Following in the flickers of a solar eclipse, Friday held one of the most important planetary transits of our times.

After a brief flirtation with these flavors of instigative change from last May through early September, on February 13th Saturn entered Aries once again, and on February 20th formed a conjunction to Neptune at 0° through the cardinal fire sign — an epoch-defining aspect, in this era which at times feels like a grieving exclamation mark.

At a degree point synonymous with the commencement of the natural year, of equal parts day and night, of emblazoned growth in world-forging directions — here we find two planetary giants that together rearrange the epistemic building blocks with which we conceive of realities social, political, technological, existential, like a game of cosmic Jenga.

Saturn in Aquarius, which largely coincided with the pandemic, saw the time-binding planet in its yang home, yet still imposing stark penalties from this cold perch — humans measuring the physical and ideological distances between each other.

Coming from fixed air to mutable waters, Saturn’s entrance to Pisces in March of 2023 saw the planet of death seeking to define along a shoreline — discovering the depths of grief, feeling for the contours of an ocean floor, cohabiting Pisces with Neptune for the last of the sea god’s years there.

When the planet of hard realities, with its 29.5-year orbit giving just under three years per sign, chased after the trident-bearing body of dreams and dissolution, it reminded that Jupiter’s yin home of Pisces is not just some floating poetic improv, but a place where bigness is incubated in amniotic darkness, yet to see light of birth, where Saturn and Neptune co-present made truth feel at times like a ghastly funhouse of mirrors.

Not only what to ‘believe,’ as this word is the motto of Pisces and central to Jupiter who spent years ruling them, but what type of truth does something purport to hold?  Now, as they do every 35 to 37 years, Saturn and Neptune meet, on this momentous occasion in the cardinal fire sign Aries which says ‘I am’ — and in the waves between an eclipse and a fallen retrograde.

In what direction to build, and unto a vision for what kind of world?

* Solipsist Sunsets *

It’s true that Neptune’s 165-year orbit around the Sun has come into focus all the more in recent weeks, as the American Civil War started when Neptune last entered Aries 165 years ago.  While this took place at Ft. Sumter, South Carolina, it’s true that Minnesota was the first state to volunteer troops to President Lincoln.

Layered amidst the harrowing tragedy of unjust killings in modern day Minnesota, it was curiously powerful to me that the poem for which Renée Nicole Macklin Good won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize opens with the words, “I want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets.”

For months, I’d been thinking the words ‘epistemic solipsism’ in regards to the upcoming Saturn/Neptune conjunction in Aries.  The philosophical belief that one cannot know anything outside one’s own mind or perception to be real.  My concern is that coming from the death, melancholy and disillusionment of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, fumbling in the amniotic dark for some semblance of clear truth, the conjunction of these two in Aries would lead as much to a rejection of anything outside ourselves and our immediate perception as it might an empowered path forward.  A steepening vanity amidst slow-motion collapse.

That Good’s language uses the image of sunsets, perhaps in reference to the illusion of separation in a culture that exalts endless self-definition — yet with this conjunction taking place at 0° Aries, the zodiacal sunrise of the year — has hit me in gut again and again.

* Aquarian Contexts *

As with that Civil War synchronicity, it’s also true in the Glubb Model, the average age of an empire is 250 years, just two years over Pluto’s orbital period.  The Assyrian Empire lasted roughly 250 years, the British Empire the same, and Glubb analyzed different slices of the Roman Empire’s duration in ways that fit his postulated arc of ‘pioneering, conquests, commerce, affluence, intellect and decadence.’

The question of technological utopia/dystopia posed by Pluto, the hidden, Hadean wanderer made glacial in Aquarius since November of 2024, presents perhaps the longest astrological context for the events I write of here — in times that hold wavelengths meant to overstimulate and disorient.

As historian and disinformation researcher Dave Troy remarked:

“The endgame is cascading epistemological collapse.  Epstein, UFOs, 9/11, JFK, new reveals etc. are all fair game and on deck in this phase.  The desire outcome is the obliteration of institutional trust.

Of course, these don’t have to produce any actual ‘revelations’ — partial reveals can be spun; redactions are proof of conspiracy; lack of proof is proof of coverup; failure to confirm folklore is complicity.  This is how ‘just asking questions; can take down a civilization.

This is not to say there aren’t things to be revealed, or legitimate trust issues.  But DO be aware that this is a weapons system being deployed directly against your mind and the population as a whole.  Build defenses; reality test; differentiate between fact and conjecture.”

* A Way Forward *

Again, in what direction to build, and unto a vision for what kind of world?  Certainly.

Yet this is a time to “reality test and differentiate” such that we do not become victims of epistemic solipsism’s shadows… the implicit vanity of one’s own vision, or a rejection of everything beyond the momentary myth of individualism — as though our quests for self-definition do not have massive implications for the total organism of the planet.

Saturn in its fall of Aries highlights the natural square between the cardinal fire of Aries and Saturn’s yin home of Capricorn, something I often characterize as a child careening about without yet knowing quite well enough the pain of the ground or that coffee table corner.  Our obstacles, limitations and the planetary situation must be kept well in mind, but an ageless vigor must be maintained perhaps — blazing forward with the spirit of the child made dominion in Aries, the courage to carry on in Story even as old illusions simultaneously crumble in a haze of screens and airwaves.

As murky waters give way to the instigative fire of collapse and planetary trailblazing at once, it is paramount to guard against these pitfalls as much as acknowledging their validity.  Doubting anything outside oneself to be real is an understandable defense mechanism in times meant to confuse, but in my view this energy must be harnessed to take action — to cast light on, to grow, to build together with what is directly in front of us, seed by seed, brick by brick.

More to come… until then, swim well stargazers.

—A.B.