The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 140, titled:
Saturn in Capricorn: Major Themes From 2017-2020
With Chris Brennan and guests Austin Coppock and Patrick Watson
Episode originally released on January 18, 2018
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released April 18, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Sunday, January 14, 2018, starting just after 8:21 PM here in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 140th episode of the show. For more information about subscribing to the podcast and helping to support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit TheAstrologyPodcast.com/subscribe.
In this episode, I’m going to be talking to astrologers Austin Coppock and Patrick Watson about the transit of Saturn through Capricorn which is going to be taking place over the course of the next three years. So hey, guys, welcome to the show.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey, Chris. Hey, Watson.
PATRICK WATSON: Hey, thanks for having us.
CB: All right, I am excited about this episode. It’s a little almost anticlimactic because of course Saturn went into Capricorn almost a month ago now in mid-December, and there was a lot of fanfare and all the astrologers were talking about it. But Austin, you had what I think was a good suggestion which was to let a little bit of time pass so that we could start soaking in this transit—such a big shift—for a little bit and sort of collect our thoughts on it and then record this podcast, since this is going to be around for two or three years while that transit’s going on. And do you feel like that was a good move in terms of starting to see some of the manifestations of the transit over the past two weeks?
AC: Yeah. You know, as we talked about on a previous podcast, when planets enter a new sign there’s often a burst of significations where you start seeing the themes both at large and on a personal level in seed form. And just a week following Saturn’s ingress towards the end of December, I saw a bunch of stuff; and some of it was nice in that it confirmed what I thought was going to happen, and then I got a few notes from it as well, like, “Mm, that makes sense, but I didn’t write that in my piece.” We’re coming up on almost a month of observation now.
CB: Right. Yeah, and you guys both wrote articles, and you’d been working on this and researching it for quite a while before the ingress actually happened. I know, Patrick, you did a video. Like how long ago was that that you actually published your video on Saturn in Capricorn?
PW: Uh, I don’t remember. I don’t remember exactly when I published that; it was about a few months ago. But yeah, I focus on the transit of Saturn through Capricorn as well as its coming conjunction to Pluto, and it was called “Sunshine, Rainbows & Daisies: Saturn, Pluto, and Capricorn 2018-2020,” and that was available on my site for people to pay for. At some point I might make it public, but for right now it’s not.
CB: Sure. Well, I’m glad you’ve joined us tonight to share some of that with the public for free.
PW: Yeah.
CB: And yeah, why don’t we jump right into it then since we are in the thick of it now. So since you guys have done the most research on this, I’ll be deferring to you a lot in terms of your expertise and your background in it. But one of the things that you guys suggested in terms of a starting point that I thought was a good idea was talking a little bit first about the basic significations and meanings of Saturn in order to set a foundation for the rest of this discussion. Since this entire episode is going to be talking about Saturn and its transit through its ‘home’ zodiacal sign then it makes sense to figure out what the meaning of that planet is first.
So one of the starting points that we talked about—or usually a good starting point—is reading from an ancient author on how ancient astrologers conceptualized Saturn and what kinds of significations they gave to it. So we’re going to read a passage from Vettius Valens who lived in the 2nd century, and he gives a list of significations for Saturn some of which are kind of extreme, but some of which are kind of interesting. And then I’ll contrast that with a passage from Cosmos and Psyche—which is a book by Richard Tarnas that was published about 10 years ago—for more of a modern take on the subject, and then we’ll sort of discuss those significations and hopefully come to an understanding somewhere between those two extremes of modern and traditional. How does that sound?
AC: That sounds like a good method.
PW: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, well, I’m going to pull out my book—available at fine bookstores everywhere, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune—where I have an excerpt that I spent quite a long time [on]. I spent like five years going back over this translation, over and over again, to get the significations that Valens gives for Saturn down, and there’s a bunch of footnotes that I’ll leave out. But Valens says: The star of Saturn makes those born under him petty; malicious; having many anxieties; those who bring themselves down; solitary, deceitful; those who conceal their deceit; austere; downcast; those who have a feigned appearance; squalid; clothed in black; importunate; sullen; miserable; given to seafaring; practicing waterside trades. What do you guys think so far?
AC: Sounds like my people.
CB: Practicing waterside trades. One of the funny things in ancient astrology, they often associate Saturn with waterside trades and seafaring.
PW: Right.
AC: Chris, I want to jump in because that stuck in my head for years.
CB: Right.
AC: And I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable with that because Saturn’s qualities are excessive coldness and dryness.
CB: And dryness, right. And he actually says parched or squalid as one of the earlier significations.
AC: And being associated with concretization both literally and metaphorically. But I was thinking that two days ago, and I was thinking about the fact that Saturn is almost universally regarded as representing boundaries or limits. And it occurred to me that being seaside or by a river—like that’s the boundary between water and land; it’s such an obvious boundary.
CB: Mm-hmm.
AC: If you look at the globe, the main boundary you notice is the blue part and the kind of brownish, sometimes greenish part. I was like, “Oh, that boundary.
PW: Well, in Greek myths too the character’s always fall to hubris if they ever have to travel past a boundary—past a body of water.
AC: Right, which is the structure of hubris, right?
PW: Right.
AC: Transgressing. That’s really interesting.
CB: Sure.
AC: Anyway, sorry, I just wanted to jump in; I had a thought.
CB: No, that’s good. Do that if you guys have any others here, so I’m going to continue. So Valens goes on, and he says: And Saturn causes depressions, sluggishness, inaction, obstacles in undertakings, long-lasting punishments, subversion of matters, secrets; restraints, imprisonment, sorrows; accusations, tears, being orphaned, captivity, and exposures. He makes farmers and gardeners because he rules the soil. He also produces hired workers of property, tax collectors, and violent actions. He produces those who acquire great reputation, notable rank, guardianships, the administration of that which belongs to others and fathers of other people’s children.
Of substances, he rules lead, wood, and stone. Of parts of the body, he rules the legs, the knees, the tendons, the watery parts of the body, phlegm, the bladder, the kidneys, and the inner parts that are hidden. Of illnesses, he’s indicative of those that arise from coldness and from moisture such as dropsy, pain in the tendons, gout, cough, dysentery, tumors, convulsions. Of disorders, he indicates spirit possession, unnatural lusts, and depravity. He makes those who are unmarried and widowed, orphans, and childlessness. He brings about violent depths by water or by strangulation or through imprisonment or from dysentery. And he causes falls on one’s face. He is the star of Nemesis and is of the diurnal sect. He is dark brown in color and is stringent in taste. And that’s the end of Valens’ significations of Saturn.
PW: And that’s why I called my Saturn lecture, “Sunshine, Rainbows & Daisies” because that’s just exactly what Saturn’s about.
AC: Right.
CB: That’s pretty much taking it right from Valens’ descriptions in terms of the…
PW: Sunshine, yeah.
CB: So one of the things about ancient astrology that’s immediately striking is just that they tend to state things in the extreme, so those are often framed in the most extreme manifestations of Saturn. Elsewhere in his book, Valens digresses a few times and says of course Saturn when well-placed or in certain circumstances can indicate very constructive or sometimes positive things, but in terms of stating the extremes of some of his significations that’s basically the list.
AC: Yeah, it’s a lot of hyperbole in some of those books.
CB: Sure.
PW: I mean, in some ways the point of that is to sort of show you the general direction, giving you an extreme example so that you kind of get the idea of Saturn—not that fun. I don’t know if this is supposed to be taken so literally. Kind of like how all the names of ancient lots are kind of odd and strangely specific, but I think they’re supposed to show you something more general about it rather than something really specific.
AC: Yeah, I mean, hyperbole is a rhetorical device.
PW: Right.
AC: It helps make a point, right? Sometimes you need to blow things up to an almost cartoonish level. But Saturn can signify all those things.
PW: Yeah.
AC: I suppose another advantage of that is you’ll feel better about your own Saturn after reading that list.
CB: Sure.
AC: You’ll be like, “Oh, I just got hives and broken bones.”
PW: “I really have dropsy.”
CB: Right. “I’m not a sailor, and I’m not given to waterside trades.”
PW: “I’ve only got one tumor.”
CB: Yeah. And the other thing is of course Valens is focused on the literal manifestations and it’s much less about the broader archetypal meaning or psychological or what have you; some of that’s supposed to be inferred underlying the individual concrete manifestations. And that’s why the next author that we’ll focus on—a more modern author—will focus on that end of things which is more of the archetype. So this next excerpt is going to be from Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas which was published in 2006.
So according to Tarnas, he gives a list of some of Saturn’s significations. He says: Saturn is the principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation; time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things; gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, binds, challenges, fortifies, deepens; the tendency to confine and constrict, to separate, to divide and define, to cut and shorten; to negate and oppose; to strengthen and forge through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority; to experience difficulty, decline, deprivation, defect and deficit, defeat, failure, loss, alienation.
[T]he labor of existence suffering, old age, death; the weight of the past; the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, imprisonment, the sense of “no exit”; pessimism; inferiority, inhibition, isolation, oppression and depression; the impulse and capacity for discipline and duty; order; solitude; concentration; conciseness; thoroughness and precision; discrimination and objectivity; restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom; the harvest of time, effort and experience; the concern with consensus reality, factual [concreteness], conventional forms and structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, judgment, the superego; the dark, cold, heavy, dense, dry, old, slow, distant; the senex, Kronos, the stern father of the gods. And that’s it. So right away…
PW: Hell of a run-on.
CB: Yeah, it’s quite a sentence. But you can see he’s trying to get to the deeper archetypal meanings from which you might be able to draw specific concrete manifestations, but some of those are sort of broader concepts that may be tied together or could be applied to multiple underlying concrete manifestations using that.
AC: It’s a good list.
CB: Yeah, it was a good list. I mean, the thing about Tarnas I like is that even though it’s ‘modern astrology’, he actually does try to—because of his familiarity with history, his first really popular book, The Passion of the Western Mind, was a long book on the history of Western thought—he does draw on some of the older traditions and ideas and [incorporates] that into the modern understanding that he has of the planets.
PW: Yeah, the only way I could top that list is just to say to ‘Saturnize’ Saturn, the archetype, there’s almost just a list of synonyms. It’s crazy that that much is packed into the idea of Saturn and that we can just express it as Saturn; but yeah, that’s astrology for you.
AC: I want to just share some thoughts I had the other day in terms of distilling or communicating the nature of planets in terms of archetypal characters which is something we do a lot and has been done a long time in the sense of Mars is warriors and smiths, etc., etc. They weren’t referred to as archetypes a thousand years ago, but you look at older texts and they’ll be like, “Oh, yes, these are the children of the planets,” right? I always liked ‘the children of the planets’ images and ideas because it gives you a sense of who are the people of Saturn, right?
So in a lot of ‘children of Saturn’ images, you get some of the people who are dirty and disheveled and broken down by work, as Valens says, because they’re doing mining or they’re doing agricultural work. They’re getting their hands dirty; they’re working very hard and very physically. You also have administrators which are mentioned in both of those lists, and I believe Tarnas mentioned the senex which is the wise old man archetype, or the Elder as an archetype.
And I was thinking the other day though in terms of the building or constructive side of Saturn. I really like the figure of the architect because to be an architect and to oversee the design and building of something huge and physical means cutting the stones and managing the labor and dealing with the inevitable setbacks. If you’ve ever watched a building project, they’re always, always, always behind schedule and over budget. And so, I was thinking about Saturn as both architect and demolition crew to structure, and I was also thinking about the ‘death’ side of Saturn and the relationship with the past and the dead.
So in my mind, I’ve been playing recently with this sort of simple pairing of the architect and the necromancer. You know, there’s the sort of scary ‘Skeletor’ version of Saturn which is dealing with death and those things—all of the fears which Saturn signifies which are communicated by the simple visage of the skull, right? I don’t know, I’ve been kind of thinking about that as ‘night-side’ Saturn and then you’d have the ‘day-side’ of Saturn being the architect and demolition crew which is dealing with more concrete, visible things like boundaries and the foundations and building blocks and all that. I don’t know, I just wanted to share that.
PW: Saturn is definitely a builder. Yeah, Saturn is definitely a builder; I’m kind of noticing that.
AC: Yeah, and I believe you were going to tell us about what he likes to build in Capricorn.
PW: He likes to build prisons in Capricorn; that’s what he likes to build. That’s like my big insight about Saturn lately is that Saturn likes to build structures which are relevant to the sign that he’s in. So in Sagittarius, Saturn builds bridges, and in Capricorn, he builds prisons. And obviously, a prison is somewhere you can’t get out of. It is literally a boundary around you where you are supposed to sit and be punished and think about your crimes in isolation.
Prison is a perfect metaphor in a sense for Saturn in Capricorn, but it depends on what you want to choose to do with your time which is the only thing you have in a prison; and that’s coincidentally what Saturn kind of represents. You know, I guess you could just waste the time, but you could also build something yourself while you’re in seclusion. You could be in prison or you could be in meditation or isolation building on yourself. But I didn’t know if you wanted to get into some of those concrete examples about Saturn in Capricorn.
CB: I mean, we’ll get to some of that especially once we get to talking about the sign.
AC: That’ll be a teaser for a more…
PW: Okay, yeah, there you go.
[crosstalk]
AC: …half-an-hour maybe.
PW: Sure.
AC: Because I want to get into that with you and I’m going to restrain myself right now.
CB: All right.
PW: Cool.
AC: With the power of Saturn.
CB: Some of the broader things that we’re talking about here are themes like—if we could try to boil some of that down, as you were just doing, Austin—themes like boundaries and constraints which can sometimes be positive like setting goals or setting a deadline or something like that in order to get something done. They can also be experienced as subjectively negative, like you were saying imprisonment which is a type of boundary or constraint that you’re not happy about, but you don’t have a choice.
PW: Literally what Valens said. Valens says imprisonment; that’s right in the text.
CB: Right.
AC: Because we’re early in the year, something like a New Year’s resolution, “I’m going to stop doing ‘X, Y, or Z’,” right? That’s a self-imposed limitation that’s not fun, but certainly we need to be able to impose limitations. I was thinking about this the other day—and you can probably relate to this, Watson, as you have children. In order for your children to not die, you have to say ‘no’: “No, you can’t play in the street,” right? And imposing a limitation or discipline, even though it may not be the fuzziest of experiences for a parent or a child, like we’d all be dead—at least I would be. I wouldn’t have made it past age four if my parents hadn’t kept me wandering around in the woods.
CB: And that’s kind of interesting because part of the reason that a person is put in that position or part of the reason that you end up doing that and having to be the one to impose those limitations is by virtue of being older, and time and experience and being around longer than the person oftentimes; you know, not just in a parent-whatever relationship, but also in let’s say a teacher-student relationship.
PW: A boss-employee.
CB: Boss-employee or mentor-mentee. Oftentimes this idea of time conferring not just experience but also authority or authority as a result of experience.
AC: Yeah, and Saturn thus brings us into the types of relations between people that we see in hierarchies which can be very unpleasant, especially when they’re abused. And yet we can’t just toss the idea of hierarchy out the door because your judgment is probably better than your baby’s, right?
CB: Right.
AC: I hope, right? You know what? I’m going to make a call for all of us here—the blender is not a toy.
CB: Right.
PW: Right. Yeah.
AC: It’s okay that you get to be the decider.
PW: Right.
AC: Like that makes sense.
CB: I mean, the baby doesn’t think so though which is interesting by virtue of the difference between time, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in terms of the perspective that it gives you on life and the way that maybe you acted earlier in your life versus things you would do now by virtue of having been around longer; or sometimes even just the way time that time speeds up as you get older because you’ve had more trips around the Sun so to speak. When you’re young, you’ve only had two or three years or so in the context of your entire life; even small, short-term events seem like a really huge deal, whereas as you get older and you’ve lived thousands of days—hundreds or thousands of days—time speeds up because those individual days end up taking on almost less significance within the broader span of everything else.
And there’s this broader theme about Saturn being the furthest visible planet and therefore taking the longest to make a revolution around the Sun or around the solar system that became central to astrology for that reason; just because of that idea of not just it being at the outer edge of the solar system as far as we could see with the naked eye, but also because of it taking the longest to take a trip around the Sun or around the Earth.
PW: You know, I saw it as funny—one of these observations that were made with modern astronomy—[that] Saturn itself, the planet, has these very prominent rings which evokes this idea of constriction and limits; like the planets handcuffed to something.
CB: Right. And astrologers didn’t know that until a few centuries ago, but they’ve been using metaphors that very much invoke that for hundreds of years prior to that time.
PW: Right.
AC: It’s literally the most visually-bounded planet. And so, I wanted to just jump in with a few things. One, Chris, you were pointing out that Saturn is the slowest, furthest out planet that we can see with the naked eye.
CB: Mm-hmm.
AC: One of the ways that I like to say that and think about is Saturn signifies the limit of the visible, right? There may well be all sorts of weird stuff that happens after death but you can’t see it from here, right? It’s what you can see from here on Earth. It may not be the ultimate limit but it’s definitely the boundary of what can be seen. And then about just Saturn being the slowest, I discovered recently that in Jyotish or Vedic astrology Sani or Shani—who’s the god of Saturn—is considered to be lame in one leg and that’s why his planet is so slow to go around.
And I thought that was really interesting because it lines up perfectly with the way Saturn is often depicted. In alchemical and a variety of other Medieval and Renaissance woodcuts you’ll often see Saturn lame in one leg with a crutch, and I was like, oh, that’s really funny as a literal testament to his slowness. Also, Saturn rules people who’ve had misfortune happen to them. We were talking about Saturn’s children—those who got wounded and can’t walk right are absolutely Saturn’s children. And so, I thought that was a really nice sort of sync-up between different people in different times and places observing Saturn and coming to very similar conclusions.
CB: Sure. And one of the things we should say here—especially after reading a long list of significations from Tarnas and the long list of significations from Valens—is that there is an overarching principle underlying all of this which Patrick you were referring to as ‘just Saturn being Saturn’. But the issue is that with an archetype, an archetype is transcendent and therefore you cannot articulate it. You can articulate a bunch of the manifestations which are individual aspects of that that can be derived from the archetype, the archetype itself—because it can manifest in so many hundreds of different ways—there’s no single word that you can use which will summarize all of it.
And so, people need to understand that’s why astrologers give these long lists of significations because what they’re doing is trying to articulate something that cannot be articulated. And by almost focusing or sort of meditating on those significations you’re supposed to attempt to come close to understanding the archetype that is unifying all of them, even if you can never perfectly grasp it with a single word.
AC: Yeah, totally. And I would just add two things to that. I think that you can’t enclose an archetype in words but you can certainly evoke an awareness of it with words.
CB: Mm-hmm.
AC: You know, that difficulty in directly describing the essence of a planet’s nature is also one of the reasons that a lot of astrologers end up using stories, whether from myth or other places, to try to communicate these rather densely-bundled truths. I prefer stories to lists personally, but they’re both ways of getting your head there.
CB: Sure, and that’s what we’re going to be doing for the remainder of this episode essentially. We’re going to be talking about different aspects of Saturn in Capricorn and different ways that has been experienced in the past by different people in different contexts, in natal astrology or through Saturn returns or through mundane astrology.
And in the process of doing so we’re going to be basically doing the same thing with those examples and trying to get to the bottom of what Saturn going through Capricorn is going to be all about over the next two to three years in the present time and the types of scenarios and themes we would expect to see based on some of those past correlations. And if it goes as the Saturn in Sagittarius episode went—that we did about three years ago now at the beginning of Saturn in Sagittarius—then we might actually get pretty close to articulating some of the core themes and the archetype underlying that transit which will get us pretty damn close to making relatively decent predictions about what to expect over the next two to three years from this transit.
PW: Yeah.
AC: Indeed.
CB: So I think that’s a good setup, so maybe we should transition into now talking about Saturn and its zodiacal rulership and relationship to the sign Capricorn and drawing in the other part of this—the other component of the delineation that we’re going to be focusing on today, or the combination—which is Saturn moving through the sign of the zodiac that we call Capricorn. So where should we start with that?
AC: Well, I want to start by saying that we’ve kind of already been doing that. You know, if we’re talking about ‘Capricorn-flavored’ Saturn, it’s just ‘Saturn-flavored’ Saturn; I heard you like Saturn. When a planet’s in a sign that it rules, it comes across in an archetypally unmitigated way. It looks more like the keyword book than if Saturn was in, I don’t know, Virgo—there’s going to be a very definite admixture there—whereas Saturn in Capricorn looks and feels exactly like Saturn or very close to that archetypal core. So to a certain degree I feel like it was appropriate for us to spend some time just with ‘What is Saturn?’ because this Saturn is going to be rather, how shall we say, non-specifically ‘Saturn-Saturn-Saturn’.
PW: It’s pure Saturn. It’s fresh Saturn. It’s organic Saturn. Yeah, I mean, Capricorn has a lot of the significations of Saturn. You know, the Sun, when it reaches Capricorn each year, that’s when we celebrate our New Year’s. That’s when people are looking back on the past year and they want to make goals for the next year—and they all fail. This is where people are kind of looking back on the mistakes they might have made or the things they’ve accomplished. It’s kind of a reminder across the globe of the fact that time just marches on and time is passing and everyone’s getting older and everyone’s kind of getting closer to death—or at least I have these thoughts when I see the ball drop in New York City.
So you know, the Sun in Capricorn just in general is an almost kind of somber time because the holiday season’s over and everyone’s kind of hung over from that and in debt from that, so it’s a very Saturnian time of the year in many ways. I mean, that’s an example of an annual transit—the Sun going through Capricorn—and we have this very Saturnian kind of experience together. I mean, as far as delineation for Capricorn, yeah, Capricorn is very Saturn-like, so Saturn being in Capricorn is Saturn just kind of being more like Saturn without an additional reference.
AC: Yeah, I like that. I think that seasonal analogy is really good. And I would also add that every retailer or small business owner in the world knows that January is a crap month for sales because everybody’s spent their money. I think one of the few filters that we can really meaningfully apply to Saturn in Capricorn is that it’s the ‘earthy’ side of Saturn. Saturn already is predisposed towards rather concrete and heavy things but Saturn also rules Aquarius which is an air sign. And so, Saturn in Capricorn is especially the earthy half of Saturn, right?
PW: Mm-hmm.
AC: One of the reasons we were talking about architects and building and stone and demolition and the bones of the dead—there’s a materiality and substance to Saturn in Capricorn significations which I don’t think are quite as present during Saturn in Aquarius. You see a lot of laws being drafted—important laws being drafted in the past during Saturn in Aquarius and that’s certainly an important thing that affects the materiality of our lives, but a law’s an abstract, airy thing.
PW: It’s more abstract.
AC: Yeah, and that’s Saturn too.
PW: Capricorn’s more real, right?
AC: The law is an idea, whereas my home is a physical structure. And so, I think we do need to shade a little bit towards the material with Saturn in Capricorn.
PW: The other thing that really kind of clues me into what Capricorn is really about—remember that Capricorn isn’t just where Saturn is at home (which makes it the naturally serious, somber place) but it’s also where Mars is exalted. So this is a place where action and violence is kind of well-directed; Mars kind of gets a ‘Saturnian edge’ to its blade in this sign. It’s where Jupiter is in its fall. This is not a happy place. This a place where justice isn’t really supported; it’s not about your feelings. Jupiter is not at home in this sign.
The Moon—forget about it. You know, emotional needs are not really supported in this sign. This is a tough sign. You’re going to get in here, you’re going to go by the rules of Saturn. This is not a place for Moon and Jupiter people. This is a place to go if you’re a tough guy like Mars or a serious person like Saturn. What clues me into this general idea of Capricorn is what planets are supported in this sign [and] which planets are not really welcome in this sign.
AC: If I can jump in on that.
PW: Yeah.
AC: And so, one way to think about it from let’s say sort of an electional point of view, if you have a ‘sweet and squishy’ sign, the Moon and Jupiter are very happy in Cancer, right? And so, if you want to do sweet, loving, gentle, organic growth sort of stuff Venus and Jupiter in Cancer would be the perfect place to do that. But life requires many other types of activities, and life requires Saturnian and Martial activities, right? There are lots of things which require a stoic or even fierce attitude that life absolutely requires. And so, that’s Capricorn archetypally and Saturn there we could say is a good time to do hard things.
PW: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Definitely. So part of the thing that we’re going to be focusing on of course—the image I was showing just a minute ago was the traditional rulership scheme—for anybody that’s not familiar with—which is the association that’s been around for about 2,000 years now between each of the seven visible planets and each of the 12 signs of the zodiac. They assigned the Sun and the Moon to Cancer and Leo, and then each of the other traditional visible planets were assigned to flanking signs sort of moving out in zodiacal order first to Mercury assigned to Gemini and Virgo, then Venus, then Mars in Aries and Scorpio, then Jupiter, and finally Saturn being the furthest and the slowest and the dimmest of the visible planets gets assigned to Capricorn and Aquarius, the two signs that are opposite to the two luminaries, the Sun and the Moon in Cancer and Leo.
PW: Light versus dark.
CB: Right. So a lot of those significations from Saturn—and even many of them from Tarnas—ended up focusing on this contrast between what the Sun and Moon signify as the two lights or the two luminaries in Cancer and Leo and then what Saturn indicates or signifies in contrast as literally being on the opposite side of the zodiac from those two.
And one part of that is the manifestation of Saturn in Capricorn being in a feminine, earth, cardinal sign and the other is Saturn’s manifestation as the traditional ruler of Aquarius, in a fixed, air, masculine sign. So today we’re going to focus a lot on Saturn and his sort of feminine and earthy manifestation in Capricorn but there is that other side—as you guys were talking about, or as you mentioned Austin—which is the more sort of airy side of Saturn which is in Aquarius.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And then just for another visual, can you guys see this from the circular calendar?
PW: Mm-hmm.
AC: I can see the top-half.
PW: You can see Saturn.
CB: Yeah. That’s what I’m focusing on here is just Saturn right there in the middle. This is from the circular Planetary Movements calendar that Paula Belluomini and I designed this year for 2018, and right there it shows Saturn at the very start of 2018 ingressing and making his way into Capricorn. Eventually it’s going to go retrograde. Do you guys know what degree it stations retrograde at in 2018? It’s like 10?
PW: Uh, 11 or nine.
CB: Yeah, I mean, it should be somewhere around there.
PW: I think it’s two to nine.
CB: Okay.
AC: Two to nine is what I remember.
CB: Okay. So it stations there and then it retrogrades back to early Capricorn where it stations direct and then moves forward again until it gets to almost mid-Capricorn by the end of 2018. So of course that’s only this year of 2018 and we’re talking about a period that’s going to span from Saturn going into Capricorn in December of 2017 all the way until I think December of 2020, when Saturn will finally leave Capricorn for the very last time. So it’s a full, essentially three-year-long transit of Saturn through that sign. Of course one of the big things that we can notice right away is it’s going to catch up to Pluto at some point who’s been transiting through Capricorn for about a decade now. And I know, Patrick, you’ve got a lot to say. I know both of you actually have a lot to say about that which we’ll get to in a little bit, but I just wanted to have a quick just visualization of Saturn.
I mean, one of the reasons we designed this calendar is so that you can visually see how far Saturn will move compared to any of the other planets over the course of an entire year. He really just moves through about a third of the sign of Capricorn over the course of 12 months, whereas the rest of the planets: Jupiter is moving around in Scorpio and then eventually by the end of the year, he’s a full 30° over in the middle of Sagittarius. Mars makes his way around. He’s going to go retrograde this year, so he doesn’t get that far, but he still makes it through, what, one-two-three-four-five signs of the zodiac.
Mercury of course makes its way all the way around. Venus goes almost all the way around the zodiac. Saturn though really takes his time moving through each of these zodiacal signs, and there’s something very important about that just because of the way it can sort of grind through and emphasize not just that sign of the zodiac but also a certain part of your birth chart or a certain part of any other chart so that you really get the point of what that transit is about in a very particular way over the course of let’s say a year or two or three as it’s moving through a certain sign.
PW: Yeah, I’ll say.
CB: Yeah. So in terms of Saturn and its rulership—Capricorn being one of its home signs—I think one of the points that you made, Austin, is just that we’re going to get a much more purer representation of Saturn, or that’s one of the things that we’re expecting as a result of it moving into that sign, right?
AC: Yeah. Absolutely.
CB: Okay.
AC: All of those fundamental themes that we discussed should be very clear.
CB: Sure. And Patrick, that was one of the things you were saying as well in contrasting it with Saturn moving through Sagittarius where the manifestation was Saturn expressing itself often through Jupiter significations, so things like travel. You pointed to bridges, for example.
PW: Going from A to B. Yeah, an adventure, going somewhere, you know, connecting places, whereas Capricorn is holding up in a place and just staying there in Capricorn.
AC: Yeah.
PW: The freeway versus the prison, yeah.
AC: Well, the way I was trying to balance the imprisonment theme with Saturn in Capricorn is imprisonment and fortification are two sides of the same coin. If you have a giant, super secure, stony palace that’s awesome. You know, you’re fortified. If things go bad, you’re fine. However, if somebody’s keeping you inside of one of those we’d call it a prison, right? It depends. It very much depends.
PW: Do you want to be in it? I mean, it’s a fortress keeping you—that’s what it really is. It’s what keeps things out as well as what keeps you in.
AC: Right. And again, that can be amazing or terrible depending on where you are in that same picture of the big stony building.
PW: And this shows up so literally with Saturn in Capricorn transits. It’s crazy. I mean, just as an example—I know we’re going to get to historical examples and stuff—but for example the Berlin Wall was first erected in the 1960 Saturn in Capricorn period, and that literally was sectioning off East Berlin and West Berlin from each other.
AC: And it was a symbol of literally dividing the world in two.
PW: Yeah, I mean, it was this wall built up to just totally isolate people. And then of course at the Saturn return in the early ‘90s—you know, 1990s…
AC: ‘89?
PW: Well, November ‘89 that’s when people were smashing it down with the hammers and stuff, but it wasn’t actually until the next year that the military officially did that, and they did that when it reached the degree of the construction. Yeah, construction began on the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 and Saturn was at 24° of Capricorn and then the East German military officially began dismantling it on June 13, 1990 when Saturn was back at 24° of Capricorn.
AC: That’s amazing.
PW: Yeah, isn’t that cool? I mean, literally, like you said, the demolition team came in and smashed down the wall.
CB: Right. So it can be both the construction of walls and barriers and things like that but also the removal of those things. Although, as we’ll get into, the 1980s were a special case because we also had Uranus-Neptune there in Capricorn at the same time.
PW: Right.
CB: And that’s going to, in just a second, provide a nice transition into our next topic which is the major planet that Saturn’s going to meet up [with] in Capricorn this time around, which is that conjunction with Pluto. So that is a good segue. For people watching the video version of this—that I’m going to post on YouTube—I wanted to share the screen. One of the things that’s funny about tonight, we sort of have been planning to do this for a month or two, but we sort of threw it together over the past few days and finally decided ‘let’s do it’. And of course tonight we’ve got a nice little—not little—a gigantic Capricorn stellium of six planets going through Capricorn for our electional chart for recording this episode tonight.
So we’ve got Virgo rising. I believe we started with Virgo rising—early Virgo rising—Saturn in Capricorn at 3°, the Moon at 4° of Capricorn separating from Saturn and applying to a conjunction with Mercury at 5° of Capricorn. We’ve got Pluto at 19 Capricorn, the Sun at 24, and finally Venus at 26° of Capricorn. So six planets—that’s quite a stellium. Usually four planets for me is a stellium. Apparently there’s a debate about this and some people say three planets is a stellium. I’m a ‘four-planet’ stellium person myself, but I don’t know about you guys. Are you guys ‘three-planet’?
PW: I agree. I think at least four.
AC: I don’t know.
CB: You don’t care.
AC: I don’t care. I mean, if it’s three, it’s three; if it’s four, it’s four. Three is significant.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Four is more significant in that direction. I guess I’m not that concerned about that word.
CB: Sure—stellium. Well, it’s one of those words that people get fixated on very early in their studies especially if you have stellium, but that becomes slightly less important, just like yod or something like that.
PW: Yeah.
CB: You know, somebody says they have a yod in their chart.
PW: Attaching a word doesn’t change my interpretation of that configuration. I mean, if you have a bunch of planets in a sign then you just gotta interpret those planets being in the sign regardless of whether you call it a stellium or a ‘super’ stellium or ‘mega’ stellium; there’s no difference really.
CB: All right.
PW: But if I [were] going to use the word I guess I’d say, well, maybe at least four; but yeah, it doesn’t matter.
CB: Sure. All right, well, this is definitely a stellium. I think there’s nobody that’s going to argue that point.
PW: Actually it’s a ‘super’ stellium.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Uh, yeah. So this is our starting point then for recording this discussion. So Saturn, in the last transit—I’m still laying down some foundational stuff in terms of outlining the parameters of Saturn in Capricorn. One of the things that was weird about last time of course is we had this gray area where Saturn I think first ingressed into Sagittarius in late 2014 but then it retrograded back into Scorpio before finally eventually going back into Sagittarius for the final time. We don’t have that in this instance. In this instance it just went straight into Capricorn in December of 2017 and will now stay there for the next two to three years basically, right? At least in terms of the first of that.
AC: No ‘take backsies’.
CB: No ‘take backsies’. In my approach using whole sign houses as soon as a planet ingresses into a new sign it moves into a new house, and you can immediately start seeing some of the circumstances and the situations that are going to be associated with that transit over the next two to three years as soon as it ingresses in, and I’m already seeing that in a lot of people’s lives around me. Have you guys seen similar things?
PW: Oh, just dramatic, dramatic.
AC: Absolutely.
PW: Just appalling.
CB: Okay.
PW: This is the one time I got exactly what I expected might happen and I’m not any happier for it.
CB: Sure. Sure. Yeah, and we’ll get into some of those examples later. So anyways, just animating the chart, Saturn’s going to be moving through Capricorn, and of course it stations retrograde and direct and goes back and forth a few different times over the course of the next few years. But in terms of the ending phases of the transit, eventually it does go into Aquarius and sort of dips its toe into Aquarius at some point very late in the game I believe, right? Do you guys know when the first ingress takes place?
AC: I mean, it’s back and forth in 2020.
PW: Yeah, I just know the middle of 2020 there’s a little bit of Saturn in Aquarius.
CB: Okay, here it is. It looks like March of 2020, Saturn first ingresses into Aquarius, but what happens is that it’s not finished with its transit of Saturn in Capricorn and eventually it stations retrograde and moves back into Capricorn later that year. It looks like by June or July it retrogrades back into Capricorn. Then it stations direct by late summer/early fall in the northern hemisphere and then eventually it ingresses into Aquarius and leaves Capricorn for the final time in December of 2020. It looks like right around December 16, right?
PW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Okay, so December 16 of 2020—December 16-December 17—is going to be the end of Saturn transiting through Capricorn. So that sets the final limit of our discussion in terms of the timeframe we’re talking about which is mid-December of 2017 through mid-December of 2020. So with those parameters now defined, why don’t we talk a bit about the unique part of this Saturn transit because we’ve talked about Saturn and its essential essence, we’ve tried to talk a little bit about Capricorn and its essence.
One of the complications though that we mentioned already in terms of trying to discuss what this is going to mean is that Saturn very rarely is just transiting through that sign on its own. But instead in different eras it will meet up with other outer planets and sometimes that can color and really influence the expression of Saturn in Capricorn. This time around the big difference and one of the major things that’s going to make a difference that a lot of astrologers are talking about and focused on is that Saturn is going to conjoin Pluto exactly at different points, a few different times eventually once it gets into the middle and late degrees of Capricorn, right?
AC: I believe there’s just one exact conjunction.
CB: Oh, there’s just one? It just passes by once?
PW: Yes, once.
CB: Wow.
PW: I believe it’s on February 22, 2020.
AC: I believe that is correct.
PW: It’s like 2-2-2-2-2.
CB: Okay, so that is towards the very end then of the transit.
PW: It’s February, the second month, 22nd day of the second month at 22 Capricorn.
AC: It sounds like a conspiracy.
PW: Right. Yeah, 2-2-2, that number kind of jumps out. But yeah, I don’t know how much to make of that.
AC: Even though it’s only going to make one perfect conjunction, it will be sharing the sign with Pluto the entire time.
PW: Yeah.
AC: And so, for those of you who are unfamiliar, that’s a condition called ‘co-presence’ which is not as strong as a conjunction but is very meaningful. And Watson, I know you have a bunch of good stuff that you dug up about Saturn-Pluto co-presences.
PW: Yeah, so basically we have to understand how kind of rare this is. Saturn-Pluto conjunctions—what I found out is that Saturn-Pluto conjunctions happen in the same part of the zodiac every 735-ish years. So the last time that Saturn was conjunct Pluto close to this degree was in the year 1284, 700 years ago. Wait—do I have that right? Yeah, 1284. There was another time that Saturn was conjunct Pluto in Capricorn and that was in 1518 but that was at 4° of Capricorn. So yeah, in the year 1284 that was the last time Jupiter and Saturn were in that sign together close to those degrees. It precesses a few degrees back but basically the Saturn-Pluto recurrence is a 735- to 736-year recurrence.
And so, I don’t know what exactly to expect. I mean, I haven’t really done much work with this aside from just kind of finding this out and seeing what historical parallels there might possibly be. I don’t know. It’s not going to be something that connects immediately obviously because everyone from that time is totally dead but there are a couple of strange things which I found. For example, in 1284, that was basically when Wales, the country of Wales was totally dominated by the United Kingdom and has kind of been under their possession ever since; and it was a very brutal and bloody battle that basically led to Wales [coming] under the dominion of the English king and ultimately part of the UK.
And what’s interesting about that is that it meant that in 1284 that was the year of the first Prince of Wales who was an Englishman. And the only reason that is significant now is because we’re now coming up to the likely death of Queen Elizabeth II. If her son, Prince Charles, who is currently the Prince of Wales, takes over, we will now have a new Prince of Wales who would be William I suppose.
You know, a lot of people are kind of wondering about what’s ultimately to become of the monarchy in the modern age. There have been some calls to potentially abolish the English monarchy after Queen Elizabeth dies. So it will be very weird and interesting if there [was] something that comes about as a result of Queen Elizabeth’s death that might change the relationship between Wales and England as it did at the previous Saturn-Pluto conjunction all the way back in 1284, where we had the first Prince of Wales who was an Englishman.
CB: And she’s actually Capricorn rising, isn’t she?
PW: Yeah. I think she has a significant Taurus placement as well, so when Uranus enters Taurus that’s like right on Prince Charles’ Midheaven. So something significant is happening. That’s the only thing I can think of that would potentially bring this about is the death of Queen Elizabeth and then some sort of reorganization with the relationship between Wales and the UK.
CB: Sure. So in terms of the broader—since we kind of broke down Saturn a little bit and we broke down Capricorn, maybe we should do a little bit of that with Pluto. I mean, Austin, what are some of the core primary significations that you associate with Pluto that might be relevant in terms of understanding what it’s going to do or what it means [and] what its significations are when Saturn catches up to it?
AC: Yeah, so I tend to think of Pluto—it’s such a different creature than all of the rest of the planets. You know, it’s in an entirely different layer of the solar system. Its composition is very different. Its orbit is very elliptical and it’s inclined. I tend to put Pluto in its own category and I tend to see Pluto more as a really intense modifier to other planets.
CB: Right. Like an intensification of the significations of the planets it touches.
AC: Yeah. And sometimes that’s a total disruption of them, sometimes it gives them weird superpowers. If I were going to associate what Pluto seems to do with any of the traditional points, I would say Pluto is more like the nodes; it’s more like the eclipse points in the sense that it strongly modifies that which it touches. I think of it like all the planets are colors that you’re painting with and then Pluto is like, “Hey, what would happen if I blowtorch this canvas?” It’s like this fully other element.
CB: Right. Well, let’s actually sit on that for a minute because that’s a good point in comparison. Because when you think about Pluto doing that with other inner planets, it actually becomes really clear what it’s doing in that intensifying factor, like for example, let’s say a Pluto-Venus conjunction. Taking the principle of Venus, many of the significations underlying Venus [are] love and relationships. And then when you add a conjunction with Pluto—or let’s say a hard aspect with Pluto—there is this extreme intensification of the relationship or the relating impulse which can sometimes go extremely well in deepening that far deeper than it ever could be, and other times can go very not-well in turning into almost like an obsession or sort of an obsession-type relationship scenario that can be unhealthy in some sense, right?
PW: Without being too literal, I think Pluto makes planets radioactive—like radioactive superpowers or nuclear meltdown—so we’re going to get a radioactive Saturn. I always thought that Richard Tarnas did a really great job of explaining the Saturn-Pluto archetype, but basically he talks about how Pluto empowers the Saturnian complex.
AC: I have to interrupt you for just a second. Sorry.
PW: Yeah.
AC: You were talking about making Saturn radioactive.
PW: Yeah.
AC: That type of superpower is totally the traumatic ‘50s comic book where if there’s a superpower it’s because they were exposed to cosmic rays and went through a torturous transformation into ‘Blah-Blah-Blah Woman’ or ‘Blah-Blah-Blah Man’.
PW: Like Spider-Man.
CB: Right.
AC: When it empowers, it doesn’t empower gently.
PW: Right.
CB: [What] was the comic book—Watchmen? Doctor…
PW: Oh, Doctor Manhattan.
AC: Doctor Manhattan, yeah.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good example.
PW: So what I find is when Saturn is hit by Pluto—I mean, Saturn’s already kind of like the worst things that happen in life—so when Saturn hits Pluto, it’s like the very worst things that we see from our own history even just from the 20th century. World War I broke out very close to a Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Cancer. The squares coincided with the rise of fascism in Europe. There was a square between Saturn and Pluto right before the invasion of Poland which started World War II, and then we had the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1947 which was basically at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, which ended essentially what was like a ‘World War’ cycle—the Saturn-Pluto cycle which began in the early 1910s to 1947.
Then from 1947 to 1982 that’s another full Saturn-Pluto cycle. You know, 1947 is the establishment of the state of Israel and of course that creates this huge issue with Israel and Palestine being locked in not just any kind of division but like an eternal battle seemingly, an eternal division. And in 1982, that’s when due to the Israel and Lebanon war that’s when Osama bin Laden gets this idea about ramming planes into towers, and then at the Saturn-Pluto opposition in 2001, we get 9/11.
So Saturn-Pluto is kind of like the very worst things in life but kind of brought to this crazy extreme. So genocide and intractable conflicts, disease, terrorism, things that really cause a lot of fear in people. You know, I don’t want to fearmonger, but I’d also just want to honestly account for the kinds of things which seem to pop up when Saturn and Pluto come together. You know, you get human rights abuses, mass killings, terrorism, all of those really like almost unspeakably awful kinds of things which happen to people.
CB: Sure. That keyword of ‘extreme’ or ‘extremism’ I think is a good one because you could take that in either direction in a very positive or often very negative way, but it’s the idea of blowing it up and taking it to the utmost extreme.
PW: Well, I will say that the positive side of that though is that it also takes an extreme toughness to be able to deal with and withstand these kinds of threats against humanity and survival. I mean, you want a Saturn-Pluto person going up against Saturn-Pluto issues. You want these 1981 to 1983 people who came about from the time when the world nearly blew up in an inferno between the US and Russia, when the world came closest to an apocalypse. The idea of not just the end but like the apocalypse [is] another kind of common theme across these different Saturn-Pluto cycles of people feeling like they’ve reached the end of their respective worlds or cultures. The Welsh lost their culture, the Germans totally in defeat, the Mongols totally taking over China back in the 1500s—[in] these major Saturn-Pluto conjunctions and oppositions that seems to be a really common thing.
Another common thing is slavery. The topic of slavery comes up a lot during Saturn-Pluto conjunctions. For example, actually back [in] 1518—[the] Saturn-Pluto Capricorn conjunction—that was the year that King James V basically legally decreed that African slaves would be brought to the New World as slaves to work, thus sort of unofficially inaugurating the legacy of slavery. So Saturn is just a hard day at work. Saturn-Pluto is like you are fucking—oh, sorry, pardon me. You are totally screwed, you are a slave now. You’re not just going to work, you are property. And all associated ills of that sin reverberate across the centuries through the Saturn-Pluto cycle.
If you look back at the history of the Civil War, you see that there’s a Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1850 which kind of led to a lot of the events that ultimately led to the Civil War and the rise of domestic terrorist groups. The KKK first came about under the Saturn-Pluto opposition right after the Civil War then the KKK came back at the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the 1910s. And then during the Saturn-Pluto opposition in the ‘60s, you had the KKK come back in opposition to the civil rights period. I mean, Saturn’s now co-present with Pluto. I think we’re going to be seeing this theme of hate groups and things like domestic terrorism and all of those issues really come to a big head. We’re coming to the end in some ways of a cycle that was started in the early ‘80s from the last Saturn-Pluto period and that sort of encompasses these ideas of terrorism and hate groups and all this stuff.
CB: Sure.
PW: Yeah, I mean, Saturn-Pluto on just a conceptual level, you can see how, yeah, Pluto is taking Saturn and just making it radioactive. It’s not just your average bad stuff; it’s like the really, really terrible stuff.
CB: Sure. And Austin, what do you think?
AC: Oh, it’s not often that I get put in the position to be the positive one.
CB: Right. Please save us from Patrick’s depressing but very probably accurate [unfortunate] overview of Saturn and Pluto through history.
AC: So yeah, I mean, if you’re going to track cycles the Saturn-Pluto cycle is the most depressing to track, it’s not the only thing happening at any point in time. There’s a huge difference between what happened in the early ‘80s and the outbreak of World War I, right?
PW: Right.
AC: I mean, you might have felt that that was a bummer in the early ‘80s but they’re not at all on the same scale. And although the establishment of the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is certainly something we can look to as bad, World War II which it followed was considerably worse, right? So these conjunctions don’t always mark ‘peak’ nightmare, right? If we’re looking at the one in the late ‘40s that was what followed ‘peak’ nightmare. What they do in addition to bringing up the topics, they bring up the reality of those things, but they also bring up the fear of them which may or may not be the same.
You know, there’s something to be said for the traumas of the past echoing through the present. One of the points I wanted to make that I think gets made by several other things we’re going to talk [about] and we’ve already talked about is this round of Saturn through Capricorn in a lot of ways [is] about the end of a thing, right? To use the hard example of slavery, I don’t think we’re going to see slavery reestablished.
PW: No.
AC: Like maybe—hopefully—maybe this is like we work through that toxic legacy on a deeper level during this time than we have for a long time. Another sort of ‘coming to the end of’ factor here—and I’ll try to make this brief because I don’t want to get too technical about it—but Saturn’s time in Capricorn gives us the last three years of what’s been an over two-century-cycle of Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions in earth signs. And the Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions being in signs of a particular element for 200-ish years at a time is one of the sturdiest building blocks of mundane astrology and has been for at least 1,200-ish years; probably older, but [from the] sources that we have, about 1,200. And when you look back at history in terms of centuries and arcs, it’s very convincing.
And so, forget about the Age of Aquarius, we’ve just started the last three-year countdown to history since the beginning of the 19th century. The last one began 1802 with Napoleon trying to take over all of Europe, and we’ve had every industrial revolution since then. We’ve had a whole lot of people fighting about territory and resources and control; this is the last three years of the earth cycle. And literally like a week after Saturn goes into Aquarius at the end of 2020, we get the beginning of 200 years of air, and air isn’t necessarily rainbows but it’s different.
And where we are right now, where we’re going to be through this entire Saturn in Capricorn period is we’re going to be wrapping up, looking back, probably also breaking down and throwing away some of the structures mentally, emotionally and otherwise that we’ve built up over the last 200 years. The last 200 years have a very complicated legacy. And so, there’s that sort of ‘endings before beginnings’ quality just from the viewpoint of the triplicity cycle, and then that ‘endings before beginnings’ theme is 100% there with Pluto.
And during 2019 and part of 2020, we’re going to have solar and lunar eclipses on the South Node right next to Saturn. The South Node is also very much bringing up and processing old stuff. And so, you can look at this from a variety of angles and you kind of end up with that sorting through and dealing with the past, and not necessarily just celebrating the great things that have happened. That’s going to be…
PW: I think…
AC: Go ahead.
PW: Oh, I was just going to say that I think when people look back on this time period in the future, I don’t know exactly what they would call it, but I think that whatever name they would give it would have some allusion to ‘the end of’, ‘the endings of’. This was the end of ‘this’. The theme of endings will reverberate through many different spheres whether it’s political, economic, social. The structures we’ve built up to support society will be kind of irrelevant or not the point, beside the point.
CB: And it would have been the end just in and of itself due to the shift of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction cycle that you guys are talking about. Like that in and of itself, the shift from the earth triplicity—where the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions have been in all earth signs for like a couple of hundred years—and then shifting into air signs for a couple of hundred years in and of itself would have indicated a big shift. But the fact that Saturn is hitting Pluto at the very end of that seems like an intensification or exaggeration of that.
AC: And they’re going to be eclipses on top of it.
PW: Yeah.
AC: The skies speak clearly. Oh, and just one thing, just one point. Just so I don’t get ‘lecturing’ emails, yes, I know about the difference between the mean and apparent conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, and yes, I’m aware of the premature Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Libra in the early ‘80s, I’m just not trying to get into all of that right now. I’m glad that you know that. That’s cool. We can talk about it but I’m aware of that. But what we’re looking at in 2020 is the apparent, you can actually see a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in an air sign that will be followed only by Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in air signs.
CB: Right.
AC: That’s why it’s the final piece of moving from earth to air.
PW: The last time that we had Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto kind of altogether in the same part of the zodiac around this degree was 1894 BC, to give you kind of an idea of how almost epochal this transit may be. Now the Jupiter-Saturn has been conjunct Pluto before but just in different areas of the zodiac.
AC: Was that the First Intermediate Period in ancient Egyptian history?
PW: 1894 BC?
AC: I don’t know about the day but I believe that that’s right around there.
PW: June 2, yeah.
AC: Right, the Hyksos are going to invade. Watch yourselves.
PW: Yeah, I can’t speak to exactly what that would mean. But yeah, we were talking earlier about how this theme of endings will be present. And one way that I’ve kind of already figured out that we’ll be thinking of endings is just in terms of popular entertainment—the fact that in 2019 and 2020, those are the years where we’re going to be seeing the final Star Wars film. The final Skywalker saga when Episode VIIII comes out is happening at that time; this is the end of that.
CB: That’s really probably the most important world event in terms.
PW: No, but it goes on because people have been watching Game of Thrones for seven years now.
CB: I take that back. That’s actually probably the most important world-defining event that will take place around this time.
PW: Yeah, so the final season. So Game of Thrones is ending. Star Wars is ending. Avengers, the original lineup of Avengers, this is going to be the last movie where a lot of them are going to be in it according to their contracts, so The Avengers will be ending. We’re kind of having to say goodbye to a lot of our favorite characters and franchises. It’s going to be kind of—as you said Austin earlier—a time for new stories. This is like the closing of the book, the closing of those chapters. It is done.
AC: I love that point about narratives because I think that we can make that a little bit bigger. And we need new stories; we’ve been doing reboots for a while. And if we’re looking at our position within a 200-ish-year cycle, we’ve been closing it out for a while now, and the ‘reboot’ thing has become epidemic in Hollywood, we need new stories. Even our stories about the future were written 50 years ago, or 30 or 40 years ago, like dystopias. We’re not even writing new dystopias, we’re like rehashing William Gibson, we’re rehashing 1984.
PW: Right.
AC: Even when we’re looking at the future, we tend to keep doing it culturally through the eyes of the past.
PW: I mean, another part of that is the Neptune-Pisces thing and nostalgia and all of that stuff. But yeah, I get what you’re saying. Well, luckily we do have a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius coming up.
AC: Yeah, we do.
PW: Any sign that I think would be the remedy to that, I would imagine a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius kind of fits the bill.
CB: Well, yeah. And there’s broader long-term, huge societal things obviously changing. The advent of the Internet of course over the past 20 years has already accelerated technological and societal shifts far beyond anything anyone could have anticipated, or far beyond other shifts. You know, you have discussions about things like the singularity and at what point artificial intelligence is going to happen with speculations that it’s coming up sometime in the next few decades—the creation of true artificial intelligence—and what implications that would have for many different areas of society and the world in general. You have the recent advent of cryptocurrencies and digital currencies and the implications that has for world trade and world currencies.
We’ve been going through the Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions in earth signs for 200 years during the course of the Industrial Age. And now with automation starting to take place and starting to take over the automation of many of those things, [what’s] that going to do to different parts of society? We’re already starting to see some of that. You know, we don’t even have to focus on shorter-term cultural trends but there’s some major long-term cultural trends that we’re all aware of, and we can kind of see that we’re on the precipice of something.
PW: Self-driving cars. Sex robots.
CB: Right.
AC: You know, just to link that back to the triplicity cycle, the mean conjunction—which is a mathematically-idealized conjunction—between Jupiter and Saturn in air signs began in 2000. And in a sense the ‘air’ age has already begun, right? It’s digital everything; it’s just that the apparent conjunction—the one that we can actually see hasn’t happened. You know, in many ways the future is here, we just haven’t caught up.
PW: We can’t see it yet.
AC: And I think that’s part of the difference between the apparent and the mean.
PW: Genius.
CB: Sure.
AC: Thank you.
CB: And that’s something that Ben Dykes and I talked about in a past episode of The Astrology Podcast where we discussed his two-volume series on mundane astrology, which was a bunch of translations of works of Medieval astrologers where they talked about and dealt with this distinction between the mean conjunctions and the apparent conjunctions. So people can check that episode out for more information about that.
Let me see, it looks like it’s Episode 36 of The Astrology Podcast. If you go to the website TheAstrologyPodcast.com and go to ‘Episodes’, go to Episode 36, and you’ll hear all you ever wanted to hear. I think we talked about that for like 30 minutes. So no need to worry too much about it, Austin, in referring to people that might criticize whether you’re using the mean or apparent conjunction.
AC: It’s just complicated and I don’t want to spend like half-an-hour…
CB: Yeah, and there’s no real reason to. People can listen to that episode. One of the things I’m showing right now on the screen for the video version is just the actual to-the-degree conjunction of Saturn and Pluto. It looks like it takes place on January 12, 2020. Yeah, for whatever reason I just wanted to show it here. So that conjunction takes place then, but as soon as Saturn [moves] into Capricorn one point that we really need to emphasize here is that conjunction started to form at that point.
We were talking about what quotes to use and I mentioned using that quote from Richard Tarnas, and Tarnas is sometimes criticized for using overly-wide orbs. But I actually would extend those orbs to the extent that I think a conjunction begins as soon as two planets move into the same signs and you can see the significations of those two planets starting to mix together and co-mingle. The circumstances and the scenarios that will eventually culminate at the exact degree-based conjunction, which will happen here in January of 2020, really start to be set in motion already
When the ingress of, in this instance, Saturn took place in December of 2017 that conjunction with Pluto started to form. So it’s still loose or it’s still not going to be as intense or as clear as it will be in three years’ time but there’s already some themes that will start to form and eventually start to snowball at this point over the next couple of years that will become clearer and clearer as we get closer.
AC: Yeah.
PW: That’s another potential bright spot about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, the fact that Jupiter will be moving in there. Now Jupiter isn’t welcome in Capricorn but Jupiter will be in the vicinity nonetheless, although I can’t tell whether that’s worse for Jupiter. Do we just get a ‘Saturn-Pluto-ized’ Jupiter? Do we get an ‘evil’ Jupiter when Jupiter comes by Saturn and Pluto? Or does Saturn and Pluto get just a little smidge more kind when Jupiter swings by those two planets?
AC: We shall see.
CB: Sure. Let’s see, so backing up, I mean, where should we go now? I’m trying to think if there [are] any precursor things that we needed to set up or if we should start jumping into talking about both some natal examples as well as some other additional historical examples.
PW: There’s only one other thing I’d want to say more specifically about Saturn-Pluto. Another thing about Saturn-Pluto cycles or conjunctions when they happen is that the general atmosphere tends to be one where there’s heightened paranoia, heightened fear, and sometimes the fear is justified and sometimes it’s not. For example, at 9/11, it wasn’t merely that there were terrorists who hijacked a plane which hit into buildings, but it was also the entire response to that which was obviously generated by that fear which built up this increased fortified national security apparatus of national homeland security.
And so, that’s something we might be able to say about 2019-2020 is that there might be a general atmosphere of fear and that we may be tempted to fortify institutions in order to contain what we’re afraid of, because Saturn-Pluto is multivalent. It depends on what your situation is and the context, but either way you are either reacting to something (which is Saturn-Pluto) or you are reacting in a way that is Saturn and ‘Pluto-ish’.
And another more specific example that happens to tie into my imprisonment theme is the fact that since Saturn represents imprisonment and prisons in general, one of the really interesting events that happened at the last Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1982 in Libra was the company CorpsCivic was incorporated and that was the first privatized prison company in the United States. And they had a huge boom in their business after 9/11 because the government gave the contracts for them to create prisons to detain immigrants.
And so, now that we’re coming back to another Saturn-Pluto conjunction—and it’s actually in the sign of Capricorn which we already know Saturn has this history with prisons—I think we’re going to see unfortunately a potential reaction to incidents or terrorist acts which cause this company or the notion of privatized prisons—which we know are abusive of justice in many cases and of law—will be empowered; that will be an empowered impulse and a likely consequence of terrorist threats or otherwise. Fortification, national security apparatus, and the use of corporatized prisons. Yeah, just that phrase by itself evokes Saturn-Pluto: Saturn as prison, Pluto is sort of empowering or powerful or a corporatized prison.
CB: Sure. I really like what you were saying, the idea of heightened periods of fear or heightened feelings of fear, because fear in a lot of modern astrology textbooks [is] one of the core—I forget who I was reading. I think it was Bil Tierney or somebody like that who said one of the core things to him that Saturn signifies is fear and where in the natal chart a person has fear in their life or where they have some underlying sense of fear.
Because that’s something that over the past three years of Saturn going through Sagittarius I felt was one of the most clear manifestations of that transit—that Saturn was indicating fear and that Sagittarius was indicating this broader theme of that which is ‘foreign’. And it was manifesting in this very literal way of fear of foreigners in different ways over the course of that two-to-three-year period.
PW: There is a certain person who is proposing that another wall will be built to keep certain people out of this place.
CB: Sure.
PW: And that’s happening as Saturn is now in Capricorn. So who knows if that wall will come about as a result of the transit.
AC: Well, let me chime in here with something cheery.
CB: You’re going to balance things out again?
PW: I’m the resident bummer today. Oh, my gosh!
AC: Apparently I’m the optimist. So yeah, Saturn and Pluto definitely does all that stuff, it brings up that stuff, it times those sort of terrible things. But just use the Berlin Wall example, we came back to the topic of walls and decided to tear one down. Here my idea or my hope—which I think is not unsupported by the configurations we’ve discussed—is that maybe some of this attention on the Saturn-Pluto stuff because it’s closing out a cycle, we’ll be like, “Heeyy, that corporate prison thing, maybe that wasn’t a good idea,” right?
PW: Right.
AC: Maybe some of this attention because it’s end-cycle will absolutely fall onto these fearful constructs. But while some will no doubt be built and fear will certainly be generated—I mean, people are always scared when society’s in transition—but maybe some of that attention will be like, “Let’s maybe not do that going forward.”
CB: But sometimes that only happens when something is taken to the utmost extreme, and then people see what it actually looks like to take something to the extreme and how bad that can be. And then it’s only at that point that there’s that pulling back and saying, “No, that’s too far,” or “That’s not a good direction to go.”
AC: True.
PW: That’s happened before. And Austin, another thing—all right, I’m going to try to be more positive from now on I suppose.
AC: Yeah, leave me room to be negative.
CB: Right. Gotta give Austin some…
PW: “Get outta my space! That’s my line.” So one thing that’s sort of interesting is we know that people who have Saturn returns that whatever planet conjunct Saturn or configured with Saturn at the time that they were born [tends] to bring those significations along with their Saturn returns. So to your point, Austin, I think it’s interesting that this current crop of people who are going to be having their first Saturn return have Uranus and Neptune conjunct their Saturn.
And remember that’s the Saturn cycle that brought down a huge, world-dividing wall, and those people are going to be having their Saturn return at a Saturn-Pluto conjunction. So it’s basically like the Saturn-Uranus-Neptune people meet Saturn-Pluto and do battle. And the Uranus-Neptune people, it remains to be seen whether they will win out, but we will have a huge group of Saturn-Uranus-Neptune people bringing their ‘wall-breaking’ energy to a ‘wall’ moment with Saturn, so that’s a reason for hope.
AC: Probably the most interesting Saturn sub-generation, coming-of-age stories that we’ll see for a while.
PW: We’ll ever see. We’ll ever see.
CB: Yeah, definitely. And I’m trying to think of staying positive because [the] other thing I was going to transition into saying [is] the other possible issue though with Pluto there—the consolidation of power. And one of the weird stories that happened within a day I felt of the ingress—and correct me if I’m wrong—but the big tax bill that was passed in the United States happened—wasn’t it within a day of Saturn’s ingress into Capricorn?
PW: Yeah, it was right at the ingress.
CB: Okay. So without getting too political or making a statement where some people are going to agree and other people are going to disagree for political reasons, the fact that that coincided almost exactly with this ingress implies to me that it’s either something about that specific event and the results that it’s going to have over the next two-to-three years, or there’s some broader theme underlying that in terms of some of those archetypes that is going to become more prominent over the two-to-three years, and somehow that event is going to become symbolic or sort of endemic of this entire transit. What are those themes that you guys connect with that?
PW: Well, taxes is traditionally a Saturnian signification.
AC: Yeah, Saturn just on that level.
CB: Sure. Taxation. Corporations to some extent. Or large impersonal corporations.
PW: Yeah, good.
AC: While we’re discussing the larger mundane sides of these issues, with Saturn and Pluto I think one thing that’s going to be really clear is it’s going to bring a lot of attention to institutions which are badly out of step with the needs of people. If you look at the American healthcare system or the American school system, for example—and this isn’t just America, I just happened to be more familiar with this country having lived here—the guts of these systems are decades and decades and decades away from our current situation.
I think that’s very easy to see with education. That was like a hybrid agrarian, early industrial model—that’s how public school was built. And there have been a number of extremely ineffective attempts to reform it, but the bones of the thing, some of the deep structure—there’s a Saturn-Pluto key phrase for you—there’s some deep structural problems. And that’s true for a lot of things in large part because we’re kind of getting done with these centuries, and it takes especially institutions which are very large, slow things a long time to adapt, especially during periods of political turmoil or paralysis.
And so, I think basically the problems of crumbling, probably literal crumbling institutions—like ‘why is this school’s roof falling in?’—but also just non-functional institutions will also be a big theme with Saturn in Capricorn, Saturn in Pluto. And that’s a good thing. We need to think about those bad things that are happening collectively and hopefully constructively in order to get anything done.
PW: It’s interesting you say that, Austin, because the Saturn-Pluto conjunction happens around 23 Capricorn, right?
AC: Mm-hmm.
PW: And so, one of the big connections as far as global cooperation or global organization that I’ve thought of is the fact that the UN, the United Nations, was started on October 24, 1945, and on that date Mars and Saturn are at 24 Cancer, which is the two malefics of the United Nations exactly opposite this Saturn-Pluto conjunction. And so, that to me kind of spells a time when the United Nations may be facing tumultuous changes or a debasing of its value.
AC: Yeah, well, I think we can say that’s an international institution rather than a national one.
PW: Right.
AC: But it was created to address the needs of a time period which [is] increasingly distant from what the world looks like now.
PW: Right.
AC: And I’d be very surprised if the Saturn in Capricorn period didn’t coincide with a crisis as to what its role is and whether it should exist, and if so, in what form. What is its role in this world, right?
PW: And it also hits the natal charts of many world leaders too. Angela Merkel, her Sun is right there too, opposite the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. Donald Trump’s Saturn is right around that same degree. The Saturn opposition of the UN will be the same as Trump’s Saturn opposition at the time of the Saturn-Pluto opposition.
AC: That’s really an interesting point.
PW: Yeah, so right around that time. One other prediction you can make about this coming Saturn-Pluto conjunction is the fact that oftentimes the people who are at the center of the drama will be people who were born at Saturn-Pluto hard aspects, especially the conjunction; so people born in 1947-1948, people born in 1982-1983. It’ll also be significant for the kids who are born in 2001 because this will be the first time that the kids born at the opposition kind of reach the conjunction phase of their natal Saturn-Pluto separation. We’ll get a lot of people who have points and planets who are in tight configurations with that Saturn-Pluto configuration as well as people who were born at Saturn-Pluto hard aspects, or people who have Saturn-Pluto on the angles.
AC: Right. So this is a Saturn-Pluto time and it will call Saturn-Pluto people to [be in] starring roles.
CB: Right.
PW: Yeah, exactly.
CB: That’s kind of like how sometimes if you have transit in your chart—like a major transit comes up—sometimes somebody will come into your life that has that planet or that placement prominent in their chart and they end up manifesting that transit for you, or they become the physical manifestation of that transit by coming into your life.
AC: Right.
PW: The same thing happened with the Uranus-Pluto square. That’s when a lot of people who are kind of at the center of a lot of those Uranus stories came up. For example, Chelsea Manning, born with Sun conjunct Uranus, becomes the center of this whistleblower drama during the Uranus-Pluto square. You had Bashar al-Assad—the president of Syria, born with Sun conjunct Uranus and Pluto—had the middle of the Syrian civil war taking place across the Uranus-Pluto square. So yeah, it’s a common phenomenon. When the sky looks a certain way the people who kind of match that pop up.
CB: Sure.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: One of the themes you guys wrote down which might be good to talk about—which can go either way—is the theme of ‘credit where credit is due’ as a general theme of Saturn in Capricorn.
AC: Yeah, that was me.
CB: That was you?
AC: That was my happy realization two days into Saturn in Capricorn. I started noticing just on Facebook and in my life people who had been laboring steadily and perhaps even humbly at something just getting recognized for what they’ve been doing. One of my favorite quick formulas for what Saturn does—I think the wording comes from you, Chris—which is ‘confirm or deny’. Maybe that’s my interpretation.
CB: I will take credit for that regardless.
AC: Okay.
PW: Well, give ‘credit where credit’s due’, Austin.
AC: And that’s actually absolutely key to the characterization of Saturn in Indian astrology is he gives you credit for what you did. And if you were a villain then he throws you in a prison, and if you’ve been laboring steadily, he’s like, “That was really good. Keep doing that. Here’s your backpay.” That’s another related concept to ‘credit where credit is due’ that I’ve been seeing; it’s not that Saturn in Capricorn is going to come and give you something you haven’t earned but you might have earned something that you didn’t realize. You might have actually just had your head down doing whatever your work is in the world and Saturn’s like, “By the way, good job. Here’s your back pay for those five years of labor.”
There’s something about recognizing—we were talking about authority very early on—just recognizing, “Oh, they’ve been studying for that 20 years. Maybe I should listen to them.” That recognizing authority and sorting out who’s an authority and who’s not about what. I feel like Saturn in Capricorn is very big on making those distinctions correctly rather than Saturn in Sagittarius which is sort of making those distinctions based on the loudest explosions and most convincing light show. Saturn in Capricorn wants people to not be, how shall we say, distracted by spectacle, right? So anyway, ‘credit where credit is due’.
And that also goes for people getting what’s coming to them which is like the mean way to say that. I was inspired by your bit on prisons—that sounds funny—Patrick, and I didn’t have that much time to research this particular part, but I was like, “Hmm, I wonder if any famous criminals got brought down during Saturn in Capricorn periods.” Oh, yeah. It took me five minutes to find Al Capone finally goes to jail.
PW: He was born at Sun-Mars opposition across Cancer and Capricorn, right?
AC: I do not remember. So the timing of his [incarceration] he was like public enemy number one.
PW: Awesome.
AC: Also, the imprisonment of Pablo Escobar—also, one of the 20th century’s most famous criminals—gets put in the La Catedral (my Spanish is terrible). He gets put in prison. It’s a swanky prison and it’s super corrupt and he gets to live like a king, but he’s stuck in one place and that eventually leads to his death.
And then there was a headline just the other day about a pretty infamous gangster who inspired the plot for the movie Goodfellas. He was in a road rage incident and finally went to jail not for necessarily his other crimes but they finally got him, which is what happened with Escobar, and which is what happened with Al Capone as well. For those of you who are familiar with it, there’s a documentary on HBO about the ‘Slenderman’ murders. Anyway, the perpetrators just got sentenced like a week into Saturn in Capricorn. So there’s definitely this punitive element and it’s not always grotesque and unjust.
CB: Right. Yeah, this idea of Saturn being associated with Nemesis in Greek or with retribution is a theme that comes up in Hellenistic astrology.
PW: And that’s another thing that I would kind of say, I hope when people are watching this they’re not necessarily trying to decipher or overlay their political or personal opinions on top of these Saturn transits, for example. Sometimes the fears are legitimate that are brought up during Saturn-Pluto periods and other times the fears are not; sometimes it ended up not being necessarily a thing. Yeah, I guess it really just depends on your perspective, like yeah, that guy either got what was coming to him, or that poor innocent person got totally smashed by a Saturn transit.
CB: Sure. And it does sometimes happen; we have seen some of the recent examples. You know, this all started happening and then snowballed before Saturn went into Capricorn a few months prior to its ingress, but there have been a number of notable Hollywood celebrities and politicians and other people that have fallen over the course of the past few months—starting in late 2017—and then our experiencing the aftereffects and the results of that now.
One of the interesting cases of course is Kevin Spacey who is somebody that actually has Saturn in Capricorn natally; so he has Saturn at 1° of Capricorn. So he actually just had or is having his exact Saturn return; his second Saturn return right now in the aftermath of all of these allegations coming out against him about past actions. And as a result of that he lost his series—what’s the Netflix series? I’m spacing it out.
PW: House of Cards.
CB: House of Cards. He was the leading actor in House of Cards which was like in its fifth or sixth season, and it was getting close to the end of the season where it culminates and reaches some resolution. And the last season I think they were in the middle of filming and then they canceled that, and it’ll probably presumably never be finished. At the same time he was about to be in a big movie that was J. Paul Getty, the famous billionaire who was like the richest man in the world in the 1950s and ‘60s. And Kevin Spacey was playing this guy and the film was set to come out in December of 2017, and then all of these allegations come out. And suddenly the studio—I think it was Sony; I forget who the film studio was—but they completely took Kevin Spacey out.
The film was already filmed, it was a month away from being released, and they completely took him out of the film and replaced him with another actor, with Christopher Plummer. Interestingly, the movie was directed by Ridley Scott, and Ridley Scott evidently originally wanted Christopher Plummer to play this lead role, to play the famous billionaire who was being depicted in this movie.
The studio wanted Kevin Spacey, so Kevin Spacey got the role, [and] they filmed the entire movie. But then a month or two before it [was] going to be released suddenly all these allegations come out about Kevin Spacey [and] his entire career implodes over the course of just a few weeks very quickly and very suddenly and unexpectedly, and he’s removed from this movie and then replaced with Christopher Plummer. They refilm all of his scenes within the course of a few weeks and then release the movie in December of 2017 when Saturn goes into Capricorn and Kevin Spacey has his exact Saturn return.
So that’s already fascinating enough that we’re seeing somebody who was as towering of a figure as Kevin Spacey was in Hollywood over the past decade or two, being an Academy Award-winning actor, but that’s not the most interesting part—that’s part of the most interesting part. The other most interesting part is that the guy who replaced him—the actor whose name is Christopher Plummer—also has Saturn at the exact same degree of Capricorn at 1° of Capricorn—here’s his chart—but he was born in 1929; so he’s actually having his third Saturn return right now. So Kevin Spacey was born—and this was pointed out; it was a listener of the podcast who’s also a patron who posted this in the private discussion forum for the group. And I’m forgetting their name, but I’m going to quickly look them up after I stop talking in a few minutes here because they pointed this out as a great correlation.
I had already been paying attention to Kevin Spacey’s Saturn return and the fact that his career was imploding right as the second Saturn return was beginning; he was born in 1959. But what’s crazy is that the guy that replaced him in the film that was then released in December of 2017 had Saturn at the exact same position at 1° of Capricorn but he was born in 1929 and he was experiencing his third Saturn return. That is some crazy stuff.
PW: Yeah, that’s really cool. There’s a few other examples of that in Hollywood, like Salma Hayek has the same Saturn as Frida Kahlo and she played her. Oh, another Saturn in Capricorn one actually—not Sean Bean—Sean Penn has the same Saturn as Harvey Milk and he played Harvey Milk in a movie, so there’s definitely things like that. Another thing I’d say about Kevin Spacey’s Saturn is if you go back to the chart, Chris…
CB: And this is an untimed chart. I just did a noon chart.
PW: Right. Yeah, this is irrespective of that. He has a Mars-Pluto conjunction, and that Mars-Pluto conjunction is nearly exactly trine his Saturn, so that means that his Saturn is susceptible to Mars and Pluto-type events. And so, what I think is interesting about that as well is he has been most acclaimed for his roles in which he plays essentially like a villainous-type character. And Saturn is the ‘Scrooge’ character. Saturn is kind of the villain archetype in some ways, the nemesis, the bad guy. And then I think around his first Saturn—that would have been 1989 or the very, very end of 1988—he first got popular after he played this insane arms dealer, this criminal on this TV show Wiseguy, and he played a few criminals after that in that period.
I don’t know if he filmed The Usual Suspects in the Saturn in Capricorn period, but I know that he sort of got started—he didn’t get started—but he came to prominence with a criminal or villain character. And so, I think it’s interesting that he is now playing this murderer, criminal president in House of Cards which is all about building up an empire only to have it crash down—and that actually is happening in his real life. In playing this villain, now he’s being revealed to be kind of a villain in his real life in some ways to other people through his actions towards them.
CB: Yeah, I wish we had birth time for him to know where that Sun was placed in his chart to understand it better.
PW: It’s just mind-blowing to think of the way that…
CB: Hold on before you interject—one little quick thing.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
CB: The guy that both of them portrayed, I used him as one of my very first chart examples in my book. But the billionaire the movie was about—that they were both portraying—we actually have a birth time for him, and he has Capricorn rising, with Saturn ruling the Ascendant and placed in Libra in the 10th whole sign house. So Kevin Spacey played this guy and has Saturn in early Capricorn and then was basically kicked out of the movie; and then the guy that replaced him has Saturn in Capricorn and he ended up then depicting him in this big Hollywood movie that will forever sort of memorialize this guy and his personality.
He was kind of this Saturnian, miser-type figure. One of the most famous stories about Getty was that one of his relatives—his grandson or nephew or something—was kidnapped and they tried to ransom him and asked for millions of dollars, and Getty refused to pay anything. So there’s this interesting sort of miserly Saturn archetype that Getty himself represented, and it’s interesting seeing it echoed in the actors who ended up playing him.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
PW: If there are any actors out there, now you know what kind of characters you should be playing.
AC: I wanted to just jump back to that initial stunning example of Kevin Spacey and his replacement, their Saturns and where Saturn is now. I think that’s a perfect illustration of ‘credit where credit is due’ working out really well for one person and not so well for another person. You know, the—who was the other actor—was the person that the director wanted, right?
CB: Right.
AC: You know, he was supposed to do it. That was what was right and it was denied.
CB: And in all honesty, even though I did like Kevin Spacey as an actor, regardless of the other personal things…
AC: No, he’s really good at acting creepy, right?
PW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, I mean, he did a great job in House of Cards, especially in the first couple of seasons and other similar type roles. But what was I saying? What was the point of that sentence?
PW: Even though you liked him.
CB: The point you were making though [about] ‘credit where credit was due’—what was weird is that in the previews for this—you know, Kevin Spacey, they put him in a bunch of makeup and prosthetics and it looked really weird in the previews. Even though the studio wanted him because they wanted a bigger actor, it almost didn’t look appropriate for the role; whereas Christopher Plummer who ended up replacing him—and they reshot all the scenes—actually looked really good as somebody trying to depict Getty. So the statement you were making and where you were going with that I also see that as being true in that somebody that was more appropriate for the role actually winning out somehow through this weird twist of fate, and the person that was perhaps less appropriate for it losing it in this very odd way.
AC: Yeah, yeah.
PW: Definitely.
AC: That’s a wonderful example for a lot of reasons.
CB: Sure. So did you have anything else to say before I sort of interrupted you?
AC: Me?
CB: Yeah, did you have anything else to say about that example?
AC: No, I just kind of wanted to point out how that’s an application of ‘credit where credit is due’ to both people. One looks like a terrible event where you lose your career and one looks like a great event, but it’s the same thing; it’s just which side you fall on.
CB: Sure.
AC: Although Saturn transits can certainly bring what is experienced as unearned tragedy or hardship, there’s also a lot of earned tragedy and a lot of earned authority or earned recognition, right? The person who had been an actor their whole life and they did that, they earned that skill and that reputation; they earned the director’s respect. And as much as it might have roots in a tragic childhood or whatever, Kevin Spacey did those things; he earned that ill-repute and that rejection. Sometimes the planets do signify just random stuff, good or bad, or seemingly random, but there is a very strong connection to action over time, especially with Saturn, especially with Saturn in such a ‘Saturn-y’ sign.
Saturn especially in Capricorn is a big fan of, “See, if you do something everyday for three years then that’s what you’ll have at the end of it; it’s not magic,” right? If you hurt people everyday for three years, I bet your reputation will suffer and you may be imprisoned. If you, I don’t know, do an exercise everyday for three years you’re going to be amazing at that. One of Saturn in Capricorn’s tricks is the least magical thing in the world that is the most magical thing in the world, which is if you keep doing that, this is going to happen.
CB: Sure. That’s a really important point because it’s a delicate topic that comes up over and over again on the podcast. On the one hand, this objection that I have to some strands of modern astrology—and certainly Leisa Schaim when talking about Saturn and Saturn returns and Saturn transits also—is that in the attempt by modern astrologers oftentimes to speak in an empowering way, they attribute almost godlike powers to any individual to actualize their own will, and therefore to manifest anything. But then as a side effect of that they basically attribute sometimes things to individuals that happen in their life that are not under [their] control and say that it’s somehow their fault for not actualizing their will, or that they attracted that to them or something like that, which can be bullshit in many instances.
But that being said, the point that you were making is really important, which is that of all things sometimes Saturn is closely connected with the results of actions and receiving your just due for that, either in a good way or a bad way. So it’s hard balancing those two things because you don’t know until you get to an individual case what it actually is going to be. Is this something that is a result of a past action, and you’re receiving your just desserts? Or is it something that is just a tragic thing that you have to put up with and deal with that is not necessarily your fault?
AC: Yeah. Well, a lot of times it’s pretty clear. One of the examples—I don’t know if you want to deal with—was Michael J. Fox being diagnosed with a terrible disease during his Saturn return. That wasn’t because he was a jerk, and so God gave him, what—Parkinson’s is it?
CB: Yeah, at his Saturn return.
AC: For me, at least knowing that everyone will experience difficulty or tragedy that is not the result of their actions, to me that frames a sort of underlines the point that not everything’s in your control, so by all means make the best out of what is in your control, right? You don’t have total control—don’t fool yourself—but you do have some control. You know, if you let the fact that things just sometimes happen convince you to give up what little control you have then that’s just a shame and that’s not going to work out for you.
CB: Right. And what is that saying? It’s like, “Give me the power to accept the things that I have to accept and control.” Do you guys know that saying?
PW: Yeah, it’s something like “Grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change.”
CB: “And the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
PW: Yeah.
AC: Yeah.
PW: There you go.
CB: Yeah, something like that along those lines. You know, the other thing from a technical standpoint that’s relevant here and is probably relevant—I don’t want to overemphasize this because there can be mitigating factors and reasons why this is not the case. But oftentimes sect seems to play a major role, especially for Saturn returns, in sometimes indicating from a more technical standpoint if the person is going to experience the more constructive side of the Saturn transit or if they’re going to experience the more challenging side of the Saturn transit with, generally speaking, all other mitigating factors aside, people with day charts often experiencing the more constructive side of the Saturn transit and people with night charts experiencing them more challenging side.
And that can be mitigated in a number of ways, for example, with Jupiter or Venus aspecting Saturn and offsetting things. Or in this instance, this is particularly relevant if Saturn is dignified zodiacally by sign, either being in one of its own signs—like Capricorn or Aquarius—or being in the sign of its exaltation, Libra; that can be a major mitigating or offsetting factor to that rule. But all other things aside, sect often is useful in determining which way it’s going to go. And that’s one of the reasons I wish in the case of Kevin Spacey and Christopher Plummer that we had their birth times because it would be interesting to see, for example, if Kevin Spacey was a night chart and Christopher Plummer was day chart or what have you.
PW: The other relevant thing to point out in Michael J. Fox’s chart is the fact that Saturn rules his 1st house—which is the house of one’s appearance and one’s general vitality and health—but then the 12th also represents not just enemies but suffering, like that kind of bad stuff. And so, the fact that Saturn at its return—I mean, this isn’t going to be the same for every person who has this setup, you know, Saturn in Capricorn in the 12th with Aquarius rising, but the fact [is] that he did start exhibiting symptoms of Parkinson’s as he was approaching his Saturn return, when it rules these parts of his chart, and he has an illness.
You know, if we were reading his chart there’s a bit more we could say. That wasn’t the end of his life getting Parkinson’s, it was really the beginning of his new life. Instead of being an actor or being just an actor, he became this health advocate and activist for stem cell research. The Saturn opposition I believe, that’s really when he got much more political about it and taking his case to lawmakers and saying, “Look, this is this therapy that we really need for people who are suffering.” So the cause of his life now—not just his own personal suffering—but also the idea of suffering in general is now the focus of his core identity. This is who he is now. He goes around and tries to fix what’s broken. I mean, in one way, we might even be able to say, well, maybe the Saturn return is when he’s done in by it or something, it might be—Chris is like, “Stop predicting death so much.” I’m not predicting death.
CB: Sure.
PW: Maybe that’s a breakthrough. Maybe he gets some sort of important legislative victory for stem cell research, or there’s some other kind of accomplishment or achievement he makes as a result of going through these 29 years of advocating on this topic.
CB: Yeah, definitely. So he’s somebody who Leisa used in her lecture on Saturn returns and sect and one of her favorite examples because of his Saturn ruling the Ascendant and being placed in the 12th in a night chart, and then him basically being diagnosed with Parkinson’s during his Saturn return. And so, he’s somebody who’s certainly now—one Saturn cycle later, having Saturn in Capricorn—it will be interesting to see what his second Saturn return is all about and what the closing down of that 30-year cycle and the opening up of a new 30-year cycle will look like for him in his life. There’s a lot of other Saturn in Capricorn people where we’re interested in that as well in terms of people going through their Saturn returns at this time, going through that process of closing down one chapter of their [lives] and then opening up another 30-year chapter.
PW: Barack Obama is actually another one just like this.
CB: This chart actually really makes me think because of course Michael J. Fox was born pretty close, within a few months of Barack Obama, and he also has Aquarius rising. So of course Obama is also going to be experiencing his second Saturn return in Capricorn, and it’ll be interesting to see what that’s all about. I don’t think we need to go into it.
PW: Right. I mean, I’d say it was probably when he opens up his foundation or his presidential library. That’s what Clinton did at his Saturn return after his presidency.
AC: And there’s a lot to be said at Saturn returns especially for the people who are doing their first, second, third these next couple of years. There’s often a big question about what role should I play. You know, when we talk about opening and closing a chapter that chapter often looks like a change in roles. Sometimes it’s just internally thinking about your life and what you’re doing differently but it’s often quite clear externally. As for the first Saturn return there’s that question of I learned how to do this in my 20s and I guess I’m good at that. I’m educated in this, but what is my role in the world?
What is the container that I’m going to pour myself into? What is my job in the context of the rest of the humans? And I think that that’s a pretty key Saturnian thing. It’s a pretty key Saturn return thing. Again, because Saturn is in Capricorn, we’re kind of seeing Saturn on steroids here, so all of those fundamentally Saturnian themes I think are going to be very clear.
CB: Definitely. Are there any other Saturn [returns]? You know, with Saturn in Sag we looked at some Saturn returns where we were looking forward to how those turned out. One of them that was funny was the actor Shia LaBeouf and knowing that he had Aquarius rising and Saturn in Sag, and we were looking forward to seeing what his Saturn return would be about. And that was actually really interesting, one of the things being him, on the week of his exact Saturn return, renting out a movie theater and then sitting down and watching all of the movies he had done since he was a little kid over the course of that week of his exact Saturn return in a very vivid and stark Saturn return example, in addition to obviously other things. [Who] are some other people who were born with Saturn in Capricorn where we’re going to be looking forward to seeing how their Saturn returns turn out?
PW: So I would like to use the example of James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones’ is one of my favorite examples of a chart now. We have a timed birth for him so that’s really cool. One of the coolest things about James Earl Jones’ chart is the fact that he was born with Mercury in Capricorn rising, and of course he’s most famous for his big, deep, dark, booming voice which he uses to portray these iconic father figures and/or villains.
CB: Darth Vader.
AC: A person with a rich, deep, bass voice who just exudes gravitas—that’s what Saturn looks like in a sign that it rules, right? That’s what Saturn sounds like.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Well, look at it, it’s Mercury stationing direct at 6° Capricorn on the Ascendant. It’s actually 3° above which means the moment he was born, Mercury was just rising over the eastern horizon at that moment, and then a few minutes later the Moon rose over the horizon and Saturn came right after it, all right before the Sun. So all those planets—Mercury, the Moon, and Saturn in Capricorn—preceded and rose just before the Sun, just before sunrise that morning, the morning he was born.
PW: Yeah, I mean, I just think that is just so amazing. But what’s even more interesting about it is the fact that he was not always known as this legendary voice in cinema. When he was a kid, he was actually mute for several years. He did not speak at all; he could not speak; he had a very severe stutter. And this is a very common theme with Mercury-Saturn people is they oftentimes have obstacles revolving around the idea of speech. But then as time went on—and again, that’s Saturn’s thing and Capricorn’s thing—over the course of time and maturity and maturation, he becomes an adult, he gets this deep voice. He now speaks with authority. Now he speaks and people tremble. Now he speaks and people listen. So I think it speaks so clearly.
AC: It’s beautiful.
PW: It’s beautiful actually.
AC: The first time he spoke a word, he caused an earthquake.
CB: Yeah.
AC: There was just a big, big rumble. The Earth trembled.
PW: I mean, he is literally the voice of Darth Vader. I mean, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful chart.
CB: And that theme—before you move on—just that idea of something that initially is a weakness or a shortcoming or an obstacle but then eventually becomes a strength almost through—sometimes it’s overcompensating but other times it’s through just sheer focus and willpower and repeated failure that eventually it becomes something that’s hardened that the person is able to wield as something that’s powerful rather than something that’s a shortcoming. That’s a great Saturn- and Capricorn-type theme—weakness earlier in life that later becomes a strength.
PW: Yeah, exactly.
AC: Just to expand on that, one thing I see with Saturn positions with people is, yeah, it’s something that they’re not naturally good at a lot of the time, and so they have to learn to do it right without the benefit of talent. You know, talent’s a wonderful thing, but it means you don’t really have to study very hard.
CB: Right.
AC: You know, if you’re good at something, you’re just naturally good at it. You don’t have to build that skill from the ground up. But when you’re less talented than your peers at something—this could be Saturn in the 2nd house (bad at managing money) or in the 9th (you’re not sure what you believe) or whatever—you really have to start building from the ground up a lot of times in the area where Saturn is, which will again look like a handicap the first couple of decades. But by the time you’re in the middle of life, you’re not relying on talent or the grace of God—you’ve learned how to do it correctly from the ground up.
PW: That’s perfect, Austin. So the deal with James Earl Jones first Saturn return was in 1960, he didn’t really have much contact with his dad; he wasn’t allowed to be in contact with his biological father (and again, that’s another Saturn thing we didn’t really touch on with fathers and absentee fathers and things like that). But his dad was an actor, but the son wanted to get into acting too but wasn’t cast in anything, so he just worked as a carpenter at a theater making sets and stuff before he ever got cast in a role, but then he finally started acting.
He basically had to work his way up from being like a lowly stage hand to finally getting a role. And then it was finally in 1960 that he got this role in a Shakespeare production, the very first Shakespeare in Central Park, playing in Henry V; and it was also the year of his first role on the New York stage. So this was really his entrance in New York into being a real actor.
AC: On his Saturn return.
PW: Yeah, that was in the year of his Saturn return. He said on a spring day in 1960, he was offered the role in the Shakespeare thing which got him a lot of acclaim and notice. And this is another example of ‘credit where credit’s due’. You know, he put in the hard, hard work. This is a guy who couldn’t even speak for several years until he was a teenager. So it’s a huge testament to his grim determination with his Saturn in Capricorn.
And the other thing that’s really interesting, the reason why I’m also looking at him, especially for the one coming up, is the fact that he was born with the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction opposite Saturn. So he’s another one of these Saturn-Pluto-Jupiter people, and we’re about to go into a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto period.
CB: Right.
PW: He’s one of these people you’re kind of expecting like, “What’s going to be going on with you?” The only thing I really know about what’s coming up for him now is he is going to be reprising his role as Mufasa in the new Disney remake Lion King, and he recorded that part at the previous Saturn in Capricorn.
CB: Well, and that’s interesting because this is going to be his third Saturn return. But that second Saturn return, he really was at almost the height of his career at that point.
PW: Yeah.
CB: So 30 years after you said he got that initial role in the late 1950s, early 1960s during his first Saturn return. 30 years later, the Star Wars trilogy had just wrapped in the mid-1980s, [in] which he played such a big role. But he was also getting actual movie roles, like Field of Dreams I remember in the early 1990s.
PW: Yeah, in the Saturn in Capricorn period, he had a lead role in a TV show where he played a cop. Oh, no, I think he might have played a prisoner—of course—who finally got out of jail. I forget what the name of it was, but I know that he is the only actor to have won two Emmys in the same year and that happened for the work he did during his second Saturn return.
CB: Wow.
PW: So again, a really big career accolade as Saturn is transiting through Capricorn.
CB: Until his second Saturn return, this is a guy in his late 50s, early 60s at this point. So it’s another one of those examples of something that really took a lot of time. It’s not something that was just given to him early in his life, but he really worked for it and built up to it over the course of two Saturn cycles.
PW: Totally. So I think with this next Saturn-Pluto cycle—I mean, with this next Saturn cycle, he will receive the accolades again, and it’ll be similarly grand, I guess.
CB: All right. Were you going to say something about that, Austin, before we move on?
AC: Oh, I was just going to say this is one of the charts that validates what astrologers say about Saturn stuff getting better with age.
CB: Right. Definitely.
PW: Yeah.
AC: Sometimes when I’m talking about something or I’m talking to a client—or a friend or whatever—and everything’s ruled by Saturn and Saturn’s all up in everything, I tell them, no, no, give it time. Like I’m not kidding, it feels like a platitude but it’s really not a platitude. If your chart is ‘Saturn-tastic’, give it time; some of these take a couple of extra decades to cook. And one of the things again about Saturn is that while a very Jupiterian chart, for example, the person will often be blessed by having opportunities earlier in life or they may be blessed with talent, the tide goes out on opportunities and talent; it goes out and it comes back in. But when you’ve just built it with stones you quarried yourself from scratch, it doesn’t really matter what the weather is, if you’ve built Saturn-style, it takes you five times as long. Not five times as long—it takes you two-and-a-half-times as long, but it’s not…
PW: Weathers every storm.
AC: Yeah, it’s not subject to the same weather patterns or tides.
PW: Perfect. That’s a great point. Literally, this guy just has to speak and money pours out. I mean, it’s amazing.
CB: Right, but he didn’t start that way; it started the exact opposite.
PW: Not at all. Not at all. So we could go to the next example.
CB: Who did you want to do? Charles Dickens?
PW: We can do Charles Dickens, yeah. So this one is obviously from a long time ago, but he is obviously still a very famous author. Everyone knows who he is.
CB: And hold on a second. First, let me pull up his chart.
PW: Okay.
CB: Do you see it?
PW: I see it, yeah. Shall we continue?
CB: Yeah, let’s go.
PW: Okay. All right, so this is Charles Dickens’ chart. And one of the things that’s really interesting about Charles Dickens is he was an author who was famous for writing stories which were about the grinding misery of poverty. And he was born with Mercury as the ruler of Ascendant and it’s in Capricorn. So he is thinking and talking about hard times: orphans, all the Saturn topics; Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and all of that stuff.
And what’s interesting about this too is the reason why he is so interested in those topics for his novels is because when he was a kid, his dad got locked up in debtors prison and he had to work in terrible conditions to support his family for several months. And because he came from a place of relative privilege, his descent into this world of being in poverty left a huge impression on him. And so, that’s why in his books he’s always focused on these really hard, Saturnian issues especially of youth in poverty. Mercury in Capricorn kind of captures that kind of idea of youth in poverty.
AC: Well, Saturn’s there in the 5th.
CB: Yeah, children.
PW: Yeah, Saturn’s in there in the 5th, exactly. And that’s why his books are sort of focused around child characters in hard, terrible situations. So his first Saturn return, he was a very famous author by that point already, and he made this very controversial visit to America. He had never been to America before, and for him it was a Saturn return experience for him because it was a total disillusioning experience because he thought that America was this place which kind of had it all figured out with regards to poverty; he thought it was this utopia.
And he got there and kind of saw the good parts, but he also specifically requested to see the prisons and the poor houses and the insane asylums. He wanted to see these Saturn in Capricorn places because he’s obsessed with them because of what happened. And he saw that while America had a lot of things right, it also had a lot of things wrong. So he wrote this book during the Saturn in Capricorn period in which he was very critical of the Americans, and a lot of his American fans kind of turned on him. He eventually was able to win them back with subsequent books, but that was Charles Dickens first Saturn return, and I thought that was just right.
CB: Brilliant.
AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So just to say a little bit about Saturn’s position natally and how clearly that fits into his story and his stories, we have Saturn in Capricorn in the 5th whole sign house and the 5th house signifies children, so there’s writing about poor children.
PW: Tiny Tim. Oliver Twist.
AC: Right. The 5th house is also very strongly associated with artistic creativity, what you create, right? And of course we create children. But if you’re an author, you also create books. And so, he’s creating books that have Saturn as a theme and then you have the 5th house children thing layered on top of that. It’s 5th house-5th house-Saturn-Saturn.
PW: Think of his most famous character, probably the most perfect Saturnian archetypal character possible—Ebenezer Scrooge.
AC: Yes.
PW: Bah, humbug.
AC: Right. And what is he visited with? He’s visited with a vision of how time changes things.
CB: Right.
PW: Right.
CB: The Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
AC: Right, so it’s a confrontation with time; the old man’s confrontation with time. Yeah, that’s an excellent point, Watson. Perfect, perfect example.
PW: Yay! I got praise from Austin Coppock.
AC: Oh, hush.
PW: I’m going to put that on my site.
CB: And then to wrap up this section on Saturn returns I think what I want to do is mention other people having Saturn returns with no commentary about our interpretation or otherwise what we’re expecting, but just a few interesting ones that we know are happening with Saturn in Capricorn to pay attention to as interesting research subjects to see how that’s going to turn out. So the list that we’ve got written down is Mike Pence; the Vice President of the United States has Saturn in Capricorn. Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox News empire. What’s the broader umbrella corporation? I forget. I’m spacing out the name right now.
AC: News Corp.
PW: News Corp.
CB: Okay.
PW: He’s another Saturn-Pluto guy.
AC: Really shocking.
CB: Warren Buffett, the famous investor along similar lines. Val Kilmer, the famous actor, but he’s actually going through some very serious health issues right now that have come out in the news.
PW: So is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, born very close to him with a Sun-Saturn conjunction in Capricorn.
CB: Right. And you have a few others listed here. They’re not in a separate bullet point, but some other actors and musicians?
PW: Yeah, Daniel Radcliffe; basically all the Harry Potter actors. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint—the Harry Potter generation grows up.
AC: Oh, that’s so interesting.
PW: Yeah, it is. Taylor Swift is going to be having a Saturn return and I’m kind of looking forward to that just because it’s going to be fairly visible, I would imagine, because of her visibility. And it makes me wonder—especially due to some of the more negative attention that’s been brought to her—that she may question what’s doing with music. She may choose to go into a different direction, maybe leaving music or something of that sort. She’s not quite at the actual return yet but the return has started.
And she just released this new album and it happened with Saturn on her Sun, and she’s come out with this appropriately Saturnian, darker material, and apparently a lot of her ticket sales have stumbled. It kind of looks like she’s entering a kind of less pleasant period potentially with Saturn in Capricorn. So I’m kind of looking forward to—sorry. I mean, I’m looking forward to it, not like I’m enjoying it.
AC: You’re looking forward in time at it.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Right.
PW: There you go. There you go. There you go. I don’t have any particular feelings towards her.
AC: And both Rihanna and Chris Brown are Saturn in Capricorns, aren’t they?
PW: Yeah, yeah.
AC: So I don’t want to go on at length but the first thing that really got me thinking about Saturn in Capricorn was watching a Chris Brown documentary maybe two or three months ago—maybe three months ago—and finding out that he’s sort of just barely not gone to jail for a lot of things and he seemed to have a very unrepentant attitude. And I was like, “Hmm, is he pre- or post-Saturn return?” And then I was like, “Oh, it’s coming up.” But I was like, “Hmm, don’t know that that’s going to go well for Chris Brown.” Maybe he’ll just…
PW: Change it up.
AC: Maybe he’ll put away childish things and make good. But I was just sort of like, hmm, I don’t know if Saturn in Capricorn approves of that behavior.
PW: He’s a New Moon in Taurus, by the way. So Uranus is coming up for his Sun and Moon.
CB: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s a whole other thing we’re going to have to do a show on in a few months here, which is Uranus’ ingress into Taurus which is marking not just the three-year shift of Saturn in Capricorn but a whole new seven-year shift of a planet going into a new sign. And one of the things of course we learned that was very unique about Saturn in Sagittarius and the people that were having their first Saturn returns in Sagittarius that was so stark and—not comical—but unique was a lot of them had Saturn conjunct Uranus.
And so, there was this heavy, heavy Uranian component of something unexpected or something that came out of left field that often ended up being part of the Saturn return experience. And for many of the people experiencing their first Saturn returns in Capricorn who were born in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s that’s also going to be present for them as an interesting component of their Saturn returns, since they have Uranus in Capricorn conjunct or at least in the same sign as Saturn for the most part, in addition to Neptune which most of the Saturn in Sagittarius people didn’t have. So that’s actually a unique additional component that’s going to be new and introduce a sort of unique combination or a unique component for these first Saturn return people.
AC: Yeah.
PW: The walls explosively dissolve with Saturn-Uranus-Neptune.
AC: Weighty and surreal, I don’t know.
CB: Right, weighty, surreal, unexpected.
PW: The Neptune thing is the thing that really throws me off.
CB: Yeah.
PW: I’m not quite sure how to…
CB: Well, because it’s such the antithesis of Saturn. And you can see that with the destruction, the dissolution of the Berlin Wall, for example, and the Uranian and Neptune component perhaps being part of the reason why we’re talking about destroying or the taking down of the wall during that time with Saturn going through that sign versus building one up. But then the question is what does that look like then when a bunch of those people start having that placement activated in their chart? What walls are being dissolved or brought down in their personal lives at that time?
AC: And I would also say to a certain degree by controlling the boundaries around space, Saturn will create and destroy worlds. You know, in a sense when the Berlin Wall came down, it destroyed the political world that people had been living in for decades. But thinking about the Saturn-Neptune-Uranus people, there’s this whole layer of the virtual world that is going to need some very strange architects: imaginative, technically-inclined, willing to dwell within virtual worlds. It seems like out of that generation we’ll get some notable architects of that virtual layer of our world which is only growing, right?
PW: Yeah.
AC: I mean, just the very basic things that people have obviously already got to be working on, like “Well, what if you did Second Life for Facebook but it was completely virtual—it was full immersion VR?” I’m not in that area; that’s not an original thought; that’s like an obvious thing. There will be these worlds that are being built. That terrain has got to be formed and shaped, and I would be shocked if the people who end up being the leading figures in that aren’t from that Saturn-Uranus-Neptune sub-generation, not that that’s the only thing that that’s good for.
CB: Right.
PW: And I’d also like to add as a side note to that that Chris did that paper on the Uranus-Neptune cycles and its continuing synchrony with the synthesis and development of innovations in astrology itself. And so, a lot of the older modern astrologers kind of looked at the Pluto in Scorpio kids as the people who would really kind of shake up astrology. And I, as a Pluto in Scorpio person, is kind of like, no, no, no, it’s the Uranus-Neptune kids from the early ‘90s who are going to be doing the crazy stuff.
So in a way I’m also excited for the possibilities for astrology itself and the astrologers who will come of age with this Saturn return because they’re going to be bringing forth the Uranus-Neptune thing. And especially once Uranus squares Neptune a few decades from now that’s going to be another amazing time I think for those people who I think will be building something at this time, like you said, Austin, who will be extraordinary to us, I think.
CB: Definitely. Yeah, it’s interesting to think about the people who may discover astrology who are having their first Saturn return, and to discover astrology during your first Saturn return with it also activating that conjunction or co-presence with Uranus and Neptune at the same time; that would make some sense.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. And we should probably not go any further down this rabbithole.
CB: Right.
PW: Right.
AC: You know, in a sense we can date the beginning of the translation movement and the beginning of the absorption of traditional texts into astrology to that Saturn in Capricorn period last time. So in a sense the traditional revival in astrology is coming up on its Saturn return.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really important point.
PW: That’s really interesting.
CB: And the whole thing about that was always transmission and synthesis of the ancient traditions with the contemporary ones for 2,000—no, 3,000 years now because I’ve actually traced it back as far as the 7th century BCE where those Uranus-Neptune conjunctions were still relevant. All right, so let’s move on. So you guys wanted to mention a few other cultural examples before wrapping up? Is that what it was, or what was the plan?
AC: I was thinking we could just talk about, okay, so you’re living with Saturn in Capricorn for three years.
CB: So what are the strategies/advice section?
AC: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
CB: Okay.
AC: Or just living with it. Because one thing to note—just like we said before—this is peak Saturn. Whatever transits you have from Saturn right now—whether it’s just a square to your Mercury or whatever—that’s going to be the most important Saturn aspect your Mercury’s probably going to get for a very long time. Saturn’s just sort of turned up to full ‘James Earl Jones’ for years. And after this of course Saturn goes into Aquarius which is the other ‘full Saturn monty’. And so, all of the Saturn transits—and all of what I would even call ‘Saturn opportunities’–are all at max. After this, Saturn’s not going to be as strong until it gets to Libra after, I don’t know, 20 years. And so, there’s just a lot of Saturn happening.
One example of a Saturn opportunity is in electional astrology, right? Do you have a thing that you want to do that requires a good Saturn position? Congratulations, Saturn’s going to be in its rulership for five years or five-and-a-half-years, right? If you’re doing traditional astrological magic and you have a thing that requires Saturn in its dignity, in its hour and rising and all that, congratulations, that’s going to be really easy to find. The Saturn elections are going to be bountiful and so [are] the Saturn transits. You know, it’s not the same thing as Saturn aspecting something in your chart from Sagittarius or Scorpio or whatever, this is real Saturn; and I think that means of course you have to take it really seriously.
And just putting a Saturn frame around the next several years will I think benefit people immensely, and I don’t mean by ‘a Saturn frame’ regard it with fear and terror. But one of the things that I was thinking—that I think I mentioned at the end of one of our discussions, Chris—was if we can recognize that Saturn, especially in Capricorn, likes to give you what you work for, then great. I don’t know, if you realize you’ve been working on something for 10 years and you get credit for it that’s awesome. But how about planning to have earned something by the time Saturn leaves Capricorn at the end of 2020—like beginning now a daily practice or a weekly practice or whatever it is? Jogging everyday. Getting on the right side of ‘credit where credit’s due’ is what I’m saying.
PW: I actually did that myself. I just started what I call my ‘Saturn challenge’ to lose a hundred pounds in a year. I’ve been posting daily videos of my progress, and I chose a Saturn election with Saturn in Capricorn rising. And so far I’m sticking with it; it looks like it’s going to be good. But it’s really interesting what you said: the [kinds] of elections you want to cast while Saturn’s in Capricorn are going to be things you want to really, really last a long time. I think since Saturn’s in my 6th house of health that’s what I want for the next 30 years. I want to be there, yeah.
CB: And something that you know you’re going to work at and build over time rather than like a ‘get-rich-quick’ sort of scheme. That’s not a good idea for a Saturn election.
PW: It’s not a good idea.
CB: And you actually used the election that we highlighted for January in our yearly forecast episode, right?
PW: Yeah, I did, but it was somewhat backseat because I had forgotten about it. And then my wife said, “Oh, you should go today.” And then I was like, “That’s funny. That’s the day they suggested.” I didn’t get to do it with Venus rising but I did it with Saturn rising.
CB: Right. Are there any final things that we should mention? I think that was a great note about Saturn elections and using those. And obviously we’re going to be highlighting a lot of those in the monthly forecast episodes over the course of the next couple of years, if not longer here. Any advice or anything else we should say as we’re wrapping up this whole discussion about Saturn in Capricorn? I think we’ve covered a lot.
PW: I know I’ve been a bit of a fearmonger, I know I’ve ‘monged’ some fear this episode. And so, I just would like to impart that you should try your best not to fear what’s coming but just to understand what’s coming and to be Saturn in Capricorn. I mean, I think Saturn in Capricorn asks us all to be more cautious and to be more serious. And I think we just have to take every moment the way that we always should, but the way that Saturn I think needs us to act, or the way that we need to act in the situations that come before us, so we shouldn’t fear it. And in order to face down Saturn-Pluto stuff, we need Saturn-Pluto people to do it. So those people are among us and out there, and they’ll be our heroes.
CB: Right, the same thing from the Saturn-Pluto that causes difficulty and sometimes oppression can also lead to strength and resilience.
PW: Yes. There you go.
[snippet from video version]
CB: Go ahead, Austin.
AC: Oh, yeah, sorry I cut in there. I’m getting some technical stuff.
CB: Yeah, that’s okay. It’s cutting out really badly, isn’t it? Yeah, we might not be able to do a final monologue. It’ll be in the audio version because your audio recording’s still going, but the video’s getting really wonky.
AC: Yeah, maybe not. Yeah, maybe just get on the right side of ‘credit where credit is due’ is a good final note and Watson’s concluding piece; although I only heard half of it because it kept cutting out.
PW: It was really good.
CB: It was really good. You’ll see it in the final YouTube version.
PW: I didn’t even predict one death.
CB: Yeah, there’s still time after the episode credits. I’ll do like a whole montage that’ll be the cut scenes of you.
PW: People will die in the next Saturn in Capricorn period.
CB: Right. A fireside chat with Patrick Watson, five hours in length.
[end of snippet from video version]
CB: All right, so this is great. Thank you guys both for joining me for this discussion. Things are starting to cut out, so I want to mention everyone’s website where people can find out more information about each of you. So first, Austin—you can find out more information about him at his website, AustinCoppock.com. He writes an amazing horoscope column—astrological column—on his website, and he also does a successful and very useful Patreon campaign which I’m signed up for, and I think Patrick is also signed up for where you can get a bunch of benefits [from] both his [daily] and [weekly] and monthly astrological columns and a bunch of additional bonus content.
So check out his website at AustinCoppock.com for more information about that. He also has some great articles on Saturn in Capricorn and other stuff that he’s written. I’ll try to link to some of that in the description either for this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. For Patrick, you want to check out his website which is—what is your URL at this point?
PW: My URL is www.BigFatAstro.com.
CB: All right. And I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s not going to be relevant anymore as a name by the end of this transit.
PW: Potentially, but this could change into ‘BitFitAstro’.
CB: Oh, that’s good.
PW: I mean, regardless of my own size it never was just about me; it was also about my astrology which is big and fat. And I think having ‘big fat’ astrology—you shouldn’t plus-size shame my astrology, Chris.
CB: Sure. ‘BigFatJuicyAstro.com’.
PW: Yeah, my astrology has curves and you will not besmirch them and their good name.
CB: No, no, your astrology is great. So yeah, BigFatAstro.com…
PW: My astrology is very big and fat.
CB: …where you’ve got articles. You have a great article which I think at some point you should release, the Saturn and Pluto one; so that’s otherwise available for purchase on your website. You also do a YouTube channel which is the same name, which you can find through your website, but it’s BigFatAstroVlog!, and have also a successful Patreon campaign where people can sign up in order to get early access to your videos and articles and other things like that, which I follow and appreciate. So yeah, people should check out your website.
And as for myself, I primarily host The Astrology Podcast at TheAstrologyPodcast.com. If you enjoyed this episode then please give me a good rating on iTunes, and you can also subscribe for extra bonus content through Patreon where I have electional episodes and behind-the-scenes content and other bonus podcasts that are not released to the public. Also got some posters, one of which is in the background, and those are linked in the sidebar of the podcast website at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2018Posters.
All right, I think that’s it for this episode. Thank you both for joining me. I’m so glad we got a chance to do this. This came out really well. And we should reconvene in three years and do a retrospective and see how things worked out. What do you say?
PW: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, I’m into it. Thank you for having us, Chris.
PW: Yeah, we’ll meet that, thank you.
CB: Yeah, thank you. This was awesome. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening. Check out the websites in the description below, and we’ll see you in three years when we do the next episode on Saturn going into Aquarius. All right, thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.