The Trident & The Sickle: Neptune-Saturn Conjunction & the New Moon

 Today’s New Moon at 6° Gemini is just two days ahead of Saturn’s ingress into Aries at 0° Aries 0’, the point of a new astrological cycle. Saturn was conjunct Neptune at 1° Aries 43’. While these two planets get closer in July 2025, the exact conjunction occurs on February 20^th, 2026. The conjunction between Saturn and Neptune happens every 36 years; the last synodic cycle of Neptune (specifically Saturn-Neptune) began in 1989- a year that saw the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Saturn and Neptune will remain in Aries until April 2028.

The keynote for the Sabian Symbol of Saturn’s entry into Aries is Emergence of new forms and of the potentiality of consciousness.

To be individually conscious means to emerge out of the sea of generic and collective consciousness — which to the emerged mind appears to be unconsciousness.

The possibility of success and that of failure is implied throughout the entire process of actualization. Every release of potentiality contains this two-fold possibility. It inevitably opens two paths: one leads to “perfection” in consciousness, the other to “disintegration” – the return to the undifferentiated state (the state of humus, manure, cosmic dust – i.e. to the symbolic “great Waters of space,” to chaos).

While it may seem positive to be moving away from Saturn’s cold shadow and his restrictive demands (the Saturn Pluto conjunction of 2020), it is beneficial to consider that while Saturn is the restrictor he is also the liberator. And while Neptune promises transcendence, it is also a world of “strange perceptions”, and “the realm of glamor and deceiving phantoms” (Dane Rudhyar, New Mansions for New Men 1938).

My own thoughts (inspired by Rudhyar) on this conjunction centre around an appreciation of all that Saturn can offer us at this time as we embark upon a new age.

In ancient Rome Saturn’s Temple at the foot of Capitol Hill was the repository of Rome’s wealth. As a god of agriculture, Saturn’s sickle is a symbol of growth, death and renewal- we reap what we sow (this is why Saturn is associated with karma and cycles of time). Saturn is also associated with the seed and all that is inherent within the processes of growth. For Rudhyar, the seed, buried deep in every human being is the “purity” of our true self. Through time the light of the seed has become obscured by the shadow of Saturn that has made us rigid and afraid of loosening our grip of tradition and laws for the comfort of safety. This has inhibited the expression of our creative soul (Uranus). Uranian brilliance and mastery of technology and science is therefore seen as a pathway to Neptunian transcendence and liberation from the drudgery and darkness of Saturn where we go round in a never-ending cycle of obedience to ghosts of the past. That is if the Uranian spirit is cultivated with responsibility and maturity (Saturn).

Saturn is the malefic of modern astrology and is viewed as a hard task master that enslaves us, but as Rudhyar says, we enslave ourselves through the superficial nature of our everyday personalities. Saturn’s stern and forbidding countenance is only the negative image of our true selfhood. Our “seed being” implores us to become what we were before we were born. This speaks to the original face of our soul before it was blemished by environmental factors and distortions.

Neptune’s mystical light promises a new world that is beyond or above the complex cycles of personhood or soul making, and the painful pathways to individuation. It may feel very seductive to dissolve the ego and the structures of the world through the lure of Neptunian freedom and unboundlessness. Like a Siren from the depths of the ocean, Neptune’s ethereal song makes us forget about duty, responsibility, morality, and the terrible burden of being human. It pulls us into the golden light of the 5^th dimension. Not that there is anything wrong with the 5^th dimension, after all isn’t that what we all want, a brave new luminous world in which, as evolved beings of light, we put an end to the painful ugliness and suffering of human life? Maybe. But first, do we have to integrate and learn from our human journey so far?

Saturn, as task master, as the “Dweller at the Threshold”, and gateway to the outer planets, keeps the score. What do we need to evolve in such a way that allows us to retain the seed of our true selves? If there is to be a new Golden Age, should it not be made up of conscious, unique human beings born from the spectrum of human potential, and not an ocean of soulless entities who have lost their essence to artificial processes? Saturn, with his sickle in hand, reminds us that even though we are in a different age from the “Golden Age” of his reign, while we are embodied flesh, bone, and blood, the laws of Nature are still in operation.

Is AI taking us back into the sea of generic and collective consciousness? Is it a regressive step?

That’s not to say that I am wholly against AI, it is that I keep a cautionary reserve in interacting with machine consciousness which is essentially a mulching of the collective mind. This mulching of the collective consciousness- the algorithm- is as much Saturnian as it is Neptunian, only one is composted in the Earth, and the other is dissolved in the great ocean of Spirit. Chiron and Uranus, I feel, can help us in this process of renewal and transition.

Neptune in positive aspect, and in relation to individuals who have responsibly learned to master technology and science for a higher purpose than ego driven desire, offers the possibility of new life at a new level of consciousness. A life that Rudhyar says partakes of “a more universal rhythm”, and which “knows itself as a participant in an order of being far transcending the earth -horizon of a narrow instinctual selfhood”.

With the Saturn Neptune conjunction taking place in Aries, which is ruled by Mars, it will benefit us to consider the nature of our instinctual self-hood, particularly when so much violence is still happening in our world.

With the New Moon in Gemini the opportunity is to bring material, which until now has seemed diffuse and vague, into conscious reasoning and expression.