Whatever sign it’s in, Saturn uses absence as a teaching tool.
Saturn (lack, negation) moved into the Air element in March.(1) This was when the quarantine was at the point where, for some of us, a stolen breath of fresh air had taken on a new poignancy.
We are being reminded that we are oxygen-breathing animals.
Articles are coming out by immunologists and psychologists about the dangers of being cut off from sunlight and fresh air, but their warnings are hardly necessary. For many a shut-in city dweller, this experiment in dissociating from Nature is a case of absence making the heart grow fonder. 
This past Earth Day, April 20th, many found themselves, perversely, indoors. Eleven days later, modern pagans found themselves in a quandary bordering on sacrilege.
May 1st was the Celtic festival of Beltane. Every corner of the ancient world had some version of this fertility rite, now imbedded in our cellular memory. It was a celebration of humanity’s kinship with other living things. To be under house arrest during this particular sabbat seemed 
jarringly wrong.
And yet it all seems to be part of the cosmic plan. Many people will remember the spring of 2020 as the time when they realized, with a pang of loss, the preciousness of Nature.
The pandemic has made us feel — not just know, but feel — that we are mortal beings, and that the planet is, too.
Memento Mori
Saturn was once considered the planet of death. This makes sense when you consider that human life was seen as being on loan. Our sins, accumulated over time, were to be tallied by Saturn (karma) on Judgment Day. In the religious mind, the looming threat of death kept us honest.
[Death] never seems quite real until the end, and even then it’s hard to believe. — Kim Stanley Robinson
Like Renaissance aristocrats with their little skull accessories, we moderns are getting the Plutonian message: Memento 
mori. “Remember you must die.”
For many of us, our personal death, while undeniable, remains an abstraction, like the notion of ecocide. But we are at a hinge point in history, when both are starting to feel very real.
The Sixties
Nothing comes out of nowhere. We know this intuitively, and astrology spells it out mathematically. As surely as every New Moon leads to a First Quarter, every conjunction leads to a square.
So it was with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, the transit that made the sixties The Sixties. It set off a barrage of creative/destructive revolutions. One of these was the world-changing notion of ecology 
(discussed in detail here).
At the time, Uranus and Pluto were opposing Saturn, the planet of cause and effect. Like heedless teenagers, humanity was being warned by Mother Earth that our actions would carry consequences.
Next came the cycle’s waxing square, which has dominated the past 15 years. Gradually, continuously, this period has challenged (Uranus) the denial we’ve been in, as a species, about our relationship to Natural Law (Pluto).
As the cycle waxed, anthropocenic changes have become so obvious that those in denial are now outnumbered by those who aren’t. It has become common knowledge that extreme weather events are the new normal. It has become increasingly clear that unless we get our act together, catastrophic global water and food shortages are unavoidable.
It has started to sink in that fish are disappearing from the world’s oceans and that there are fewer butterflies.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. —character in Chernobl
The next milestone in this series of astrological wake-up calls is now upon us. The transits of 2020 led off with the conjunction of Saturn and Pluto, which are squaring Uranus. These are the same three planets that blew the world’s mind in the sixties.
The issues raised back then are coming to a head.
As Without, So Within
If you look at things symbolically, you’ve probably been seeing parallels between the peril our bodies are in, from the viral microbe, and the peril our terrestrial macrocosm is in, from homo sapiens.
Julie Anglin writes in with this insight:
The virus prevents certain cells from releasing CO2, causing the terminally infected to drown from the fluids released from cell death. This calls to mind the specter of a planet drowning from rising sea levels caused by a surfeit of CO2.
The more detachment we get from the pandemic, the more we might discern a modern myth in the making.
… The people burned so much ancient sunlight into the sky that the atmosphere began to die. [They had] a sick and twisted leader who courted disaster by ignoring the warnings of the gods… Thom Hartmann, in Salon
Following the clues
Social critics are connecting the dots between the virus’ presumed birthplace, the Wuhan “wet market” (the phrase is enough to make you shudder), and the larger issue of factory farming. More people are starting to see slaughterhouses as not just ethically barbaric but massively toxic. The meat industry is being outed.
Because the pandemic zeroes in on the lungs, air pollution is getting renewed attention. Saturn’s ingress into an Air sign suggests that the disease is a biological mechanism gone awry. Our poor bodies are trying to negotiate the toxic load.
The concept of contagion is associated with causality (Saturn), upon which the assumptions of conventional science are based. (2) But the transits associated with the virus include planets beyond Saturn, and we need to go beyond causality if want to plumb its deeper meaning.
Pluto (hidden undercurrents) is the main driver here. This is the planet of purging and elimination. It tells us that although contagion is a vehicle for spreading the pandemic, its raison-d’être is the act of expulsion.
A virus is a secretion. We say we “get the virus,” but we actually already have it, and are expelling it. – Acupuncturist Barbara Hammer
Uranus, governor of electricity. is the third major player here. This points to another environmental insult that has, up until now, received remarkably little attention in relation to its impact: that of the electrification of Earth.
Now it’s getting a lot of attention, much of it from alarmed debunkers. From all along the ideological spectrum, critics
of a video — since removed from YouTube — by a Dr Thomas Cowan have hastened to deride the notion that the wireless infrastructure clogging the Earth’s atmosphere could have anything to do with global disease.
This is supposed to be a preposterous idea? Tell that to the bumblebees.
But the good doctor has been impugned for touting a conspiracy theory.
[Linguistic sidebar: It’s interesting how that phrase, conspiracy theory, has taken on the snap-crackle-pop of partisanship. Its denotation simply proposes the existence of a plan concocted by behind-the-scenes agents. But its connotation has become explosively charged. This is clearly because many such theories originate in the deranged minds of the rightwing, who delight in the outrage they incite. At this point, in common parlance conspiracy theory immediately delegitimizes any idea to which it becomes attached, even the non-crazy ones.]
In the case of 5G, I doubt whether the telecommunications industry has any conspiracy in mind other than making a humongous profit. If that counts, emperors of capitalism like Mark Zuckerberg must be the ultimate conspirators of our day.
More interesting to astrologers, as always, is the timing. The American Gas and Electric Company established the first long-distance high-voltage transmission line in 1917. This was when an earlier Saturn-Pluto conjunction was applying.
As was an earlier pandemic, the Spanish flu.
Jupiter
Jupiter, like Saturn a social planet, is also part of the 2020 story. Jupiter pushes to the forefront timely social issues, exaggerating whatever it touches.
Accordingly, the Coronavirus has exacerbated racial and economic class divisions. At one end of the spectrum, we’re seeing people who can afford to flee the crowds by escaping to a second home in the country. At the other extreme are those who are stuck in mass petri dishes of infection: prisons, migrant labor camps, nursing homes, the rez. (3)
The separation illusion
So in the plague …people sat still looking at one another and seemed quite abandoned to despair. But the near-view of death would soon… reconcile all differences…and bring us to see with different eyes than those with which we looked on things before. — The Periwig Maker
The fundamental truth behind the Covid phenomenon is that we’re all part of an inextricable Whole.
More and more people are getting this. Social media is buzzing with variations on the theme, We are all in this together. Even though the idea is as old as the hills, to recognize it (literally, “to know again”) feels like an inspiration.
Appropriately, most are welcoming it with open arms. Others are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into it.
Still others are merely kicking and screaming.
If you believe that erecting a wall on the Mexican border will keep you safe from unemployment, I guess you’ll believe that verbally abusing Chinese people on the street will keep you safe from the virus.
But these pockets of resistance cannot hold. Ultimately, any attempt to escape our interconnectedness is an exercise in futility.
Globalization
Since the last conjunction of Pluto (corporate power) and Saturn (government edict) in the early 80s, globalization has triumphed as an economic construct. Their new cycle is going to drive home the point that it’s not just economic.
The First World paid little heed, by and large, to the environmental catastrophes that began punishing the poor and war-torn parts of the world over the last few decades. But complacency faded when American sushi started showing radiation from Fukushima, hurricanes hit the Eastern seaboard, and fires began to ravage bucolic Napa Valley.
When things fall apart in Asia, in America, at the North Pole, it becomes your problem eventually, wherever you are. — James Poniewozik
Right now the gods are using the threats of ecocide and pandemic as teaching tools. The humblest denizens of the world are suffering first and most severely, but soon enough no one will be insulated by wealth, geography or luck. Even those with million-dollar bunkers and private islands depend on the Earth’s living systems.
Regardless of how long it takes the recalcitrant human mind to get there, all roads lead to unity consciousness.
Holistic point of view
There’s nothing like existential threat to get us to think holistically. As the Jungian philosopher-shaman Paul Levy puts it, “the virus and its eco-system (which in our case happens to be the whole planet) are one seamlessly interconnected whole quantum system.”
[W]e shouldn’t be under any illusions – the world we lived in prior to the advent of the coronavirus pandemic … was a world gone mad. — Levy
Beginning right now
We’re in a decisive moment.
When something is just getting started, the quality of our intention is critical. The state of our consciousness at the beginning of a cycle impacts everything that will follow. So right now is a really good time to get conscious.
The Pluto-Saturn conjunction of this past January is setting the tone for the next three decades. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of this coming December will set the tone for almost the next two centuries.(4)
Meanwhile, there is a notorious Mars retrograde coming: Sept 9 – Nov 13/ 2020 (see June’s SkyWatch). Whatever has been building in the mass mood will ignite. Mars will be in Aries, fiery and aggressive. It will square Jupiter, Pluto and Saturn.
Everything will depend on what people do with their pent-up (Saturn) ego drives (Mars).
Moreover, the transit targets Trump’s chart and that of the USA. The potential exists for popular feeling to be set ablaze against any number of social injustices (Jupiter).
[If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections] …with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, … flying around in private helicopters … then I think we could have massive political disruption. Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like, we may also see what collective rage looks like. — Journalist and public health expert Laurie Garrett
Over the months and years ahead, our practical and psychological learning curves will be steep. Old habits will bite the dust.
Old expectations of government and of social functioning will continue to break down. The world will continue to globalize economically.
The cosmos will continue to globalize us spiritually.
Notes
1) Mars too is in Aquarius (3/30- 5/12). If you have been feeling its pinch, you may have felt it most acutely at the Saturn-Mars conjunction, March 29 – April 2nd.
2) Although not that of New Physics.
3) Robert Reich describes these groups, in order of descending financial security, as the Remotes, the Essentials, the Unpaid and the Forgotten.
4) We’ve just started the transit of Saturn in Aquarius, 2½ years long. In December the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction kicks off cycles that are 20 years and 180 years long (discussed in this webinar). Looming in the background is the long, slow transition into the Age of Aquarius, 2,000-years long.
