Planetary cycles tell stories. Those told by the Saturn-Pluto cycle concern the deeds of the Four Horsemen—testing, transformative episodes in which the stakes are literally life and death. Lasting from 31 to 38 years, depending on where Pluto is on its highly elliptical orbit, many of the darkest tales in human history thrum to the rhythms of this cycle.
If you’re reading this in 2022, you’ve lived through the opening chapter of one of these stories. As many astrologers have noted, the last Saturn-Pluto conjunction took place on the 12th of January 2020, just a day after variations of this story appeared in media outlets across the world1:
Few had realised it yet—save a few astrologers and Chinese officials, perhaps—but an epoch-defining story had begun. Within a few weeks, that was obvious to everyone.
Those were hard, heady times: Saturn-Pluto times. Also striking was how, almost as quickly as the pandemic story began, another seemed to end: that of the Global War On Terror. The narrative pushing Islamist terror as the greatest threat to our lives evaporated almost overnight.
9/11: the incredible correlations
The GWOT, an international military campaign purportedly aimed at destroying Islamist terror networks, was initiated by George W Bush in 2001 following the September 11th attacks that killed some 3,000 people on US soil. On that terrible day, burned indelibly into the memories of almost everyone who lived through it, Saturn and Pluto were just two degrees from opposition:
Here we find Pluto, planet of extremes, in Sagittarius, sign of faith. Opposed, we find Saturn, planet of structure, in the sign of the Twins. Astrology rarely speaks louder than this, and the destruction of the Twin Towers by jihadist terrorists was probably the “loudest” single event of the 21st century so far. (Another correlation: The World Trade Center opened on the 4th of April 1973, with Saturn at 15°52’ of Gemini, meaning it was around a degree from its exact Saturn return when it was destroyed.)
Lest we forget: among the GWOT’s consequences were multiple US-led wars that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, the displacement of millions more and widespread chaos in much of the Middle East. The scale of that tragedy is impossible to measure. It was a deeply Plutonic episode: a revelation of the nature of American power and how it was maintained.
Was it foreshadowed astrologically? Yes.
The Saturn-Pluto cycle of 1982-2020
The Saturn-Pluto opposition of 9/11 was the culmination of a cycle that began with a conjunction in November 1982. With that in mind, read this excerpt from Britannica’s entry on suicide bombing:
Contemporary suicide bombing began in 1981 in Lebanon. However, it achieved worldwide notoriety in 1983, first with an attack against the U.S. embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people and then with simultaneous car bombings of U.S. and French military barracks, also in Beirut, that killed 299 more. These attacks, mounted by the Shiʿi Islamic group Hezbollah, were credited with forcing the withdrawal of Western military forces from Lebanon.
Saturn and Pluto were within 3 degrees of conjunction at the first of these attacks and 7 degrees at the second. The United States’ resulting withdrawal from Lebanon caught the attention of a certain Saudi mujahideen named Osama bin Laden. Here’s an excerpt from Britannica’s entry on the September 11 attacks:
Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian who was a bin Laden associate in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ’90s, explained that, in the years prior to the attacks, bin Laden became increasingly convinced that America was weak. “He believed that the United States was much weaker than some of those around him thought,” Masri remembered, and “as evidence he referred to what happened to the United States in Beirut when the bombing of the Marines base led them to flee from Lebanon.”
In other words, we see a direct line from the events around the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1983 to those at the opposition in 2001.
What about the other hard aspects of the cycle: the squares? They speak loudly too. In 1993, during the waxing square, a group of terrorists including Ramzi Yousef, nephew of al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, attempted to destroy the World Trade Center for the first time by detonating a truck bomb in the underground car park of the North Tower. The attack failed to bring the tower down, but killed six people and injured thousands. In 2011, at the waning square of the cycle, the United States assassinated bin Laden at his home in Pakistan.
Of course, the whole story goes way beyond these individual events, encompassing the entire history of US involvement in the Middle East, its support for Israel, its backing of various repressive Arab regimes, jihadist millenarianism, and all the carnage that followed across the region after 9/11. But the striking coincidence of these major events with the hard aspects of the Saturn-Pluto cycle is hard to ignore.
While the US remains the most powerful nation on the planet, it’s hard to deny that the fallout from 9/11 seriously damaged the country’s standing and moral authority. The Saturn-Pluto cycle reached down into the depths and brought truths about the realities of US power to the surface. For the US, it was ultimately a cycle of decline. But for its greatest geopolitical rival, China, it was quite the opposite.
China as child of Saturn
Planets and their cycles are multivalent. And there are other ways to read Saturn-Pluto cycles beyond the dark tales we opened with. Pluto, for example, can empower what it touches. Thus, Saturn-Pluto can speak of the empowerment of the Saturnine. China—likely the oldest extant civilisation in the world—is Saturnine.
As far back as the 11th century, in The Book of Instruction on the Elements of the Art of Astrology, the great Persian astrologer Al-Biruni associated China with Libra—the sign in which Saturn is exalted—and East China in particular with Saturn’s sign of Capricorn.2
Remarkably, 1,000 years later the most recent incarnation of the Chinese state retains a highly Saturnine signature. Here’s the chart for the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949:
Saturn rules the Ascendant. The Moon rises in Saturn’s sign of Aquarius. The Sun is in Libra. Jupiter is in Capricorn. It’s a chart that validates al-Biruni’s Saturnine associations almost a millennium after he committed them to parchment.
China’s meteoric rise
While Saturn commonly signifies challenge, limits and pain, it can also build. And it’s particularly apt to offer its constructive rewards to its “children”—those with strong Saturnine signatures in their charts, whether individuals or nations.
In 1978, reformers in the Chinese Communist Party, including president-to-be Deng Xiaoping, launched a program of economic reforms intended to create a “socialist market economy”. In short, China—still an impoverished country back then—was to emerge from its self-imposed isolation and participate in the global economy.
In 1980 came a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Libra, initiating the Age of Air, about which I wrote here. This was closely followed by the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the same sign in 1982. Deng Xiaoping became supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China in September of that year, and went on to lead the early stages of the country’s rise towards what it is today: an increasingly wealthy and powerful state-capitalist autocracy.
In 2010 China overtook Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world. Today it’s increasingly assertive on the world stage, forging networks of economic influence across the globe and projected by some observers to overtake the US in economic size by the 2030s.
The late, great French astrologer André Barbault saw this coming well in advance. Here’s what he wrote in The Planets and History in 1967:
We have enough serious reasons to believe that the new Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1982 chiefly concerns Communist China, the completion date for this end of cycle taking on much more emphasis and brilliance because Jupiter is also there… We have to think that at this point of renewal in the cycle China will become an international leader.
The “completion date” Barbault was referring to was January 2020. By this point China had indeed become an international leader. And, as we all know, other events intervened to complicate the global situation—the pandemic which Barbault had also predicted.
Thus we see how the same Saturn-Pluto cycle told two very different stories for two very different states. But will these trajectories continue? Will China rise to dominate the world as the US has done for the past 70 years? Are the days of the US as global hegemon numbered?
In a forthcoming article we’ll examine the Saturn-Pluto cycle that began in 2020 with the coronavirus pandemic and will take us to 2052. We’ll examine the differing fates of the US and China over the last two years—and consider what that tells us about the future.
Thanks to Chris Brennan for popularising this remarkable correlation on the Astrology Podcast. It was the event that convinced me to take astrology 100% seriously.
Thanks to Deborah Houlding for pointing me to this information.