This year’s Saturn/ Neptune opposition has many layers of meaning. Lying across the Leo Aquarius axis we have themes of possible conflict between heart versus head and individual will versus collective will. Saturn stands for structure, boundaries, discipline, limits and authority while Neptune is our ideals, yearnings, desires for escape and longing for oneness.

Neptune the great dissolver is currently in mutual reception with Uranus the innovator and technocrat. Together they are making a powerful duo. Whatever we dream of, technology will surely deliver. We can even have the ‘ideal’ body. Hi-tech health interventions include nip and tuck, test-tube babies, bionic limbs, Botox and transplanted organs. Saturn, the cosmic naysayer, is currently weak in the sign of Leo. When Saturn moves on into Virgo, the sign of health, will there be more debate about and how we interfere with the powerful wisdom of nature and our bodies?

Last November I heard a radio feature about a man who was given a kidney by his wife and subsequently developed a new interest in supermarket shopping, baking scones and gardening. It seems that part of her personality had been transferred along with the organ. (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/01/2006_47_wed.shtml) How Libran, I thought; kidneys and relationships. However, the programme went on to describe how such cases are common with all transplanted organs. Examples of ‘transplant memory’ include a young man who abandoned rock and roll for classical music and started eating quiche, adopting the tastes and some of the vocabulary of his heart donor. A seventy year old woman picked up a liking of action movies and French fries along with her new blood pump. A grieving mother instantly recognised the energy of her dead son before the man who had received his heat even walked in the room.

There are now hundreds of such stories from around the world. Scientists are still sceptical but it seems that our organs are more than just a biotechnical collection of cells. Our bodies hold memory. Consciousness does not just reside in our brains but in every part of our physical being. As a long term blood donor I wonder how many people are walking around this planet with a bit of my energetic imprint within them. Transplants save lives. Relatives who lose loved ones in accidents can give a priceless gift to a living person by consenting to their organs being used. However, do we really understand what we are doing as we tamper with the integrity of our bodies? Are we failing to honour the energetic body when we cut and invade? Is such surgery a spiritual violation?

Transplants have been attempted for centuries, but have only taken off since drugs (ruled by Neptune) have been developed which prevent the body rejecting the alien organ which it discerns as ‘non-self’. Saturn, the body’s keeper of boundaries and structure (ruler of skin and skeleton) mobilises Mars to fight the foreign invader. In order for transplant surgery to work, the body’s own defence system has to be pharmaceutically suppressed.

A key medical milestone was the world’s first heart transplant on 3rd December 1967 in Cape Town, 40 years ago this year. The event made an international celebrity of surgeon Christiaan Barnard. Interestingly, Saturn was also weak at that time, being in fall in Aries. Mars, the ruler of knives was in the sign of technology and squared the Aries north node, which it also ruled. Aries likes to be first and break new ground. Pluto conjoined Uranus in Virgo signalling a technological health breakthrough where the dead could give life. Neptune was conjunct Mercury in Scorpio, changing our ideas about death and Venus was powerfully placed in rulership in Libra next to the south node. As we now know the donor lives on in the recipient in an energetic as well as physical form.

What genie was released from the bottle on that day? Every bio technical advance lures us into a new wonder world of medical miracles. Neptune gives us the ‘Hollywood’ version of life and we get seduced by all that technicolour, special effects and promise of happy endings. When Saturn is weak it’s harder to ask the ethical questions “we can but should we?” Do we really understand the wider and longer term implications of what we are doing?

“Will I still be me?” is a question now asked by potential organ recipients. Do such patients really appreciate that the consequences of receiving part of another human being go beyond the physical? With a shortage of organs available for transplant can they afford to be too fussy? Who are we creating with these human bio-mergers? Or does it just remind us that we are all connected at a deeper level? We are all one.

Saturn is again weak being in its detriment. Interestingly, it is in the sign of Leo which rules the heart. With this current opposition, is it time to re-visit and re-assess that surgical event of 40 years ago? Or is it already too late? We have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. The apple in the Garden of Eden is genetically modified, Eve has had a boob job and Adam with a transplanted pig’s heart has gone off fruit!