Saturn-Neptune and the Desert of the Real

From late 2005 through 2007, the planets Neptune and Saturn will form an opposition to each other.¹ This particular alignment will be the most important alignment of the latter half of this decade, informing the cultural dynamics as we head into the more turbulent, chaotic potentials of the next decade. This essay will aspire to illuminate the many archetypal motifs associated with this alignment—both its problematic and constructive possibilities. 

Astrology is the study of human complexity, of the multiple paradoxes interwoven into the fabric of our being. One of the great contributions of astrology is its ability to wed symbolism to the various dichotomies of the individual and collective psyche. Of all the contradictory and clashing symbols of astrology, the pairing of Saturn and Neptune suggest life’s greatest paradoxes. The dualisms suggested by the Saturn and Neptune pairing are immense both in sheer profundity but also in the magnitude of the questions they invoke. The Saturn-Neptune problem catalyzes the most sublime artistic expressions, the most inspired religious responses, the most disturbing and troubling philosophical enigmas. When Saturn and Neptune are forced to confront each other, we are forced with the eternal mysteries: “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is this world so divorced from goodness and truth and fraught with misery, pain, and imperfection? In what way can we best repair the rift between our higher selves and our humanly faults? How can we best redeem ourselves?” The paradoxes suggested by the Saturn-Neptune combination do not give answers, only strivings, searches, and questing.    The expressions the combination engender are as puzzling as the fundamental dualism inherent in the symbolism: absurd yet ennobling, grim and angst-ridden yet redeeming, nihilistic yet profoundly spiritual, nightmarish yet poetically beautiful.  

We can understand the enigma of the combination by briefly delineating the nature of the symbols. Saturn represents the concrete, the tangible, and the sensible; it is what we see with our own eyes and what we take at face value. Neptune is the converse. Neptune is the ethereal, the spiritual, the unseen, and the imagined; Neptune is accessed not by the senses but by the faculty of imagination. Saturn concerns the pragmatic necessities and details of the day-to-day—the “here and now” details and particulars of human life. Neptune represents that timeless, the eternal, and the boundless infinite. Saturn concerns the defeating and limiting qualities of life, and the responses it invokes are the actions of the world-wary pragmatist. Neptune concerns the possibilities inherent in the imagination, transcendent, and otherworldly and call upon the poet, the artist, and the mystic. Saturn primarily concerns facts, figures and face value; Neptune, by contrast, concerns the ambiguous nature of symbols—at once literal and yet participating and connotative of something else. Saturn is the real-life condition of our mortality and sense of difficulty, hardship, and frustration of life. Neptune makes the problems of the condition of the astrological Saturn sublime, that is, Neptune creates a cosmic, high ideal out of the defeating quality of Saturn.