We have just undergone a pivotal astrological shift. After spending the past two and a half years in his rulership in Aquarius, Saturn has entered into the mystical, dreamy sign of Pisces, ruled by the planet Jupiter. Saturn ingressed from Aquarius into Pisces on March 7th, 2023, and will remain in Pisces until May 5th, 2025.
Classically, Saturn was known as a chronocrator or a time lord, heavily directing the direction and circumstances of life depending on the sign he occupies. The two and a half years he spends in one sign will heavily affect the timbre of life - from people’s personal lives to the general body politic.
The sign placement of Saturn will heavily characterize the direction and his movement from one sign to the next has a great effect on civic institutions and the goings-on of life. Additionally, his movement (known in astrology as an ingression) from one sign to the next will define the timeline around major chapters and pivotal moments in people’s personal lives, depending on how Saturn transits the native’s chart.
In what follows, I want to unpack this ingression in detail, to make sure you’re prepared for the next two and a half years that this Saturn-in-Pisces season occurs. I’ll start with an overview of Saturn’s significations and energetics in classical astrology, and from there go on to discuss the nature of Pisces. When Saturn and Pisces clearly outlined, I’ll talk about what Saturn in Pisces indicates, and where I see the general direction of life going for the next few years. I will also compare this period to previous times in history when Saturn occupied Pisces.
The Nature of Saturn
In the cosmology of classical astrology, the earth is situated at the center of the universe, surrounded by the heavenly realms on all sides. Separating us from the heavens are seven concentric spheres, one ruled by each of the seven traditional planets. A soul will descend from the heavenly realms of the stars through the seven realms of the planets, eventually receiving a physical body from the Moon and being born into the earth. We live on earth in the center of the universe, but we ultimately come from the stars and heavenly realms above, and will return there when we die.
As Saturn is the furthest visible planet from the Earth, he is closest of all the planets to the realm of the heavens and the other side of the veil. As such, Saturn rules the boundary between this realm and the realms beyond the veil of death. Saturn is both the border between life and death, as well as death itself. Saturn is the watcher on the threshhold - the ferryman who takes us from the material world to the empyrean realms.
Saturn represents the wild, untamable forces of spirit that tear down structures and individual ego. Saturn represents the ineffable, terrifying forces of a higher reality that spurn comprehension by the egoic self. Saturn’s transits and effects often dismantle one’s reality and dismantle our personal agendas. Saturn brings the dark night of the soul.
In modern astrology, Saturn is identified with “structure,” but Saturn tears down structures more than anything else, laying waste to whatever kingdoms we have built for ourselves and putting the ego and its intentions in check. Many people experience Saturn’s motions through their birth charts as a kind of threshing or winnowing, a painful process of letting go. For this reason, Saturn is traditionally considered a difficult planet, associated with loss, grief, and uncontrollable forces that dismantle the lives we have built for ourselves.
However, Saturn will always replace what he takes away with something in much closer alignment with our true spirit. This is the gift of Saturn – a transformation that, though difficult, is grounded and quite permanent. Sometimes it’s a new skill or relationship or even a new life path. Whatever it is, people generally spend the rest of their life cultivating and enjoying this gift.
Whichever sign Saturn occupies will indicate specific topics and themes in the world that undergo Saturn’s winnowing and threshing. As a planet of negation and denial, his sign placement will indicate topics where people become critical and negative and point toward critical trends that will take up a lot of collective attention for several years. Ultimately, a lot of shadows and issues are illuminated in this process that leads to genuine social change.
The Sign of Pisces
Pisces is a mutable, water sign ruled by the planet Jupiter. For thousands of years, Pisces has been associated with mysticism, contemplative spirituality, and the deepest, ineffable components of the inner life.
Pisces, like the sign of Sagittarius, is ruled by Jupiter, the lord of priests, pontiffs, swamis, lamas, and anyone vested with some kind of formal, ecclesiastical authority within a religious sect. Its rulership by Jupiter, lord of priests and spiritual wisdom, gives Pisces its inclination towards mysticism and spirituality.
In Pisces, we see Jupiter’s authoritarian role as the awakened mystic - one who has totally unified the personal self with the Divine self and sits in the contemplative stillness of its true nature as the flow underneath all things. Within Pisces lies a quiet confidence and assuredness in the truth of its own experience.
This privileging of inner experience and the truth of the inner life is reminiscent of the other two water signs, Cancer and Scorpio. As a water sign, Pisces has strong associations with intuition, dreamtime, and the emotional realms. Pisces, however, is by far the weirdest about it - delving deeply into the realms of the unconscious and non-dual experiences.
We can arrive at many of the meanings of the signs by considering the quality of the time of year that the Sun occupies that sign. During the season of Pisces, the length of days has almost surpassed the length of night - the light is almost about to triumph over the darkness - but has not quite yet. For now the darkness still reigns supreme, and we must wait patiently until its power is broken, and the cleansing fire of triumphant Sun once again redeems and restores the material world from grip of winter.
Within this lies a great faith and hope in the inevitable triumph of goodness - the victory of the Sun at the spring equinox. Sometimes this will demonstrate itself as a belief in the virtue of humanity, or faith in the ultimate the redemption of the world are squarely piscean attributes, or even unconditional faith in the validity of one’s own personal experience and felt sense of truth.
Fitting, then, that Pisces carries connotations of mysticism and the contemplative life. The mystic sits in quiet reflection, still entombed within the darkness of the material body and materiality, yet completely surrendered to the noetic, divine spark within that had originally descended into the material world, and will once again be free.
The shadow of this faith and hope of Pisces is escapism. The optimism and faith of Pisces is predicated on something coming in the future, from somewhere else. It’s not rooted in anything in the here and now.
As such, Pisces can easily “check out” from the present moment and disengage from everyday reality. It can disappear into inner worlds and perceptions that have nothing to do with the present moment. It’s happy to release control of the steering wheel of its life because there’s nothing out there that’s worth controlling - just check out and wait for things to improve. In the past, it has been exactly this “checking out” process that Saturn emphasizes in the collective consciousness when in this sign.
Saturn in Pisces - Turn on, Tune in, Drop out
To get a sense for what is coming down the line with this upcoming Saturn in Pisces period, I want to begin by examining the previous two transitions from Saturn in Aquarius to Saturn in Pisces.
The past three times Saturn had occupied Aquarius, a great humanitarian struggle overtook the zeitgeist. Aquarius is associated with collective ideals, humanitarian impulses, social normativity and responsibility, and identifying the right modes of thinking and using language. It only makes sense that Saturn, the great negator and critic, would create humanitarian struggles when occupying this sign.
Saturn in Aquarius in the early 90s heralded social outrage, civic unrest, and a massive push for a transformation in our society. In true aquarian fashion, a strong examination of our language and collective treatment of each other took over. Political correctness first became a thing. The Rodney King riots filled the streets of LA with well-deserved outrage over police brutality. There was a vocal, collective outcry at injustice and inequality throughout the world.
Saturn in Aquarius had an almost identical effect in the previous period in the early 60s - this was a pivotal period for the civil rights movement. The Birmingham protests that led to MLK’s famous “letter from the Birmingham jail,” as well as the 1963 march on Washington both occurred during Saturn in Aquarius. Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” - the seminal work on environmentalism and conservation.
But in both these periods, the civic fervor ended as Saturn went into Pisces. At the very least, the idea of sweeping social transformation through analyzing our words and behaviors became less trendy and in vogue. People gave up on the idea of making serious collective, social change through ordinary means, and began to check out instead. Instead of Aquarian reassessments of rhetoric and social organization aimed at a humanitarian ideal, a nihilistic apathy at the thought of sweeping civic transformation crept in instead.
In the 90s, the great hope of civic and collective change lost steam and was replaced by grunge. The dream of the 90’s wasn’t making a better world - it was doing the bare minimum of work at a job (or better yet, not working at all and dumpster diving for food) to support a lifestyle outside the confines of society and civic institutions. In the 60’s, the new trend became the hippy movement. The essence of Piscean escapism and detachment became crystallized in Timothy Leary’s psychedelic anthem: turn on, tune in, drop out.
The timbre of Saturn in Aquarius hasn’t been any different this time around. Social media became a hotbed of conversation about a myriad of social issues from cultural appropriation to transgender rights. I can now pick my pronouns on Zoom. The Black Lives Matter movement gained a great amount of traction in response to inordinate police brutality that uncannily echoed the Rodney King riots in the previous Saturn in Aquarius period. We’ve had our own 21st-century version of Rachel Carson - Greta Thunberg.
But just as it has the last two times Saturn moved into Pisces, this collective, social focus will be superseded by detached apathy. People won’t care as much about social and civic issues as they have been. It’s not that these issues will cease to matter or that people will stop caring about them, but they will be less trendy. The people who want to pay attention to people’s pronouns will pay attention to people’s pronouns, and the people who won’t, won’t. A lot of the push for social and civic change in the collective commons will lose steam. The focus will move elsewhere. People will lose faith in the possibility of changing anything in any real way in the civic world.
In a word, I expect Piscean escapism and the impulse to disengage from the world will overtake the previous Aquarian impulse towards humanitarian collective transformation.
However, while people will become discouraged at the possibility making real change through reframing language terminology, they will be more encouraged at the possibility of escaping from the rat race and corporate hustle and finding a deeper truth and connection beyond the confines of civic discourse and rhetoric. The nihilism and apathy of Saturn in Pisces will also open doors to find more worthwhile spiritual truths through other avenues.
Alternative forms of spirituality will become even trendier and more popular. I expect psychedelic medicine to become a lot more mainstream. More people will begin journeying with plant medicines. More people will disengage from participating in the corporate world, and will choose instead to engage in a lifestyle that is oftentimes more explicitly spiritual.
No mundane analysis in this zeitgeist is complete without mentioning Covid. The fear around Covid will really begin to subside now. The pandemic lockdown in the U.S. was declared the day after Saturn moved into Aquarius; the timeline of events around Covid has been closely linked to Saturn’s placement in Aquarius and the conjunctions and copresences it made with Jupiter, first in Capricorn and then Aquarius.
Now Saturn is gone, and the era of covid will be coming to a close. There won’t be another mask mandate or any other sudden spikes in cases that aren’t statistically anomalous from when people tend to get the flu.
All in all, I do believe that this Saturn in Pisces season will be easier than the previous Saturn in Aquarius season. I think there will be less aggression, shouting, and infighting among people. I think people will be less likely to get up in arms over differences in opinion.
For someone like myself who has already been rather cynical at the possibility of civic and collective change in any meaningful sense, I see the potential of a focus on spiritual interests and activities to be more fruitful. I hope that people use this period as an opportunity to disconnect from the noise and return to the tenets of a quiet, simple, meaningful life that isn’t constantly filled with social media.
But like anything, be on the lookout for corporate interests trying to capitalize on the new trends. Plenty of banks and evil money-making profit machines were more than happy to brag about their gender-neutral bathrooms so you didn’t ask why they were bulldozing the rainforest to make room for cheap beef. Expect changes in their strategy.
One of the most invaluable things that astrology offers identifying and disengage from trends, fads, and fervor. When I see a new priority overtake the zeitgeist around the same time that a new astrological ingression happens, it’s hard for me to completely buy into the hype. With this knowledge, you can start to sift through the meaningful results of transits and planetary alignments from that which is ephemeral and impermanent.
Recognize trends for what they are. The opinions and focus of the crowds and hoi polloi is fickle and changing. Today’s breathtaking revolution is yesterday’s fad. As Saturn begins moving through Pisces, some new fads will begin to reveal themselves. Hold onto the truth and genuine wisdom underneath the fad, and let go of everything else.
For this Saturn-in-Pisces season, hold onto the absolute truths of reality that are not found within society or civilization. Hold fast to the promise that your true nature is not contingent on anything that happens in a board room or on twitter. Take active steps to cultivate and nurture your connection to your spirit, and take the issues of society less seriously. But ignore any over-the-top nihilism and apathy, and don’t completely check out from your responsibilities to help other people. Don’t give up hope for other people, even if the civilizations they have built are beyond saving.