Planet Waves

by Eric Francis Coppolino and illustrations by Emil Alzamora, March 06, 2007

Chaos and doubt, fomenting awareness and fermenting commitment, weirdness like any other moment we’ve known, is all animated in the cosmos by the opposition of Saturn and Neptune. Every 35 years they meet face to face, and because of the movement of the Earth spinning around the Sun between the two of them (which creates the retrograde effect), there is usually a series of three exact meetings. The second of these was February 28. The first was back in August of 2006 and the third one happens this coming June.

Personally, it would seem that everyone is experiencing this on some level in our personal lives, even if only through the lives of people close to us: assumptions dissolving, becoming free from psychological patterns, and seeking a new depth of self-understand-ing. Saturn opposing Neptune is about waking up and transforming ourselves in a conscious way; if done gently, using a combination of imagination and manifestation; otherwise, by falling apart and coming back together in a different form.

With an event like this, you typically get a news curve focused around its most exact alignments. History speeds up and it takes on distinct properties, or at least they’re distinct if you can feel symbols at work and can imagine that we live in one world where everything is interconnected.

When astrologers of the future look back, they will remember the Saturn-Neptune opposition as the time that the planet acknowledged the reality of climate change. It “all began” with the twin hurricanes, Rita and Katrina, in the summer of 2005, which is well within the time frame of a major transit like this (the total span of effect is at least five years, total, centered on right about now). That was an obvious turning point, particularly on the heels of the tsunami.

That has not been pinned on climate change, but I have a theory. The melting ice cap in the south has taken the weight of that region of the world, and the resulting change in shape of the crust set off a subduction zone. I also have a theory that the quake was caused by oil drilling, which set off a knock effect via an immediately prior quake near Tasmania, and I don’t doubt that the technology exists to make an earthquake. Followers of Nikola Tesla would say it has for a while.

Flooding of the land is the perfect image of Saturn, symbolically a solid thing, meeting Neptune, symbolically and in reality a liquid one. So, too, is the revelation of the ineptitude of a government in the case of the United States that could not really help, and feels all washed up.

The tsunami and the hurricanes changed the geography, economics, and the social structure of the world. Our way of thinking changed as a result. The tsunami and hurricanes were early effects (Neptune, in my experiences, often has those, and has the widest effect orb of any known planet).