Planetary Personalities: Saturn

In October of 2024, I began working with an incredible illustrator and visual artist, Alex Raguso (@crumb_eater on insta), to transmute my written descriptions of the 7 primary planets into a series of Tarot Card style illustrations. We spent months talking through mythology, etymology, and astrology to find the cultural common threads. We did draft after draft of both the text and the illustrations until these cards were born. I am grateful and proud and hope this collaboration helps contextualize why celestial bodies and their rich cultural histories have always, and will always be celebrated as important to human's understanding of themselves and their power. Below, you will find the fruits of that labor in all their HQ glory. We posted version on social media meant to poison AI, so please refrain from reposting the unpoisoned version in this post anywhere else. I've also included the collage I made after writing each planetary profile at the very end.

This is the last of the planetary personalities series, Saturn ♄!

Saturn: Rules Capricorn and Aquarius

Saturn is known for its ring. The circle that runs around the entire planet and pulls things into its orbit, it's heavy gravity suspended in weightlessness. All circles are representative of cycles, systems, and mechanisms. To fully understand the power of the ring as a symbol, how it represents Saturn, and what Saturn's system is, we must first talk about polar opposites. That's what Aquarius and Capricorn are, polar opposites, but they teach us that bending a line, blending the beginning and the end, can create a beautiful flow. With time, that which seems polar can be shaped into sameness and oneness. Saturn respects time and the power it has to do the hard work of un-polarizing anything. So let's talk about the those opposites! Let's see how time can make anything polarizing into something easily integrated, and make anything normalized into something strange.

Aquarius is the stranger, the outsider, the cloud hovering above the ecosystem. Its perspective is the bird's eye view. Some things can only be understood and innovated upon by taking a step back or consulting an outside party. Aquarius is the outside party. Like the cloud, Aquarius recognizes that the maintenance of an ecosystem might require resources not found inside that ecosystem. It delights in it's outsiderdom, because why fear being an outsider if what is needed is on outside? The Aquarius might hold a knowledge that seems strange or detached from the ecosystem's current needs, but it deeply understands that there will come a time where those needs change and it is equipped to get the jump on it. Aquarius revels in the moment when its estranged perspective becomes exactly what is needed to modify and better the ecosystem, when its perspective becomes the new normal. "New normal", a contrasting idea. Aquarius smooths the transition between currency and futurism. Surely the cloud knows the value of its distance from the ground, too far up and its water won't ever reach the ecosystem and become integrated, too close and it can not condense anything new. It's all about place and time.

Capricorn is the insider. The valued perspective of one connected to the history and legacy of an ecosystem. Just as the Aquarius anticipates a future need, the Capricorn deconstructs the needs that got us to this very moment. The groundwork is as important as the sky work is, and every cloud raining needs an irrigation system for the water to even be properly absorbed in the first place. Capricorn's connection to time and place exists between currency and tradition. It understands the past the way Aquarius understands the future. Capricorn is comfortable being overfamiliar as opposed to estranged, because it learned the legacy. It knows what work must be done to maintain the ecosystem and it does it. It is the gear turning and being oiled from above. Without a running ecosystem to absorb newness, without the foundation of life to water, a cloud would only be good for flood. What good would its distanced perspective be if there was nothing to feed information or resource back to? The reason Capricorn knows when the roots need watering is because it knows and is connected to its roots. Surely anything grounded knows the value of the ground. Capricorn makes use of the intel and normalizes that which was once strange. It is, once again, all about timing.

This is Saturn's system: Time. A mechanism that helps us maintain and/or breakdown facades, maintain and/or breakdown cycles, maintain and/or breakdown tradition. We often want more time despite only ever having less and less of it as it passes. Saturn doesn't fear this deficit, it believes in working with what you have: your remembrance of the past and your hope for the future. To tap into that cycle and know when to sacrifice what we've known for something strange and new, or when to sacrifice newness for something deep and familiar is divine timing. Saturn represents this idea. It bends linear time to make the future and the past meet despite their polarity. Time can smoothen any process running jankily until it's swept into that easy flow. Saturn's recognizes time, in all its limitations, as usable material. Time's hard boundaries and edges make light work of softening the world. After all, what is normal if not just something coming back from before and/or something from the future coming to meet us? Arguably one and the same.

As time bends these polars, the old and new perspectives together, it creates a tension so tight the whole system could snap, but it doesn't, time just keeps going. One of the only systems we have that doesn't succumb to the tensions of opposing ideas. And that's the beauty of Saturn's chosen shape. The circle, the ring, dissolves those individual points and evenly distributes the tension throughout the whole. Saturn believes all tension, all contrast, even stark and polar difference, has its place inside or outside the system and will be integrated in due time. It tests this theory through waiting and watching. It positions one of its zodiac signs at the watchtower inside, and one at the watchtower outside (but both their watches are synchronized). Saturn teaches that any prediction, willing to wait long enough, will see itself succeed. Anything strange will become normal one day, and another day become strange again. More evidence of this hand off comes when you notice Saturn is the only planet ruling two signs whose seasons occur back to back. It is a planet that believes in the power of continuum, and opposites coming together.

This is why the watch or the clock - a circular system to keep time, its gears grinding internally, but its outward face portraying smooth motion - is the perfect physical metaphor for Saturn. Night and Day may be opposites, but time allows them to meet face to face as the clock changes. Midnight 59 and 00 new day are only ever as far apart as the millisecond it takes to change. Times always change. Despite Saturn ruling an earth and air sign, the planet has a deep connection to water, represented in Aquarius as the water bearer and Capricorn as the sea-goat. This is because water is an element that understands what it means to always change. Change is merely a connection made by bringing two far things together and waiting for them to merge, like bodies of water connect and merge. Saturn knows that change is the only way to integrate tension without breaking, and so its gear, its ring, takes on the shape of water, the swirl. There is a flow to the way Aquarius speaks and thinks (airs) and the way Capricorn builds and maintains (earth). They represent their elements. Aquarius can use the mind and the process of imaginative thought to connect the present to the future, while Capricorn uses the body and the and the process of recalling feeling to connect the present to its roots.

The beauty and horror of the Greco-Roman Mythology of Saturn, and the art depicting him consuming his own child, is not about fearing death or change. The horror is in what it says about continuum. Time’s cycle makes an ouroboros of us all, blending our beginning with our end until it all seems one and the same. We hope our children, the future, will be kind when they come to dissolve our past and our traditions to dust, but we also remember the reality of how it has alway happened. The changeover was, is, and will always be quick, and to the larger system of time, it's also inconsequential.

p.s. if you've ever wondered why people fear their Saturn return, or why yours felt so heavy, it is because Saturn is here to remind us how much time we've spent, and how much we still have left. The weight of a moment full of both remembrance and hope feels almost crushing until you learn to smooth it all out in the way Saturn would approve of: wait it out.