ARTICLES FROM CURRENT ASTROLOGERS

Saturn decides what’s true and normal

Anachronistic though it may be, in the modern world Saturn still means what it meant before the string theorists and Carlos Castaneda started messing with our minds about the nature of reality. In a given culture, Saturn governs those consensual viewpoints that are felt to be so unarguably real that they don’t register as relative. They register as self-evident.

An example is the idea that American-style democracy is the most superior form of government the world has ever seen (1). It is not considered a mere opinion; it is a defining cultural premise. So is its corollary: that the desire to introduce democracy to less-enlightened nation states is a proper and, indeed, an idealistic position for a politician to take. The only argument between the two major political parties on this issue concerns the means by which an American-style government should be foisted upon, and thereafter managed within, the benighted countries involved. The question of whether it should happen elicits no argument; only how it should happen. It’s considered too obviously true to subject to argument. One doesn’t argue about gravity, either.

We proposed in our last column that the Saturnine concept of normalcy is similarly relative: that what a culture considers to be base-line normal changes from decade to decade, if not from year to year or month to month; even varying widely from one socioeconomic group to another—all the while seeming, to the person holding the assumption, to be as immutable as Mt. Everest. Saturn represents all viewpoints which take for granted that Everybody sees things this way except for a few wingnuts.

To the extent that we stay stuck in this collective application of the Saturn principle it becomes impossible to assess, or respond to, what’s going on in the world today. Our job as symbol-readers must be to rediscover the elasticity of the archetypes we find in the astrology books, thereby to use them, in all their fullness and complexity of meaning, as tools of consciousness.