5 years of Saturn

Hello folks, 

Friendly Neighborhood Astrologer here, with some particularly personal thoughts about Saturn. 

Saturn moved into Pisces on March 7, 2023, thus ending 3 years of Saturn in Aquarius and over 5 years of Saturn at home in the Saturn ruled signs of Capricorn followed by Aquarius. So exact dates for those who want to play along at home are:

Saturn in Capricorn: December 19, 2017 to March 21, 2020 and July 1, 2020 to December 16, 2020

Saturn in Aquarius: March 21, 2020 - July 1, 2020 and December 16, 2020 to March 7, 2023

I’m not going to talk at length about the societal implications of that, because we lived it. Saturn brings authority, restrictions, boundaries, isolation, and growth over the long term as a result of hard work. Saturn builds, but slowly, by opposing, delaying, challenging, and breaking anything that can not stand.  

Ya’ll know I love to read the USA chart, and in this case it’s interesting if not entirely expected. During the Capricorn times, the focus was on Resources (2nd house). During the Aquarius times, it was on our Routines, Siblings, Neighbors, Subscriptions, Habits and regular Communications…all those things we take for granted because they’ve just always been there. In the broadest sense, culturally, the Capricorn times correspond to Me Too and other matters of trying to curb corruption, while at the same time necessary regulations were being scrapped. I would not have placed that in the “Resources” house at first glance, but it’s interesting to do so.  Particularly when you keep in mind the Authority significations of Saturn. People in authority were suddenly held to account and many of the consequences hit them where it would actually hurt: their resources (up to and including the March 2020 stock crash and the shady dealings surrounding it). Then came the Aquarius times, superseding so many personal charts with crisis, with to Covid, with something that shrank all our worlds to our immediate environs (especially during that initial March-July period) making people either appreciate their habits, routines, and immediate surroundings or devote the rest of the Aquarius period to changing them. Saturn’s retreat back into Capricorn showed the consequences of corrupt leadership and the disrespect that had been done to Saturn with deregulation.  The rest of Aquarius time became about fixing what broke when the world ground to a halt.  Sometimes Saturn reveals the problems then puts a long term plan in place. Aquarius is a master of innovation, particularly in terms of technological innovation like one of the fastest vaccines ever produced.  Capricorn is great at goals, but Aquarius finds solutions. 

So…does Saturn in Pieces mean Covid is over? As an era, I would say yes. I know for some folks it may never be and for some it was never enough of a thing to begin with, but astrologically speaking, I think we will continue to move away from it being a societal force. Jupiter in Pieces was a perfect marker of premature hope in the sense of the false spring of 2021 mask removal, but I think Saturn’s ingress will bring more reality and longevity where Jupiter brought hope. There will be problems, but new ones. (Specifically in the USA chart, Saturn is taking up residence in “Home and Private life” so…will we see more attempts to control and regulate such things? Seems likely, at least to start, because remember Saturn is the player of the long game.) But Saturn in Pisces is more flexible also not nearly as strong… and much more easily distracted…speaking of which…

…I said this was going to be a personal case study. So those who just wanted my current events take can tap out now. 

I’m an Aquarius rising. So Capricorn is my 12th house, classically associated with Isolation/Secrets/Enemies/Mental Health. Aquarius is my 1st house of Body/Self/Identity.

In December of 2017, I was working for Riot Games.  And while Riot was NEVER without drama (and never shall be) late 2017 was the end of the beginning.  The August 2017 eclipse in my Partnership house lead to the surprise firing of a trusted partner in the middle of my product launch and while reeling from that I made a bad call to get involved in drama that did not concern me by attempting to warn someone else. In late October of 2017, I was put in a pretty impossible leadership position when someone who reported to me came to me with accusations I knew weren’t true and would ultimately end up doing as much damage to her as anyone else. At the time, Saturn was transiting my house of Society/Groups and by the time December rolled around, I had effectively exiled myself from my initial Riot social circle and set out to build a new team in a poisoned well. Saturn passed from my house of Groups/Society into my 12th house of Enemies/Restrictions/Secrets in December of 2017. 

And let me be clear, that I’m not using astrology to absolve myself of any of this. I have a very distinct memory of a witch working in January 2018 about how Lilith eats her children, because she unleashed those monsters on the world. I had hired my well poisoner and when the time finally came, I fired her. She went on to sue the company, and paint me as a monster in her claims, but that was all par for the course by the time we got there and eventually got swallowed up in Riot’s legitimate awfulness. But my first Saturn challenge on the field of Enemies was one of Virtue in Authority: “What will you do when faced with something that is generally true, but not true in this specific case?” “Can you kill the monster you made and accept the consequences?”

My second test was one of succession. Could I surrender Authority? And the answer to that was, yes, gladly, but again I had chosen the wrong person. Either in a successor, a confidant, or both.  I built something that could have outlived me but not without time and they wanted me dead first so they could build it themselves. So the snapshot from October 2018 is me awake for 36 hours knowing I’d never know who had betrayed me and that as a result (with a few forever friend exceptions) I could never trust anyone there ever again.  So I bided my time, I built my walls, and after one more stupid crisis on the way out the door, I left. 

It looked like I had won. I got an impressive title (even if it came with a pay cut), and finally got to work on television for the company everyone was trying to emulate at the hight of its power. But to me…it felt like moving home after a bad breakup. Professionally speaking, Marvel is the only place I’ve ever truly felt safe and understood. Marvel is home, and the folks who work on the actual comics are family, even if they were still a continent away. I finally had an office with a door, but I sat in it alone most days, read scripts, watched episodes, licked my wounds, and ignored my boss’s insistence that I take people to lunch.  Because the truth is, as much as I love Marvel, Riot broke my heart. I had fallen from a great height with a knife in my back, so I surrendered a lot of my authority in exchange for something safe and familiar. When my boss tried to dump authority back on me with that 2020 ingress into Aquarius, I wasn’t sure I even wanted it, particularly if it came at someone else’s expense.

While I kept up boundaries at work, I poured my actual energy into my two crafts. Theatre and witching have always been my refuge. Both allow me to use an inherent sense of Truth to take ownership of any pain and transform it into something productive. And as those two crafts became increasingly intertwined, I found my writing process skewing evermore toward Michelangelo’s sculpting technique: “look for the Truth inside a thing, and cut away anything that’s not it”. In 2019, I wrote a play that I could probably die happy having written (Heretics) and one that almost killed me. And I knew better but after so much disappointment I really wanted to believe…in a lot of things, but ultimately my own ability to power through and pull it off no matter what. So as I tried to sculpt an empty core, and avoid hurting someone else, I just ended up cutting myself. The snapshot of February 2020 (still a few weeks away from learning how deep and long the last big Secret ran) is me sobbing my way through an entire meditation working and then taking myself to the doctor for antidepressants the next morning. If healthy boundaries don’t exist, Saturn will reveal the need for them and Mental Health is one of the struggles of the 12th house. But though Saturn is classically considered malefic, it can be benefic in the long term, so when I found my limit, I asked for help and got it. A month later, as Saturn was finishing the first pass through my 12th house of Isolation, the whole world went into lockdown. And there was nothing good about that, but in some ways, time alone was what I needed. 

Once Saturn moved into my 1st house of Self, I found myself learning (to an extent that would have shocked me in my 20s) that I didn’t mind the quiet or my own company. Extreme self reliance may be a trauma response, but it’s one of my favorites. After two years of having havens become the new problem, my world shrank to a routine of work, Sunday zooms (witches followed by plays), and the group texts in between. There was still work drama and distrust, but the bigger question was whether I was being true to myself in what I was doing or my approach to it. What did I want to do with the next chapter of my ever shifting career if I actually had a choice? Would I ever again feel like playing to win instead of just not to lose? I wrote a ton and submitted things places. I sat with the reality that maybe I’d never have another long term romantic partner, or the children I always assumed I wanted, and for the first time in my life thought that could be okay. I took pride in the fulfillment, love and community I’ve found in so many other areas of my life. And though I certainly had moments of despair or frustration, I was shockingly grateful to be on my own rather than with the wrong person, which validated a lifetime of preferring to put the burden of proof on an individual relationship proving itself necessary rather than trying to find someone to fit a particular idea of partnership. 

The Sunday zooms became my hearthstone. I bonded with witch friends I’d known for years but never managed to really open up to or get to know. The weekly readings of whatever script anyone had lying around didn’t just keep Bespoke alive, they bolstered our ranks with new talent, honed our craft, and strengthened our bonds. I left lockdown with more and closer friends than I had going in. Jupiter gets a lot of credit for my pandemic going as well as could possibly be expected, but I took that good fortune as an opportunity to do the Saturn work. And once the lockdown ended, I kept building bridges back to parts of myself. I returned to directing for the first time in a decade and accepted that I’m quite good at it. I wrote a play that took a hard look at my early witch days through the lens of what I know now (Graves). I finally slept with a friend I’d been flirting with a long time and let that be fun for as long as it was. “Look for what’s true and cut away what’s not.” In December of 2022, my doctor decided my antidepressants were no longer necessary. 

As I write this, I’m wearing a ring that was charged with a dual essence of Saturn, positive and negative. Saturn can bring power or a fall, authority or disgrace, safety or discord, build or break, stabilize or stagnate. Saturn teaches and challenges (because I don’t think those are opposites). Based on the sign and the house (as well as the rest of your chart and circumstances) your milage may vary. But I hope my experiences help illustrate both of those aspects. My Saturn in Capricorn experience destroyed a lot of trust (because it was in the 12th house of Secrets/Enemies) even though my life was actually pretty great at the time. My Saturn in Aquarius experience was set against a backdrop of global devastation, but proved personally restorative as I replenished and fortified my 1st house of Self. But in both those cases…I had to do the work. Positive or negative, Saturn brings consequences. There was a lot of talk during the Capricorn years about what I could or should have done differently, or might have used magic to change, but I honestly believe that the work of Saturn isn’t to find a way around the hard times, it’s to hold your ground, find your boundaries, and grow.

Regardless of what house Saturn is moving into for you, Saturn in Pisces should be a bit more flexible as a guest in what is ultimately Jupiter’s free flowing mutable sign. Personally, Saturn is coming for my second house of Resources. So there may be some resource management in my future that raises some interesting questions about future job shifts and longterm planning. But in the meantime, a judge is supposed to finally sign off on the Riot Games settlement this week (after being delayed multiple times in the past few years in typical Saturn fashion). So that’s an amusing bookend to my personal Saturn story.  

Finally, here’s  a quick reference for how Saturn has moved through your chart based on your Rising Sign…