You don’t have to know astrology to understand this article.

Here’s your primer: Celestial movements have a correlation to events on earth. Want proof? Read Richard Tarnas’s ground-breaking book “Cosmos and Psyche”. I will be relying on it quite heavily in this article. With the basic principle of astrology being as above, so below, we can trace through time (as far back as we have recorded dates) the patterns that have emerged between planetary movements “up there” and human events “down here”.

Astrologers have been voicing their concerns about 2020 for awhile now… not because they are psychic or tapped into some other forcefield that the rest of humans can’t see, but rather because they study well-documented patterns. What is happening in the sky right now has happened before. It’s kind of that simple. There are lessons to be learned from the past to prepare for our current reality and the future.

Currently, the main cause for concern is what astrologers call the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. In other words, the planet Saturn and the planet Pluto (yes, it’s a planet in astrology) are currently aligned in the sign of Capricorn mere degrees apart.

The past has told us that when these two planets form certain alignments such as this, there is a direct correlation to specific kinds of events unfolding on earth… namely, just in the last century, the first two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the financial collapse of the eighties, September 11, and the last stock market crash of 2008.

So, when we see this pattern emerge again, we can’t help but pay attention.

Entire books have been written about Saturn and Pluto respectively and their influence in astrology, but for the sake of extreme brevity, please accept these basic keywords:

• • Saturn is associated with limitations, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, finality, authority, tradition, discipline, oppression, depression, repression, and hard truths.
  • Pluto is associated with transformation, death, rebirth, violence, darkness, destruction, nuclear power, military force, psychology, the underworld, and catastrophic historical developments.

According to Richard Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche, alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle coincide with “especially challenging historical periods marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction: eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects” (209).

An atmosphere of gravity and tension tend to accompany these three-to-four-year periods, as does a widespread sense of epochal closure: “‘the end of an era,’ ‘the end of innocence,’ the destruction of an earlier mode of life that in retrospect may seem to have been marked by widespread indulgence, decadence, naivete, denial, and inflation” (Tarnas 209).

These are time periods of extreme crisis associated with economic failure and mass hardship on a global scale.

Fear and feeling threatened are hallmarks of these time periods. Tarnas uses one of the most recent examples of the Saturn-Pluto cycle, the September 11 terrorist attacks, to illustrate this:

“The tendency towards hypervigilance and armored boundaries associated with the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex was evident in the collective experience of the 2001-04 period in many ways, as in the extreme intensification of air travel security, the constant warnings of heightened alerts to catastrophic threats, and the widespread popularity of aggressively oversize, quasi-military vehicles such as SUVs and Hummers” (229).

Occurring every 31-37 years, the Saturn-Pluto cycle is made up of four stages/phases: the conjunction, the initial square, the opposition and the final square. Picture a planet within a circle. Let’s call it Pluto. It is moving so slowly that it doesn’t really look like it’s moving much at all. There is a planet beside it—Saturn. It is close to it (say anywhere from 0 to 10 degrees or so). This is called a conjunction. When Saturn moves away from Pluto and reaches 90 degrees of separation, this is called a square. When Saturn moves even further away—as far as it can possibly be—it is 180 degrees away from it. This is called an opposition. When Saturn starts heading back towards Pluto and it reaches 90 degrees again (on the other side), this is the final square. When Saturn eventually comes back to Pluto, we have a conjunction once more, and the entire cycle starts again.

These relationships—the conjunction, square and opposition—are known as aspects in astrology. There are many more types of aspects; however, for our purposes, these ones are the most critical and crisis-inducing historically.

The conjunction in particular brings about the beginning of these Saturn-Pluto cycles. This is where we’re at right now: the beginning. Tarnas states: “In the sequence of Saturn-Pluto alignments during the twentieth century, we can observe how the three successive conjunctions coincided with defining events and decisions that established an enduring historical foundation upon which casually related developments would then unfold for several decades afterward” (214).

Take a look at this chart that goes from 1913 to 2021.

The first column shows the type of aspect (conjunction, square, opposition). The second column shows the time period this cycle was active with the third column being the exact alignment (when the planets were within a degree of each other); this can be thought of as the eye of the storm. I am using Tarnas’s dates here (on page 214 of his book). The final column I added is a selection of some of the major events that occurred during these times.

100 Years of the Saturn-Pluto Cycle

I’ve only focused this discussion on the last hundred years.

After reading this list, would you be surprised to hear that a Saturn-Pluto conjunction was happening from 1348-1351 when the Black Death and the Bubonic Plague decimated Europe and China respectively? Probably not.

Whether it’s a conjunction, square or opposition, these Saturn-Pluto cycles coincide with “profoundly weighty events of enduring consequence; violence and death on a massive scale; the irrevocable termination of an established order of existence; collective intensification of division, antagonism, and hostility; the deployment of massive, highly disciplined, carefully organized destructive power; and a widespread sense of victimization and suffering under the impact of cataclysmic and oppressive forces of history” (Tarnas 210).

What makes this period even more unique?

Although we are familiar with the Saturn-Pluto cycle, what we are currently seeing hasn’t happened for four millennium.

Currently, the planet Jupiter is also transiting the sign of Capricorn and is making conjunctions to both Saturn and Pluto.

This hasn’t happened since 1894 B.C.E. which was around the time Babylonia was born.

Jupiter’s influence here is to enlarge and inflate this already tumultuous line-up. Associated with global and international issues, Jupiter is traditionally know as a beneficial planet often offering relief during difficult times; however, its larger-than-life influence can blow events sky high. For example, in medical astrology, if someone is dealing with a tumour, any aspect of Jupiter can increase the size of the tumour, so we shouldn’t always look to Jupiter as a beneficial influence.

What’s more, in the sign of Capricorn, Jupiter is in its fall position, which means its most challenged position. (Read: it does not function well here.) Jupiter won’t be in an elevated or beneficial state again until 2022 which further supports my assessment of our world taking until then to climb out of this mess.

Finally, on top of everything, Uranus is currently in the sign of Taurus, shaking up and breaking down our financial, agricultural and real estate sectors. (This is an article in itself.)

Read the next article: The Astrology for the Rest of 2020 into 2021