Sitting with Saturn and Softness
“Alive, a man is supple, soft;
In death, unbending, rigorous.
All creatures, grass and trees, alive
Are plastic but are pliant too,
And dead, are friable and dry.
Unbending rigor is the mate of death,
And wielding softness, company of life:
Unbending soldiers get no victories;
The stiffest tree is readiest for the axe.
The strong and mighty topple from their place;
The soft and yielding rise above them all.”
With Saturn hovering around the last degree of Aquarius, my own Saturn Return is coming to a close. During these past few weeks with Saturn under the clarifying beams of the Sun, ruminations upon my Saturn return’s significance have become revelations. Although we often think of Saturn as a planet of incredible hardness and rigidity, this latest lesson was one of softness.
On the run-up to Saturn’s recent conjunction with the Sun on the 15th, I took a mile-long walk to a local graveyard, where I watched crows alight upon the branches of soaring cedar trees. Chickadees chittered and clicked in the shorter yews and spruces. I spotted some crocuses emerging from the earth and a handful of shy crabapple blossoms - subtle signs of spring’s imminent emergence.
For the soundtrack to my journey, I’d chosen a recent conversation on the Saturnvox podcast between the stellar McCalla Ann and the relational astrologer Diana Rose Harper. The topic at hand? Saturn, of course. The pair weaved their conversation through many of Saturn’s traditional significations like suffering, structure, and limitations. However, their most fruitful interaction came from a question of devotion and relationship. If we dwell in a living Cosmos in which one can relate to all manner of sentient beings, including the planets, then what does it look like to be in right relation with Saturn?
From their experiences as astro-magical practitioners, McCalla and Diana each shared the face of Saturn they interact with. Neither of them reported seeing Saturn in his traditional Greco-Roman image of a weary old man. Although each of them noted Saturn’s appearance as someone or something elderly, ancient, and numinous, neither saw Saturn as feeble senex.
And naturally, this provoked a question in me: how do I see Saturn?
Saturn as depicted by Cristoforo de Predis, a 15th century Italian illuminator.
Throughout my Saturn Return, I have cultivated a devotional relationship with Saturn. The intention was originally somewhat remedial. I thought, “If I make offerings, recite prayers, and spend time with Saturn, then surely he will lessen his blows. Perhaps his lessons will land with less force.” At the very least, I hoped to work with my Saturn Return intentionally versus incidentally.
How foolish of me. Saturn is always going to Saturn. In hindsight, I now wonder whether I actually activated Saturn, drawing an excess of his essence into my experience of the past three years. Observing my body in the mirror after a shower, I noted recently how spare and thin I have become, how sharply my bones jut out from my skin, how weathered my skin is. Reflecting on personal conflicts that cropped up and the deaths of two friends, I rolled through moments of sorrow, of bitterness, of regret, of loneliness and hate.
Considering my own devotional interactions with Saturn, the visage I have witnessed of the Greater Malefic has often been vulture-like. But need it always be?
One of the elusive attributes of Saturn addressed by Diana and McCalla was water. Neither his domiciles of Capricorn or Aquarius are water signs, yet they retain a connection to water through their archetypal imagery. In its original iconography, Capricorn is a chimeric creature: half-goat and half-fish. Likewise, Aquarius is represented by the image of a Water-bearer, a person pouring out a libation upon the Earth. In this hydrologic dance, Diana and McCalla pried at the possibility of Saturn containing some softness as well, with McCalla suggesting that Saturn, like the Buddha, favors the Middle Way, the path between polar extremes.
Reflecting upon this, I realized that I had perhaps needlessly forced Saturn into the extreme of deprivation and denial. Of the manifold masks Saturn may wear, I had compressed his vast potentia into an image of brittleness and bitterness - that of a hobbled, scowling old man or the skeletal ascetic meditating at the forest’s edge. While those images are deeply vital to Saturn’s milieu, so are contrary images of grandmothers and water. If Saturn preaches the Middle Way, then the Saturnian move for me at this point would be to relax the rigor of my self-imposed discipline.
“Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.”
In my own chart, Saturn occupies the 5th House of Good Fortune, one connected to pleasure, creativity, and children. More than any other event in the past three years, the birth of my daughter has defined my Saturn Return Although this shift in role and responsibility has aged me, it has done so through something soft, something young. My daughter has no cynicism nor bitterness. She approaches each experience with eagerness and “eyes unclouded by hate” a la Princess Mononoke. Although I thought Saturn would harden me, my daughter has made me soft.
And if ultimately what Saturn wants is longevity, he will call us to soften, to use the gentle touch, to take our time. Because, as mentioned in the above verses from the Tao Te Ching, longevity does not arise from rigidity. It arises from that which is yielding, subtle, and soft: water.
A few days after my epiphany, I heard another astounding conversation on Saturn, albeit obliquely. On a recent episode of my friend Brett's podcast 21st Century Vitalism, contemporary thinker Dr. John Vervaeke discussed the aging process as the thing that draws us into right relation, saying "[As they age]...what people zero in on ultimately is their relationships - with themselves, with Reality, and with other people."
Going on, he discusses how this change in values in reflected in a qualitative shift in relating, moving away from relationships founded upon need gratification to relationships founded upon the inherent worth of the Other. Instead of asking how Others are relevant to one's own egocentric needs and desires, one asks "How am I important to anther person or thing's survival? How am I relevant to them?"
If the Saturnian aging process is about getting into right relationship with others, then I'm starting by getting right with Saturn. To allow him to live outside of the austere iron cage I've crammed him into. To allow Saturn to be my grandmothers, to be both firm boundaries and open arms, to be loving care driven tenderly by the awareness of mortality. To be water.
Sitting with Saturn and Cycles
Life always unfolds in cycles - the waxing and waning of the moon, the endless turning of the seasons, the path of water from rain to river to sea to cloud and down again. Saturn counts the years to a slower metronome, with beats lumbering and long and vast intervals of silence between.
With Saturn nearing the end of its time in Aquarius, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own Saturn return.
Life always unfolds in cycles - the waxing and waning of the moon, the endless turning of the seasons, the path of water from rain to river to sea to cloud and down again. We count the years on calendars, but trees count them in rings, ticking away the days of budding to blooming to fruiting to falling apart and letting go.
Saturn counts the years to a slower metronome, with beats lumbering and long and vast intervals of silence between. I often think in terms of minutes and hours, days and weeks, but Saturn thinks in terms of eons, ringing in eternity to the tune of a funeral dirge. Under this unfathomable rhythm, Saturn traces great rings around human lives like the beautiful rings it wraps around itself.
It takes Saturn 10,756 Earth days to complete one revolution around the Sun, returning to the same spot it occupied roughly 29½ years prior. Each time Saturn returns to its natal position in the chart is the beginning and end of a Saturn cycle. In this way, Saturn weaves 2 to 3 great bounds around the average human life. And the first Saturn return largely forms the outer boundary between adolescence and adulthood. With a sharpened scythe, Saturn reaps the karmic harvest we sowed with our actions during the previous cycle.
As I’ve sat with Saturn and the closing of this chapter, I feel hemmed in by the here and now, keenly aware of my past errors and failings while simultaneously grateful for the good things coming to fruition. I'm grown up and growing older. Hopefully wiser too. I feel very humble and human-sized, living in greater intimacy with my impermanence. I am happy to be outlived by mountains and trees and seas, to be eclipsed by greater forces beyond my ken. Content to be a grain of sand in Saturn's hourglass, a blip in infinity.
Do You Want to Go to the Seaside?
Just 50 miles beyond Santiago de Compostela, the destination for pilgrims on “El Camino de Santiago,'' there lies a small craggy spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. It is called Cape Finisterre and can be found at the furthest Western edge of Spain in the enchanted province of Galicia. The Cape is so-named because the ancient Romans literally believed it to be the “end of the earth.”
Just 50 miles beyond Santiago de Compostela, the destination for pilgrims on “El Camino de Santiago,'' there lies a small craggy spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. It is called Cape Finisterre and can be found at the furthest Western edge of Spain in the enchanted province of Galicia. The Cape is so-named because the ancient Romans literally believed it to be the “end of the earth.” Here stone, sky, and sea meet in the breaking of waves upon rugged sea stacks and the aerosolized spray of seafoam.
This past Friday, while Venus was applying to a conjunction with Saturn in Aquarius, we took a day trip west to see the coast. Although the drive took us through thick mists in the mountains, the clouds were scarce once we reached the shoreline, evaporated by the winter Sun. We came to our own ends of the Earth, where Turtle Island meets the Pacific Ocean. Here we strolled along the shoreline, drinking in the lambent rays of the Sun. Rising dramatically from surf and sand, a couple sea stacks stood resolute. The everpresent roar of the ocean engulfed my awareness, a low oceanic drone drawing my thoughts to Saturn and Venus in the skies above.
Cannon Beach, Oregon
Amongst the many significations attributed by astrologers to Saturn is that of bodies of water like rivers and seas, travel by water, and water-based trades. Wouldn’t a planet with their domicile or exaltation in a Water sign make a more suitable ruler of the sea, such as the Moon, Venus, or Jupiter? Although other planets retain their own connections to water, it becomes quite clear when standing on a rocky seaside outcropping why Saturn would govern such a place. The sea is such a clear and definitive boundary marker, a hard limit, a point where one can literally go no further. Bounded by his rings, Saturn wards the world with locks and limits, degrees and divisions. He curtails, constrains, and controls. And for much of human history, seas, rivers, and oceans served as clear boundary markers between tribes, cities, and nations. Without a boat or bridge, water is simply impassible.
As the furthest visible planet, there is also something inherently remote and removed about Saturn. According to Lilly, he is the planet of “obscure valleys, caves, dens, mountains” and other remote or abandoned places. Often in these hinterlands, we find hermits, true children of Saturn. Whether they be Christian monastics, Buddhist monks on retreat, or Vedic ascetics, spiritual people are often found dwelling in solitary places. They are self-imposed outcasts, set apart from mainstream society by their devotion to their spiritual tradition. Fittingly, wild Cape Finisterre is dotted with sainted stones and solar altars. While I saw no such sites of pilgrimage along the Oregon Coast, the air hummed with a spiritual potency.
A part of me wonders if that potency lies in the sea’s aura of mystery, its sheer vastness and unimaginable depth. What really lies beneath the waves? Sunken ships and dead sailors? Beyond Saturn lies objects invisible to the human eye and the black void of space. And beyond the twilight zone of the ocean lurk monsters that live without sunlight, grotesque beings of the black abyss. What a gargantuan, all-encompassing thing is the sea. Its immensity summons to mind the concision and humility of the Irish fisherman’s prayer:
“Dear Lord, be good to me.
The sea is so wide.
And my boat is so small.”
And yet, Saturn was conjunct Venus too, no? There is a raw, feral beauty to these desolate places, a gorgeous beauty that tears out the heart, a jaw-dropping splendor that crashes down with a skull-cracking gravitas, splintering the self into incalculable, forgettable pieces. We are inescapably drawn to these bare and windswept places where our self-importance is eclipsed by the endurance of much older, wilder things. Here at the edges we butt up against beauty in its most extreme and austere form. The Romantics named this immense confrontation with the natural world “the sublime.” The sheer magnitude of the land and seascape conjures a sense of awe, appropriate smallness, and a touch of horror. As the ineffable experience of nature comes crashing down, one loses their words and is left only with wonder.
A Light in the Dark
Recently, I spent a couple hours at home in the dark. Aside from a few shafts of light sneaking in through slanting shades and stray lights on appliances, there was no illumination. No lamps, no candles.
Recently, I spent a couple hours at home in the dark. Aside from a few shafts of light sneaking in through slanting shades and stray lights on appliances, there was no illumination. No lamps, no candles. As the Sun slid behind the western horizon, my home became filled with the voluminous dark. It crept over slowly, my home becoming cavernous.
As we are now at the tail end of Autumn, the sun had set by 5 PM. These are the longest nights of the year. Outside the snow falls in many places, accompanied by a deep chill. Why then should the sign of this season, Sagittarius, be a Fire sign? The outside world lacks Fire’s characteristic brightness and warmth that we can see and feel during the Sun’s time in Aries and Leo. And why should the ruler of Sagittarius be Jupiter, a planet associated with optimism, joy, and generosity, when the natural world appears so melancholic?
As I sat at home on that dark day, I thought of my ancestors, those who lived before the advent of electric light and furnaces lit by gas. In their analog world, the seasonal interplay between light and dark, between heat and cold, would have held much greater stress and significance. Blinded by our digital devices, we struggle to conceive of such an existence, but without electric light, the onset of darkness would be much more significant.
Western astrology is rooted in the seasonal interplay of Light and Dark. Rather than tying the signs of the zodiac to the constellations that bear their names, the zodiac signs we use today are actually 12 equal divisions of an ideal circle of 360 total degrees. This fixed and mathematically ideal circle is synchronized with the equinoxes and solstices and is called the tropical zodiac. It begins each year with the Spring Equinox on March 21st, starting at 0 degrees of Aries. On this day, the Light and Dark are equal, but the Light is steadily increasing. Days become longer and the weather becomes warmer in the Northern Hemisphere. This gradual increase in light hits its peak with the Summer Solstice on June 21st, the longest day of the year. From the Summer Solstice to the Fall equinox, the days grow gradually shorter, but the Light still predominates. This entire span of time, from Spring Equinox to Fall Equinox, or from Aries to Virgo, is the Light half of the year.
The Dark half of the year begins with the Autumnal Equinox, another day in which Light and Dark are served in equal measure. However, with the start of Libra season, we pitch into Fall, and experience an increase in Darkness. Not only is it dark outside, but the darkness is growing stronger. After the Winter solstice on December 21st, the Light will steadily increase, but Darkness still holds sway. We can consider this entire time, from Fall Equinox to Spring Equinox, or from Libra to Pisces, to be the Dark half of the year. As the final, feral sign of Autumn, Sagittarius is therefore the sign falling during the days of deepest Darkness, when the chaotic energy of the Dark reaches its peak.
Interestingly, this time of year is also marked by many holidays, nearly all festivals of light. Take Christianity for example. Christ’s birth is celebrated this season, for it was when the world was in its darkest hour that their Savior came. Similarly, Buddhists celebrate the Buddha’s Enlightenment during this season, for his message of wisdom and compassion is meant for a world in the deep darkness of suffering. With the lighting of the menorah, Hanukkah commemorates the miraculous burning of the ner tamid in the Temple. One also thinks of the burning of the kinara candles during Kwanzaa, the candle crown worn by girls on St. Lucia’s Day, the candles lit for Diwali, or the bright fireworks of Chinese New Year. Granted, not all these festivals fall during Sagittarius season, but they do fall in the darkest parts of the year. When the Light is in short supply, we must make it ourselves.
Jupiter’s rulership of Sagittarius affirms this strong spiritual character of this season. Priesthoods and religious rites are a key Jupiterian signification going back millennia. The Greater Benefic coheres, unites, and brings together, a key purpose of holidays. He gives gifts, infusing this season with generosity and gratitude. He increases, expands, and maximizes, providing bountiful feasts of fine foods. He stabilizes, ruling Sagittarius and Pisces, the seasons at whose end Light is transformed and gains in strength.
Think back to our ancestors again now, collecting wood for the coming cold of winter, stockpiling the winter harvest, and preparing for the long rest of winter. The Fire of Sagittarius season is therefore the hearth fire, the burning of the Yule log which lives on today in glowing Christmas trees. The Fire of Sagittarius is the faith that the Light will return. It is the warm hearth that centers a household, the bonfire that brings together a village, and the sacred flame that unites a religious community. It is the miraculous burning of the ner tamid in the Tabernacle, the luminous realization that came to Siddhartha Gautama beneath the Bodhi tree, and the Christ-child born in a dingy stable. As the Gospel of John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Sagittarius carries the flame while outside howls the wolves and the winter winds. It is the Light in the Dark.