If you recall, Saturn, which has a 29-30 year cycle, entered Capricorn (where it will remain for three years) on December 19, 2017, a date I recall easily since it happens to have fallen exactly upon my 75th birth day. I’ve posted several times on this new resonance in the collective winds of our time, calling on us to slow down, pay attention, get real, make solid, concrete plans.

Saturn to enter Capricorn on December 19: Slow down! Serious Business Ahead!

And this includes preparations now, in 2018, for the coming years 2019-2020, when Saturn will conjunct Pluto, an immensely long cycled planet (248 years) that has been grinding its way through Capricorn since early 2008, the very year when the world’s centralized financial system nearly melted down.

The Spiralling Context of the Upcoming Saturn/Pluto Conjunction

Included in the above Saturn/Pluto article, is mention of another phenomenon,  the promise of Pluto finally returning, for the first time, between 2020 and 2023, to the degree it occupied at this nation’s birth, when it closely opposed Mercury. This very first Pluto return will signal, at the very least, severe karmic lessons having to do with the use and abuse of power (Pluto), and its relationship with intelligence and communication (Mercury). Putting these two planets together, we have power (Pluto) served by propaganda (Mercury). Most likely, this adolescent nation, which still assumes it can throw its weight around without consequence, will then receive its comeuppance, not to mention blowback, for near-continuous wars waged upon the rest of the world, and upon both indigenous and black and otherwise colored populations inside its own borders. 

Just how all that will play out remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it interests me greatly that the upcoming Saturn/Pluto conjunction just happens to fall in the same degree area of mid-Capricorn that the last Uranus/Neptune conjunction fell into, between 1989 and 1993! In other words, these two very prominent conjunctions of “outer planets” — 30 years apart — reinforce each other’s message.

The years 1989-1993 also happen to demarcate the subgeneration within the millennial generation that interests me most, since they are the ones with whom I happen to find myself in constant contact here in Green Acres Village.

Now between 25 and 29 years old, the Uranus/Neptune in Capricorn millennials arrived during a rare outer planet conjunction that occurs only once every 168 years, and heralds, when in the sign of Capricorn, the creation of a brand-new visionary (Neptune) structure (Uranus) for society. Let’s hope these beautiful, idealistic young ones can live up to their awesome task. 

I imagine that the years 2019 and 2020 when most of them will be going through their first Saturn returns, will be even more of an initiation for them than the first Saturn Return usually is. For their Saturn Return years will be both yolked together with powerful, death/rebirth Pluto, and also hearken back across a 30 year span of time to resound the bell of their original sub-generational signature: the Uranus/Neptune conjunction, 1989-1993! 

I bring you here, an essay that I wrote and published back when this conjunction was just getting going, during a time when I was feeling into the subtle shifts in the cultural atmosphere that it entailed. Think of the upcoming Saturn/Pluto conjunction as not only having a Saturn/Pluto “feel”, but as well a “Uranus/Neptune” feel, since that note will be echoing from 30 years ago. In other words, look upon this old article as predictive, not just of what went on during the time it referred to, but to a time 30 years in the future (2019-20) when something of the same atmospheric presence would once again drift in to blanket the whole world.

And yes, what comes in 2019-2020 is actually beginning to be felt now, ever since Saturn’s entrance into Capricorn on my birthday, last December 19th.

CONCRETE, IRREVOCABLE SHIFTS: The “Feel” of Capricorn (1989)

 

By Ann Kreilkamp

 

First published in Welcome to Planet Earth, 1989

 

Introduction

Something has changed. Something all pervasive and impossible to describe. I feel it as a concrete, palpable shift — in the nature of things, in the way things work.

I try to point to it, to pin it down, to fix it in place. I cannot. For what is “it”? “It” does not lie outside me — nor is it inside. “It” cannot be specified so narrowly, as if confined to one place rather than another. “It” is the very air I breathe. “It” permeates the very substance of things. As if all the objects of this world have been lifted from their places and set down within another world, a world with an entirely different gravity, a greater density.

Each element exists in exactly the same relations with its surrounding elements as before. But because their arrangement is now located within an entirely new context, their individual identities and the system of which they are parts have both altered. Nothing is what it was before. Change the atmosphere, and all that lives within it changes, too.

Think of the difference between drawing in pencil on a sheet of paper and cutting into a piece of fabric with scissors. I can always erase what I have drawn and start over. But I cannot undo the splitting of the fabric. That cut is there, I must work with what is.

Here is the difference between Sagittarius and Capricorn, what I am wanting to describe. The “it.” In Sagittarius, we were building castles in air. Flying high, we released ourselves from Earth’s gravity and sketched utopian dreams.

In Capricorn, we are to concentrate on putting a foundation under any castle we decide to really construct (not just think about). And that foundation must rest securely on earth, rock, bedrock. The exact specifications of the foundation set up the exact parameters for the castle to rest upon it.

Every decision is irrevocable. Each step prepares the way for and sets limits to the next. What we do now creates the exact conditions within which the future will unfold. There is no going back. All decisions have precise consequences, to which we must be responsive, and for which we are responsible.

The work is hard, steady, and full of obstacles. Earth does not move easily. Earth resists. In order to reach our goal we must concentrate and focus with unswerving dedication. Our former flights of fancy are no longer in order.

We humans perceive identities through the comparison of differences. We understand what something is in part by perceiving what it is not. We could better understand this new Capricorn phase of history, were we able to switch back and forth between Capricorn and Sagittarius, the phase that preceded it. Instead, we must rely on our memories of the quality or tone of most of this decade to begin to grasp the shift that occurred in late 1988.

People ask, what can we expect as a result of this shift? This question is especially pertinent when Capricorn is the phase in question, since this sign is the very one associated with expectations! We astrologers have many predictions to offer, some of them seemingly contradictory, but all of them rooted in some inchoate, largely preverbal sense of how the world feels when immersed in the Capricorn vibration.

I am interested in presenting — no matter how elliptically — a sense of the change we have gone through, as a felt, bodily experience.

Sinking Down

I sink down within this new world, my substance altered, density thickened. Everything I do seems weighty, every decision irrevocable. I ponder the cuts which so long ago formed the characteristics of my character, my castle, my fortress . . . I feel the rigidity of my ego boundaries, the separation between inside and outside, the alienation, the loneliness . . .

The origins of these ego foundations are both deep and wide. They are deep: constructed in early childhood, they mirror, in part, structures formed previously, in past lives, in genetic history. They are wide: automatically, irrevocably, my current form is modeled in part upon same or similar forms within both my family and friends and the general cultural ambiance within which we all chose to incarnate.

Irrevocable cuts. Cuts that still dictate the way I am and think and do. I feel isolated, alone; I feel all too connected. Locked within the embrace of this original paradoxical structure, I feel immobilized.

The above feelings are characteristic of Saturn in Capricorn, one of the three major planets now located in this most austere and sacred sign.

Saturn in Capricorn: I feel the substance of my body as a heavy, inert thing. I am my body. I am my body, therefore I am. I am down inside my body, deep within it. I feel in its unique variegated shape and density a record of my personal history.

Saturn dissolves into Neptune: I feel my body’s cells remembering an even deeper past, when they were less specialized, more homogenous, spread out, earth open to sky, their ground mulched by other people’s bodies in other centuries, all bearing within them records of their personal histories, all living and breathing within a cultural matrix common to them and their times.

Subtly, imperceptibly, the acceptance of the feeling of Saturn’s walls allows them to dissolve — into Neptune. A haunting feeling of oneness. A sense of seamless unity amidst all the diversity gaining definition, form. Body as “temple of the spirit.” Consciousness embodied, living in body, informs it, fills it with light, a light body, body delight, suffused with a glowing, growing sense of . . . of what? The wonder of it all. The mystery.

The very air I breathe has altered. In my breathing in and out I feel all of nature swell and contract, rhythmically attuning to all that is in motion now, and real, so very real. Air itself takes on material substance. No longer do I conceptualize air as a vacuum within which all things exist, a space that holds them separate from one another. Air hovers, air screams, air is a constant swirling in and out of my lungs and yours. The air I inhaled a week ago from the spring breeze of Wyoming mountains now diffuses — to whistle through a cave in France, to lift and swirl a sand dune in the Sahara, to be sifted for clues by a tiger in some exotic jungle, to sound the death rattle of a weathered old woman in Siberia.

Air lives, veiled creature in continual motion, the sea within which our lungs are all immersed, binding us to one another. I stretch and bend into the linkages that blend us, dissolving boundaries, dismantling the iron curtain that has split the earth in two, has split our very brains in two. East meets West, glasnost. In the space that opens a chain reaction begins, both on the level of neutrinos and of a welcoming neutrality in international relations. “Fusion,” we call it, and it is confusing, after all these years of separation. We wonder, is it really happening? Are the experiments working?

Meanwhile, I sit inside my own emotional confusion, attempting to both feel and alter patterns of addictive, co-dependent behavior seemingly rooted in place for centuries.

Saturn and Neptune, both obscuring and lighting up the night, the ever present gloom, the sense of impending doom that is Capricorn.

Skin Splits Open

Doom to our present way of life. The required changes are Capricornian. Simplify. Slow down to a crawl . . . Falling on my knees, I begin to pay attention to what’s directly in front of me. To what really is. Stripping away layers of projection, I peel myself back to nothing.

Uranus in Capricorn: an electric knife blade, sharp, incisive, cutting through the densest, most inmost parts of me, slicing them in two, exposing them to air. Aaahgh. A shift takes place. Skin splits open in response to extreme internal agitation. Toxins discharge.

Saturn and Uranus in Capricorn: this seemingly inert body is radioactive! Pulsing regularly, activating nerves, muscles, bones, Uranus energizes the whole in such a way that I know not who I am or am becoming. Breaking my bones, in order to set them again, in a new way. Setting me free. But what is me? Whose me? I am controlled by outside ofrces. I am controlled by inside forces. I am the Force controlling myself. I am the body electric, zapping the walls, burning them to dust.

Mind reaches down into body to inform and reform each and every cell, to build a new kind of foundation that can house a new character, a new castle, this one not a fortress, not protected from assault from the outside but a shimmering diaphanous membrane breathing in and out, resonating with all that is, one small cell in the larger sounding body.

Changes inside me reverberate holographically with all that is. Uranus shifts me into a larger reality, a sense, an expectancy . . . Anything is possible, any structure can be, and indeed is being shifted, irrevocably. Perestroika! Structures in governments, in persons, in groups, in corporations, in small towns, in traditions and institutions of all kinds are suddenly, irrevocably, reorganized.

So, though the density is greater, invoking initially a sense of futility, of immobilization, so also does this density make for something very real to work with. To come up against. To clash with. To sculpt. And the whole is shot through with energy, an electric charge strobing us into fuller awakening. Whatever Saturn decides to manifest, Neptune breathes into the whole of things and Uranus shocks into a greater awareness.

Standing Naked to the Task

As our world begins its initiation into Capricorn, each day we grow more and more familiar with the changed atmosphere, the deeply felt sense that what counts now is deeds, not words; that who we are and what we do in each moment changes us, irrevocably. The path continues to narrow. We focus, concentrate, discipline our wayward minds, link intention to action, pursuing down to earth interest with an utterly concrete particularity. We put away our childish things and get down to the business at hand.We must rescue and heal our home planet, Earth.

The above statement could not have been made 20 years ago — or ten years ago, or five, or even one year ago? — without being considered crazy, grandiose. Now, in May, 1989, we are only six months into Capricorn, and the statement is commonplace, almost cliché.

Thanks to Uranus’ just completed journey through Sagittarius, our minds have indeed stretched to comprehend the breathtaking enormity of this task! The task we must undertake together, as a species, if we wish to enter the twenty-first century alive. With only ten years and a few months to go, we feel the clock counting down. We sense the urgency, the finality, as a crushing weight bearing down upon us.

Each of us contracts to a point where we stand and must take a stand of some kind. Stripped of our illusions, we stand naked to the task, deciding once and for all what our own individual role is to be in this common human endeavor.