Our almost 6 year stretch of overpowered Saturn is coming to an end. On March 7th, the Greater Malefic leads the charge in planetary shifts and heads for Pisces. This period is quite important to me since it marks the beginning of my 1st house Saturn Return. However, I do think this is a significant turning point for a lot of us. We are leaving behind the austerity of Saturn in domicile in favor of a Saturn answering to Jupiter. Interestingly, we also get to experience Saturn co-present with Neptune, something we have not experienced since the early 1990s. I had the privilege of discussing Saturn in Pisces with Dan Waites over at the World Astrology Report, if you want a general mundane overview. In this newsletter, I want to explore three different stages of Saturn in Pisces. My reasoning is that there are three decans of Pisces, and during Saturn’s time here Jupiter will move through three different signs.
Act I: A Quest for Treasure.
Mar 7th 2023 to Mar 1st 2024
The first year of this transit, Saturn will spend all of its time in its own decan in Pisces. I find the transition between the final decan of Aquarius and the first decan of Pisces to be especially emblematic of the times. Saturn’s final gifts to is from Aquarius may involve the detachment from difficult situations to take stock of what is essential. You may need to strip yourself down to the core and only continue engaging with people, places, and experiences that can sustain a baseline of normalcy or comfort. Because once Saturn switches into Pisces, you may realize that you need to leave something behind. You might have put all your resources into something, or tried to hold onto a situation to extract as much as you can from it. However, you may quickly begin to realize that these systems and ideals that you have chained yourself to have become devoid of meaning and lack purpose. This is the point where the water bearer must empty their jug, so that the jug can become useful again later.
This movement into Pisces kicks off the decanic journey through the sign, which I like to describe as the struggle to achieve true belonging. If Pisces is to be thought of as the last sign, then it makes sense that we shed our egos and any false pretenses about individuality in favor of liberation from these constructs that generate a lot of suffering and even loneliness in life. Here, people surrender to the divine or the forces of nature (whatever your preference is), realizing that perhaps they are not in the driver’s seat. Instead, they are merely vessels through which meaning is channeled and certain principles and cycles end up playing out. In order to realize this, one must abandon the things they are emotionally attached to in order to go deeper. This is the blessing and curse of Pisces I. At best, there is this gravitation towards finding deeper meanings in everything. At worst, it can have you escaping into worlds you will never reach, or running away from your problems by picking up and going (guilty as charged!).
Although the first two months of this transit are ruled by Jupiter in Aries, Saturn will actually be answering to a Jupiter in Taurus for the majority of this arc. Following the quick pivot to a new direction, Jupiter’s tenure in Taurus may allow us to stabilize whatever parts of our lives are governed by Taurus. Generally speaking, we want to maximize comfort and consolidate resources that we can reliably derive pleasure from. After a difficult three years of Saturn-Uranus action bringing about permanent changes, perhaps we can be rewarded for finding new sources of comfort to rely on. However, in the attempt to create new standards of comfort, perhaps the valuation of certain objects may be inflated.
On a mundane level, Taurus does get associated with commodities. Our attempts to find new stable commodities to assign value to may leave us feeling unmoored. Perhaps, Uranus being co-present with Jupiter for this period will really force us to make a hard pivot when it comes to the collective standards around sources of value. I wanted to refrain from straying too far into mundane astrology, but think of the discourse around the need to move away from fiat currency that has been floating around lately. While the cryptocurrency boom of 2020 generated a new multimillionaire class overnight, 2022 was a brutal year for the digital currency market. However, crypto could make a resurgence during the Jupiter-Uranus co-presence in Taurus, probably as a result of markets such as China reopening its doors to the trading of cryptocurrency.
With Jupiter ruling Saturn in Pisces, this reform of our baselines around assigning value to things and deciding what is worth acquiring may provide opportunities to venture into uncharted territory. I often think about the connotations of Saturn and labor. With these changes in tastes and cultural norms around what is valuable, perhaps our relationship to labor will also change. While Saturn in Aquarius gave us a masterclass in a need to reform our structures around connecting to one another as we perform our duties, Saturn in Pisces might not be as keen on maintaining such levels of distance. While productivity may be higher for those privileged to work remotely or flexibly, the desire to unite people behind shared purpose may be diluted through a computer screen or a phone call. While some organizations may strong-arm their employees and associates to return to the office to participate in the illusion of life before the pandemic, others may embrace new structures that may boost morale. It’s possible that workers may be positioned to make more demands about protecting their spaces, especially as metrics for comfort and the amount of effort required to achieve a certain level of that will shift. While the sextile between Saturn and Jupiter during this phase may promise new opportunities to cultivate stability or work-life balance, there may not be enough tension to enact such changes.
Act II: Lost at Sea.
Mar 1st 2024 to Feb 23rd 2025
The real drama of Saturn in Pisces kicks off in March 2024, when Saturn finally makes it to the middle decan. After embarking on the journey into uncharted territory, we typically enter the chapter where we encounter things that can fill the void inside and replace that which was left behind. I often view this decan and associated narratives in terms of serendipitous discovery. In the Pisces decans episode of the Fixed Astrology Podcast, Pao and I discussed the resonance between this decan and the story about Jesus turning water into wine. There is an element here of taking something little and making miracles to provide sustenance for others.
However, Austin Coppock does mention that malefics in this decan can disrupt this sense of discovery and exchange. Since Saturn will also inch closer to a conjunction with Neptune by this stage of the transit, it is possible that doubts may be cast on the feasibility of such solutions. To add insult to injury, we get our only Saturn-Mars conjunction in Pisces in this decan. On a mundane level, Mars-Saturn conjunctions point to the types of crises that we may experience within a 2-year period. The 2020 Saturn-Mars conjunction coincided with the closure of borders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns which forced us to take most activities online, which is on brand for the themes of Aquarius. Perhaps we can look at the nature of the sign, and the term ruler of the conjunction to provide additional context for the plagues this particular conjunction will bring. Interestingly, the conjunction takes place in Jupiter’s sign, Jupiter’s bound, and Jupiter’s decan! Since Jupiter has connotations of knowledge, wealth, morals, and alliances, I would not be surprised if there were challenges related to our ability to that trade alliances will hold up or that we can rely on the wisdom of a spiritual advisor or scholar. It does not help that Mars is also ruling the Great American Eclipse of 2024, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
This particular phase is also more stressful because Jupiter will move into Gemini on May 26th, 2024. Jupiter, arbiter of morality, rewards, and honors is exiled in the signs of Mercury. The diametric opposition between the Jovial and Mercurial will be on grand display during this phase. Mercury is more concerned with breaking things into smaller parts, while Jupiter wants to synthesize things and incorporate them into a larger framework. A plight of Jupiter in exile is the inability to focus on cohesive narratives due to hyperfocus on the facts and details. With Jupiter being a planet of faith and also morals, there is potential for the use of anecdotes and figures out of context in ways that make it hard to believe in things or their value. Perhaps there is a fixation on identifying exceptions to the rule in order to justify certain narratives, morals, and belief systems.
With Saturn in the superior square and applying pressure to its lord for adequate support, it’s easy to see how frustrations can play out archetypically. Saturn can be thought of as a trainee or apprentice tasked with giving form to something formless without clear guidelines. Jupiter in exile becomes the unreliable guru or authority figure, providing guidance based on information taken out of context and focusing on very specific scenarios that do not generalize to the types of complex problems that Saturn is tasked with handling. Furthermore, it does not help that Saturn as a planet is concerned with orthodoxy and needs to do things in the “correct” way. When you have a mentor suggesting that everything is relative, how is it possible to begin creating boundaries so that people and systems can operate effectively? As a result, people may fall out of favor with certain belief systems and metrics of assigning cultural and monetary significance to things. However, Jupiter does have triplicity dignity in Gemini, suggesting that people may become easily swayed by unreliable narrators displaying high level information without nuance or context. While the suggestions or beliefs may be popular or touted by some, the things shared may not necessarily be true. Alternatively, this configuration may force people to rightfully confront the ways in which cherished values and beliefs do not hold up to logical scrutiny.
Not only is Saturn answering to an exiled Jupiter, but this is the opening Saturn-Jupiter square after the Grand Conjunction of 2020. Being the last of the two visible planets, Saturn and Jupiter historically served as markers of time. Each conjunction of the greater malefic and benefic marks a 20 year period of global events with particular themes. The opening square can be thought of as the first test of the ability for this new era to take hold. Saturn always has the superior position during this phase since Jupiter moves more quickly through the zodiac. In Postcolonial Astrology, Alice Sparkly Kat depicts the ways in which Saturn can have connotations of an idealized golden age we have strayed from. Therefore, it seems likely that we would expect some resistance or reactionary response to the expansion that Jupiter is trying to create. Saturn answering to an ill-dignified Jupiter sets us up for an interesting dynamic because there are two key ways this could play out. Perhaps people may want to cling to this old way of being out of resistance to new information about the hypocrisy of their beliefs. Or people may be driven to build structures based on unreliable information taken out of its original context.
Act III: The Last Frontier.
Feb 23rd 2025 to May 25th 2025 & Sep 1st 2025 to Feb 13th 2026
The last act of Saturn’s travels through Pisces is going to be one for the books. This period is interrupted by a brief intermezzo where Saturn and Neptune make their conjunction in Aries. Regardless, this transit has a major quality of finality to it. The imagery and archetypes of all the final decans of mutable signs carry connotations of major endings, which pave the way for new beginnings to take their place. During this arc of the greater malefic’s journey through Pisces, we reach the point where we will need to make a key sacrifice in order to achieve some kind of “happy ending.” With Saturn being a planet of obstacles, I would imagine that this may require some major loss that can force people to come together out of necessity.
This particular stretch of the transit is interesting because Saturn will be in close proximity to Rahu (the north node), which enters Pisces on January 29th, 2025. Per the Vedic astrological tradition, Rahu and Saturn are said to share some similarities. This is likely because both are associated with the sign Aquarius, have connotations of being concerned with the collective and abstract things, and because both planets can bring about difficulty. Therefore, the qualities of Saturn will be enhanced during this period. The thing to remember about Rahu is that it is a head without its body— meaning it has a strong hunger for things but may struggle to understand when satiety has happened. We may find ourselves longing for structures and systems that we can give ourselves to, but perhaps we may go to extremes to make this happen. Since this conjunction occurs in the last decan of Pisces, perhaps we may reach a point of no return. Rahu and Saturn conjoin on April 7th, 2025, following each of their conjunctions to a retrograde Venus in Pisces. While Venus is in her exaltation and doing her best to represent the highest forms of love, beauty, and interconnectedness between people, her retrogradation and proximity to malefics (including a trine to Mars in Cancer) corrupts the experience. Venus will actually station direct pretty close to Saturn and Rahu, and she will immediately conjoin each of them again over a two week period. There is an element of forcing people to adhere to these ideals in such a way that may leave us wondering, “do the ends always justify the means?”
Following the intermission involving that Neptune-Saturn conjunction in Aries, Saturn returns to Pisces on September 1st to provide us with an encore (Neptune won’t rejoin the party until early November). This phase is interesting because by this stage, Jupiter is exalted in Cancer. The greater malefic and benefic will be mutually applying to a trine with one another for a couple of months in the fall. When Jupiter first enters Cancer in June, Saturn will have been in Aries preparing to conjoin Neptune. While Jupiter will not have any say over the affairs over that fallen Saturn, it’s possible that the need to forgo limits and boundaries to initiate will serve the purpose of tearing down structures in favor of ones that actually promote a greater sense of care. Jupiter provides that fallen Saturn with the moral backing and perhaps even financial support to achieve this mass overhaul. Neptune, the dissolver of structures is also aiding and abetting Saturn in these goals of systemic overhaul.
When Saturn returns to Pisces to form a trine aspect to Jupiter, there are connotations of rebuilding and perhaps even reconciliation following a decisive action taken under the Saturn-Neptune configuration. One of the last major configurations Saturn has to another planet before leaving Pisces for good in early 2026 is the trine to Jupiter in Cancer, which stations retrograde not long after perfecting, which leads me to believe that this attempt to regroup and perhaps redistribute resources in a way that benefits more people will inform our experience of the highest expression of Jupiter. Saturn coming back to Pisces to make amends with a reformed Jupiter may allow us to make peace with any decisions we made to implement new structures and leave old ones behind, even if we had to strong arm others into going along for the ride.
I am hopeful that this reflection on potential themes of Saturn in Pisces will really inspire each of you to see the strength into surrendering to the unknown. Sometimes to find what really matters we need to embrace the idea that we are beholden to forces beyond our control. However, the best way to endure these things may involve collective efforts. This might require acceptance that the actions of few can have consequences for many, and contributing to structures and systems of connecting with others with this principle in mind. If you want more guidance on how this shift may affect you, please consider booking a session with me!