Saturn: How Limiting is it?

edita-vilkeviciute-black-white1Question: I have been absorbed with Saturn’s influence in a birth chart. I know it’s about limitation and how it diminishes what it touches. How limiting is it? Will it diminish the good things?

Saturn is not my favorite bedfellow at the moment 1. The planet can be an incredibly challenging symbol on the birth chart. It can be painful. It always feels like it takes things away from us. It can rob an individual of their confidence in whatever house it occupies. Saturn is lead to be transformed into alchemical gold and this is how modern astrologers approach its interpretation. Liz Greene has taught us that Saturn is the dweller at the threshold, the keeper of the keys to the gate, and that it is through him alone that we may achieve eventual freedom through self-understanding. 

Human beings do not attempt self-discovery until things become so painful that they have no other choice.

Saturn’s Chains

We must learn the value of any Saturnian experience before the planet will hand over our much-earned freedom. Greene describes how some people do something at the last moment to destroy the dream before it blossoms. Is it really us destroying the good things all along? Traditional astrology referred to Saturn as “malefic” and we had to endure our pain. Ptolemy related it to lingering diseases, declines, rheumatisms, exile, poverty and a general mass of evils, griefs, dreadfully chilly atmospheres and frosty, gloomy looking clouds. Back then, we didn’t have access to tools for the kind of self-awareness we possess now. Although some astrologers will go to great lengths to articulate Saturn’s new positive meaning in the 21st century.

The planet wants us to live by our true nature, real essence. Dane Rudyhar believes Saturn is the most vital character on the birth chart. It relates to the inner-pressure to fulfill our destiny, according to our pattern of potentialities, pushing us to do the work we should be doing so that we can develop the diamond soul. Before this happens, Saturn can heighten our insecurities about ourselves through painful experiences. Ultimately, though, it can bring us towards the verge of transforming, and could finally open the gate to a greater autonomy. Occultists astrologers have claimed Saturn is the scaffolding around the real self while the edifice of the individuality is in the process of building. It has also been pointed out by ancient astrologers that the planet is at the center of all self-consciousness.

We have resistance to changing, Saturn limits expression through fear or some recollection of a painful experience. The task is severing the bonds of limitations and passing beyond his ringed sphere. We are limited excessively but all astrologers teach about the education of this pain and how it challenges us to search deep into what it all actually means, rather than turning bitter. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.”

  1. I have it in transit squaring everything and this includes the two “malefics” (Mars square Saturn) forming a difficult aspect.