by Robert Wilkinson
On November 4, Saturn goes stationary direct at 1 Pisces. This is a platform from which all Saturn affairs move forward for the next 8 months until it goes stationary retrograde at 20 Pisces in June 2024. This year’s direct station features the quality of “a last minute, joyous rallying to some task,” within the context of social responsibilities.
Lessons of this part of the Zodiac
Now that Saturn is again in forward motion, it will re-trace ground it covered since it went stationary retrograde in June at 8 Pisces. In 2023, its shadow zone is between 1 and 8 Pisces. You can find out more about recent months when Saturn was retrograde in this crucial time period by taking a new look at Saturn Stationary Retrograde in June 2023 at 9 Pisces – Hearing the Call to Renewal.
The area between 1 and 8 Pisces is said to be in the “Scene of Federation” with 1-5 dealing with the actional-material level and 6-8 dealing with emotional and social activities. We got our first look at this span of experience between March and June, and now have gotten a new look at that material since June. We now get to move forward a third time across this span, demonstrating we’ve learned the lessons our inner Saturn wanted us to learn. Because it’s Saturn, it all relates to our ability to demonstrate maturity, organization, and patience in taking command of our life trajectory.
Saturn has occupied its stationary direct degree at 1 Pisces since October 10, and will continue until November 27. We now begin our anew of Saturn’s expression in the sign of Pisces, testing our ability to find “forms of effective action in the fog” and “not fear the confusion.” This is Saturn teaching us about collective consciousness and the need to demonstrate a mature compassion and forgiveness when something must end. We now get a third look at how empathic or intuitive we are or aren’t, and will get new understanding of the collective field.
From here it transits 1 to 20 Pisces, helping bring structure and form to what Jupiter opened between May and July 2021 and January-February 2022. In 2021 the SRX began an acceleration of our evolution so that “new mutations from Cosmos” could come forth after October 2021. We then wound up in a time of learning to use spiritual energy effectively beginning Summer 2002, being led to the need to rise to some occasion between October 2022 and June of 2023, when we began the recent period of “hearing the call to renewal.” We now understand life is a marketplace, and can move forward to claim what nourishes us by the Summer of 2024.
It is helpful to regard 2020 as a training period for our “Group Performance” related to our current and future group work, with the December 2020 Jupiter conjunct Saturn “Grand Mutation” at 1 Aquarius, marking a point at which past and future separated. That conjunction set a 20 year Aquarian pulse into play, as well as a 200 year era of Air sign dominance. Humanity and the Earth are evolving out of a 200 year era of being stuck in materialism into a 200 year era of relatedness and movement.
Saturn will be in its 2023 “shadow zone” until it again moves across 8 Pisces between February 5 and February 14, after which it finishes its movement through the first half of Pisces and begins its time in the second half of Pisces. Having finished its work structuring our lives wherever we have Aquarius in 2021-2022, since early March we’ve been learning to structure how we flow through the collective field wherever we have the first decan of Pisces in our charts.
The Dance of Saturn and Uranus
Saturn is now in its closing (waning) phase with Uranus, and as it goes direct, it begins to move away from the forming but not exact quintile in play from March through June 2023. After that Saturn returned to a binovile in August which has persisted through now. A binovile is a 9th harmonic angle which requires that we see the common base to two apparently contradictory realizations. We now can see what has worked and what has not, and begin a new “march toward specialization” through the quintile in January and February 2024.
These two planets play a huge part in how we fulfill our individual destiny, since Saturn’s mastery of the visible world gives structure to Uranian genius. We have all been experiencing a revolution wherever we have Taurus in our charts; while Saturn taught us through the square in 2021 and 2022, we’ve now moved past that “tension of action” and moved into a long term set of spiritual understandings about the dance of individuality with the need for structure. By how we have chosen to individualize in grounded and effective ways, we now are able to express our unique talents and purpose as a Spirit in the material world.
We are now in the closing phase in the dance of individualization we have been doing with these two spiritual heavyweights. The square required “right action” either to correct something, turn a corner on something, or block something already in motion which needed to move in a different direction. We had to focus on permanent patterns while catabolic forces broke down old structures, rules, and limitations. We saw what was important and left the unimportant behind while finding our parts in our larger spiritual group work.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
This long wave cycle began in 1988 with three conjunctions between Saturn and Uranus. The first was in February at 30 Sagittarius, the second was in June at 29 Sagittarius, and the third was in October at 28 Sagittarius. That began a “structuring of awakening” or “the boundaries of individuality” which came to fulfillment in the dynamic squares from Saturn in Aquarius to Uranus in Taurus in 2021. The first was in February at the 8th degree of those signs, the second was in June at the 14th degree of those signs, and the third was in December at the 12th degree of those signs.
Saturn and Uranus were in a beneficial waning trine between late 2016 and late 2018, bringing new ways of blending the old with the new, as well as ways to innovate life structures so they allowed us more freedom and individuality. In 2019-2020 they made a tredecile and biseptile. The first biseptile from Saturn to Uranus was January through May 2019, which began the crystallization by Saturn of the seeds of the Uranus biseptile Pluto already planted. These biseptiles marked major forks in the road of destiny, as Saturn has made these visible in the world. While Pluto’s influence is invisible, Saturn’s is highly visible.
Between October 2019 and mid-June 2020 Saturn brought form and structure to the “invisible seeds of radical transformation” generated by the Uranus/Pluto biseptiles. That was an exremely volatile period in world events, as well as a time of crucial choices and changes in our lives related to Capricorn and Taurus sectors. Interestingly, Uranus and Pluto were in tredecile between June and early November 2020, made another biseptile between November 2020 and May 2021, with the final iteration of that phase of “The Grand Irrationality” between late Dec 2021 and mid-April 2022.
These Plutonic seeds were next given form by the biseptile between Saturn and Uranus in December 2019 and early January 2020. The final biseptile occurred non-stop between July and November 2020, and it’s easy to see that was a major “turning point in the road of destiny,” where the future of the world was on the line as the irrationality of our times set the tone for the extraordinary conflicts of 2021 and 2022.
We now get the realizations of the waning binovile, the high specialization and unique gifts and blessings of the quintile, eventually landing on the sextile between these two spiritual powerhouses by 2025. Overall, the opportunities to blend the old and the new, the established and the innovative, the predictable with the unexpected, haven’t been this numerous for more than 20 years, so have fun as your Pisces sector works productively with your Taurus sector.
Overlapping Capricorn and Aquarius Cycles
Saturn’s many conjunctions of January and March 2020 set the stage for all that will come over the rest of the first half of the 21st century. That was a very intense period of multiple conjunctions between Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, all in the last decan of Capricorn, with Jupiter making three conjunctions with Pluto at 23 and 25 Capricorn throughout 2020! The longer wave cycles will last 12 and 33 years, and so they set the structures which will dominate the world stage for many years to come.
Saturn in its home signs of Capricorn and Aquarius made it extraordinarily important in all our lives between 2019 and 2023. We had our Capricorn lessons in 2019-2020, and had our Saturn dominated Aquarius lessons on our plates from 2021 through March 2023 when it entered Pisces. At this point, from now through June will be excellent for deeper and wider connections with others who are our spiritual Brothers and Sisters, so prepare for going deeper into the Piscean fogs in 2024!
For now, we’ll close with something we all learn about making friends with the Saturn power within us so we can fulfill our purpose on Earth.
Saturn symbolizes the universal binding force in Nature, the “Ring Pass Not” of Dharma. Dharma is our “true function,” that overarching Truth of Self that permits all things if they serve Dharma and no thing if it does not serve Dharma. Saturn is our “skin of personality,” the boundaries of what we are able to master, found through the ten thousand things that temporarily enslave us through various types of mental, emotional, or material inertia.Uranus is the Higher Law, Saturn is the worldly law. Uranus helps us break free, break out, and break through the binding force Saturn represents. Saturn helps us give structure through discipline to our eternal discoveries along our Path to Truth. In one esoteric system, Saturn is Divine Understanding, whereas Uranus is Divine Wisdom. Both serve each other in the Great Work each of us is here to do.
As I mentioned before, my book Saturn: Spiritual Master, Spiritual Friend addresses these important evolutionary issues we all deal with throughout our lives. It explores how Saturn relates to Dharma, the “Ring Pass Not,” and various types of Karma, and how we can make friends with our inner Saturn to claim our spiritual individuality. The second part of the work examines the important changes we go through as Saturn conjuncts, squares, and opposes all the planets in our charts as it moves through the houses throughout our lives.
For now, take a look back at what you first encountered between March and June 2023, and see how the review since then has helped you get ready for the adventure promised now that Saturn is again direct in motion. This is the Cosmic Timekeeper about to reverse course again and get back on the move, so it’s also time for us to move!
I’ll publish part 2 on this important moment in Cosmic Time this week, with Sabian symbols, aspects, and more.
© Copyright 2023 Robert Wilkinson
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