They’re coming at us right out of the gate, as 2021 begins: cosmic echoes of 2020.
In astrology, the calendar year doesn’t have a singular beginning. Cycles overlap, bleeding one into another. New lessons begin against the backdrop of old ones. The cosmos is saying: You want to know what’s going to happen? Assimilate what you’ve just been through.
It’ll be easier, now that it’s behind us, to look at the infamous year just past. There’s nothing like the passage of time, even a little bit of time, to provide perspective.
Which is why the Goddess invented Saturn.
Empire collapse
Saturn governs chronological time, one of humanity’s most reliable structuring devices. It also governs traditions and conventions, rules, regulations and laws, traffic lights. Things that keep systems functioning.
Saturn is the planet of normal (that is, whatever a given culture has agreed to consider normal): it establishes what “reality” is. (1) It does not plump for one worldview or another — that’s Jupiter’s job. Saturn just cobbles together a sense of the way the world works, that most people believe in.
Too much Saturn leads to stilted conformity. But if we repudiate altogether those commonly held agreements about reality, we open the door to chaos. To keep ourselves from becoming unglued, we need Saturn.
The fact that the world’s established order is coming unglued right now is symbolized, in part, by the conjunction of Saturn with Pluto, the planet of death/ rebirth. “Normal” is being dealt a series of mortal blows.
Crazy Town
The Saturn-Pluto conjunction, which put 2020 on the astrological map, recurs about every three decades. The sign is different each time, and so is the historical context, but it always signifies that the world’s about to get a new variation on the theme of reality.
Consider the conjunction of 1914. Imagine how it felt to be alive when, in the wake of WWI, four of the great global empires collapsed. In the mass mind, the whole conception of reality must have crumbled.
The next time the conjunction hit, after WWII, reality got reshuffled once again.
Now we’re in a postmodern version of empire collapse, accompanied by mass death from a pandemic. The transit is telling us that nothing short of a rebirth is due, which is always preceded, by Natural Law, with something that feels like death.
The symbolism doesn’t specify physical death, but it guarantees the psycho-spiritual kind.
The country has gone collectively insane. — Chris Hedges
Father figures
A generation ago, longtime newsmen like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather were Saturn figures. They represented a worldview shared by pretty much everybody who watched the 6-o’clock news, which meant just about everybody.
What made these guys Saturnine? It wasn’t the ideas expressed by their newscasts (Mercury). It wasn’t even about the ideologies behind those ideas (Jupiter). It was the fact that their reports rested on assumptions that were harbored en masse.
Listening to these guys made people feel like there was a reality out there. These solid old anchormen, or at least the assumptions they represented, seemed like they’d been there forever, and would remain around forever. This is what we mean when we say a person or thing is “an institution.” They personify cohesion.
[A Washington think tank] ranked the political “cohesion” of various countries between 2008 and 2018; they measure the entrenchment of factions, trust in the security forces, and the level of popular discontent. The US recorded the largest drop in cohesion among any of the countries studied. — Evan Osnos
2008 was the year Pluto entered the sign ruled by Saturn: Capricorn, governor of the institutions, shared values and traditions that bring cohesion about.
Perfect storm
If you looked at the US chart a couple of decades ago, you’d have seen a perfect storm of transits headed our way. Neptune was fated to undermine the public’s faith in its most seemingly permanent constructs, while Pluto activated the rot at the country’s foundations.
Pluto was slated to take aim at the skeletal structure of public life, including its political norms. In the mid-20-teens, Saturn was scheduled to square Neptune (illusion), suggesting a fracturing of consensual reality itself.
This turned out to be the period when, in the USA, the doubting of government moved from the margins of society into the mainstream — far enough into the mainstream that it got re-branded, by some, as patriotism.
Saturn-phobia
These transits didn’t invent the Question Authority principle. There have always been people who doubt (Neptune), repudiate (Pluto) and rebel from (Uranus) the official narrative (Saturn), and thank Goddess for them. What’s remarkable about the postmillennial period is the degree to which Saturn-phobia has become normalized.
Before now, it was the leftists and other malcontents who claimed the exclusive right to trash the powers-that-be. But as Saturn’s authority started to slip, attacking the government – not just its current representatives, but its founding principles, its laws, its very elections – started to be identified as “conservative.”
It’s hard to overstate how different this viewpoint was from that of a couple of generations ago. Boomers like me grew up in a world where anything other than unquestioned allegiance to the state was considered treasonous. It was
… a world of postwar America triumphant. The United States was not only the most powerful country but also the most virtuous… the adults in our lives were uniformly trustworthy: parents were reliable authority figures; teachers were potentates of the classroom… The world was ordered as tidily as a suburban lawn. — James Carroll
It’s not that things were better in what Robert Lowell called the “tranquilized 1950s.” (The only better/ worse distinction in astrology is the one between a cycle that’s dying –- which is bad, if we try to hold onto it — and one that’s fresh – which is good, in the sense that it’s where life is headed.) The Saturnine mindset had grown dead and calcified in the postwar period.
It was ready and waiting to be exploded when the 
Uranus-Pluto conjunction opposed Saturn in the mid-sixties, and blew everything sky-high.
American psychosis
By the time the Tea Party was launched (2009), the breakdown of the Saturn principle entered its second phase. Phase 3 was when the three planets from the mid-sixties again convened in the sky (2014 thru 2015) creating a grand cross to the U.S. Sun-Saturn square.
We’re now in Phase 4, the Pluto Return. The American Experiment has reached its fated crossroads. It’s either re-invent ourselves, or dissolve.
Future historians will no doubt marvel at this collective psychotic break, and those of us alive in the thick of it ought to do our best to understand it. How did our country arrive at the point where a good proportion of the citizenry believe that a corrupt casino owner is a moral hero protecting them from blood-guzzling lizard people?
He was not just our reality-TV president; he was our alternate-reality-TV president. — Naomi Fry
Caught in the web
As Hairplug Himmler (2) recedes from presidential power — although undoubtedly not from the media scene — it will become obvious that he was not the cause of America’s woes, just their inflamer. He embodies our mass breakdown.
Never the most well-informed of citizenries, the US public entered the era of peak ignorance and misinformation with the birth of the worldwide web. Gone was any need to know what you were talking about.Now we were blessed/ cursed with a one-click delivery system for every conceivable factoid or conviction.
Everybody’s gotta get into the act. – Jimmy Durante
Many were delighted by the idea of information becoming democratized. But as it turned out, what ended up being democratized was reality itself.
Online access fueled divisiveness, pushing ideological polarization to an unheard-of extreme. But it wasn’t just about one political 
camp vs. another. It was a mass withdrawal from the idea of consensus about anything. Fundamental beliefs about how existence is structured (Saturn) were becoming decentralized into millions of tiny little thought-fiefdoms.
Unsavory festerings from the damp, sordid corners of the internet started to get as much airtime as long-accepted points of view. Self-invented misinformation celebrities took the place of the old-fashioned Saturn figures who had once commanded the national audience. The more counterfactual the new voices were, the more popular they became.
By the time a reality-TV personality became the fake president of the most powerful country in the world, it was clear that Saturn had been horsewhipped into submission by Neptune.
As Americans struggled to describe the squirreliness of public life under Trump, we started to hear the term “surreal” a lot.
Conspiracy Central
Pretty soon social mores that had been around so long they were considered beyond debate — such as that expert opinion was good, and Nazis were bad — were no longer sacrosanct.
As the Pluto Return started to cook, Neptune, the planet of paranoia and mass hysteria, entered into a mutable cross in the US chart, still strong through 2021. Conspiracies started to bloom like weeds in a Fukushima seabed.
Ideological common ground was no longer a thing. The collective unconscious was leaking, dribbling, then pouring into the collective consciousness, with less and less filtering from the traditional gatekeepers: responsible media, peer review, time-tested opinion. No theory was deemed too unlikely, pathological or just plain weird to be reported by the talking heads with a straight face.
We made the turn to CrazyTown a while ago. Now we’re just doing doughnuts in Kookoo Canyon. – Stephen Colbert
As the public listened to their president suggesting that we stop a hurricane with an atom bomb, trade Puerto Rico for Greenland and drink bleach to treat the virus, they took it in with an “air of sedation, of unreality and chaos, a sense that no one narrative is real.” (Emily Nussbaum)
America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. – George Packer
Month by month, the fantasies (Neptune) bubbling up from the depths of America’s id became ever more extravagant and politicized. Here were obsessions that made public what people usually pursue only in private: primal fears of corruption, sex and death (Pluto).(3)
Plausibility no longer mattered. Pedophile rings run by career Democrats from the basement of a pizza parlor ? The visions seemed to be scraping the very bottom of the Plutonian barrel.(4)
Capricorn loses its cool
Usually we think of taboo projections like these as operating in the seamy underworlds of war, murder and vice. We expect the human mind to work out its Pluto fixations by watching horror movies and crime shows. But now, here they were, being spewed out upon the dry-as-toast terrain of Capricorn: the world of political parties.
An unlikely battlefield, but one that fits the planetary symbolism. The great Manichaean battle between good & evil is now being waged on the pedestrian turf of governmental systems.
Capricorn is, as signs go, evidence-based, drama-averse and disdainful of incoherency. But at the end of a year that started with a stellium in that sign, the USA was engulfed in an autogolpe complete with pardoned-felon henchmen floating the idea of military overthrow.
No less a coup for being jaw-droppingly inept, it is an utterly predictable coda to the past four years. The Never Concede movement has plenty of enthusiastic adherents, even now:
…you gotta love how Lil’ Donnie Two-Scoops gets his hopes up every time Sidney Powell claims a talking salamander told her the voting machines in Pennsylvania were possessed by Vince Foster’s ghost or whatever. He truly expects this gibbering lunacy to hold up in court. ..In the legal(ish) trenches of the Stoopid Coo, the latest strategy appears to be dressing up like official Electoral College electors and putting on little plays where everyone pretends they’re in the Electoral College, and then pretending these plays grant them some sort of legal standing. Somehow. Do you think there will be 2020 Electoral College reenactments someday?–Shower Cap blog
The past is not over until its lessons are learned. 2020’s issues will not disappear with the turning of a calendar page, and Trumpism will not disappear on January 20th.
Some of the almost-half-the-country who voted for Trump last month have bought paintings of him crossing the Delaware. Some see him as 
an agent of Jesus Christ. These folks are the poster children for the crisis the country is in.
This is not just a political crisis. Like a family member who refuses to enable a loved one’s incoherent ravings, we need to acknowledge this as a loss of tethering to reality.
True or false?
Five years ago, Russian cyber-attacking was the big conspiracy. When the US public first got wind of it, there was a flurry of righteous shock. (5) Right and left-wing pundits seemed to unite, for a moment, in a Cold-War-style freak-out; it was as if they missed the good old days when everyone agreed that Russia was the evil empire. (Left unmentioned, as always, was the fact that nothing Moscow could have done to mess with us could be anywhere near as destructive to democracy as what US corporations already do).
The issue slipped from the headlines amidst the relentless onslaught of scandals that followed, though it reared its head again just before the Solstice, when the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction presented us with a dramatic synopsis of the last several years.
From the point of view of factual accuracy, the jury’s still out on how much impact Putin’s hackers had on our elections. But from a big-picture point of view, it doesn’t matter.
… the Kremlin’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election were indeed a success, no matter how many votes were affected by their active measures… If the goal is disruption and confusion, then being seen to affect outcomes is as good as actually affecting outcomes. —- Joshua Yaffa
Trying to explain Uncle Sam’s current mental state with statistics is using a model of reality that won’t work right now.
“No one will believe you”
We don’t need commissions and reports to see that Trump’s own attacks on consensual reality far outstripped anything Putin could have dreamed of accomplishing. From demonizing the media to sowing distrust of the post office, The Donald has weaponized the Question Authority principle more successfully than any public figure in modern history.
And he has been astonishingly upfront about it. When asked in an interview with CBS News why he kept attacking the press, he said: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so that, when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
Fake frauds vs. real frauds
At this writing, the long, drawn-out “voter fraud” stunt is still alive and kicking. (6) Well, kicking, anyway.
The coup is being discredited in court after court, which is important; we do need to keep calling bullshit by formal means, as a gesture of respect to Saturn. But the deeper meaning of this crisis won’t be revealed by evidence and legalisms.
Neptune (alternative realities) is overpowering Saturn (provable facts) right now in the collective psyche. It’s not Neptune’s fault that we’re getting its dark side: lies, confusion, mass neurosis. But that’s how the planet shows up without a base-line level of awareness.
One of its favorite tools is disinformation, like the one about Chinese troops amassing on the coast of Maine. Or the one about a dead Venezuelan president stealing Trump’s victory. Plenty of Trumpsters in Georgia believe that one, with the result that they don’t see the point of voting in the Jan 5th election.
But the crisis is bi-partisan. The whole country is awash in not knowing what to believe.
More juice
One of the most intriguing things about this state of affairs is that the made-up conspiracies have more juice than the real ones.
The more vitriolic of these theories flatter their adherents by firing up the prejudices they already hold. The fantasy about evil Jewish cabals controlling the world, for example, is clearly fueled by good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, mixed with the kind of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism that 
often show up in societies with grotesque educational and economic inequality, like ours.
Over the past several years, the rhetoric has found more and more traction. First came the radio hotheads, who picked up on how much money could be made stoking an audience already seething with decades’ worth of unaddressed grievances: cash in by vindicating their fear, suspicion and despair.
Soon we had cable “news,”Breitbart, and then tweets straight from the White House. Now we have QAnon, whose hyper-ventilating imagery invents ever-more atrocious atrocities with every news cycle. Time-travel, cannibals, Satan, oh my! It’s as if anything more temperate would fail to sate the appetites of the horror-hungry.
Meanwhile, these folks seem blithely unfazed by the myriad actual conspiracies in this great land of ours, the ones in plain sight. Such as the fact that a handful of plutocrats really are taking over the world. No need to hunt down the Illuminati, my friends. Look no further than Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
While the conspiracists whisper darkly about vaccines implanting tracking devices into their brains, they seem not to realize that this is happening, right now, with the smart phones in their pockets. Have they missed the fact that we are all living in a panopticon?
Then there’s the bizarre double standard underlying the sex abuse accusations. Obsessed with visions of their political enemies as child traffickers, the QAnonners have been strangely nonjudgmental about the Jeffry Epstein crowd, a bipartisan gaggle of rich old pervs.
Even after the Epstein bust made headlines, accompanied by photos of a beaming D. J. Trump at those bunga-bunga parties, is it still somehow easier for rightwing fantasists to imagine Nancy Pelosi being involved in sexual predation than to imagine that their trophy-wife-marrying, pussy-grabbing, porn-star-dating, daughter-fondling hero is?
Perhaps because the actual conspiracies are above ground, they lack titillation value. Who wants to hear about scandals everybody knows about?
The depredations of late-stage capitalism are, of course, far more likely to be the real cause of suffering for the average Trump fanatic than any of their dreamed-up plots. But I guess it’s more fun to get frothed up over aliens and Antichrists.
Consider their beef with Bill Gates. It seems these self-professed enemies of enslavement condemn Gates not for the obscene wealth he amassed from the computers they all own, but for having given away too much of his money to the World Health Organization.
In their eyes, it’s Gates-the-warm-and-fuzzy-philanthropist who’s evil, not Gates-the-voracious-monopolist.
The interests of conspiracy theorists and the interests of the selfish end of the plutocracy have a way of aligning. Both are cynical and mistrustful of institutions of authority, the courts, the media, the government… the conspiracists because they think such bodies are malign agents of a secret elite, the plutocrats because they place limits on their wealth and power. – James Meek
New glue
When our society goes off the rails, we feel it, because we are part of the greater organism. Our bodies and emotions feel it; our very cells register it. So let’s get our minds on board, too; it will help. It will allow us to put everything we’ve got into the task at hand: that of shoring up our own psychic integrity.
It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and work with our natal Saturns. This means focusing on what life experience has taught us is real, 
and withdrawing our energy from the nonsense. We can also track Saturn’s transits through our charts, and get tips — specific to our own soul work — about how to keep ourselves glued together.
If we remain identified with the collective Saturn pictures, the ones that are dying, that’s okay too. We’ll get new ones, because that’s Natural Law. The question is whether we will get the ones we want.
That’s where consciousness comes in.
…………..
Notes
1 “Reality” (Saturn) is a concept that needs quotation marks, unlike Truth (the outer planets). As Jane Wagner says, “Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.” Truth, at least, realizes it’s a figment; but reality thinks of itself as the be-all-and-end-all. Saturn is “what everybody thinks” (which really means: what we think everybody thinks).
2 A tip of the cone hat to the Shower Cap blogger for his endless supply of Trump monikers.
3 Astrologer Frederick Woodruff sees the Cancer grouping in the USA’s chart behind “the various manias that have erupted over time within American pop culture, always involving some element of child violation. They appear like clock work: ritual satanic abuse, day care abuse, kidnapping (faces on milk cartons), space alien abduction, repressed memories erupting in adulthood, razor blades in apples at Halloween.”
4 This one reminds me of the over-the-top crimes trumped up against Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette, who similarly personified the obsessions of mobs frothed up about imagined wickedness. Their accusers, too, seemed to be driven by Plutonian projection, tacking on to each woman’s rap sheet, at the last minute, the charge of incest.
5 Odd, isn’t it, that Washington’s own history of “regime change,” of instigating coups all over the world, decade after decade, fails to warrant the same outrage.
6 Astoundingly, he is still raking in millions of dollars from his devotees to fight the election results. From the Shower Cap blog: “[T]wo of nature’s fiercest foes: MAGA Nation and Objective Reality. We’re talking about people who not only bet money that Trump would win, but kept on betting more and more AFTER Election Day. …. I was skeptical once, but you truly can fool some of the people all of the time. Serious question: with so many different grifters picking their pockets, how do the Children of the Candy Corn manage to hang onto enough money to feed and clothe themselves? Maybe y’all can reduce your Economic Anxiety™️ a little by cutting into your Blank Checks to Charlatans budget?”
Painting: Eclipse of 1842, by Ippolito Caffi.
