Saturn-Neptune Opposition II(a): Historical Drifts

2.20.07


What should we as a world do when the great Cold War ends? That's what we're still in the process of figuring out—at least as far as the current Saturn-Neptune opposition is concerned.

While Saturn and Neptune are now opposed (or at a 180-degree) to one another, the two planets last conjoined in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down… and what a symbolic event in our consciousness that was, eh?

Of course, it wasn't just the Germanys who pulled open their iron curtain, letting folks on both sides see what they'd been missing. That same year, the compulsory one-party dominance of communism also came to a revolutionary close in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, with ripples that affected us the whole world over.

We haven't been the same since.

The union of Saturn and Neptune combines a firmly grounded attitude of responsibility, directed toward building enduring structures and cutting the unnecessary fat (Saturn), with a holistic idealism in which we may invest hope, taking faith that when we act in service to a higher altruism, we all win (Neptune).

It makes sense, then, that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions (like the one in '89) seem to align with cultural upswings in popular optimism. Saturn draws Neptune's romantic visions of imagined bliss down to earth, bringing some 'manageable compromise' version into being. Neptune, meanwhile, helps Saturn see beyond his limits, instilling greater compassion and meaning into the authority with which he holds things together. These two work together to fit dreams into reality.

Of course, whether these swells of 'people power' witnessed when Saturn conjoins Neptune are deemed a good thing depends on one's relation to the 'authority' being questioned. For instance, 1989 also brought the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, an amazingly popular show of dissent against China's communist regime—which quickly turned into the Tiananmen Square massacre, after Chinese forces reasserted their centralized control. Unlike in Eastern Europe, the new Saturn-Neptune cycle that began in China in '89 didn't imprint a full-scale endorsement of freedom into the years that would follow… but as anyone watching China can attest, major changes have indeed occurred.

When we look back at the other two previous Saturn-Neptune conjunctions of the last 100 years, we can see this pattern of related political readjustments across the globe becoming clearer.

After all, it was at the conjunction of 1917 that the Russian Revolution started that whole communist hoopla… not to mention the simultaneous entry of the US into World War I, which is widely believed to mark 'the beginning of the end' of that first, unthinkably massive global conflict.

And during the following conjunction in 1952-53, the nations were still putting the post-WWII peaces together—ultimately in the form of a world map divided by varying allegiance to one of two 'superpowers', a split emphasized by simultaneous significant shifts of power in both the US (from Truman to Eisenhower, ending two decades of Democratic rule) and the Soviet Union (following Stalin's death, Khrushchev took over with a reformist bang). With the Korean War drawing to an uneasy ceasefire close and the height of McCarthyism's communist witch-hunt sweeping across America, the 'line in the sand' was etched deeply into the global consciousness.

As we can see, the last three Saturn-Neptune conjunctions marked moments in history during which a fresh thread of high-minded vision for a better tomorrow (Neptune, speaking from his heart) was woven into the societal structures being built and rebuilt (Saturn, reasserting his designs)… thus, laying a new precedent for the relation between the whole of humanity and the systems of authority for governing over it, which we then assimilate to and react against over the succeeding 36 or so years of the cycle.

But it's the opposition between Saturn and Neptune that really matters to us right now, as we're hitting the second of three exact peaks next week (Feb 28). This transiting aspect is big news, people… perhaps the single most important astro-factor we've been confronting since early last summer, when its effect began to bear down.

The obvious question to ask ourselves: How far have we come since '89… and where exactly did we go? More, coming up…