than anything that has happened this year.

While there will always be a few who believe the lies that politicians tell, I don’t think most people do. People vote for the more charismatic candidate, the one who connects best with people, for better or for worse. In the case of Brexit, we had the appeal of Boris and Nigel Farage on one side, and the relatively bland David Cameron on the other. And it was the same with Trump and Hillary. (To say that doesn't make me right-wing: I'm not.)

This way of looking at things is, of course, insulting to the intelligence of the voters, but it is the way things go in elections time and again. You don’t even need astrology to predict the outcome. As Churchill said, Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others. It is the ongoing Saturn (substance) vs Neptune (appearance) nature of democracy, and Neptune generally wins. It is how GW Bush and Obama each won the presidency, and how Tony Blair became the UK leader.

Saturn-Neptune describes the fact that the debate has come to centre on the lies of politicians. But it’s not the real issue, because politicians have always lied. Neptune is a hall of mirrors, it reflects back on itself.

And the same people who are crying foul because of the lies of the Brexit and Trump campaigns, have also been denying loudly that the Brexiteers and Trump actually won. The political lies are (correctly) being called unusually egregious, yet the simple facts of who won and who lost are being denied.

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The lies, particularly in the case of Trump, have admittedly been exceptional. The man will say anything that suits, and exaggerate and castigate to his heart’s content. (Though I also think it is important to admit when he has a point, like when he said that Castro was a dictator; otherwise our opposition is blind, and this kind of blindness is surprisingly common amongst ‘educated’ people.)

But the pretence that Trump and the Brexiteers lost - or that the elections were stolen and invalid, or that Brexit won't happen, or that the electoral college won't elect Trump - has to me seemed to be what is truly unusual about these events. Yes, Saturn-Neptune and bigger lies from politicians, that is part of the picture, if anyone is actually listening. 'Twas ever thus. But this new element of outright denial of a basic fact by an educated part of the population: that is what is truly different. Maybe we should be talking about the post-fact era?

I think it shows just how polarised things have become politically, which is what one expects from the larger picture of Uranus-Pluto. But I think it reminds us yet again that being educated and being self-aware are not the same thing. I think that the sense of moral superiority that many liberals have also confuses the picture, like Trump/the Brexiteers can't have won because they're the bad guys, so how did they cheat us?

Being an astrologer and being self-aware, at least in these polarised times, do not seem to be the same thing either. At a major astrological conference in the USA in October 2016, a panel of 12 experienced astrologers unanimously predicted that Hillary would win (though some said that it was 11 out of 12.)

Either way, this just doesn’t happen when you ask a bunch of astrologers to predict something. And if they’re good, I’d expect most to be right. But I certainly wouldn’t expect them all to have the same answer - in any other situation, it would be called groupthink. But these were 'gifted' astrologers, we are told, so that can't possibly be what was happening!

And I don’t think it comes down to method either, though I’m wandering now into the nature of prediction. I think if you rely on method alone for predicting, it will break down in time. Mercury the trickster comes in, this was something that Jung found. No, there is also intuition involved, even in how you decide which charts to use. It is the skilled intuition that is essential, that is the real gift of the astrologer. But because it is personal, it is also subject to personal wishes and the wishes of the collective.

This, I think, is what happened. It can happen to all of us, and we can all get predictions wrong. I do. But astrologers are well known for being politically liberal. It was a fiasco, and soul-searching is needed. 

It makes astrology look ridiculous, and heaven knows we don’t need that. But the reason I’m writing about it is that the issue was then surrounded by the same sort of defensive denial that you find in the population at large, namely that Trump hadn’t won the election because Hillary got more votes, even though everyone knows that it doesn’t work like that.

This denial compounded the fiasco. Astrologers, and diviners of all sorts, need to be able to stand apart from their political preferences and collective currents. This is really basic. And we will sometimes fail. But please at least let's be honest when we get it wrong.

Saturn-Neptune: 'The Renewal of the Living Spirit'

Saturn dominates Neptune

Saturn and Neptune will be squaring each other over the next year. These 2 planets are opposites: Saturn promotes form, Neptune formlessness. And in a contest (which hard aspects can seem to be like), if Saturn wins, imposing his will on floppy Neptune, you get a dictatorship. And if Neptune wins (in his indirect way), you get a swamp. 

Of course, we don't really want a contest between the two, we want them to work together to create a heavenly symphony. And to do that you need to be able to both listen to the angelic voices (Neptune) while putting in the years it takes to learn your craft (Saturn).

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it not only did so with the Sun

and Asc in Pisces (ruled by Neptune) but with the prospect of a Saturn-Neptune opposition 3 years down the line: and it indeed

Neptune dominates Saturn

became a swamp that continued for years. The US eventually largely withdrew with no clear victory. And it has withdrawn with the prospect of a Saturn-Neptune square that begins in a couple of weeks, as Saturn changes direction, and moves forward to make the first of 3 exact squares over the next year or so. And that tells us the flavour of the new war they have out there, against IS: it is already a swamp, with no clear way forward, and is set to continue that way for a while.

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The above concerns the mundane Saturn-Neptune, the 2 planets operating in the world. The world, acting in the collective way it does, tends not to very conscious, the choices are very limited: that was why Germany pulverised Greece last week, forcing it into an impossible situation.

Mundane astrology and the events associated with it can be therefore quite illustrative of what happens to us on a personal level if we don't think we have choices under these transits: we become a mess with a Plutonian, Neptunian or Uranian flavour. (Greece is a Uranus-Pluto mess).

This Saturn-Neptune square particularly concerns you if you have Sun, Moon or an Angle between about 5 and 15 degrees of a mutable sign - Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces.

If you are at the earlier end of that range, then Neptune will have been hard-aspecting you for maybe a few years by now.

Neptune and Pluto are the 2 big transformers: I'm not sure how much difference there is between them. They each tend to drag you through an underworld - one earthy, the other watery - and pull you apart then put you back together again, renewed: if that is what you want, of course.

Neptune Transit

You could say that with Pluto the emphasis is on becoming more real, more authentic. While with Neptune the emphasis is on ensoulment and redemption from suffering. There is a different feel to them, but maybe they still amount to the same thing. All astrology is doing, in a way, is providing appropriate myths at different points in our lives. And myths need not to be taken literally: they are stories that we intertwine with our lives to make sense of them.

So if you have been under Neptune's influence for the last few years, then the theme of your own suffering, and the need for redemption from it, may be writ large. Neptune dissolves. He dissolves the thick skin we often create just to survive: this is an unconscious process that occurs early in life. Unless you are lucky enough to have a functional upbringing!

And that thick skin turns into a habit, long after it has served its purpose. It is like a dog that guards us, he means well, but we no longer need to him to chase away visitors.

So Neptune slowly dissolves the skin that has, to a greater or lesser extent, become who we are, leaving us adrift, not knowing who we are any more, but open and porous to other influences - open, if you like, to the soul, in both a personal and transpersonal way. A Neptune transit is a time of messiness and hopelessness but also emotion and ecstasy.

Into this crucible steps Saturn. It is still a time to dream and wallow, but it is also a time to give form to those wallowings. If it was Saturn on his own, it would probably be time to find those forms, to sit down and work it all out and take action. But because Neptune is involved, there is also a strong element of opportunities presenting themselves, of the work you have always been 'meant' to do appearing.

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men and women in whom it lives and who proclaim it. The living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manfold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.
Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

So this is the wider meaning, the wider context of Saturn-Neptune. Your problems have become problems - which they need not do, you see many people carrying on happily in the same old misery for their whole lives. And those problems can heal under Neptune, but also be the gateway to the transpersonal dimension that Jung describes.

Which makes me wonder, is there such a thing as healing without the 'transpersonal' dimension being involved? Neptune and the other outer planets would say no, you don't get healed without us, and that's because you are us, humans are transpersonal beings. And that dimension beyond the personal is the matrix that we become from, which is Neptune again. I meant to say 'come from', but the accidental 'become from' hits the nail on the head.

Problems, symptoms are more than just bits to be fixed so we can normalise. They are also calls from the depths of the psyche. A course of 6 sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy on the NHS may well produce some temporary results (though the evidence is that it is becoming less effective), but the deeper turning about that is the real meaning of misery is a much longer process. 

And this is reflected in the length of time that outer planet transits take. Yes, they may be most obvious when they are within a few degrees. But they begin a long time before that, maybe 15 degrees before the exact aspect. Deep transformations are slow and take many years, and you may not know you have been in one until you look back afterwards.

As human beings we have this capacity for deep change, if we are interested in it - or if it calls us, and leaves us with no choice. And it often begins with the wonky bits that may have tormented us all our lives. And for them to sort, we need to leave the duckpond in which we have grown comfortable and let ourselves be carried downstream to the sea. This is the soul journey of Neptune. 

And as Saturn approaches a square to Neptune, that journey starts to take shape in the world, it unites inner and outer in a synchronistic manner. The separation into subject and object, self and world, is basic to everyday, coping consciousness. But under Saturn-Neptune we get glimpses of an underlying unity, "the vison of a living, intelligent, conscious Cosmos in which all aspects of life are related to each other." (The Dream of the Cosmos by Anne Baring).

SATURN-NEPTUNE & PARENTAL FANTASIES

Last Wednesday, Lynn at astrodynamics did an interesting blog on the health of John F Kennedy. Not being familiar with his chart, what stayed in my mind was his Saturn-Neptune conjunction on the Midheaven. As Lynn put it, “Saturn [is] right on the MC where it reflects the pressure of his father (Saturn) pushing him into public life (MC). And in Cancer no less, demonstrating that his public life was part of the family dynamic and not just an individual ambition.”

I have heard it suggested elsewhere that left to himself, Kennedy’s natural leaning would have been to become something like an academic, and that it was mainly family expectation that pushed him into politics. The dreams (Neptune) of the father (Saturn) and family (Cancer). Or even the unreal (Neptune) expectations of the father (Saturn).

John F Kennedy 29 May 1917 15.00 Brookline MA

He had no fire planets in his chart, and an unaspected Sun and unaspected Pluto! You would expect to find Fire – a sense of vision, direction, leadership – in a President (like Bush’s Leo Rising or Clinton’s Leo Sun). Unaspected planets can manifest in various ways – they can, for example, be apparently absent, or they can take over (like Hitler’s unaspected Neptune-Pluto conjunction, which made him the undiscerning voice of the German Unconscious.) In the case of JFK, we could speculate that in manifesting his Saturn-Neptune, he never found his real individual destiny (unaspected Sun), and that Pluto, again unaspected, and the only planet in a fire house (the 9th), was able to manifest as a raw drive for power, independently of his personal needs and wishes. No wonder he had health problems! Maybe, even, no wonder he died young.

I have been struck lately, through personal experience, by the extent to which members of an ambitious family can subsume their own identities in the collective consciousness of the family, leading lives that are the same down to ridiculous details, and espousing identical, unexamined values. It is no different to the dynamics within a religious cult. It gives psychological security, but it is also based on fear, which the worldly success can mask, for to question such a family’s values inevitably leads to ostracism, to what would be experienced as psychological annihilation. And such families usually have one or two members who suffer this fate.

Back to Saturn-Neptune. It is interesting that Kennedy didn’t just carry the dreams of his father, he also carried the dreams of a nation, the Cancer nation to which he belonged. He was built for this, as we can see from his chart. And he wasn’t just the victim of family pressure: the Saturn-Neptune-MC is also HIS Saturn-Neptune-MC, he had a propensity to carry the unreal expectations of others (‘Camelot’) at the expense of his personal destiny (unaspected Sun).

Tony Blair also has a Saturn-Neptune conjunction (opposite Mercury and Venus in Aries) and he too has been the carrier of the dreams of the collective, and the original expectations of him were way beyond what a human could deliver. Saturn-Neptune can raise you to god-like status, and if you don’t die young (which many of them do), you are likely to eventually encounter a huge backlash as people feel let down. This happened to Blair over Iraq, and would almost certainly have happened to JFK had he lived: archetypal patterns have an inevitability about them. It is interesting that David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party under a Saturn-Neptune opposition, because he is seen by many as the Tories’ answer to Blair, the young saviour of the Party (who will inevitably let them down in the end.)

The Dalai Lama was born under a Saturn-Neptune opposition, and his life from the word go has been devoted to living out the dream/fantasy which his religious tradition (Saturn in the 9th) and the Tibetan people have of him: the god-king. It is amazing he has done so well on it, as this level of expectation would twist most of us right out of shape. Maybe those who brought him up knew what they were doing. I think the Tibetan tradition does have a lot of good stuff in it, but it is also an organised religion, and prone to exactly the same weaknesses as other religions.

Venus Williams, the former world number one women’s tennis player, was born under a Mars/Saturn-Neptune square, and her and her younger sister are well-known for being the products of their father’s ambition. Mars gives the sporting drive and ability, but it is interesting that her reign at the top has been short-lived and erratic, and she is known for pursuing other interests: this suggests to me that Venus has been breaking away from the dream (Neptune) of her father (Saturn).

On 22 May this year, twins were born to a 60-year old woman in New Jersey. I read this in a blog by a lady named Out the Comet's Ass. Now I don’t want to rush in and judge, and only time will tell how wise it is to have kids at such an age. But the astrology doesn’t look entirely promising. The twins have no earth planets (though they do have earth ASC and MC), suggesting there may be a problem about their connection to the earth and to nature, but which their Angles (which are doorways, rather than part of us, unlike the planets) will require them to develop. This interpretation is backed up by a Moon-Saturn conjunction in 12th House Leo, opposite Neptune and Chiron. At worst, this indicates that they are the product of the damaged fantasy (Neptune/Chiron) of a self-centred (Leo) unconscious (12th) Mother (Moon/Saturn). This is a harsh thing to say, but there may well be an element of truth in it. And again we have Saturn-Neptune, the dreams, even fantasies, of the parent, which these twins will be carrying - they'll have to live up to being 'miracle babies', or something like that.

I think it’s natural for parents to have hopes and dreams for their kids, even unrealistic ones, dreams that perhaps compensate for what they haven’t managed to achieve. If you’ve built up a business, you’re probably going to want one of your kids to join it and build it further – and at the same time, you may be jealous of their youth and success, and you may try to undermine them. We’re a bundle of contradictions, with feet of clay (Saturn) and dreaming of the stars (Neptune).

When I was young I was at the receiving end of some pretty powerful and unconscious parental fantasies which, with the Saturn-Neptune opposition currently hitting my Sun-Chiron, I’m doing a further stage of untangling. It can take decades! But I’m not kidding myself that I can decide not to have my own set of fantasies for my 6 year old. I can try to minimise them by being fulfilled in my own life, but beyond that it’s probably just a matter of finding out in 35 years what those fantasies were when he presents me with the bill for his therapist. (Joke)

As always, it’s good to have a bit of myth around these things so we can see the universal pattern that we fit into. In their book ‘The Mythic Journey’, Liz Greene and Juliet Sharman-Burke begin with the myth of Thetis and Achilles, which they subtitle ‘Great Expectations’ – “How parents expect nothing less than everything from their children”.

“Thetis was the great goddess of the sea and ruled over all that moved in its depths. But it was time she married, and Zeus, king of the gods, had received a prophecy that, if Thetis married a god, she would bear a son who would be greater than Zeus himself. Worried about losing his position, Zeus espoused the sea-goddess to a mortal man called Peleus. This mixed marriage was not unsuccessful, and the two settled down relatively comfortably – although Peleus sometimes resented his wife’s supernatural powers, and Thetis sometimes felt she had married beneath her station.

In time, Thetis bore a son, whom she called Achilles. Because he was fathered by a mortal, he was a mortal child, allotted his time on earth by the Fates, as are all mortal beings. But Thetis was not content with this prospect. Being immortal herself, she did not wish to remain eternally young while watching her son grow old and die. So she secretly carried the newborn child to the River Styx, in whose waters lay the gift of immortality. She held the child by one heel and dipped him in the waters, believing thereby that she had made him immortal. But the heel by which she held him remained untouched by the waters of the Styx, and therefore Achilles was vulnerable through this one place.

When he reached adulthood and fought in the Trojan War, Achilles received his death wound through an arrow in the heel. Although Achilles achieved great glory and was remembered forever, Thetis could not cheat the Fates, nor turn that which was human into the stuff of the gods.”

SATURN-NEPTUNE AND THE SELF

Buddhism has what is known as the ‘no-self’ doctrine which, applied to all phenomena, becomes the doctrine of emptiness (of which there are a number of kinds!) It’s easy for all this to become very heady – which some Buddhists can be very prone to – but the basic idea is that our sense of who we are is not fixed and enduring. As astrologers we’re on familiar territory here, because we regularly observe ourselves and others changing in times of major transits. But we only believe it partially: if we feel criticised, for example, we tend to want to defend ourselves, to protect our sense of who we are, instead of looking at the criticism with equanimity, and taking it on or discarding it as we feel appropriate.

So this is the reason for the ‘no-self’ doctrine: as human beings we treat what is a working construct – the self or ego – as something permanent, something that gives us a sense of security in an uncertain universe.

And this easily translates into the interplay between Saturn and Neptune. We do need a sense of self, a sense of ourselves as a centre of experience, but we need to get it right. Too much Neptune, and you’ve got someone who isn’t very present, who is too dreamy, lacks a strong sense of what they think and feel, and cannot achieve practical results; they find it hard to take responsibility for their lives, and may become parasitic and manipulative. Too much Saturn and you have someone who certainly knows what they think and believe, but their self is rigid, it is like a great wall around them, and it tends to be based mainly on their ability to earn money and recognition and respectability, along with a sense of superiority to others who are less ‘successful’. OK, I admit it, I’ve just had an encounter with someone like this, who has Sun-Saturn-Jupiter conjunct in Capricorn, and it was bruising!

So while we’re here on this planet we need an ego, a sense of self. There may be other realities before or after death where we don’t need a sense of self, but I wouldn’t know about that. If consciousness continues after death, it’s quite possible that Saturn as embodiment disappears, and we are just left with Neptune, in which we do not experience ourselves as being at the centre of things, and there is no protective barrier between ourselves and reality. That is the Buddhist view, along with the idea that we cannot handle it, and we flee back to embodied existence. That is where I part company with e.g. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, because I don’t believe that I was born just because I couldn’t handle Reality. I’m on this earth because it’s a beautiful place to be, and I want to fully appreciate that before I die. Nor do I believe I have a ‘purpose’ being here: that seems to me to be a bit of an abstraction, it takes me away from my experience, which is that I do what I do, and I feel very happy about quite a lot of it.

So whether or not anything continues after death, what I do know is that I’m here, and that I need a strong yet flexible sense of myself. I need Saturn in order to feel I’ve arrived, that I’m real, and that I am building and creating myself; but I also need Neptune to let go of all that, not to take it too seriously (“It’s only money,” as I said last night to someone who had lost some), to allow in new experiences and perspectives, and to remember that others, with equal validity, are also centres of experience.

And it’s not just an intellectual exercise in having the right attitude. In a society based on a one-sided Saturn, I think that generous actions, doing stuff for other people purely because you want to (NOT ‘ought to’ – that’s Saturn) helps get the balance right. Because practically speaking, the best way to understand the no-self doctrine is to be unselfish, but not in a self-sacrificing way.

I think a good image for a balanced Saturn-Neptune, and a balanced self, is a cell membrane. It’s tough, it lasts for years, it contains, yet it is flexible and delicate and porous.