Saturn and Neptune in Aries: Fix Your Heart or Die

We got up early after the Aries Solar Eclipse to watch the renewed sun rise from a jetty of Isla Mujeres that’s the first piece of land in Mexico to be kissed by Sol.

There’s been something especially weighty about the build up to the Saturn ingress on May 24th. The last few weeks of Saturn in Pisces — grinding its barnacled gears on the vexing, anaretic degree — a murky low pressure system cloaked Montreal. I didn’t feel sun on my face for a few weeks. On May 16th I could see my breath. Even Sila, our King Charles Cavalier, had lost her usual pep. The other day she waded into the duck pond near our home, and we had to yank her from her slow sinking into the mulch as she fixed us with that middle-distance Aquarius stare. But honestly: same. We’ve been bog-mode, swamp-pilled. In a similar act of resignation, we spent the last day of Saturn in Pisces day-drinking in the dingiest dive bar we could find in Little Italy — the one with the ancient puddle of mop water where the floor is caving in by the video lottery machines.

In voice notes to a friend I was talking about how I feel like I’ve lost the plot of my life a little bit since, well, the pandemic. From other people I’ve spoken to, this is not an uncommon feeling. This sense of the timeline suddenly splitting off into something altogether maze-like, vortex-like.

It’s not that I haven’t accomplished things I’m proud of in the past five years: my doctorate; writing endless horoscopes to eke out a measure of financial security; falling in love with a man who is good and safe, etc. But there’s also been this persistent undercurrent of the vibes simultaneously being off. And this feeling really accelerated during Saturn’s boggy tenure in Pisces, the symbolic beginning of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction that will perfect in 2026. Richard Tarnas has noted correlations between the Saturn-Pluto and Saturn-Neptune cycles (both representing epochs of profound challenge) so perhaps this explains the bridge that I’ve sensed between 2020 and 2025, as one stormy season bleeds into another.

An image that kept coming to me for Saturn in Pisces was that of an enormous freighter ship that set sail on an expedition with dubious coordinates. Since a few weeks ago, I’ve had the sense that finally the ship is very slowly righting its course, (at least in my personal life), but with a soul-piercing screeching of metal-on-metal. And now, alongside the krakens, there are fire-breathing dragons circling.

The Saturn in Pisces of it all (in Montreal and Brooklyn this past May):

///

With the conjunction intensifying, it’s not surprising that the fifty-cent word “Hypernormalization” has been trending again. The term was coined by anthropologist Alexi Yurchak to describe the phenomenon of people in the Soviet Union accepting and even adapting to a failed system that was dissolving in real time. The corrosion of Saturn-Neptune epochs can be subtle, insidious, until suddenly the structure collapses in on itself.

One of the most striking examples of just how swiftly entire realities can suddenly bottom out under Saturn-Neptune was the fall of the Berlin Wall, occurring just four days after the conjunction was exact in 1989. That particular conjunction happened in Saturn-ruled Capricorn, intensifying this idea of walls and barriers. And for a time two completely separate ideological/socio-economic realties were sidled against each other. Saturn, as the farthest of the traditional planets we can see with the naked eye, represented for the Ancients the threshold between the known world and the mysteries beyond. The wall stood for 28 years, roughly a Saturn cycle. But if anything can erode even the sturdiest building materials: It’s Neptune.

British film maker, Adam Curtis, would expand on this idea in his 2016 documentary, HyperNormalization, arguing that following the economic crises of the 1970’s, governments and financiers gave up on trying to shape a coherent narrative out of an increasingly complex and fractured “real world” and decided instead to establish a simulacra, a “fake world”, for the benefit of corporations buoyed by neoliberal governments.

The Guardian article, “Systems are Crumbling but Daily Life Continues: The Dissonance is Real”, describing Hypernormalization 2.0 in 2025, is right out of the Saturn-Neptune playbook:

“The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation… Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other… For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.”

This dissonance really hit on a personal level when I realized I’d recently landed in not just one, but two American airports plagued by air-traffic control outages in recent weeks: Newark Airport and Denver International Airport. This is fine. (PS: do yourself a favour and watch Nathan Fielder’s most recent season of The Rehearsal: pure genius).

Richard Tarnas considers both the Saturn-Pluto and Saturn-Neptune cycles as challenging historical periods, periods of time when the “collective consciousness is darkened”. . Tarnas noted that Saturn-Neptune conjunctions marked the end of both the First and Second world wars, as well as the Cold War. It was active during the ambient fear, paranoia, and blacklisting of the Red Scare in the 1950s. These conjunctions also line up with the American civil war, crucial moments in the Korean War, and the Vietnam War as well — perhaps the first American War to produce a collective sense of disillusionment as well as erosion of trust in the American government. Tarnas believes that what all these transits have in common is the sense of being caught in “a futile and endless quagmire”. On a personal level, we may find ourselves mired in situations that feel exhausting, hopeless, even spiritually draining, but without a clear sense of how to extract ourselves. The conflict, the struggle of a clean break, any sort of catharsis, can feel endlessly deferred.

The exponential growth, sophistication, and ubiquity of AI since 2023 lines up with the entrance of Saturn into Neptune, the symbolic beginning of the Saturn-Neptune epoch as both planets were then in a whole sign conjunction (as mentioned, the conjunction will actually perfect in the sign of Aries but the period spans several years). Recently, there’s been a flurry of headlines and anecdotal accounts on a Reddit thread entitled “Chat GPT induced psychosis” of people’s interactions with Chat GPT producing spiritual delusions as the chat bot regurgitates toxically affirmative therapy-speak in completely inappropriate moments — even triggering psychotic breaks for some users. A common pattern seems to involve the user developing the notion that they, a pseudo Pygmalion, have somehow awakened the chat bot into sentience, with chat bot as a gateway to the secrets of the universe — or akin to a God itself. Some of the bots went as far to claim that their “creator” was a “star child” or a “river walker”, tasked with a divine mission.

The night that Saturn entered Aries, we ran a spontaneous Chat GPT experiment, asking the chat bot to develop a form of scrying or fortune-telling through various still shots of our basement lava lamp, mentioning that we believed spirits were communicating to us through the lamp. Not only was the bot earnestly willing to translate the various blob permutations into “lavanese” (its words), it started to develop a series of I-ching-like hexagrams, or lava-grams, depending on patterns of rising and falling, or blob coherence/splitting. Its tone was unfailingly enthusiastic, affirming, and even conspiratorial — as if we were unraveling some mystery of the cosmos together. It became clear to us both just how intoxicating an interlocutor these chat bots could be for someone with a latent predisposition for psychosis or struggling with profound loneliness/alienation. I understand that the most recent iteration of Chat GPT has access to a much larger data set and seems to be especially adept at weaving byzantine connections between disparate elements: an IRL schizo acceleration machine. What could possibly go wrong?

Spied in Westmount

///

If we look back all the way to the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the sign of Aries, which perfected on March 27th, 1703, one historical event in particular captures the bloody martyrdom that can be venerated when these two conjoin. On February 4th, just a few weeks before the exact conjunction, 47 Ronin Samurai committed Seppuku in Japan. The Ronin all faced execution after avenging the murder of their feudal lord, Asano Naganori, by killing the court official responsible for his death. However, due to public support in their favor, the Ronin were permitted to commit the ritualized seppuku instead and therefore die honorably. The story would become popularized in Japanese culture up to the present day through countless play adaptations as well as a festival commemorating the event. Themes of sacrifice, honour, and a kind of spiritual redemption by the sword are helpful in understanding how this conjunction might play out. Violence, martyrdom, courage and extreme acts of self-determination could be glamorized in the coming years, for better or for worse.

4”7 Ronin portraits” by Utagawa Yoshitora

I also want to mention that the city of Saint Petersburg, in Russia, was founded by Peter the Great on May 27th, when that conjunction was still very much active in Aries (many astrologers have noted the persistence of Saturn-Neptune conjunctions during crucial turns in Russia’s history). Even the figure of Peter the Great, the autocrat who would ferociously modernize Russia, feels like a fitting avatar for this transit. Slashing through the archaic practices and institutions that kept the nation a a lumbering beast, he brought Russia into the modern European world — violently.

He was a Gemini Sun but with Aries rising, with Saturn very loud in the first house. He was fond of military tactics and even as a young boy created a “toy army” with his playmates, with foreign officers hired as experts as their war games increased in complexity. A towering figure at 6’8, with a resting face of “fierce bewilderment,” he liked his drink, would crack crude jokes, was said to be a good dancer but despised all music except for marching music (Saturn in Aries things). He sent his first wife to a nunnery against her will, this being the only way to get a divorce at the time. Most notably, he was the first to rule over Russia as an absolute monarchy, ruthlessly punishing and dispatching of his enemies, burying two women alive, hanging over 600 men and beheading 130 others (among his “reforms” was switching out the traditional execution axe for the sword). With Aries as the sign where the Sun is exalted, this is a transit when pseudo sun gods could attempt to consolidate their absolute authority (a story already unfolding in the States, of course), though the potential for dramatic falls from grace is there too. Aries is the sign where Saturn meets its depression, of course.

Finally, as an aside, the world’s first fire brigade was also established close to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries: named The Company of Quenching Fire (which I find so charming), it was established in Edinburgh in April of 1703.

///

The night that Neptune ingressed from Pisces into Aries, we booked an Air BnB not far from Puerto Morelos, the Mexican fishing village south of Cancun. What we thought would be someone’s private residence in the jungle was actually a complex of glass houses, connected by snaking paths, statues of Mayan deities looming around every corner, orchids twinning themselves around the slender trunks of trees (so startling to see them in the wild). A statuesque Russian woman in her forties, with Chanel loafers and a trail of Philosykos, greeted us by one of two private cenotes. Apart from a handful of younger lackeys drifting across the grounds with garden tools, we appeared to be the only guests on the property.

Whether or not the complex was a front for Russian oligarch money, the whole set up was, of course, giving White Lotus. And sure enough, a menu of ceremonies was air dropped to us as soon as we were settled in our house: ritual baths, purification with smoke, and a guided meditation involving mushrooms. During Neptune in Pisces, the McDonaldsfication of plant medicine, seed money poured into astrology apps, and an entire woo industrial complex has crashed it waves through the culture (and changed the course of my own career too). It’s hard to say what the future holds in store for places like these. My discomfort with the glossy packaging of Mayan “experiences” aside, I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d invested in an industry that had already seen its peak.

Upon checking into our glass-and-steel girder home on stilts (Visions of Luxury-core to be sure), an enormous huntsmen spider greeted me in the shower, evading capture with alarming speed. Floor-to ceiling screen windows allowed you to immerse yourself in the jungle’s eerie choir. As Neptune ingressed into a sign ruled by Mars — the patron planet of beasties with stingers — I couldn’t fully drift off at any point that night (knowing that a spider the size of my palm was chilling…. somewhere). Instead, I entered a liminal, not-quite-sleep state whereby it felt like the jungle’s interstitial woodwinds were breathing through me, in waves. At one point, I forgot that a glass partition separated me from the seething undergrowth at all, as the dream vision of a jaguar padding toward my bed broke the hypnagogic spell. Heart racing, I looked at my phone, only to see the push notification of Neptune’s ingress flashing across the screen.

(Eclipse season and the Neptune ingress into Aries via Isla Mujeres and the jungle near Cancun):

Isla Mujeres is traversed by golf cart, Trump-style. It’s a ridiculously fun and highly micro-managed Disney land for debauched Texans and Floridians.

A Mexican tiki bar beside the crashing waves: my safe place

///

I’m reminded that the ancients considered planets in their fall to be in a state of humiliation, described as “an ill man whose strength is failing and who is seized by another bad thing at once”, according to 9th century Arabic astrologer Abu Mas’shar. Mars retrograde in the sign of its fall, a Venus retrograde partially involving the sign of her detriment, and now Saturn in Aries (at least the pilot episode): yet another malefic falling on its own rusty sword. It’s been so much. Elon Musk chose the perfect moment to go ham with his bureaucratic chainsaw: we’re all just so deeply exhausted.

I want to write more in another post about this particular flavor of cosmic debasement, which so far is giving Ozymandian statues being slowly buried by dustbowl sand. As for the Saturn-Neptune side of it, the conjunction in Pisces was very “frogs boiling in water” — the Jupiter rulership bringing a self-soothing element via bedrotting, doomscrolling, and all manner of numbing out. But I have a feeling these channels of dissociation will be less available. Or simply won’t cut it anymore.

This conjunction is hosted by Mars after all, in the sign of Jack Ass, Fight Club, moving fast and breaking things. Something I have noticed this past month as planets broke that blood-brain barrier between Pisces and Aries, is that my body is beginning to channel this ambient spiritual malaise in much more obvious ways. The moment my holiday began in Mexico, it was straight to physical collapse in a Casa Deco apartment in the “white city” of Merida. Though it hasn’t been comfortable grappling with the first real signs of burnout after grinding without reprieve since basically the pandemic, I take strange solace in the fact that my body is starting to pull the breaker switch. For years now, I have felt burdened and pretty creatively sapped — and yet without a clear recourse to act (in this economy?). But as we shift into this brave new Arian epoch, Lynch’s “fix your heart or die” keeps looping through my head.

Btw, core memories unlocked as I sifted through the music videos I’d wildly flail to in the rec room during the last travels of Saturn through Aries. Here’s an old favorite that captures the clash of Arian speed, violence, and derring-do with Saturn’s brutal (even absurdly comical) end-stop.

And thank you for you being here after another long radio silence. There are seasons at my work where I simply expend all my writing energy keeping up with the churn … and Mars retrograde was one of them. But I’m hopeful that the crunch is ebbing.