Notes on a Saturn Return
One of my favorite things about astrology is how it helps so many mysterious threads of my life join a larger weave: why I find comfort in elaborate cooking projects while my mother prefers antiquing and shoe shopping; why my friend is all of a sudden going through it? Astrology can point to my Virgo moon and hers in Libra and that my friends has Saturn entering her first house. Astrology can reveal the patterns connecting our insides to the stars.
Astrology helps me remember that we’re not alone: some planetary configuration or activation always seems to give an external correlative to our internal experience, and also a language, a shorthand for understanding our predicament. It also lets me know the limits of my agency and that a lot of my struggles aren’t because of something I am or am not doing: it’s just the current step on the spiral stair.
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March is a month of changes. Apt that I just wrote about Denebola, the star in the lion’ tail, which is also known in Islamicate astrology as “the changer”. I associate Denebola with the forces of countercultures, gender fluidity, wild beasts and great storms. This week, when the moon was in Denebola’s Lunar Station, I got visions of saw-toothed priestesses under the magma of a volcano gathered around a hole covered with a lattice of snakes.
Snakes have always been symbols of transformation, usually the hurting kind. This month, we have already undergone Saturn leaving Aquarius and entering Pisces, the first time Saturn has changed signs in almost three years. This means that a collection of people have left their Saturn return and a whole new collection have entered it.1 Saturn returns are like birth canals into adulthood; you are squeezed and not afforded the usual space to juggle options. During a Saturn Return, things often become clarified and you realize you have the power to inscribe your life with the patterns you maintain during this period. It is not a pleasant experience, I can attest, but it changes you.
In just two weeks, on the 23rd, Pluto will change signs for the first time in fifteen years. I like using 2008 recession to bookend this transit to highlight the sort of vibe-shift Pluto in Capricorn gave us. It was in that period that we realized (not for the first time) that the people holding our money didn’t necessarily care if they lost it. They had made themselves so “indispensable” to the country that the president would bail them out when they behaved negligently. I was only in middle school then but I was already hearing stories about college students not being able to find jobs for the first time in what felt like forever to me. Since then, I’ve watched cycle after cycle of regular staff cuts at billion-dollar companies making record profits and the shrinking of stable jobs in favor of piteously-paid freelancers and the cramming of three full-time positions into one.2
If you’ve noticed, Pluto, the planet of transformation and deep power, will be entering the sign that Saturn just left. Whatever area of your life is governed by Aquarius will be getting a deepening after the great building.
If you are feeling like everything is changing, as so many people have reported to me during this time, that’s because it is.
It doesn’t mean wanton destruction, just a clearing out of what was on its way out anyway.
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I just ended my 7th house Saturn Return and one journey it has given me: the ability to be with my body/needs versus compulsively prioritizing the perceived desires of others.
The 7th house in the place of the sunset, the western horizon, always opposite the ascendant. As a result, the 7th house is often known at the house of the “other”: it governs contracts, partners, committed relationships, as well as business dealings and open enemies. But there’s also a chthonic aspect to it. The western horizon was always associated with death because it was where the Sun died each day. Manilius, a 1st century astrologer, described it this way:
“Here dies even the very of light of day, which the ground beneath steals from the world and locks up captive in the in the dungeon of the night…This temple also claims for itself the guardianship of good faith and constancy of heart. Such is the power that dwells in the abode…surrendering that which it has received, and brings the day to a close”.3
Saturn in my 7th has often meant that love is hard work; often it doesn’t work out and when it does, it still contains plenty of difficult tasks.
But 7th house Saturn’s such as myself also know the deep feeling of being committed to another— how, we have nowhere to run because the other is always clarifying us, for better or worse— stones rubbing each other at the bottom of the lake.
When I am bothered by someone, barring abhorrent behavior, almost every time I have taken the backward step and looked within I have been met with genuine transmutation— a sudden loosening of my judgment and a recognition of a part of myself I’m still learning to hold. My favorite is being around people who embody the traits I wish to aspire in myself— we are often told that our ability to see a trait in one person means we have it within ourselves too.
But in that moment, the version of us we know diminishes to make room for the new possibility the other presents to us. We are constantly “dying” to other people, letting them influence us when we let them in. But through this process, by paying attention to ourselves and others, we begin to feel love. I think we expect love to always feel nice or pleasant but I’m with Frank Stanford when he says love is “low, dark, and cold-blooded, like a cottonmouth”.4
But if I am paying attention, I am practicing love.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on what literature could tell us about knowing the other— where it led; what it was for. All I know is, worshipping anything human as a savior is a ticket to mutual destruction. But attempting to know the unknowable, the universes within all of us?
Again & again I find the process of knowing humans worthwhile. The point is not to get exactly what we want out of another because then they aren’t a person anymore but a thing for you to grasp for again & again. It feels good to approach as many beings as possible with love
When love is not simply a nice feeling, it does not preclude a lack of accountability or justice; it does not exclude fierceness, anger, distance. To me love is attention. But then it’s also putting in the work.
That’s doesn’t preclude endings, especially when being with the other is changing yourself too much— the essence rather than the reactive patterns that relationships can help us shed. Love can include distance and definitely requires boundaries.
A partnership has to be strong enough to accommodate all of you for it to last. But the depth you get is like a cathedral that’s all yours. The right person or people will join you there.
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Recommendations:
Tortellini in Brodo
This funny, infuriating review of fatphobic paradise “The Whale”
I just bought the new Grace Jones “Boy Smells” candle and I am beyond stoked to invoke her spirit in my home <33
Until next week, loves,
Chloe
particularly if you were born between 1994-1995 and parts of 1993
Yes Capricorn is my 6th house so labor and the ills our current capitalist system were high on my mind
Manilius, Astronomica, II. 946-948
Frank Stanford, “Living the Good Life”