The 'great conjunction' kicks off a new astrological epoch. So what now?
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 macrocycle.
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.
Historically, Earth periods like the one we are about to exit focus on materialism, hierarchies, resource acquisition, territory control, and empire stabilization (see the late Roman empire, high middle ages, and industrial capitalism). Air periods, by contrast, favor the renovation of hierarchies, decentralization, shifting orders, rapid translation, mass mobility, trade networks, and rampant spirituality. Relevant historical examples include the rise and fall of Alexander the Great’s empire leading to the network of citystates in the Greek-speaking Hellenistic world (Air period 383-185 BCE), the fall of the Roman empire (Air period 412-610 CE), the division of the Mongol empire after Ghengis Khan’s death, and the Black plague’s destabilizing effect on feudalism in Europe (Air period 1206-1405). Thematically, Air periods tend to foster information ages that focus on the intellectual, the immaterial, and the ideological – though not necessarily in a peaceful manner.
I am a trend forecaster. Part of my job is about zooming out and looking at big-picture data and trends in order to analyze the present and model key changes to come. I’ve found that astrology, which tracks data from the motion of stars and planets and tries to extrapolate trends and meaning from it, is a useful, evocative model for pattern recognition. I’m not alone in this fascination: Astrology is absolutely booming among millennials and Gen-Z, led in part by a renaissance of scholarship around the subject over the last ten to fifteen years, which has restored a great deal of classical legitimacy and rigor to the admittedly woo-woo new age astrology of the 1960s and 70s.
Speculating on the current transition, as a researcher and student of astrology, what kind of shifts do I anticipate might follow? One is a move from key social conflicts over physical territory to struggles in the psychological and ideological realms. Astrologers suggest the game will be “up in the air” rather than “all too dense”. That means mass migration and decentralization of power seem likely, as well as radical technological advancement that will make a mockery of Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. (Have you noticed how much of the newest tech, such as Blockchain, has seemed to end up being about finance or infrastructure, after an initial expansive frisson? That’s very Earth period, and I believe we can expect it to change.) The world wide web itself is entering its Saturn return, a period traditionally viewed as a difficult but pivotal coming of age passage. As a trend forecaster, I’ll be looking for developments related to ideological struggle, surveillance, decentralization, virtuality, exile, subculture, and the avant garde – as well as shifts in the contours of empire, of course.
In addition, I’ll continue to pay attention to the current astrological renaissance (whose stars include Chris Brennan, Leisa Scheim, Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees at The Astrology Podcast; Chani Nicholas in the queer-pop-self-help sphere; and Maren Altman on TikTok, among countless others) as its combination of spirituality, unseen realms, classical research and digital distribution is a perfect match for an Air period.
As for your own experience: don’t panic. Elements are traditionally neutral, which means going from a period typified by one to a period typified by another doesn’t spell disaster. Epochal shifts are part of life, though not everyone has the privilege of living through one like this, since they only happen every 200 years. While I definitely recommend keeping your eyes peeled for changes, don’t expect everything to update all at once – the Air period may be upon us, but certain heavenly revolutions are a slow burn, indeed.
Emily Segal is the author of the novel Mercury Retrograde, recently released by Deluge Books. She leads the thinktank and consultancy Nemesis
tarians that followed – but the fact that it is now held up as a repudiation of the very notion of protest. “We blame ourselves,” Hafsa Halawa, an Iraqi Egyptian woman active in the post-Tahrir political movement, told me last week. “But we are also blamed.” The revolutionaries have their own regrets to contend with, but now they are also condemned for underestimating the scale of the challenge they were facing.
“You didn’t know what you were up against, you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” Halawa says they are told. “But we failed because there was too much pressure on the protest movement to become this political animal. Once protesters overthrew the regimes, they were expected to take their place.”
Even in Tunisia, Bouazizi’s name has lost its sanctity. His family was smeared and harassed, accused of profiting financially from the death of their loved one, and joined the other millions of Arab spring exiles to leave the country. In his home town, a Guardian reporter met a woman walking past the giant picture of Bouazizi erected in his memory. “I curse at it,” she said. “I want to bring it down. He’s the one who ruined us.”
But all this finger-pointing and selfflagellation obscures the real truth about the Arab spring, which is that it failed because it could not have succeeded. Peaceful transition was simply impossible, at that time and in that manner. What we underestimated – from Syria to Sudan – was not the power of the military or the brutality of the security services, or the tenacity of the entrenched interests and elites that would do anything to maintain their power. What we missed was actually the lack of any real counterweight to all these things.
The problem was the absence of enough of the forces necessary to the success of a revolution rather than the presence of too many counter-currents against it. Because dictatorship isn’t just about the rule of one man, it is about the sterilisation of democracy. After the despots fell, it became clear that decades of despotism had salted the earth. There were no opposition parties to harness and guide political energy, no charismatic figures who had returned from exile or escaped imprisonment to galvanise political movements, and no room for political discourse because there was no media ecosystem or intellectual space that was healthy enough to resist capture by conspiracies and sectarianism.
The very thing that made the Arab spring a shocking historical force – that it was an organic, people-powered movement that had no leader or ideology – eventually cannibalised it. The vacuum swallowed the revolution. In that faltering, there are echoes, and lessons, in the resistance faced by antiestablishment movements in the west, from Black Lives Matter to the challenges to the centre ground from the left. What the Arab spring came up against was a universal conundrum – how to convert the forces that demand equality into those that deliver it.
Today, it is hard to see beyond the established narrative of failure: the millions displaced in Syria, Libya and Yemen; the dead and the missing; the bodies filling Egypt’s political prisons. But a closer look reveals a lingering affirmation of what was once so exciting, not least in the insecurity it has sown among the leaders who followed. Egypt’s relentless police state is a sign that the military and security services have learned that the threat of another revolt is so potent they cannot permit the slightest transgression. Like a jailer whose charge once escaped but has since been recaptured, the country’s paranoid leaders will go to preposterous lengths to make sure it never happens again.
And so everyone, from young women on TikTok posting dance videos to doctors struggling with Covid, is seen as a threat to the airless monoculture that needs to be maintained to suffocate any challenge. It is a futile effort. Discontent continues to swell, as corruption and economic struggles push people to abandon rational calculations, to spill out into the streets and into certain detention, torture and even death.
This has been the ticking metronome, marking out time since the protests began a decade ago – one moment a fear for life and livelihood, and the next a desperate, passionate, undaunted rage. You can see this dual consciousness in polls that show a majority in eight countries across the Arab world agree their societies are far more unequal now. But in five of those countries, a majority say they do not regret the Arab spring protests. It is a tense and fragile winning margin for the forces of the ancien régime. Things may be worse than they were a decade ago, but there is one fact that is now clear to the despots and the people alike – a fact that gives the people an advantage they lacked the first time around. It can happen. It has happened before. Now we know what it looks like. And next time, we will know what is required of us.
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist