Everything You’ll Ever Need to Know About SATURN


If you were taking my course, 102 – the planets, this would be what you would be discussing with me in your eighth class, the class on Saturn:


Saturn’s Sutra:
The Miserable Limitations of Reality.

When you cut straight to the chase, Saturn is all about reality.

Reality imposes limitations and is unyielding, yet only by embracing it do we escape misery. Reality itself is not miserable. Reality is beautiful. Our illusions contradict the beauty of reality, and this contradiction is the true mother of all misery. Saturn frequently operates as a miserable planet only because it exposes our unwillingness to embrace reality.

What “reality”? The truth that we are limited in every way; that we are neither perfect, powerful, nor significantly happy. If we detach from our illusions and embrace the truth of our small, limited nature, we experience peace. Then Saturn becomes the planet which erases all misery.

The Limitations Imposed by Reality

Reality has four walls: time, decay, weakness and flaw. These four walls define the limits of our small existence. Time not only limits our daily schedule, it also ushers in old age and death. Decay works alongside time causing our bodies to become diseased, our memories to fade, and our things to breakdown, fail and become garbage.

Weakness operates under the auspices of this decay. We feel too slow, ugly, and never smart enough. We feel powerless and become servile employees rather than bosses. Thus we feel disenfranchised, alienated, and alone. In isolation we develop abnormalities and thus become further shunned. We grasp at any and every chance to lick a discarded drop of happiness, and thus become perverse and lawless.

Weakness allows flaws and faults to exist. We are intimate with flaws and faults, because we are full of them. Thus we spot them everywhere and become critical, negative and spiteful.

The Strength to Face Reality

Saturn feels like an unyielding grindstone made of reality’s limitations and crushing our illusions to dust. We foolishly compensate by becoming more stubborn, as if we can compete with Saturn. When we are more willing to let go of these illusions, Saturn grants us stability, endurance, tenacity, & perseverance.

Detachment from Illusion = Elightenment

Saturn’s whole motive is to give us no alternative but to let go of our illusions so that we can truly be freed from misery. To those who are making progress on this path, Saturn grants detachment from material things and material ego. This develops further into enlightenment, when all illusions of identity and possession are discarded. In the enlightenment of embracing our true nature we find perfect freedom from misery and experience a state of deep inner peace.

Saturn – the Final Planet in Human Evolution

Saturn and Jupiter both seek to elevate the human soul up out of its descent into a world of illusory objects. Jupiter does so with a positive approach, Saturn with a negative approach. Jupiter rewards our good deeds and allows us to flourish. Saturn punishes our ignorance and forces us to admit the limits to which we can flourish in a venue which is a temporary phantasm – this world.

Saturn finally delivers the “sunlight” back to itself. The sunlight harbored desires in the Moon. It reached out to exchange with others through Mercury. Through Venus it created the senses that made those exchanges tangible. By Mars it developed strength to compete with others to obtain what it desires. Jupiter then helped it attain a broader world view and see the role of less selfish morality and religion. In the end, it is finally Saturn who forces the sunlight to deal with darkness, to deal with the reality that this world of illusory objects is hemmed at every step by restrictions and limits. Thus in the end it is Saturn who causes the sunlight to become disenchanted with illusion and instead seek out its inherent peaceful, satisfied nature.

Saturn in Action

“Too much” Saturn: We see the bad in everything, and almost no one can correct or show us another viewpoint. We are critical, and spiteful. Disliking most other people, we prefer to keep to ourselves and our own ways; thus we become strange, abnormal and perverse. Dull, menial, and slow in mind and body – we live weakly, surrounded by decaying things, filth, and illness. We age prematurely and are tormented to live out a long, tasteless life.

“Not enough” Saturn: We are frivolous, short-lived, short on attention, and attracted to any fluffy object that promises quick happiness. We flee from all critiques. We are impatient, give up easily, lack seriousness, hate to work and are gullible suckers for any idea that sounds optimistic and hopeful. We have unusual fear of death, and prefer to keep old and sick people out of sight.

Just right: We are realistic, patient, perseverant, and detached – able discard garbage and walk away from things that serve no purpose. We enjoy working, and work hard in whatever capacity is required of us. We can improve any idea. We are not afraid of sickness and death. We live long and seek true knowledge.

- Vic DiCara

www.vicdicara.com

Prayer to Waters (and Saturn)

Prayer to Waters (and Saturn)

Water, you kindly grant life
In which we can find happiness.

Please grant us your most auspicious nourishing essence
Like a mother feeding her beloved

You carry us happily to far destinations
And give us strength for procreation

Waters that we drink, you are goddesses bringing aid and bliss
Let your health and strength stream to us

Come in a flood to heal us, goddess queens ruling precious things
Supreme controllers of men

The Moon God (Soma) told me that water holds the power of every medicine
And holds within her the all-blessing God

Waters, you are full of medicine, protecting my body
So that I may live long under the Sun

My faults, my evils, my lies
Wash them away, O water

Water, with this prayer I seek the blessing of your Moisture
Send forth God, the nourisher, to bath me in light

This is ninth prayer from the tenth chapter of the world’s oldest surviving book, the Rg Veda. The ancient founder of my school of astrology, Sage Parashara, prescribes meditation on the fourth line of this prayer (in bold) to pacify problems astrologically related to Saturn.

The Sanskrit for this fourth line is:

शं नो देवीरभिष्टय

अापो भवन्तु पीतये

शं योरभि स्रवन्तु नः

shamn no deviirabhizhTaya

aapo bhavantu piitaye

shamn yorabhi srvantu naH


- Vic DiCara
© 2010 Vic DiCara, All Rights Reserved

Symbols and Glyphs of Astrology

Symbols and Glyphs of Astrology

I am a huge fan of the glyphs developed in the West to represent the signs and planets. The essential meaning of every planet and sign is encoded into these fascinating symbols.

Glyphs for the Planets

Each planet’s glyph is made of the same primary symbols: a circle and a cross.

The circle is symbolic of life. The top of the circle is your original self, the bottom of the circle is your material identity. Life is a cyclic process of the original self transforming into a material being and then returning to a truer understanding of itself.

The cross is the symbol of effort. “We all have our crosses to bear.” The specific location of the cross on the circle reveals a lot about the meaning of a planets glyph.

There are two secondary symbols used in the glyphs: the half-circle and the arrow.

The half-circle is symbolic of evolution and development. The exact type of half-circle used in a specific glyph reveals a lot about it’s exact symbolism for that planet.

The arrow is simply a blurred cross, distorted due to the energy of the arrow’s movement. Only Mars has the energy to transform the cross of effort  into the arrow of ambition.

The Sun’s glyph is a circle with a dot in the middle. The circle is life. The dot in the middle of the circle is symbolic of the fact that the Sun is the center of all things in life. The center of life is your identity – the core of your conscious awareness.

The Moon’s glyph looks a lot like the moon, which is handy. It is the only glyph without a complete circle in it. Instead the left side of the circle has folded over or reflected to the right so that there are two half circles linked together on the right, making the characteristic crescent moon shape. Why? The Moon is your emotional self, a tricky reflection that creates and satisfies feelings of incompleteness which arise from our interest in a world of dualities.

The half-circle represents evolution. The Moon (emotions) allows evolution in both directions – towards the true self and away from it.

Mercury’s glyph is a circle with a cross at the bottom and a half circle at the top. The cross at the bottom shows that Mercury facilitates the effort for the true self to become a real manifestation in the material world. The half circle at the top is unique to Mercury. It shows that he alone can truly facilitate the evolution towards the higher self. This glyph encapsulates in a single symbol the fact that Mercury is your intelligence, which creates the ability to communicate as well as understand.

Venus’ glyph is like Mercury’s, without the half circle at the top. She gives you a physical body replete with fascinating senses through which you can truly experience the wonderful manifest world in your life.

Mars’ glyph is a circle with an arrow (a distorted cross) at an odd angle towards the top of the circle. This symbolizes that Mars is your energy. He is the passion and ambition which prods you to going off in your own unique direction with your own angle on life.

Jupiter’s glyph is a cross supporting the right side of a half circle. The right side of the circle represents evolution towards a deeper understanding of life. Jupiter is supportive of this effort. He encourages it and rewards it and provides the systems of religion, philosophy, and law which do the same.

Saturn’s glyph is a cross to which the right side of the circle is affixed and bound. The evolution towards a deeper understanding of life is nailed to the inescapable realities which Saturn generates: death, old age, decay and misery. We evolve by coming to grips with these realities.

Rahu’s glyph has no cross. In fact only the five real planets have crosses and represent effort. The Sun, Moon and the two nodes Rahu and Ketu are not literally planets. Their glyphs contain no crosses. They manifest their nature without any effort or evolution required.

Rahu and Ketu are the only planets to contain two complete circles. Their glyphs consist of these two circles joined by the arc of a half circle. The two circles represent two different lives, two different worlds. Rahu’s arc connects the two – bridging the present to the future, creating the ability and need to move upward and outward, and causing the possibility of nearly instantaneous change and movement.

Ketu’s glyph is identical to Rahu’s except that Ketu connects the two circles with a downward arc, while Rahu does so with an upward arc. This glyph symbolizes Ketu’s essential nature as a like between the present and the past, the ability and need to move inward and downward with the possibility of nearly instantaneous change and movement in those directions.

Sign Glyphs

Aries is the beginning of the zodiac – where the one (at the bottom) splits and becomes many (at the top). This symbolizes the tremendous energy and ambition of life itself.

In Taurus the energy forms a stable unit (a circle) which is like a womb for the new energy of life. The circular womb will cause things to grow and develop upwards (the half circle at the top).

Gemini is the sign in which the incubated energy of creation is born and becomes a distinctly separate being. The many created at the beginning by Aries have developed by the support of taurus, and now become a second being, a truly individual self capable of its own experiences and ideas.

In Cancer there are two circles attempting to connect. The new being of Gemini finds that she wishes to integrate her new self with her former self. Therefore Cancer is a place where energy directs inwards and emotions are examined rather privately.

Leo begins a new cycle of evolution – the evolution to understand our own powers. A newly integrated single circle moves sets out with a new identity.

Virgo‘s glyph like taurus, creates circles. The three lines of the “m” represent the three layers of the world. The last line of the “m” weaves around itself, creating circular environments. In Virgo the newfound personal power of Leo enters these circles and attempts to more deeply and practically understand and express itself.

Libra‘s glyph evokes both a balance and an equal sign. It shows a balance of desire to work equally with the world as well as on it. In Libra we attempt to achieve the delicate balance between our own personal strength and the personal strengths possessed by the other people in the world, to whom we relate.

In Scorpio we complete the mastery of our own powers. Thus an arrow develops at the end of the three lines – the three layers of the world. This shows that we and now ready to move to a new stage and apply our newly understood personal power on a higher level.

Sagittarius’ glyph shows the arrow which appeared in Scorpio moving beyond the line of the “new level” of operation. Thus, in this sign we begin to truly explore the various ways in which we can develop ourselves on higher levels.

Capricorn’s glyph, like Taurus and Virgo before it, possesses circles. The straight lines from Sagittarius resolve into curves which create circles. This glyph shows that the new levels we discovered in Sagittarius can now enter a safe “womb” and incubate here to become more deeply and stably realized.

The glyph of Aquarius, like Gemini and Libra before it, is dominated by two lines. These lines are wavy, showing that Capricorn’s effort to evolve a deeper understanding of life are now vibrant with power and potential.

Pisces‘ glyph is two half circles bound together by a line. In Pisces we reach the end of one cycle of evolution. The new levels we discovered in Sagittarius, developed in Capricorn and expressed in Aquarius are now ready in Pisces to bear their final, deepest fruit: the ability to transfer us to an entirely new cycle of evolution. One of the half circles is the end of the old cycle. The line is Pisces effort to transport us to the other half circle, the beginning of a new cycle of evolution.

- Vic DiCara
© 2010 Vic DiCara, All Rights Reserved

Saturn – “I Am Misery”


Saturn is the misery of limitation, whose purpose brings strength and enlightenment.

~ * ~ * ~

Saturn rules everything that brings you misery. To understand Saturn you will have to understand misery. So ask yourself, What makes me miserable?

There are a lot of things, of course, but try to boil it down the the essence. The fundamental thing that makes us miserable is restriction. Limitations and restrictions makes us miserable because they block us from getting what we want.

I’m sure you can identify a lot of things in your life which cause you misery. Maybe you wanted a guy or a girl to love you. But you were not beautiful enough or cool enough or whatever enough to attract their love. The limitation on your beauty, coolness, etc was Saturn causing you misery.

The ultimate misery comes from the ultimate limitation: time. Time restricts and limits everything, causing the profound miseries of decay, old age and death.

Obviously, Saturn is a dark, morose figure who day in and day out has to deal with the most morbid and difficult of subjects. This is why Saturn controls  endurance, perseverance and tenacity.

Very few people understand the purpose of misery – therefore very few people understand Saturn. They rudely cast him out and shun him. Saturn is alone – private, cold, distant, alienated, lonely and misunderstood, and therefore spiteful.

If you too treat Saturn like this – hating your own limitations and miseries – you will earn his spite and thus only become more miserable and restricted. You should try to understand Saturn by understanding the purpose of misery. If you do so, Saturn will grant you enlightenment.

REALISM & PESSIMISM

Since Saturn is the one who imposes limitations and restrictions, he is very pessimistic. What is “pessimism” anyway, expect the ability to see the limitations of an idea?

You say, “Yeah, I’m gonna win the lottery.”

Saturn says, “Millions of people are trying to win the lottery. The odds are against you. This idea falls short.”

People call it pessimism but it is also realism. Pessimism is just realism taken to an unhealthy extreme. You are just very unlikely to win the lottery. That’s realism. But to take this realism to unhealthy extremes is pessimism. Like, may you are just trying to make a joke or lighten up the mood. Being strictly “realistic” in reply would be taking realism to an unhealthy extreme that can be rightly called “pessimism.”

CRITICISM

Being critical of something means being realistic about it’s limitations. A commercial comes on TV about a vacuum cleaner so wonderful it will get all women married to millionaires and all men laid five times a week. OK, well the people who would be moved by such an ad really must not have a whole lot of Saturn doing them much good in their horoscope – because they are extremely uncritical. A critical mind would say, “Yo, that idea falls seriously short of reality.”

The ability to criticize and be critical is Saturn’s talent. If Saturn is good in a horoscope, this ability will get you into important jobs and be useful for you and your friends. If Saturn is bad in your horoscope your habit of always criticizing others will make you lose opportunities and friends.

NEGATIVITY

In many ways Saturn and Jupiter are a pair of opposites, much like Mars and Venus. Saturn limits and restricts things, but Jupiter helps things grow and expand. Saturn is pessimistic, Jupiter is optimistic. Saturn is critical, Jupiter is encouraging.

Opposites attract because to be “opposite” you have to have something very important in common. For example, the north pole and the south pole are opposites right? But by being opposite that means they have something huge in common: they both define the Earth’s axis. That’s why opposites attract, because they are two extremes of the same spectrum. Two sides of the same coin. This means that Jupiter and Saturn must have something fundamental in common. What is it?

They both want to keep our passion (Mars) from getting out of hand, and they both want us to come back to a higher understanding of who we are so we can exit the cycle and attain enlightenment.

Jupiter does so by encouraging us to do right and rewarding us for it. Saturn does so by making it impossible for us to keep doing wrong, and punishing us for what wrongs we insist on holding on to.

MISCONCEPTIONS: AUTHORITY & DISCIPLINE?

Saturn is often associated with authority and discipline, but this is really rather misleading. Let’s take authority first. The Sun is the authority and that is that. Saturn however, is one of effects of authority: restrictions and limitations. This is illustrated in the fact that the Sun is light, and Saturn is one of the side effects of light: shadow and darkness. You should not think of Saturn as “authority” because he is in fact an outcast, a shunned loner who hates the authorities who run the systems that cause him to be so despised. However because Saturn does impose restrictions, you can acknowledge the role he plays in any authority structure.

As for discipline, there are many planets who cooperate to produce many different types of discipline. Saturn defines limitations and restrictions, and in that sense he imposes a type of discipline or rule. Jupiter also creates discipline by establishing laws. Other planets, like the Sun and Mars also contribute significantly to discipline, Sun being the authority and Mars being the energy to punish those who disobey.

TIME

When America blew up the first atomic bomb, the scientist primarily responsible for it quoted Bhagavad-Gita, “Time I am. I destroy all the worlds.” Saturn is the planet invested by God with the power of this quote.

Saturn creates limitations and restrictions and there is no greater restriction than time. None can escape it. There is a song I wrote about it, called “Forever is Destroyed”

~ * ~ * ~

Your days I grind into dust

Your memories I bleed into the sand that buries us

Your existence is just vapor in my void

Your every hope, by me, forever, is destroyed.

Your every joy I do encase

With fences barbed of tears, I mangle and deface

All you embrace, I shall erase

And leave your broken heart,

With nothing it it’s place.

~ * ~ * ~

Time spares nothing and no one. This is Saturn’s attitude. Time transforms the beautiful princess into an old, wrinkled queen lonely and cold without a king or love. The healthy young man becomes bed ridden and stricken with disease after disease. And death – the ultimate restriction itself – ends everything, even the most joyous love.

These are the tasks of Saturn.

THE STRENGTH TO ENDURE

As you can see, Saturn’s tasks are brutal, awful and thankless. Only the truly strongest of the planets could continue to bear the burden of such responsibilities day after day for the duration of never ending time.

Saturn therefore bestows “strength.” Not the muscular strength of Mars, nor the sensual strength of Venus, but the strength to survive the impossible. Saturn grants the ability to endure.

Since Saturn also operates time and death, his connection with endurance gives him the most complete control over your longevity.

All sorts of endurance are in the treasury of Saturn.

Tenacity is also most abundant in his purse.

When Saturn is beneficial in a horoscope, he grants us longevity, the ability to defy old age, the ability to persevere against challenges and endure insult and opposition, and the tenacity to see even difficult tasks through to completion.

But a bad Saturn in the horoscope is a significant problem because he makes everything in life – even the very things you desire to enjoy – feel like a drag, a chore, a task to be endured and survived. He robs you of the ability to enjoy your work and your daily life.

ALIENATED

Having read this much about Saturn, how do you feel about him? If you are feeling sympathetic you are one of the few. Most people loathe Saturn. They don’t invite him to their parties, to say the least. They kick him into the gutter and force him to run away and live by himself. He is alienated and lonely.

His condition in a horoscope indicates how and when alienation and loneliness affects you.

PRIVATE, DISTANT & COLD

A child is beat up and hated by the others. He turns within himself and lives there, separate from the rest of the world. Saturn is that child. Cast out and hated, Saturn keeps to himself and becomes very private. This is why, in outer space, Saturn is the furthest astrological object in the solar system. He is dim, distant and cold in every way.

SLOW

Saturn is the slowest planet. Everything he does happens slowly… but surely.

SPITEFUL

Mars rules anger but it is Saturn who is the master of hatred. If you treat a person as badly as we all treat Saturn – hating old age, death, etc with the intensity that we do – you just fill that person with hatred and spite for you. Saturn is a bottomless pool of contempt for those who shun him and his effects.

Isn’t this sort of amazing, though? The more you hate something associated with Saturn the more that very thing hates you. The more we hate old age, for example, the more negatively old age affects us!

PERVERSE

Perverse really just means abnormal. People become abnormal when they are not comfortable with what is normal. For example, I went to high school. The normal kids there were about as interesting to me as fried soup. Boring. So I became abnormal and hung out with weirdoes. Much more interesting. You could say were were a “perverse” group – skateboarding on people’s cars, throwing stuff at the managers of fast food stores, you name it. Because we were not embraced by the norm, or could not ourselves embrace it, we became abnormal or “perverse.”

“Normal” people would rather embrace a cactus than Saturn’s decay, old age, death, etc. So saturn becomes the master of abnormality and perversions.

DETACHMENT

Everything about Saturn makes him the master of detachment.

Saturn is perverse and abnormal: So is detachment. We came to this world to enjoy it. It is strange to do the opposite and become detached from it.

Saturn is full of spite and hatred: Detachment is connected to a type of hatred of sense gratification.

Saturn is private, distant, cold, reserved: “detached.”

Saturn controls time, causing disease, old age and death. These three things are the prime stimulants for spiritual detachment.

I mean seriously, this is almost funny: people turn to astrology to gain something by knowing the future. Well Saturn has a very simple reading for you which is 100% accurate every single time.

What is his reading?

You are going to die.

Probably you are also going to get old and sick, but certainly you are going to die.

That is Saturn’s astrological reading for you. What can you gain from it?

Detachment!

Allow Saturn to put your life back into perspective. Yes, it is really a bummer that someone else got your promotion, or whatever, but guess what? That person is going to die and so are you. Get over it. There are much more important things to worry about.

Like what?

Like figuring out the purpose of misery in the first place!

THE PURPOSE OF MISERY

As we learned earlier in the book, we wanted to come to this world but we also wanted an escape route. We wanted in, but we wanted a way out eventually.

That is why we suffer.

Misery is the key to opening the exit door from the illusory way we currently tend to live out our tiny lives.

It is not the only key, don’t get me wrong. Jupiter also gives the key to enlightenment in a positive way, without misery but with encouragement. Jupiter encourages our less selfish actions with positive rewards and thus gradually moves us towards the enlightenment of selfless divine love. But this really takes a long time. It is seriously beating around the bush. Saturn has a huge shortcut, you just have to be willing to enter the doorway of misery.

Misery is a negative reward for the more selfish actions we have done throughout our incarnations. To hate your misery is a selfish reaction, which thus attracts even more suffering. But how can one utilize misery in a positive way? By becoming detached!

Becoming “detached” means becoming less selfish.

Detachment means not holding on to things for yourself. You must detach from the things you wish to possess and simply let them be what they are, and love them for what they are. This attitude will not only end misery, it will bring about its ultimate purpose, enlightenment.

Saturn therefore plays the leading role in helping human beings wake up to the fact that they did want to come into this world, but we also wanted to get back out. We get back out by becoming detached from it.

Saturn plays what appears to be a very grim role – causing misery and grief by creating this insurmountable limitations of time and, ultimately, death. It is always important to remember that all the planets exist only to serve you. They all mean you well, they just have different ways of going about it.

Saturn means you well by waking you up from illusions that you have limitless time and energy to fantasize here in a material dream land.

Saturn can bless you to have the positive side of everything his is the master of – he can remove limitations, extend your lifespan and health, make you satisfied and happy in all your daily tasks, give you the insightful realism and make you detached from inevitable sufferings. On the other hand, if you have been hating Saturn in previous lives and in this one, Saturn will give you one hell of a rough treatment.

~ * ~ * ~

Saturn is the misery of limitation, whose purpose brings strength and enlightenment.