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