Sep 2016
Faith and Doubt

September is upon us. The biggest celestial event of the year, the Saturn-Neptune square, reaches its third and last exactitude on the 9th and 10th.

Coming to a head right now are the issues we’ve been looking at in the Skywatches throughout this year.

Since late 2015 when the square began, the world has been shaken by a struggle between the planet of form (Saturn) and the planet of formlessness (Neptune). It is an existential conundrum that has taken myriad expressions: cold hard fact vs. emotionalism; sense vs. nonsense; doubt vs. faith.

World crises

It has been a globe-rattling year. Fraught issues, one after another, have been crashing in upon the world mind. In the USA, the karma (Saturn) of past negligence (Neptune) was expressed with raw clarity by Flint Michigan’s poisoned water (Neptune), and by the opioid and heroin addiction (Neptune) that hit the headlines as an epidemic requiring a governmental response (Saturn).

And by the hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking sanctuary from war and destitution, who have became a human flood of Biblical proportions (Neptune), their overwhelmed host nations reacting with barbed wire and border walls (Saturn).

Law of Correspondences

If we believe that the outer world is joined at the hip to the inner, it follows that these collective crises can be understood as a mirror of the lessons we are each meant to learn personally.

The group traumas playing out in the news are inextricably connected to our own private ones. Great moral and spiritual questions (Pisces, Sagittarius) are reflecting each other, macrocosm and microcosm. This is the Law of Correspondences at work.

Consider how the humanitarian catastrophe that is the refugee crisis is mirrored in our private lives.

Some of us have been encountering the limits of compassion in a relationship, trying to boundary ourselves in ways that are healthy and appropriate. Some are calling upon the inner strength to take responsibility (Saturn) for our role in others’ suffering (Neptune), as opposed to taking the path of least resistance: becoming over-reactive, unethical, spiritually shut-down.

The specific issues will differ from person to person, depending on where Saturn and Neptune are transiting within your particular chart. But we are all, in some form, juggling yearning and practicality, faith and doubt. If we’re unclear about which departments of our lives are carriers of these lessons, it will probably become clear this month and next.

Not black and white

Keep in mind that these issues defy black-and-white thinking. It may seem at times as if Saturn (the need for order) is right, and Neptune (mob rule, chaos) is wrong. But it is equally likely that the reverse may seem to be true: Saturn, in its guise as tyrannical regimentation, may show up as the enemy, while  Neptune, artistic, free-form and mystically in-tune, seems to be the good guy.

The best way to resolve a planetary square is to view the two combatants as impersonal forces, without saddling them with our human judgments. When we look at Neptune as the principle of inclusiveness — a value-neutral concept — we remember that inclusiveness is appropriate in certain contexts. And the same goes for exclusivity (Saturn).

Each is equally valid, and they each have their chance to predominate in a given situation. How do we know when to emphasize one over the other? We know through the goddess-given intelligence that, when we’re paying attention, clues us in to the situation at hand.

Notes

1) The theory of cosmic parallel is usually expressed as As above, so below: that is, the cycles of the planets in the sky reflect human cycles down here on Earth. Another variant of the law is As within, so without: events in the outside world are mirror images of issues we are dealing with as individuals.

Images:

Artwork of Apple child miners: Eduardo Relero

Photo: The Beatles at Buckingham Palace, 1965