Retrogrades of Saturn and Neptune in Pisces
Saturn and Neptune both turn retrograde this week, triggering a cosmic exhale and recalibration. It’s a great energy to lean into, if you understand its purpose…
QUICK EXPLAINER…
Since March 2023, Saturn and Pisces have been participating in a curious intermingling of energies in the sign of Pisces. Neptune has been trawling through this water sign since 2011. It’s comfortable here, with its planetary symbolism meshing well with the sign it co-rules. Many of the hard-to-define, impossible-to-touch parts of life belong to Neptune and Pisces. We’re in the realm of mystery, glamour, spirituality, dreams, infatuation, transcendence, escapism and compassion. Neptune can inspire us, seduce us, confuse us and help us to float away in daydreams. Sounds wafty, and it is, but every innovation in the world and within ourselves begins with a dream or hope.
Saturn moved into Pisces in March 2023, beginning a 2-3 year transit that is far less comfortable. Saturn is structure, authority, responsibility, work, patience, restriction, rules and reliability. Which is all challenged in Pisces.
THE SATURN/NEPTUNE TOPICS…
For me, this odd combination has produced this current crisis of ‘what can we believe?’ - we’re surrounded by deep fakes, false narratives, scams, unreliable leadership and an all pervasive sense of sadness. The world seems to be despairing, as though the Saturnian pessimism is oozing into all the nooks and crannies of our collective psyches.
Currently Saturn and Neptune are 10 degrees apart, slowly building towards a conjunction (an exact meeting) which won’t happen until 2026, but they get super close throughout 2025. So we can expect these themes to build and grow over the coming 18 months.
HOW WE’RE IMPACTED…
All astrological configurations are storylines. They build and place pressure, then evolve and retreat and grow and build and resolve. Events happen and attitudes shift and as a result our society changes. In our personal charts, this energy impacts particular topics (find your Pisces house for more information) and for people with planets in the later part of mutable signs (Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius), there’ll be exact hits that funnel these themes into your life more directly and personally.
THE RETROGRADE…
I always think of retrogrades as big cosmic exhales. On the forward motion inhale, we tense and expand, on the exhale we relax and integrate. Just as the physical exhale supports the parasympathetic nervous system and expels carbon dioxide, the retrograde of the planets is a time to relax into topics, to sift through, integrate the good and expel the toxic. It’s a pause that enables assessment and correction before the next push forward.
The 2024 retrograde (from July until November) is the second in this cycle. We had the first one in 2023, between June-October. Look back through your diaries/photos to see what you were up to. Expect similar themes and topics to permeate the coming months. For me, it was a nice patch of time. Quiet, constructive, full of warm connections, memory making and moments of spiritual insight. So I’m looking forward to building on this period, with further pushing along of projects and relationships that date back to then.
People get scared of retrogrades in pop-astrology, but there’s no need. They’re an essential part of life. In the same way that inhales are only possible because of exhales, life is richer for what we expel during the retrograde periods.
#astrology #retrograde #Saturn #Neptune