Do you have any planets at the first degree of a mutable sign? If so, Saturn has your number.
The Great Bullshit Detector has found its way back to the first degree of Pisces, which means it is zeroing in on whatever is represented by that natal planet of yours. This may show you things you’d rather not see.
Don’t take it personally. Wherever Saturn is passing, we tend to worry that we’ve done something wrong, but that’s not the point of the transit. It just wants us to stop and look.
Instead of making what’s happening into a problem, try to see it as an invitation to reconsider the issue.
Put your money where your mouth is
Especially if Saturn is conjoining, squaring or opposing something in our chart, we will feel its gimlet-eyed gaze, as we might have felt as a child scolded by a censorious parent.
But that’s not what’s happening now. We have grown up, and have become the authority figure in our own lives.
Instead of projecting our father issues on Saturn, we might think of it as a benevolent critic. It’s trying to get us to trim the fat, and be more realistic.
When it’s transiting an emotional planet, Saturn says: Commit to this person (/place/ thing) or else don’t waste your time on it. When it’s transiting a mental planet, it says: Put your money where your mouth is.
If you have a natal Sun around 0° Pisces (or Sagittarius, Virgo or Gemini), it’s telling you to accept your limitations. Instead of bemoaning them, use them to deepen and solidify your character.
If you have a mutable Moon around that degree, Saturn’s telling you to pare down your needs. If your Mercury is there, you’re being invited to chill out your chattering mind. If Venus is Saturn’s target, you’re being reminded to choose your friends carefully. If it’s on your Jupiter, Saturn’s saying, Oh, you believe that, do you? Prove it.
If it’s hitting your Mars, Saturn is saying: Beware of what you want, for you will get it.
Squeeze it into form
The sign Saturn is in right now, Pisces, gives these transits a complicated set of meanings.
In last month’s SkyWatch, we discussed the paradoxical nature of this particular planet moving through this particular sign. We know that Saturn is a no-nonsense planet, whose job is to promote productivity and workability. But what does this mean in a dreamlike water sign?
Pisces is about miasmic fields of feeling: mob anger, mass suffering. Or mass joy, like the blissful sense of unity we might feel in a concert hall, or at a rave. The power of these experiences is amorphous and hard to cobble into a cohesive shape. But Saturn is pressuring us to do just that.
We are being asked to funnel these swirling feelings down into the material world somehow. Or at least to pin them down in words and images, as poets, musicians and filmmakers do. We are being asked to squeeze something intangible into tangibility. Out of this pressure extreme creativity can arise.
Pay particular attention to it under the Saturn-Venus opposition (10/9-10).
Question reality
The world has become habituated to chaos ever since Neptune went into Pisces (2011-26). The past dozen years have been gradually, inexorably, melting down the sureties of group consciousness.
This strange era we live in, with its partisan-driven news, deep-fake visuals and AI-generated writing, has undermined clear distinctions between the genuine and the contrived.
This doesn’t mean that the definitions of realness we used to believe in were true, in any ultimate sense. But our pre-transit certainties — for example, the model of the atom that we were taught in school, or the old legal standards of photographic evidence — did give us a sense of stability that we no longer have, here in this era of Heisenburgian physics and Orwellian politics.
When Mercury opposes Neptune (Oct 2), give a thought to how all this has affected you personally. Consider how your intelligence can operate, with integrity, in the face of it.
Neptunian madness
There is a method to Neptune’s madness. To use its transits optimally we must get transpersonal with it.
This means allowing part of our mind to go beyond any particular ideology. If nothing is “real” in the old sense, then we are no longer constrained by group assumptions that never felt right anyway.
A sense of new possibility arises when we question — with a spirit of openness and humility — official narratives, whether government press releases or the whole idea of mechanistic materialism. Only a planet as disruptive as Neptune would invite us to question the concept of reality in general.
Under Neptune in Pisces some people have been ushered into profound new states of mind. Consider the spiritual and consciousness teachings, once secreted away in esoteric societies and available only to a select few, that have been made accessible to millions these days over the internet. These shifts, like the ones signaled by this month’s transits, can be liberating.
But we must remember the difference between descending beneath ordinary consciousness (e.g. via alcohol) and going above ordinary consciousness (e.g. through the practice of mindfulness).
If we follow Neptune in a half-assed way, it will merely deaden us. But if we follow it with deep conviction, it will plunge us fully into the present moment, where wisdom lies.
