Mark your calendars – on March 7, Saturn crosses the Pisces frontier. It will remain there until it enters Aries on May 24, 2025 – but then it will cross back into Pisces on September 1, 2025, not finally fully committing itself to Aries until February 13, 2026. That’s nearly three years in total, and Saturn’s passage will leave fingerprints on the headlines – and on your life too. 

What will it mean? That’s not really up to Saturn, it’s up to you. There are ways to be in harmony with this energy and ways to get into trouble with it too. All that is what I want to explore with you in this newsletter.

Let’s analyze this transit systematically. We’ll start by understanding a few basics about Saturn itself. Then we’ll imagine what Saturn will look like when it is motivated by Piscean values – that’s always the key to any successful interpretation of a planet in a sign: you start with the basic function of the planet, then give it the particular values, interests, and drives of the new sign it is entering. 

From the evolutionary point of view, the next step is the critical one: recognize that the configuration represents both high and low possibilities – shadows and light, in other words. Obviously the best course is to  aim for the higher ground, but let’s also recognize (without shame) that sometimes the path to that higher ground involves wrestling with the lower expressions of the energy too.  

One of my favorite one-liners about Saturn is that “this is the planet that gives us the ability to do what we don’t feel like doing.” When, for example, was the last time you were in the mood to visit the dentist or clean the house? And yet, you know what happens if we don’t do those things. That leads us to the single most fundamental Saturn “yoga” that I know: self-discipline.  Here are some more Saturn yogas: character, integrity, self-respect, and maturity. Get it right, and you’ve earned the right to apply those words to yourself. 

What about how Saturn, in traditional astrology, is called the Greater Malefic? The truth of it, at least from my point of view, is that Saturn isn’t “bad,” it’s hard – and to lazy people, those two words mean the same thing. It’s indeed “malefic” if you’re afraid of focused effort and personal responsibility, and I suspect that explains most of why poor Saturn got saddled with a rotten reputation.

Meanwhile, Pisces at its best represents the process of becoming more transparent to the cosmos. It’s about parting the veils of ego and letting the light of the higher realms shine in. Call it spiritual. Call it imaginative. Call it creative. Whenever “a lightbulb lights over your head,” you’ve had a Piscean experience. Where does such inspiration actually come from? Whatever your answer to that question might be, getting to that place reflects the loftiest expression of Piscean energy. All signs are about motivations, needs, and drives – and these are the ones that animate Pisces, at least when it’s healthy.

Now we put two and two together – so what happens when Saturnian self-discipline serves Piscean purposes? Obviously the term spiritual discipline immediately comes to mind, at least when we are thinking about the loftier possibilities – and don’t worry, we’ll get to the lower ones soon. Right now though let's focus on what we might call the divine purpose of Saturn’s passage through Pisces – how to get it right, in other words.

Note that there will be two levels of meaning to what we explore here. The first is simply about the energy that will be in the air for the next three years and how best to live in harmony with it. The second one is the fact that naturally a lot of children will be born between now and early 2026. For them, the “great work” of Saturn in Pisces is close to the central purpose of their lives. Transits come and go, but birthcharts last a lifetime.

Want to please the great god Saturn while he’s showing us his Piscean face? Set your alarm for 6:00 AM and get up and meditate for half an hour every day. That’s an illustration, not “an order,” by the way. What it illustrates is just one example of spiritual self-discipline. Saturn loves commitment and regularity. It loves to see promises made, but more importantly, promises kept. To respond well to the call of Saturn in Pisces, apply some of those intentional virtues to expanding and deepening whatever the natural form of your spiritual life might already take. Meditation is an obvious possibility. For someone else, it might be committing to traditional religious observance – church, temple, mosque, whatever. Practicing yoga or Tai Chi come to mind too. 

All of these illustrations so far are in the vein of obviously “spiritual” practices. All are recommended. All will work spiritual wonders on you, provided you apply them consistently – remember, Saturn loves to see sustained commitment. It has no affection for mere dabblers.

It is profoundly important to remember that there are healthy, positive responses to Pisces that don’t look “religious” or even obviously spiritual. Everyone has some Piscean energy in them. Really, any time we surrender to that vast spaciousness in our own minds we are doing Piscean work. Thus creativity in any of its forms is a spiritual practice. Are you an artist of any sort? Commit more deeply and intentionally to that process and you’ll be responding well to Saturn in Pisces – and that’s true even if you think of yourself as an atheist. All artists stare into space from time to time, hoping for inspiration to strike. What they’re really doing is staring into inner space, surrendering and opening to it. That’s still Pisces, whatever suit of clothes it might be wearing. Again, even atheists can get this right.

I am thinking of a simple man who enjoys fishing. There he sits in his open boat at dawn, the mists rising from the still waters. The fish aren’t biting and he doesn’t care – fish are not the real reason he’s there. Here’s a line about him that promises to make the angels laugh – his wife is mad at him because he skipped church that morning to go fishing. The angels understand that he is in church. 

You’ll note that in this imagery we’re defining a broad spectrum of positive Saturn-in-Pisces activities – and again, they’re not all “officially” or obviously “spiritual.” More importantly, note that there is an underlying set of values in these words and that is a compassionate acceptance of other people. There’s not much that is more Piscean than that kind of open heart. To be in harmony with the cosmos for the next three years, strive to practice more of that kind of compassion. Confronted with the horrors of the world, sometimes keeping an open heart like that is very difficult. Hey, didn’t we just mention that Saturn is the planet that gives us the ability to do what we don’t feel like doing? Compassion sometimes requires discipline too.

One final idea on the positive side of the equations – Saturn is about the process of maturation. It carries the archetype of the wise old man or the wise old woman. Imagine what will happen if you intentionally up your spiritual discipline, whatever form it takes, by 5% and do it consistently for the next three years. We can guarantee that by February 2026, you will have matured spiritually to a significant degree. How could it possibly be otherwise? And there, in a nutshell, is the divine purpose of Saturn’s passage through Pisces – the slow and steady work of evolving ourselves. All of humanity is invited to do it.

Let’s now turn our attention to the Dark Side of the Force. Here we skirt a world populated by the kinds of astrologers who view Saturn as inherently malefic. In that world, Saturn is the planet of blockages and limitations. Bad luck and trouble. Depression, loneliness, and sorrow. The toast landing butter side down. Our question is, how might that kind of bad energy interact with Pisces?

Dark Pisces is an escapist. It seeks oblivion, not enlightenment. We can understand that soul-cage compassionately too. When we see that sad face of Pisces, what we are really looking at is someone who is so overwhelmed by their own psychic sensitivity that they find ways to numb it. Drunkenness and addiction can arise. So can any other compulsive activity – the bottom line is that basically anything that’s pleasurable and repeatable can be used in an escapist way. Video games come to mind. Doom scrolling on Instagram. Compulsive sexual activity. The list of life’s little escape hatches is long, not to mention very popular.

This Piscean energy will not go away until 2026. A person who does not respond in some positive way to it will surely respond negatively. There are, of course shades of gray in between the extremes, but basically what it means is that we’re all getting a little extra amperage running through our psychic circuitry and we need to use it wisely or it will hurt us. Use it well, and you’ll be moving up that spiritual mountain – a mountain we’re all climbing whether we know it or not. But fail to use it positively and it will scare you a bit – and pretty soon, you’ll be looking for a little insulation from that fear. And you will find it.

A weak response to Saturn in Pisces involves us feeling cut off from God, abandoned by the Higher Powers of the cosmos, living a meaningless existence in a random universe. Depression, loneliness, and sorrow naturally follow. To keep our feet on the ground, we need to understand all of that – but to keep our eyes on the stars, we also need to recognize that there’s higher ground available. It’s hard to get there – that’s Saturn. But that good work beats depression, loneliness, and sorrow by a mile.

What house in your chart will Saturn be passing through while it’s in Pisces? What aspects will it make? We can get a lot more specific detail about your own personal path by knowing those things, but that would take us beyond the realm of a newsletter or a podcast.

Let’s also remember the other big event this month, and that’s Pluto’s long-heralded entry into Aquarius. I’ve prepared an hour-long program about that which Astrology University will air on March 25 as part of their Pluto in Aquarius Summit. Click here for details. That’s a big subject, but with two slow, epoch-building planets changing signs within just a couple weeks of each other, we can safely say that the times they are a-changing. 

Listen to the podcast version.

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