The New Moon in Aquarius this morning waxed from a conjunction to its ruler Saturn, our luminaries brought together with the time-binding planet in its yang or ‘diurnal’ home.  Just as Capricorn, the yin home of Saturn, might navigate existing power structures, winning games ‘on a system’s terms’ to sport the jewel of endurance or honor a lineage, Aquarius as the yang home of Saturn tends to rattle the walls, push the envelope and architect new pathways around structures in place.

This lunation also points to the condition of Venus, the lover planet having stationed direct on the 29th with Mercury soon to catch up on the 3rd.  Moreover, it reactivates the fading last of 2021’s three squares between Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus.  It is ‘the Age of Air’ and all his pathogens, be them cartridges, coronavirus, or capitalism — the endless abstraction of subject from object — and a re-emphasis of how our individual, relational and collective values are configured.  Dynamics to watch for:

* iconoclasm, solitude, dissent; groupthink, ‘a unity’ but under what banner

* inverted parties and divisive talking points; ‘airy percepts’

* what meant one thing now means the other; people inoculated with this idea or that, polarizing and mobilizing, winds stirring objects in the corner

* is what I do useful only as an idea, a number, or a half-contribution to the intangible bankroll of technocracy, or is my worth a tactile, visceral thing in which I participate and actively reclaim as an act of personal sovereignty and service to the world

* the relationship between materiality and the ideas we abstract from it

* individual and collective definitions of value; the mitigation of differences among many voices

* Kanye West’s Instagram post vehemently knocking the notion that he’ll do an NFT

* boundaries, revisions, and the examination of what stability or sustainability look like with others, from romance to the reifying of community and societal ideals

* hard work and slow ascent as much as rapid manifestation

Whereas Capricorn energy might fortify a physical matrix for the conduction of an idea, Aquarius energy seeks to restore things to that ideal; a wizard spelling crystalline structures and a renegade taking to them with a disruptive torch, both two sides of the same coin.  Genius works that way — part of Air’s ‘gischt’, whether conforming to or unraveling social complexes.

While modern planetary rulerships might relegate one saturnian sign energy to upholding and the other to tearing down, Vic DiCara will tell you how punk a placement Capricorn Rising is, a sentiment I can echo just looking upon some of my friends in Pittsburgh.  Conveying this point in another arena of art, I often like to say Henry Miller (a Capricorn Sun) wasn’t exactly fond of censorship.

Similarly perhaps, you will find many a notable ‘staunch conservative and eccentric firebrand in one’ born among the Saturn in Aquarius generation two orbits ago in the early 60’s.  Some of the most famous right-wing pundits therein haven’t gone the traditional routes one might sometimes associate with their closest party alignments.  It was early 2016 when I first wrote about the aquarian signatures in some of these charts, with many such individuals — Hannity, Breitbart, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones — going degree-less against the grain.  While I don’t happen to share these political persuasions, such examples demonstrate that just as both houses of Kronos have reformer and revolutionary streaks interwoven, so they transfer different relationships to upholding or eschewing convention.

Yet through the numinous perception lent by an astrologically informed worldview, statistics as to ‘which sign placement is what way’ become less important than the way in which a resonant archetypal quality is expressed by someone born under a given sign or planet-in-sign placement.  We all are complicit in the upholding of things, as much as we are compelled to tear them down and spell them anew.  Martin Luther King Jr. embodied a third decan Capricorn Sun conjunct the Midheaven, with his lone Aquarius planet being Mercury in the 10th ruling the mental muscles of his Mars in Gemini in the 2nd.  His often parroted quote, “The ultimate tragedy is not oppression and cruelty by evildoers, but the silence over that by good people” is one of the weightier expressions of this particular saturnian dynamic’s multivalence.

Aquarius refines any approach to organizing people or system-building with an idealistic bent.  Where Capricorn’s cardinal mode and earth triplicity might conjure a more sensory orientation around power, eyes cast upon a domain of moving pieces, Aquarius’ fixed mode and air triplicity evoke ‘fixed thought’ and the force of mind that makes networkers and world-bridgers as much as outcasts and pariahs.  This not quite the melancholy of the will’s negation in Saturn’s nocturnal home Capricorn, as it is the melancholy of the mind’s isolation in his diurnal home Aquarius, ‘the madman’ in his laboratory annex.

Aquarius is the sign of the Sun’s fall, opposite our Star’s ‘home’ in Leo.  While Leo radiates from the inside out, Aquarius looks from the outside in, keenly aware of what makes each person feel different, even alienated.  Aquarius says, “I see that in you, I recognize you, it’s okay” and reels the person in.  By this same breath Aquarius ‘bridges the gap’ and can be the life of the party, as much the iconoclast or exile.  In our human condition as wounded healers and learning teachers, just as Aquarius stirs the pot and rattles the walls, so it builds bridges, healing the divide between seemingly separate hearts and minds.  All solaced walks lead back to the same hive.

—A.B.