Those paying attention woke up one morning in November 1989 and the so-called Iron Curtain had fallen. It did so within days of the most recent Saturn-Neptune conjunction.
Dear Friend and Reader:
We’re now in the maelstrom of the most, what’s the word, I’m not sure…the most something astrology in a generation, or several generations. Descriptors like ‘intense’ and ‘powerful’ are bywords and meaningless as such.
Rare? Unusual? Outstanding?
A little scary?
Definitely understatements.
To understand the current astrology, we can look to history; we can look to the world; and we can look inward. It also helps to read the chart. That means thinking, which for the next 10 minutes of your life I’m planning to do out loud.
To save you time since I know you’re in a hurry, I tried to sum up my whole message in a tweet, but I couldn’t get it right. I was trying to say something like, “We are in a potentially historic moment of human awakening.” But that’s not exactly it. Then I tried, “Wake the fuck up,” but my audience is sensitive and polite.
So you’re invited to come along while I take a more circuitous route to I’m not sure where. I’m guessing you’re not so sure either, so we won’t feel so lonely even if we’re on the road to nowhere.
The First Saturn-Neptune Conjunction Since…
We’re about to experience the first Saturn-Neptune conjunction since the opening and demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Like the coming conjunction of Saturn and Neptune in Aries on Feb. 20, the 1989 event in structure-oriented Capricorn was supercharged by the surrounding aspect pattern, and there were undeniable results.
For those of us who grew up consciously living through any part of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall being reduced to souvenirs was stunning. All our lives we had existed with the constant reminder of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. There were duck-and-cover drills in the 1950s, scaled down but still happening through the mid-1970s.
There were those weird yellow and black fallout shelter signs everywhere (leading to dark, musty atomic bomb shelters stocked with water, rations and radiation detectors).
There was the sly genius of Dr. Strangelove reminding us the end was possible, if not nigh. We, as in my friends and I, worried about incoming missiles, and in 1983 watched The Day After, which promised that some people would survive nuclear war.
But then: Gone? Just like that? The Berlin Wall, symbol of the whole crisis. Poof.
Decades of fear and anticipated horror? The Cuban missile crisis? Visions of Jonathan Schell’s “republic of insects and grass”? Sting singing, “I hope the Russians love their children too,” and Reagan saying “the bombing begins in five minutes” — and that was that? Like none of it had ever happened?
It is perhaps ironic that the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant three years earlier led to the near-bankruptcy of the U.S.S.R., which contributed to the whole Soviet project failing. But that was it: those paying attention woke up one morning in November 1989 and the so-called Iron Curtain had fallen. And it did so within days of the most recent Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Remember that.
The Question of Self
Now we’re back to this 37-year cycle turning over again. After a long warmup (back to July 2025 or so), there is one exact contact, on Feb. 20, in the first degree of Aries. That degree is called the Aries Point, which turns the sign of “I Am” into a collective portal. In one sense, the Aries Point is a magnifier of effects. It’s a node, or an echo chamber. In another sense, it blurs individuality and instigates tribal conditions — just like digital space does.
The Aries Point is where the political becomes personal, the personal becomes political, and where the world crashes into your living room (and your pocket and car system and earbuds). We have the meeting of the boundary planet Saturn and the blurry planet Neptune happening right there, right in that spot, for the first time in history (by which I mean approximately 6,500 years; Western astrology is only about 2,400 years old). That goes on the long list of “what are we to make of this?” issues.
And then there is the question, “What gives?”
To understand the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, it’s necessary to understand the other conjunction that’s happening in Aries, which in the most immediate sense has been gradually building up for about eight years, or 55 years, or a whole century, depending on how you count. That is the conjunction of Chiron and Eris in Aries.
It has a theme similar to Saturn-Neptune, which I will develop more fully in an article soon, but let’s sum it up succinctly.
Eris is What Electronic Mass Media Created
The past century of Eris in Aries (yes, it moves that slowly) is the story of what has happened to humanity under the influence of electronic mass media. The span is from commercial radio at one end through all forms of television, clear through to digital in all forms, including all computing devices, the internet, social media, A.I., the large language model (such as ChatGPT) and “virtual reality.”
If you study the charts of major people and events of the Eris in Aries era, you can watch this story unfold — as humanity goes deeper into a dream of forgetting itself with the occasional moment of awakening. And now that Chiron is conjunct Eris, we get such an awakening moment — in potential.
Chiron-Eris looks like a lot of individual awakenings. Chiron offers the power of both awareness and individuality. Saturn-Neptune describes a collective opening. Both point to the extremely strange digital environs in which we now live, and how it has either formed or transformed every person living on Earth.
We are not really aware of, nor could most people be aware of, the extent to which the digital environment has shaped and distorted all of so-called reality. But we can try.
For Example, Scrolling Facebook Shorts
On Wednesday, I was scrolling through Facebook short videos. There were the usual ones about pro-male dating advice followed by the Himalayan Fur Monster cat video and the one-armed kid on the one-wheel skateboard, and the slinky A.I. girls trying to teach me how to say things in Chinese (“I want you,” “I miss you,” “I see you”) — and then there were some chickens on a cutting board. But one had toes.
The presenter said that it was a photo out of the latest Epstein files drop, which showed part of a small person on the same cutting board with the chickens, mostly blacked out. The presenter said something like, well, QAnon has been warning for years that the world is led by pedophiles and cannibals, and now, here’s your proof.
(The image turned out to be a 2003 art piece titled “Chicken” by German photographer Harald Seiwert. Cindy dug that fact out of somewhere for me, thank you.)
So, baby being served = not true, but — true enough. It might have been true. Do you agree? What we know in fact about this real-life Island of Dr. Moreau is already horrifying. We have all voted for at least one presidential candidate who associated with Epstein, who visited the island, or who did business with him (Trump seems to have not been a customer but rather a supplier).
Professors and Presidents
The list of visitors, customers and associates snakes and turns from Noam Chomsky to Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. It winds in a twisted path from Bill Gates to Prince Andrew to Stephen Hawking to good old what’s his face, Elon Musk. I’m sure Prince Charming visited. Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s name comes up as the potential narrator of a theoretical documentary someone might make. He got a kick out of that.
We know bad things happened on that little island. How bad? Bad enough to horrify any sensitive person. But seen in another light, this is what we consider normal for the internet, which means for what we experience in our minds, which means for contemporary existence. Get ready for another million pages in a week or two.
Let’s reframe this chicken/baby meat image beyond the context of Facebook shorts. Let’s say you were telling your nonexistent psychiatrist that you had a weird dream that started with dating advice and then became a kid skateboarding and then became cannibalistic meal preparation. There might be cause for concern; you might be crazy or deeply troubled or working out an issue.
But is this really different than a video about making the perfect pie crust appearing in the middle of your CNN “news” report about a mass shooting?
The Greatest Healing Crisis Ever Told
Now multiply this by a few billion or so for the total effect of the digital environment on consciousness and society. What is worse, that photo or the government purchase of a massive warehouse in Pennsylvania that will be part of the deportation system? How much of this is going on?
How much worse can this nightmare get? How much darker?
Saturn conjunct Neptune seems to be a confrontation between the real and the imaginary. In Aries, it’s about determining what is true for you; and on the Aries Point, how that multiplies out. I am having difficulty envisioning how this might look other than what we are already experiencing (for example, how casually people are accepting the inflation of generative A.I. technology into their minds).
The alignment of Chiron and Eris seems to be a more focused healing crisis, potentially broadcast on a mass scale. We know that most people don’t deal with their stuff. That’s why the same dramas go on generation after generation. Then suddenly there is this deep, focused call to awakening.
What exactly happens? What is happening?
Whatever The Day Holds
Awakening means opening your eyes to whatever the day holds. But mostly it means awakening to yourself. Anyone who has ever had the experience will confirm that it’s real: the all-encompassing personal revelation. (I am not that person.)
There is, at the same time, the ever-present temptation to blot out or otherwise medicate perception and awareness. You know, stuff it, drown it, deny it, forget it. Suppression leads to more disease and more chaos. Suppressing anger and grief leads to depression. It’s not a good option but it’s the most easily available. You don’t even need to go into the beer cave.
The other option is actually waking up: paying attention, bearing witness to the world, and being real about what’s happening to our society. This will be exhilarating for some people and extremely difficult and painful for most others, especially those who have never really confronted existence or their personal history.
And we are witnessing the destruction of the things that have supported us in the past, including human relationships and those with previously trusted institutions. We are living in a world with exceedingly little trust.
This Is Our Timeline
Like or no, this is the timeline we’re living in. Whatever anyone may think, and whatever anyone’s opinion may be, and no matter how rude or beautiful the awakening, the bell is ringing. And as the next six weeks unfold, it will ring more loudly. If you choose to respond, this is the calling into your potential, and your participation in your life, and in the wider life of your community.
That’s difficult to imagine if you’re having trouble getting through the day. So for those who are in a position to help, and who have what you might call the luxury of resilience, this is going to come down to thinking globally and acting locally. That may be the best-ever description of the Aries Point. But this is not just an idea. It will require thinking, and communicating with others, and it will require action.
Those things seem to be in short supply, though in the end that’s up to each of us, and all of us. The choice is yours. And yes, it would seem that for most people, awareness of one’s personal potential is triggering, and even terrifying. Some would clearly rather not go there.
How about you?
Faithfully,
