When Saturn, our Beloved Greater Malefic, rises from the swirling deep of Pisces, carving a flame-paved path into the sign of Aries the end of May, those of us for whom it returns will be pinned under its gaze and the rest of us will get singed by association.
Saturn is surly in Aries - Clint Eastwood chewing the stub end of a cigar under the unflinching glare of the Sun. It’s a dry heat that reminds me of every Louis L’Amor story featuring a lone man attempting to outsmart the desert with nothing but his stubborn determination to continue living. “I’ll die some day, but not this one” the loner says. Defiant Life - a life fully owned by one’s self, separate from convention or expectation. After Pisces, Aries is going to feel arid and solitary - the individual human grain of sand amidst the towering dunes of existence.
This isn’t the collective structure Saturn wants to build in Libra, the sign of its exaltation. This isn’t the collaboration of beauty and utility, a life crafted in harmony, in relationship with Everything Else. No, this is the Eye of the World staring down a single soul and applying the heat.
Saturn uses its tuning fork to find the fractures in our bones, the unsoundness, the subluxated joints. Its resonance calls to our energetic echo and any pain experienced comes from our own misalignment. We become ‘out of tune’ through our upbringing, cultural expectations and pressures, trauma, and adaptations necessary for survival and every so often we need to be invited, however forcefully, back into our true shape. Is this pleasant? Fuck no. But when we submit to the adjustment, we find ourselves mobile, active forces in our lives once more.
Saturn brings us home to the truths we fear, the obligations we dread, the reality we dissociate from, the limits that press against our throat, the bit cutting into the corners of our mouths. It also offers us the opportunity for satisfaction through meaningful labor and a job well done, the triumph of striving, and unlike any other planet, Saturn teaches us presence. In Aries it is the perfect remediation for the ‘self-help epidemic’ we live in, tempering us to reality and burning away the bullshit so that when we finally reach the other side of the vast ocean of sand, we are a fitting complement for the Sacred Other. We appreciate Other because we have been face-to-face with our Self.
I have always seen Saturn administering its aggressive teachings through questions; Saturn’s transits are more like interrogations than anything else. It wants us to look at hard things and give hard answers. Always. It wants Response. In Aries, they pin us to the mat and ask, “Who the fuck are you?” When it’s just you and the Sun - no law, no order, no social sins or influence, who are you? And then, my favorite demand,
“What are you going to do about it?” It? Everything. What will you do with this terrifyingly fragile yet infinitely important life? If you are responsible for it, then what will you do? If you are the point on the spear, what will you do?
Saturn’s calm, gravelly voice is in our ear, “You’re going to die. So how will you live?” It holds our bones, an agonizing vibration against fractured limbs. We wrestle and thrash and I think I can hear a laugh, low as the grinding of tectonic plates. Wrestling is better than cowering, gnashing is holy and being on fire is our divine right. We begin to feel our spines shift back into place, we begin to feel the hum of alignment coming from within us and not an outside force.
Aries was recently washed with eclipses during the North Node’s transit, and now it is being sharpened on Saturn’s stone- it will be honed and shining like a blade. Through this transit we will be made to acknowledge the necessity of claiming our right of responsibility, embracing our agency and cultivating the fierce kind of selfishness Terry Pratchett describes in “The Wee Free Men”
“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!”
If we all count ourselves responsible, if each of us shows up in a tidal wave of individual agency and response, if we grasp this bird-boned life and hold it - the day is ours. “How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!” The defiance, the fire, the ownership - a smile plays on the cracked lips of Saturn’s sunburnt face, and our bones begin to mend.
In the next three years, Saturn wants us to respond to reality, to bravely face and burn away the mortal dread that fogs up our lives, to strain against sheep-like apathy, to wake up and cry out on behalf of life and its right to BE, to exist. To own this life, to sharpen our teeth and fight for it - because it’s OURS.