The Beginning of a New Saturn–Neptune Era

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we are going to continue our exploration of Saturn's entrance into Pisces by looking at the Saturn-Neptune dynamic. Saturn is entering the sign of Pisces as Neptune is also finishing up its long journey through the sign of Pisces.

The two will be copresent. It's like they're both at the same party in the same house. They are both present in the same astrological temple of the fish. And they will be there traveling together through that sign until they both change into Aries, where they finally meet. But this means that we are officially entering into a Saturn-Neptune era; it's going to last a long time because of that transition. They're copresent; they moved together into Aries, and they spent a long time together copresent in Aries.

So what I want to do is I want to familiarize some of you with Richard Tarnas, If you don't already know his work, and with something that he wrote on Saturn-Neptune eras. So this is like a little reading hour today. And then I'm going to offer some commentary as we go along, just pause and reflect on some of what he's writing and my experience with Saturn-Neptune dynamics and in transit and birth chart work. So that is our plan for today. Don't forget, as always, to like, subscribe, and share your comments. It really helps the channel to grow. And if you want, you can find a transcript of any of my daily talks on the website afterward nightlight astrology.com.

So let's take a look at the real-time clock so that you can see exactly what we're talking about here. So, here we are; Saturn has entered the sign of Pisces and is now copresent with Neptune. So watch how this works. The two planets are now in the same house, which means they are officially commingling their archetypal qualities together, even if they're not conjoined by degree. Most people don't know this, but in ancient astrology, conjunctions were present simply by being in the same house. House was the original name for a sign.

So they are in the same place in the same astrological temple, and they are therefore commingling their qualities together way before the conjunction ever occurs. So this copresence begins in March of 2023. And look at this, we're getting close to their conjunction by degree, and it is May of 2025. So we have two plus years of them being copresent before they even get together.

Then they both pull into the sign of Aries, where they are copresent again. But then watch what happens. We're going to move this along, and you're going to see Neptune retrograde and Saturn retrograde before they actually get together. So then we take this forward a little bit more Saturn is going to retrograde back into Pisces, and we're gonna see Neptune retrograde back into Pisces, and they are present together again; this is in the fall of 2025. And then they're coming together, and they finally get together between the mid to late part of February 2026.

If you take it beyond that, then we have the two planets moving along, and their conjunction happens that winter of 2026. Their copresence is there for a long, long time. Saturn does not move into Taurus for the first time, where you finally get them out of the same sign until April of 2028. This means we have around five years of this planetary copresence. Now that might not seem like it for a lot of people; it's like you might think, Oh well, they're conjunction; that's what matters. But again, their copresence matters a great deal to we're entering into a five-year Saturn-Neptune era.

So what I want to do is I want to read you a passage, one of my favorite passages ever written on the Saturn-Neptune dynamic that comes from one of the great legendary books on astrology in the modern era. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New Worldview by Richard Tarnas. If you haven't read this, it is brilliant. Richard's daughter Becca has taught for my speaker series programs many times, and I've had the chance to attend several of Richard's workshops on the West Coast. And he, you know, he is just top shelf amazing. So I'm going to read you a passage, and as I go, I'm going to pause and just offer my little insights. And that will be our exercise for today because I don't think I could possibly say it better than he does and to introduce you all to the era we're entering before I offer some of my own insights, which I will do many times over the course of the next five years. I want to let the master say it, So this comes from around page 470, And Cosmos and Psyche, in case you want to follow along. We're going to read through it, and as I go, I will pause and just offer some reflections.

A characteristic motif of Saturn-Neptune eras is a heightened tension and dialectic between ideals, hopes, and beliefs on the one hand and the hard realities of life on the other. The same complex can express itself in the form of heightened conflicts between religion and secularism, belief and facts, faith-based and reality-based, and in the United States, red states and blue states. Each side perceiving the other to be living in a state of delusion, self deception. Intensified secular skepticism toward religious beliefs of any kind tends to be constellated at the same time as an intensified commitment to conservative religiosity, which often takes the form of anti-scientific biblical literalism, God versus science, the conflict between creationism and evolution as a characteristic expression of this archetypal polarity as in the case of the Scopes trial during the Saturn-Neptune square of 1925, and of Darwin himself born during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1809.

Sensitivity to the oppressive and constraining aspects of religious belief tends to be heightened, bringing forth sharp criticism of religion as mere myth, superstitious nonsense, naive fantasy, the opium of the people, in the words of Marx, born during the Saturn-Neptune square that followed Darwin's conjunction, a psychologically motivated illusion in the view of Freud born during the Saturn-Neptune square exactly one cycle later. Issues surrounding skepticism generally, the discernment of truth and illusion, and the confronting of deception and delusion frequently emerge.

So for me, this is going to be a particularly interesting period, for example, for the future of the astrological industry. I wonder what kinds of challenges we may face from the scientific establishment or what kinds of critiques or attacks we might see directed toward religious or spiritual groups or communities in general, as well as what kind of extreme behaviors or fanatical examples of religion and spirituality or new age groups that may emerge and sort of provoke such attacks as well.

There is also a tendency during Saturn-Neptune eras to experience a subtle but pervasive darkening of the collective consciousness. Sometimes as a diffuse and difficult-to-diagnose social malaise, and other times, it's a direct response to deeply discouraging or tragic events. Reflecting the complex in its most intense form, such eras are frequently marked by collective experiences of tragic loss, the defeat of ideals and aspirations the death of a dream, which are accompanied by a sense of profound sorrow.

The current Saturn-Neptune opposition first reached the 15-degree range in November 2004. The bitter disappointment and vast sadness that overcame half the US population and much of the rest of the world as a result of Bush's re-election, just as the alignment reached the 15-degree threshold, is highly characteristic of the Saturn-Neptune complex. The pervading sense that an ideal had been lost took many forms, the loss of the ideal image of what the United States had what's once represented, both to its citizens and to the world, the defeat of the widespread hope for a change in the world's leadership at a critical time in history. The sense of futility felt after so much work on behalf of that cause, the loss of faith in the democratic process, lingering doubts about the truthfulness of the vote count, and legitimacy of the election. Highly characteristics of the Saturn-Neptune complex with a pervasive experience of discouragement and depression, resignation, pessimism, despair, and dazed disorientation that descended on many in the following weeks and months like an immense dark cloud.

The same complex was visible even more acutely one month later in the wake of the tsunami in Asia with its tidal wave of grief, inconsolable loss, anguish, and mass rituals of mourning. Here to were other characteristics Saturn-Neptune themes death caused by water, the ocean as a source of suffering and loss, contamination of water, waterborne and infectious diseases, and numberless haunting images of death and sorrow transmitted throughout the world and permeating the collective consciousness.

Now I know that sounds dark. But it's important to understand that Saturn-Neptune has long been associated with existentialism, for example, and with the kind of Buddhist bottom line of suffering, impermanence, and grief as realities that one has to encounter and come to terms with on route to you know, any kind of spiritual transformation that Saturn-Neptune as the Saturn-Neptune alignment move closer and orb in the late summer of 2005.

Virtually all these themes dramatically repeated themselves in the catastrophic flooding that overwhelmed New Orleans after the Gulf Coast Hurricane Katrina. Many characteristic motifs of the Saturn-Neptune complex pervaded the event and its aftermath, death, and disaster through water. Are the floodwaters breaching the protective levees, the stream of globally televised images of suffering and death, the drowning of a city and legacy that represented the soul of much of American culture, floating corpses, the contaminated and diseased water, the widespread dehydration, the lack of critical drugs, the countless medical crises, the powerless hospitals and nursing homes, the strange paralysis of the government, the collective sense of hopelessness and despair. The steady focus on the suffering of the poor, the abandoned, the sick and the frail, the very old and very young, the dying, the homeless, and the grieving.

Now again, I know that that's all pretty heavier, like, geez, thanks. Thanks, Adam. Thanks for the warm and rosy sentiments in the middle of this week. But it's important to understand that there is the flooding of structures that we think protect us from the reality of impermanence and suffering, the reality of our insignificance. These events are reminders of suffering and impermanence that are both humbling but also eventually reawakening of our spirituality and the need for deeper structures in the psyche that can hold space for the realities of impermanence that define the material world.

A comparison of the central crises of the two consecutive Saturn oppositions, first with Pluto and then Neptune, that have marked this first decade of the 21st century is instructive. For example, Saturn, opposition's first to Pluto, then with Neptune, the fiery Hill and ashes of Ground Zero in New York on September 11, followed by the shock and awe destruction of the Iraq invasion during the Saturn-Pluto alignment stand in sharp contrast with the tragic water nightmares of the Asian tsunami and New Orleans flood during the Saturn-Neptune alignment.

The difference in the collective emotional responses of the two crises is striking as well. The intensified power struggle conservative empowerment, grave determination armored security, and mutually demonizing hostility during Saturn-Pluto alignment compared with the widespread sense of diffuse helplessness, disillusionment, and despair, bitter disappointment with the government's failure and negligence, and private outpourings of compassion, prayer sacrifice and aid during Saturn-Neptune.

So there's much more of a sense of, like, for example, the overwhelming power of nature. During the Saturn-Neptune alignments, Saturn-Neptune alignments have this; there's the sense of being overwhelmed by forces that are bigger or out of our control, bigger than our control or out of our control. As well as the sense of the kind of compassion, prayer, and spirit of collective grieving and collective outpourings of support. I mean, it's actually incredible how Saturn-Neptune dynamics tend to bring into our lives groups or people that somehow serve to support and prop things up when they're falling apart.

It's a transit of great humanitarian aid and all the best things of the human spirit that can come together in times when we need to pull together, and Saturn-Neptune can be a part of that. But it's also there's this feeling of helplessness and overwhelm that is very, very common for Saturn in Pisces we talked about yesterday, but also Saturn copresent with Neptune. Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis during the Saturn-Pluto period, the focus of collective judgment and division, Saturn was on power, violence, terrorism, and war Pluto, both in the United States and abroad.

The focus of collective judgment and division in the aftermath of the 2005 crisis during the Saturn-Neptune period was on empathy and the failure of empathy. Unsystematic negligence, the acute as well as chronic lack of care for the poor, the disadvantaged, the narcissistic bubble enclosing the current US leadership and its policies, and the immense human cost of that blindness and insensitivity.

With the kind of precision of symmetry and aesthetic coherence, the reactionary structures that were empowered by fiery events and ruthless violence in the earlier period Saturn-Pluto were now weakened or dissolved by watery events and compassionate concern. So they're very different Saturn-Pluto versus Saturn-Neptune dynamics. As often occurs during Saturn-Neptune alignments, the hidden shadows of past actions and policies become visible, haunting the present.

While only an extensive historical overview of the Saturn-Neptune cycle could give the reader an adequate basis for discerning the full range of correlations that will be relevant for understanding the current alignment, it is worth mentioning here that one of the most frequent themes historically has been a widespread sense of discontent and loss of faith pervading the social and political atmosphere, as in the sustained crisis of confidence of 1978 and 79 during the Saturn-Neptune square that occurred in the later years of the Carter administration.

In wartime, Saturn-Neptune alignments often coincide with the later stages of a war when a collective sense of physical and spiritual exhaustion, disillusionment, and low morale often on both sides is dominant, as happened at the end of World War One, World War Two, Vietnam and the Cold War and he lists all of the different Saturn-Neptune alignments that occurred during the end of those different wars.

Virtually the entire American Civil War was fought during the Saturn-Neptune opposition of 1861 to 65; the sense of being caught in a futile and endless quagmire is often felt invoiced, as in the current case of the Iraq war between 2004 and 05 to the above list can be added the Korean War, most of which was fought during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1951 to 53 and he goes on and talks quite a bit about Saturn-Neptune and that era. I'm going to skip past that.

Frequently seen on the spiritual level during Saturn-Neptune eras, our dark nights of the soul, and severe challenges to religious faith, such as Nietzsche his announcement of the death of God during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 81 to 82 or John Lennon's song God in the late 70s. God has a concept by which we measure our pain, as well as his bitter postmortem for the 1960s during that same 1970 to 73 Saturn-Neptune alignment quote; the dream is over.

Often individuals during these periods questioned the existence of an all-loving God who would permit tragic events and vast human suffering, as many voiced after the tsunami in Asia in the winter of 2004 and 05, or as countless people experienced in 1943 to 45 during the greatest period of horror and anguish in the concentration camps; also Saturn-Neptune. A more particular form of this collective tragedy took place during the Saturn-Neptune square in 1963, with worldwide grief and mass ritual mourning after the assassination of John Kennedy. And an equally strong expression of the Saturn-Neptune archetypes in combination is the impulsive stain, faith, and hope in the darkness.

That's a really important point here that while there is the sense of collective tragedy and suffering and darkness and loss or challenge to faith, there is also the sense of the need to remain stubbornly devoted to things that we believe in. As in it doesn't matter if the government is failing to provide provisions, we'll go there ourselves, we'll do it. Martin Luther King Junior's courageous, inspired I Have a Dream speech before the Lincoln Memorial came in 1963 during the same Saturn-Neptune alignment or John Lennon's influential song, imagine during the following one in 1971. So you see, there's a sense of the loss of hope and faith, but also it's those exact kinds of events, the collective suffering, the sense of hopelessness and overwhelm, that provide us with the sense that we must persevere; we must imagine, we must keep the faith, light a candle, help your neighbor, et cetera.

Paradoxically, as we have often seen with other cycles, such periods tend to coincide with collective expressions of opposite sides of the same complex loss of faith and disillusionment but also a forging of deeper faith in the face of harsh or tragic realities. The latter response can take many forms of search to discover a foundation of hope in a greater though not yet visible reality, an inward turning withdrawal from the world to contact inner spiritual resources and ideals, a strengthened commitment to religious traditions, a turning to spiritual discipline in practice, ritual prayer and meditation.

The same archetypal complex can also constellate an individual or collective impulse to engage the world in a manner that is both spiritual and pragmatic, to devote oneself to overcoming the disparity between the ideal and the actual through service and spiritually informed actions. Here the synthesis of Saturn-Neptune has expressed through the strenuous effort to embody spiritual values and compassionate ideals by enacting them within the concrete realities and challenges of the human community.

A call for service and sacrifice is strongly felt. The Dalai Lama, who was born with Saturn opposite Neptune, is a paradigmatic example of this potential expression of the complex. Frequently the experience or witness of suffering serves to dissolve rigid boundaries and past enmities and to call forth united and compassionate healing impulses, as was visible, for example, in many instances in the wake of the tsunami.

So as with many Saturn-Pluto hard aspects, Saturn-Neptune periods generally present a significant challenge to the collective spirit of an age. And he goes on for several more pages, but I just wanted to give you a feel because that is one of the most masterful things ever written about the collective dimension of Saturn-Neptune alignments, whether it's the conjunction square opposition; Richard Tarnas unpacks it and from an archetypal and historical level just better than anyone.

So I want all of us to, you know, you can look at that whole sign house and your birth chart to get a feel for where the Saturn-Neptune dynamic is unfolding. For example, it's unfolding in my 11th house; I suspect that the grief and loss overwhelm, you know, the sense of threat, the tragic, could be something that we look at in the broader in my chart, like I'm looking at it and saying, Well, maybe it's going to have its presence within the world of, you know, the communities that I'm a part of astrological, spiritual, religious, etc.

Or among friends, among colleagues, you know, and you can look at that whole sign house to get a feel for where it's gonna land. I certainly don't want it to sound like, well, this is just one of those you're screwed transits, but you know, maybe you'll get to pray because of it. Something like that. A song like Imagine doesn't come from like; it is usually like that song was born during a Saturn-Neptune period. Imagine there's no heaven, you know, No, hell below us. Right? There's, there is a sense in these periods of the dissolving of rigid boundaries and dualities that you can't get to.

You can't get to the need for that dissolution, that letting go and not surrendering. Until you're, you reach a breaking point; you reach a point where the structures are flooded and the levee breaks. And the spirit of grief and loss and suffering and impermanence are things that we love to mention. You know, in passing, when we're having a rough day, you know, like memes, and we all have ways of calling on these insights when we're dealing with mundane stuff that we feel like we're being eaten alive by.

But it's different when we face collective tragedies. And we have to look deeply into the reality of nature. And the darker and more painful aspects of what it means to be alive. And that the sense of futility and the deep doubt and despair that we can face. But it's only when we face those things, paradoxically, that we find there's a way in which our faith is deepened. I mentioned in Saturn entering Pisces a talk that I did on that yesterday that that transit can coincide with a sense of unknowing and uncertainty loss or lack of faith, but contentment can come in its place. Well, I don't know. But I'm content not to know.

Well, I don't know what to do with the suffering, but I know that I can help, I know that I can heal, I know that I can show compassion, I know that I can lend my resources, my heart, my ears. I don't know anything beyond that. But there's something about that just, it brings us back home, you know, it brings us back home to what matters. So there's a weird way in which getting flooded by Saturn and Neptune over five years. And all the, you know, some of the deep collective tears, the sort of valley of tears that Saturn-Neptune points to.

It's only through the re-examination of those periods, historically, that we come back to how simple spirituality living a spiritual life can be, how basic and how it does not need to be rooted in our certainties or our heroic overcoming of challenges or our sense of having learned or mastered lessons. It can be simply those moments that just life just brings us to our knees sometimes. And all of a sudden, things get really simple from that point of view and sometimes profoundly beautiful. I remember this is a stupid story, but I'll end with this. I mean, I guess it just comes to my mind.

I remember I was in graduate school when the tsunami happened. And there was an exchange like I lived in student housing where there were exchange families, and the people that were living near me, they wanted to tune in. I don't know if they had family or whatever. But they would come by and say, can we see the news? Can we watch your TV because they didn't have a television. And this was Saturn-Neptune. And I remember feeling so helpless to do anything. I didn't have any money; I was broke, and my neighbor kept coming over, wanting to watch the news. So I just decided to give him my TV. I was like, Well, you just like, Would you like to have this? I don't use it. And I didn't, and I was so busy studying, and I was at that time, I was a little bit more of a monk. I was writing all the time and reading and stuff like that.

I just remember the look on his face. It was just, like, totally illuminated, like, oh my god, are you kidding me? I look back now, and I think, you know, that was just it was a simple moment. But it was a seating moment for, I think, in that moment, this spontaneous act of compassion and kindness born out of the feeling of frustration; there's nothing I can do about any of this. It did something for me. And I think that's how Saturn-Neptune alignments can be. I'm focusing on some of the heavier dimensions of Saturn-Neptune, but we can't forget that Saturn-Neptune is also about what are the practical things I can do in this world to somehow embody these higher ideals that I want to live my life by. How can I embody my faith? How can I make my faith real? How can I make my spirituality more of a lived, practical thing?

Simple, you know, it can be simple things that get that rolling because a lot of us may find that some of these big historical movements, or something we're simply watching on the news and the way that these things, these Neptune-Saturn combinations show up personally are very different. So we will be exploring some of the ways I think that Saturn-Neptune combinations tend to show up in our personal lives and psychology and a different episode, but I wanted to give you a feel for the historical archetypal and collective dimensions of the transit today through that great passage.

I recommend you go read it again. It comes from Cosmo and Psyche by Richard Tarnas. Started on a bit page 475 I remember correctly. So anyway, that's what I've got for today. I would love to hear your thoughts and reflections. If you were born with a Saturn-Neptune dynamic in your chart. Tell us your story. What has it been like to live with that? Tell us the best and worst of it. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Share your comments. Tell us how things are going. Transcripts are always found after I give my talks on the website nightlightastrology.com Alright, that's all we've got for today. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.