#jupiter-saturn conjunction

The most pertinent astrological event of these years is the once-every-two-centuries transition in the elements of the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle. In December 2020, we are moving from an earth age to an air age. I will be cataloguing reflections and predictions, as well as amplifications of the elements and their zodiacal signs. Here are the first four.

Small Things and Small Views
We are seeing deeper specialization, we are seeing narrower reality tunnels. The final act of the epoch of earth was kickstarted by the narrative of fake news, and relative truth. There were no longer supposedly objective news sources. Ideologies became more specific as milieus were reduced to echo chambers.

What I realize as I observe this is the movement from earth to air. Virgo is the airy part of earth, and rules sand, particles, and details. The microscope—and the tiny worlds emergent from observation through that tool—are ruled by Virgo. The finale of the atomic understanding of the universe is the overbearing strain of the intellect toward the asymptote of infinite detail. Ultra high resolution. Next, we shall not find bits, but qubits. We shall not find things, but processes. Not nouns, but verbs.

The Undead Dragon
It doesn’t always go down like this, but in 2020 when Jupiter and Saturn conjoin for the final time in an earth sign, they will then be moving together, still close, into Aquarius, officially inaugurating the synodic air epoch.

That this earth-based synodic cycle should conclude with Capricorn is fitting, and even more fitting the continuity into Aquarius. These two signs are both ruled by Saturn, and are indeed the only adjacent signs ruled by the same planet. Thus even the proximity of these two signs testifies to Saturn’s constriction, endurance, and authority; the sun will always take twice as long to cross Saturn’s domain, as it is the only “double-space” on the board.

The entire tension of the last 30 years can be summed up between Capricorn and Aquarius, despite all the spectacular aspects in other signs during this time. But basically the cultural backdrop across much of the planet has been about the tightening of regulations and infrastructure amid struggles for independence. The capitalist narrative in the final act became less fascinated by the amount of goods it was possible to produce; nor was the focus anymore on the acquisition of land and deriving its highest yield. These stories were still around, but the new focus was on the abstraction of capital itself: people began to ask “how do we keep this going? How do we keep the system alive?” Like an increasingly desperate necromancer. And more and more bare was the inherent symbolic magic of the system, as banks were bailed out with conjured funds, and new companies with no profit were monstrously inflated with venture capital, their entire worth a fabrication of promise.

This is both Capricorn in decline, feebly attempting to carry on the work of prolonging the life of its institutions; and it is the anticipation of Aquarius, the wish, the hope, and that a company’s acumen is prized above the goods themselves.

Virtual Black Squares
In the black square too I see one of the final proclamations of the age of earth. The square (and cube) is a classical symbol of earthiness and materiality. Blackness too is associated with earth: the deepest, heaviest, earthiest hue. But it is no object that we are seeing in the black square: it is a digital image, a projection of light with no weight. It is not in one place, as a physical object is. It is diffuse across platforms. In this sense it anticipates the air epoch.

Earth is also the element of value. It is desire that coheres matter into form, and those forms inspire evaluation. Do I value the green cube or the blue cube? “Where I come from, we sit on blue cubes! We eat green food! These are my values!”

The black square phenomenon speaks to our collective experiments with value over the last 200 years. It reminds us that we are individuating away from objective materiality into deeper recognition of our personal reality tunnels. To some, they are posting the black square in informed solidarity; others post it as accidental sabotage; still others post it deliberately for counterrevolutionary purpose. When people look upon it, some see a dramatic collective statement; some see a tacky thing; some see a distraction. For certain casual witnesses, this cyberspace abstraction is their main statement on the historical moment.

During the revolutionary protests, the first widespread issue to cleave the gap in values was the “looting” of Target, a temple of goods. For some, the seizing of commodities was irrelevant to the issues of the protest; others sensed the close relationship between the capitalist temple and the racial and social inequality it engenders.

The multiplicity of values ignited and bared by the proliferation of the black square—this flat image that invokes the form of earth, but does not present it—is one fitting summary for what our preoccupation with material goods has born. America forgot that black lives have value, and now it believes black squares matter.

Devil and Clown
As it has stood til now, “the devil is in the details.” Virgo is the sign of detail, and the scientific paradigm of collecting an infinite amount of samples, rules, and categories has crept into the corporate and legal systems that rule the social order. In the US we find it is rather difficult to bring charges to a police officer, due to the meticulous legal attention it requires. The law finds a way to break down an incident into particles of appropriate size so that it can reconstruct it into a version that preserves itself.

There is an earth devil and an air devil, and the earth devil is the one who instrumentalizes the masses to its own purposes. This is the devil of fascism. By comparison, the air devil fills people with radical individual self-interest. That devil does not grow its arms into the polis, it turns people into violent free agents. If we are using Virgo, mercury-ruled, as one example of an Earth devil, then its analogue in air is Gemini, mercury-ruled. Gemini is the clown, the unpredictable, volatile, independent actor driven mad by apparently irreconcilable cultural forces. We have spent the last few years with this little boogeyman, in the joker movies and the IRL clowns who were scaring people a few years ago. Were these a symptom of the school-shootings, the random and senseless outbursts?

Virgo, and the other Earth signs, convince us that things are ultimately reducible to discrete parts. We wanted to isolate the killer clown, wherever we found him, separating him off from the rest of us. We were focused on the independent actors, and relatively unconcerned with the systemic oppression which produces the social and psychological circumstances that birth such nihilism. Only now, in the final years of the earth age, has the police state and capitalism become flagged as the central issue among the masses. Systemic relations are the concern of air. The clown, master of affective mutability, is frightening because it contradicts atomic positivism. This is something else that is anticipated the age of air: the interdependency of things, the leaking of identity into the individual from the environment. There are no independent actors anymore. No fixed objects of any kind, only becomings.

Notes on the Triple Conjunction

Hello friends. What follows is a short introduction to the incredibly rare and historical astrological conditions of the year 2020. This was written with the intention of accessibility first and foremost; I believe it’s important that people have some idea of this moment in a historical context, and the tools to evaluate the themes and stories that are emerging currently and in the near future. To my eyes astrology is at its most useful when it is neither prescriptive nor prophetic. It is foremost a tool of psychological midwifery; reading the meaning of the world and its events.

So it’s in my interest to be painting in broad strokes. If you want concrete predictions or exact dates for orbs of conjunction now and in history, then there is a vast field of mundane astrology for you to Google. The myths I’m unfolding here are only for context and consideration—I hope you find them helpful.

Also, there will be a major western bias in my evaluation of history, which sucks, but that’s the milieu I grew up in and can speak to, and it remains the information most easily available. But of course astrological conditions are affecting the entire world. We can still trace the vibe through western examples.

Our Axial Moment
There are two incredibly rare astrological events happening this year. One event is the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius. These two planets come together routinely, mechanically, every 20 years. But the rhythm of their waltz is such that each meeting takes place in signs of the same element for 200 years at a time. So when they conjoin in Aquarius, in the last weeks of 2020, that will be their first time together in an air sign since the 14th century.

Since 1802, all of their conjunctions have been in earth signs. (Much more on the significance of this later, but some may already notice this 200 period’s coincidence with the industrial revolution and the age of capital). In the 200-odd years before 1802, they would join every time in fire signs—and for the 200 years before that, water. One waltz more brings us back to the 1300s and 1200s, the previous epoch of air signs. Returning to the present day, we should realize that since an age like this persists for two centuries at a time, it is essentially impossible for someone who witnesses such a transition, to have ever even known anyone who witnessed the previous transition. That is, the 100 year old person in December 2020—even if they had, as a newborn, shared a breath with a 100 year old person—would not reach far back enough in history to have even a dim, second-hand knowledge of the epoch of fire (1603-1801). These periods are effectively the frame edges; the curtains around the drama of the world stage.

Rare as it is, the other historical aspect of the year is much rarer: the fact that Saturn and Jupiter will also conjoin Pluto in Capricorn before they dance their first step together in Aquarius. Though these 3 will never occupy the exact same degree together, they will come very close, on and off throughout 2020. Of course a triple conjunction of planets will always occur in more unpredictable intervals than any pair of planets because of the 3 separate orbits. Famously—well, famous among astrologers—it last happened in the sign of Capricorn during the founding year of the city of Babylon, 1894 BCE.

History of the Elemental Epochs
Because the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle is so regular, and because we didn’t know about outer planets til the 18th century, the dance of these two planets through the elemental stations is by far the oldest astrological tool for determining epochal periods. It has long been assumed to be the basic attitudinal/affective backdrop of the zeitgeist. (Now that we know about Pluto, we have a new vibecheck every 12 years! But isn’t it funny that generations didn’t have names until we noticed Pluto in 1930?)

I would be remiss not to mention that there are overlaps between these periods. For instance, Jupiter and Saturn were briefly conjunct in an air sign (Libra) for a few months in 1981. So toward the end of each epoch, humanity gets a little multi-month preview of the coming age. 1981 and the transitional period is a whole other topic in itself, but that’s all I’ll say here.

Even though these elemental ages have been observed for so long, we don’t have a ton of historical examples to draw upon to get a sense of the nature of a particular epoch. As for the air age that we’re entering into, we can refer to the high medieval period as the last instantiation, but to get a third example we have to go into history 6 centuries before that! Soon the world starts to look so different from the current day, that we have to stretch the imagination that much farther. So let’s just a get a brief summary of the previous cycle through the elements.

Earth
1802-2020

This is the epoch we are still in as I write this. It began during the industrial revolution, and the earth themes are undeniable. Human begins have had a resolutely atomic understanding of the universe; materialism is rampant; and it feels that capital and capitalism are catalysts of most human drama. We take things literally and concretely: instead of speculating about other realms, we want to drive our spaceships to big slabs of land like the moon and Mars. We have discovered how to build and make so much STUFF!

Fire
1603-1801

This period is famous for the enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. The time of great sparks! Reason, brilliance, luminance … self-validation and self-determination. This is really when human beings began to appreciate the value of the idiosyncrasy of a particular thinker. “THIS dude’s contribution” etc. Rights, laws, freedom, were all in vogue. “Here I am!” say the fire signs.

Water
1425-1602

Just as materialist scientism was born out of the liberating thought of the enlightenment, so were the insights of the enlightenment enabled by the world-broadening discoveries of the renaissance. During the water epoch, everyone was sailing everywhere, being introduced to new cultures, and the “new world” was reached by the Europeans. At home, classics of antiquity were being rediscovered and the world was broadened in that sense. Shakespeare was poppin off in a big way. The concept of the stage is essentially water; water is the idea that there is an affective component to reality at all.

Air
1226-1424

Is it a coincidence that the least widely known stage of the cycle is the one we are now entering? Or is that just the nature of history, as it fades further into the past? This period was called, in the West, the “high medieval” era. It was marked by civic demarcations that more or less persist to this day—the previous few hundred years saw constantly changing borders, but now people grouped more firmly into ethnic or national identities drawn to territories. This is also where we got chivalry and the first real rights for women in a long time. And there was the discovery of an actual social life and leisure. “Hanging out” was invented, thank God.

Reality itself received a major patch update: we invented mechanical clocks, which caused people to relate to the passage of time in a totally new way. We used to just slice up the sunrise-to-sundown period into 12 equal parts; now hours were a constant length throughout the year. Common folk had glass windows in their homes for the first time, and the elite even wore glass in front of their eyes to correct their vision. Music became much more complex, as people had more time to take it seriously and form theories. People could go to libraries; for the first time ever there were more books in cities than in monasteries. Cities were finally the place to be. We invented the compass, the game of chess, and the printing press. The astrolabe, like the compass, allowed us to orient ourselves to something that was formerly hopelessly abstract (the stars). Most of this cool shit came from the Arab world, which was flourishing.

Air Epoch 2.0
That’s the historical overview. Obviously there is much, much more there for any anthropologist or history of philosophy ass person. But we are beginning to see some idea of the relation between the qualities symbolized by the elements and the respective periods. Now we can begin a more informed speculation.

The movement from the previous earth age to the previous air age seems to be one of dramatically more complex social relations. Less emphasis on the riches of a kingdom, and more emphasis on its culture, civility, and sophistication. Abstract things became the treasures. As we look to our own incoming air epoch, it is easy to envision a world that places more emphasis on networks instead of objects. Social media, gig economy, and blockchain all appear to be prefigurations of this. In terms of philosophy, it no longer seems very radical to conceptualize oneself as part of a universe whose essential composition is not defined by particles (nouns) but relations and processes (verbs).

What Was Babylon?
I ain’t no student of ancient culture. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even know Babylon was where Iraq is. Of course I think it would behoove all of us to research as much as possible the previous instantiation of this astrological aspect, but I also think it’s valid to speak about its cultural impact through a layman’s osmosis.  As far as I can tell: what is Babylon best remembered for? The miraculous hanging gardens, the Tower of Babel, and the law code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi’s code, inscribed onto a stele about a century after the founding of Babylon is celebrated as the first known written laws, some 190 edicts long—and by the estimation of modern scholars, supremely humanitarian for its time. What is the modern equivalent of the ancient innovation of codified laws? Hard to fathom, but something for us to consider as the new age dawns.

More famously, there is the story of the Tower of Babel. A persistent image of human hubris, even today people respond to the tower motif as a symbol of defiance of God or of nature, and it is routinely invoked when artists and pundits comment on the ecological folly of industrial enterprise. Human beings tried to use their intellectual capacities to reach the position of God. Without reading the Bible, I can tell you that the punishment for this was the diversification of languages. All of a sudden people couldn’t speak to each other, because there were so many ways to speak.

Today we take for granted the many languages of human beings, so what is the modern equivalent of this event? Taken as a metaphor, the variation of languages could represent a variation of worldview. Styles of interfacing with reality. Because the element of air is so closely associated with concepts like perception, the structuring of thought, communication, and virtual realities, we might imagine that in the new age we will begin to understand just how deeply diversified our mechanisms of interpreting reality are. Phenomenology seems like a pretty fringe field in our current world, but AI is certainly not; and content creators have increasingly brought phenomenological themes to the center of their work over the last couple decades. Just as the previous air epoch (12/1300s) saw the advent of movable type, perhaps we will soon develop novel means of recording our impressionistic realities.

Finally, Babylon was host to the famous hanging gardens. Supposedly built by king Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife who missed the natural beauty of Iran, it is still unclear whether this wonder of the world ever existed in physical reality. In any case, the story is relevant: a ruler, in the midst of tremendous infrastructural expansion, and with it the inevitable subjugation of nature, finds that his greatest cultural influence across the centuries is ecological restoration. Looking at these three legacies of Babylon together is rather interesting: the law code stele, though purportedly divine in origin, is unquestionably real to our materialist sensibilities—you can go and see it. The Tower of Babel, taken from the Bible, was probably not real in the same fundamental way; though there was without question a great ziggurat in Babylon, the Biblical account is not literal. The hanging gardens is the most mythological. So between the three we have different concentrations of myth and historical fact.

Second Second Life
I write this in the first few weeks of social isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. There is much more to be said about the connection between this unprecedented social condition and the imminent radical astrology—maybe the subject of some other essay. But off the dome, we can see plainly the defaulting of Capricornian things: governments, businesses, economies, and social infrastructure. Without much of a choice, we are withdrawing our energy from the material to which we are accustomed. We’re cooped up in our houses, where the merciful currents of the internet continue to draw us on, to operate in cyberspace as normal. New social functions and vocabularies are already emerging as we are forced to reconsider the online networks that have seemed so toxic for the last few years. People find themselves operating “peer to peer” out of necessity. Some “inessential” products may no longer be available on amazon, but your neighbor might have them. More importantly, people are reaching out to each other for nothing more than human contact. We’ve been wringing our hands about the importance of human connection, but capitalism—through spectacle or stranglehold—has drawn us away from putting it first.

Social service is (along with certain essential aspects of the internet) ruled by Aquarius. Saturn, governor of concern, has already ingressed into this sign, but will retrograde back out in a few months; and then at the end of the year, it will be joined by Jupiter, who greases the wheels, expands the potentiation of Saturn’s concern, and affords prosperity to those who take social service seriously. And together they will inaugurate the new age.

Tomorrow is the great conjunction, a PERFECT time for manifesting your desires or starting something new which will help you in the long term! A great way to manifest is by using abundance checks, which act as a wealth transfer from the Universe. I also put together a few scripting pages or templates to help you set your manifestation into reality.

You can find the abundance checks here.

And the scripting set here.