Saturn Neptune – fighting for the underdog

Saturn Neptune conjunctions come round roughly three times a century – in 1989 in Capricorn, in 1953 in Libra and in 1917/18 in Leo. The next one nearly comes together in Aries in June 2025 and comes exact briefly in February 2026.

  Historically they have been associated with the fight for womens’ and workers’ rights, epidemics, religious events and collapsing empires.

 Below is a pull together from previous posts and from The Astrological History of the World.

WOMEN:   All countries have their own specific arc of history but looking at the UK, the first key change towards the emancipation of women came with the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, with Saturn Neptune together in Taurus, which gave wives for the first time the right of separate ownership. Then on the next conjunction in 1917–18 in Leo, the campaign for women’s suffrage succeeded in getting the vote for women over the age of 30.

  Both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne to exert feminine influence over matters of state on Saturn–Neptune conjunctions — in 1558 in Taurus, and 1953 in Libra. Both of them were enduring monarchs in typical Saturnine fashion, Elizabeth I ruling for 45 years, Elizabeth 11 for 70 years.  Benazir Bhutto became the first woman prime minister of Pakistan on the conjunction in Capricorn in 1988, though it proved a short-lived triumph.

  Literature also rose to the challenge and produced memorable novels by or about women – Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Molière’s The Misanthrope and The Dumb Lady. More recently Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish film-maker, produced his cult movie Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown.

  Not that anything happens without a backlash and Saturn Neptune also has associations with the persecution of witches – arising from the masculine Saturnine fear of the mysterious, less rational feminine in Neptune.

  The two previous Saturn Neptune in Aries were in 1702/1703 and 1379. In line with Saturn Neptune’s proclivity towards the feminine, Queen Anne took over in 1702 as monarch from her brother-in-law William of Orange to reign for five years. The 2018 Olivia Coleman movie ‘The Favourite’ related court intrigues as she sank into depressed middle age after 17 pregnancies with no issue. She was born on 6 February 1665 when Saturn and Neptune were both in Capricorn, so she followed the pattern. When she took over the throne Saturn was in the final degree of Pisces about to join Neptune in Aries.

EPIDEMICS: When the Spanish flu struck around January 1918 the Saturn Neptune conjunction in Leo was in place.  Saturn Neptune is the classic astrological signature for epidemics and illnesses. Spanish flu killed off, on rough estimates, anywhere between 1 and 6 per cent of the global population – perhaps 25 to 50 million people.  It was exacerbated and spread by troop movements at the end of World War 1 and killed more in 24 weeks than HIV/AIDS did in 24 years. Curiously it mostly killed young adults it is thought because the older population had built up immunity from a previous flu exposure. It came in three waves – over early 1918, receded through the summer, built up again in the autumn and killed most in the USA over the winter of that year.

But it doesn’t mean it always shows for every epidemic since the early 1950s Saturn Neptune in Libra, while it coincided with one minor flu outbreak, was more notable for the setting up of The Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) by WHO to monitor the evolution of influenza viruses.

HEALTH AND MEDICINE:

The dual face of Saturn–Neptune in providing practical care for the suffering and in the insidious undermining of the body’s health both find a place in world history. An epidemic of St Vitus Dance (chorea) broke out in Europe in 1021 when Saturn and Neptune were together in Aquarius; the disease causes involuntary jerky movements and leads to brain deterioration, and was so called because victims prayed to St Vitus, the patron saint of dance.

   The plague that devastated Europe and Asia during the 1340s was marked by the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aquarius of 1344, and the Uranus–Pluto conjunction at the same time. The outbreak of bubonic plague in London in 1665 and the Great Fire of London a year later both took place when Saturn and Neptune were together in Capricorn.

  In 1846 in Aquarius, widespread famine in Ireland followed the failure of the potato crop. During the 1917 and 1918 conjunction in Leo, there were massive casualties from the Spanish ‘flu epidemic. By the conjunction of the late 1980s in Capricorn, the AIDS virus was running amok, causing countless deaths in Africa, Europe and the United States.

   Medical advances are also highlighted under Saturn–Neptune, with the physicians’ meeting place in Rome, the Schola Medicorum, being set up in AD 17 in Sagittarius; in 1739 in Cancer, the London Foundling Hospital was established; and by 1881 in Taurus, Louis Pasteur had discovered the anthrax vaccine.

WORKERS’ RIGHTS: Neptune’s compassion for the victim meets Saturn’s ability to organize in a constructive way. If the balance is wrong, however, then Saturn’s authoritarian need to exert order and maintain the status quo can completely crush the Neptunian dream.

   The English Peasants’ Revolt during the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries in 1381, demanding an end to serfdom was suppressed and its leader, Wat Tyler, beheaded. Two conjunctions later, in Virgo, Irish rebel Jack Cade leading the Kent and Essex peasants’ revolt, was also killed. Another two conjunctions further on, in Pisces in 1524, there were extensive peasants’ revolts in Germany.

   By 1845 with Saturn–Neptune in tolerant Aquarius, Engels was writing The Condition of the Working Class in England. Still under the same influence, the Irish potato-crop failure of the following year drew attention to the plight of the starving and the suffering. By the next conjunction in Taurus in 1881, British prime minister William Gladstone had passed the Irish Land Act to prevent excessively high rents, although the outrages of 1882, when 10,500 Irish farming families were evicted, gave every indication that Saturnine rigidity and greed still held sway. In the United States, the American Federation of Labor was founded in Pittsburgh in 1881. One conjunction on, in 1917 in Leo, striking Russian workers rose up, and were joined by soldiers to overthrow the last feudal tsardom.

   During the last Saturn–Neptune conjunction of the 20th century, in Capricorn in 1989, Solidarity, the Polish workers’ party, came to power in democratic elections. The fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe freed workers to control their own lives and government. There was also mass rehabilitation of Russian citizens who were victims of Stalin’s brutal purges, Stalin himself having succumbed on the Saturn–Neptune conjunction of 1953. Also in 1989, the Tiananmen Square demonstration in China, staged by students and workers, was brutally suppressed, resulting in 2000 deaths. In Britain just a year later there were the violent Poll Tax Riots, the first serious mass revolt against the government in decades.’

  Although Saturn Neptune doesn’t sound rebellious it tends to bring the state and the status quo (Saturn) into conflict with spiritual movements or the underdogs (Neptune). The flower power, hippie movement was very much a Saturn Neptune in Libra phenomenon in the 1950s.