How to Avoid Astrological Burnout: Don’t Be Afraid of Saturn – Episode 5

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today, we are going to continue our series on how to avoid astrological burnout by taking a look at Saturn, all of the reasons that people tend to fear Saturn, and why we tend to misunderstand this particular planet, maybe more than any other planet.

In my experience, Saturn is the misunderstood planet, and I've actually done a number of courses and seminars at astrological professional conferences and for various groups around the country, giving a talk on Saturn called The Mystical Saturn.

The basic premise of this talk is that we tend to think about Saturn as everything that is limiting and prohibiting, and restrictive and hard and heavy, and we miss out on 2000 years of astrological history that has looked at Saturn as one of the most mystical planets in our tradition and there's a lot of really interesting reasons why Saturn is a planet associated with mysticism and imagination and romance, and things that people generally don't think about when they think of Saturn.

So today, we're going to talk about why people tend to get stressed out with Saturn, or why they fear Saturn transits and try to give you an understanding of Saturn that will hopefully be enriching, educational, uplifting, inspiring, something that will help you to work with Saturn differently. So that is our goal for today.

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Okay, so today, the mystical Saturn, I'm really excited because this is actually probably a more fully developed talk that I'm giving within this series only because I've actually taught on and developed a talk on this very subject and taught it broadly across the country in various settings. So, I figured this would make a really good presentation for today.

So I've titled this talk the mystical Saturn, and basically, this talk will follow in the series that we've been doing on the various planets that people tend to be afraid of astrological burnout.

So before I get into it, people know people get astrological burnout because often, the kind of astrology that we take in is sort of like the news cycle. Here's the next dramatic thing, life is dramatic, and there are ups and downs that we face each and every day.

But the point of astrology, if you read what the ancient mystics had to say, those that viewed astrology as a divine gift given to us from the gods or from divinity itself, as a way of meeting life with deeper soulfulness with a sort of participation mystique, right, that we get to experience the magic of life because this language aids us in seeing the divine blueprint of the way things happen.

That's really what it's supposed to be doing for us. Sometimes, it doesn't do that because it actually amplifies the sense that life is like this dramatic, crisis laden roller coaster, and we don't want astrology to be doing that. We want astrology to be helping us feel more deeply accepting and appreciative, even in awe of life and of the way our lives unfold.

So one of the ways that people tend to get burned down, in particular, is that certain planets ring the fear bell as soon as you hear it, oh, there's a Pluto transit coming. We did a video, Don't Be Afraid of Pluto. Here's why.

There's a Neptune transit. There's a Uranus transit. So we're just going down the line. Here's why people tend to get afraid of these planets, here's why you don't have to be and, especially with Saturn.

Saturn is probably the planet that people are like a Saturn more than anything. I've met more people that have constructive views of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto than I ever have of Saturn. Most of the time, when I talk to people about Saturn, traditional astrologers and modern astrologers. Saturn is like, well, he's here to teach you, but it's hard, you know, like that.

So I'm going to, hopefully, in this talk, my goal is to change your mind about Saturn, not to eliminate some of the hard things that Saturn represents entirely to validate them while also taking Saturn three steps farther out into the cosmos than we've ever been with Saturn or three steps deeper into soulful, mysterious, you know, mystical territory. So, hopefully, we'll achieve that goal, and you'll feel like you have diversified your Saturn portfolio in your mind.

Okay, well, anyway, here's the Mystical Saturn. Let's get into it. We're going to talk about the modern significations of Saturn, which tend to be the ones that people get freaked out by. We're going to talk about Saturn and the outer planets. We're gonna talk about the traditional significations of Saturn. We're also going to speak about the joy of Saturn, which is the 12th house. So, I will be doing a separate video in this series called Don't Be Afraid of the 12th House, and we'll talk about the 12th house in much more depth.

We're going to talk about the discovery chart of Neptune and why Saturn and Neptune sometimes have more in common than people might think, and at the end, I'll just show you some chart examples. So I hope you'll enjoy this.

In modern astrology, the meaning of Saturn has changed dramatically compared to the way that Saturn was thought about for several 1000 years, and as a result, we now tend to only emphasize certain aspects of Saturn symbolism. We've really lost touch with some of its more some of Saturn's more diverse significations. By the way, if you like the presentation here, all of our presentations in our school in our curriculum are done by my assistant Delia, who is really gifted when it comes to making really nice presentations. Anyway, so just a shout out to her work because I wish I was as talented to make something like this, but she takes my curriculum and transforms them into these beautiful presentations.

Anyway, in modern astrology, some of the most common significations of Saturn are the following, and these should be the familiar ones that stress you out. Time and Karma, right? They're all very heavy, hard work. The teacher who is a taskmaster, Saturn, is like a taskmaster who's here to teach you discipline and structure, restriction constraint and limitation conservativism, and that doesn't mean necessarily it could be political, but it just any kind of conservative energy. A resistance to change and, insistence on the status quo and insistence on the old way of doing things, and a tendency toward authority or authoritarianism. Follow the rules, dammit. Responsibility and maturity; grow up.

You know, people get stressed out by Saturn for these reasons. I mean, it's not the fear of Pluto, who's like, I don't know, going to show up. Like, I'm some kind of stalker that's chasing you around at the amusement park or something like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, you know. But Saturn is more like that life is hard, and you should just get used to it; it's good for you.

It's really a bummer that these are the significations that have come to dominate our mindset in modern astrology. Now, I'm not saying that they're all false. But we're going to fill these out significantly.

Modern astrologers tended to glorify the outer planets as they were being discovered and thought of them as more evolved or sophisticated than the traditional planets, and because the last known of the visible planets, the furthest most distant one out was Saturn. Suddenly, these planets were thought of as beyond and better than or more spiritual than Saturn, which now stands as a kind of garden guardian of an old way versus a new way because it sort of is the boundary marker between the visible planets and these invisible planets, which are now called trans-Saturnian, or transpersonal and, quite frankly, you know, quite frequently are described as transcendent, versus the traditional seven, which are thought of now as more mundane.

This suddenly may be one of the most tragic things that's happened in modern astrology. As much as I love everything that the outer planets have given to astrology, this is one of the things that, in some ways, they've taken away.

For example, there's an early modern astrologer named Raymond Harrison, and he gives you the flavor and something he wrote of how early modern astrologers were thinking about the outer planets; he said to those who can respond to their very high vibrations Uranus and Neptune and probably Pluto denote the more highly cultivated types of humanity. Okay, so the outer planets now being associated with more highly evolved beings or people in general.

He also wrote it's been suggested that both Uranus and Neptune are the spiritual correspondence or counterparts of Mercury and Venus; they probably are in touch with elements of thought and feeling that are wholly inconceivable to the more mundane types of Venus and Mercury. So now, we also have this idea of outer planets being something like more spiritual, higher octaves of the traditional seven.

This is also really unfortunate, in my opinion, as an astrologer, because really, I don't think this is just my personal opinion; I don't think that any planet is more divine than another or more evolved than another; I see them all as valid, interesting, oracular symbols, all useful, all able to be employed with great effectiveness, but I don't see them personally, as more or less spiritual.

This tends to coincide with the modern belief that anything that is newly discovered means better or more advanced. Anyway, that's part of the mood of the modern era that thinks of progress, all kinds of progress are, progress is the hallmark of enlightenment technologically, industrially, scientifically, etcetera.

Now, I'm not against progress. But I'm also suspicious when we start worshipping at the altar of the future in progress, and I think a little bit of that started happening, and it starts coloring the way we look at the traditional seven planets, which, alongside not having a huge amount of information about our astrological history available to us until the 1990s, when huge amounts of ancient texts started being translated and brought into the English language for the first time and hundreds of years, led to kind of just like a deficient understanding of the mystical, you know, complexities of the traditional seven planets the way that they were thought of.

Anyway, he also wrote, or this is a different article from the Astrologers magazine in 1891. That said, what our forefathers as astrologers lacked in deficient astronomical knowledge through which much of what they said was regarded through a superstitious I only is more than replaced in modern times by advanced scientific knowledge.

So there's this mood in early modern astrology that suggests that what we have now is better and more advanced scientifically, and so on and so forth. Even though astrology, the people looking at the outer planets and the way that they're trying to understand them and work them into the system is really not scientific by, you know, at least not in sort of empirical in an empirical sense.

Alan Leo also wrote that the ancients would frequently attribute partial effects to fallacious causes. Hence, the theory of terms and phases, which the experience of the present day lead us to reject substitutes, were used to supply the place of the mystic planet Uranus and horary astrology. The old traditions were either lost or had become so corrupted and distorted that astrology could no longer be called a science but rather a mere mode of divination.

Well, that rubs me the wrong way because I tend to see astrology as a form of divination, and I see divination as a very sophisticated kind of epistemological way of knowing and relating to reality. So, he thinks Alan Leo was thinking of ancient astrology as mere divination and that what we have now is sort of scientific. I see that as indicative of a larger problem that modern astrologers had, like maybe a kind of unconscious blind spot in terms of the way that they started thinking about traditional planets versus the newly discovered outers.

I don't have any problem with the use of outer planets; I love them. I use them every day in my practice and teach them in my programs. But I do have a problem when everything that is considered modern in astrology is looked at as better than things that existed 2000 years ago, especially when the people saying these things, like Alan Leo, in this case, literally had not read or had any access to the ancient texts at that point, or very few of them.

Leo also wrote that the Greeks held to the tradition of the Chaldeans for a time, but the study gradually became more of an art than a science with them. Oh, boy, right. I'm just pausing to comment here, like, again, science over art. Well, what is art? That's a question that maybe Alan Leo didn't think of at a deep enough level, and it's so far degenerated in its teachings that little trace of the original truce can be found in the Greek authors known to us, finally becoming nothing more than a form of divination. Nothing more than divination, nothing more than art.

I would suggest that there's a lot more to art in divination than we may think that there is. That art and divination have the power to convey truths and an oracular insight that, you know, we may not, or people like Leo may not have taken the time to think about deeply enough. So anyway, these are just this is my soapbox, right? But you can consider these things for yourself.

In modern astrology, Saturn was seen as the place holding symbol for the categorical difference between the merely mundane traditional seven planets and the more highly evolved outer planets. So this is why Saturn starts to be thought of, in this very particular, restrictive conservative way, because it starts being the placeholder, or the scapegoat, in a way for a dichotomy that's being made by modern astrologers between traditional astrology and modern astrology, or between newly discovered planets, and the old planets, etc.

So the outer planets don't; in other words, they don't have to be looked at in terms of a dichotomy between new versus old. They couldn't; you can look at them that way. But, you know, I don't know that. Like, for example, if you have some new children being born into a family, you don't suddenly start pitting the new children against the old children. Right? You think, Well, we're all just part of the same family. That's going to be a healthier way of developing the family, then of being like, well, there's the new, there's the new order with the new children, and then there's the old children. Do you see what I'm saying?

That's the way I tend to look at it is like I don't see that it's entirely useful to go too far with the new versus old dichotomy when we're talking about a collection of divine symbols that speak to archetypal realities that are all in the mind of God from the perspective of ancient mystics. Do you know what I mean? So, there are a lot of patterns and thoughts and shapes in the mind of God, and I don't see why we have to start categorizing them in terms of more evolved symbols or patterns in the divine field than others.

But that's me, and again, my sort of thesis here is that, like, Saturn starts inheriting this sense of being representative of the merely mundane of the personal versus transpersonal of the old way versus a new and more evolved way and it's really Saturn because Saturn is the planet that sits farthest out, closest to these planets that lie invisibly beyond the last visible planet, Saturn becomes this kind of placeholder for old stuff, and that's problematic because it's not exactly how ancient astrologers looked at Saturn. There's some resonance there, and I'll explain how and why. But Saturn was so much more sophisticated than that for a very long time.

Saturn, in relation to the outer planets in the modern mindset, thus becomes the limits of an old system, the merely mundane or personal, a less evolved archaic past that people might cling to stubbornly, or the stubbornness of an old worldview, a less evolved planet representing an older and less evolved form of astrology and if you don't believe me read more of what early modern astrologers were saying about the outer planets compared to Saturn, especially but also the traditional seven in general. It's, it's everywhere.

So, what were the traditional significations of Saturn? The significations of Saturn in ancient astrology were remarkably diverse, and in my opinion, once you understand them, Saturn also becomes a lot less stressful and anxiety-provoking Saturn. First, it's going to sound like I'm saying some things that are pretty dark, but just hang in there.

Saturn was associated with the melancholic temperament. In fact, one of the greatest books that has ever been written on Saturday is literally called Saturn and Melancholy, and it's a history of Saturnian archetypal symbolism throughout history in art, and yet, like art and history, and it's a beautiful book. Anyway, Saturn is associated with the melancholic temperament.

Melancholy is, in turn, and Saturn is associated with all of these things. Melancholy expresses itself in terms of depressive depression, but also sort of wistful, pensive longing, severe emotions, both positive and negative. Grief, or the experience of grief, as both a spiritual and psychological state. Hallucinations and delusions as in difficulty with seeing things clearly. Dark or somber reveries like to sort of sort of dark romantic states of mind, insomnia, demonic possession, it's a little heavy.

Saturn was associated with winter death, old age, and impermanence. It ruled the sign of Capricorn, which was called the gateway of the gods, and at the winter solstice, when the light begins to return, the Sun starts to rise up in the sky, again from the southern horizon going upward. This was associated with the departure of the soul from the body and its aiming toward enlightenment, the realm of the gods or transcendence, or heaven, so to speak, and so this Saturn-ruled sign, the first of two Saturn-ruled signs in a row that come as the light is returning was associated with transcendence, and we have to ask the question, why?

The answer to that is that Saturn, as the planet that was farthest out, dimmest, and most distant, sitting on the edge of the visible and the invisible, was actually seen as a gateway to the realm of the Divine, which was thought to be situated beyond Saturn, and so Saturn was a planet that was associated with a sort of roaming dissatisfaction with the world and a romantic longing for things that go beyond this world that can make this world sort of difficult and heavy and challenging to live with.

Now, that is not generally what we think about when we think about Saturn; Saturn was the dimmest, most distant planet closest to the realm of the fixed stars and the sort of divine mind or primary motion that lay beyond and so, similarly, in Dante's Paradiso, so he gives the seventh sphere of heaven to Saturn.

This is a realm where Dante encounters the spirits of people who dedicated their lives to prayer and contemplation, and so not surprisingly, Saturn is associated with the hermetic, the monastic, the contemplative, the life of study, a life of solitude, or a life of artistic and creative distance from the world.

Most artists have some kind of contact with melancholy. Melancholy at its most inspiring and beautiful and uplifting because it was not just seen as an affliction. It was also seen as the temperament of mystics, inventors, musicians, and artists.

Of course, it has a dark side to, you know, melancholy can drive us to depression and grief and suffering and addiction, and destructiveness, in sort of chronic dissatisfaction. But those exact same qualities can also be the ones that keep us up late at night, under the realm of the stars, looking out deep into space, reading books, studying astrology, maybe staying up all night in some kind of psychedelic ceremony and going beyond the limits of our mind or the material world.

Now, we don't typically think of Saturn as something that can point us beyond this world because the modern split between the outers and the traditional seven, and this kind of dichotomy has been placed on Saturn to the extent that we tend to think about Saturn's as only this world and its mundane limitation. But that's not how Saturn was seen traditionally.

Saturn amplified the tension between opposites most fundamentally; Saturn ruled the aspect of the opposition and was also most fundamentally associated with the opposition between the material and the spiritual. That may be an oppositional tension that tears us apart. But it can also be the oppositional tension that leads us into a meaningful contemplation of higher things that somehow go beyond this world, and yet, the challenge, of course, is always to live in this world while being in contact with what lies beyond.

For this reason, Ficino who was a famous Renaissance translator of Platonic texts and an astrologer. Ficino said that, you know, the astrological life was a Saturnian life that many astrologers were born children of Saturn. Why? Well, it's not because they like rules and structure, and they're just into limited thinking and authoritarianism. I mean, that's just so shallow.

No, it's because Saturn was also thought of as the planet that represented the gateway between the numinous and the material world and that Saturn is a keeper on a watcher on the threshold between these worlds; Saturn was associated with dark weather and, and trades or crafts that took place by the ocean or cold, wet places.

Saturn was associated with the threshold between the beach and the ocean because it's another threshold between a sort of oceanic realm and an earthly one. Saturn was associated with deterioration and dampness, not just with structure, but with the deterioration of structures over the course of time. That's where we get the time signature. It's not just like, all hard work and good results happen in time, and that's a Saturn thing and just, you know, buckle your belt a little tighter and do the hard work.

Saturn is also associated with the deterioration of structures and time because Saturn is a planet sitting on the edge of the numinous and points us to what is beyond the material, and the reality of impermanence was a Saturnian reality.

Saturn was exalted in the sign of the fall equinox Libra, which is the sign of the harvest and a sign of justice and judgment, as well as beauty and fairness. You don't always think about Saturn as Libran. But actually, when we look and judge things, and when we say how does an ideal image and archetypal image, a platonic image square with the actual material result if you set out to build a structure of some kind, you have it designed and on paper and you have an idea or image of it in your mind. Then, when it's actually built, you sort of look, and you evaluate how closely does this resemble the image that I set out to to mold or shape.

Saturn is not just the structure in the building. Saturn is the comparison between the ideal and the real. Saturn is the opposition between the ideal and the real. Saturn is the tension between the ideal and the real, and in that sense, Saturn is super Libran. It is just like a planet that fits very nicely as the exultation ruler of Libra.

It is an evaluator; in a sense, Saturn signifies wise judgment and a keen awareness of the difference between the structure and the ideal form that somehow shaped or informed the building or development of that structure. In that sense, there is a way in which Saturn is related to Karma and the evaluation of results and actions and consequences and stuff like that.

But we forget that Saturn has the ability to hold two things at once, some kind of ideal that exists in the mind of God versus, you know, the crooked messiness of love, like life and the material world. Saturn is a planet that forces us to reconcile ourselves to both simultaneously. It's not always comfortable to do, so it's a lot different than saying that Saturn is just the lord of limits.

In Indian astrology, Saturn was associated with outcasts; in ancient Greek, the word mela is at the root of melancholy, also meant dark black, or a person of dark black color disposition, and we're not talking about skin color here as much as we're talking about temperament.

Right, so we're talking now about a dark constitution, like a color, like a mood ring. It's like a dark black on the mood ring spectrum or something like that. But I do think it's interesting that this color was also generally associated with, like, we use that word black sheep, or we talk about outcasts in the caste system in India associated with Saturn. But this could also be the hallmark of a heretic or someone who doesn't fit into an institution. Isn't that interesting?

Because most of the time, when you hear people talking about Saturn, they think of Saturn as something that represents the establishment. People think of Capricorn, and all they think about is, like, the patriarchy or something like that, and there's something to that, but it's much richer. Saturn is not so much in, especially not in Capricorn, which is a feminine earth sign that's deeply enigmatic, and the sea goat is an image you should sit with a little bit longer if all you can think about is the patriarchy with Capricorn, especially since it's a feminine sign.

But at any rate, the point here is that when you're thinking about Capricorn and Saturn or Aquarius and Saturn, either way, you're thinking about the tension between insiders and outsiders, the establishment and new ideas or different ideas, people that fit the mold versus people that don't fit the mold. There's that evaluation between something that's ideal and something that does it, or does it not conform to that ideal?

That comparison is Saturnian, but that means that people born under Saturn can be innovative. They can be like Galileo, a heretic, an outcast, but an inventor and a kind of genius that sees something that's different than the ideal image that a particular group has embraced as, like normative, that's Saturnian as well to do that, to have that kind of outsiders insight.

As the gatekeeper between the visible and invisible, Saturn is associated with both the establishment and those that are despised or ostracized by it, and that tension comes up through Saturn's symbolism more so than just saying that Saturn is rules. It's not a complete or deep or sophisticated understanding of Saturn, historically speaking, in what, so why do we end up thinking that way?

Again, we tend to think that way because when Saturn was discovered, it tended to be, or when the outer planets were discovered, they tended to be pitted against Saturn and called trans-Saturnian, as though everything Saturn represents is old and limited. Saturn may equally represent a criminal, someone who falls outside of the scope of the ideal behavior in a society. Society. I didn't blast your ears off.

A heretic could be someone that doesn't conform to the rules of the church or a miser, someone who hoards resources, stingy, conservative, so there is that symbolism there. Right, but it tends to be just one piece of what ancient astrologers the way in which they described Saturn.

Saturn may represent a black sheep, a wise hermit, a recluse, an introvert, or even a sectarian of some kind, and they don't mean that in a negative way. Although it could be but, a sectarian would just be someone who belongs to a specific group, they conform to the ideals of that group, and they don't tend to associate with things outside the ideals of that group.

But the tension between holding to a specific way, path, doctrine, dogma, group, or sect exists in so far as everyone that doesn't do that, right. In forces, the sense of what you belong to, you know, and sectarianism can be held loosely and in a relaxed way that's accepting of the fact that there are people who don't follow the same sect. Or there can be a way in which it's, you know, it's like anyone who's an outsider who doesn't follow this is like wrong or bad, that politically we get into that all the time.

Saturn was said to be the ruler of feigned appearances and is naturally the planetary contrary of the Sun by both exultation and domiciles. So there's a funny way in which when we think of the Sun, the light of the Sun, right, you think of in ancient astrology, you really are thinking of the platonic realm, the prisoner leaves the cave in the platonic allegory of the cave and goes out into the light of the Sun and sees the real forms in the real world.

The Sun is associated with a sense of higher illumination of the real; that which is transcendent in the life of the philosopher or the spiritual Seeker is to be in touch with what is real. To see with transcendental eyes, Saturn is the natural opposite of the Sun and tends to look at the way in which things fail or fall in comparison to the ideal.

So there is a kind of almost like a negating tendency that Saturn has to say that's not it. But it's very important that we honor that negative space because there's a, you know, neti neti, not this not that, that's a very important part of development spiritually in eastern philosophy, for example, not this not that, it means that's fake, that's phony, this isn't good. This isn't right. Society, man. That's not it.

At some point, if it's only negation, then you stay stuck in a kind of tendency to reject, as opposed to negation leading you closer and closer to what is real or true or affirming something, and so there's this interesting tension between the Sun and Saturn. Anything that presents itself as truth, That's bogus, Saturn will be very suspicious or skeptical of a good Capricorn that's sort of like, you know, like, can be kind of cynical, you know, you don't want to be so cynical that you can't ever affirm anything, or, like give your heart to something or find some way of merging into the light, so to speak. But you also don't want to be a sucker, and as we go, we have to be able to sort out the real from the sort of phony; this is a set attorney intention.

In mythology, Saturn rules the golden age but eventually is cast out from his throne and usurped by his son Zeus. So there's also this tension between the new and the old. It's in the very mythology of Kronos and Zeus. Saturn being the Roman equivalent, but the Chronos Zeus myth has to do with the old age and youthfulness and transformation from one kind of way of doing something to another, and Saturn will sometimes cling stubbornly to the past. But also, there's something Saturn was the ruler of the Golden Age. So there's something in Saturn that encapsulates an ideal, but an ideal that has somehow fallen away or that we've gotten away from.

Again, there's that almost that tendency to be in a kind of melancholic state of loss or disappointment, and that can be a challenge for Saturn, but it also is so much a part of why people love the sign of Aquarius because Aquarius is the one looking around going like society, man, this is not it.

You know, so and that's why I laugh so hard every time that comes up, which is from the movie Into the Wild, or from, you know, from the book, if you ever read it, there's a young man who's disillusioned with the world, a very Saturnian take that he has, he has a kind of anti-society, anti-world, the antithesis.

That's Saturn. Saturn rules opposition's, and we have to wander outside the walls of civilization to experience the wilderness, the wild to be an outcast, to live in the hut at the edge of the village, so to speak, before we sometimes find our way back in the tragedy at the end of Into the Wild was that the young man never found his way back in; he died in the wilderness because he was almost too extreme, in some ways in his rejection of the world.

So I quote that all the time because I find that that scene in the movie, first of all, is just like one of my favorites; it just cracks me up. Like, I laughed so hard, and it was one of those scenes where I ended up rewinding it like ten times just because it made me laugh so hard. But it also so perfectly encapsulates, like, you know, it's like society can be like a quarter jar word, and when you catch yourself saying it in this kind of oppositional manner, or in a way that's like sliding over what a loaded word that is, like, it's just perfect to just stop and, and double down with this.

There are also some really interesting associations between Saturn and the Roman god Janus as a god that looked both ways and guard and was sort of a guardian of thresholds, and you have to think of Saturn as a God that is not really a God of limits and bound limits and boundaries that keep things out. But also as a marker of boundaries that get us curious about both what's on the other side of something and, so don't think of Saturn as a wall; think of Saturn more like a gate, the threshold.

Anyway, Saturn was said to rejoice in the 12th place, which was called the place of the evil spirit. It's a place we don't see. It's a place that takes us out of control. It was a place called metacosmia, which meant a kind of a liminal space. There's really interesting the associations with the 12th house; we're going to be talking about the 12th house in the series at a later point.

But it is interesting that Saturn was associated with the 12th; in turn, associated with Saturn was also like melancholy, associated with things like ostracization, abandonment, loss and grief, exile and imprisonment, disease, sickness and slavery, confusion and deception, insanity and sorcery, confinement and shipwreck, impermanence, all of which could be very, very useful when it comes to these experiences, also delivering a kind of spiritual awakening.

So believe me when I say I am not a person who might hear these themes and go, well, I think the 12th house is just more positive than that, and I'm sort of of the same mind, except I don't whitewash these topics, like a lot of people like to do in modern astrology.

No, I think these are the topics of the 12th house; I just think that a lot of these topics can vary in intensity and psychologically, and the kind of events also people can work in these environments can serve suffering people in these environments, there's a lot of really good things that come out of the 12 house. But mostly, it's because when we encounter these things, we grow spiritually, and that's where I see the benefit of this place in particular.

Just like Saturn, when you have to, when you have an experience of being different or an outsider or an outcast, you get a perspective that's pretty, it's pretty unique. I can say a lot more about, you know, my own experiences with that, but they would really pale in comparison to what some of you guys have experienced. So I'll just shut my mouth about that. But I will also say that these, again, these 12th house themes are Saturnian insofar as they push us into spaces where we are encountering our mortality. We're encountering impermanence. We're encountering loss of control; I think of the 12th house as a place that is sort of like the dark night of the soul. But that dark night is there's rich, fertile material in the dark, and it often leads to some of the most mature, interesting, thoughtful, gifted people.

So I don't see the 12th as a bad place, but I also don't see it as a place that is not associated with these themes. I think it is. That's the history of 2000 years of astrology. It says that it is anyway, and I tend to agree. I don't see the 12th place as a place, for example, of like, well, I'll just keep it like that. Let you guys think about it. We'll talk more about the 12th house later.

Interestingly, in modern astrology, the 12th house has come to be associated with mysticism, ego loss, and Karma, as well as the planet Neptune through the conflation of the 12-letter alphabet system that conflates signs and houses, which was not the way that ancient astrologers looked at the houses by the way.

Interestingly, Saturn is implicated in aspectual relationships with all of the outer planets and their discovery charts. In the discovery chart of Uranus, Saturn was opposed to Uranus when it was discovered. In the discovery charge of Pluto, Saturn was opposed to Pluto when it was discovered. But with Neptune, what's really interesting is they were exactly conjoined in late Aquarius.

I find that to be really fascinating. Is it possible that the symbolism of Neptune and Saturn are more closely related than we'd like to admit? Consider the following similarities, and I'm not saying that you don't need Neptune. I'm not saying that there aren't any differences. I think there are. But I think there are more similarities, and people tend to think.

Neptune is associated with the dissolving of boundaries, as well as all that is transcendental, mystical, and otherworldly. Saturn was associated with disillusionment, death, winter, and disintegration, as well as mystics and contemplatives, who saw through the hollowness of the world albeit through a somewhat melancholic face.

Neptune is not always associated with the melancholic as much as Saturn is, but they sort of point in the same direction either way. Neptune is associated with delusions, dreams, intoxication, and madness, and Saturn was associated with melancholy, which covers many of the same bases.

Neptune is associated with water and confusion, and Saturn was associated with water in the darkness of ignorance as an opposition to the Sun. Neptune dissolves that which is permanent. Saturn was associated with old age and decay.

Now, again, I'm not saying they're identical, but I think that people tend to be less afraid of Neptune because they see Neptune as this romantic, otherworldly, mystical, imaginative planet, and actually, Saturn carried many of the same significations, and I think there are some big differences too, which we could hash out maybe in a different video but my point is that you don't have to be any more afraid of Saturn than you are of Neptune when you get that sense that, like, well, Neptune is also mystical. Yeah, but so is Saturn. Well, Neptune is very romantic. Yeah, but so Saturn, Neptune is otherworldly. Yeah, but so Saturn.

So I hope that helps you. Let me just show you some charts of, you know, some client charts, and actually, I'm going to skip the client charts because I think that the celebrity charts will make a little bit more sense, and even though I had permission to share the client charts in the conference settings, I did not get permission to share them on YouTube, and I think I probably shouldn't, so I'm not going to show those client charts, but I will show some celebrity charts.

Nina Simone, singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist, took her name Nina Simone in order to disguise herself from her family members who believed that jazz and blues with the devil's music; she was rejected many times as an artist due to the color of her skin.

She took up the mantle of being an artistic outsider who was also a civil rights activist, and this fueled her career. She has Venus and Saturn in the first househouse of identity. Right? So, a lot of people that didn't know this was Nina Simone, they saw Saturn in the first househouse, they would instantly think, for example, like, oh, this person is probably really Saturnian, and then that would potentially carry some very conservative connotations. But actually, here, what we're dealing with is a kind of artistic genius that comes from being a kind of artistic outsider, and there's an otherworldly creativity that comes through that. So, it's pretty amazing to see in this example.

Here is another one. This is the chart of Timothy Leary, who is a professor turned LSD researcher and is famous for saying Turn on, Tune in, Drop out. He was also criticized for being something of a psychedelic fundamentalist. What I find interesting is he has Saturn in the 10th house along with Jupiter, and I mean, granted that Jupiter is his ascendant ruler, but Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions often speak to that kind of Cronos Zeus meeting of the old way and the new way.

He's an established professor who wants to push a new way, and it's a kind of Turn-on, Tune-in, Drop-out; he's suggesting something that is sort of heretical, and he also gets a little extreme about it, almost like sort of psychedelic sectarian. Strong Saturn symbolism in his 10th house.

Here's another one of my favorites. This is Frida Kahlo. Now, she's, of course, you know, a visionary outsider artist in so many respects; she explored questions of identity post-colonialism, gender, class, and race, especially in Mexican society but also in just the broader world. She has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.

One of the things that I find really interesting about her chart is that she also literally described herself as struggling with melancholy after her leg was amputated, especially, and is believed to have taken her own life while being very ill. There's some dispute about that.

She experienced two major depressive episodes and suicide attempts, both through depression and suicide were linked by those who knew or to her marriage. It's very interesting when you see the ruler of marriage being Saturn in the eighth. So you're connecting a big part of the melancholic temperament in her life, also to Venus through the square to Venus that's there in her chart, the ruler of her 10th house, and then also putting it in the eighth house as the ruler of the seventh place of marriage.

That's a fascinating example. I could say a lot more about that, but I just want to give you some kind of quick hits of the, you know, people who have strong Saturnian signatures who are, you know, visionaries, you know, outsiders contemplatives artists.

Hunter S. Thompson, Saturn on the ascendant, visionary gonzo journalist, maverick renegade fueled by drugs and melancholy madness, also took his own life. Saturn is on the ascendant. This is the ruler of his career house as well. Very much the outsider Saturn in its fall as well. So, you know, some come, we'll just call it complex Saturnian symbolism, maybe take longer to unpack it, maybe a deeper visitation of his biography.

That's a great example again of a sort of outsider signature that people will often overlook; they might, you know, go for something that tends to focus on Saturn as you know, really problematic as opposed to looking at the way it contributes to his status as a visionary artist. Elena Blavatsky has one. I'm gonna go through these a little bit.

Now, here's one that I think is really fascinating. I'll actually do this one, but here's Ram Dass, an influential spiritual teacher who helped bring yoga and meditation to the West. He came out as gay in the 1990s, which was a major turning point for his life and professional work. He described it as one of the most important turning events in his life, along, of course, with his study of yoga and so forth, but he has Saturn conjoined the descendant in the seventh househouse of relationships or marriage.

So nontraditional and also a kind of outsider experience, and he described it as painful but enlightening to come out as gay. I think that's a great example of Saturn in the seventh house and one that people don't always think about.

Teresa of Avila had Saturn in Sagittarius in the 10th house of her career. That's another amazing placement of a very famous Christian mystic and saint who is also a contemplative. Sri Ramakrishna, another incredible visionary mystic from India, had Saturn in the 10th. So, those are just some examples that I wanted to share with you. I'm kind of skipping over for the sake of time here.

In conclusion, I just hope that you guys will be less stressed out about Saturn by learning about this and that, in addition to the modern popular designations, which I don't necessarily disagree with, I just want to say that there's so much more, there's so much more than just the limit, or just the conservative taskmaster who's trying to teach you hard lessons.

Saturn is mystical and contemplative. Wise and deep, fair, and just imaginative and often misunderstood associated with outcasts and outsiders? Deep but also comfortable with death and decay. There's so much that's so mysterious and deep and magical about Saturn.

So, you know, people always describe Saturn is the Lord of Karma. Here's another thing to remember, everything in the birth chart from the standpoint of ancient Indian astrology, the progenitors of Karma, is no more or less karmic than anything else.

The entire birth chart is Karma, which is a description of Karma, and there's no planet that is more or less Karma than another. That may also help you since people tend to mistakenly think that somehow Saturn has the market cornered on Karma.

Remember that the foundation of most mystical traditions is the reality of impermanence and suffering; without that understanding, spiritual life can't be entered into, created, or sustained in an authentic way, and that's Saturn's territory. How beautiful is it that's our gatekeeper to spiritual life in a way.

So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this presentation, and basically that, it just makes you less anxious about Saturn and more eager to befriend Saturn and let Saturn accompany you as a very wise, very mysterious, very romantic, and interesting planet.

So that is it for today. I hope that you guys will tune in for future episodes; we're going to move through the planets Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn, the ones that people tend to get really afraid of.

I think we might tap into Mars a little bit because people tend to get really freaked out by Mars, too. People don't tend to get freaked out by the other planets as much. Maybe Mars will do as well before moving into some of the houses that people tend to get freaked out by. Alright, that's it for now. Have a good one, everyone. Bye