Last time we explored some of the history of this cycle and looked at what happens when the conjunctions shift from earth into air. Earth cycles are about consolidating power and resources to increase material security. When these eras end, those power bases tend to fall apart, often at the hands of barbarian hordes who overrun the old empire. Who will play the role of barbarian this time?

As we saw in the first post, the transition into the air cycle began with three conjunctions in Libra in 1980-81. This marked the start of a 40 year transition, broken by the conjunction in Taurus in 2000, and ends with the conjunction in Aquarius on 21 December 2020. This represents our definitive arrival in the air cycle and we’ll be there until 2199.

The exact conjunction is on the solstice but Jupiter and Saturn will be conjunct by degree from 14 to 28 December, beginning in the final degree of Capricorn and then slipping into Aquarius. Saturn enters Aquarius on 17 December and Jupiter follows on 19 December. The rest of the cycle plays out like this:

• Jupiter Saturn conjunction: December 2020
• Jupiter Saturn square: 2024 – 2025
• Jupiter Saturn opposition: 2029 – cycle peak
• Jupiter Saturn square: 2035 – 2036
• Jupiter Saturn conjunction: 2040 – end cycle and new beginning

Fast forward to the very end of the air cycle and it starts to transition into water with a conjunction in Scorpio in 2159, followed by a return to air in Gemini in 2179, and a final air conjunction in Aquarius in 2199. The next water cycle will then begin in 2219 with a conjunction in Scorpio. It’ll be interesting to see if we’re all still here then!

Generally speaking, Jupiter is happier in air than Saturn, but Aquarius is Saturn’s home turf so Jupiter might not always be welcome. Because they represent the opposites of expansion and contraction, Jupiter and Saturn balance each other in a dynamic pattern – a bit like breathing in and out. We need both expansion and contraction, optimism and realism, and things tend to go pear-shaped when we let either side get out of control.

At best, the Jupiter Saturn conjunction offers an opportunity for change and to integrate the best of the old with the new. On a personal level, you may experience both expansion and contraction in the Aquarius area of your chart.

This will be a good time to review your goals and look for opportunities to grow and learn. Look at where you find meaning and social purpose, and how you contribute to society and connect with others in a productive way. To get a sense of how it might play out for you, check out:

• Jupiter Transits through the houses
• Saturn Transits through the houses
• Jupiter Transits to Saturn
• Saturn Transits to Jupiter

On a collective level, we can expect to see the breakup of old empires based on hierarchies and the accumulation of stuff, and a shift to a decentralised, multi-polar, networked structure based on trade and the sharing of ideas.

The foundations for these changes were seeded in the earth cycle and started to spread with the conjunctions in Libra in 1980-81. This is when we saw the tech revolution take off in IT, personal computers and mobile phones. It gathered speed in the 90s with the launch of the World Wide Web, and then exploded in the 2000s with social media, smart phones and ubiquitous digital connectedness.

These technologies were viewed with great idealism (Libra) when they first started to spread and that has mostly continued, although many are now voicing concerns. The conjunction in Aquarius marks the birth of the digital age, taking us away from the physical world into the virtual.

In economic and social terms, the transition into air saw the rise of neoliberalism and deregulated markets which has created enormous debt bubbles and crippling levels of inequality and poverty. This is having a devastating effect on the natural world and is causing a global crisis in governance that threatens the entire system.

The peak of capitalism came in 2000 at the final earth conjunction. The ‘End of History’ was announced – the West had won! This proved premature – nothing but arrogance and hubris – because next came 9/11 and the meltdown began. That decade ended in recession and austerity, and capitalism has now entered its final catabolic phase and is riddled with corruption.

This transit is difficult to write about because it’s sandwiched between the Saturn Pluto conjunction and the Saturn Uranus square, and Pluto is still doing his thing in Capricorn, tearing up the furniture. We’re right in the eye of the storm that’s collapsing the old system. There’s too much chaos to see through the fog and it could take many years to clear.

In theory, we should be entering a period of expansion and increased optimism. But that’s hard to imagine right now. Some areas will expand while others contract as we deal with the fallout of our current and multiplying crises.

The Jupiter Saturn conjunction will also square Uranus (exact in February 2021), boosting its effects. We could be about to experience the mother of all economic implosions following the ballooning stimulus packages and money printing that’s been going on – and mostly going to the already rich.

Back in 2000 we had a similar configuration but the other way around: Jupiter Saturn conjunction in Taurus square Uranus in Aquarius. That transit coincided with the Dot-Com bubble crash. They believed it couldn’t fail – right until it popped. Of course, it didn’t take the tech industry long to recover, but that wasn’t the entire global economy.

Whatever happens, economic reform could see the expansion of a huge speculative bubble based on ‘green’ tech and bio-surveillance leading to growth after 2022. Along with UBI, this could fuel great optimism, but as with all previous bubbles, the growth may turn out to be imaginary and implode at the opposition in 2029.

How long can we keep doing this?

The last 200 years have brought us to an impasse, and the consequences of the materialist worldview are now obvious. We’ve mastered the material world but our relationship to the earth is destructive – a shadow manifestation of the earth cycle. Not a good start for the next 200 years.

However, things look bad right now because all the trauma, corruption and injustice is coming to the surface. This provides an opportunity to face the past and heal old wounds. Only then can we find a healthy and sane way forward.

This isn’t an easy process – it’s a living nightmare for many – but then, so was living in the old order. As the old order decays and collapses, the new order is seeded in the mulch and will grow out of its ashes.

Unfortunately, that process of change is already being hijacked. The so-called Great Reset is trying to subvert it by continuing the old order under a new guise. The 4th Industrial Revolution isn’t a revolution but a mutation. It’s business as usual painted green. A mutation of capitalism that allows the uber-rich to hang on to their goodies at the expense of everybody else.

Remember: Aquarius is revolutionary but not necessarily progressive (see Saturn in Aquarius). Its focus is humanity, equality, freedom, and fairness, but its shadow is fanaticism, groupthink, and totalitarianism. The ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Build Back Better’ talk about reform and equality and justice and community, but that’s all it is – talk. Marketing and spin.

In reality, it’s driven by ideologies that are rooted in the old way of doing things, on 19th century assumptions about population growth, dodgy scientism, a dim view of humanity, and a hatred of the body and the earth. It’s motivated more by a desire to control than to live. And that’s why it will fail.

The shift into the air cycle corresponds with periods of rapid social change and intellectual development. Add digital technology into the mix and we’ve got the potential for exponential change. The question is what direction that change takes and who directs it.

During the earth cycle the fuel for growth was physical stuff, like land, gold and oil, and the exploitation of labour. That system is no longer productive thanks to diminishing returns. Basically, they’ve bled us dry and need a new way to extract value and accumulate wealth.

In the air cycle the fuel for growth will be information and data, and the basis for empire will centre around the control of data. Instead of exploiting labour, the system will exploit data as a resource.

Data will be extracted from you and stored on blockchain and traded as a commodity. Only the rich will be able to afford privacy. The rest of us will be digital serfs subsisting on an allowance conditional on compliance. And it will be called freedom.

This way of using data betrays the flaw at the heart of the globalist agenda. It represents a reification of data, the confusion of the map with the territory. In other words, it’s based on the old materialist perspective.

The real problem here isn’t necessarily technology or data, but our beliefs about reality and the ideas that underpin how we organise ourselves and run society.

With the shift into air we have the potential for a radical change in consciousness. Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius both want to build a better society, so now is the time for conversations about what kind of world we want to live in and what kind of people we want to be. What is a good society? What does it mean to be human? How can we live together without killing each other?

The shift into air offers us an opportunity to master the mind rather than the material world. But mastery of the mind doesn’t mean accumulating more and more information. You need to know what to do with it and how to understand it. In other words, you need wisdom.

Unfortunately, the West appears to be gleefully destroying itself. We’re busy deconstructing all the advances made since the Age of Enlightenment and have given up on Reason. We could be about to enter another Dark Age brought on by our inability to think and tolerate difference and debate – a drift into the dark side of Aquarius.

However, this deconstruction is part of the natural development of consciousness. It’s simply what happens when the ego-mind reaches the limits of its powers and starts to break down. This is potentially dangerous because it can unravel into madness, as we’re seeing.

But it also has the potential to shift into a breakthrough. If we have the humility to learn from other cultures that understand paradox and four-value logic, we could experience an awakening into a more integral or holistic level of consciousness.

We could see a renaissance of new ideas and alternative perspectives, especially coming from voices that have been marginalised in the past. There could be a great flourishing of culture, music, art, and theatre, and breakthroughs in science and physics with a move away from materialism. As Arthur Eddington said:

“The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

Plasma physics could open the door to a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe and new ways of generating energy. (Explore these Walter Russell quotes for a head start – also a clue to how astrology works!) There may be more space travel (for the rich) and space-based tech, including satellites, Moon bases, the mining of asteroids, and trips to Mars…

The dark side of this is surveillance and the digital economy which depends on the security of space and the domination of the planet as a whole. However, any move to create a One World Order, or top-down control system, is likely to fail in the long-run because it goes against the flow of change.

The archetypal pattern of the air cycle is fragmentation and decentralisation. Earth is hierarchical, while air is horizontal and networked.

This could manifest as a shift in ideals towards community and humanity, a reduction in scale to the human level away from massive corporate entities that alienate and depersonalise. Democracy could become participatory rather than representative, perhaps using technology and local assemblies, with regional and city states administered by mayors.

Obviously, there are different levels and types of participation and the people won’t necessarily get a say in how things are run, except in a token way perhaps. Developments like this could lead to the illusion of democracy – so business as usual – unless the people make their voices heard and demand real change.

Long-term, we might see the breakup of Europe and nation states into smaller entities. The UK and the US are both ready to descend into civil war of different kinds, but heading in the same direction. America could see a rise in states seceding from the union, and the UK could eventually return to its ancient regional kingdoms.

Whatever happens, the West is in decline. It’s our turn to face the barbarians at the gate.

This sounds like bad news, but it doesn’t have to be. It depends how attached you are to current system – and considering that system is falling apart, the less attached you are, the better.

Barbarians only succeed in destroying civilisations because those cultures have become corrupt and weak and are already collapsing from within. The dominant empire gets lazy and soft and lowers its guard. Or it goes mad with hubris and greed and overreaches. The barbarians take advantage of that weakness and move in for the kill.

So who are the barbarians this time?

The word ‘barbarian’ comes from the Greek for foreign, so it just means someone from outside the civilisation. Looked at this way, it could be any culture that hasn’t been absorbed into the dying empire. And the West isn’t short of enemies.

The conjunction happens to fall on China’s ascendant in Aquarius, so this could mark the start of the economic shift to the East. It won’t happen overnight but the West has just shot itself in the foot (or the head), making that shift easier.

However, we also use ‘barbarian’ to mean uncultured. This may be unfair to actual barbarians who were often quite cultured, and these days it’s what would be called ‘hate speech’! 😉 But looked at this way, the West itself is pretty barbaric.

You could argue that Western civilisation lost its way and got twisted into the machine system that we live in – a system that’s barbarous, destructive and inhumane. If that’s the case, then the barbarians are already inside the gates and have been running the empire for years!

But perhaps this degeneration and corruption is just the natural course of empire slowly destroying itself. The question is how ‘we the people’ respond.

The conjunction falls on the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, the domain of the West. This moment symbolises the death of the old king or gods, and the rebirth of the light in darkness. (More on that here)

The old gods can’t hang on for much longer. The globalists are unlikely to succeed because that ideology is in decline. The ‘Great Reset’ is a continuation of the old cycle hanging on for dear life, and that monolithic approach can’t survive going forward. Anything imposed from the top down will fail in the long-run, even if it succeeds short-term.

There are no leaders who embody the incoming Aquarian principles of fairness, equality, and humanity – they talk about it, but that’s just hot air. The system is too corrupt to produce the leaders we need. That shows us that true leadership and change will come from the people.

Maybe only when the system fails will we be able to rebuild something better and truly humanitarian – not the digital feudalism promised in the Great Reset. There could be a period of crisis over the next couple of years followed by a rebirth and renaissance driven by genuine community movements – not from within the system, but from outside it. As protesters in Spain have been saying, “Not right, not left, we are from below.”

The alternative is a shiny new tyranny to replace the old one. And no sane person wants that.

Further reading:

• The Saturn Uranus Square: Freedom or Slavery – time to choose
• The Great Reset for Dummies on Tessa Fights Robots
• Klaus Schwab and his Great Fascist Reset on Winter Oak
• Blockchain Education, A Ticket to Digital Serfdom on Wrench in the Gears
• Great series on why the 4th industrial revolution isn’t green: Unpacking Extinction Rebellion: Part 1 – Net-Zero Emissions

Images: Sign; Empire

More Jupiter Saturn Cycle posts 

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