Stop Worrying About Your Saturn Return

When I was going through my Saturn return, I was an anxious wreck. Nothing particularly horrible was happening to me. As far as I could tell, nothing in particular was happening at all. I knew that couldn’t possibly be right. Saturn returns are supposed to be dramatic, life-changing events. I knew I must have been missing something important, I went to my mentor and begged him to help me figure it out. We talked about the symbols and ways that I could work consciously to feel better about the Saturn area of my chart, but no matter what he said, I didn’t feel prepared. Finally, he sighed and looked over his glasses at me and told me that there was no way to know what my Saturn return was all about. In all likelihood, the themes that would be raised by my Saturn return wouldn’t even begin to finish playing out until I was thirty-five.

“Wait until your Uranus opposition to start evaluating your Saturn return,” he said. “You won’t have any idea what it meant until you’re at least 42.”

I was furious at the time, but now I’m starting, I think, to understand what he meant.

My Jupiter return is coming up in about two years. (Yes, I know this is supposed to be a post about Saturn returns. Stick with me.) Two years is pretty far out, but it’s close enough that I can start to predict a little bit where I’m going to be in life. After a tumultuous 20s, it is glorious to be able to think at all about what life will be like two years from now. Being in this place is making me realize that I am only just now in my mid-30s getting to the place where I can think about planetary returns at all.

It isn’t a matter of intelligence or maturity. There are some astrologers in their 20s who have more wisdom in their finger than astrologers twice their age. It’s just a matter of being able to zoom out enough on your life to see the patterns.

It is only after 2.75 turns around Jupiter’s orbit that I’m able to see my Jupiter cycle themes clearly enough to work with them consciously. My Jupiter is in Aquarius and the 7th house, which is the House of Marriage. You would expect that my Jupiter cycle would have something to do with close, partnership relationships. Yes… But that’s not at all true in the way you’d expect.

The first time I experienced a Jupiter return was when I was 12. I did not have any close friends that year, and I didn’t date anyone. Partnership was entirely off the table. Sometimes, the absence of appropriate themes is because the person is too young, but my second Jupiter return was when I was 24. In that year, I also had no major events around partnership.

What both of those periods of my life have in common, though, is spirit. I first connected with spirit when I was 12. I was terrified and pushed it away. Twelve years later, spirit knocked again, much more insistently.

At first glance spirit work and my Jupiter placement have absolutely nothing in common, but Jupiter rules Pisces, which is in my 8th house (House of the Occult). It is also square my south node (past lives) in Scorpio (more occult stuff), my sun (ego) and north node (destiny) in 10th house (vocation) Taurus (value what’s important), and sextile Uranus (individuation) in Sagittarius (life’s a journey) the 5th house (past life relationships).

This means that Jupiter is connected to themes of spirit work, past life experience with spirits and the occult, and my sense of mission. Any event that triggers Jupiter, is going to trigger all of those things, too.

Now, on the edge of my third Jupiter return, I’m only just starting to see how the 7th house connects to all of this. I work with deities (Jupiter’s expansion theme -> big spirits), but I refuse to work with them in the usual devotional way (Aquarius). I agreed to work with them only if our relationship would be a partnership (7th house), and that’s what it’s become. There are ways in which they’re much more powerful and wise than me, but there are things that I can do here (like compassionately hitting someone over the head) that are much easier for me than it would be for them. That understanding is foundational to our relationship, which makes it (at least, with the gods I work with most closely) a 7th house partnership.

How could I have possibly seen that when I was 12 or even 24? When I was 15, I had no idea that the ghost that liked to camp out at the end of the hall at my parents’ house was the world of spirit trying to get my attention. When I was 24, my first brush with spirit after years of attempts to shut it out was still relatively subtle, the sort of thing you remember later only when you have a larger story to put it in. It was only a few years later, when spirit started to break down the door, that I could see that those experiences were significant in the larger plot of my life.

If Saturn moves almost three times as slowly as Jupiter and deals with themes that are just as big and long, I probably won’t have this kind of perspective on my Saturn issues until I’m in my 90s. Or dead.

It’s like when you’re first reading Harry Potter, and you think that Quidditch game with the snitch Harry Potter almost swallowed was a humorous interlude. It’s only in the last book that you understand the significance of that infuriating tiny object. It’s only when you can look at the whole story that you can see what’s really important.

Astrology can help you get a hint of what the larger themes in your life are, but an individual life is full of so many twists and turns. The way you put together the complex set of symbols in your birth chart will be shocking when they happen but oh, so obvious in retrospect.

So, if you are in your 20s, and you’re interested in astrology, and you’re gnawing your nails to bits worrying about your Saturn return, stop. You may feel like you’ve lived a long time, but your life is only just beginning from Saturn’s perspective. This isn’t the point in the story where you’re facing the crisis that will determine your future. You’re still the kid under the cupboard. Any step you can take to get yourself into a place where you belong is applause-worthy, and if all you can do right now is see where the problems are, that’s okay. Those problems are the conflict that will make your story worth telling. If you can see what those problems are now, you’re wiser than Harry Potter ever was.

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 7 January 2019.