18 Feb Dreamers of Dreams ~ Pisces Season Forecast – February 18th-March 20th, 2023

“Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.” -Michelangelo

On February 18th, 2023 the Sun will slip into the vast oceans of Pisces, where everything returns to its celestial source and all time dissolves into eternity. After a long journey through the zodiac, the Sun has grown weary of becoming. With a great sigh of relief, the ending of its story begins to unfold.

In Pisces, the Sun surrenders to the bliss of sleep, dreaming of all that has been or ever shall be. The ocean absorbs the light of consciousness, illuminating the abyss. Glimmering in the primal depths of imagination, dreams become reality.  

This Pisces season, you too may feel weary of becoming. After all, the collective trauma from the global pandemic has stirred a climate of emotional exhaustion and burnout. Everyone is world-weary. 

But what began in March of 2020 with Saturn’s entrance into Aquarius will finally come to an end on March 7th when Saturn enters Pisces.Therefore, this Pisces season is a threshold, bringing closure to the pandemic-era.

Saturn’s transit through Pisces also represents the end of a 30-year cycle. So the weeks ahead will feel like the end of a story, a grand farewell that brings a long sigh of relief. 

Going back to March of 2020, Saturn entered Aquarius and the lockdowns began almost immediately. This feeling of restriction and confinement was made more severe by travel bans, mandates, censorship, hyper-inflation and many more abuses of power that have destroyed many lives and livelihoods. 

There’s no doubt that Saturn’s time in Aquarius was full of trials and tribulation. It was a time of reckoning that revealed the consequences of utopianism, as well as the effects of the internet and all its accompanying technology on society.  

For all its blessings, the world wide web has woven many traps for humanity over the last thirty years, transforming the once private citizen into a surveilled and controlled commodity.

The commercial internet was born last time Saturn was in Aquarius, between 1991-1993. And if the medium is the message, then the message of the internet turned out to be technocratic global control, which now exerts more hegemonic mastery than any imperial project since the Enlightenment. Technocracy is a culture that commodifies everything and dehumanizes everyone. And the hyper-manic cyber-utopianism of the early 90’s was the Trojan Horse that invited this culture of control in.

 

But history reveals that times of oppression and exhaustion are unavoidable. Learning to bend instead of break ensures success at a later time. No doubt, the pressures of the last three years have shifted your internal landscape in profound ways, giving you new strength of mind and heart to carry into the future.

As painful as the last few years have been, Saturn’s wisdom reminds you that character and integrity can only develop through struggle. You can’t build muscles without weight. And it takes tremendous heat and pressure to transform coal into a diamond. 

The good news is that when Saturn enters Pisces, the tone will shift. Just as Saturn’s entrance into Aquarius signified a major turning point, so too will this entrance into Pisces. A high tide will rise, crashing over everything that’s risen to prominence and power over the last 30 years. And as all the debris washes back upon the shore, a scattered history of the last three decades will reveal a new perspective.

She Eyes Me Like a Pisces 

The last time Saturn was in Pisces was between 1993 and 1996. Nostalgia for the pop-culture of this era is so seductive, because it was such a lush and glittering time for movies and music. But this was nobody’s idealistic youth because it was an era of postmodernism, late-decadence and nihilism. 

Politically, the recent triumph of Western Liberal Democracy was arrogantly called the “End of History” and humanity was gaslighted into believing it had reached some kind of apex.

In America, the feeling of the end inspired a great depression, an internal one that flooded the entire culture with despair. The fashion iconography was heroin chic: fallen angels, sunken eyes, numb to the core. This was the era of Prozac Nation, where anesthetizing your soul’s pain with pharmaceuticals became the status quo. 

In 1994, the drug Prozac was so popular that a Newsweek article said it had attained “the familiarity of Kleenex and the social status of spring water.” In other words, it became “normal” to be depressed. 

And over the last 30 years, depression has been hyper-normalized.

Profiting off of people’s desperation, the entity now known as Big Pharma became engorged. And the parasitic relationship it has created with the public reads like a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome. And their crimes against humanity over the last 30 years are irreconcilable. 

When Saturn enters Pisces this year, some of the delusions that have taken root in the collective mind over the last 30 years can be dissolved. The mind-numbing deceit, denial and nihilism can be washed away, sunk to the bottom of the sea.       

The I-Ching describes the emotional state of Oppression and Exhaustion in in Hexagram 47 which states that: 

“a feeling of despair or depression is a sign that you are holding a false belief. To perpetuate an untruth about yourself, another, or the Sage is to block your own happiness. Root out and remove any idea or attitude which causes negative feelings.”       

Saturn transits always represent hard work. And this hexagram summarizes the work of Saturn in Pisces, which is to remove the false beliefs that have allowed despair to take root.

 “Do not suffer, for God has not made us to abandon us.”

This Pisces season will invite you to purify the waters of your imagination, giving you the power to dream again, aligning with the primal source of creation. 

Saturn in Pisces will inspire you to develop your dreams, to work towards making them manifest. Like carving an angel out of marble, great labor will be required. But a sense of inspired purpose will guide you to devote yourself to bringing the beauty of your inner world into external reality. 

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”

Stirring the waters of the collective unconscious will call forth illuminated visions that will pour through humanity as great art and spiritual insight. 

While Saturn is in Pisces, the artists, mystics and healers will deep dive into the waters of imagination, summoning waves that uplift and inspire humanity to evolve. As Arthur O’Shaughnessy said in his famous poem, Ode:

We are the music makers,

    And we are the dreamers of dreams…

In the weeks ahead, as the Sun, Saturn and Neptune stir the waters of Pisces, the collective dream of humanity will evolve. You may feel overtaken by a mythic sense of meaning and a connection with the whole human story. Upon the waves, you’ll feel the agony and the ecstasy of all ages. 

This season, you will dilate upon the agony and ecstasy of life. You will see that the highs and the lows are but a singular process of creation, one in which every pressure put upon you is like the hand of a sculptor carving out a beautiful form. Every strike of the chisel and all the roughness of sanding is for the same end: to find the divinity within crude matter. 

At this crisis point in human history, the dim imagination of tyrants can not be the dream that prevails. Their vision is artificial, cruel and myopic. And as they desperately claw for more power through censorship, surveillance, and war, the true heart of humanity must rise.

The true dream for humanity is of expanded freedom and prosperity, where peace, love, and unity can flourish. This dream of the future is ultimately more powerful, because it aligns with fundamental creative principle in the universe.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

In Pisces, to dream is not oblivion but a return to the most primal form of consciousness. The language of dreams is imagination. Enfolded within the depths of imagination is the yearning for intimacy with the universe, a relationship with something greater than one’s self.  

When you remember the power of dreaming, you see that the planets are thoughts whirling through the inner space of consciousness. In this way, the whole world and its future can be ordered and ordained by divine imagination. In the ocean of consciousness, tiny ripples can become great waves. 

This means the fate of the world is as much in your power as anyone else’s. Dream of peace, light and beauty.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The soul of Pisces can best be appreciated through immersion into the life and art of the great renaissance artist, Michelangelo, who was born with his Sun, Moon and Mars in Pisces on March 6, 1475. 

His relationship to sculpture (not to mention painting, architecture, and poetry) perfectly articulates the immensity of human will in such tension with pure imagination that an explosion of magnificence poured forth as a never-ending fountain of divine creation. And he exemplifies the gravitas of Saturn in Pisces, giving form to visions with fluid strength.

“All of his fluid strength, love, passion, desire had been poured into the nascent form . . .  giving of its inner heat and substance and fluid form, until at last the sculptor and the marble had totally coalesced, so deeply penetrating and infusing each other that they had become one, marble and man and organic unity, each fulfilling the other in the greatest act of art and love known to the human species.”

– Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

It is in the dreamworld of Pisces where individual consciousness becomes merged with the infinite, thereby overflowing with inspiration. 

Michelangelo’s tremendous gift reveals how immersed he was in the sea of images. He must have slipped easily into half-lit dream worlds, yielding to the flow of the currents, trusting that he would be carried to wherever he needed to go. 

“My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.” 

It is pleasant to imagine that all the art created during the High Renaissance was for purely spiritual reasons. But the art was funded by wealthy patrons, thus tainting all of it with political motives and intrigue. Even in the best of times, there are the worst kind of people in power.

Michelangelo was notoriously rebellious, often encoding messages in his art that insulted the political tyrants and even the Pope, whom he had a personal dislike for.

So numerous were Michelangelo’s contributions to Florence, it is difficult to say which of his works is the most beautiful or iconic.

But his statue of David may be his greatest sculpture, fully embodying his genius and the tension with the politics of his time. 

“Genius is eternal patience.”

David and Goliath

It was through his art that Michelangelo was able to bring to life a perfect world that seemed to exist only within the realm of dreams.

His masterpiece David was as much a political statement as it was an artistic achievement, and its message is just as resonant today as the Psalms attributed to the Biblical legend of its subject and namesake.

Constructed at a time when Florence was still recovering from the tyranny of the Medici banking dynasty, David stood erect in front of Florence’s town hall as an apotropaic talisman to ward off political oppressors and foreign invaders.

Michelangelo was not the only Florentine who had David on his mind at the time. In one of the most remarkable cases of historical synchronicity, Niccolò Machiavelli was invoking the Biblical legend in his masterwork of political philosophy, The Prince. 

In the Bible story, David rejected the weapons offered to him by Saul, opting instead for his own sling and knife to defeat Goliath. Machiavelli interpreted the legend as a political metaphor for the city-state and how to defend it. “In conclusion,” he said, “the arms of the others either fall from your back, or weigh you down, or they bind you fast.”

There was already a long standing tradition in Italy of depicting David as the patria or father and protector of the Italian cultural heritage. While Michelangelo’s statue was his contribution to the patria tradition, he deviated from traditional depictions of David by chiseling the Biblical legend moments before he slew Goliath rather than standing victorious over the giant’s head. 

It was a strange artistic decision. Without Goliath present in the work to demonstrate the giant’s behemoth size, there was no frame of reference with which to perceive David’s truly heroic feat.

Art historian Saul Levine suggests this omission was deliberate, as absent at the time was the true Goliath of Florence: the Medici family. A decade prior, the banking dynasty who had ruled over Florence for generations—were expelled during an uprising led by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, of the bonfire of vanities fame. Determined to reclaim their seat of power, the Medici family fled to Rome.

It is said that David’s eyes were watching Rome due to its strategic location outside Florence’s town hall. The statue was originally commissioned to be part of a series of Biblical prophets to adorn the roofline of the Florence Cathedral. However, when builders proved incapable of mounting the 12-ton 17-foot statue, a new location for David had to be determined.

A special committee (that included Leonardo Da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli) met on January 25, 1504 to determine the ultimate location of David. The Florentine republicans wanted David placed in front of the town hall as a symbol of their government and a protector against foreign threats. 

Medici sympathizers, however, felt it would be safer to place him off to the side in a nearby sculpture gallery, ostensibly out of concern that Michelangelo’s masterpiece might deteriorate if not protected from the elements… but likely out of fear that it might offend their masters.

It was ultimately decided that David be placed in front of Florence’s town hall, the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo’s work displaced an earlier work by Donatello depicting Judith and Holofernes, a “deadly sign” that symbolized Medici rule. 

The family had commissioned the earlier Donatello work and, according to the historical record, placed it “in its position under an evil constellation,” suggesting that the banking family employed a knowledge of astrology when electing a time to erect a statue that would symbolize their dominion over Florence. Some things never change. 

It’s amazing to think of David as a protective talisman against exiled banking elites more than 500 years after it was erected in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. 

There’s really nothing new under the Sun. And in 2023, what the Medici family was to Florence, Italy has evolved into multinational investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard. While the Medici dynasty returned to power in Florence less than a decade after David was erected, the vitality of art to transform the world must not be forgotten.

We can follow Michelangelo’s example and slowly chisel away at the raw chaos of existence to create a world worth living in, one that values beauty and remembers that giants can be defeated.

To channel this divine power, you are invited to pray the most notable Psalm attributed to David this Pisces season:

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

Much Love,

Rachel