The Cosmic Story: Saturn in Pisces
Renewing our Archetypal Terrain
Saturn Journeys Through the Sign of Pisces
from March 7, 2023 – February 14, 2026
There are two archetypal energies at play when we look at planets in different signs. The planet is the action or archetypal energy in play, while the sign gives us the archetypal landscape where that action takes place.
In 2023, we’ll see three big planetary energies (Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto) moving into new signs, so be prepared to flow with the changing energies.
The first shift will occur in early March, when the planet Saturn, the ‘reality’ principle, leaves Aquarius and moves into Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac, where everything dissolves back into the ocean of the Collective Unconscious .
Something big is coming to an end.
Before Saturn enters Pisces, the sign of dissolution, let’s review what Saturn has been up to in the last seven years (¼ of its cycle) before he sinks into the depths of Pisces’ ocean currents.
In November 2015, Saturn was just beginning to transit through Sagittarius, the sign of truth-speaking, when it squared Neptune in Pisces, the sign of illusion, delusion and imagination. Suddenly we were confronted with ‘fake news’ and the questioning of our consensus ‘reality’.
Saturn’s transit through Sagittarius brought up the question: What is Truth? What is Realty? What we believed was a single shared reality was shown to be an illusion. These past few years has thrown us into cultural chaos because of this ‘not knowing’.
But for things to really change on a collective level, we have to descend into some Chaos, so something really new can emerge. Otherwise, we get a repeat of what we had before, only worse.
The truth is, we all live in our own separate realities. Ask don Juan or the Buddhists. This belief in separate/alternative realities, which is the new scientific paradigm, is finally going mainstream. Have you seen the movie, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once? This movie about parallel lives/ alternative realities is a masterful example of how these multiple dimensions affect our lives.
Then Saturn transited through Capricorn – one of the two signs Saturn ‘rules’ (has an affinity for). From January 2018 to March 2020, Saturn in Capricorn tried to make sense of what was going on in collective culture – what was true and what wasn’t. To shore up what was worth saving and to let Pluto’s wrecking ball smash the rest. And then in January, 2020, a once-in-500+ years conjunction in Capricorn between Saturn’s energy of structure and order, and Pluto’s energy of destruction for evolution’s sake, came to a head with the world shutting down over COVID.
Life changed. Our culture changed, like it did 500 years ago after the Protestant Reformation.
Next, from January 2021 to March 2023, Saturn moved through Aquarius, another sign it rules according to ancient astrologers (who knew nothing about Uranus, the modern co-ruler of Aquarius). It began its transit by conjuncting Jupiter at 1* Aquarius on Winter Solstice 2020, starting a new 200 year cycle of collective growth and well-being in Air signs.
With Saturn in Aquarius, we had to look at the big picture issues to see where we stand. For the past few years, people have become more engage in fixed-air Aquarian issues: in politics, in community action and in their personal tribes. We had to recognize what was working and what wasn’t working in our social contracts.
And then there's AI.
One gift of Saturn’s transit of Aquarius is to help us bring our ideals into our everyday consciousness, and into our collective consciousness. I think this is the result of the last quarter Uranus-Saturn square in 2021 – 2022. Will we hold onto the old story or will we move into a new story based in Mother Earth’s biological terrain? We were all being shaken and now we see the results. People are standing up for equal rights, for women’s rights, for voting rights, for people-power in the marketplace. People are taking back our freedom concerning work and we’re beginning to see through the corporate manipulation of our ‘reality’.
And those who are afraid of change – really they’re afraid of life – are trying to control the rest of us by lying and manipulating, or by bombing innocent cities or killing us in mass shootings. The old paradigm doesn’t want to die and let something new be born. This is part of Saturn’s ancient mythic story: Saturn swallowed his children; refusing to pass his power on to the next generation.
We’re seeing the split in ideals mostly because the manipulators are trying to divide us as they play morality police. But in reality, most people want the same things – peace, love, good work, security, comfort, companionship, community. The morality part is personal and needs to be kept personal. Nobody should force another human being to think, believe, and act on things that go against their personal beliefs. Nobody has the right to force those beliefs on others.
That’s the Aquarian ideal of community. Take personal responsibility for what you do as long as it brings no harm to others or to Nature.
After 5 + years in signs it rules (Capricorn and Aquarius), Saturn’s energy has helped us see how our modern 3D reality is sick because it is removed from both Mother Earth and our human needs. And our collective emotions are being played out in large measure through Mother Earth’s intense weather patterns. This disconnect is due to religious beliefs as well as the mechanization of life. The collective chaos is needed for cultural renewal.
And so when Saturn steps into Pisces, the chaos might feel worse, but we have the opportunity to transform our fear through playing seriously with the Creative Imagination.
Saturn’s Archetypal Energy
The Ancient Greek story about Saturn has him swallowing his own children, sickly mirroring his father Ouranos, when he kept stuffing his children back into Gaia’s womb. That led to Saturn castrating his heavenly father, cutting Earth off from our cosmic community. Ouranos’ phallus, his potency, fell into the ancient oceans and gave rise to Aphrodite, the personification of Love. That’s the parting gift the cosmos left us. The Power of Love.
For most of the past, astrologers saw Saturn’s powers through the lens of it being the last planet they could see with their naked eyes. It marked the boundary of the known universe, so Saturn became the boundary, the limit, that held us all in its embrace.
Astrologically, we say that Saturn’s archetypal energy embodies the principle of limits, structure, constraint, necessity, patience, endurance and manifestation. It rules achievements in life and in your career. Saturn is associated with Time, maturity and mortality (the Grim Reaper is one of Saturn’s masks). Saturn is the symbol for authority, old age, status, hierarchy, structures (like government and rules), sobriety, and mortality.
Saturn’s energies can also repress, make rigid, negate and defeat our ego needs, or restrain them until we face our responsibilities. Saturn builds boundaries, foundations, laws and restrictions. Saturn is called the Great Teacher, because we have to face those tests to achieve our destiny. Saturn teaches people to work through limitations, adversity, and obligation. So Saturn also symbolizes the wisdom gained, the discipline learned and the karma that needs facing.
Saturn is the archetypal senex – the stern old man. This is an apt image of patriarchy. Since patriarchy is finally being named as the system we live under (when you can name something, you can have power over it), we can begin to leave it behind, like Zeus, who wasn’t swallowed, and who led the rebellion against Saturn and his followers, the Titans.
In the Chakra system, I place Saturn at the Root Chakra. The Root Chakra is the energy that grounds us in Earth’s biosphere. Our culture and our family shape this chakra, for good or for ill. For a long time, our collective root chakra has been shaped by patriarchal rules that inspire fear, insecurity, male domination and female submission, disconnection from nature, over-reliance on logic and rational thought, and a denial and rejection of our feeling, emotional and spiritual natures.
These are the characteristics that have become almost stereotypical of patriarchal far-right beliefs – which in turn constellates its opposite – extreme left-wing wokeness. Here is Saturn in Aquarius, sorting out the group Mind.
We have to stop rebelling against the old story. When you rebel, you’re still tied to the old story – like being a teenager lashing out at dad or mom. To be truly revolutionary, we have to leave the patriarchy-within-us behind so it can die in the outer world. We all need to step out of that paradigm. Personally we can be as radical as we want. But collectively, we have to create a balance that can help us all evolve together. Otherwise the war mongers and corporate elite will win out and control the future.
The Root Chakra is the origin of where patriarchy lives within us and it influences all the other chakras. So look at what keeps you grounded or gives you a sense of security. Are you doing the things you want to be doing? Or need to be doing?
Check in with yourself because when Saturn is in Pisces, those things will no longer serve you.
 |
| Milky Way Galaxy |
Since 2012, when there was a galactic alignment of the Sun, Earth and the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, we have entered a new 26,000 year cosmic cycle, a new beginning for life here on Earth. That means, we’ll be re-imagining all the archetypes, letting them break out of their old stereotypical shells, so they can re-define themselves for us. This is especially true of Saturn’s transit through Pisces for the first time since this new galactic alignment.
These
next few year will hopefully see patriarchy swept away while Saturn
is submerged in the mysteries of the Great Mother’s watery womb.
Since we are coming to the end of the Winter Solstice season, the
Great Mother is still our guiding archetypal feminine energy. Mary
is worshiped by Catholics as ‘Stella Maris’ – the Star of
the Sea, the Goddess as Cosmic Womb. When Saturn enters
Pisces, its archetypal energy goes back into this Cosmic Womb for
rebirth. So don't be afraid to call on her for her help and wisdom during this transit.
Stella Maris
Archetypes are the basic instincts that make us human. They are the blueprint of those instincts, which get filled in by each Cosmic Age, culture and generation. When an archetypal energy no longer serves life, it becomes a stereotype. It loses the energy to engage people and needs to be renewed.
When Saturn transits through Pisces in these next few years, we have the opportunity to let go of those rules which shaped our root chakras, and let Spirit re-shape our understanding of the rules of Life. If we let patriarchy die, Saturn can center us in a new reality, a reality that invites us to re-align ourselves with a multi-dimensional understanding of ‘reality’. This will happen easier if we all develop a strong spiritual practice.
When Saturn enters Pisces, this energy will be striped to the bones/the essence. Saturn’s renewed archetypal energy can create new bones, new structures of realty that are not based in patriarchal thinking. Saturn no longer serves as the limit of our solar system. When we dive into Pisces’ oceanic womb, Saturn can form the bones of a new collective reality that includes those other, more subtle planetary energies.
Saturn doesn’t have to be the old judgmental man. Saturn can become a symbol for the old wise woman, whose bones instinctively know the limits of growth.
The Sign of Pisces: The Return to Source
“The Otherworld changes people. Without a strong sense of self, or of purpose, it will transform you into your deepest desires or fear.”
Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk
Charles de Lint is speaking of the old Celtic belief in the OtherWorld, an inner psychic landscape where the archetypes become myths and magic abounds.
The 20th century scholar and mystic, Henry Corbin, named this inner realm the “mundus imaginalis” or world of images. He describes this as “a truly real though subtle landscape located in a third domain that is neither precisely spirit or matter, but lies somewhere in between the purely intellectual world of angelic intelligences and the sensible world of material things and participates in both.” It is the Mundis Imaginalis, the imaginal realm where symbols arise and begin the process of manifesting. This is the dimension where our human mind can interact with the Creator’s Mind. This is where shamans journey to speak with the spirits. We could say it’s the Quantum Field.
It is also the realm of the meta-verse, all of those parallel worlds we create with our choices. Once again, if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch Everything, Everywhere All At Once. It shows the fear and pain patriarchy creates in us and how we are constantly creating parallel universes by our choices. When we connect to those other parts of ourselves/ our world, we can find the resolution of that fear in remembering to Love.
This is the realm of Pisces: the ocean, the multiverse, other dimensions, the Imaginal World, the Collective Unconscious, the World Soul.
Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac, the return to Source after our long journey through the cycle of life. It is the realm where energy dissolves back into its essence. It is the watery womb we all return to, where we let go of our sense of individuality and dissolve back into the Source of Life. This final sign receives into itself the lessons of the previous 11 signs.
In Pisces, we swim through currents that connect us to cosmic consciousness (Aphrodite again), and we sense the ideas, influences, and revelations of the rest of humanity. Pisces symbolizes the World Soul, which holds within itself echoes of all human and natural experiences. It is the magical realm that connects to all dimensions of cosmic reality.
As we come to the end of the Piscean Age, we are facing all the sins and the glory of the past 2,000 years. What have we learned about the energies of these two fish, swimming in opposite directions? If Jesus Christ is the god-man of the Piscean Age for us westerners, our work has been to understand that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. This is the first fish.
When the Christian Church chose as its symbol the Cross over the Resurrection, it tied us down to a belief system that gradually became one of fear and control rather than love and peace. And for the past 1000 years, our Christian society became the opposite fish, the Anti-Christ. While some Christians want to point to a specific person as the Anti-Christ, it is obvious that our whole society has become anti-Christ—opposed to the idea that we are Spirit. Our society only believes in what it can touch and see, it believes matter is dead and there is no real connection to Spirit. It acts as if the outer world is the only life available to us. That is why we are a death culture. We see Death as a final encounter rather than a translation to another realm of being. And we are so afraid of death that we create death all around us. We’re stuck on the cross of life without the redemption of the Resurrection.
As some of us leave this old paradigm behind, we are changing the beliefs of the rest of the world.
Pisces symbolizes the watery realms of the Collective Unconscious. Carl Jung said that this is the realm of the Archetypes, as well as all the feelings and values humanity has rejected from our collective life. Neptune and Jupiter are co-rulers of Pisces, and Neptune is finishing up its transit through Pisces in 2025, just as Saturn gets set to leave it as well. Saturn and Neptune will meet up in early Aries in 2026, working to align our collective reality with a deep mystical vision that will take this Aries initiative and make things manifest.
The realm of Pisces is a mysterious sea of mysticism, creativity, and imagination. It is a space where we birth the shape of our most heartfelt desires and dreams. It is a realm where the Creative Imagination speaks to us in symbolic language. It is the realm that gives birth to stories and dreams, as well as delusions and illusions. There are no defining boundaries. Everything is in flux. Everything moves to the tidal flow of this watery womb.
So what’s going to happen when Saturn, the archetype of structure and boundaries, enters the watery realm of multi-dimensional realities?
I imagine that this time, when Saturn is in Pisces, we’ll all be going on a collective psychedelic mushroom trip.
As my Psychedelic Counselor friend told me: Mushrooms are the children. They are playful and can also bring in trickster energy, depending on the state of our own personal unconscious. Mushrooms are great for deep inner work, bringing intensity to the work. In a high dose can bring people into different realms of reality.
We will meet all our demons and angels on Saturn’s trip through the inner world. This is a good time to brush up on your knowledge of stories, myths and dreams, because these are the tools we’ll need for understanding what’s happening and to give meaning to it.
It’s time we faced these demons and angels, so we can get on with our new story. So hang onto your center and don’t be afraid to dive deep. As Lady Gaga sings so beautifully, We’re far from the Shallow now.
Saturn in Pisces
“True Freedom is not an effect. It is a kind of ever-expanding spaciousness that arises spontaneously inside you as you come to understand how deeply victimized you are by your own core beliefs.”
Richard Rudd
On February 20th, there is a New Moon at 2* Pisces. This New Moon sets the tone not only for this last lunar cycle of the astrological year, but for Saturn’s entrance into Pisces.
The Gene Key for the first five degrees of Pisces is Gene Key #55 – The Dragonfly’s Dream. It is an important Gene Key for humanity, and it is a unique one, for while the Shadow of this #55 key is victimization, it is the only Key where both the Gift and the Blessing is the same: Freedom.
With Saturn entering Pisces an
hour after the Virgo Full Moon on March 7th, our cosmic
instructions will be to begin letting go of the story of
victimization so we can create the new story of Freedom. An
excellent image of how we are going to transmute our collective root
chakra: out of fear and victimization and into a new grounding in
spiritual awareness and unity.
We are going through a personal and collective transmutation. Our DNA is literally going to mutate. The image that Rudd gives us to describe this awakening is the image of a dragonfly. Did you know that dragonflies live their early lives underwater, not coming up to breathe air at all? They are called nymphs and are quite successful predators. Then over a period of years, they start a series of moultings – shedding their skins while still staying submerged. They go through hidden mutations until suddenly, something in their DNA is triggered and they find a plant stem and climb up it into the air and sunlight. They emerge into a whole new world. The Sun continues the final phase of their moult and their wings unfold and are filled with the remaining water inside their body. Once their body is completely reshaped, they fly free!
That’s a beautiful image of this upcoming transit of Saturn in Pisces. The hope that we will emerge in a completely different story in two years. Hold onto that hope as you go through this multi-verse initiation.
Saturn enters the sign of Pisces on Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 5:34 am PST/ 8:34 am EST/ 1:34 pm GMT just about an hour after the Pisces/Virgo Full Moon.
When Saturn enters Pisces, we’re still in the Full Moon energy. Both the Pisces Sun and the Virgo Moon want to be of service, one in a grounded way and another in an imaginal, spiritual way. This Full Moon wants us to find ways to ground our spiritual insights into our natural healing abilities. Mars in Gemini squares the Sun and Moon, perhaps overloading the mind with too many facts and too much information. So it’s a great time to get out of our Minds and into our Hearts to discover the Truth of Life once again.
Jupiter, Venus, Vesta, Juno and Chiron are all in Aries, healing our sense of Self and expanding our vision through Feminine energy of love and connection.
It’s a chart that points to the ending of the old and the renewal of energies so the new can arise.
Just to remind you, the Collective Unconscious / Anima Mundi / Mundis Imaginalis / Quantum Field speaks to us in symbols and images. So it’s time to shift gears out of your left-brain rational mind and get down into your right-brain imaginal one. Learn the deep meanings in fairy tales and ancient myths because this is the language of the archetypal realm.
I
also feel that if we work consciously with these energies, we'll become
more 'psychic': we'll experience telepathy, we'll connect on our
'inner-net' with family and friends and even strangers. We have to
begin to trust our intuition, our feelings, our instincts. All very
feminine ways of seeing the world.
None of us can predict the outcome of a transit. We can only comment on the energies. There will be changes in our collective consciousness (around water, pollution, religion, fuel, climate change, media) but I’m more interested in how we personally work with this energy. How well we understand those energies helps us to work with them.
So I can only offer you the way I’m going to work with this transit. I’ll begin by imagining Saturn walking into the surf at my local beach (or at any of the many beaches of the world). I see Saturn as a giant stone Being, carrying the weight of the past 26,000 years on his shoulders. Remember, this is the first time Saturn has entered Pisces since 2012 when our solar system lined up with the center of the Milky Way Galaxy to the start a new 26,000 year cosmic cycle.
I’ll imagine myself walking into the ocean with Saturn. First I’ll watch his form dissolve until only the bones remain. Then I’ll look around to see what I can see as well as what Saturn sees. To let something new arise, I won’t focus on anything in particular, but I’ll let the images come to me on their own. These will be the energies to work with, attracted to Saturn to be tested and re-birthed. There will be different images and symbols that arise at different times throughout these next two years.
If you do something like this, use your Saturn discipline to keep a record of them, because like dreams, these images and what they tell you hold information that you’ll need to create that new story once Saturn emerges again into Aries.
Let Saturn help you hold your center and allow the images to flow. Ask if whatever image comes to your awareness is in its true form. Use Saturn’s gift of focus and concentration to stay with the many changes in the image, because, like the Old Man of the Sea, as you hold on, it will shift and morph until it reveals its true form. Once the image stays consistent, you can let Saturn work with it.
The ocean holds many hidden treasures. It’s interesting that two movies this past year have to do with beings who live underwater. Both Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water awaken us to the beauty and dangers that lurk in the Womb of the Great Mother, both literally and symbolically.
One of the dangers of interacting with the Collective Unconscious is that it is too easy to get inflated by the archetype’s energy if you don’t have a strong ego to balance you. You are NOT the archetypal pattern, but rather you get to work with the archetypal energy. That will be one of the dangers of this journey if you’re not prepared or if you bring your patriarchal root chakra of fear with you.
As so many astrologers have said, this will be a time to bring your dreams into your conscious reality. I believe you need to speak to those dream images in symbolic language and let your creative imagination tell you the new story you’ve been waiting all your life to hear.
More on Pluto’s dip into Aquarius in my Spring Equinox newsletter.
As we begin this new phase of our journey, may the peace and the love of the Goddess and the God be ever in your hearts. Merry meet, merry part and merry meet again!
Cathy
Tell me something, girl
Are
you happy in this modern world?
Or do you need more?
Is
there something else you're searchin' for?
I'm
falling
In all the good times, I find myself longin' for
change
And in the bad times, I fear myself
Tell
me something, boy
Aren't you tired trying to fill that void?
Or
do you need more?
Ain't it hard keeping it so hardcore?
I'm
falling
In all the good times, I find myself longing for
change
And in the bad times, I fear myself
I'm
off the deep end, watch as I dive in
I'll never meet the
ground
Crash through the surface, where they can't hurt us
We're
far from the shallow now.
