Pisces Season

Such a lot going on in March it’s hard to fit everything in: Saturn goes into sidereal Pisces with a bang on March 29th, coinciding with a Solar Eclipse in Purva Bhadrapada, while three other major planets sit in Pisces: Mercury, Venus, and Rahu. From a Western standpoint, Neptune and Chiron also in the sign of the Fishes makes an incredible eight-planet line-up. News moves so fast today that anything more than 24 hours old is passé before it gets into print, and with Saturn and Neptune joining in Pisces, confusion reigns supreme.

The mass stellium affects different people in different ways, depending on where Pisces falls in your chart. Context is everything, as always. All planetary energy has the potential for good and bad, so for every person overcome with confusion and existential despair, another will find inspiration and enchantment. Cognitive dissonance is already off the scale, with reading of the news divided sharply into two – people literally cannot comprehend others who take the opposing view.

A stellium – collection of three or more planets – either transiting or natal, is hard to read in any event, as the various energies are contrasting and may enhance or nullify each other. Mercury-Venus-Saturn makes a potentially awesome yoga, but mixed with Sun, Moon, and Rahu, become complex to the point of chaos. Saturn conjunct Rahu in particular is a harsh and powerful blend – Shrapit Yoga – which puts real-world issues forward in an inescapable way. Both these planets have a powerful karmic signature connected to their materially-oriented natures, and make us see the world as it is, rather than how we’d like it to be. This can be ugly: occurring every approximately eleven years, the Rahu-Saturn conjunction gives ambition and Machiavellian political cunning, in the form of a challenge that cuts to the core. Saturn is institutional power, while Rahu is sleazy, desire-driven realpolitik: the promised Epstein Files so far have not been forthcoming, but are supposedly in the works – the Old Guard are apparently dragging their heels - and to what extent this is purely theatre will be seen. On the opposite extreme, Pisces is also the Church, and we may see a purge for all stripes of Christianity, not just the Catholics.

Saturn changing signs is a major event in any case, signalling the end of the mini-era of Saturn being in its own signs going back altogether to January 2020, first in Capricorn, then Aquarius. Eventful. People with longer memories may recall times of war and revolution, but this five-year spell has been the weirdest and most intense in world events I can remember. The period of political upheaval has come full circle with Donald Trump now back in the White House and a phase of oligarchy that is only commented on now the previously entitled elite find themselves on the sidelines.

A special shout-out for Venus, retrograde from March 2nd to April 13th, in Pisces exaltation all the way, which is a time for romantic renegotiation. This is an archetypal phase, a real astrologer’s chestnut, with the synodic cycle of Earth and Venus creating five conjunctions or ‘kisses’, beginning a single degree apart every eight years. The Planet of Peace retrogrades each time for about six weeks – forty days and nights – and is bound up with the myth of Inanna in the Underworld as it passes in combustion across the Sun, this year from around March 22nd. Venus then re-emerges as Morning Star on March 31st, which is traditionally a more assertive and proactive placement – people go to bed in the evening to make love and rise in the morning to make war.

To some degree we’re all still living the consequences of Jupiter and Saturn coming together in Capricorn 2020, the Grand Conjunction that defines the political and cultural climate every twenty years. This was an authoritarian signature that signalled a change in how we’re administered in the digital and online paradigm. George Orwell could only imagine. Alongside Jupiter and Saturn came Pluto in Capricorn in 2020, where it remains until 2039 (a bit of a facer if one follows the Tropical Zodiac and Pluto’s alleged ingress into Aquarius this year). Trump’s second term is truly Plutonian, wasting no time in cutting government spending in radical style, and going against the flow. Pluto cuts the branch to spare the tree, here giving a financial heath check to authorities and institutions who are more used to dishing it out. The effect has been emetic: Pluto induces discomfort, fear and nausea, to the extent it becomes a life-and-death struggle, literally: Trump Derangement Syndrome, arguably, is itself a Plutonian syndrome inducing a visceral hatred. This has also been the state-mandated vaccine era, only gradually being rolled back. What will be the upshot of the mRNA vaccine harms being slowly acknowledged?

Transiting Saturn gives solidity and substance, so this approaching two and a half years in Pisces may feature therapy, helping, spirituality and mysticism. Uttara Bhadrapada’s association with burning and purging comes through psychology, meditation, as you clear yourself of material baggage. This nakshatra’s ruler, Ahirbudhnya, the serpent of the depths, also favours working on your own transformation, where you can get closer to somebody through deep emotional experience and perhaps shared yoga practice. Saturn’s initial two-month conjunction with Neptune in Pisces, in this nakshatra beginning June 14th 2025, is also symbolized by a two-faced man. This transit is an approximately once in 34-year event, with the last occurrence in 1988-90 coinciding with the Berlin Wall coming down. That period happened to be my initiation into astrology, when everyone was raving about the symbolism of the Bounded and the Boundless coming together to dissolve an obstacle. Here’s hoping a similar miracle happens this time around, with the two planets coming exactly together up to August 11th.

Saturn-Neptune should affect the more general defining of boundaries, which is a major issue of the 2020s. Between national borders, gender stereotyping, and political affiliation, the Woke movement challenged traditional labels and definitions, supposedly to champion freedom and self-expression. Saturn and Neptune may not ultimately resolve any of these issues, but there will be an attempt, amid the other side throwing sand in people’s faces. Saturn-Neptune is a more general signature for cognitive dissonance, which is off the scale: ‘misinformation’ is not lies or mistakes, but inconvenient truth.