Saturn transits Pisces from March 7, 2023 - May 24, 2025 and again from August 31, 2025 to Feb 13, 2026.
The last time Saturn transited Pisces was May 21, 1993 - June 30, 1993 and January 28, 1994 to April 7, 1996.
Past the Saturn hour offer below, please find my lengthy blog about Saturn’s sojourn through Pisces in the 1990s …
The Saturn Hour
$125.00
Consider purchasing The Saturn Hour (scheduling begins in March after Saturn moves into Pisces), a reading which will make a deep dive into your natal Saturn placement by sign, house, and aspect. We will also consider the major Saturn events of your life (returns, the Saturn opposition that happens at 15 and again at 45, and heavy aspects to the Sun). We will then use that context to contemplate what Saturn’s transits through Pisces, sign of endings and letting go, will mean for you in the next three years.
Saturn in Pisces: the art of failure
It’s not often that I approach any astrological event with dread, but spying Saturn in Pisces coming up on the horizon gave me a visceral reaction. For context, I am a Virgo, and so this event corresponds to transiting Saturn opposing my natal Sun, as well as executing a pretty gnarly T-square in my chart. For further context, I’m old, and so I have the gift of being able to look back thirty years and remember what happened the last time Saturn transited Pisces.
I truly don’t want to contemplate this time or write about it, because it sucked. The overwhelming feeling that comes to me when I remember 1994-1996 (when Saturn was last in Pisces) is one of failure. I failed, at everything. I was hanging onto incarnation by a thread. I felt completely lost and half crazy and like I was a nobody doing nothing. But I am proceeding with this exercise of writing and remembering because my faith (read: experience) in the wisdom of our planetary teachers is so great. Pisces events break us down so that we can be redeemed by - what? Hard work, in Saturn’s case? The brutal realities of Capitalism? That’s bitter but effective medicine, and so perhaps some of you out there reading this found salvation by putting your nose to the grindstone when Saturn last transited Pisces in the mid-nineties.
For myself, I’m coming around to the idea that failure itself is what saved me. Failure, and disappointment. I looked them square in the eye and they were so real and unmitigable that I simply gave up. I gave up my dream that college would be a magical wonderland where cultured intellectuals would exude all the meaning that was lacking from my life. I gave up my goal of being “normal” and finally getting over my crazy family and abusive childhood. I gave up on ever fitting in anywhere. I gave up on consensus reality, and acknowledged privately that the world was not as finite and concrete as the smart people said it was. And for that reason, I also had to give up a conventional idea of “mental health,” since my reality was populated by a host of unseen forces. Unfortunately, I also gave up on values and integrity. I gave up on hope. I gave up too much.
But how about some context? When Saturn moved into Pisces for the long haul in January, 1994, it was the second semester of my senior year of high school. I barely attended, but was privileged to have indulgent teachers who waved away my absences because my test scores were so high and I overwrote my assignments with zeal. I was a sort of tortured-Romantic and manic-pixie-dream-girl rolled into one, with a shaved head and Riot Grrrl boots. 93/94 was the year that “alternative broke,” and so overnight I went from being a trenchcoat freak to de facto popular. I honestly could not have cared less.
What comes up for me about the end of high school is intense shame over all the friendships I trashed. I was a horrible gossip and passive-aggressive, and dealt with my frustrations with friends by talking shit. All of that juvenile behavior blew up in my face at the end of senior year; a whole gang of former friends had nicknamed me “the psycho bitch.” They weren’t wrong. All my cool punk and goth friends had graduated the year before, and so I felt intensely isolated. Meanwhile, my family life was in shambles. One of my teachers had reported the physical abuse going on at my home, and so I was dealing with social services. I convinced a social worker that if I could just couch-surf with friends for the remainder of senior year, I could avoid my abusive father and then be off to college! College would be my salvation.
Saturn in Pisces: fantasy collides with grim reality
With Saturn in Pisces opposing my Virgo Sun in the month of high school graduation, the culmination of my secondary school career was anticlimactic and bitterly disappointing. The friendships I’d nurtured for the past seven years had dissolved (notice the Pisces themes here), none of my high school experiences had unfolded like the movies (classic Piscean fantasy and disillusionment), and finally, the only structure (school) holding my life together had just come to a formal close. My parents were supposed to meet me for a celebratory dinner around the day of graduation. They never showed up.
What I remember about the summer before college was waiting and longing, more classic Pisces themes. I didn’t have a job and I didn’t have any enrichment programs and I was living on pure belief in the future, and desperate hope that UC Santa Cruz was going to fill up the giant hole I had inside. From the time I was a young child in a gifted program, my teachers had told me that I would only really blossom in college. I was too deep and had too much real-life experience compared with the other kids my age, and college was where it was all going to even out. My high school English teacher said he couldn’t teach my college-level brain anything else, and so had let me conduct my own independent projects senior year. College was what I was living for. College was where I was going to find meaning, connection, and direction.
Now you might be saying to yourself that UC Santa Cruz isn’t exactly the academic creme de la creme and you’d be right about that. But I’ll just say that my parents didn’t have the money for Sarah Lawrence or my early admission to Reed, or any of the other idealized small liberal arts colleges that I had my eye on. Even if I had gone to one of those romanticized places, would it have changed my fate? Saturn would still have been transiting my tenth house where Pisces is intercepted. My career at a small liberal arts college would probably have unfolded like the plot of The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Besides, UC Santa Cruz does a truly fabulous imitation of a small liberal arts college. And honestly, I was lucky to get in anywhere after phoning it in at the end of high school. The attendance ladies who collected all my pathetic absence slips over the years were genuinely shocked that I even had a post-high school plan.
At this point, 46-year-old me is longing to tell 18-year-old me about the compound effects of early life trauma, and how the sustained violence at my home (one therapist referred to it as “terror,” or like living with terrorists) had set me up to fail before I even made a proper start in life. But 18-year-old me was blissfully and arrogantly optimistic about pulling a geographic and leaving her traumatic past behind her, so let’s continue.
Saturn in Pisces: drift (and its consequences)
Where do I even start? College was perfect and idyllic. But I was a hot mess (It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me). I had selected Porter College at UCSC, the art college where all the cool alt kids went. It was like being transferred to punk rock high school. To cut to the chase, I spent several hours a day in the dining hall talking to my legions of cool new friends about music. I spent my evenings at rock shows, seeing every band that toured the city play at tiny venues or in the living rooms and backyards of dilapidated Victorian houses. I didn’t go to class or do any homework. At the end of the year, I and most of the folks I’d been wasting time with were asked to leave UCSC and never come back.
Pisces themes: drift. Doing what the herd does. And also: the salvation of the community. I think almost every person who attended Porter College in the 90s was overwhelmed by having been the weird kid at their high school, and fundamentally not knowing how to deal with a college population where everyone had purple hair and the latest seven-inches. My freshman tutor was Miranda July, for chrissakes (yes, that one). Firstly, all of us awkward weirdos had no idea how to handle suddenly being popular when our identities had been forged by being freaks. And secondly, having a smorgasbord of like-minded friends to dine on was, for me, an intoxicating drug. It was a totally unprecedented experience and I lapped up all the Piscean vibes of over-identification with the group while I soaked up the counterculture.
The energy of Pisces is anti-egoic. Pisces asks us to dissolve the boundaries of personality and become one with the universe (or whatever else is available). Famously, a lot of Piscean types loosen the grip of the superego (or social conscience) by abusing drugs and alcohol. More evolved Pisces pursue meditation and mysticism to transcend the finite understanding of the Self. The whole agenda of Pisces is to lose the Self, and there are both constructive and destructive ways to do this. You can lose yourself by getting stuck in an abusive relationship. You can also lose yourself by doing humanitarian work that offers no benefit to you personally except the joy of giving. It’s a wide arc of possibility. I lost myself in “the scene” and in music. You’ll find that many Pisceans, if not musicians themselves, hold a reverent attitude toward music and its place in their life. I have one client with a 12th house Pisces Moon who compulsively attends rock shows as a survival mechanism, just like I did when transiting Saturn in Pisces was working my chart.
I have a saying that transiting planets always show up as the good, the bad, and the neutral. We’re not grasping astrology’s real scope when we imagine that Jupiter always gives us a good time and Saturn always gives us a bad one. Jupiter creates Jupiterian events and Saturn creates Saturnine ones. We’re likely to enjoy some of those manifestations, dislike other ones, and be indifferent to the rest. If I’m honest, I’ll tell you that I enjoyed having an epic extended party on my parents’ dime while I was away at college. That’s as close as I can get to the “good” of this transiting event. The bad was an unhealthy and exploitative relationship.
Saturn in Pisces: long-lived codependence
For seven years, I was in a cult. It was not a religious cult but a self-help therapy cult. I joined when I was 16, and the therapist did everything possible to alienate us from our families and our friends in the outside world, so that our whole emotional focus became “the group.” We had our therapeutic in-speak, and the focus of much of our group work was how people on the outside just couldn’t vibe with our superior perspective. For many years, the group helped me, and functioned as a replacement for the family connection that was completely lacking in my life. I’m pretty sure I’d be dead now if that therapist and her bad boundaries hadn’t intervened in my life in those key teenage years. The problems only started when I decided to leave group.
There was a joke among group members that the only way to successfully leave group was to move out of the country or die. I tried moving six hours away to Santa Cruz, with college as my excuse, but the therapist wasn’t happy. My parents’ insurance payments had long since run out and I was attending group for free, not realizing what a valuable service I was performing for the therapist in being a kind of co-counselor who parroted all her crazy cult speak. I called her occasionally from college, and her advice was always the same: come back to Southern California, to group, to your real family, and we will take care of you.
I knew this was a messed-up situation and that she was wrong, but I was powerless to say no. She had saved my life, after all. “Thea,” she commented, “you’ve always been so good at everything. I think it’s important for you to learn what it is to fail.” The layers of Piscean complexity here are profound. Did I fail out of college because my therapist told me to? Or did she simply give me permission to embrace what she already knew was coming - that I was too fucked up and traumatized to survive without the help of a support group? In one of my favorite television shows, Lodge 49, the character Liz extols the virtues of going down the chute as opposed to going up the ladder, in the game of chutes and ladders. She even puts a full-sized slide in her tiny apartment. That mood describes my life in the mid-90s under the influence of Saturn in Pisces - I was going down the chute, and there was a perverse kind of fun to it. I gave up on my college-as-salvation fantasy in that conversation with my therapist, as well as the idea of striking out on my own. I was a pathetic mental health case and that was OK.
I failed out of college and I also failed at leaving group. I sat through meeting after meeting and years of toxic retreats where the therapist played shaman, knowing that the “therapy” wasn’t deepening anything except my entrenchment with this possessive Scorpionic soul. From the perspective of the astrological counselor that I am now, I can say that this period of waiting and non-action taught me a patience with my own process that has been an invaluable resource over the course of my life. I wasn’t emotionally strong enough to leave the group, and so instead of fighting myself, I simply watched my reactions as the therapist’s egregious ethical transgressions continued to mount up. I would not successfully negotiate my way out of that pseudo-therapeutic wild west until several years later, at the tail-end of Saturn’s transit through Aries.
At the risk of appearing compulsive about turning life’s lemons into lemonade, I’ll say that I’m proud of the way I handled my escape from group therapy. Pisces’ traditional association with “victims” asks that we understand that term literally. Victimization is real, it happens every day, and in some cases it is a crime punishable by law. The absolute worst legacy of pop psychology and self-help is the stubbornly persistent idea that “victimization is a state of mind.” Certainly, it can be useful to make an attitude check if you take everything personally, and falsely believe that the world is out to get you. The flip side of that coin is that we are all treated unfairly at one point or another; we get betrayed by a friend, exploited by a boss, or have our life turned upside down by a drunk driver. Imagining that we are not actually victims of life’s recurring hard knocks is not self-help, it’s delusional.
I knew that I was the victim of my therapist’s megalomania, in the way that she collected and exploited broken young people like myself. She would heroically swoop in and save suicidal teens, but unending fealty to her cult was the price of that salvation. The simple act of acknowledging I was powerless was the first step in the journey to severing my connection with her, and I mean that with all its 12-step resonance. Two of Pisces’ keywords are “invisibility” and “consciousness,” and a successful Pisces event will facilitate growth of the latter, though on the surface all that will appear is the former. Much like the Hanged Man card in the Tarot, periods of Piscean activity are characterized by inner transformation, visioning, and dreaming, while the outer life continues in suspended animation. Endurance, a Saturn word, of the state of being powerless (Pisces), gave me the serenity to accept the things I could not change. I will repeat that this Saturnine wisdom has been a pillar of my mental health from that time forward. The courage to change the things I could only came with Saturn’s later transit into Aries.
Saturn in Pisces: the arduous task of expanding consciousness
In this exploration of what was onerous about the Saturn in Pisces period, in an effort to get to what was constructive about it, I have to mention my actual struggles with mental health. I say “actual struggles” because I didn’t really believe I was mentally unhealthy for wanting to get away from my toxic therapist and her creepy group. I knew that was a sane desire. But I legitimately feared that I was mentally unwell because I started to see things that no one else could see, and hear things that no one else could hear. I didn’t tell a soul about these events. For context, all the weird communications that made me worry I was bat-shit crazy all those years ago are now a regular part of my life. I talk (and listen) to spirit guides in my career as an astrologer, Tarot reader, and intuitive. I see ghosts and gods and talk to trees and flowers. It is a basic assumption of my life that much of “reality” is unseen and incorporeal.
But 18-year-old-me had not yet learned to trust the sentience of the invisible world. One of the most profound events that unfolded during the Saturn in Pisces period was a waking vision that I had in the woods of Santa Cruz. It disordered all my previous ideas about the structure of reality. And though I did try magic mushrooms for the first time while away at college, I was stone-cold sober when a pathway opened up in the redwoods that had never been there before. The trees spoke to me that night, the spirits of the Ohlone people spoke to me, and various divine beings materialized before my eyes. All of reality had a pulsing, liquid quality.
My robust response to this accidental initiation activated all the magic that I’d been learning with my new pagan friends. I became enormous and energetically armored to protect myself from the swirling apparitions. After I left the woods and walked back to campus, I became conscious of the need to use the facilities. I remember looking down at the doorway to the women’s restroom from some great height. It occurred to me that I would have to re-enter my body in order to get back to earth.
All I can say about that night was that it was real, it happened, and I no longer had the luxury of believing in a merely material universe from that point forward. The message I received from the redwoods was life-altering, and a big part of my Saturn in Pisces story, but the content is not something I share publicly. It is fun to contemplate though how Saturn, ruler of trees, transmitted a stern, “tough love” communication via the redwoods while passing through mystical Pisces.
Saturn in Pisces: existential loneliness and longing
Processing that vision without an elder to guide me was the most painful aspect of the experience. In fact, the lack of a qualified teacher to help me was a dominant theme of the whole Saturn in Pisces period. Here I’m feeling Saturn’s rulership of elders and the Pisces affiliation with loss and longing. Where was my teacher, my tradition? Had I been born in the wrong time, or the wrong ethnicity? Was modern society just irreparably broken? I needed a shaman to sort me out, but it was before the internet and I didn’t know where to find one. I fervently believed that when the student was ready, the teacher would appear, as I’d read in so many New Age and self-help books. But my guide stubbornly refused to show up.
I struggle to put language to the way that Saturnine hardship ultimately assisted me in making order out of Pisces’ altered states of consciousness. Saturn is also associated with loneliness and solitude, and I was so isolated by my visionary experiences that I was ultimately thrust upon my own resources for unpacking them. There was a lot of waiting for clarity that never came. And when no answers were immediate or easy, I was forced to give up the idea that the violent bend in reality I’d witnessed was ever going to “make sense.” I didn’t judge it or dismiss it or jump to a conclusion; I simply let it be and watched as thin meanings hardened into solid concepts over a period of years. While we tend to think of Aquarius as the sign of detachment, Pisces also has a remote quality. With Pisces, the detachment is spiritual as opposed to emotional. The Piscean shedding of ego facilitates the growth of spiritual consciousness, by allowing the inner sight to zoom out far enough to see beyond the ego. It was at this age that I began to grasp that my teachers could be the trees, the spirits, the gods, and my own higher self: Saturn in Pisces, the still center of the soul.
Saturn in Pisces: self-deception (and its consequences)
One might translate Saturn in Pisces as “death of a fantasy,” or “reality bites,” as I’ve named this article. Reality Bites, the Ben Stiller-directed film that came out in 1994 just as the Saturn in Pisces era was getting underway, perfectly captures the Piscean themes of slack, nihilism, and disenchantment. In the film, four freshly minted college graduates watch the value of their degrees dissolve as they confront the choice between being overqualified and underpaid, or unemployed. I identified with Winona Ryder’s character in the film, who becomes so disheartened by the available options that she goes down the chute. She wallows in depression, wastes time and money calling 900 numbers, and lives off her parent’s gas card.
I wound up at my parent’s house again after my willful defeat at UCSC, and I was mortified. I had planned to never see these people again. I made herculean efforts to strike out on my own and get an apartment with friends, but all the struggle amounted to a handful of sand slipping through my fingers. I tried to settle into an inglorious career at junior college in town and a stupid retail job, but my dream of a special post-high school destiny still had some life in it, and so I only pretended to live the life of an average 19-year-old. I lied to my Mom about going to school and work, while in reality I killed time with friends, shoplifting and writing bad checks to cover my petty needs.
I’m so ashamed of this period in my life. I’d never lived with so much deceit, before or since. Lies and deception, or more properly an inability to face reality, are also strong hallmarks of Pisces.
The Takeaway
You are probably wondering at this point what all this has to do with the coming years of Saturn in Pisces. Possibly, quite a lot. My takeaway from this reflection is that Saturn will test us where we are most vulnerable. Where we are open to being exploited and manipulated, we will be taken for a ride. Where we are prone to over-identify with a relationship, group, or identity, we will watch that affiliation dissolve. Where we are most unsure of our feelings, beliefs, and assumptions about the world, we will be forced into stark confrontation with the confusion until we get clear.
But there’s got to be a positive side, right? Saturn in Pisces might work out OK for some people, right? Sure - you might sublimate your own selfish needs by taking on a humanitarian cause. Done and done. But since the function of Saturn is to make us more resilient by ferreting out weakness, expect to have your divine compassion turn into a liability. Expect to be so seared by the pain of the world that you are forced to put on Saturn’s bullet-proof vest and insulate your bleeding heart. In other words, focusing on others or making an optimal response to a transiting event doesn’t get you out of the plain hard work demanded by Saturn. Typically, Saturn asks for your blood, sweat, and tears, but in Pisces, Saturn demands the onerous work of expanding consciousness.
I’m fond of reminding my clients that Saturn is not gleefully pitchforking hapless humans in the butt just so that he can cackle at them from outer space. His testing is to a purpose. So don’t be so eager to escape yourself while Saturn is in Pisces that you forget to actually look at yourself. I’ve just outlined my story of a brutal dressing down by Saturn in my first college year. On the surface, none of the experiences I mentioned seem very redeemable. That time was a big fat embarrassing mess, and my least favorite period of my life to remember, because it shows me in such a bad light. All my weaknesses were exposed and they brought me down low.
But it turns out, the pay-off for grappling with the realities of disappointment, disenchantment, and failure is pretty high. By becoming conscious that I was being manipulated by a toxic therapist, I learned to defend myself from exploitation by abusive healers and spiritual practitioners (remember Saturn’s bullet-proof vest). Not only that, Saturn’s lessons can forge the backbone of your character, hard-earned truths that help us stand up straight in the world. And my hard-earned value, as a counselor now myself, is that I do not manipulate vulnerable people for my own ends. Confronting the stark reality of abuse-disguised-as-therapy in my own life has given me deep insight into the toxic power dynamics that I avoid like the plague.
My spectacular failure, as the former gifted kid with straight A’s who got booted out of college, was actually a liberation from my over-identification with being “the smart kid.” This was brought home painfully the first time I ran into a friend that I’d sat through four years of honors classes with in high school. I was working at K-Mart, and she came through my check-out line, stocking up for another year at Yale (my cheeks still burn!) Failing out of college, and eventually convincing myself to take a purposeful break from school, was a necessary initiation into all the other aspects of life that my brittle existence as Miss Overachiever had forestalled. And I’m not just making lemonade. Falling off my high horse, being forced to laugh at myself and life’s vicissitudes, has given me a kind of Saturnine resilience that others find enviable. I have the lived experience and the consciousness that you can bounce back after a spectacular failure, and a hard-earned wisdom that allows me to see things in their proper scale. Cancer and car accidents are serious. Failing out of school is not.
As I tried to make clear above, fear about my mental health was the most stressful aspect of the last Saturn in Pisces period. The upshot is that I have not had any major fears about my mental health in almost thirty years. I went through a slow, protracted (hello Saturn) initiation into the idea that reality was complex and multi-layered, and inclusive of many unexplained and inexplicable things. I got serious and methodical (Saturn) about the wonders of the invisible world (Pisces). And you might notice that my career, a famously Saturnine sector of life, is built upon these same assumptions. As an astrologer I have to stand for the idea that causal factors that are not yet empirically provable have a bearing on the psyche of the individual. I would not trade this bedrock of gnosis for the world, but the price I paid was many dark nights of the soul, alone with only my own personal verification process to guide me.
It pains me to say this, but losing the sense of your own specialness and understanding yourself as a fallible human like all other humans is one of the greatest gifts Pisces has to offer (the Smiths’ lyric “I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives, now it’s happening in mine” just came crashing into my head). It pains me to say it because it’s a hard sell as a plus-point for this astrological event, and also because 18-year-old me is still a little offended that I wasn’t plucked out of obscurity and crowned Queen of the Psychic Universe. Seriously though, all the Piscean failures I collected by sitting on my ass, waiting for life to happen to me, were a powerful initiation into Saturn’s existential aloneness. You are born alone and you will die alone, and so it’s tremendously useful to learn how to do things for yourself, like the little red hen. After dicking around for two years waiting to be discovered last time Saturn was in Pisces, I finally gave up the game and sought out a teacher myself. 19-year-old me signed up for astrology lessons, and began the arduous process (Saturn) of putting form to the noetic and transcendent (Pisces).
If you’re curious about how the rest of my story played out in the short term, I got a full-time job, and I loved it. Seeing myself as a productive member of society instead of a possibly-too-mentally-fragile-for-the-real -world headcase bolstered both my confidence and my resilience. My parents (finally) got divorced, and life moved in some surprising directions. I eventually went back to college (and plodded all the way to the PhD, as some of you know), but I went back on my terms, as a returning student grounded by my life experience.
Saturn in Pisces is still a hard sell. The sustained work (Saturn) of becoming more conscious (Pisces) is never going to be the opiate of the masses. Many folks will simply pass on this opportunity for growth, and drink too much, watch too much TV, or take on someone else’s troubles as their own. They’ll live through Saturn in Pisces just like the rest of us, of course, but will remember it as an epoch of victimization or confusion instead of as an invitation to toughen up their weakest points.
There are myriad other ways that transiting Saturn in Pisces might manifest in the individual natal chart (I haven’t even touched on mysticism and art!), but since this blog is pushing 5,000 words, I’m going to stop myself here. If you’re curious about what the Saturn in Pisces event will mean in your chart, consider booking a Saturn deep-dive with me (linked at the top of the page), and exploring this planet’s natal potential and transiting power.