Saturn in Pisces' Diaphanous-core
I explore Saturn's recent ingress into Pisces through sea weed blobs, crow magic, AI's siren songs, the return of the naked dress, and my own restless Bay Area drifting.
As Saturn ingressed into Pisces on March 7th, I witnessed the seachange in real time, after my 5k run around Lake Merritt (yes, new Mercury Papers HQ just dropped). A murder of crows suddenly flocked over the water, in watery glissandos and erotic couplings. Their danse-macabre was decidedly rhythmic, fluid, even Venusian (Pisces is the home of Venus’s exaltation after all).
I was reminded of the love-knotted Piscean fish in the fleeting pairs diving each other, brushing wingtips, only to spin out of each other’s orbits again — supplicant to the larger hive-mind. Nothing like the scrappy aerial turf wars I associate with these puckish birds.
What I witnessed instead was crows larping a murmuration of starlings: iron fillings pulled into whorls and alien sigils. Perhaps they were tracing the elastic forms of Saturn in this liminal water sign itself — translating its quantum ballet for those who cared to look up. According to Vedic astrology, these scavenging birds answer to our Lead Daddy, and the ritual act of feeding crows can help to mitigate Saturn’s more malefic qualities. I can dig it.
After more than five years in its two domicile signs — Capricorn and Aquarius — Saturn enters the nocturnal water sign of Pisces. The endless winter of our discontent is finally over. At least, we’ll experience the greater malefic with more nuance: a dialectic between Jupiterian expansion and Saturnian contraction that should feel more artistically fertile.
1993 - 1996, when Saturn was last in Pisces, was a golden age for grunge, Brit pop, industrial rock, and all forms of alternative music (even as so many of its patron saints later slipped through Saturn’s gossamer-thin veil). From Jeff Buckley’s Grace, to Elliot Smith’s Roman Candle, to Portishead’s Numb (stays on during sex), to the Blakean visions of the suburbs melting in the video for “Black Hole Sun”, so many of my favorite bands produced their best work in this period — though an undercurrent of melancholy haunts even its most effervescent cuts. I’ve got a Saturn in Pisces Spotify playlist in the works that I’ll drop here soon.
I’ve been listening to Elliott Smith’s “Kiwi Maddog” on repeat lately, wandering the side-streets of Oakland, past the abandoned Spanish church and squat craftsmen mansions, in a 12th House trance. There’s something rotting under its glistening guitarwork, like the fermenting liquors of a just overly-ripe peach. I’m obsessed.
Though Saturn in Pisces heralds my waxing square in a couple years, I’m grateful for this shift. Saturn in Aquarius felt like this frictionless, free-floating air bnb aesthetic, skinned onto endless “spaces”, all designed to feel like an extension of our apps. It manifested as pastel infographics, Corporate Memphis, globo homo, crumpled face masks in gutters, lobotomized dolphin YouTube workout music, and endlessly replicating Netflix shows shot on digital in a palette that’s either bisexual lighting or oversaturated turquoise and mustard yellow. Oh, and NFTs, of course. The emergence of Theorygram, and memes as digital art, was the only interesting creative development of Saturn in its air domicile (imho). Otherwise, it was a grim time for Venusian matters.
In a Jupiter-ruled sign, Saturn’s walls will have some give to them. Think semi-permeable cell membranes, or the blown hoop-skirts of jellyfish. In its Jupiterian expansiveness, Saturn in Pisces hearkens galactic super-structures in deep space, honey-combed with voids. Instead of Saturn in Aquarius’s hermetically-sealed terrariums, we experiences boundaries as the gossamer threads of a spider’s web.
We’re barely two weeks into Saturn mermaid-maxxing and its ripples through the zeitgeist have been all too literal. You know the quantum flunkies are trolling when headlines like “Giant Seaweed Blob Visible from Space En route to Florida” drops. Or “Pope Francis Urges Followers to Pray that AI and Robots Always Serve Mankind”. A deluge of sheer, barely-there dresses on the Oscars red carpet — let’s call it diaphanous-core — further heralded the shift. In fact, comparisons were being made to Kate Moss’s iconic “naked dress” of 1993 (when Saturn was last in Pisces).
Recent attempts to curtail — or even ban — TikTok in North America speaks to the Saturnian correction of Neptune in Pisces that’s coming (something I’m personally grateful for). In some ways, Neptune in Pisces feels like the most insidiously malefic of our outer planet transits, seeding conspiracy ant-mills, deep fakes, endless virtual escapism, the new untouchable e-girl/OF shows hole complex. This erosion of meaning will only accelerate as the AI chat-bots sing their increasingly mellifluous siren songs.
The danger, I think, of Saturn in Pisces will be the emergence of false gurus and prophets grifting and profiteering on the despair that has saturated society. Jordan Peterson is apparently building an “ark”, or ARC — the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship — touted as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, with a former “Mumford and Son” on the organizing committee (yep, the quantum flunkies are shit-posting). Neptune in Pisces’s unreality demands a riposte — but can someone other than Jordan Peterson please stand up? New mommy era with Marianne Williamson?
Saturn in Pisces can also be the unstoppable wave of a popular uprising that infiltrates even the sturdiest institutional vessels. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius, alongside Saturn in Pisces, the Storming of the Bastille took place in July of 1789, as revolutionary insurgents took control of the Medieval Armoury — then the seat of royal authority in Paris and a symbol for the corruption of the monarchy. It was considered a flashpoint in the French Revolution, which spanned Pluto’s last journey through Aquarius.
The current uprising in Paris is one to watch, especially as Pluto enters Aquarius on March 23rd (for its first three-month act). Violent protests heated up in France around Saturn’s ingress, after Macron’s attempt to impose an increase in the country’s retirement age (without a vote in the National Assembly).
The last time Saturn passed through Pisces, between 1993 and 1996, waves of violence flowed through Rwanda. In the genocide that followed, a hundred-day killing spree left 800,000 Tutsi people dead. War also raged in Bosnia, where 100,000 people were killed and 50,000 raped in a conflict that lasted from 1992 to 1995. And on American soil, the Oklahoma City Bombing terrorist attack killed 168 people, including 19 children.
Though I’m feeling hopeful about this transit on a personal (and creative) level, I’m nervous about its potential riptides through the masses. As alienating as Saturn in Aquarius has been, its glass pipettes, perspex slides, and beakers have largely contained its various “alienated” cults of political extremism, conspiracy, femcels/incels, DID TikTok zoomers, NEETs, etc… Saturn in Pisces brings an inevitable blurring of these ideological boundaries, as these disparate Petri “cultures” start to leak into each other and intermix.
The internet itself is emerging from its Saturn return. The rogue AI element will likely erode whatever sense of “reality” and infrastructure still holds within cyberspace, as AI generated content floods its remaining human artifacts. There’s some sort of Zizek gag here about Tinder maintenance bots endlessly sexting and negging each other while their owners wax philosophical in parks.
Though it all sounds rather quaint now, the last time Saturn was in Pisces unleashed Beanie Baby mania, cited as the first internet sensation in 1995. Even as regulatory attempts are pushed on TikTok, the damage is already done. The collective has never been more porous. Why cultivate your inner garden when you can chase the dopamine dragon forever through content whose algorithm has already hacked the contents of your soul? As Pluto in Aquarius’s death-drive and will-to-power plugs into the hive-mind — and boundaries already funky with Saturn in Pisces — mass hysteria, mania, and psychosis will be the feature, not a bug, of the coming years.
So yeah. At least my Gemini rising ass won’t be bored. It will be fascinating to watch this collective game of exquisite corpse unfold. If you were hoping for a restoration of order, meaning, and societal cohesion — I don’t know what to tell you. The zeitgeist is only going to get weirder within the swaying kelp grottos of Saturn in Pisces, though my hope is that it does usher in some sort of renaissance of the arts.
Speaking of which, I experienced Saturn in Pisces’s exquisite artistry (and emotional catharsis) at a concert at San Francisco’s Chapel a few nights ago — when the Mars-Neptune square was peaking. I met my friend / Grateful Dead scholar at the venue, and we smoked a bit of weed in the negative storm ions outside. Godspeed You! Black Emperor were headlining, but I was especially moved by the opening act: Jessica Moss, of A Silver Mount Zion. She played two longer orchestral pieces composed during a Montreal lockdown, in the dead of winter. She described it as her scoring of a period of extreme loneliness.
Using a looping pedal to layer filaments of violin and her own angelic keening, I was reminded of the imaginal worlds that Saturn in Pisces can build out of nothing. I felt as if I was wandering through web-vaultings, halls, and balustrades of pure vibration. Her performance gave me the feeling I’ve only experienced in Reiki sessions: when your energetic fields are delicately stitch-picked, plucked, and rearranged. The Chapel itself is an intimate venue and I was struck by the lack of phone use through the three-hour show. A few people jotted notes into moleskines. Mostly reverence and intense focus. Definitely a vibe shift.
Near the end of Moss’s second piece, violins bled into what sounded like whale song, which warped into the choral howling of wolves as the lights dimmed to a crimson halo. Gooseflesh. After a short break, GSY!BE further channeled March’s changing of the gods, a sublime and relentless sonic assault. Wave after wave of crescendo caused me to dissociate, as a projector bathed the Canadian ensemble in the looping image of a war plane plummeting through clouds.
I couldn’t help but think about Aquarius, as the angel/alien, falling from the heavens — to change, well, everything. Some lines from Yeats come to mind: “A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds; / I balanced all, brought all to mind, / The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this death.”
It’s impossible to cover all the astrological props and sets being shifted by invisible stage-hands in March. It’s like a year of astrology packed into one month. Next week is an especially charged cascade, with the Equinox, an Aries New Moon, Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius, and Mars finally entering Cancer after six months of paralysis-analysis in Gemini. Whatever has felt stuck or stagnant in your life, or has caused your thoughts to endlessly spiral — no longer.
For now, I’m grateful for the anchorage of Lake Merritt, where prime people-watching makes my 5k runs somewhat less painful (I’m trying to get back to the SUB 25 minutes I was running as a graduate student in Manchester). There’s something about Oakland that appeals to my inner Gemini collagist: its 70’s concrete apartment blocks inter-spliced with art deco turrets and faux-arcadian gazebos. There are portals everywhere: the satyr-carved fountain in its glade of palms, encircled by glass skyscrapers, where I’ve been taking my morning coffee as of late. Or the Rose Garden, frequented by lovers, burn outs, and Russians, which is always several degrees cooler than its surroundings.
I might linger in The Bay a bit longer: a friend’s Japanese-style cottage, flanked by an ancient oak tree and stands of bamboo, has become available to sublet. I’m only planning my life a few weeks in advance in this 12th House profection year, though I’m starting to entertain visions of myself in Barcelona, Portugal, and Greece this summer. We will see. Leaving space for the mystery.
I’ll leave you with a video of Jessica Moss’s sonic invocations:
Thank you❤️ some creepy themes coming up this Saturn cycle. I wonder if we will get a grunge revival? Or the YBA art? Damien hursts diamond incrusted monstrosity.