Saturn, the planet of hard-core reality, is big this month. And its square with Neptune is starting to itch.

The Saturn-Neptune square, which we’ve been feeling all year and will be strong through the autumn of 2016, is the most important transit in the sky right now. In November it will be exact to the minute of arc for the first time,⁽¹⁾ and we can feel the tension mounting. Saturn’s several collisions this month with the quicker-moving planets — preview transits — are warming us up for the big drama.

August squares

Skywatchers love preview transits. They let us know what we’re getting into, so we can prepare ourselves to take in with all our senses (including the sixth) what the cosmos wants us to understand. By working on it ahead of time, we lessen the likelihood that we’ll be clobbered once the big transit rolls around.

There’s no lack of Saturn action this month, starting with its direct station on August first. Then it squares Jupiter on the 2^nd-3^rd, Mercury and Venus the 4^th-7^th, and the Sun the 21^st-26^th. Each of these exercises our Saturn muscle, like a workout at the gym.

The Enforcer vs. the Dreamer 

Let’s look at the Saturn-Neptune square upcoming.

Saturn represents Father Time, and his rulership over what we consider to be Real Life in the Real World. Neptune is the oceanic mind: fantasy, dream stuff and visions… i.e. everything reality is not.

Saturnine personalities ⁽²⁾, at their best, are stalwart guardians of the rules and regulations that keep us glued together on the Earth plane. They are the policemen, crossing guards, fact checkers and enforcers of this world. They respect authority and timeworn values.

The natal Saturn within each of our charts functions, at best, as an inner father figure. It maintains order and structure in our life. This part of us prefers empirical proof to theories and fancies. It teaches us to be responsible. It takes things deadly seriously.

This part of ourselves considers hopelessly airy-fairy just about everything governed by Neptune: poetry, ghosts, fairy stories, utopian ideals. Given that your natal Saturn already thinks of your natal Neptune as ungrounded and unrealistic — often with good reason⁽³⁾ — imagine the tension when these two planets are locked in a fixed square. ⁽⁴⁾

In the context of this two-year-long confrontation, let us take the measure of their respective weights.

Total connectedness

Neptune is in its glory years in Pisces (2012-25). As a transpersonal planet, it concerns only indirectly our physical lives and conscious thoughts. Neptune cares about nothing but our relationship to spirit. Its counterpart in the chakra system is the one at the top of the head: the state of cosmic connectedness, that we either feel infused with, or suffer from the lack of.

In this world, we are conditioned to measure things in terms of material and temporal criteria (Saturn), so Neptune’s impact on our lives is harder to identify than Saturn’s. We may feel the effect of Neptune in our moods; but it is not so much about our personal moods as our soul mood.

It’s a background feeling-tone that permeates our daytime consciousness, like a haunting fragrance, blooming into dominance during sleep at night. At best, Neptune envelopes our ordinary life in rich, shimmering color; at worst, it drapes our days in a grey meaninglessness.

Neptune is not inscrutable by accident. It’s trying to undermine our clarity, so as to bring us into an altered state. it is the siren call of the unconscious: through the imagery of art, through spiritual yearning and romantic ecstasy, or through escapist spacing-out, Neptune seeks to take us somewhere more sublime than the workaday world. ⁽⁵⁾

Water vs. stone

Water is the element associated with Neptune’s holistic state of mind. This includes literal waterways and the great all-encompassing ocean. If  Neptune is prominent or water signs dominate your natal chart, you feel the pull of the sea all the time. Constant but always in flux, the ocean is the Universal matrix whence all life derives and whither all waters are heading.

Contrast this vast boundarylessness with the hard, compact things under Saturn’s governance: bones, stones, the Rock of Gibraltar.

Is there any doubt which packs the greater punch? We all know that in time, even granite cliffs are eroded by the sea.

Transiting house

In order to understand what the square means for you personally, you need to know what these planets are up to in your chart right now.

Your first step is to find out where Neptune is passing. It takes far longer than Saturn – about a dozen years (Saturn takes 2½) — to teach us a specific set of lessons. Knowing its transiting placement lets you identify the department of your life where, perhaps for years now, the scales have been falling from your eyes. Start by checking — or have an astrologer check for you — the house Neptune is currently in. It shows where you have been learning the laws of impermanence.

During August, Neptune moves retrograde from the tenth to the ninth degree of Pisces. If these fall in your 7^th or 5^th houses, maybe you’re learning about the fictive nature of life by means of relationship deception (or self-delusion). If these degrees fall in your 11^th house, maybe the ephemeral nature of social media “friend”ships are descending into disillusion.

If in your 2^nd house, perhaps you find yourself letting go of possessions, an apt ritual of Neptunian detachment. If in the 9^th, the transit may be inspiring you to support an organization that seeks to transcend the boundaries of partisanship, like Doctors Without Borders. If it’s in the first house, your self-image may be dissolving like a sugar cube in warm water. It’s Neptune’s way of demonstrating what an illusory thing physical appearance is, and the psychic masks with which we present ourselves.

In the 12^th, Neptunian compassion is boundless, but exquisitely private. It may be helping you grieve or dream or retreat into yourself, in order to be free of the illusion of form.

Reality checks

Next pay attention to where Saturn is now. During August, it is covering ground it’s already covered recently, when it was retrograde. Think back to last December: that was when Saturn was in the same place it’s in now.

Ask yourself what reality checks you got back then, that had to do with intimacy, merger, and/or deep psychological housecleaning. They are being revisited now (I talk about various Saturn-in-Scorpio scenarios in this essay.) Defining them now will prove enormously helpful during the preview squares of August.

Saturn’s transiting house tells us where we need to drop any expectation that things should be easy. Here is where we need to take more time than usual, where to pull in rather than reach out, where to conserve our resources.

It’s hard to overstate how important this bit of information is. Knowing where your obstacles⁽⁶⁾ will show up is hugely empowering. It’s as if Saturn is leaning down and whispering into your ear his special little secret:

Just because things are difficult does not necessarily mean you’re doing it wrong.

Notes:

1 The current square is best understood in the context of the whole Saturn-Neptune cycle. This kicked off in 1989, when the two planets conjoined at 10-11° Capricorn. Their waxing square was in 1998-1999 at 29 Aries/Capricorn – 4°Taurus/Aquarius. Then in 2006-2007 they opposed each other, at 17-21°Leo/Aquarius. Now, 2015-2016, we’re in the waning square, at 7-10°Sagittarius/, which leads to the next conjunction in 2025-26, in early Aries.

2 People whose charts feature a strong Saturn, for example, where it is angular, in aspect to the Sun or Moon, or a ruler of either; or multiple planets in Capricorn.

3 These foibles are especially likely during stations of Neptune. See the Skywatch from June 2015.

4 Squares are the most challenging of all the major aspects; fixed signs the most intense mode a square can be in.

5 For an in-depth look at Neptune’s spiritual purpose, see my webinar.

6 My acupuncturist calls these “environmental insults.”

Image sources:

Midsummer Eve by Edward Robert Hughes

Seascape by Ugo Flumiani (1876-1938) 

Stormy Sea at Etretat by Claude Monet, 1883

Light in the Darkness by Alicia Eggert

Goddess wave by Leigh Bardugo