Saturn in Pisces - what is real anyway?

So I’ve been obsessing for some weeks now about Pluto’s move into Aquarius, not least because I was teaching on it at the Faculty’s Winter Weekend a couple of weeks ago. Now Saturn’s move into Pisces is coming more deeply into my awareness too. Having had Puto in Saturn ruled Capricorn for the last fifteen years or so, it’s not surprising that I’m seeing many links between them.

Saturn and Pluto are the heavyweights of the planetary gang, the cosmic realists. They force us to see life, ourselves, the world, as they truly are. Pluto has been doing that since moving into Capricorn in 2008, peeling back the layers of hierarchical authoritarian structures, of white-centred heteronormative patriarchal capitalism until no one can deny the seething mess of corruption and pain underneath. Not to mention overturning the assumption that empirical reality is our only reality, that Cartesian separation and duality are some sort of ultimate truth.

The positives of Saturn in Pisces - some boundaries for all that flow.

All of these supposedly fixed realities are the comfort zones of Saturn in its own signs of Capricorn and Aquarius. But soon Saturn will move into Pisces, no longer lord of his own domain but subject to the expansion of Jupiter, the softening of Neptune. Everything we think we know is breaking down and dissolving. All of these “just the way it is” realities - we are called to surrender them. To let them go, to let them disperse back into the oneness, the universal chaos of Pisces. To make space - I’ve said it so often I’m calling it my very own cliche -for something genuinely new, genuinely different.

But of course, we can’t know what that is yet. Pisces is the liminal space at the end of the zodiac cycle. The challenge of Saturn in Pisces is to sit with uncertainly, with the discomfort it brings to have our nice solid structures pulled from under us, with nothing to replace them. We’ve all lived it, these last few years. Saturn in Pisces calls us to pay attention to our feelings, however unpleasant. To let ourselves grieve all the losses, all the might have beens. Otherwise, we’ll never let them go, we’ll cling to them as Pluto moves into Aquarius and make them even more dogmatic, even more rigid. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways Pluto might shift our understanding, of which more to follow….