It's the Great Conjunction, Charlie Brown (and the Great Mutation, Too)

“How many years can a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
Yes,and how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?”

—Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Six very long months ago, I threw a predictive hat into the ring that the upcoming Jupiter-Saturn conjunction would usher in “positive new developments, since it is clear to me that Saturn at 0 degrees of Aquarius (where it was in late March and early April of this year, and where it is currently) is a crucial factor for this particular pandemic. Aquarius rules groups of people, revolution, science, and technology. With Jupiter joining Saturn there at the end of this year, perhaps humanity will step up to the plate.” (From my blog post of 6/27/20.)

Little did I know when I was waxing so uncharacteristically optimistic in my usually downbeat astrology blog that this was to be no ordinary Jupiter-Saturn conjunction—not that any of them are, as so-called Great Conjunctions only occur every 20 years and serve as markers for societal epochs—but a Great Mutation. It came as mind-blowing news for me to learn that Great Conjunctions do not fall in random signs every other decade, as I had assumed ever since I began practicing astrology; instead, Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions occur in a single element for 200 years before jumping to a different element for the next 200 years—although there is a preview of the Great Mutation in the penultimate conjunction of each 200-year cycle. (Indispensable source material for this article: https://www.astropro.com, “Astrologer Richard Nolle’s 3000-Year Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction Table," published 4/26/98.)

In other words, by the time you read this article, we will have just emerged from an earth-element Great Conjunction cycle that began on January 26, 1842. Let that sink in for a New York minute: on a societal level, this cycle has been almost entirely focused on the material world. Even the flower children of the 1960s who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of the dog-eat-dog rat race for at least a few years, wanted to (as per Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock”) “get back to the land to set my soul free […] And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Our most recent glimpse of the air-element Great Conjunction cycle was the 1980–81 Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Libra, which marked the next two decades with the rise of the personal computer, the internet, and dramatic shifts in the institutions of marriage, law, politics, and borders. There was the rise of Reagan on the one hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the other.

In 2000 the final earth-element Great Conjunction occurred, in Taurus. With the exception of the preview of 40 years ago, our last Great Conjunction in the air-element cycle occurred on January 16, 1405—and it happened in Aquarius.

I am writing this with Jupiter and Saturn still playing tug-of-time in Capricorn, so I am finding it difficult to evade the clutches of earth-sign logic, which is empirical, not theoretical; rooted in the five senses and the mundane world. Perhaps it is the Capricorn influence that is encouraging me to fixate on an identical pattern during the last elemental shift from earth to air: Libra (1186) to Taurus (1206) to Aquarius (1226) rather than ditch history and simply predict that the coming Great Mutation in Aquarius will send humanity to group therapy…. Yet even if history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.

The countless generations of astrologers who lived before the outer planets were discovered would probably slap me upside the head for not being aware of this Great Conjunction pattern, but back in the long-ago day, Jupiter and Saturn really were the naked eye’s final frontiers of our solar system. Every 20 years, they appear in the night sky to merge into one extraordinarily bright star, which in the year 6 BC was conjunct in Pisces three times (May, October, and December) and christened the Star of Bethlehem or the Christmas Star, alerting the Three Wise Men (code for astrologers) to the birth of a great spiritual leader. Before the outer planets were discovered, Jupiter co-ruled Sagittarius and Pisces, while Saturn co-ruled Capricorn and Aquarius. These final four signs of the zodiac are associated with transpersonal matters; appropriately, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction is also known as the Great Chronocrator, Markers of Time.

The Great Mutation at 0 degrees of Aquarius occurs on December 21, 2020, on the heels of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, when the Sun enters the Saturn-ruled sign Capricorn. Saturn is clearly still a force to be reckoned with here, not ready to cede its dominance of 2020, and is putting its harsh taskmaster stamp on the “dark winter” that US president-elect Joe Biden has been warning us about concerning the pandemic. Although expansive, optimistic, gambling Jupiter will have an easier time transiting through Aquarius than in Capricorn (sign of its fall), it will still be dominated by Saturn, as the latter planet is still the co-ruler of Aquarius.

The chart for the Great Mutation in Washington DC points to a classic earth-air conflict, as the Ascendant at 0 degrees of Taurus (conjunct Joe Biden’s Moon at 1 degree of Taurus) exactly squares the Great Mutation, with wild-card Uranus in Taurus in the First House of identity, while the Sun-Mercury conjunction at 0–1 degrees of Capricorn trines the Ascendant. Consider, too, that the Sun on Inauguration Day conjuncts the Great Mutation, literally spotlighting its significance. I do not want to come off as Chicken Little here, but…the sky could very well be falling.

The seeds of Saturn in Aquarius were sown at the very beginning of last spring; this winter, they will bloom as social distancing (a manifestation of Saturn in Aquarius) moves into a new phase with new or enhanced forms of online or virtual technology (Aquarius) in an attempt to normalize on a collective scale what this time last year was unthinkable or unimaginable for most individuals. Social media will be more policed (Saturn) at the same time it expands (Jupiter); Zoom may roll out a Zany offshoot while Slack rolls out Slick. This past spring, I predicted that multiple breakthrough Covid-19 vaccines would be invented on the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction; at the time of this writing, approvals of various vaccines are already occurring in some countries, without necessarily finishing the standard protocol (Jupiter and Uranus going rogue on Saturn).

The most significant aspects of the winter of 2020–21, following the Great Mutation, are profoundly challenging: the Jupiter-Uranus square (1/17/21) and the first of several Saturn-Uranus squares (2/17/21), during the same period that Mars is conjunct Uranus in Taurus. As Mars is an inner planet, and debilitated in Taurus, there is no way for us to opt out of these challenging squares, and they will involve the same signs of the Jupiter-Uranus and Saturn-Uranus squares of 2000—just flipped. Rhyming history, anyone?

Think back to 2000, the final Great Conjunction in the earth element, specifically Taurus; reflect on the past 20 years of societal matters, and how they have all been tied into the sign of money and possessions. Particularly in the US, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened into a canyon. Unfettered capitalism, tax breaks, and the stock market have mainly benefited the 1%. Nearly all politicians are in the back pockets of corporations, which recently were determined to have the same rights as people (but not vice-versa). 9/11 occurred and has had the effect of dismantling certain personal liberties (e.g., Big Brotherish surveillance) in the name of security (an earth-element desire). Even as the internet, virtual reality, and AI gained traction with Uranus in Aquarius, the tech bubble burst in 2000 and true communication between disparate groups (Jupiter and Saturn) got bogged down in the bullheaded “my way or the highway” modus operandi that is the dark side of Taurus.

This time around, however, Uranus has moved from the sign of its rulership to the sign of its fall, which suggests that the effects of this square will be even harsher and involve not just public health and economic misery for millions of people, but the climate-change emergency that is mainly kindling young activists who will be most affected by the coming devastation if nothing is done very soon to mitigate it (as it may already be too late to stop the damage entirely).

During the spring of 2020, millions of individuals lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and a global recession ensued;
Saturn backed off from the exact square, but starting this winter, the square will be in full force. While the Jupiter-Uranus square willencourage conspiracy theories, cultlike groups, rampant fake news, and gambling with money and literal lives, the real crash will come on the exact Saturn-Uranus square. Incoming president Biden may say “Bye Don” as the Lame Donald Duck is removed from the White House with a butterfly net (or, depending on what he attempts during the Jupiter-Uranus square, in handcuffs). But unless the US Senate is flipped in the January runoff in Georgia or the Senate Majority Leader candy-flips, Americans may not be helped in any real way this winter as Covid-19 ravages the nation and vaccines are at the very earliest stages of being distributed. As of this writing, there are talks in the Senate of passing a compromised stimulus bill to help individuals and businesses; if there is no significant improvement, and individuals are being evicted and going hungry, even more people will take to the streets in protest of this utterly avoidable mess than the Black Lives Matter movement (though there will be overlap). And the protesting could easily turn violent.

The stubborn nature of this Great Mutation in Aquarius squaring Uranus in Taurus also indicates that another bubble will burst, with more potential violence: the information bubble, which has polarized our society and is yoked to money in the form of corporate interests and hucksters. Critical thinking has become a lost art, as has compassion and a sense of fair play. Every opinion is a fact; every fact is an opinion. Many of us, no matter how nice, educated, or “evolved” we are, have our own set-in-stone beliefs on just about everything, gleaned from such disparate sources that when op-ed columnists opine, newscasters speak, epidemiologists weigh in, the CDC flipflops, Facebook friends post, or twitterers tweet, they are all preaching in echo chambers to their very separate choirs. Very recently, I became aware of Parler, a far-right social media platform that formed in response to pushback from Facebook.

Federal mask mandates and strict three-month lockdowns may work in some countries, but not here, and particularly not during a 20-year cycle defined, as in the last 20-year cycle, by Jupiter and Saturn squaring Uranus in fixed know-it-all signs. Freedom has become such a loaded term, used by many people to define their right to not wear a mask to protect other people, that I nearly scrapped the Bob Dylan reference at the beginning of this article. As the poet William Butler Yeats put it so eloquently in “The Second Coming,” just following the First World War and the last pandemic:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Now that we are trying to tame the worst public health crisis since Yeats wrote that poem in 1919, the center must regain its footing if we are to make it as a species, or at least as Americans, to the next potential renaissance (as occurred in Italy midway through the last air-element Great Conjunction cycle). We need not to “get back to normal,” as recent normal was not working out so well for many of us, but to be inspired by a long-ago era.

An era when the newborn Magna Carta was used as a springboard for common law outside of England. An era when the populace (symbolized by Aquarius) hungered and fought for human rights (Aquarius again) that would benefit as many people of all races, religions, and walks of life as possible instead of sinking into tribalism, cynicism, nihilism, and authoritarian populism (which has enabled fascism, holocausts, ethnic cleansing—and most recently, a mentally ill psychopathic grifter to become the President of the United States). An era when ideas and communication (domains of the air element) were valued at least as much as things and ownership (ruled by earth).

Tribunals and revolutions may be unavoidable during this elemental societal change. But if enough humane humans unite, we can get the true Age of Aquarius rolling…with the great transformer Pluto transiting through Aquarius, to boot. This winter, let us mask up, take a deep breath, and begin a 200-year-long journey.

Jupiter Conjunct Pluto, Round Three: The Return of the Coronavirus That Never Left

Jupiter and Pluto swimming in a sea of Covid-19; collage created by T. C. Gardstein in April 2020

The Jupiter-Pluto conjunction of 2020 has been one of those aspects that neatly dovetail with science: as I wrote back at the end of June, with number 2 of 3 such meetings between Jupiter and Pluto about to recur, this aspect has coincided with surges of Covid-19. Now, as we gaze down the barrel of the third and final conjunction, exact today (11/12) at 4:39 p.m. EST, the pandemic is spiraling out of control in many countries (with a few notable exceptions, such as the Far East and Australia, which instituted strict lockdowns). Even New York City, which had succeeded in tamping down positive cases to about 1 percent this past summer after a terrible spring during which tens of thousands of New Yorkers died, is moving in the wrong direction -- as is the rest of the state.

Unlike the first two Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions, we have a glimmer of hope in the form of a supposedly highly effective vaccine being developed by a pharmaceutical house that has refused to take any Operation Warp Speed money from the White House's current administration. I predicted earlier this year that mid- to late December would bring a welcome Christmas present (even if, like me, you do not celebrate this holiday) in the form of a scientific breakthrough, a testament to humans' humanity. It would be wonderful if a vaccine that is safe and reliable turns out to be this gift. However, as reputable news sources have already cautioned, one or more such vaccines will not end this pandemic immediately; there will be issues concerning manufacture, distribution, and a willingness of most people to take the vaccine, and in the Nothern Hemisphere, there will be a long winter of "pandemic fatigue" to get through first.

Interestingly, on the second Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, Mars entered its ruling sign Aries, which turned retrograde near the end of the sign on September 9. Traditionally, the period of Mars retrograde indicates that bullies will prevail. Mars finally stations direct on Friday the 13th, so hopefully this will put the kibosh on any coup that the current US (p)resident may be planning via some high-up Republicans finally growing a backbone and refusing to enable the Toddler in Chief any further. If this does not occur, Mars direct in Aries may well spark a new wave of protests.

Remember that Jupiter expands the nature of whatever planet it contacts as well as the sign it inhabits. Jupiter is said to be in its fall (i.e., significantly debilitated) in Capricorn, where it has been since late 2019, and Pluto in Capricorn could also be referred to as Big Brother, combining the Saturnian harsh taskmaster with the underhanded, manipulative Plutonian cruelty aimed at the collective. The Jupiter-Pluto conjunction has indeed brought mass suffering, but the maddening thing about it was that it didn't have to be so devastating. The pandemic could've and should've been brought to heel in January or February, but a perfect storm of the worst manifestations of Capricorn -- corrupt, heartless governments and leaders; the politicization of science; having "the economy," corporations, and the stock market matter more than people's lives; cruel racism; extreme nihilism and cynicism stemming from just as extreme mistrust of abusive institutions -- wound up raining illness, death, stress, depression, and destruction down on millions of people.

Even after Jupiter pulls past Pluto for good (or, more accurately, for the next 13 years) we will be feeling the effects of this conjunction very intensely for at least another week or so, as the Sun in Scorpio will sextile Jupiter and Pluto on Saturday 11/14 and the Moon in Capricorn will conjunct Jupiter and Pluto on Thursday 11/19. The sextile should bring an opportunity to work harmoniously with this odd, potentially destructive energy, while the Capricorn Moon will attempt to suppress the emotions, but any denial or stuffing down of feelings will ultimately fail. Confronting the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction is not for the faint of heart, but it must be done if there is any hope for getting through it.

If you are having a Solar Return or an anniversary today, which just so happens to be the day of the week ruled by Jupiter, the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction will certainly have a lot to say about your upcoming year as an individual or as part of a relationship. This uncompromising aspect urges you not to randomly gamble (as Jupiter frequently does to test Lady Luck) but to take extreme actions to learn, teach, travel, have out-of-body experiences, expand your roots, deep-dive into earth energies, and ultimately transform.

Election Predictions: Mercury Stationing Direct on a Jupiter-Pluto Conjunction...Will the Third Time Be the Charm, or the Perfect Storm?

With Mercury stationing direct on US Election Day, it is very unlikely that the results will be determined tonight or even tomorrow, particularly since Mercury will soon square transiting Saturn in Capricorn (indicating delays) and US Pluto in Capricorn (indicating all kinds of frightening, underhanded, violent, criminally oriented possibilites). Mercury is in Libra, the sign of the Scales (the symbol of justice), so it's also very likely that the Supreme Court will be involved.

Mars, the planet of war, aggression, and desire, is still retrograde in its ruling sign Aries until 11/13, the day after the final of three Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions in Capricorn, so until then there is also a sense of pushing hard without quite breaking through. As I wrote earlier this year, I believe the signature of Covid-19 is the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn; each time this aspect that expands/magnifies (Jupiter) pestilence and death (Pluto) nears the exact conjunction (April 4, June 30, November 12), there has has been a corresponding wave or surge of this pandemic. This holds especially true for the United States, since Jupiter will also pass over US Pluto, though Europe is currently facing a second wave. The key difference, of course, is that the US government, steered by the Republican majority in the Senate, cut off aid to individuals and small businesses months ago; economic hardship (also symbolized by Jupiter in the sign of its fall) foisted on those who need the most help has effectively set up a lose-lose situation. Many claim that the cure (lockdowns and less extreme restrictions) is worse than the disease, yet the two undeniably depend on each other. The politicization of public health has been an unfortunate side effect of this heavily Capricorn year, though Saturn's three-month stay in Aquarius (from late March till early July) manifested in the highly unpopular social (Aquarius) distancing (Saturn).

Although I believe that Biden will prevail in the end, due to his own natal chart lining up better than Trump's with the US's natal chart this year, over the next four years, with the United States coming up on its Pluto Return, revolution is inevitable, both from without and within. The United States must either regenerate and transform (Pluto actions) or die under a fascist plutocracy. Trump may wind up in jail, but the fact that almost half of the US voters continue to believe in his vision, as well as the rise in Far Right groups such as QAnon, is highly concerning. Over twenty years ago, I predicted that the US would have another civil war, despite the messy geographical boundaries. Now it seems more than ever that the US is headed for a messy divorce.

It remains to be seen if the US will wind up on the right side of history by the time the biggest global crisis since the Great Depression and World War II has ended with either a bang or a whimper.