By Robbie Tulip

Tags: astrology, astrology cycles, iran, mundane, planetary cycles, war

Hormuz, Oil and the End of the Age of Pisces

Astrologers have long identified two key turning points in the 2020s: the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 12 January 2020, which coincided with the official reporting by China of its first COVID-19 death, and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries of 21 February 2026. The first marked the pandemic shock. The second is now looking just as decisive.

The great French mundane astrologer André Barbault saw the 2026 Saturn-Neptune conjunction as a threshold of civilisational renewal, even describing it as a possible relaunch of civilisation.[i] In 2014 Barbault described this interplanetary partnership as “the most benefic configuration of the century.” That optimism now faces a severe test. One week after Saturn met Neptune at the beginning of Aries, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, opening a new world crisis around war, nuclear fear, oil and the Strait of Hormuz, severely disrupting the supply of petrochemical products from the Persian Gulf. [1]

My view is that Barbault will be proved right over time. Saturn-Neptune at 0° Aries is more birth through rupture than gentle dawn. The relaunch of civilisation can only come by exposing the weakness of the old order.

The Iran War is a signature event in the millennial transition from the Age of Pisces to the New Age of Aquarius. It shows the fossil economy at its most vulnerable choke point: the narrow sea passage through which the oil age breathes.

The Solar System Barycentre and the Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune Braid

My research places the Iran War against the primary deep patterns of the Solar System. The first such pattern, integrating all the mass of the planets into a single motion, measures the wobble of the Sun around the Solar System Barycentre. The SSB is the mathematical centre of mass of the system. In The Physics of Astrological Ages, [2] I showed that this solar movement has a precise wave function with a stable repeating period of 178.86 years. This is close to exactly one twelfth of the physical period of an Astrological Age, 2147.6 years, defined by the astronomy of precession of the equinoxes as one twelfth of the Great Year axial precession cycle of 25.771.5 years. [3] It is essential to use this exact calculation rather than the conventional rounded estimates of 25,920 or 25,800 years, in order to see the harmonic resonance between the House and the Age.

The cause of this SSB wave function is the fact that Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune (JSN) come together in conjunction families with a period of 179 years. Every 179 years there are five Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, nine Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions and fourteen Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions. These three gas giant planets dominate the barycentric wave, with Uranus playing a lesser role, and the small terrestrial planets having almost no impact.

Astronomical Structure of History

In my second Correlation article, The Braid of Time, [4] I refined this model as a quintuple helix, as shown in the article diagram reprinted here. Five permanent overlapping conjunction families are formed by the orbital patterns of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. This orderly structure of time has been stable for almost four billion years, providing the local cosmic context in which life on Earth has evolved, and providing a systemic framework to analyse world history.

A defining structure of the Solar System is that these major planets always have the same position relative to each other as 179 years previously, advanced by just over one zodiac sign. Using heliocentric measurement, Saturn and Neptune are always about 34° further along than they were 179 years previously, with Jupiter moving slightly faster. 34° is 1/7^th more than one 30° sign, so after seven cycles the JSN conjunctions skip a sign. This orbital pattern matches the annual pattern of the movement of the Sun through the signs, providing the physical basis for what I call the Houses of the Age. Our geocentric perspective provides only slight distortion to this stable pattern of local cosmic order. The diagram shows how this simple astronomy creates five families of JSN alignments over 3700 years. Each Jupiter conjunction to Saturn and Neptune is shown at the bottom, while Jupiter opposition SN is at the top.

This model defines Houses of the Age as the 179-year periods within each 2148-year Astrological Age marked by successive JSN conjunctions. This twelvefold overlapping structure is entirely empirical, with the 179-year SSB JSN cycle exactly one twelfth of the Age period.  As explained below, we are now in the middle of what I call the Modern Family, shown in red in the chart, and we have just entered the twelfth house of what I call the Christian Family, shown in darker blue. The emerging Aquarian family is in light green.  The five are rounded out by the Classical Family in light blue and the Capricorn family in purple.

In The Braid of Time, I explain that the Modern Family achieved equality of orb with the previously dominant Christian Family around 1340, marking the paradigm shift from medieval Christendom to the Renaissance and scientific enlightenment.  The 1344 Aquarius House in the Modern Family reflected the emerging Renaissance ethic of evidence and reason. The 1524 Pisces conjunction coincided with the Protestant Reformation in Christianity, the 1703 Aries conjunction with the Scientific Enlightenment and the 1882 Taurus house with the consolidation of capitalism and the oil economy.

This gives a coherent astrological framework of modern history. The House of Aquarius planted the seed of knowledge over authority. The House of Pisces transformed medieval religion. The House of Aries turned the new reason into will, revolution and industrial fire. And the House of Taurus converted that rational will into matter - petroleum, electricity, capital, corporations, railways, automobiles, plastics, fertiliser, ports, pipelines and global commodity trade.

The Taurus House of the Modern Family coincided with the foundation of Standard Oil, the predecessor of ExxonMobil and other oil majors, on 2 January 1882. Taurus is fixed earth: matter, value, possession, money, food, comfort and stored energy. Petroleum is the perfect Taurus-Neptune substance: ancient organic life buried in the Earth, compressed by Saturnian geology, released as fluid Neptunian power and expanded by Jupiter into global abundance.

The oil age promised security through material accumulation. The Hormuz crisis is fracturing this vision. The more deeply civilisation depends on oil, the more exposed it becomes to chokepoints, missiles, mines, naval escalation and energy blackmail, as well as global warming.

Dating House Ingress

Each house inception can be dated in two ways, by SN and JN conjunction dates.  The Saturn-Neptune conjunction gives the clean five-family structure. Saturn and Neptune meet every 35.8 years, and every fifth conjunction marks the return of a JSN family after 179 years, with one family always dominating for about 1000 years. This is the cleanest structural marker.  The Jupiter-Neptune conjunction marks the closest triple orb, when Jupiter is closest to Saturn and Neptune.

In a tight JSN family, dates for the three conjunctions are close to each other, whereas in the current end of the Christian/Piscean family, they are several years apart.  The current transition is spread over six years, from JS at 0° Aquarius on 21 December 2020. JN at 23° Pisces on 12 April 2022 was the moment of closest JSN orb, with Saturn 30° away. Saturn and Neptune then met at 0°45′ Aries on 21 February 2026, the formal Saturn-Neptune gate. The Braid of Time explains this in more detail.

These two ways of explaining the house ingress help reveal the symbolism. The Age of Pisces over the last two thousand years is now coming to an end. The stretched chord - Aquarius in 2020, Pisces in 2022 and Aries in 2026 - means the end of the old age involves conjunctions in each of these signs. After JS anticipated the New Age of Aquarius, the entry into the twelfth house of Pisces swells through one last Jupiter-Neptune flood of dream, faith, compassion and confusion in Pisces, then breaks into the Saturn-Neptune Aries field of action, sacrifice, force and vision.

Hormuz: The Throat of Taurus

The Strait of Hormuz is the symbolic throat of the oil age. Until the war, about 20 million barrels of oil flowed through it every day, about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption, as well as major trade in gas, sulphur, fertilizer and related petrochemicals.

The closure of Hormuz is a crisis of the oil age, revealing the petroleum body of the cloud economy. Oil flows are overheating the planet, but ending these flows puts the world economy into convulsions. This is the late Taurus contradiction: continued fossil abundance destroys the climate, while interrupted fossil flows disrupt trade, food, transport and military security.

The Iran War joins two deep astrological historical structures. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction marks both the ending of the Christian/Piscean family, and also the late-stage crisis in the Taurus house of the Modern Family.  The closure of Hormuz is choking the House of Taurus and hastening the end of the Age of Pisces.

Jupiter Square Saturn-Neptune: The 2025 Trigger

The trigger came before the 2026 conjunction. Around 19 June 2025, Jupiter in Cancer squared Saturn and Neptune after they briefly entered Aries, in a close graze before their 2026 conjunction.  This cardinal crisis pattern, Aries against Cancer, fire against water, created a brake on the bold Aries vision, requiring it to integrate themes of home, food, shelter, family, nation, sea, land and protection.

Saturn-Neptune in Aries symbolises the dream in action, as vision seeks new institutional form in a decisive forward-looking rupture from the past. Their square to Jupiter in Cancer asks what must be defended and nurtured, and at what cost.  The square during the Israel-Iran war in June 2025 coincided with questions of nuclear threat, national survival, civilian vulnerability and US intervention dominating world politics. It set the stage for the 2026 crisis.

The symbolism of the signs contrasts home and security against impetuous inception. The context of the waning House of Taurus symbolises the economic strains on oil and material supply. Pisces is the fading religious dream. Aquarius is the coming demand for planetary systems thinking.

So the formula is:  War in Aries threatens the Cancerian home through the Taurean oil artery, opening the world to a new Aquarian vision.

Each house has an axis of symmetry around its midpoint at 89.5 years, with a consistent symbolic structure.  At the midpoint, S opposes JN.  The dreams, ideals, faith, expansion, myths and utopia brought by the JN conjunction are opposed by Saturn, symbolising structure, law, limit, judgement and reality. Every midpoint asks whether the dream of the house can survive contact with Saturnian consequence.  All the other aspects are mirrored in the two halves of the House.

The Aries house from 1703 reached its midpoint in 1792. Saturn opposite Jupiter-Neptune symbolised the revolutionary crisis of modernity: the Enlightenment dream of liberty, equality and universal justice confronting war, law, execution and state violence.

The Taurus house from 1881–82 reached its midpoint around 1971–72, when the fossil-consumer order confronted limits: the end of Bretton Woods, the rise of environmental consciousness, the approach of the 1973 oil shock and the first systemic recognition that material growth had planetary costs.

In addition, each House is divided into five equal SN conjunction periods.  For the House of Taurus, these have a striking alignment to Russian history – the assassination of Tsar Alexander in 1881, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the death of Stalin in 1953, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1889, as well as the prior emergence of Marxist theory in the 1840s.  We wait to see if the current conjunction will mark a similar regime change.

We are now in the last fifth of the Taurus house, entering the cusp transition period between the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius. The 2025–26 Saturn-Neptune conjunction square to Jupiter marks a late reset of the Taurus oil age, pointing toward the coming global transformation when we enter the House of Gemini in 2060. Understanding the House of Taurus in terms of the oil economy shows why the Iran-Hormuz crisis is structural.

The Weakening Christian Overlay

The present Saturn-Neptune conjunction also belongs to the old Christian Family of the Age of Pisces. This family was tightest in 769 AD at the Cancer-Leo cusp, with an orb of less than a quarter degree, around the high point of Christendom’s long cultural ascendancy.

Since then, the Christian Family has weakened. It moved through Sagittarius around 1487, Capricorn 1666, Aquarius 1842–47 and now Aries in 2026. The 1840s Aquarius house prefigured a more humanitarian and scientific ethos, even while the old Age of Pisces remained in place. The 2026 Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries opens the twelfth house of the Age of Pisces, but with a wide gap from Jupiter, showing that the old Christian paradigm has lost much of its former social and intellectual authority.

This weakening overlay is crucial. Modernity defeated Christendom as an authority system, but inherited Christianity as a moral imagination. The old Piscean language of sacrifice, salvation, apocalypse and redemption still haunts politics, but it no longer governs the world through a stable theological consensus.

The fact that SN skipped the House of Pisces – after conjunctions in the six preceding signs – illustrates that the current SN conjunction in Aries calls us to look forward rather than backwards. At 0° Aries, that old dream no longer appears as contemplative faith. It appears as action, war, decision and rupture, opening the need for a new vision of the planetary future. The last house of Pisces does not arrive as mystical peace but as the demand to act.

From Pisces to Aquarius

In The Physics of Astrological Ages, I argued that the Age transition from Pisces to Aquarius involves the gradual replacement of religious belief by scientific knowledge as the primary ethical framework for ordering society, while retaining mythology as sacred memory. The shift is from mystical compassionate belief, the theme of Pisces, toward innovative humanitarian knowledge, the theme of Aquarius.

The Hormuz crisis reveals exactly why that shift is necessary.

The old world systems of myth, fear, sovereignty, national destiny, oil dependence and sacrificial violence are not suited to the emerging need for global thinking. The emerging Aquarian Age requires a deliberate cultural evolution to ground the strategic basis of planetary security and stability in themes such as systems knowledge, energy resilience, climate science, cooperative security, atmospheric responsibility, planetary stewardship and humanitarian equality.

The oil age has become a test of whether humanity can move from possession to coordination. Taurus asks what we own. Aquarius, indicated by the JS 2020 conjunction in Aquarius, the entry of Pluto into Aquarius in 2023 and Uranus into Gemini this year, and also the next air House in Gemini from 2060, asks how we belong together in one system.  The ethical task of science is shifting its paradigm from description to connection.

The Uranus-Pluto Trine and the Barbault Bucket

The grave challenges of the Iran War contrast with Barbault's hopeful reading of the 2026–28 sky. Uranus in Gemini, Neptune and Saturn in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius create a positive air-fire polarity, enhanced by the 'Barbault Bucket' as Jupiter enters Leo in July. Barbault saw the Uranus-Pluto trine, strengthened by Neptune's double sextile as shown in the attached graph, as opening "a great new phase of technological growth, altruistic in nature." Artificial intelligence is the obvious candidate for this technological wave, though its altruistic use is far from an automatic result. This alignment frames the Iran-Hormuz crisis as the pressure point against which a new Aquarian planetary intelligence can emerge, aligning scientific knowledge, communication, courage and institutional transformation with the common good. The task is to ride this wave well, converting technological power into shared resilience, climate repair and planetary wellbeing.

Barbault’s Relaunch

Barbault’s hope for 2026 remains vital even though the conjunction has arrived with war. The deepest Saturn-Neptune symbolism is the meeting of reality and dream. At its worst, this conjunction could allow collapse, delusion, fear and oppression. At its best, it can give structure to the vision for a better world.

The crisis at Hormuz marks the paradigm shift through which Barbault’s relaunch must pass. The fossil order is being revealed as fragile, violent, ignorant and obsolete, even while the oil economy lays the foundation for ongoing shared prosperity and stability. To simply oppose that order is deeply impractical, in view of how entwined our existence is with fossil fuels, even while we imagine a gradual transformation to a sane planetary future.

The transition will need action to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight alongside steady action to remove greenhouse gases from the air. Such revelations are painful, but also clarifying.

A relaunch of civilisation cannot be built with the old mentalities of the House of Taurus.  Just the denial of climate change by the fossil economy is a recipe for collapse. It must be built on a new planetary intelligence, imagining and creating and anticipating the future House of Gemini starting with the next Saturn-Neptune cycle in 2060.  And then, at the end of this century, in 2095-8, the Age of Aquarius starts to really kick into gear with the JSN triple conjunction in Virgo.  This is an early part of the new Aquarian Family, with tightest orb 21°.  But the Modern Family will continue to dominate for another five hundred years.  These transitions are slow.

Conclusion: The Fossil Body and the Aquarian Mind

The Iran War and the closure of Hormuz show the oil civilisation at its symbolic and practical limit. The Taurus House of the Modern Family gave the world petroleum, electricity, corporate capitalism and mass material abundance. That same House now reveals its shadow: dependency, climate danger, geopolitical fragility, biodiversity collapse and the conversion of energy security into military crisis.

The Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries opens the final House of the Age of Pisces while inviting us to create a new vision of a hopeful future. It turns the old dream into action. Its immediate expression may be war, but its deeper meaning is transition.

As the Age of Pisces moves into its final House, the Saturn Neptune conjunction in Aries has opened the gate, enabling clear vision of the problems of the fossil economy in the light of new Aquarian visions of the global thinking needed to build a planetary civilisation.