Virgo Full Moon, Pisces Solar Festival, March 2023 Cosmic Weather Forecast

Full Moon Over Winston Salem, February 2023, photo by Jane Sherry

  

The combination of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces also represents the likely Neptunian dissolution of existing rigid Saturnine structures in our social, economic and political spheres.

For those on the spiritual path, this energy signature represents a golden opportunity to perform repeated rituals, meditations, and energy work designed to expand our consciousness. This is the positive aspect of Saturn's influence on this watery Neptunian cycle.

Spiritual practices and subtle energy work will be amplified in power as we can more easily connect with intuitive spiritual guidance. Dreamy Neptune supports us as we envision new and completely different lifestyles.

We will more easily learn to surrender the ego and transcend our rational materialist mental maps of the world as we renew our connection with the web of life around us.

If we focus our attention with love on the web of life, we will be able to commune at will with the Elementals and Nature Spirits, Angelic presences and the Guides and Teachers who preside over our spiritual practices.

     

For those individuals and groups whose lived experience is an expression of the egoistic personality, Saturn in Pisces can trigger restrictive and reactive behavior based upon fears and phobias that originate in the shadowy realms of the personal and collective unconscious.

The positive manifestation of this energy on the ego and rational mind is that the fear of making a mistake can focus our attention fully on verifying every tiny detail related to our work and our art. This can be an exceptionally helpful aspect enhancing the mental rigor required by scientists, engineers, medical professionals, and those in the healing arts generally.

Energy healers, past life therapists, meditators, and depth psychologists will find that Saturn in Pisces supports efforts to plumb the hidden depths of the individual and collective psyche, to identify the source of hidden, unconscious fears and phobias, and to uproot and release the stuck energy that maintains these restrictive and oppressive negative emotions.

Astrologers are predicting a sea change in global politics during the mid 2020s, based upon the history of previous Saturn-Neptune cycles.

The conjunction of Saturn and Neptune historically has represented the manifestation of collective ideals in politics, religion, and art. The pungent scent of revolution permeates the ethers, and what had seemed immutable is shown to be ephemeral. What had seemed impossible becomes quotidien. Artists and poets commune with Nature, then produce prodigies of love that inspire generations to aspire to transcendence. 

The Saturn-Neptune conjunction in its positive manifestation involves using Saturnine persistence, determination, perseverance and discipline to manifest Neptunian dreams, visionary spiritual literature, art, music and performance. 

This powerful conjunction precipitates determination in the collective consciousness to take action to implement widespread changes in ossified social mores, authoritarian political systems and entrenched economic relations. Unfortunately, these collective impulses can, if partaking of too much Neptunian dreaminess, result in unrealistic goals and failed revolutionary agendas.

Neptune was discovered in 1846, just prior to a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. During the 1847-1849  Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Pisces, Romanticism peaked in the arts and literature. As a movement, Romanticism combined a deep reverence for nature with an affinity for the mysterious, the supernatural and the spiritual. Romantic writers, musicians and artists also held high political ideals, and supported revolutions to bring an end to aristocratic rule and elevate social democratic values. 

The chromatic operas of Richard Wagner and the expressionism of Verdi caught hold of the public imagination. Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Schumann captured the tempestuous emotional tonality of the moment, and expanded the vocabulary of musical coloration with virtuoso performances and compositions.
Europe was convulsed in revolutionary upheavals during this conjunction. In 1847 the Communist League, the world's first Communist party was established in London. 

      

During the period of 1847-1849, when Saturn and Neptune were conjunct in Pisces, anti-Imperial revolutions occurred in France, Austria and Hungary.

King Louis-Phillippe of France was forced to abdicate and the Second Republic was born. A nephew of Napoleon, Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was elected President in 1848, but the Republic was short lived. Louis Napoléon forcibly took power in 1852 and crowned himself Emperor. He would rebuild Paris and rule until 1870. 

Inspired by the French Revolution, workers and students in Austria revolted against the oppressive Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, resulting in the resignation of the legendary Foreign Minister Metternich.

The Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna, included Germans, Hungarians, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs and more, all of whom rose up to attempt to break away from the Empire, and/or take over the Imperial role for themselves. Revolutionaries were divided into nationalist, liberal, and socialist factions.

Emperor Ferdinand I attempted to placate the revolutionaries by offering a set of constitutional reforms, but Conservative forces brutally suppressed the revolutionaries and Ferdinand was ultimately replaced by Emperor Francis Joseph I.

              

                           Viennese students in the streets during the 1848 revolution

Hungarians revolted against the new Emperor in 1849, and despite the help of Russian forces, the revolutionaries were defeated by the Hapsburgs. Francis Joseph then divided the Empire into two kingdoms, Austria and Hungary.

Meanwhile in Germany, which was then a loose confederation of 39 independent states, a revolution designed to consolidate these disparate small statelets into one German nation was led by two opposing factions, the bourgeois liberals and the working class.

Radicals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were involved in the creation of the short lived Frankfurt Assembly, which had been created to forge a true German nation state.

Ultimately conservative aristocrats were able to overwhelm the divided revolutionary forces and the liberals were forced into exile, many of them settling in the United States. It was not until 1866 that a German state emerged on the world scene, ruled by the legendary General Bismarck.

So as we can see, these revolutions of 1848 reflected widespread discontent with the rule of aristocrats throughout Europe by all the other classes of society. However, the revolutionaries were divided between liberal middle classes and radical working classes, and ultimately this led to their downfall.

The revolutionaries' Neptunian ideals, which appeared in a variety of ideological flavors, failed to manifest their desired goals, because they could not exercise the Saturnian discipline required to unite opposed factions to achieve a common goal against a common enemy. 
 

At the next conjunction of Saturn and Neptune, in 1917, World War I was decimating armies across Europe. The Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Russian Tzar, and the world's first Communist revolution took power.

German Expressionist Art was ascendant at that explosive moment in history. Prior to World War I, European artists supported the conflict, hoping it would shatter the ossified hierarchical social structures they abhorred.

After the intellectuals and artists of Europe were conscripted, sent to the front lines, and encountered the horrors of the First Industrial World War, many returned home wounded, and many suffered nervous breakdowns.

Their previous pro-war positions did not survive the reality of these bloody experiences, and suddenly antiwar sentiments abounded, as expressed in the bold colors and jagged angles of George Grosz's painting entitled Explosion, which you can see above.


  

             Berlin 1989; picture taken soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9.
                  Raphaël Thiémard from Belgium., CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The current phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle began with the conjunction of 1989, with the rise of people power and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which triggered the slow motion  implosion of the Soviet Empire.

In China, a similar people power uprising demanding democracy and freedom was met with unflinching repression during the Tiananmen Square massacre. 

Iraq invaded Kuwait the next year, triggering the First Gulf War in 1991. The First Gulf War was an unqualified success for American forces, who used shock and awe tactics to win a crushing victory over Iraqi forces. 

President George H.W. Bush and the American punditocracy declared the end of history, and the establishment of a unipolar global system of governance, based on the unquestioned dominance of an increasingly Imperial United States. 

  
            Diva Battle Royal during Wrestlemania 25 at Reliant Park in Houston Texas 2009
                      Ed Schipul from Houston, TX, US, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As we enter into the next Saturn-Neptune cycle this month, it's apparent that the previous cycle of unipolar American Imperial dominance is coming to a close. Numerous players on the world stage, including Russia, China and Iran, appear determined to directly challenge American global hegemony.

History shows us that the struggle between the old order and the new one is likely to be messy, and the outcome uncertain. It's also probable that unless many challengers unite in a worldwide revolt to replace the globalized American system of military, financial and cultural dominance, they will most likely be unable to achieve their goals.

On the other hand, the Imperial hegemon, America, is likely to be weakened by the struggle in ways that will alter the global balance of power over a period of years, and even decades to come. 

If history is any guide, America is likely to be forced to resort to military force abroad and Draconian repression at home to achieve its goal of remaining the unquestioned global ruler.

Domestic politics during the coming Saturn-Neptune cycle are likely to resemble the European revolutions of 1848, when several different political groupings attempt to force dramatic changes to the existing system, but are unable to unite around common goals. 

Absent cohesive alliances among groups that see themselves as ideological and cultural rivals and enemies, it is very possible that the status quo can be preserved in some form after a messy and unpredictable series of revolts and social explosions that could easily resemble nothing so much as a World Wrestling Federation Battle Royale, such as the one pictured above.

 Extinction Rebellion München auf der Fridays for Future Demo in München, 2019-09-20
Henning Schlottmann (User:H-stt), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the United States, during the Saturn-Neptune return, we can expect many political groupings will make more dramatic and decisive protests against the status quo. Environmentalists, woke liberals, working class nationalists, evangelical Christians and white supremacists are all extremely dissatisfied with the present political system, and they are all likely to express their displeasure in rebellions of various degrees of severity.

Could we be in for a new version of the 1848 European revolutions in America? 

Perhaps, but given the decades of culture wars we've seen in America, and the increasing cultural polarization we see all around us, it's very unlikely these groups will unite to overthrow the present political system. They are all likely to create enough of a disturbance that the ruling elites will be forced to attempt to placate them, and eventually to repress them by any means necessary. 

Democratic Socialism appeals to approximately 49% of Millennial and Gen Z Americans, and appears once again to be creeping into US politics at the highest level, and Democratic Party politicians seem to be aware that the future American electorate will be more open to democratic socialist policies in the next couple of decades than at any time since the 1960s and 1970s. 

President Joe Biden's US Chips Act provides $50 billion in grants and loans to incentivize companies to onshore semiconductor manufacturing and spend money to design a new generation of computer chips. The money comes with directives to companies that require companies to refrain from further investment in China. 

                             Clean room of a semiconductor manufacturing facility
        Uploaded by Duk 08:45, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Surprising many in the US and Europe, Biden used the opportunity to extend some novel social welfare provisions to companies participating in the plan. Companies must provide “affordable, accessible, reliable and high-quality child care” to employees. Companies are required to provide for child care that is affordable even for low income households. Most dramatically, recipients of the money are “strongly encouraged” to sign collective bargaining deals with unions ahead of building new plants. 

These types of requirements represent a tentative break with the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus that unions should be crushed and the federal government should stay resolutely out of the business of micro-managing big business.

This landmark legislation appears to be an attempt to appeal to both nationalistic sentiments and working class voters at the same time. The Democratic Party has been losing working class voters for decades, and especially working class voters with nationalistic ideologies, who have become the core of the Trump Republican base.

No matter what happens in America, there will be momentous political uprisings around the world.

During the last couple of years leading up to this month's momentous Saturn-Neptune in Pisces conjunction, environmental protests have occurred throughout Europe, in England, in China, and in America. In the next few years we are likely to see a substantial increase in environmental activism around the world, as more and more people are impacted by the extreme weather events driven by climate change. 

The next few years will most likely bring unexpected outbreaks of determined rebellion all across the globe, along with an explosion of artistic innovation, and an upsurge of interest in spirituality, the occult and the paranormal, as the Saturn-Neptune conjunction unfolds.

If you're interested in some Neptunian escape as we approach the coming storm, here are a couple of creative works that epitomize the sensibilities of the new Saturn-Neptune in Pisces cycle, we've got a couple of movies to recommend for your viewing pleasure.

Check out Triangle of Sadness, a hilarious surreal black comedy that won the Cannes Palme d'Or in 2022 for best picture. Click on the link above and start a free trial on Hulu to watch this gem. A luxury yacht peopled by a couple of Instagram influencers, a Marxist ship Captain, and a group of wealthy party goers encounters a storm and is boarded and sunk by sea pirates.

   

The survivors, stranded on a bleak, jungly island, create a new social order headed by the maid who was in charge of the maids cleaning the toilets onboard. It's a 21st Century update of Louis Bunuel's surrealistic film classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, incorporating Saturn-Neptune in Pisces themes including: sea storms, copious outpourings of various bodily fluids, gaslighting, dissolving social hierarchies, and stunning mental and emotional transformations.

If such challenging fare does not appeal, you might enjoy Kardec, a moving, well-crafted Brazilian film about the life of Professor Leon Rivail, a skeptical scientific academic thinker who founded Spiritism in 19th century France, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, when the new Emperor was leading a counter-revolution in close partnership with the Catholic Church.

     

                 Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, aka Alan Kardec, Founder of Spiritism

"Under the suggestion of his spiritual guides, he published the books we now know to comprise the beginning of Spiritism under a name from a previous incarnation to ensure the works would stand on their own merit, and not on that of his sizable academic credibility," his official biography explains. "This would also serve another purpose: to unequivocally establish that the ideas and concepts contained in the basic books of Spiritism were the work of the communicating spirits and not of Rivail himself — a point further made clear in the title of Spiritism’s first work, The Spirits’ Book."

Rivail, who was closely connected to the Theosophical Society, sold over 30 million books in Brazil alone.

As we know, the Saturn-Neptune in Pisces cycle that coincided with the 1848 Revolution in France prefigures the upcoming Saturn-Neptune in Pisces cycle beginning this month. One of the characteristics of this cycle is an upwelling of interest in psychic phenomena, spiritism, and spirituality in general, along with a sharp conflict between traditional religion and spirituality based on direct experience. 

                       
                             Curtis and Jane Selfie in Reynolda Gardens, February 2023

Jane and I affirm that you and your loved ones receive the grace and guidance you require to grow stronger in your spiritual practices during this long emergency. We affirm that you are given golden opportunities to achieve your spiritual and material goals as the veils thin during the coming years of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Pisces.

Meditation Moment: Thanks, by W.S. Merwin