Planet Waves: At Opposite Ends

Included in that prediction could have been that the occupation of Iraq would go into an endless downward spiral of death and violence, with no sign of the occupied nation stabilizing. In response to this, Bush’s approval rating would sink to the 30-percent range and the American public would finally dump the Republican House of Representatives and Senate. Yet the new Democrat-controlled Congress would soon after write a blank military spending check to the Administration, proving that they are Republicrats after all.

I did not predict these things (the closest I came was to say that we would probably have a lot of serious dam breaks starting in the summer of 2005). But they would have been reasonable forecasts, given the astrology. This includes the once-per-35-year opposition of Saturn and Neptune, which made its third and final pass on June 25. Personally, I try to avoid predictions of catastrophe, preferring to give the human family the time and space to make up its mind about what it wants to do with its brief moment on the planet. I view all astrology as an opportunity for change, and I am open to being pleasantly surprised by the possibilities for difficult aspects that are not necessarily considered by predictive astrologers, who typically display little ingenuity.

Saturn opposite Neptune is one of the more difficult aspects that comes along, and there were many predictions of disaster. It involves Neptune, whose energy is dreamy, watery, foggy, delusional, creative, and idealistic, being opposed by Saturn, whose energy is typically experienced as structured, solid, heavy, and often as a limit or a boundary. Basically, it is a solid, realistic thing and a big pool of water and imagination meeting face to face, with our world in between. If you want to visualize this, imagine it like the Full Moon, with the Sun to one side and the Moon to the other (an opposition), only replace the Sun and Moon with two vastly larger planets. In an earlier Planet Waves article, I described this as “the unbearable tension of water.”

An opposition is the peak of a cycle, or maximum polarity between two planets. It is a culmination, though this is not often logically expressed by history in a way that relates to the beginning of the cycle, the conjunction. The most recent conjunction of Saturn and Neptune occurred in 1989. It was actually an extremely rare triple conjunction between Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (since at the time there was a rare conjunction between the latter two planets, which were then joined by Saturn).