Depth Astrology

In a recent post I asserted that there is no clear archetype of nature in the horoscope. I want to take that back, kind of. There are actually several symbols that could be different faces of the nature archetype — for example Mars’s wild instinct and Venus’s sensuousness and the abundance of Jupiter — but I’m going to go out on a limb (ha!) and call out the least “wild” of all archetypes as the horoscope’s fullest embodiment of nature.

Saturn.

In western astrology, Saturn is so often associated with doubt, fear and loathing, but every archetype has its light and shadow, and those associations are really, in my view, just potent bastardizations of Saturn’s good side. For, from the Huber perspective, Saturn is the matrix, the ground, the wellspring of security beneath our feet — the mother, even. (Before you take up arms against the idea of Saturn being the mother, let me assure you I’ll post about that soon enough.)

While Saturn may not imply abundance the way Jupiter does, it is the embodiment of the physical world — the roots, the trunk, the spreading-out of leaves, the slow and steady growth, a sort of integrative ability: the drive to take things into oneself — sun, rain, soil — and to distribute them according to need, in order create a productive system that is greater than the sum of its parts: a tree, a frog, an internally balanced ecosystem, a cohesive and secure family.

Saturn also embodies the arduous, enduring path toward that creation, and the patience of time spooling through the cycles of life, the inevitability of what follows: spring, summer, autumn, winter; pregnancy, birth, growth, death; inspiration, thought, action, results. It is not impetuous or unpredictable, except on the longest of timelines — who but the Divine could have foreseen that butterflies, for instance, would emerge from the Big Bang? — rather, like nature, Saturn is evolutionary, making incremental changes that are rooted in the seeds that have already been sown.

Saturn is, then, the keeper of the gate, the guardian of the rules of how a process must unfold. And though we tend — in our planned and organized society — to associate wilderness with chaos, the reality is that the wilderness depends on rules, on systems, on order for its very survival. If summer did not follow spring, if flowers did not condense into berries, if forest fires did not provide the raw material for regrowth, the wilderness would truly be chaos, and desolate. But humans’ first problem with Saturn is that, in our hands, within the confines of our small egos, Saturn wants to control the rules, the unfolding, of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the Life/Death/Life Nature. We want to decide when it’s time for something to end: a relationship, a project, a life.

If we are conscious and humble and sincere in our motives, we might get that chance. If we are not, Saturn will render our endings for us, through crisis, ugliness and fear. And so Saturn is also the reaper, the symbol of the eventual unfolding, in due time, of what is sown. And here, again, we resist because the rest of the Saturn cycle has been reassuring, safety-making, connective and secure. We get used to the activity of sowing and tending whatever it is we are sowing and tending — a seed, a project, a relationship — forgetting that the seeds we are planting will eventually blossom and fruit with whatever pulse of energy we have poured into them. And when the fruit is ready to be transformed, we buck back. We want to hold the ripe, juicy fruit in our hands forever. But we can’t. It must become food, or it must shrivel and die.

This happens in nature all the time — both the nature without and the nature within. Internally, the transformation process is the ultimate test of authenticity and survival. Saturn seems to trouble us because we don’t want change and in its matrix we believe we will find the safety of changelessness. But we won’t. Because for as much as we astrologers associate Saturn with retrenchment and contraction, it is more about the inevitability of evolution. And if we retrench in the face of inevitability — if we embrace fear instead of the slow tectonic shifts of life’s seasons — then nature, Saturn, will find a way to crowbar us out of the ground beneath our feet. She will throw us into the wilds to find our own deep path toward survival.

Photo credit: Micky

Most books on karma and reincarnation in western astrology look to the natal chart for clues about what baggage we lugged into our present journey on earth.

In the natal chart, as many astrologers have pointed out, the Moon’s North Node signals a karmic calling in this life: what the native is here to accomplish. It’s normally not an easy task (why would we be sent here to live out an easy life?). But while the North Node is the lodestar, it is not the whole journey. For that, astrological psychology pioneers Bruno and Louise Huber have developed a different tool: an entirely new chart covering the whole sweeping scope of past lives. It’s called the Moon Node chart.

This question has come up, in various forms, during several horoscope readings lately: What is my relationship to the environment? – meaning the natural environment, nature, wildness, wilderness.

I suppose the question is becoming more and more urgent as environmental degradation seeps more deeply and more intractably into our lives — and as people of certain stripes reach ever more desperately for connection to the earth, or to our inner wilds. But it’s a difficult question, not only because there’s no clear archetype of nature herself in the horoscope but because what the horoscope does tell us about nature seems, in my view, to jive with a more imperialist view of humanity’s relationship with the trees and the mountains and the rivers.

Funny, after what seems to be a lifetime of being female-oriented — going to a women’s college, working in lots of women-owned and women-dominated businesses (including at a women’s PAC), being generally very pro-female and pro-feminist — boys seem to be springing up everywhere in my life these days. I blame Jung and the tension of opposites.

Most of the time, when I look at the picture of the week, I see right away the astrological archetype with which the image aligns.

My first instinct with this one was Saturn: the organization, the predictability, the safety of the grid-like pattern. But then I thought: No, Uranus: energy, electricity. Or Mercury: thousands of little connections all bringing energy to an undefined, in-between space.

All of these archetypes are true to the image in their own way but they don’t really get to the core of it for me. What is most striking about this photo, in my view, is the stark, bright, white light against the utter blackness: the striking oppositeness come together. Secondarily (or perhaps primarily, depending on the viewer), the grid pattern kind of couches or embraces a cross, which in the Christian tradition is the symbol of light penetrating dark.