Saturn-Neptune in Aries
Our astrological archetypes — the planets and signs of the Zodiac— are far wilder and more dimensional than any of our boxes can contain.
The things you read or hear on repeat from astrologers can take us a certain distance along the path of self-reflection and self-connection. But, eventually, what’s played on repeat in the astrology world can become another wall between us and our own creative spark. Especially during times of change when the mind’s more activated and anxiety is stirred up. A conceptual, top-down, from-the-heights-of-Mount-Olympus delivery of astrology can be dissociating, taking us up and out of our power, our relationality, our connection to eros as a Life-embracing impulse — leaving unnoticed and untended our own personal doorway to the divine, to mythic perception, to seeing through the literal world and surface of things.
For example, today, Neptune conjoins Saturn at 0 degrees Aries. A profoundly rare moment.
And leading up to this once-in-a-millenia event, I’ve heard on repeat how Neptune is spiritual, otherworldly, mystical. How Neptune governs the imagination and the intuition. Illusion and fantasy. How Neptune is the idealist.
And Saturn — the realist. I’ve heard on repeat how Saturn is form, structure and discipline. And how these two unlikely partners coming together is about building structures for our dreams to come through.
I don’t disagree. But there can be a lot of stuff we carry into our interpretation of what these “structures” could or should be. And what “our dreams” are.
If we’re going to keep the astrological language from drying out, Aries asks us to root more deeply into the immediacy of our own direct experience, touch the fire held within the body, honor the magma inside the Earth. And work with basaltic lava to re-build a kind of soil structure that can hold water.
Each of these archetypes have so much range.
Yes, it might be exactly right to say that this moment is about giving structure to our dreams. But the way that this is recognized and discovered?!! Can happen in utterly wild and infinite ways.
I want to hear mine, I want to hear yours and I want to find out what happens when we hear each other’s.
If these kind of keywords and cookbook phrases are to carry any life into the world, we have to marry the big-picture view that astrology offers to help illuminate meaning in our lives, with a bottom-up expression of what is alive right now, coming through the specific details of our own personal experience as a divinatory act.
Both movements, up and down, keep the bridge between the mundane and the sacred, a living dynamic thing that humans can be custodians rather than marshals of.
I want to to know what rises up from your conversation with the sacred as you live your own wild and precious life.
So instead of telling you, again, that Saturn is about form, responsibility, heaviness, time …
I want to ask you this:
What comes up for you when you imagine — sit-with, move-with, really feel into through your own dreaming body’s ways — the weight of a ram’s horns?
As the animal mythically associated with the sign of Aries, and the animal that humans have seen in the sky for thousands of years in the place the Sun enters at the vernal equinox …
I want to know:
What happens when we open our imaginations and tune the body’s listening into the dream of the Ram?
Male bighorn sheep grow horns that can weigh up to 30-40 lb, about the same weight as all of their other bones combined. These horns differ from antlers in that they are not shed, but rather grow over the course of a ram’s life. The ridges you see along their horns represent growth rings, marking years akin to what you see in a tree trunk. The horns are made up of a keratin sheath that covers a live bone core, directly extending from the ram’s double-layered skull. The spiral geometry of the horns and the honeycomb-like architecture of the bone help the ram absorb the immense shock of 800-1500 pounds of force coming through their head-butting collisions, as rams charge at each other at speeds of up to 40 mph.
What happens when you, at a safe distance, tune into what that’s like?
The locking of horns.
The charge.
The rippling impact.
And, the shock absorption.
Somehow, the brain — protected.
Clarity and vision — protected.
Neural connections — the bridging and wiring of many parts of the brain together — protected.
When we let ourselves go in head-to-head with someone or something, what are the many ways that Saturn can still creatively express itself, as our Guardian of the Day Consciousness?
How does Saturn help us stay clear-headed — while still allowing the rutting instincts to exist and be here?
What structures help us continue to access our self-reflective, analytic and forward-thinking capacities — while metaphorically allowing and holding space for the physiological changes that come with rutting season (surges in testosterone, aggressive impulses, the drive to compete and to mate)?
What containers help us maintain access to our many different aspects of self, so that we don’t lose ourselves to the heat the battle?
Neptune and Saturn conjoin at 0 degrees Aries. Such possibility. Such peril.
Fire is dangerous.
What guards your mind?
Horns are built from dead, keratinized epithelial cells layering onto each other, creating a sheath around a live bone core.
What past identities have laid themselves down, sacrificing their lives to a stratified “structure” that protects your clarity of mind? That protects your access to a kind of coolness and discernment, even in conflict? Even when moving in a more full engagement with Life?
What ancestral connections hold you in the experience of belonging and response-ability, even while you rise up and courageously bring forth what wants to come through your individuality?
And, after you’ve let yourself be-with, become more permeable-to and in-formed by how Life has found its way through this form of the Ram—
What have you learned about your Aries place or Aries planets?
When your “ram-like” part of self or inner “ram-body” is activated, what do you see and notice in your life that you did not before? What’s given more permission? What new inner dialogue is prompted? What new questions are raised? What new conversations — and conflicts — can now be entered? What fresh learning and growth can happen?
How can the container of your personality expand to make habitat for the Ram’s ways (it’s needs, desires, gifts, resources) within and around you?
It’s fascinating and inspiring to me that this Saturn-Neptune conjunction comes directly on the heels of a Mars-Vesta conjunction in Aquarius. I’ll save that note for the next newsletter. But for now, I’ll say this feels like a real Spring-time in the education of Mars and the place of Aries. And it begins, again, with this:
A creative spark lives at the center of each of us.
I invite you to join me in tending this inner flame, and dedicating our work together to the dignity of all beings, everywhere, without exception.
Living the Signs of the Zodiac: The Fire Signs
Tuesdays 5pm-7:15pm Pacific
March 18 - June 9
Warmly,
Nicole
“And when the anxiety of change is elevated, the instinct to imagine often turns to an imagination of ruin or doom; hence, why telling mythic stories during this time can be of assistance. Myth turns our imaginative eye to the symbols and archetypes that sustain our humanness. They support us in the process of seeing through the literal world.”
- Brian Clark, At Home with Hestia, a return to center
