Reality Undefined: The Saturn/Neptune Years (2023-2028)

Art: Neil Krug

On the whole, the 2020s began on a tumultuous note that will probably out-chaos the rest of the decade. A Saturn/Pluto conjunction, followed immediately by a series of Saturn/Uranus squares, is enough to demolish anyone’s sense of normalcy. Actually, we have a rare configuration to look forward to in the middle part of the decade, when every outer planet will be perfectly sextile the other (dubbed “the basket” by S.J. Anderson). Every outer, that is, with the exception of Saturn conjunct Neptune.

Though Saturn/Neptune alignments are not historically or symbolically the coziest of times, the Saturn/Neptune conjunction of 2026 will be woven into the basket. In other words, things don’t occur in isolation. The surrounding context is important. Saturn and Neptune will be copresent (occupying the same sign) for a roughly five-year period — one that will likely erode the boundaries of everything we thought we knew, bring about multiple crises of faith, and leave us feeling a bit unmoored in the uncanny valley of a newly unfolding reality. However, the conjunction of these two planets is participating in an unusually stable, supportive, and cooperative assembly of the slowest-moving planets in the sky — almost like a UN meeting of the titans in the sky — in 2026.

I think, as with most things worth dissecting, there’s going to be a lot of both/and. The Saturn/Neptune years will be both a gut punch and a brand new world of possibility, both the disillusionment and the discovery of something real to believe in, both the funeral for a lost ideal and the laying of new abstract foundations. I suspect it will be a time when reality itself will be in an indeterminate state, both terrifying and exciting.

A Timeline

The current cycle that’s ending

Last synodic cycle began: 1989 (Saturn/Neptune conjunction in Capricorn)
Opening square: 1998-1999 (Saturn in Taurus/Neptune in Aquarius)
Opposition: 2006-2007 (Saturn in Leo/Neptune in Aquarius)
Closing square: 2015-2016 (Saturn in Sagittarius/Neptune in Pisces)

1989 was a historically significant year: the Berlin Wall fell, there were riots in Tiananmen Square, and the beginning of the end of South African apartheid formally began in 1990, with the conjunction still in orb. Previously existing boundaries and divisions (Saturn) were eroded and dissolved (Neptune). The celebration of painful histories ending coincided with the uncertainty and confusion of transitional times. And as we’ll get to in a bit, the timeline of communism was punctuated with important events.

1999, at the opening square, brought about a similar sense that the world as we knew it was ending, so we “partied like it’s 1999” (aka prepped for the Y2K apocalypse). Google was launched in 1998 and Putin was elected in 2000 with the square in orb. Nigeria terminated military rule and established its current government, the Kosovo War started and ended, and the Columbine High School massacre occurred with a retrograde Mars forming a T-square with Saturn and Neptune.

Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath occurred in the leadup to the first exact opposition. During this time, Twitter and Tumblr were also launched, the first iPhone was brought to market, Saddam Hussein was executed, much of Eastern Europe joined the Schengen border-free visa zone, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and the subprime mortgage crisis in the US began.

During the closing squares of 2015-2016, the Standing Rock Sioux and allied water protectors protested the Dakota Access Pipeline. Trump was elected, and Brexit passed. Luminaries like David Bowie and Prince died. 2016 was also the summer of Pokemon Go, a time when “augmented reality” broke through into the mainstream.

The 2020s and the beginning of a new cycle

Saturn and Neptune copresent in Pisces: March 2023 - March 2025
Saturn in Pisces, Neptune in Aries: March 2025 - May 2025
Saturn and Neptune copresent in Aries: May 2025 - Sep 2025
Saturn and Neptune copresent in Pisces again: Oct 2025 - Jan 2026
Neptune enters Aries: Jan 26 2026
Saturn enters Aries: Feb 13 2026
*Saturn/Neptune conjunction at 0 Aries: Feb 20 2026*
Saturn and Neptune copresent in Aries: Feb 2026 - Apr 2028

Saturn/Neptune conjunction within 15 degree orb: March 2024 - May 2027

In summary: this chapter of history will span the years of 2023-2028, with a more active intensification of Saturn/Neptune themes between 2024-2027. In February 2026, the previous cycle resolves, and a new one begins.

The Loss Of The Known, The Loss Of The Hoped-For

Saturn and Neptune contradict each other in many ways. Saturn represents stone-cold reality, the permafrost of factual truth and factual limits, the boundary between the known and the unknown (quite literally, as it once was the most distant planet visible to the naked eye, and therefore a symbol of the edges of the known universe). Neptune is a fog or a mist prone to suggestion, a vapor that faithfully reflects your projections, the intangible substance of our ideals, dreams, and illusions. When Saturn and Neptune get together, they mutually annihilate each other in certain ways (Saturn scrutinizes, fact-checks, and debunks Neptune’s smoke and mirrors, and Neptune erodes Saturn’s certainty like an ocean dissolves a rock formation). In summary, this is often a process of both sobering up around previous delusions and also no longer being certain what’s actually real anymore. And at the same time, it can also be a process of concretizing the abstract, of “giving form” to Neptune, aka bringing it down to earth.

In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas notes that Saturn-Neptune eras are often times when epistemological conflicts between religion and science (and even opposing political parties) are heightened, and skepticism runs rampant in both directions. Tarnas notes that Charles Darwin was born during the conjunction of 1809, and the Scopes trial took place during the square of 1925. When Nietzsche announced that “God was dead,” it was during the conjunction of 1881-82.

In general though, the need to separate truth from fantasy, to confront delusions and lies, and to bury the ideals that haven’t worked out for us is a strong Saturn/Neptune theme. Sometimes it’s less about entombing the lie than it is about doubling down on your ideals by actually walking your talk. It can be about the death of a dream as much as it’s about the labor of ensouling 3D reality with the dream (and in this case, I can’t help but think of the “expectations vs. reality” meme, which apparently originated via this cartoon from 1921).

Saturn/Neptune times are also low morale times. Tarnas writes, "There is also a tendency during Saturn/Neptune eras to experience a subtle but pervasive darkening of the collective consciousness, sometimes as a diffuse and difficult-to-diagnose social malaise, at other times as a direct response to deeply discouraging or tragic events."

There have been times in history, just like right now, where a Saturn/Pluto alignment was followed by Saturn/Neptune (for instance, 9/11 and the Iraq War followed by the Bush reelection and Hurricane Katrina). "The reactionary structures that were empowered by fiery events and ruthless violence in the earlier period were now weakened or dissolved by watery events and compassionate concern,” says Tarnas. "In wartime, Saturn/Neptune alignments often coincide with the later stages of a war when a collective sense of physical and spiritual exhaustion, disillusionment, and low morale — often on both sides — is dominant.”

Given where things stand in the world right now, this will probably have implications for the war in Ukraine, and likely for the multi-hyphenate forms of apocalypse that are all occurring while most of us still have to go to work and send our little emails (I’m at the pandemic, I’m at the climate collapse, I’m at the combination pandemic/climate collapse/encroaching fascism/alien invasion). Remember: this is the ending of the cycle that began in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and symbolically announced the victory of capitalism over communism. Could it be that some of those ideals haven’t exactly worked out for the world either?

This particular Saturn/Neptune era is especially striking, not only because Saturn and Neptune will be cohabitating for *so long* (normally they’d spend just 2-3 years engaging each other), but because this occurs across the last and the first sign of the zodiac. The exact conjunction literally lands at 0 degrees of Aries! It’s omega spilling into alpha, the tail eating the snake.

The Saturn in Pisces era really will feel like the end of something, and I suspect will bear the brunt of the “despair, dissolution and disillusionment” part of the equation (whereas Saturn in Aries might be where we pick up the pieces and move into the trial and error phase, of reality-testing our dreams and ideals in a new paradigm where the old rules don’t apply).

Saturn’s stint through Pisces is, in many ways, the finale to the Neptune in Pisces era that started in 2011. It’s seeing that the Wizard of Oz is the man behind the curtain, it’s the consequences of this past decade’s delusions coming home to roost, and it’s the hard aftermath of a slowly dissolving consensus reality. The internet of the personal algorithm has contributed to a more siloed relationship with reality, and a crisis of truth, of knowing what to trust. The 2010s were a prolific decade for fake news, and this stands to only get worse with the advancement of AI and deep fakes. There are multiple universes of “facts” that exist side by side, but remain largely closed to each other, in this era of the information bubble. Will Saturn in Aries be a hard reset, or a shared universe collapsing into an infinity of solo galaxies?

Reality Waits To Be Determined

Then again, maybe a little doubt is a good thing. Maybe a little dose of skepticism is what will save us in the end. With Saturn and Neptune signaling the merging of the known and the unknown at the first degree of the zodiac, it’s almost as though what we knew before will no longer apply in the face of previous mysteries solidifying and taking shape.

Saturn in Aries is a punk-rock Saturn. Saturn in Aries is a Saturn in fall, which looks like statues and edifices falling down. Under Saturn in Aries, we’re not necessarily listening to the old rules and authority figures. Under Saturn in Aries, there are no gods, no masters. We are in the wilderness of a near-complete lack of structure, but that also means we get to DIY a new one. Saturn in Aries feels like thinking for yourself and doing for yourself, whether that’s exciting to you, or whether you simply have no other choice.

If Saturn in Pisces, a Jupiter sign, was the gradual erosion and crisis of faith, Saturn in Aries, a Mars sign, is for doing something about it. This is the part of the story where we say, “thoughts and prayers are not enough.” Resisting despair looks like proactively taking steps in another direction, and finding something more durable to ground our hopes and spirituality into.

A Few Related Timelines To Watch

Communism & Russia

It’s pretty well-established in the astrological lore that the Saturn/Neptune cycle is relevant to the history of communism, and to major turning points in Russian history.

The Communist Manifesto was published in the wake of the 1846 conjunctions (with Saturn still in orb of Neptune). Actually, that year, 1848, was the last time Saturn and Neptune were copresent in Pisces.

There were subsequent Saturn/Neptune conjunctions in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution; in 1952 and 1953, the year Stalin died and also the year the Korean War ended and cemented the division between North and South Korea; in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and also the year of the Tiananmen Square protests. We know it didn’t take long for the Soviet Union to fall apart from there, in 1991.

We can tell, based on this, that the upcoming Saturn/Neptune conjunction will coincide with another turning point in those histories, and on a similar, if not greater, level of magnitude.

The Climate Crisis

In my own research, I found that the Saturn/Neptune cycle also has some pretty striking correlations to the history of the climate crisis — not so much just the weather itself, but also the human response to it.

1988 is widely considered a turning point in the broader public "paying attention to global warming." That summer was the hottest on record, and a scientist testified in front of Congress that he was "99% sure" global warming was happening. In 1989, the year of the exact Saturn/Neptune conjunction, the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 1997, about a year ahead of the opening square (but already within orb), the first global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, the Kyoto Protocol, was adopted.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006, at the opposition, the same year China surpassed the US as the largest carbon emitter.

The closing square took place during 2015-16, which saw Obama bringing the US into the Paris Climate Agreement and Trump withdrawing from it a year later.

As we come around to the resolution of that cycle and the seeding of a new one, it’ll be interesting to see how the failed and inadequate response of the last couple decades informs what comes next.

Here’s another thing: Saturn plus Neptune (a general signifer of oceans) has overlapping significations with Saturn in Pisces: both point to the contamination of water, and even to potentially water-borne diseases. Along with rising temperatures and sea levels, I am curious to see if ocean pollution will become another major focus during the Saturn in Pisces era.

Mass Media, The Internet & The 24-Hour News Cycle

Tarnas writes of Saturn/Neptune that the polarization between secularism and religion that happens during these periods also extends to the notion of opposing political camps and ideologies, of “red states” and “blue states,” so to speak — “each side perceiving the other to be living in a state of delusional self-deception.” Not only is the water contaminated, but the well of public discourse is poisoned in some ways, too.

Another theme I picked up on in my research is that the recent history of mass media is also tied into this cycle. You could argue that the advent of cable news, and specifically of the 24-hour news cycle, is the big precursor that led to the even further polarization of information bubbles online. Saturn/Neptune themes include things like: who gets to define reality? What's truth, and what's illusion?

In June 1980, at the exact last closing square of the previous cycle, CNN became the first 24-hour news channel in the world.

In 1989, at the conjunction, CNBC was created, and so was News Corp's Sky News (Europe's first 24-hour news channel in the UK). This is where Rupert Murdoch cut his teeth in the 24-hour news business, only to launch Fox News in 1996, just ahead of the opening square. That was happening at the same time that The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed in the US, which deregulated the industry and led to a broadcast media that was largely controlled by a couple big corporations.

Here’s another interesting tidbit: at the opposition in 2006, Facebook first rolled out its News Feed, which represented a sort of tipping point away from broadcast media to social media being the primary source of news (and its ever-increasing, and ever-manipulative, algorithmic sorting). Remember what we said before, about Google entering the fray during the opening square? The opposition brought us the iPhone, Twitter, Tumblr, AND the News Feed on Facebook.

It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of new information paradigms are introduced over the next couple of years, and whether there will be some sort of resolution or closure to the previous cycle. If we’re supposedly headed in the direction of “everyone wearing their own virtual reality headsets,” where does that leave media?

The Long COVID Aftermath

Tarnas also plugs the archetypal presence of “apathetic inertia, escapism and denial, psychic numbing, dissociation, physical and spiritual fatigue, world-weariness, chronic and debilitating illnesses, infectious diseases, viruses, vaccines, and difficult to diagnose mental and physical conditions” into the Saturn/Neptune framework.

He notes that chronic fatigue syndrome emerged at the last conjunction, though it's more accurate to say the first formal definition of CFS was published in 1988. I thought this seemed important, so I did some more digging, and found that in 2006, at the opposition, the CDC ran a national campaign to raise awareness about chronic fatigue syndrome, both among the general public and healthcare workers.

We are now at the next Saturn/Neptune conjunction, and major health organizations are quietly releasing statements that 1 in 10 infections will lead to long COVID (compounding risk with each reinfection — and that’s actually one of the more conservative estimates). For those not in the know, the majority of “long COVID” cases appear to be ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), a post-viral condition that existed prior to 2019, one that has profoundly disabled people who were often in the prime of their lives when they got sick, who suffer in obscurity from a condition that is extremely poorly researched and understood. Meanwhile, most of the world has been led to believe COVID is "just a cold."

There is already widespread talk of how we're in the middle of a mass disabling event, and that the eventual cost to the general public's health and the economy could be unfathomable. Unfortunately, it would make sense that five years of Saturn/Neptune would bring the sobering aftermath of the Jupiter party that just occurred in the same signs, which coincided with the lifting of restrictions and the collective forgetting/denial of COVID.

My hope is that since this synodic cycle has also generated awareness campaigns and the introduction of this condition into medical literature, that this upcoming conjunction could represent another milestone in understanding this disease, and hopefully, ultimately, treating it.

One final thought that comes to mind here, given all the historical footnotes just mentioned: if that many people are too sick to work, will that then necessitate the formation of a more robust social safety net, or a move away from economies that previously relied on a workforce capable of laboring 40-plus hours a week? If the climate crisis accelerates, will that force our hand away from an ethos of growth-and-profit-at-all-costs? That feels like a bit too optimistic of a take given what we’ve seen go down in practice, but then again, it’s actually pretty bleak that we’d have to reach rock bottom to get there, and then also still have to deal with the fallout of that.

For now, I’ll continue pinning my hopes on the Great Basket Alignment of 2026 to restore some semblance of balance to our fucked up, crazy world.