Vesseling Celestial Fire: Saturn/Neptune in Aries & Athena: Part I
From Piscean Waters to Aries Fire
When planets change signs there is a profound shift in expression of the principles and values they symbolize. Saturn and Neptune have both been in Pisces—Neptune since 2012 and Saturn since 2023. We are now on the cusp of both entering Aries—Neptune on January 26 and Saturn on February 14. [1]
Both these celestial movements point to the beginning of a new era colored by the fiery consciousness of Aries. While Saturn’s transit through Aries will be for a little over 2 years, Neptune will be in Aries for roughly 13 years (see date chart below)—so we are entering a period wherein Aries themes, and the Aries styles of perception and behavior will be prominent.
In order to explore the openings and challenges of these signatures I want to look at the Greco-Roman goddess Athena. In the zodiac of the Dodeka Theoi, Athena is the Olympian god who rules Aries. Personifying aspects of the archetypal pattern of consciousness symbolized by Aries and its polarity partner Libra, a greater awareness of Athena, and the style of consciousness she personifies, can aid us in consciously navigating some of the opportunities and challenges of this fiery celestial chapter.
But in order to look ahead with a keener sight, we have to look at where we have been.
Neptune in Pisces
Neptune ingressed fully into Pisces in 2012 and its 14 year transit through the sign of the fishes comes to end this month.
As an archetypal principle, Neptune symbolizes the vast ocean of consciousness that all living beings are connected to. It dissolves whatever boundaries that separate us from participating in the All. Its processes of dissolution also works wonders on concrete reality, opening it up to other dimensions.
Archetypal principles have both light and shadow sides. Given the difficult current collective atmosphere, we can look back at this period (2012-2025) and see how Neptune’s undoing of concrete reality can also open the door to darker dimensions of the psyche. The last 14 years correlates with the dissolution of facts and truth in the collective sphere, a process fueled by the capacity of social media channels to proliferate disinformation and misinformation, like tidal waves continually crashing on the shores that erode the ground of reality, facts and truth.
Deception is another of the shadow dimensions of Neptune which has been amplified on the political stage to a mindbending, and to use the word of the decade, unprecedented degree.
The distortive power of the online world correlates to Neptune having been in a sextile to Uranus in Taurus, pointing to the technological sphere and its Promethean drive towards progress. Consider the decision by social media tycoons like Zuckerberg to cease monitoring their platforms for lies and misinformation, in essence, opening the floodgates to the forces who are bent on distorting reality in service to their real aims of accruing greater wealth and political power.
Under Neptune in Pisces we have all been drawn into grappling with existential questions about reality and truth, the powerful ways people can be manipulated by the spinning of fantasies that stir the darker reaches of the psyche and its survival fears and shadow projections. There is also the toll that the virtual world has had on the minds and inner emotional lives of people of all ages. The virtual world, which is boundaryless and suffuses nearly every corner of human life, has changed the actual world.
While depth psychological thinkers are trained to keep our eyes on the shadow, on the life affirming side we can catch a glimpse of Neptune in Pisces in the resurgence of interest in astrology and tarot, arts of the symbolic imagination that are ancient pathways to discovering one’s connection to the divine, mystery of life, the archetypal realm.
Saturn in Pisces
Saturn has been in Pisces since early 2023 through to February 2026. If among the many things Saturn symbolizes is the principle of reality, then we can see just how far into the Piscean waters we have drifted. This has been a time of unknowns, where instability and unpredictability abounds—environmental, economic, geopolitical, and sociopolitical. It’s as if we have been cast out upon a wild sea, open and vulnerable to the power of the deep, riding its waves and thrown about by its storms. A poem that captures the sense of danger and uncertainty:
“The Wind Has Died”
My little boat,
Take care,
There is no
Land in sight.
—Charles Simic
Saturn moving through the boundary dissolving realm of Pisces points to a complex tension. Saturn is the planetary archetype of form and stability, it symbolizes the inner and outer structures of our lives which comprise our sense of identity. On the one hand the old dominant structures of our lives and identity have been called to soften and be released (Pisces) so to open to new possibilities (Aries). But that is very challenging. Change as we well know is hard and we need to be anchored in the ground of our reality and identity in order to feel safe, this is Saturn.
In the US over the last 10 years we have come to see that the voices of authority and representatives of our democratic tradition, which partly belong under the banner of Saturn, have conspired with the most challenging sides of Neptune to spin illusions into the fabric of our cultural and political narratives. Whether it is conscious strategy, dissociation, or moral bankruptcy, the abdication of responsibility that we have seen by many likewise reflects the problematic side of Saturn in Pisces. The sense of boundaries are gone and hungry Saturn hoards, feeds, gathers power for its own sake.
At the same time, Saturn in Pisces also points to the kind of vessel that might endure the turbulent spirit of the times and our passage into the new Aries atmosphere. I wrote about this when Saturn entered Pisces in early 2023, and want to share one imaginal craft which I think are still very much the work of the current time, especially since Saturn and Neptune (ruler of Pisces) will be conjunct into February 2027. Here an excerpt from that essay.
Vessels can be Saturnian in so far as by containing, they provide form and stability. Saturn in Pisces also offers psychic medicine for the fluidity, uncertainty and instability that has bounded us on all sides in this Piscean era.
One medicinal capsule from the wise teacher Saturn is this— Adhering to psychological faith that there is something forming despite a difficult birth. Though ambiguous, there is something of value emerging. Psychological faith has to do with a strengthening of the personality, a greater capacity to live with uncertainty. It means developing “negative capability.”
This idea comes the Romantic poet John Keats. He defined negative capability as a skillfulness for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”[2] It’s a way that finds value in not possessing knowledge, not being driven to work things out, not striving via reason towards knowing. Rather, a receptive, contemplative and attentive attitude towards what is unfolding and a “Willingness to let what is mysterious or doubtful remain just that” is what prevails. In other words, negative capability is related to a knowing more with the heart rather than with the reason-thinking mind.
Negative capability goes hand in hand with psychological faith because the negative knowing or embrace of uncertainty happening at our conscious ego level allows for confidence in the greater scheme of things taking shape in more unconscious ways. This sense of the larger intelligence at work in our lives is what the astro-cosmological perspective attempts to offer.
The loosening of certainties that Saturn and Neptune in Pisces correlates to in our individual and collective lives is the very condition and process which allows for something new to be born. The transparent movement of things is what allows something fresh to happen. This is what Saturn and Neptune’s passage out of Pisces into Aries symbolizes. It is from the vast, seemingly chaotic, formlessness and uncertain deep waters that life, and a sense of its bright direction, slowly emerges.
Aries - Athena and the Hero Warrior
So let us now turn to what is arising—Neptune in Aries. The last time Neptune entered Aries was in 1861 which correlated with large collective events that focused on issues of autonomy, freedom and conquest. In America this was the Civil War era (1861-1865), and the central conflict that lead to the war was a dispute about slavery between the northern states of the Union and the southern states of the Confederacy. The Confederate states wanted slavery to be enshrined and expanded to other states while the Union states wanted to end slavery throughout the US. In President Abraham Lincoln’s words, "This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."[3] And in 1863 Pres. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which freed all enslaved people in the Southern Confederate States.
Not looking to history to repeat itself literally, the Aries principles of freedom versus servitude, individualism and autonomy versus collectivity, are likely to emerge to the foreground in our collective and individual lives.
Neptune in Aries symbolizes a collective stirring of the heroic drive towards conquest and freedom. The figures that embody these Aries values include the warrior, the crusader, the hero - figures who are the chosen favorites of the goddess Athena.[2]
The scene depicted in the Atlas metope gives us insight into the special relationship Athena has with the hero, whose path is always marked by enormous and glorious struggles in service to freedom. Among them is Heracles, one of whose 12 labors was to attain golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. These apples were guarded by a huge serpent and Heracles needed the Titan Atlas to get the apples for him. For Atlas to do so, Heracles had to take Atlas’ cosmic burden, holding the heavens and the earth on his own back.
That is the moment depicted in this sculpture. Notice how the weight of the cosmos bears heavily on Heracles’ neck—he could be crushed by it. Athena stands behind him, he cannot see her, but her gentle touch on this enormous weight is what lightens it just enough to be bearable by the hero. As the classicist Walter Otto phrases it, “always she appears at the right moment as the true counsellor and helper of the mighty hero who proudly challenged monsters and paved his own path to the gods by glorious struggle.”[4] Heracles cannot see her so he believes it is his own strength that surges through him to do the impossible. But we know it is the goddess. This is a theme I will pick up in Part II and III of the essay.
As champion of heroes, Athena is pleased by courage and the willingness to fight for what one believes in. It is said that she inspired in her favorites acts of honor and daring, both of which are majestic aspects of the Aries archetype. This may be part of the Neptune vision that we find ourselves impelled towards as we attempt to move our will in the world, fired up by a heroic vision for freedom and the striving, fighting, and conquesting needed to achieve it.
Athena and Saturn in Aries
Athena’s heroes are those who alongside their fierce courage and strength also can demonstrate restraint, clarity of perception, prudence and dignity. In the Iliad Achilles, angered by the insults of Agamemnon considers killing him. For a fleeting infinitesimal moment he waits and it is then that he feels Athena’s presence and meets her eyes, immediately understanding that if he is patient he will be recompensed and so he sheaths his sword. Athena’s power of forbearance prevails. Here is the affirming power of checking one’s emotion and desire-driven impulses—Saturn is the power of restraint.
Athena abandons warriors incapable of self-control. She is about to award immortal life to Tydeus when he goes berserk on the battle field, ripping open the skull of one he has slain so to drink his brains. Repulsed, the goddess turns away, leaving him to die because he had degraded himself. Tydeus personifies a side of Aries—the frenzied lust for action that blinds us to the effect of our actions on others and on ourselves. The consciousness that Saturn symbolizes—how we feel inhibited, restrained, blocked— in the Aries fire may be a necessary counterweight to the fiery crusader vision or berserker intensity of Neptune in Aries. “What Athena shows man, what she desires of him, and what she inspires him to, is boldness, will to victory, courage. But all of this is nothing without directing reason and illuminating clarity.”[5]
Athena’s wisdom is expressed in what is often described as her flashing eyes—a far seeing perceptiveness that leads to right or clear sighted action. Hence once of her animal familiars being the owl, whose large eyes makes them able to see all around and in the dark. As a metaphor, owl vision is an exquisite wise perceptiveness.
Drawing these meanings of the particular quality of sight associated with her, Athena personifies seeing as understanding. The Jungian analyst Ann Shearer translates this into psychological terms this way, “We must make sense of what we see if we are to act; we must assess and measure the evidence of our eyes if we are to act wisely. And when we do, it is Athene who is at work in us.”[6]
Let us consider Saturn whose gifts are slowing down in order to see what is happening, to reflect in order to understand. As the Renaissance astrologer Ficino put it, Saturn is the midwife of insight.[7]
Athena’s sharp perceptiveness can be brought into life through our willingness to slow down (Saturn) in order to regard with bright attention the call to action (Aries) stirring within us and reflecting, assessing, strategizing before acting. Saturnian qualities of the strategic mind under the aegis of Athena include civilized restraint and self-mastery over impulsive action. Freshness of Aries vision is in the capacity to see and hear clearly, not naively or impulsively.
Athena’s sight has the ability to see where the opportunity is, the opening for potential victory. Strategy is one of her gifts. Otto describes Athena as “the perfection of the living present,” which is what gave her the ability to see what was the best way to proceed in any situation for victory. In myth this was often related to battles and other tricky and complex situations.
The combination of forbearance in order to perceive accurately, to strategize action that leads to victory, describes a mature Aries consciousness. Saturn in Aries suggests that we are entering a time where those are among the attitudes and skills available to be consciously cultivated.
Saturn conjoining Neptune is the medicinal slowing down of the Aries fire which Neptune elevates into a subtle but pervasive heroic spiritual call. Where we feel our actions and willful plans hampered, delayed, maybe that is the psyche looking out for us. As Plato himself said, his daimon spoke to him in negatives. Perhaps we have an opportunity here to make room at a new level for the life affirming power of Saturn and limitation.
References
[1] A version of this essay was presented at the Fire and Air Summit at Astrology University in March 2025.
[2] The Letters of John Keats, ed. by H E Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1958), i. pp. 193-4
[3] Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others,” April 6, 1859
[4] Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods (Thames and Hudson,1929), p. 47
[5] Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods (Thames and Hudson,1929), p.53
[6] Ann Shearer, Athene: Image and Energy (Viking Arcana, 1996), p. 19
[7] Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life (1489)