Fallen Mars Meets Fallen Saturn — An Energetic Block with History Behind It

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Monday, everyone! Today we're going to take a look at Mars in the sign of Cancer squaring Saturn in the sign of Aries. Now, Mars Saturn combinations are always really interesting. People get, I think, a little bit worried by them because we have the two traditional malefics getting together in an aspect, but their combination can actually be very constructive.

What's interesting about this particular combination is that both planets are in the traditional signs of their depression or fall. So we're going to talk about that today, a little bit about what that might mean or look like, the timeline for this transit, and I'll give you a list of five things to watch for. But before we get into it, as always, remember to like and subscribe.

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That's a perpetual discount on any subscription that you get with them. So that affiliate code is in the description of the video. All right, when we're looking at achepso, you can see that today, Monday, August 31, Mars is squaring Saturn. Now you would have been feeling this build over the weekend, say the 29th up through the 31st.

And if we take this forward just a little bit, we're going to see that if I drag this out tomorrow, the two planets are exactly square, and then we're going to give them three degrees of separation, and that three degree of separation mark doesn't really occur fully until about Sunday, the end of the week. Let's say Saturday the fifth.

So what you're living with this week is a Mars Saturn square all week long, but today and tomorrow, the 31st and September 1, will be the most intense version of the square as it's most exact. Then give it just a couple of days. Let's say. Friday, September 4, and it's got that two degrees of separation, three by Saturday into Sunday.

So, you know, it'll be fading as the week goes on. What I want to do today, given that Mars is in its fall and Saturn is in its fall, is just talk about what that piece of it might look like, and then we'll get into a list of five things to watch for. It's a very powerful aspect toning our week, so it's good to go into a little bit more depth.

Oh, there's the big arrow. The big arrow is out. Like, what? I want to know your ways. Is it? Is it just random, or do you have a reason for doing it? All right, so here you can see the two coming together, and what's important to note is that Saturn is in the superior position. So Saturn in Aries is setting the table, and Mars is responding.

Another way of putting it would be, for a planet in the superior position, it establishes the prior order of things. It establishes the context in which Mars in Cancer is appearing. So Saturn in Aries can represent frustrations of will or power, or can be about conflicts of authority.

It could be about different kinds of frustration that occur, especially where we feel like we can't gain momentum or forward, or like traction, or we can't gain the footing that we want to gain. The reason for that is that Saturn is—it's a when Saturn is in the sign of Aries, one of the things that happens is the natural ability that Saturn has in, say, a sign like Capricorn, where Mars is exalted, to move forward with determination and slow, steady effort.

Instead, Saturn will often feel frustrated. This is a sign that can have Saturn acting excessively willful or domineering, or can challenge us with respect to you know what we want and how we're trying to go about getting it. Like your ambition is just thwarted. Those are some of the most difficult elements of Saturn in the sign of Aries.

Saturn in the sign of Aries can also speak to serious limitations that we're experiencing: the limits of our own power, the limits of our own youthfulness or vitality, the limits of authority, and confrontations with those things can really help us grow up if we're willing to face things straight on and without any manipulation or denial.

Now, Mars in Cancer, on the other hand, can speak to difficult confrontations that are more emotional in nature, divisions or conflicts within emotionally bonded places like family or home, and so when we put these two planets together, we have a pretty difficult combination. And so, my list of five things to watch for today is really comes straight from the heart of what does it mean when these two planets are in their fall.

I would think, for example, that issues around authority or challenges to something's vitality, or its ability to endure or persist in a healthy manner, or its ability to gain traction and momentum, could have us reacting in a very emotional manner. That would be classic Saturn in Aries kind of Mars and Cancer archetypes.

But what I'm going to do now is give you a list of five things to watch for that are born of the combination of these two planets. They're in no particular order, but my hope is that you'll be able to recognize something of your own experience within these dynamics, and that this helps you process and work through things in a more constructive manner.

Number one, when these two planets get together in any combination—square, opposition, conjunction—it is normal to feel disappointed and frustrated. The sense that I'm moving in a familiar, patterned way toward a result that is expected if I simply give the right amount of time, energy, attention, and effort can be deeply frustrated.

In other words, it's if you're used to getting something done in three hours by just simply following a set of procedures that you're used to following. A transit like this can have you frustrated because it's taking longer, more is required, things are breaking down, blockages arise, and suddenly something that you're used to achieving within a certain time frame or through a certain set of actions becomes more elaborate.

You feel blocked, you feel frustrated, and you have to work around what suddenly becomes a series of obstacles. This is the classic. I don't know if you guys remember this. When I was a kid, there was a book, and I think they've even turned it into a movie now. I've certainly read it to my kids.

I don't think they've seen the movie, but it's called Alexander. How does it go? Alexandra and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It's Super Mars Saturn. The whole thing. When one thing after another after another after another just keeps snowballing into difficulties, and you have to just persist.

But as you persist, you're sort of like wringing your hands, being like, "What the fuck is going on? Why does it feel like there's a mountain of difficult encounters or obstacles just coming up and getting in the way, and it can feel almost unfair. And this is where the frustration comes in, because one frustration, two frustrations. Okay, I can deal with it.

But after the fourth or fifth, I start to feel like something's a little unfair. I start to feel like the universe is picking on me. It's not the case. The universe isn't picking on us, but there might be a sense of being tested, or your patience, or your mettle being tested in some way. How you respond to that is everything.

Because Mars Saturn can actually persevere and get through things with stick-to-itiveness, as long as you don't sort of throw your hands up, and so poor me, poor me. This is the ultimate survivor transit. Take out Pluto from the modern outer planets, and the ancient version of Pluto's survival impulse or instinct is Mars Saturn.

Way prior to Pluto saying, you know, die, survive, and be reborn is Mars Saturn saying persist, persist, persist. So remember, that's good advice right now. If you're feeling like the list of hardships is stacking, remember too that astrology. There's always something in the sky with astrology. If you listen to astrology regularly, you shouldn't be seeking an end to all astrological transits, right?

Because they just keep coming, the sky just keeps moving. We're on a—we're inside of a celestial merry-go-round of moving archetypal patterns. There is no end to this. So, what these transits can do—that's truly remarkable—is remind us that there is no end to time when you're when you're in it.

You know, the only end to time is when your consciousness moves outside of it into a timeless and eternal dimension, which is why all of these ancient traditions were very vocal about spirituality and mysticism, spiritual practice, meditation, because timelessness has to be a—it's a consciousness that's cultivated when you're within time.

So, what can a Mars Saturn aspect do? It can frustrate us in time repeatedly, but it can also help us develop a persistence born out of an appreciation for timelessness. This too shall pass becomes a value that, if you really believe it, is put to the test, and then gets the chance to see it enacted.

Well, I persevered. It sucked, but I am. I now have more of a capacity to live with and work through difficult things than I had before. That's timelessness being cultivated through the burn. Now, disappointments can also come up. Just garden variety shucks, you know, like oh shit, that didn't work.

So when disappointments come up. How do we respond? Do we keep ourselves positive? Do we let it roll off from us? Do we have maybe a little bit of space for the disappointment? It's not probably completely healthy to ignore our feelings when we're disappointed, but can we let it roll off from us and keep going?

Innovation is a very Mars Saturn dynamic in so far as innovation is born out of necessity. This failed. This didn't work. This is stuck. This is blocked. So what do I come up with? And what I come up with can actually be better in some cases than the original plan that isn't working or that's being frustrated.

If I don't allow my imagination to collapse under the burden of time space limitations. If I see them, it's like whatever that whoever that was, you know, maybe it was Coltrane or Miles Davis or someone said something like, "There's no wrong note in jazz. It just depends on what you follow it with."

I think it was something like that. Well, we get a chance to be real jazzy right now. Number two, let's talk about family schisms. When Saturn in Aries comes up in a square to Mars in Cancer, in particular, you guys like this mug? Look at this mug. It's pretty cute. Seriously, I can't. My daughter got this mug, and yeah, it's real stupid, but it's cute.

Anyway, so family schisms: Saturn and Mars, together with Mars in its fall in Cancer, can bring up sharp divisions within families. This is where a family member cuts off another family member, maybe legitimately, or maybe out of you know impulse that's not so healthy. This is where irreparable damage is having to be looked at, and is it possible that somehow forgiveness is achievable?

These two planets can also bring up the fault lines in families or close bonded living environments where a stress or attention needs to change. For example, let's just say you're living with a dog. This is completely fictional. Let's say you're living with a dog who is having regressive behavior, and everyone's anger is going over the top.

And all of a sudden, you're like, you know what? We stopped with some of our training efforts too early. He's still a puppy. We need to get back to that, or we are all going to. This is going to drive a wedge between us because we're all angry and frustrated by the dog's behavior. Maybe that dog keeps eating off the counters. Maybe you need a plan.

And I'm just kidding. I'm talking about Thor, and he's real sweet, you know. So rather than us all getting mad about it and at each other, we need something we can all do. Like, what's the protocol if we're not in the room? Then we need to make sure the counters are all cleared, so there's nothing that he could be tempted by.

It's simple things like that. In other words, where can the family come up with a structure and a plan and a way of dealing with something so that a common stressor doesn't drive divisions more deeply. You know what I mean? What I mean. Like another example of this would be if you're in the middle of moving.

You know how stressful it is when you're moving, and if you have a good plan for how you're moving as a family, rather than everyone unpacking in different directions and different orders, and then everyone's feeling overwhelmed emotionally. Our family when we have moved, and of course the kids were really little the last time we moved was going on six years ago now.

But every time we've ever moved, I think the message has been: let's coordinate our efforts here. Because if everyone's going off and doing something different, and also feeling frustrated because moving is stressful, we're more likely to be at each other's throats. So, plans for how to coordinate stressful times in families is a very Mars Saturn, given the signs of Mars and Cancer here, especially.

But Mars and Saturn in these two signs can also be about long-standing emotional rifts or divisions or conflicts, or again, like even emotional and karmic fault lines in family units or living spaces, and those will get intensified right now, brought up, and you have to confront them and work through them.

Number three on my list would be concentrated effort and perseverance. I once heard one of my colleagues, Jen Zart, talk about Mars Saturn. She called it a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker is a really good way of talking about Mars Saturn. There was a long-standing Mars Saturn aspect years ago now, and I want to say it was like the summer of 2014 or 15.

Anyway, and I was watching, oh my God, what is it called? The Band of Brothers, which is about World War II. I don't know if you guys remember this series. It's really old. It was on HBO, I think. And I was really curious about it because I, you know, the multiple family members in my wife's side and my side that fought in World War Two.

And I wanted to learn more about it. I had read in high school. I had read the Greatest Generation. Remember that old book by Tom Brokaw? I don't know. I'm sure it's like hyperbole. There's probably some more accurate historical account written. It was sort of like lionizing the whole generation or whatever.

But Saving Private Ryan had come out. I got real interested in all of this, and I think mostly I got interested in it because I was realizing at the time when I was 18 that like shit, this age, you know, like people my age were just like running into the Battle of the Bulge or whatever. So it was kind of like it was putting things into perspective for me.

Well, I watched Band of Brothers while Mars and Saturn were square. I binge watched the whole thing. I couldn't stop watching it, and I realized the amount of stress and trauma and violence and conflict and pressure was so great, Right, and all of a sudden, it was like I recognize that I'm watching this under an aspect in Mars Saturn that mirrors what these young men were facing on an epic scale.

And obviously, anyone who goes to war, I guess on some level, I'm not trying to make it about one side or whatever. It's just yeah, like people died and fought in these horrific conditions. And then I started thinking, well, I'll probably never go to war, you know. So what does that look like for me? Like, is there any part of me that can access that?

And I know this is going to sound so dumb. It really is because the only thing I could think of was the pressure of becoming a new dad, like being a new dad, and of having to operate, get all of my work done in a day with a you know like really screamy baby. At least our oldest was for the first year of her life.

Um, I know that's so stupid, right? Because it's nothing like war. But that was the only thing I could think of. Was like, how hard is it to get work done when I'm used to just being able to do my own thing? But now I've got the constraints of like both my wife and I work. We're taking care of her. We work from home.

We're taking care of our child. We're bringing her to the yoga studio. We're doing all of this stuff, and it just felt like everything was under pressure because while she was sleeping, I had to get as much done as possible before the bomb went off, metaphorically. And a lot of that was all of those things, at any rate, help me really grasp Mars Saturn.

When you are under the pressure of a deadline, when you're in a pressure cooker of having a new baby, and you have very little time to get something done before the baby cries again, and you have like maybe like my wife would talk about like not even having enough time to like shower or go to the bathroom. You know what I mean.

And yet you have to try to operate in that pressure and still stay sort of composed mentally and emotionally. I think a lot of new parents know what I'm talking about. Some people do this a lot better than others. I'm probably making myself look like a real jerk because it's like some people are like, "Come on, man!"

But where there needs to be any kind of concentrated effort, perseverance—you got to make it through something—and the pressure can actually produce an incredible result through the effort, the determination, the timeline, the pressure crunch. That's Mars Saturn. All right. Well, hopefully that painted. That was hopefully like an evocative side path that we just went down.

Let's go to number four, which is rigidity and flexibility. So the other thing that can happen with Mars Saturn, because Mars is in a water sign and can be quite rigid, Mars can in its own right, and of course Saturn in Aries can be quite rigid, but sometimes doesn't have the necessary energy to back itself up.

Okay, have you ever? This is a funny, another funny parenting moment. There are times where I'm really trying to be principled and boundary and structured with our kids, and then you reach this point where you're just like, I can't hold this boundary up anyway. I think it's invisible. Everything is actually chaos. We're floating in space.

What the fuck does anything mean? And you're thinking all of this in your head, and you're like, "Yeah, I don't care. Just do it. Everything is lost. I'm getting sucked into a black hole, and so are you. Nothing matters. Throw your principles out the door." So the what's interesting is how intensely rigidity and flexibility can polarize.

Boundaryless. Who cares? Let it go. You know, just I might as well just start drooling, and then Saturn in Aries, maybe on the other hand, being like, "No, at all costs, we must keep this up. Like, really, you sound like an authoritarian dickhole. What are you doing?" And then Mars is like, "Come on, let's have a little bit greater ease and flow in the watery sign of Cancer."

The point is that the two can really get into it with each other. Are we going to be principled? Are we going to be boundaryless? Are we going to be flowing through conflict? Are we going to be insisting on some kind of principled clash of wills here? What's going on? How are we handling it? So where you feel those two things stepping up in you. Notice them this week.

And really, the best they can do together is inform one another. Okay, a completely flat effort with no boundaries, discipline, or principles at play—that's just sort of lazy—is probably not great. But also, some flexibility, some fluidity, some grace, some emotional intelligence is necessary. All right. Last but not least, standing alone.

These two planets have a way of, like, in your family, you might recognize that you believe something, stand for something, say something that sets you apart and maybe puts you out of the group. These two planets can be ruggedly individualistic when they come together, and can emphasize, especially with Mars in Cancer, that you're different from other people, and that might be painful emotionally.

It can mean that you need to take a stand, or defend, or advocate for something, but that may also put you on the outside looking in. There can be combinations of, I need to do this, I have to do this for me, but someone else isn't going to understand it, even if I don't mean anyone harm or I, there's no antagonism in what I want to do.

It's inevitable that someone's going to perceive it that way. How do I proceed? So standing alone, standing apart, standing up for something, advocating, defending, guarding something, but maybe to the detriment of a sense of belonging or cohesion emotionally—that's potential. Now, what you would want to watch for would be unnecessarily burning bridges or antagonizing or power struggles or conflicts that really aren't necessary.

But that are happening because of a lack of flexibility, or because of or or let's avoid conflict at all costs because of a lack of principle that I probably really do need to stick to, because if I don't, the chances are that I will end up harming myself in some way. So you got to be aware of all these things.

But as you're going through this week, just notice where that tension and that feeling of the pressure cooker is existing for you, especially today and tomorrow. Well, I hope that this was fun and that you got some good insights. Always, the content is made for students of astrology and livers of the astrology.

Hopefully, that intersects for most of us. But I always want you to learn something about the archetypes, and have fun, and try to. I try to always try to relate it to real life things. Which means if you have a story or anything that relates these transits to what you're experiencing, toss it in the comments section.

It's always good to hear from you guys. Have a great day. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.