I already tutted about Saturn being the world builder and responsibility master, with a profound understanding of cause and effect, ergo overthinker.

So Pisces is ruled by Jupiter, but it’s the watery side of Jupiter. Pisces is the oceanic soup that’s interested in creating the ideal peace love and understanding environment where we can all melt together holding hands. Pisces sees the connection between all things just like Sag does, but Pisces has a lot more emotional intelligence (#sorrynotsorry). In fact the emo IQ is so high, it makes Pisces gullible for all the right reasons.

So what do you get when you combine responsibility with caring about everything that is, was, or shall be? What does this ’93-’96 generation have in common? A constant sense of vague existential dread.

Since Saturn transits are so long, it also speaks to cultural shifts. And you know what Saturn loves? To build worlds. Psychologically, we use stories to understand and deal with reality. We always have, that is what mythology is, and that is what modern entertainment aims at (but very often fails).
Combining world building with the imaginal realm that Pisces is has brought us: The Hobbit in ’37, Dune in ’65, first ASOIAF ’96, first Elder Scrolls game in ’94.
In short, it has built stories which lasted and we still escape into.

And speaking of the Piscean escapism, my favourite examples of natal Saturn in Pisces are Albert Hoffman (the walls…the walls are like moving, man!) and Karl Marx (the walls…the walls belong to everyone, man!) which together combine to make a good metaphor for our generation. (What do we want? To get away….from capitalism!).

But jokes aside, and please don’t quote me on this, Marx had some interesting ideas in regards to his theory, particularly in how he analyzed things. He was taking into consideration different groups of problems and examined them in relation to their dynamics, instead of treating each subject as an independent issue. In other words, he had a holistic way of thinking, taken from his Aquarius rising combined with the Piscean vista.
In the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he says:
“It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness.”

So in simpler words being poor makes you as poorly-adjusted to the world. This way of thinking – behavior being the result of experience and conditioning – belongs to the behaviourist school of thought in psychology, which was not a thing until 1913, half a century after that quote. (We take a lot of things for granted now, but trust me, humanity has come a long way in the past century, making groundbreaking discoveries such as being hungry makes you angry.)

And this digression has a greater point – which is Saturn will not be alone in Pisces, it will be joining Neptune and they’ll be playing around each other completing a 35 year cycle.

Neptune’s orbit includes that of all the other planets, it’s the sea of dreams – it’s not real or unreal, it’s what could be. Think about how you feel inside your dreams – not really solid, not really liquid, like an echo of reality. Dreams have immense power. They can make us feel pleasure, they can make us feel pain, and they can lead us astray. In other words, Neptune rules delusions as much as it rules our capacity to dream and envision things.

If Saturn is the wall builder, Neptune is the dissolving factor. And so pouring dissolution over walls is where this current cycle began in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell at the last Saturn Neptune conjunction, in the sign of Capricorn.

Historically, this cycle is tied to other interesting years, like 1953 when Stalin died, and before that in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution took place, and before that in 1881 with the assassination of Alexander II, and before that in 1848 with the Communist Manifesto.

In between, there have been other alignments between the two often coinciding with later stages of wars and with physical and spiritual exhaustion. In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas defines these periods as both “informed by an acute sense of irony, wry or bitter humor, a deep awareness of the absurd and insane in life.” as well all “dark nights of the soul and severe challenges to religious faith” with “tensions between ideals, hopes and beliefs versus harsh realities.”

In other words, if Pluto in Aquarius is taking us on a trip to Uncanny valley, then Saturn Neptune in Pisces is bringing the high tides of a polluted ocean which engulfs and erodes our ability to discern what is real and what is illusion.