The apparent meeting of Jupiter and Saturn in the skies – known as the ‘great conjunction’ – marks the birth of a new astrological epoch
On December 21st, the planets Jupiter and Saturn – which are actually more than 400m miles apart – will appear to come together in the night sky, forming what is called a “Great Conjunction”. This is one in a series of meetings the planets make roughly every 20 years, due to Jupiter’s orbit of less than 12 years around the sun lining up with Saturn’s, which is 29.5 years long. On the night of the conjunction, the planets will seem as if they’re separated by about one fifth of the diameter of the typical full moon, appearing to touch or form a single brilliant heavenly body. Besides its visual dazzle, this event has special significance through an astrological lens: it marks the official shift from a 200 year period during which Jupiter and Saturn made conjunctions primarily in Earth signs into a 200 year period of conjunctions in Air signs, marking the advent of a new epoch in a larger 800 year macro-cycle.
Thinkers have used Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions to track history for thousands of years – Johannes Kepler’s early 17th-century trigon diagrams are famous ephemera from the beginning of our current macro-cycle. Jupiter and Saturn are the slowest and furthest away of the planets available to the naked human eye, and function as the short hands of the astrological clock, sketching the broad strokes of an era. In astrological terms, Jupiter signifies expansion, growth, and coherence – but can also lead to cancerous hypertrophy. Saturn represents the opposite principle, of limitation, structure, and containment, often considered the cruel taskmaster of the zodiac. Together they are like life and death, warp and weft, and their conjunctions signal key moments in the formation of collective reality.
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