When reviewing the last major alignments between Saturn and Neptune, one significant thematic motif that is visibly striking is the correlations with endings of political ideals or dreams. Major hard Saturn alignments with the outer planets often correlate with endings, as Saturn is the archetypal process most affiliated with finalizations, death, and conclusions.  In the sociopolitical realm, Saturn ends or finalizes the ideals, aspirations, or dreams associated with Neptune. Thus, the finalizations affiliated with the Saturn-Neptune complex are more concerned with political aspiration over political agenda. Neptune in the political sphere concerns our ideals, highest inspirations, achievements, and imaginings. So, while Neptune may not be overtly political in the sense of being about realpolitik or Machiavellian dynamics of the nature of the beast, there certainly is a political side to Neptune. Neptune gives us our political “isms” which we are so collectively hypnotized by: fascism, communism, socialism, utopianism,  etc.

Soviet style communism abruptly ended as Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune formed a rare triple conjunction in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Less obvious yet equally important, the extreme idealism and activism of the 1960’s youth movement ended as Saturn and Neptune formed the most recent opposition in the early 1970’s. Mirrored by the multiple deaths of the heroic rock icons of the 1960’s, the early 1970’s in no small way characterized the sobering “death of the dream” of the revolutions and rebellions of the 1960’s. The Saturn square Neptune aspect of 1963 was the external referent to the death of “Camelot”, the United States’ infatuation with royalty symbolized by the Kennedy regime.  The conjunction of Saturn and Neptune in the early 1950’s distinguished the end to European imperialism and initiated the beginning of the post-colonial era.

However, the Saturn-Neptune complex symbolizes finalizations of political dreams and aspirations, the planetary configuration also suggests an urgency, crisis, or serious engagement of renewed political idealism. As Liz Greene wrote in her masterful The Astrological Neptune, “Arnold Toynbee, in a Study of History, makes some relevant observations on the characteristic responses of a society threatened by the disintegration of existing structures and values. He suggests that the experience of ‘spiritual uncertainty’ and ‘moral defeat’ in a nation may propel its citizens into pursuing ‘a utopian chimera as a substitute for an intolerable present.’” ⁵ Using Toynbee’s astute analysis of the psychology of collective politics, we can suggest that as a political dream or aspiration is thwarted out of existence, the motivation for renewal becomes heightened. As collective anxiety rises over the death of certain political ideals, the urgency for greater idealism and aspiration increases. Thus, as the Saturn-Neptune configuration on the one hand negates political “isms” that no longer can contain collective idealism, the subsequent psycho-spiritual crisis that results from the absence of idealism creates a renewed, if not stronger, desire for new ideals, new hopes, new “isms.”