Saturn was the last planet known to the ancients because it is the farthest planet that can be seen with the naked eye. Mythologically, Saturn was the father of Zeus (Jupiter) and Saturn’s “complex of meanings directly reflected” the fact that it was the farthest out planet that the ancients could see, with its longer orbit; thus it was seen as “the ruler of boundaries and limits, of finitude and endings, of distance, slowness, age, time, death, and fate” (Tarnas, 2006, p. 91). Here is Tarnas’s (2006) description of Saturn:
the principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation; time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things; gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, challenges, fortifies, deepens; the tendency to confine and constrict, to divide and define, to cut and shorten, to negate and oppose, to strengthen and forge through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority; to experience difficulty, decline, deprivation, defect and deficit, defeat, failure, alienation; the labor of existence, suffering, old age, death; the weight of the past, the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, imprisonment, the sense of “no exit”; pessimism, inferiority, inhibition, isolation, oppression and depression; the impulse and capacity for discipline and duty, order, solitude, concentration, conciseness, thoroughness and precision, discrimination and objectivity, restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom; the harvest of time, effort, and experience; the concern with consensus reality, factual concreteness, conventional forms and structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, judgment, the superego; the dark, cold, heavy, dense, dry, old, slow, distant; the senex, Kronos, the stern father of the gods. (p. 91)
These qualities of Saturn correspond archetypally to the first stage of biological birth, BPMII, where the cervix is still closed and the uterus is contracting: the “Antagonism With the Mother—Contractions Within a Closed Uterine System.” (Grof, 1975).
Tarnas relates that the Gnostics, along with different mystery traditions “believed that beyond Saturn existed another realm ruled by a greater, more encompassing deity, governing a domain of freedom and immortality beyond the constraints of fate and death” (p. 91). So let us go there now. ∆RC[inSat]
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