Copyright : Coolbiere. A.

It’s a fiery and turbulent sky today.  As the energies ripen by the minute into Saturday’s electrifying Aries Full Moon, something too important to ignore has happened. Saturn has entered the last degree of Libra. The sky is still vibrating with the recent epic dust-up of Uranus and Pluto as Saturn begins his departurefrom the sign that is sacred territory for him.

The planet the ancients called the Lord of Karma first entered Libra in November 2009. Then he changed his mind, and headed back into Virgo in April 2010. (There must have been some unfinished business to wrap up in the ancient sign of the Virgin Goddess).  Since July 2010, he’s been in Libra. In other parts of the sky, Saturn can feel harsh and punishing. The one place where that’s least true is Libra, where it’s all about relatedness. This is the sign of Saturn’s exaltation. This is where we recognize him as the other of his ancient names, the Angel of the Present.

Saturn is the ruler of the material reality of planet earth.  He’s the energy who draws the formless into physical reality. His third ancient name combines the meanings of the first two– the Guardian at the Gate. On the other side of those gates lies the expanded consciousness that can tap the full spectrum of cosmic energies—which is exactly the direction the Universe is pushing us through the seven energetic gateways Uranus and Pluto are creating between June 2012 and March 2015.  We just passed through the second of these on September 19.  On Saturday, the Moon will fire it up again. We will feel it in our hearts.

The last half of Libra is a fabled part of the skyl–the Via Combusta, or Burning Way. For the last year, this is where Saturn has been. This turbulent and often difficult territory, which spans the last half of Libra and the first half of Scorpio, falls somewhere in every birth chart. When Saturn travels through the Libra portion of the Via Combusta, reality can be reshaped in that part of our inner cosmos, in a way that is rarely otherwise possible. When we bring our conscious intent to the table while Saturn is in the Via, he will re-draw the energetic boundaries in the part of our chart that falls there.

It only happens every 30 years, give or take a year or two. Since 1983, we’ve been living within energetic structures that are the result of choices we made back in 1983. For the last year, Saturn has been offering to redraw those boundaries. That offer is good for one more week, and then he leaves the part of the Via Combusta that exalts him. When Saturn enters Scorpio on October 4, the work of transformation he’s been setting up for the last 27 months will become intensely real.

Every degree in the zodiac carries a distinct energetic quality.  Nearly a century ago, these energies were perceived as a series of symbols by a clairvoyant working with the famed astrologer Marc Edmond Jones, one of a small group who brought the ancient art into the 20^th century.  The symbol for the last degree of Libra, where Saturn is now, is symbolized by “three mounds of knowledge on a philosopher’s head.”  In his masterwork, An Astrological Mandala: The Cycle of Transformations and Its 360 Symbolic Phases,  Dane Rudhyar, comments on this symbol.  “A true philosopher is a man [sic] who is able to ‘understand,’ not merely to ‘know,’ the processes of life as he comes to experience them directly. He [sic] is the man of wisdom, different indeed from the man of science; for while there must be knowledge before understanding, knowledge alone can be both barren and destructive of wisdom.”  We don’t have to look very far to see how truly this describes our world-and the consciousness that created it.

To be able to collaborate with the cosmic energies, what we need is wisdom and understanding. This is not compartmentalized, specialized, or fragmented knowledge. It’s the holistic knowing that is deeply integrated into our feelings, our thoughts and our actions. As often as you can over the next seven days, tune into the wisdom of your whole being and look carefully at your life. How have the boundaries we’ve drawn created the reality we’re experiencing?  How would our reality change if we redrew those boundaries?

The last degree of every sign carries a degree of urgency.  In this case, the urgency is clear.  If we want to change the boundaries we drew back in 1983, the time is now. Saturn won’t be back in Libra until October of 2040.  By then, the world will have changed, more than any of us can now imagine.  In 29 degrees of Libra, the ancient Angel of the Present reminds us that what we do today is bringing that future into being.