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.
