The Saturn Return is one of the most talked-about transits in astrology. It is known as the time when the chickens come home to roost, responsibility-wise. Here comes adulthood, ready or not! Provided that we live at least thirty years, all of us will experience a Saturn Return. The question is whether we will step over this threshold with an attitude of acceptance, or kicking and screaming.
When it comes to isolating key themes of group psychology, astrologers find Saturn’s neat three-decades-long cycle a handy generational marker. Whatever sign the planet is to be found in your chart suggests a collective mandate shared by everybody in your immediate age range.
Moreover, it shows the collective mandate you share with other generations with Saturn in that sign. It reveals the compulsions, worries and potential areas of mastery that we harbor in common with those of the previous generation who have that same Saturn placement. And if we are old enough to have had our second Saturn Return (which hits at around age 58), looking carefully at the generation born after ours will reveal fears and predispositions that uncannily mirror our own. If a child born when her mother was around 29 feels no other kindred-spirit-hood with her mom than a similar penchant for uptightness, we can thank that shared Saturn in Virgo.
The Second Saturn Return
Identifying the impeccable potentials of this placement should be the first order of business for the massive numbers of baby boomers with natal Saturn in Virgo. There is no better time; this group is feeling the planet acutely right now.
An uptightness about details is just a symptom of this placement, designed to get our attention. Though it is true that one of Saturn’s jobs is to serve as a holding tank for our neuroses, contrary to popular astrological opinion this is not the primary reason for the planet’s existence.When used with awareness, Saturn in Virgo bestows an unerring capacity to spot phoniness, a sensitivity to craft and methodology, an ability to diagnose ailments and problems, and myriad other skills that are so plain-and-simplyuseful that they are often taken for granted.
Self-awareness seekers will want to use their second Saturn Return more profitably than they used their first (and when you hear us quoting the old saw, “Youth is wasted on the young”, you know we are thinking of ourselves at 29). To this end it is enlightening to examine these traits not just in ourselves but also in the young adults in our lives who are having their first Saturn return now. The 28-to-30-year-olds are our mirror.
Both generations share a compunction for detail, a hyper-curiosity about health practices both arcane and mundane, a love-hate relationship with work.
These issues will be expressed in very different ways from generation to generation (because, of course, all of the other planets that make up the chart will be in different placements. Saturn’s is only one of more than ten cycles that delineate an individual’s profile.) But the one similarity you can be sure of is that for the natives in question these issues will be tinged with a fear of making mistakes (not making mistakes: a fear of making mistakes).
The Saturn-Opposite-Saturn Transit
In last month’s Skywatch we discussed Saturn’s grand entry into Virgo in terms of its meaning for the whole population. But from a global perspective, of particular interest is what this transit will mean for the generation whose natal Saturns are being opposedby transiting Saturn right now. These individuals, just entering their forties, are experiencing the hemispheric apex of the Saturn cycle. The reason astrologers are watching them like a hawk is because of the nature of the configuration that ruled the skies under which they were born.
The Other Shoe Dropping
For several years during the mid-sixties Uranus and Pluto were conjunct in Virgo: these two powerful, slow-moving planets were making a rare overlap in the sky. And during 1965 and ’66, Saturn was exactly opposed to them. 1 This was the configuration that made the sixties The Sixties. The planet of revolution (Uranus) and the planet of complete social overhaul (Pluto) were joined together in a pitched battle with the planet of conventional mores (Saturn). It is not hard to see how this pattern resulted in what came to be known as the counter-culture. The intensity of the opposition manifested in extreme societal disruptions – destroying unquestioned social mores (e.g. sexual freedom), revolutionizing sacrosanct institutions (e.g. questioning the nuclear family) and unleashing massive bursts of collective and individual forms of creativity (e.g. radical art, politics and psychology). Suddenly “the personal” (Uranus) became “the political” (Pluto) and vice versa. The world has never been the same.
The children born under those turbulent heavens retain these energies in their blood. All the drama that made the Viet Nam war years broil with foment — the cultural polarization, the capacity for breakthrough, the wholesale shedding of conventional ways of thinking – is latent in this generation on a cellular level. For many in this age group, the drama has remained covert, simmering within them. Now it is likely to explode overtly, en masse.
For society as a whole, now that Saturn has rotated around to the part of the zodiac where its nemesis planets were located during the conflagrant years of hippies and flag-burnings and consciousness movements worldwide, a circle is being completed. The manic partisanship that we are seeing right now, every day, in this current war-torn period, represents the other shoe dropping.
As Saturn moves through Virgo we will be seeing The Sixties in a post-millennial mirror.
Taking Responsibility for Power
Those souls born in 1965 and ‘66 will be under the hottest part of the spotlight. TheseGen X’ers (the term is inexact, but we will use it for convenience in this specific astrological context), no longer young but not yet old, are going to have to come to grips with the forces that make them the most groundbreaking generation alive today. Their natal Pluto/Uranus conjunctions are in Saturn’s cross hairs.
Across the demographic spectrum, Saturn will be forcing all of us — to a greater or lesser extent — to take personal responsibility for our use of the most powerful and controversial planets in the chart. Whether Pluto and Uranus have been repressed via internal complexes, or manifest externally and impersonally (the giveaway here is a fanatical concern about some social issue), the transit will demand that we get more conscious about whatever it is that has been pushing our buttons.
Those now around 40 years old will be caught in a moment of truth: they will be the whole world’s role models. The planet of karma (Saturn) will confront their natal potential for transformation and demand that it be pressed into service. 2
Unconscious Uranus-Pluto
“Apolitical” 3 workaholism and morbid skepticism are symptoms of ill-used Virgo. This soulless social profile has come to be associated with the generation targeted by this transit, and though stereotypical it clearly has a ring of truth. Slaving away in rows of cubicles (Virgo) in front of computers (Uranus) for the enrichment of plutocratic corporations (Pluto) has become the modus operandi to which many in this demographic have resigned themselves. As to the skepticism factor, polls tell us that those born in 1964 and after are more likely to believe in UFOs4 than in receiving their Social Security checks. And though anyone – of any age — who is not in denial about the dubious integrity of America’s financial and political systems would likely agree, it is telling that this generation is the one to have inherited, justifiably or not, a cynicism emphatically disdained by the hippies and campus radicals who gave them birth.
Other Gen-Xers have expressed their Virgo conjunction with a purifying fanaticism; spearheading movements like vegetarianism and alternative healing practices that defied previous generations’ attitudes and, over the years, have become increasingly embraced by consensual thinking. However members of the Uranus-Pluto group have used their intense energies, once Saturn opposes that conjunction in their charts they will find themselves at a crossroads.
Extreme Healers for Extreme Healing
This generation was born to wax extreme in its interests and behaviors. But to be obsessed (Pluto) and defiantly individualistic (Uranus) are not considered by astrologers to be pathological conditions 5: they are often symptoms of genius. The no-holds-barred focus of the Uranus-Pluto generation exactly matches the requirements of the era during which they moving into their prime productive years.
The phrase “the state of the world” once represented a concept much more abstract than it does now. Though mass denial is still entrenched in the USA – the one country that could make the most difference were its populace to rouse itself into wakefulness — it is getting harder and harder for denizens of the Earth to ignore the extreme violence being done to the planet and her inhabitants, animal, vegetable and mineral.
Despite the efforts of the state-run corporate media to keep Americans distracted and asleep, the imagery of global suffering associated with climate change has hit home in the Western mass mind. Books, studies and blogs about peak oil, for instance, have made the issue part of the collective conversation over the course of a mere couple of years, with most of the prognosticators’ projections aligning quite exactly with the legendary end of the Mayan calendar (2012), as well as with other oracular lore, including that of mundane astrology (the Grand Cross of 2010-2014).
Breakdown and Breakthrough
There is a universal sense of an epoch breaking down, and the GenX’er transits must be seen in this context. The natal placements of these folks’ Uranus — a planet that has been called The Great Awakener — and of Pluto — which governs rot, including that of corruption in government – will soon be hit by Saturn, the no-excuses cosmic bill-collector. The fact that this series of conjunctions will be in Virgo, the most fool-resistant sign in the zodiac, suggests that the grotesqueries of our era will be named for what they are.
Interns in the Global Psych Ward
Driven by the nuts-and-bolts pragmatism of Virgo and the anti-authoritarian urgency of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction that is in their DNA, millions of Gen Xers, having now reached the age of full adult confidence, will be possessed not only of the capacity but the power to pierce through the smoke and mirrors of government propaganda.
This would not be difficult for any of us to do if we looked at our nation’s policies with the simple common sense of Virgo combined with the wit of a fifth-grader applying basic arithmetic. Americans are currently allowing their leaders 6 to allocate thirteen billion dollars per month 7 to the Iraq war for the coming year. Meanwhile they are listening to their president tell them with a straight face that it would be “irresponsible” to spend 35 billion dollars over the next five years to provide healthcare for non-wealthy children.
The insanity of America’s foreign policy is not the only example we could find to illustrate the sickness of our times; it is just one of the most obvious. The fact that moral blindness of this magnitude is deemed normal and sane by the powers-that-be has created a collective craziness for which the gimlet-eyed perspicacity of Saturn in Virgo is the ideal antidote. When one looks at the situation astrologically, one cannot help but see that the potential of this transit to heal (Virgo) a world gone mad has been perfectly timed.
Clean-up and Shake-down
No matter what generation we inhabit, each of us will feel a cosmic echo of the epochal mid-sixties conjunction when Saturn strikes the middle degrees of Virgo in the coming year. Those with other mutable signs (Sagittarius, Pisces and Gemini) in this degree range may have a special role to play. But the children-of-the-flower-children, born with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction running through their veins, are the ones who have been singled out by the celestial choreographers to lead in the massive clean-up and shakedown that must be undertaken.
The clarity with which each member of this generation uses his or her astounding birthright will make all the difference. These individuals are channelers of a collective imperative, and Saturn will make it very difficult for them to duck out of the obligation to honor it.
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Notes:
1. Individuals born between, roughly, 1956 and 1972, have Pluto in Virgo; those born between 1961 and 1969 have Uranus in Virgo. If you belong to this generation, check your natal chart to see when transiting Saturn will reach the degrees of each of these natal placements. This will give you a more specific sense of when powerful inner and outer urgencies will be coursing through you, encouraging you to change yourself and your surroundings.
2. The first peak may be felt next month: in December Saturn will station at 8º Virgo. This will be a preview of its pass over the exact Uranus-Pluto conjunction degrees, which will begin in earnest next summer. The latter half of ’08 will see only the most extreme of a long-term succession of hits.
3. See my essay on the “apolitical/political” pairing in DayKeeper Journal: http://www.daykeeperjournal.com/aarch07/0707jul/murray.shtml
4. In the American popular mind, a “belief in UFOs” has become a buzz-concept for kookiness. Actually, the term “UFO” means nothing more than “unidentified flying object;” begging the question: What has “belief” got to do with it? How can one “not believe” in an unidentified flying object? But it also begs the question: Is there not something a tad arrogant about calling people loony for questioning the assumption that ours is the only planet in the universe with sentient life? Indeed, to be unable to conceive of the idea that intelligence might exist elsewhere in the cosmos, and might be as interested in planetary exploration as we are, is surely the loonier of the two positions.
5. They can be, of course, but then so can anything else in the chart.
6. “Leaders” is not really the correct term. The cynical, lethal programs now being advocated by the big names from both parties have little to do with leadership and nothing to do with public service. Americans understand this on a primal level; but the sad fact is that those who follow the U.S. mass media will be increasingly hard-pressed over the coming months to see beyond the hysterical Dems-vs.-GOP stagecraft designed to steer their attention away from what they know in their gut. Those interested in the big picture will find that to step away even briefly from the deafening hype of the presidential “race” is to see that the similarities between these so-called opposing factions far outweigh their differences. Consider that in mid-October the three front-running Democratic candidates were asked whether they would commit to withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of their term, i.e. by 2013. Every one of them said no.
7. This works out to three billion dollars a week, or 430 million dollars per day; or five thousand dollars per second. When one starts to muse about what five thousand dollars a second could do for micro-lenders who help subsistence farmers in Africa, or for de-funded school music programs or for the soup kitchen down the street, one starts to see that what Americans deem an acceptable use of their taxes is so counter-intuitive as to deserve the term psychotic.
