How to Get Out of Saturn's Belly

The visionary activist astrologer Caroline Casey often says on her radio show “The Visionary Activist Show” that it’s our job to help “inauguarate a guiding story” for the world. Without a vision of not just what events are happening in the world, but of what they mean, we’re caught by hidden patterns that control us.

The end result is something like this:

Without a guiding story, we’re just robots controlled by the news. But with a guiding story, we’re able to be “first responders” instead of the “first reactors” everyone is these days. This is my attempt to inaugurate, or at least nominate, a guiding story. Take it as you will, just try not to robotically react.

The Wall, the Goat, and the Planets

Right now, the planet Pluto is passing through Capricorn, where it has been since 2008 and where it will be until 2024. Interpreted, that means that Pluto – the planet of intense change, evisceration, and upheaval – is doing its magic in Capricorn’s domain, which basically means that we’re in the middle of huge, cleansing transformations in what Capricorn governs. And what does Capricorn govern? Control, opposition, boundaries, and force. In other words, everything having to do with a defensive stance against opposing sides, the boundaries between groups of people, and our attitudes toward control are lit up on Pluto’s radar. They’re due for a violent makeover, and it won’t be pretty.

This is exactly what we see in the world. If there is one thing Capricorn doesn’t do, it’s compromising, which is also something no one today does. We’ve all been snookered into opposition: if group 1 does something group 2 doesn’t like, the group 2 inevitably starts a protest. Trump supporters hated Hilary; Hilary supporters hated Trump. The solution is never to build bridges; it’s always to build a wall.

Snookered by Saturn

But this is all a style of consciousness that we’ve seen before. It’s always here, but normally too invisible to see. And that style of consciousness belongs to what the ancients called a god (what I’d call a divine aspect): Kronos/Saturn, whose planet rules Capricorn. Remember: Saturn is the god of time, fixed limits, boundaries, edges. He keeps the rhythm of the cosmos, defining its limits by standing just outside it. He swallowed his children, keeping all the gods’ energies safe and contained in his belly. With him, we’re locked inside a fixed vessel, but without him, we suffer the even harder fate of being lost in a vast expanse without definition.

So as the archetype that’s constellated in the world today, we can view Saturn in two ways: 1) as an enemy to freedom and love who hates outsiders and who moves back the clock of progress, or 2) as someone who reins in the world from getting lost and dispersed our world of polyamory and thirty-something unique gender choices. Moreover, we can make this observation: the political right is explicitly Saturn (since it promotes order, limits and walls), but the political left is implicitly Saturn. In Jungian language, Saturn is the left’s Shadow: while they may not explicitly want to build walls, they are just as if not more oppositional and rigid than the right. So essentially, Saturn is at work in both sides. He’s ruling the world again, like it or not.

Cutting It (Everything) Out

So whats’s the cure? Not to fight the other side – that oppositionalism is what defines Saturn as Saturn. I’d suggest that, instead of rigidly opposing (what we see as) light and (what we see as) darkness, we accept “a twilight state.” Only then can we give back to the gods what Saturn has swallowed. Let each thing, mood, person, and viewpoint be what it wants to be. Allow coexistence, not just on the terms of your ideals, but let ideals themselves coexist. And that would mean allowing viewpoints different from yours, or even wildly opposed to it, to exist without your interference.

But above all, the cure is to trust in the light that isn’t the harsh fluorescent light of ego consciousness. The ego is the heavy-handed, rigid, literal miser that we all have in our heads. Let him die, not by killing him, but by letting him be no longer the only acceptable way to be. The light we should trust in is, again, a twilight: where the light of each god respects and does not fight against or try to swallow the light of every other god. You let consciousness be, neither claiming it as mine nor repressing it as unacceptable. And this twilight is not a dusk but a dawn. It would be where each style of consciousness is always on the way toward union, none ever dominating the others as the harsh noon of a “complete” union (which is just Saturn swallowing his kids again). And as Swedenborg said, this means a lot more than just relief from strife:

Moreover, by “morning” is signified in the supreme sense the Lord Himself, for the reason that the Lord is the Sun from which comes all the light in heaven, and He is always in the rising, thus in the morning. (Arcana Coelestia 5097)