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