Saturn Direct in Pisces: the Angel of History Weeps
All roads lead to Saturn, even as Venus enters its air domicile of Libra. Further ruminations on these murky skies.
The castle hight of Indolence,Â
And its false luxury;Â
Where for a little time, alas!Â
We lived right jollily.Â
â James Thompson (1748)
âA Klee painting named âAngelus Novusâ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.â
â Walter BenjaminÂ
Saturn stationed direct in Pisces last Saturday, saturating our skies with its plumes of black bile. In my corner of the Kootenays, an early blast of winter turned to sludge and sleet during the station, mist smearing the cedars above my home. A pair of bears have been feasting on rotten crab apples in my neighbourâs yard and the larches are stripped in their pools of golden needles. Daylight savings hit me hard and Iâve noticed a listlessness among my friends as well. Endless looping small talk about shoulder season and all that entails. If youâve felt like any sort of forward motion has been all but impossible â know that youâre not alone. Saturnâs dirge heavy in the airwaves.
For Italian astrologer, Marsilio Ficino, for whom âSaturn impressed the seal of melancholy ⌠from the beginningâ, mitigating measures against attacks of melancholia are palliative at best. To ward off its ministrations, one can arise at the hour before dawn, when the air is thinnest, and massage their entire scalp â body included. Eggplant is to be avoided and the flesh of the hare. Solitude and darkness too. Clear, light wines, scenic walks, coitus, and even flogging are thought to help.
But similar to Robert Burtonâs admission that âmelancholy can only be cured by melancholy'', Ficino recommends total submission to Saturn as the one true antidote. The only way out of melancholiaâs labyrinth is through its endlessly curving halls. And was surrender ever so wrenching as to our barnacled and bladderwracked Saturn in Pisces?
At one point this past week, at the height of my fugue, I glanced at the lineup of planets on Astro.com only to see a sea of green and blue glyphs. Apart from the lunar nodes and Chiron in martial Aries, all of our other planets were either in earth or water signs. A cosmic low pressure system amplified by the leaden qualities of Saturn, which will be grinding slowly over the first degree of Pisces for the rest of the month.Â
These are incredibly murky skies so give yourself grace if your executive function has all but stalled. Or if the flame of creativity has (temporarily) sputtered out. The heaviness may also have something to do with the fact that Saturn has circled all the way back to where it started its transit of Pisces in early March of this year. Iâm reminded of hiking the moors in the Peak District of England and that sinking feeling when you realize youâre back at the stone wall from three hours ago.Â
The past months have been an initiation into the maddeningly circuitous nature of healing â as well as grief. There may be a feeling now of having sacrificed something and having very little to show in the way of reward or measurable progress. Spiritual maturation can be a difficult thing to quantify. There isnât exactly a medal or diploma for learning to bear your sorrow well.Â
Even as we circle back to some of the themes and scenarios at play in early March, when Saturn first entered Pisces, itâs important to remember that the tools and wisdom weâve gathered along the way can empower us to choose a different path out of the moors. We can walk away from the boulder weâve been heaving up the mud-slaked hill â and perhaps rethink the whole idea of Sisyphean struggle itself.Â
And yes, Venusâs ingress today into her airy domicile of Libra is a lightening of these skies. The best cosmic news in a while, which deserves to be feted. But again, thereâs no escaping Saturn, as the two planets find themselves quantumly entangled in a mysterious feedback loop. Venus is in Libra, in the sign where Saturn is exalted. And Saturn is in Pisces, in the sign where Venus is exalted. I intend to write more about this slippery dialectic in a future post, as it requires some unraveling, but maybe this will bode well for the arts at least?
On a geopolitical level, Venusâ newly empowered ability to peace-keep may simply dissolve into further euphemism and spin-doctoring. Netanhayu has a Libra stellium himself, accustomed to iron fists in velvet gloves. A brutal and deadly siege into Jenin this past summer was given the twee moniker, âOperation Home and Gardenâ. Repeated deadly assaults on Gaza prior to October 7th were referred to by the IDF as âmowing the lawnâ. Even the term âethnic cleansingâ harkens Venusian purification. And in thereâs one astrology hill Iâll die on, itâs that Venus is almost always heavily involved in times of war.
Israel itself has its Sun in Venus-ruled Taurus, the declaration of the state of Israel occurring only a few days after a lunar eclipse in Taurus in 1948. Preceding this establishment of the settler state, the Nakba, or âcatastropheâ of 1948 saw the violent expulsion of approximately three quarters of all Palestinians from their homeland by Zionist militias and the new Israeli army. Â Â Gyn Daniels, writing for Middle East Eye, captures this sanitized (Venusian) arm of Israeli colonial violence:Â
"Home and Garden" - whatever the motivation behind coining this repulsive moniker - stands for something profound and disturbing: its insistence on the illusion that somehow the settler population should be able to live in a comfortable aesthetic world detached from the brutalising ugliness and violence it unleashes on its environment, both human and naturalâŚ
The apartheid wall is designed in many parts to barely intrude upon the homes and gardens of adjoining Israeli settlements whereas it looms in all its ugly intrusiveness over the homes of Palestinians, frequently separating them from the orchards, fields and gardens they have tended for generationsâŚ
There, privileged, exclusive and ever-expanding fortresses can only exist through the use of extreme force and by destroying the possibilities for the indigenous population to flourish in their homes or grow their gardens.â
Saturn stationing in the first decan of Pisces brings us the warnings of the murky 8 of Cups â The Lord of Indolence in the Thoth, in which the cups of curdled pleasure rise from a putrid, sulphurous swamp. Both this card and the decan are ruled by Saturn (as if lead daddyâs energy wasnât heavy enough). Indolence derives from the Latin: freedom from pain or even indifference to pain. In the Book of Thoth, Crowley writes of this card:
âPisces is calm but stagnant water; and Saturn deadens it completely. Water appears no longer as the Sea but as pools; and there is no florescence in this card as there was in the last. The Lotuses droop for lack of sun and rain, and the soil is poison to them; only two of the stems show blossoms at all. The cups are shallow, old and broken. They are arranged in three rows; of these the upper row of three is quite empty. Water trickles from the two flowers into the two central cups, and they drip into the two lowest without filling them. The background of the card shows pools, or lagoons, in very extensive country, incapable of cultivation; only disease and miasmatic poison can flourish in those vast Bad Lands.â
Austin Coppock called Pisces decan 1 âthe labyrinthâ, where many a willowisp lure us toward a centre that may no longer be there. Though the inertia of the familiar is powerful, continuing through these bog lands is folly; a new path must be taken, though the road in is not the same road out. The cloaked figure in the Rider Waite 8 of Cups abandons his cups of pleasure, striding into the unknown territory of a desolate landscape before him â the Moon eclipsed.Â
Itâs impossible to ruminate on this card without thinking about the situation in Gaza, with water trucks being struck by Israeli bombs, disease festering all over the enclave, and desperate Palestinians washing themselves and their clothes in polluted sea waters.Â
If Saturn delights in building walls, in Pisces they are decidedly more nebulas. Porous. The spandrels of a whale fall perhaps, cultivating its own fertile ecosystem, even as fish and anemones pass freely between its bones. The holding vessels of Saturn in Pisces are as mysterious as a jellyfishâs elastic walls â or faith itself. When distorted, Saturn in Pisces will evoke religion and holy crusades even as it takes on the mantle of the executioner. Saturn is the God of feigned appearances after all and the Jupiter rulership brings a a false magnanimity to its âholy warsâ. Or, to quote Sagittarius C.S. Lewis:
âOf all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.â
Looking back to the last time Saturn was in Pisces, South Africa held their first interracial elections in 1994, electing Nelson Mandela as their president. Now we see South Africa recalling its ambassador and diplomatic mission to Israel, in condemnation of the the genocide unfolding in Gaza.Â
Genocide haunted Saturnâs last stint in Pisces too, when Hutu nationalists were roused by government officials to attack the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. This period of around 100 days, during which armed militias murdered their victims in their own villages and towns, searching them out in abandoned churches and schools, resulted in around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped during the genocide.Â
The Bosnian War, following the breakup of Yugoslavia, was an international armed conflict that also spanned nearly the entire length of Saturnâs last transit through Pisces too. 101,000 people died as a result of the war, mainly Bosniaks. It also resulted in the displacement of over 2 million men, women, and children. A campaign of war crimes, 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide was perpetrated by Bosnian Serb troops under the orders of Slobodan MiloĹĄeviÄ. Many Bosniaks were driven into concentration camps, where women and girls were systematically gang-raped and other civilians were tortured, starved, and murdered.
Saturn in Pisces through history seems to dissolve concentrations of power and political blocks through balkanization and populist movements â as well as the waves of displacement following war. The holding vessels of nation states themselves become much more porous, like my earlier analogy of the whale fall. Unpredictable new ecosystems bloom amidst the mighty bones of great empires sinking.
And indeed, the Gaza bombardment is reopening schisms within the left, the factions once united by their rallying against Trump. The âlittle humanitarian pauses as a treatâ that Biden and Netenhayu have proposed are not assuaging the progressive left, as protests explode across campuses and at the gates of the White House itself. The Gaza genocide could sink Bidenâs chances of reelection.
And a new recruitment military ad just dropped, featuring predominantly white men a (a departure from the imperial diversity-washing of the past years). Conservative commentators have suggested that the vibe shift means the US is definitely going to war. With recruitment at record lows, itâs been seen as the equivalent of pushing the panic button. Though I personally donât think the average American has the stomach for any sort of hand-to-hand combat (war is to be dopamine-gooned in snuff snippets on X, formally known as Twitter, thank you very much), the 2001 deja vu continues â except itâs the democrats that are horny for war this time.Â
Going all the way back to the last time Pluto was in Aquarius, from 1778 to 1798, it was during Saturn in Pisces that the French Revolution reached decisive moment with the Storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14th, 1789. On this fateful day, a mob of angry citizens and rebellious soldiers flooded into the fortress and political prison that symbolized the oppressiveness of Franceâs Ancien RĂŠgime. Befitting the complexity of Saturn in Piscesâ slow erosion, the event was a perfect storm of multiple different causes, including the dismissal of popular Genevan commoner Jacques Necker, financial hardship, rising bread prices, and the panic of a population on the brink of starvation. It was one of the first instances of mob rule during the French Revolution and foreshadowed the dismantling of the monarchy to come.Â
Just a day before Saturn stationed direct last Saturday, protesters in Oakland, demanding a cease-fire, blocked a U.S. military supply ship by chaining themselves to a ladder leading to the vessel (astrology continuing to be literal af). It was over the Saturn station too that tens of thousands gathered in DC for the largest pro-Palestine protest yet in the US since Israel's bombardment of Gaza began. The rally called on an end for US funding of Israel in the war, accusing Biden of funding genocide (speaking of that Pluto return in the US second house).Â
Perhaps Gaza has finally broken the divide-and-conquer binary machine that has accelerated since the pandemic and the Trump years. The âlet them eat culture warsâ that the 1 percent has wielded to protect the Plutonic wealth they continue to hoard. Though the mainstream media seems determined to skew ceasefire protests as intrinsically âpro-Hamasâ â which they are blatantly not â this feels like the first serious challenge to the political elites since maybe Occupy? Am I being too optimistic? The thing about Saturn in Pisces is that its inexorable flood tends to rupture the holding vessels of partisan politics too.Â
But the US is not the only military power experiencing a mighty Plutonic reckoning. Israel will experience the Pluto opposition in the next decade (and China too), as the Lord of the Underworld transits Aquarius in earnest starting next year. The US experienced its Pluto opposition during the economic turmoil of the âdirty 30âsâ, the transit peaking in 1938 just before the Great Depression officially ended. Post WWII the US would emerge as the unprecedented global power, its economy nearly doubling between 1939 and 1945 and the US dollar cementing itself as the most powerful currency in the world. As with the Pluto return that the US is experiencing now, the axis of resources and wealth was the sight of this katabasis and rebirth.Â
But this bounty of Plutonic wealth, influence, and military power would come at quite a price. Though the first US troops didnât land in Europe until 1942, by the warâs end some 400,000 American soldiers died. Then there was the horror of the atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to avoid a costly invasion of Japan. Between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese were killed, most of them civilians. Some were so thoroughly incinerated they left no remains behind: only shadows emblazoned on the walls of their homes and the streets where ordinary commerce was unfolding only moments before. To mine the chthonic riches of Pluto â to partake in the totalizing power only Hades can pledge â one often forsakes their humanity in the process.Â
And now itâs Israelâs turn for seismic Pluto moves in the coming years, as IDF white phosphorus binds Palestinian flesh to bone and their vast techno-military apparatus is tested on 1 million children with nowhere safe to flee. Israelâs Pluto in Leo in the 11th house is solipsistic, dangerously puffed up â and aligned with powerful friends indeed.Â
Pluto in Capricorn answers to Saturn of course, and with Saturn now direct Pluto is now empowered to carry its plans forward â for better or for worse. Pluto in Aquarius will answer to Saturn too in the coming decades, as the traditional ruler of the water-bearer. In terms of the Plutonic story that will be unfolding, it will be impossible to disentangle these subterrenean shifts from the Piscean waves of grief that have truly felt boundless.
Thereâs so much more to say about these tumultuous skies: Mercury in Sagittarius coming in hot with a volley of flame-tipped arrows. And the Mars cazimi on November 17th. But I wanted to end on a quote I stumbled across by Sonia Sulaiman, writing for the Instagram account @folkloreforresistance.
âIn Palestinian folklore, we believe the stones can be our witnesses. Even though Israel has effectively severed Gaza from communication with the rest of the world, the acts that it commits there will not go unrecorded and unrememberedâ.Â
Hereâs a ragged hymn from Jeff Buckley, who would be having his Saturn return in Pisces in the coming years if he were still alive: