EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SATURN PT. 1
Turn Your Setbacks into Success Stories
This newsletter is adapted from a course I taught in June 2023 about Saturn. Part One covers the concepts of Saturn. Part Two (releasing next week) will explain what your Saturn placement means. Enjoy!
I was born in Minneapolis, grew up in Minneapolis. I was a skate punk and a musician. You can see that with the Arrest Me, I'm a Skateboarder shirt. Went to Northwestern, played in a band, majored in philosophy and economics. Moved to Manhattan, worked for Scott Galloway, Business Insider, did a bunch of business presentations, and it was a great time. But then I had a “what the fuck?” moment. I got a concussion at a nightclub. I started buying crystals and I bleached my hair. What was going on?
This is an actual snapshot of the transits that I was experiencing when I got my concussion. And guess what was going on there? This is my natal Saturn, 21 degrees of Capricorn. This is transiting Saturn in September & October, 2019. Pretty damn close to my natal Saturn Pluto on my Saturn. South node on my descendant and north note on my ascendant. For the astrology buffs out there, anyone who's reading this would be like, "Wow, you just had a spiritual awakening."
In simpler terms, I had a Saturn return. All of 2019, I had a Saturn return. It started March 2019, and it ended in December 2019. That encapsulated my Saturn return era, and the concussion basically extricated me from a party culture in which I was going out a lot, using my 12th house Mars to drink too much and be rambunctious and rebellious. But eventually, the concussion knocked some sense into me. And that was Saturn was kind of like an authority figure being like, "You’ve got to figure your shit out. You’ve got to stop just wasting your life away, drinking and partying and do something more." That Saturn return was basically my reality check, and that's why I'm here doing this right now. That's just to show you the importance of Saturn.
Even before I was interested in astrology, I had this thought when I was younger about how my life moves in seven year cycles. For some reason, everything I commit to, I basically am on a track with it for seven years, and then I reset. And once I understood astrology, I realized, okay, well, 27 to 29 is a marquee time for people when they either can't handle things anymore or they establish themselves for security’s sake—maybe they get married or they buy a house or they have a family.
I was like, why does such crazy shit happen to people between 27 and 29? And then I learned that is the length of a Saturn cycle. Technically a Saturn cycle reaches up to 29 and a half years, but on average it runs about 28 years. You can chop that up into seven year blocks.
Every seven years you reach a fork in the road. When you're seven, by the time you're seven, you have some sense of an identity, at least in terms of your ability to go out there and learn. You're really in the schooling system at that point.
And then 14, that’s your first Saturn opposition and that's when you start to develop long-term friendships among self-aware individuals (the opposition is similar to a 7th House aspect). You're in high school, you're starting to at least peek into adulthood.
And then by 21, you have a closing Saturn square. That's when you really start to feel pressure to actually commit to some type of career or career path. That's usually towards the end of college. And then your Saturn return is around 28, and that's when a lot of people are faced with a big commitment that sets their trajectory truly for the next 28 years (the next Saturn Cycle). This is the broad overview of how the Saturn cycle operates.
And then let's stack other cycles. It's not just one time, you typically have three Saturn returns. Your third Saturn return is around 86 years old, and that's about the average life expectancy.
Before I advance further, I want to delineate between personal and chronological transits. What I'm talking about with the Saturn return, that's a chronological transit. So, 28, 56, et cetera. Everyone experiences Saturn returns around that time, give or take a year. Everyone experiences a Jupiter return every 12 years. A Uranus opposition at 42 or so, Saturn opposition at 44, and so on.
But on a personal level, when do you have a Saturn-Sun square? Well, that depends on where your natal Sun is and where your natal Saturn is. If you're born with a Sun-Saturn conjunction, then the Sun-Saturn square would happen seven years later. If you're born with a Sun Saturn square, it would happen at zero and 14. And then there's obviously other times when it squares. But this is a key distinction to keep in mind.
PSYCHOLOGY OF SATURN
To understand Saturn, we have to first place it within the solar system. There’s obviously a series of planets orbiting around the Sun. Saturn happens to be the last visible planet that the ancients could consistently see in the sky, and Saturn has a ring around it, you notice that. Saturn sits between Jupiter and Uranus, and Saturn takes about 29 years to orbit around the Sun.
