A Taurus Sun will oppose Saturn’s sail through Scorpio this weekend for the first time since April 1985. Admittedly, the annual event of Earth passing between Saturn and the Sun doesn’t match the majesty of the eclipse cycle we enter today. Nevertheless, 28 years have transpired since Saturn last faced the Sun across the zodiac circle from Scorpio. That length of time confers a perspective eclipses cannot provide.
Any solar tour of a fixed modality (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius) places you fully in the season at hand. It’s the gift of being in the moment, but moments always pass.
Perspective helps you put what must pass in its place, as part of a longer, larger cycle of events. That does not mean the moment is devoid of value. The ephemeral is precious precisely because it does not last.
Grasping that concept rather than attempting to grasp onto what must pass allows you to become what you now are not. It prepares your place in what is yet to be. That’s how Saturn works.
Saturn brings structure with its long cycles. When it returns to where it was long before, it favors restructuring to suit what has come to be in the interim.
Implicit in Saturn’s return to the simultaneously fixed and fluid field of Scorpio is the opportunity to participate in reshaping not only your life for years to come, but also history for decades to come. A comparatively brief, but long deferred, opposition from the Taurus Sun only asks that you begin the process by consciously considering your moment, the options it offers, and the consequences that come with each one.
When objects oppose across the zodiac, you nearly always have options. Conflict, for many synonymous with opposing, is only one of them. Among other choices indicated by astrology’s oppositions are creativity, continuity and compromise. When an opposition is along an axis of fixed signs, the trick is to see all the alternatives. Unfortunately, conflict is nearly always the easiest to see.
There are times when conflict is appropriate. Choosing that option, however, even when the cause is just, is to choose loss. That’s how conflict works: even those who gain from it must accept the loss that goes with it. The last time that Saturn was opposed by a Taurus Sun provides a historical perspective.
In 1985 Nelson Mandela chose to continue in conflict with a South African apartheid regime that would not renounce violence. With that choice came five more years of imprisonment, during which time his health suffered permanent damage.
While an eventual release from captivity after Saturn had nearly completed a full cycle of the zodiac did result in the restructuring to which Mr. Mandela devoted his life, there is also no denying the loss that came with it. There is also no second guessing what he did. Rather there is a turn to be taken, informed both by the present, and the perspective conferred by those who have gone before, and what they have done.
Now, it’s your turn. The first of the Sun’s oppositions to Saturn along the Taurus-Scorpio axis in this century will find you fully in the solar season. Simultaneously, this opposition confers the perspective of Saturn’s cycles.
Your role, passing in between, is to begin with the faster moving Sun and be conscious of your moment and all of the options it holds. Then, for the longer term of years (or even decades) to follow, you will be called to emulate Saturn and become what your choices will make you, preparing your place in history as you do. In the meantime, the prospect of a month’s worth of eclipses will find its appropriate place as well.
Offered In Service
Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.
Hi Len, (Hi Everyone)
This post not only led me here to Planet Waves website, but it also inspired me to become a member. So thank you !
I’m really honoured to be part of the community here at Planet Waves, this is my first real Astrology experience/interaction, so I’m pretty excited.
Anyway my sign is Scorpio, on about the 20th of April & the week leading up to Saturn’s return, I endured a punishing set of circumstances, which primarily involved experiencing an intense week of symbolism, signs & synconicities.
The primary message was “make a choice..now..between Saturn & the Sun..”
Everywhere I looked I was being told choose Saturn before its to late..
But I was unaware of Saturn’s return ?
(I remember trying to visit Astrology websites that week & being swamped with adds & pop up windows ! Instead choosing to research Saturn in mythology & cosmology & the likes..
Below is just One of many examples I can give, showing the kind of stuff I was constantly seeing during Saturn’s return !!!
[Sentence below cut n pasted from Ned Kelly’s Wiki page]
The Kellys’ first son, Edward (“Ned”), was born in Beveridge, just north of Melbourne. His date of birth is not known, but at Beveridge he said to an officer, “Look across there to the left. Do you see a little hill there?”, “That is where I was born about 28 years ago. Now, I am passing through it, I suppose, to my doom.”
Some time during the weeks of panic & frantic research, surrounding Saturn’s return,
I stumbled onto Ned Kelly’s Wiki page.
RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE THE WHOLE TIME..
I NEED SOME DISCIPLINE..
I NEED TO LEARN ASTROLOGY..
(I probably have guides somewhere just shaking their heads, thinking what’s it going to take with this —-)
,
Yes, Hazel. I agree with be. You write about it so beautifully. Sounds as if you’re in the middle of an amazing shift and awakening! Really ties in with today’s lovely oracle.
Hazel1,
I’m so grateful to you for sharing your thoughts and feelings. As for Saturn almost conjunct your Neptune, I’d say he’s doing a fine job of interpreting Neptune – a tough job for anyone. Anyway, I love the sparky popcorn visual. Looking a kernel of corn it is hard but put it to the flame and it puffs up and breaks through that shell. Could it be a way of saying that the soul breaks free from the hard shell of a human body when we die? Or even when we transition from an old way of being into a new way of being, that is a form of dying too.
By the way, everybody who is anybody is weird in some way. I would call it unique!
be
In 1985 I was 22. It was just before the first part of my life ended, my mom died when I was 24 and she was the last of the family that raised me and after that I was basically alone. This July I will have been alive as many years without my family as I was with my family, so it’s already a point in my life that I’ve been thinking about. Mostly what’s coming up in my mind is how much I’ve closed off in my life and how unnecessary it is to leave it that way. How scared I am at the core about loving people. Or actually believing they love me. I’ve had recurring mental images of being a dolphin or sea turtle or something that lives in the sea but gets up to the surface often. I have an image of a large piece of land, a reef, I guess, sticking out in the water, partially out of the water, and me swimming below it, touching my nose to it for safety because the whole ocean is there around me and below me. I have been mentally picturing “diving” a teensy bit, testing to see how it feels. It’s cold, silent, deep blue green, free feeling, and very disorienting. I always gratefully swim back up to touch my nose to the reef though. This isn’t a dream I have at night, but more of a movie that runs in the background during the day. I have no idea where I came up with it, it just “appeared” a couple of months ago while I was at work. I did have a dream (at night) where I died. Or what happens when you die was revealed to me. I was standing there, I knew I was “ending”. A gold light shone from inside my left abdomen and a piece of it squirted out in a golden spark like thing. The spark kind of bloomed, it looked like a flower but reminded me of when popcorn pops. It bloomed light beams and they shone on the rest of me and the popcorn/spark/glowing flower lights ignited and I kind of “popped” into light like I was made of lighted flowers. And in my mind in my dream was the knowledge that “this is how it really happens, this is real, don’t worry”. I don’t know what this has to do with Saturn being near my natal Neptune in a few weeks, maybe the dreams are making things happen and Saturn is helping them focus, I don’t know. I have been, needless to say, more than a little distracted in “regular” life and kind of vaguely dissatisfied but not knowing what to do. Thanks for writing about *becoming what my choices will make me*. At least I feel somewhat less weird and alone. Or at least less alone, still fairly weird.
Daniel: Heartfelt thanks to you as well.
Len, thanks for a wonderful perspective article. 1985 marked the year my mom took my sis and I out of a slummy city housing complex and into a better assisted housing area in a great neighbourhood. It was the beginning of many wonderful years of music making, spiritual healing, and growing up into the world.
aword: Thank you for your kind words.
be: Thank you for remaining the champion of civil discourse and the Sibley chart. Thank you also for reiterating Saturn’s second of three transits to conjoin the Chiron discovery chart’s Sun – a telling transit for our time indded (and a brilliant observation on your part).
Sina: Thank you for beautifully sharing the moving picture behind the moving cogs.
Strawberry: What “Chief Niwots Son” said. Thank you for being here with us.
Chief Niwots Son: Thank you for being so supportive in your participation.
jinspace: Thank you for helping us get a feel for how these cycles work by so generously and perceptively sharing your experience.
Genevieve: Thank you for your kind words.
Lunesoleil: Thank you for your perspective also.
beleclaire: Thank you for sharing your teachings with us.
All of you are a great blessing in my life and for the Planet Waves community. You all have my deep appreciation.
Thank you Len for encouraging us to take time out for the longer view of our lives.Thanks for all the sharing of expereinces.
I will add my own as 1985 was a turning point year for me. My parents had both died young and I became guardian to my 15 year old brother. He came to live with me and my partner. I had a deep feeling that I must *make a new family* ( Cancer rising, 4 planets in the 4th…a done deal you might say! ) and so I married, something that as an independent woman I thought I would never do. We stayed married for a whole lunation cycle, our daughter born in 1987.
There was a lot of karma in this decision for me because I knew that I had to do parenting in a whole different way, to heal many old wounds of abandonment, neglect and lack of love.
Saturn has been a great teacher in my life , not always pleasant but always illuminating.
Saturn is in conjunction a my Sun in my solar revolution, in two word I understood this lesson of the full moon, thank you Len for this nice sharing once again 🙂
Great post Len! 🙂 Thank you for the reminder to notice our options.
“Saturn brings structure with its long cycles. When it returns to where it was long before, it favors restructuring to suit what has come to be in the interim.
Implicit in Saturn’s return to the simultaneously fixed and fluid field of Scorpio is the opportunity to participate in reshaping not only your life for years to come, but also history for decades to come.”
I remember *precisely* what I was doing in 1985 – the career I was beginning to build that would alter the course of my life, my seriousness about it, and about myself at the time. It was not a sunny period, but it was a purposeful one. I did lay a foundation then, that I was able to build upon and enjoy for a long time after, exactly as I designed it. You can’t complain about that, though I could have done with not being so hard on myself.
And where am I now? In exactly the same place – not still, but again, repeating the cycle, finding myself at the same point in my present journey as I was during this transit in 1985, both careerwise and lifewise – including being sooo hard on myself. Lately I’ve been keenly aware of that, and telling myself to quit it!
Saturn’s transiting my first house; these are somber days. But I’m also once again in the throes of laying a new foundation for a new career, knowing, like the first time around, I’ve got the resolve to see it through, and enjoy the fruits of my labor later.
Not so surprisingly, my new work delves into history, and themes of identity. Hard not to feel like a puppet of the planets (said knowing we’re not!).
Thanks so much, Len, for this reminder of how to see the bright side of a dour transit. As usual, I take your wisdom to heart.
Chief, that is the sweetest blessing I’ve ever received. I’ll carry it close in my heart through this whatever season brings. Thank you for your grace.
Dearest Kari- Thank you for your courage to change and your courage to share. May the light of this Full Moon (and the energy of the eclipse), illuminate your life from the Zenith of of your Soul.
Be, thank you for the Chiron regerence.
28 years ago I was 13 & experiencing the worst of my Chiron-Saturn wounding. I ended up deciding I hated myself for being a girl, & the following three decades can be seen pretty clearly as a result of that decision. Today has had me in deep contemplation & purging of the pain of that time & the lost years. I know I could have changed course at any time–any time I became aware. But I’m aware now, and I’m grateful for the tutelage & compassion of a community that will hold the space for me to change that course now. (Side note: this eclipse is happening within 5 degrees of my midheaven, across which is balanced my Chiron-Saturn sextile.) This is life-changing. And I’m do grateful to all of you for creating the space to work within.
In profoundest gratitude,
~Kari
Hi Len,
Thanks for giving us the bigger picture – the whole 28 years. It certainly puts this astro aspect into perspective, especially when you use Nelson Mandela’s history as the example.
Thanks Aword for mentioning where you were in 1985, and your experience of that time, because it promted me to think about the path I chose at that time.
I had to think back to what I was doing – I was at university trying to juggle study, three part-time jobs and a social life – failing miserably in all areas. So the very next year I decided to travel to Australia to seek my fortune/future, and entered the next phase of life, with not much direction or planning, I might add.
Right now, I’m in a comfortable job, that has offered a place of respite over the last three years, a regular income which saved our home from the bank, a place to heal from loss of friendships, the loss of a successful business(my creative baby), and the access to internet which connected me with Planetwaves and allowed me to complete my studies on line.
The day before yesterday, I was asked to write a regular column in the local newspaper, after writing a couple of pieces on a new local airline that is charging customers by weight.
Yesterday, the airline offered me the chance to be their “face” in their exclusive BBC deal they have signed for 12 months as they grow their airline.
Yesterday, I was also offered an interview in a position that will build on what I’m currently doing, but be completely active, engaging with students from all over the Pacific region. What an eclipse season!
But thanks to your advice, Len, I’m truly just going to have a really good think about all these fabulous options, before I choose which one to pursue, if any. I really do feel as if I”m on the threshold of the next exciting chapter of my life, and that the decision I make will determine which way my life will go. As it’s going to be a long 28 year cycle, I want to do it wisely, and with purpose and meaning.
Last’s night dream of me dipping my feet into a pool, but realising it was a lot deeper and murkier than I thought, shows me that I have a lot to discover/uncover before I make that decision.
Thanks, Len, for the thoughtful article – the cogs are moving!!!
Sina
Why Len, if I didn’t know better I would think you wrote today’s offering in honor of ex-President Geo. W. Bush’s Library dedication! I tease, but in all honesty, you hit the nail on the head, what with lines like “Perspective helps you put what must pass in its place, as part of a longer, larger cycle of events”. Then, these words of yours “. . . the opportunity to participate not only in the reshaping of your life to come, but also history for decades to come” could have been part of any former presidents speech who was present at the ceremony, but even the present president too. It was a lovely ceremony, really. Everybody was not only polite, but gracious to one another and it does a heart good to see political leaders seemingly rise above the acrimony portrayed and encouraged by the media. It IS do-able.
Today’s Mercury (ruler [likely a co-ruler with Uranus] of the media) is conjunct the U.S. Sibly Chiron in Aries and opposite the U.S. Sibly Juno in Libra, infusing the ever-flexible Mercury with a good dose of healing. He also found a nice balance with equals as represented by his relationship with U.S. Juno and his transiting sextile with Jupiter’s big picture in Gemini, still in orb of the Venus-occult-Sun degree from last June. This moment in time could give pause to the general tone of the usual media delivery.
I spoke on an earlier thread about Chiron’s influence on today’s eclipse (if not the whole eclipse season), including the Sun from Chiron’s Discovery chart being conjunct today’s Saturn in Scorpio. Along with the consciousness derived from transiting Sun in opposition to Saturn today, is the healing centaur’s discovery chart Sun, providing the perspective of past as well as the moment at hand. I hope that would include Nelson Mandela’s story, past and present, as part of it’s purposeful consciousness raising. Saturn will provide a necessary and steadying pace as we move through the next month of eclipses. Fasten your seatbelts anyway.
be
I remember the 1985 season of my life well; a moment pre-1st Saturn return when I took a stand on what I wanted (and didn’t want) and chose a path different than the one I was on (but that was a reflection of the path I had laid out a decade earlier).
Well then, this is a well-placed moment. Thank you for your clarity of point and purpose, Len. I appreciate how you are always a role-model (re clarity and focus).
Linda