Darkness, My Old Friend: Saturn in Scorpio

Saturn, the feared ancient of death and misery, cloaked in Scorpio, the sign that defines being born under a bad sign. It’s gonna suck jagged rocks, right? It has to mean you will die a horrible death, probably being dismembered while you watch, or sucked dry by a night creature, or turned into a pillar of salt for your fornicating sin, or that you are doomed to be sacrificed to the devil.

You are, in short, the lovely Miss Ives from ‘Penny Dreadful’. Case sadly closed.

Uh-uh.

But you might want to hold my hand for this. Life is dark, the night really is full of terrors, and this months pair of articles explore what that means for two different tribes who venture over its threshold.

Let us be real, and admit the truth we hope desperately is not all that there is for us to encounter – life can be cruel, pitiless and savagely hard. It can involve deprivation, desolation, slavery, unimaginable horror and fates that are far worse than death. Children sometimes fall out of giant skyscraper windows or get eaten alive by animals. Psychos chain people in basements and peel their skins off as trophies. Loving animals are treated to electroshock before having their throats cut and ending up sliced onto plates. Horror is part of our life. Sometimes it is actually what we want – and if you think you are exempt from such feelings, watch the story of Ramsay Bolton on TVs Game of Thrones.

Okay so its just a character in a story, but people really do shit like that to one another, and if they did it to you or your loved ones, in other words if it were really happening to you, those feelings you have about the characters actions and ultimate fate would no longer be so imaginary. Catch my drift? There is violence and darkness in us and we like to see it visited upon evil. If you have little problem swallowing this and do not struggle to accept all of this as reality, you may be one of these tribes.

They want to know what lies in that epic darkness. So let us go in there and see what we can find together.

Saturn in Scorpio was a recent event, as this outline of its pattern in the last 100 years and for the rest of this century shows:

Saturn in Scorpio, 1900-2100

• 20 Dec 1923 – 6 Apr 1924; 13 Sep 1924- 2 Dec 1926
• 22 Oct 1953 – 12 Jan 1956; 14 May 1956 – 10 Oct 1956
• 29 Nov 1982 – 6 May 1983; 24 Aug 1983 – 17 Nov 1985
• 5 Oct 2012 – 23 Dec 2014; 15 Jun 2015 – 18 Sep 2015
• 11 Nov 2041 – 21 Jun 2042; 14 Jul 2042 – 21 Feb 2044; 25 Mar 2044 – 31 Oct 2044
• 25 Dec 2070 – 27 Mar 2071; 18 Sep 2071- 6 Dec 2073

Here we can clearly see that nearly all the babies born since late 2012 through to September of last year (excluding the first half of 2015 and the last week of 2014) are members of this tribe. Since Saturn does not typically appear or mature until we are older, only a very few of the newest tribe will display strong traits belonging to this cohort. Around the time of their first Saturn return in the early 2040s these traits will be very clear. For today we must look back to those born between late 1982 and late 1985, asking ourselves what they have been experiencing lately as they experience their Saturn returns. Much of this will be in personal details rather than public happenings, since Saturn is at a more individual tier of collective astrology, but we have seen important things in this period that do reflect the nature of the influence. Additionally, we must look at the older generation of those born between late 1953 and late 1956, some of the so called ‘baby boomers’, where we will generally see a more concrete and inflexible development of the Saturn in Scorpio qualities. The elders of the tribe are the children of the mid 1920s, born between late 1923 and late 1926. Their youngest surviving member is about 90 right now, their eldest about 93. This gives us four periods in modern history to study and contrast.

In searching for traces of Saturn in history we have to look at authoritarian and governmental establishments and how they extend their power and influence or lose it, we look for older or more sobering figures who stabilise with their presence or block forward momentum by playing the tradition card, we look for disasters involving the consequences of human interaction with the natural laws of our world (our ability to master it) and we look for events which apply pressure or involve things cracking, the necessity for change, Nobel Prize winners or other people who are being honoured or elevated to authority, and the emergence and adoption of rules or traditions, among other things. From a spiritual perspective we look at how humanity is handling its karma and what that karma is.

Here are some Saturn in Scorpio events from these periods:

1923-1926: British submarine HMS L24 sinks after accidental collision; Lenin dies and Stalin begins eliminating his rivals on the rise to power; dock strikes in US harbours; first radio broadcast by a President (Coolidge); NBC radio network opens; Islamic Caliphate is abolished after 14 centuries; Castle Gate mine disaster in Utah claims 172 miners; the first death by gassing in capital punishment; Adolf Hitler jailed, writes and publishes Mein Kampf; fascists sweep to power in Italy; J. Edgar Hoover appointed head of FBI; Mercedes-Benz formed; Harry Mathews claims to have invented a ‘death-ray’ but fails to offer proof while offering it all over the world; ‘Indian Citizenship Act’ makes all tribal peoples citizens of the US; Hanapepe Massacre (Hawaii); death of Franz Kafka; sudden and shocking death of sex symbol Rudolph Valentino; Harry Houdini dies of gangrene; Nobel prizes given for x-ray spectroscopy, the electrocardiogram, colloidal suspension, discoveries in the atomic nature of matter, tumour research and George Bernard Shaw; appearance of New Yorker magazine; deadliest tornado in US history (695 killed, over 2000 injured); Tennessee Governor prohibits teaching of evolution; Klu Klux Klan holds marches and becomes largest fraternal organisation in America with over 5 million estimated members; first television images transmitted; martial law declared in Britain due to coal strike; Mammoth Cave National park authorised by Congress; first woman to swim English Channel (Gertrude Ederle); Agatha Christie disappears; ‘Gorilla Killer’ (necrophiliac serial killer in San Francisco) caught.

1953 – 1956: McCarthyism; First TV broadcast in SE Asia; colour TV approved in US and the first sets go on sale; The Lone Ranger radio program concludes after over 20 years; Cold War begins to set in; Korean Cold War begins; Playboy is launched by Hugh Hefner; Nixon visit to Iran sparks several days of riots and shooting; Tangiwai Disaster (New Zealand railway bridge collapses into river killing 151); ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech (push for a nuclear future by US President); dock strikes in England; Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb tests; first nuclear powered submarine (USS Nautilus) is launched; food rationing (begun in WW2) finally ends in Britain; worlds first atomic power station opens in Moscow; the first ‘Godzilla’ movie; mass vaccinations of children against polio begin; East German sovereignty is recognised by Russia; a Soviet spy ring in Australia is exposed; Boeing 707 is introduced; creation and first meeting of the Bilderberg Group; Nasser becomes Egyptian president; Alan Turing commits suicide; Rock and Roll music begins with Bill Haley; F5 tornado (the most powerful on the scale) hits Texas; a devastating tornado outbreak sequence in North America spanning three days and spawning 46 tornadoes, including an F5; Hurricane Hazel claims over 1,000 lives in Haiti; Nobel Prizes for Albert Schweizer, Ernest Hemingway, quantum chemistry research, quantum electrodynamics, wave function in quantum mechanics, oxytocin (a treatment used in child birth), vaccines and the oxidation enzyme.

1982 – 1985: First permanent artificial heart implanted; dioxin contamination in Missouri; Peoples Republic of China institutes its current constitution; first US execution by lethal injection; women protest against cruise missiles at Greenham Common by forming a human chain of obstruction; sinking of ‘Rainbow Warrior’; beginning of the Internet; Klaus Barbie arrested, charged with war crimes; first all-sky infrared surveillance from space; seatbelt use becomes mandatory in the UK; first flight of the Space Shuttles Challenger and Discovery; reactor shutdown from failed fuel rods at Kursk nuclear power plant; Live Aid; ‘Hitler Diaries’ published (later proved to be faked); comedian Tommy Cooper suffers a massive coronary on live television; British coal strikes; Soviet Union shoots down a Korean airliner killing 269 including a US congressman; Reagan announces GPS; Bhopal disaster; retrovirus nature of HIV first proposed; global nuclear war narrowly averted when a Soviet officer correctly identifies a false alarm; crack cocaine introduced; Maze prison escape (largest prison escape in British history); submarines reach a record submergence; Soyuz launch disaster; Neil Kinnock elected leader of UK Labour Party; unlicensed fireworks factory explosion in Tennessee inflicts damage in 5 mile radius and kills 12; US invades Grenada; Michael Jacksons ‘Thriller’; ‘Ghostbusters’; the Night Stalker serial killer; wreck of Titanic located; discovery of the ozone hole; Nobel Prizes given for genetics in maize, theoretical modelling for black holes and stars, William Golding, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, the discovery of the W and Z boson particles (considered two of the most fundamental particles of matter) at CERN, peptide synthesis, antibodies, analysis of crystal structures using x-rays and the influence of cholesterol in coronary heart disease.

2012 – 2015: Edward Snowden disclosures; death of Nelson Mandela; chaos and civil war in Egypt and North Africa; widespread legalisation of same sex marriage in the US; upheaval in Ukraine; turmoil in Greece; first Scottish Independence referendum; Higgs-Boson particle observed at CERN; skydiver becomes first person to break sound barrier without machines; North Korea conducts nuclear tests; celestial object explodes over Chelyabinsk; an ear is created from a 3D printer; Pope Benedict resigns; first creation of human embryonic stem cells by cloning; Syrian Civil War chemical attacks; Ebola virus outbreak begins in West Africa; Belgium becomes first country to legalise euthanasia for patients with a terminal illness of any age; Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappears over Thailand; Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shot down over Ukraine; Korean ferry capsizes and sinks killing many young people; severe sanctions against Russia are applied; Israel launches an assault on Gaza including a ground invasion; IPCC finalises its report on climate change – “severe, pervasive and irreversible” damage from CO2 emissions; Rosetta lands on a comet – the first time this has been achieved; New Horizons reveals Pluto; Iranian nuclear energy agreements reached; rise of ISIL leads to military response from many countries; liquid water found on Mars; most intense hurricane ever recorded in the west (Patricia); COP 21 summit agrees on climate change pact; Nobel Prizes awarded for modelling complex chemical systems, the Higgs mechanism, transportation within cells, energy saving bright light and for memory and cognition research in neuroscience.

Some of the themes we see here are clear demonstrations of Saturn in Scorpios essential meaning, others bear only a passing resemblance until considered more deeply. This is because in selecting these happenings I gave primary consideration to the emotional impact they had. When Tommy Cooper died on national TV, it was on a Sunday night light entertainment show watched by millions of people, and there was a strange moment when he seemed to be making a joke, but then he grabbed the curtain and fell back, his normally funny face contorted in agony. It had a huge emotional impact in the UK at the time as he was a massively popular and widely loved national treasure. Saturn in Scorpio hurts us in the soft, precious parts. We see it bringing us up as close as we can get to the brink of nuclear obliteration without tipping over, almost as if it is deeply and insightfully intelligent and is trying to show us where we are headed if we don’t wise up . Because it is. It also leads to pressure situations of the most extreme and intense kind (Syria, for goodness sake) and to transformations of our understanding of matter – it is teaching us about the truth hidden under the veneer, the bloodstains hidden under the rug, the building blocks of physical reality that underpin its manifestations, the body buried in the cement in the back garden, the hurt and the shame we feel at what we have done as well as the truth hidden from normal sight. It is brimming with ancient secrets, an ancient friend of the darkness in our soul – its confessor.

People break through barriers when Saturn is in Scorpio – speed records (for running, falling, swimming) are frequently broken through this pattern. This is because ancient powers lurk beneath the surface of this Saturn, powers that grant great endurance, strength of will, determination and good planning. As was visible in Uranus in Scorpio we also see themes connected with surveillance technology and the mass media being developed and utilized by the authorities. Nuclear power sources, doomed ships, destructive winds, methods of execution and blockages at docks and in coal mining also show up. It is generally not a good time to be at sea for any reason. With Playboy, Valentino, HIV, the Gorilla Killer and developments in childbirth we also see events connected with the sexual organs. There also appears to be a correlation with coronary disease.

The most recent passage of Saturn through Scorpio saw the emergence of the Edward Snowden material containing proof of the extensive spying operations of world governments on its citizens, also a cauldron of horrors in Syria (where Saturn was sitting on the Scorpio ascendant of the Ba’ath party chart), long standing paedophilia and sex abuse within the Church came to light and under pressure at last, notable drug and sex scandals involving people in positions of power made the headlines (Prince Andrew, Rob Ford, etc.), a series of horrendous and still mysterious flight disasters occurred, the Mediterranean became known as the ‘Sea of Death’ after countless numbers of us died trying to cross it fleeing death and worse in northern Africa, and it even delivered the first breathtaking images of Pluto – and there were many other stories resonant with Saturn in Scorpio, most of which are tragedies. This is not an indication that Saturn in Scorpio is evil; it is an indication that our relationship to Saturn in Scorpio is manifesting its darker potential and needs attention. The Saturn in Scorpio theme is one in which the cohort is inescapably confronted with darkness and must look long and hard upon its own horrors.

Should you belong to one of these groups, being born in these periods, the Saturn in Scorpio tribes immediately before and ahead of you will hold the greatest significance in terms of shared struggle and hard won wisdom through experience. The others go further beyond your reach and the generation gap then becomes a property of Chiron, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. However, the cohort ahead of you connects with the cohort ahead of it, forming a chain along which the connection can still flow providing that there is a link in the chain. This is part of the wisdom of the elders and how it is ‘passed down’ through time.

When Saturn is in any other Water sign (Cancer or Pisces) you are each given greater support in working towards life goals, building, persisting, handling responsibility or any other Saturn issue; when Saturn is in any Stable sign (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius) there are challenges thrown down and your Saturn tribe runs a collective gauntlet, regardless of age. This applies to interaction with other generations and those signs too. Age and character merely shape the form of these initiations, not their timing for the tribe or the essential nature. When you combine efforts with other people born into the same tribe of Saturn at such times you can make great progress in almost any area of life but especially in Scorpio directions if you are prepared to work hard together. Remember this because it is extremely powerful magic once known only by the eldest and wisest amongst us but now being made available to all so that we can gather again as a people to face collective trials.

Astrologically, people who are a significant degree older, having reached a completely different landmark of life than you, influences who are more serious, objects of fear, limiting or limited, authoritarian, more experienced or more highly regarded are ruled by Saturn and frequently reflect the projections of our own fears or limitations. Saturn is the final authority in any domain. Thus it is often experienced when we are children as our perspective of much older people, as our grandparents and those with the greatest and most serious experience and governance or authority especially, but is also traditionally personified in miners, beggars, crooks, undertakers, farmers, members of religious or cultural sects, people who work with leather, tanning and undertakers. Anciently Saturn is the king or ruling monarch. Today we can also add the influence of the prime minister or president, governing authorities and dominant corporations. Both Jupiter and Saturn can also be regarded to signify for our teachers or authorities, albeit different types of teacher and authority with different methods – the carrot, and the stick.

Through concentrating our attention into a narrow area – by establishing and enforcing certain limits and rules – Saturn identifies, delineates and crystallises our path to understanding the meaning of our physical experiences. It is the instruction tool and guiding rule of the Greater Self. It is, despite Jupiter’s size, the most spectacular looking planet in the solar system. Its presence immediately evokes an awareness of the delicate and complex balance of the sacred harmony of life – to behold Saturn is like gazing on the crown jewels of the solar system, at least in terms of planets. It is just a titanic, awe inspiring, epically orchestrated beauty.

Yet here on distant but neighboring Earth, Saturn appears as only a yellowish-white dot in the night sky, if at all. His breathtaking spectacle of complexly interacting moons throwing elliptical and arcing shadows onto hoops of spiralling dust sparkling like cosmic diamonds in a mine is utterly lost to our sight. It’s in the dark. We do not hear the music he makes in our souls. That melody tells us that in order to learn and grow we must at times make mistakes and suffer setbacks, accept our responsibility for our own errors and face our fears and limitations. We need to fail because in doing so we discover more about ourselves – much more indelibly than we do from the fortunes and successes of Jupiter – and yet when encountering our own failings we often fail again by failing to learn from or even accept our flaws. We go about in denial and fear, rejecting our weakness and insignificance. We blame something else and complain like Scrooge.

We get badly trapped in karmic cycles this way, in particular when we have intensely passionate feelings while we die and shuffle off to another existence. Sometimes such feelings become strictures or rules that bind us to an emotional pattern, a pattern that is often a mysterious, pressing, crushing weight on the soul that we must work through. This is sometimes what members of this tribe have to deal with – the unfinished business of something they felt as they died. Hence, it does not mean that these individuals will die a horrible death, it often instead means that they already have. One brief look at any time in history, but especially the Saturn in Scorpio times, will show that horrible deaths come all the time, and not just to individuals, but to large groups of people. We also know that many people give in to despair and commit suicide. Sometimes suicide or even killing somebody in pain is the only option that does not bring prolonged suffering, the only merciful option. A suicide or mercy killing can leave a mark like this on a soul even when it is not our own death. Saturn in Scorpio is a branding that marks the soul with its brush against these horrors.

The fearsome reputation of Saturn in this sign stems from the hidden threats of Scorpio and from this unfinished emotionally bottled-up business and its combination with a simple fact – that whatever we do not deal with fully must be re-presented to us in a more binding form, so that we will not choose to escape from it again but will instead work through whatever we did not work through. For the Saturn in Scorpio tribe, then, there is some kind of emotional bottleneck to go through as the soul squeezes its way out of entanglements with how it used to feel, a wrenching process that is tainted by fear and can take many years to pull off but which if ignored just causes the problems to intensify to unbearable levels until the pressure explodes and puts yawning cracks through our lives. It has to be faced. The darkness has to be confronted. But this tribe will not rush, for they believe in thorough preparation when going against the unknown. This is a narrow pathway to tread, and it crumbles into a bottomless pit. Those who fall from this path have a long way down to go before they hit the bottom. They can reach into the very pit of despair and drown themselves in a world of darkness. Yet equally, they have the potential to banish fear with their authority over it, to be a sober head when the reaper brushes past and to attain a maturity of occult mastery that few have the discipline for.

In terms of the zodiac, Saturn generally needs as much heat and light as he can get – when he is cold, he is very, very cold, icy, mean spirited and pessimistic and does not know when things are sufficient. In Scorpio, then, he is not in any sign that really helps him – it is icy cold Water, and if the chart itself is nocturnal making this Water even colder, and on top of this he is fully immersed in this cold environment by being above the horizon in the night sky, then he becomes very problematic and indicative of very solid and stubborn karma.  He is then totally surrounded by Magnetic Fluid which hardens him emotionally and so he becomes very difficult to deal with. Such a Saturn tends to disappoint itself by continually moving the goal posts or setting the bar impossibly high. You might see this in the chart of someone who had been murdered, or raped, or wrongly executed, more rarely in people who had done these things, and (in my view) most commonly of all in people whose lives were just steeped in death, betrayal or tragedy. Many of them have no conscious memory of this but their behaviour is somber, stoic and often suspicious. Such a cold Saturn puts one firmly in mind of tenacity and persistence but also the punishing and often self defeating intensity and potential toxicity of Scorpio turning in on itself. A frozen Saturn in Scorpio is suffering from some kind of deep gloom, a fear of intimate contact or betrayal. He can be crippled by vulnerabilities and anxieties over which he feels he has no control and spends a great deal of time being chary and withholding trust, and seeing deep into darkness which means the gloomier realities are always expected.

Sect is really a form of elevated accidental dignity. A Saturn in Scorpio with no ‘warming’ can be helped out of some of the difficulties if its essential dignity is good. In terms of essential dignity, in Scorpio he finds a small degree in the last part of the sign, from 24° to the end. These are his terms or bounds and if he lands within them it changes things. We can imagine the terms or bounds of a planet are like a property it owns in another land – the territory around it may be not at all familiar, but within this home it is familiar and has useful assets nearby that it can use, which means it will not feel that it has to bend or break the rules to make things happen and will tend to follow at least some of the ‘rulebook’ as far as societies expectations are concerned. Saturn in its own terms in Scorpio  will have basically good relations with older people and authority figures because of this. Without this support, he will tend to be antagonistic towards the rules of society in some form. Things will only take shape exceedingly slowly and with continued effort with this Saturn. That is always true with him but we must underscore it for a very cold Saturn. When he is extremely ‘cold’, surrounded by a dense Magnetic Fluid, he sees no limits and finds it hard to establish boundaries. He needs to set reachable goals or learn how to focus on one goal at a time without changing it. The terms help him to do this.

In general, the tribe may suffer other problems from this cold like a deep gloom, fears of intimacy or betrayal, isolationist pessimism , problems with strict authorities, difficulty with trusting, a sense of being chronically blocked or a challenging physical, astral or mental limitation. Things will be slow to change even for Saturn. This is an obstinate and stubborn Saturn that will be extremely difficult to budge, but the moment when things do change will release a titanic amount of transformative energy all at once. The tribe must chip away at the block of stone until the mystery of its Michelangelo is revealed.

With Saturn in Scorpio, the generational fears run deep and touch on passionate feelings which the tribe resist making any changes to – this tribe is definite about what it feels and resistant to change that stance, they are invested in what they feel for the long term. They grapple with the fear of undoing and oblivion, of violent final death, the intense emotive allure of sex and all we consider to be taboo, forbidden and dark. It is the fear that all our passions, all our deep feelings and the entire infinite majestic ocean of human emotion amounts to nothing in the end. It is the fear that deep down we are all wretches cast adrift upon a sea of madness. It is the nihilistic fear of surrender to the dark, violent and unknown forces that are sensed and deeply felt to be out there and inside. The clans dark or more overpowering passions are repressed and seek attention from within the depths of the emotional being to which they have exiled them, out of a desire to control them. Some may have perhaps misused occult or emotional power over others in previous lives and are now scared of even owning it or have certain bindings placed upon it by themselves. Much more commonly, superstition has played a role in scapegoating them for having taboo viewpoints. Oppressive astral forces may have been used against them (extreme poverty, crippling persecution, etc) and left the soul insular, collapsed in on itself and filled with deep sorrows, incapable of trust. Consequently, the tribe seek to preserve themselves through controlling these powerful passions, but they simply increase their concentration of energy when they suppress them. They can block intimacy with others and create failure through defending their emotional privacy too rigidly, refusing to even try and change the way they feel and not finding it easy to admit others into their innermost sanctum, even if it tortures them to be isolated. They can grow frightened to open up and truly surrender to the astral and acknowledge its deeper emotions, thus freezing the flow of astral energy. They can end up feeling completely crushed by their own emotional ice, by rigidly holding onto feelings and not admitting to having them. Emotional discipline falls to chronic denial.

With Saturn here individuals need to surrender to a hidden or blocked emotional higher power to escape the gravity of their own passions. It will not be easy for them to do so at times, but doing so will free them from the need to control everything through fear of securities and insurances collapsing, liberating the tribe to be more spontaneously giving of its feelings and open and flexible in loving other people.

Saturn in Scorpio demands intense transmutations of ancient emotional energies take place so that the self can be free to experience the deeper meaning behind its experiences. It is the process of emotional strengthening through becoming less rigid and inflexible emotionally so that true alchemy of our fears and limitations can occur. Consequently it is a relatively painful and often relatively slow level of initiation for the astral body, but it leads to being able to concentrate on the astral with intense focus, so that precise and surgical eliminations of certain old feelings can occur, and ultimately so that one can transform the most grievous levels of emotional suffering and pain in whatever form they take, especially that of death.

Materially the tribe can display an intense commitment to business enterprises and enjoys structuring and organising its shared resources or time, but it must overcome the temptation to secretly control and manipulate or use hidden agendas because it has a love of power and probably of wealth that it is frequently in denial over. This clan is resourceful in the truest sense of being able to draw upon hidden reserves of silent power which lie frozen beneath the encrusted surface it has placed around them, and in being able to recycle things so that they are useful again. This can make the clan as a whole either very stubborn or very persistent.

In encountering defeat the response of Saturn in Scorpio is often in plotting, biding its time, scheming or waiting for its enemies to show their weaknesses before it shows them its own, and then striking with a cold, agonising poison that lingers long in the soul of its victim. The coldness of Saturn in Scorpio can become cruel, manipulative, emotionally violent and intractable but deny all these things and blame others for making it this way. Beneath all this there are often self destructive feelings that have concreted over many lifetimes. Saturn in Scorpio denies itself emotionally, is capable of great denial and holding back the full force of its feelings, essentially a behaviour it has learned from being afraid of how overpowering and destructive they can become.

This tribe can become very determined and disciplined when the positive dimension of this Saturn emerges – it is really potentially a merit in terms of cultivating persistence and a hard skin needed to fend off fatal blows – in time and with maturity it finds within it a deep resource of emotional power and it resists being controlled by its limitations and instead tries to undermine them through a deeply penetrating perception of their secrets. For anyone interested in the occult it is a sign that, once any desire for power and control through magic is transformed and the emotional nature has become more flexible, a powerful understanding of the emotional and astral realms is available. However, actions in the past may have placed restrictions on progress that require them to patiently work through.

Aside from the purely emotional influence of this placement of Saturn and its connection with occult activities, it also shows itself in similar ways in our sexuality. Here there can be shyness or inadequacy problems because of our emotional inhibitions, for example, or because we have inappropriately expressed our sexual power in the past. An authority may have limited or otherwise shaped our sexual expression. Ultimately, Saturn in Scorpio is calling for a major restructuring of our use of and fundamental approach to our sexual power. There can be karmic consequences resulting from sexual expression, such as the birth of children or difficulty in conceiving children, challenges which force you to become more responsible or to grow up or which confront you with your own heavy, dark feelings. Drug use, chemical dependency, drought/flooding and emotional manipulation by authorities can all become involved here. Problems with sexual arousal can also play a part, and will often be rooted in our emotional pressure and repression. Here it is necessary to let go of both control and the underlying need for power.

The attitude to death can go through similar transformations. Individuals with Saturn in Scorpio can be drawn to understand the reality of death – Peter Sellers for example consulted mediums and had some near death encounters of his own following massive heart attacks – and so Saturn in Scorpio can signify that certain experiences with the death of people around us or even ourselves – personal near death experiences in which we draw close to losing our hold on the world, and ultimately our own actual death when it happens – will all serve to bring about the transformation of astral experience that this tribe came here to find. Symbolic death also plays a role here – our long term path in life may suddenly come to a symbolic dead end, forcing us to begin it all over again. Deeper and more intensely transformative dimensions of feeling will become accessible to these individuals as time goes by through these experiences, and here the influence of the Greater realm is at work, moving the emotional awareness through a phoenix like transformation towards the realisation of its immortality. Trust will be all important if these people are not to stumble or give up. Gloom and doom are clouds that follow the clan on this journey into the underworld but they must not wear them like permanent adornments or they will crush the spirit out of the tribe. Instead these things must be seen as a navigation instrument like a compass that detects occulted significance lurking in the shadows. Sorrowful, depressive, suicidal feelings must be explored and transformed into an appreciation of astral realities that brings greater meaning to feelings, not less. They cannot be hand waved away.

It may have taken many lifetimes already or involve many lifetimes ahead of them, Saturn is that patient, but eventually a natural ending to this passage will come in a realisation of the immortality of being. This realisation of immortality, when it comes, is the most transformative experience that this Saturn can provide, because beyond it there is rarely any further need for his lessons and his influence then becomes a further building upon this realisation. The realisation of our own immortality must take place at the emotional level, in the astral realm, to initiate this process. Then, when we truly realise and thus feel that there is no more to fear in death, in one fell swoop all the losses we have felt deeply in our heart, all the souls we have lost along the way, all the grief and death and emotional agony our soul has endured for so long, the great burden represented by Saturn in Scorpio, all of it will be detonated into ecstasy and there will no longer be any reason to fear that anyone is alone or that we are emotionally ‘misunderstood’, nor any reason to hold back how we feel to hoard its power. This will occur to all beings following their death, but the point with Saturn in Scorpio is really to feel and know it before then. And you must really feel it – with every fibre of your being – in order to know it.

Saturn in Scorpio essentially promises a completely redefined and restructured emotional-astral experience in life which makes us feel more secure and deeply fulfilled, if we are prepared to work at building it. But this emerges only after a transmutation is accomplished through honestly facing up to the true power of our feelings and emotions and the fears and desires entwined about them, whatever they are, and pushing deeper and deeper into what we are so afraid of in opening up emotionally to the world. The tribe can be torn between the desire to cling to the old, the safe and familiar feelings, and the deeper need to be reborn into an ecstatic, passionate, virgin realm of them. Even though it can deny looking deeply at them out of shame and fear of being overwhelmed, it is intimately, even painfully aware of its own weaknesses, failings, and darker emotions but it hides them all so well, even from itself (do not be fooled by an exterior barrier representing itself as self knowledge – if you are of this tribe you most pierce it again and again), and are therefore at times suspect of the same in others. It is necessary for them to understand that what they feel – the depths of feeling which they are capable of diving into, even drowning in – holds nothing to fear so long as they are committed to transforming what they find. They may have to be pulled under by the powerful currents a few times before they begin to realise this, however.

In essence this generation is kicking against emotional repression and deep mortal fears. It will often face a specific threat of annihilation or destruction of the natural world. It is a generation in some kind of astral bondage, tied up tight by something they feel inside which cannot be escaped and must be dealt with. It can show a generation dealing with trauma and may therefore indicate a group of individuals who experienced a horror or extreme suffering together that they are attempting to bring karmic balance to. Its greatest strength is its ability to endure and its perception of the stark realities of existence. Those who choose the occult path offered to this generation must be patient with their astral development and carefully follow the instructions handed down to them by their traditions. Those who take the material path offered to this generation must resist hoarding and fearful or intimidating uses of their financial power. Recycling and resourcefulness are keywords that help to build something up over time into something titanic.

For this tribe is a supremely powerful one, empowered with the potency to imprint its will upon astral reality, establishing a path for the future of humanity that is both transformative and practical. There are potent figures in this tribe, people with extreme power and authority, as well as those who seek to be free from it. The darkness is always wrapped closely around them, and they need light and love to be encouraged to open up and let the rest of us in, but when this happens the mystery is that they intensify our inner light. The best of them can set us free from darkness only because they understand it. The pain of it is in their songs, their music, their words, their deeds and their faces. They show us how to remain dignified in the face of it, and ultimately how to transcend it.

And that, my friends, is precisely what we need.

Saturn is in Scorpio in the charts of Amelia Earhart, Benny Hill, Annie Lennox, David Copperfield (the illusionist), Erik Satie, Jimmy Carter, Hugh Hefner, J. Edgar Hoover, Kevin Costner, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Pol Pot, Marlon Brando, Oprah Winfrey, Whoopie Goldberg, Jerry Seinfeld, Matt Groening, John Travolta, Jackie Chan, Peter Sellers, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Paul Newman, Elvis Costello, Rock Hudson, Scarlett Johansson, Prince Harry and Queen Elizabeth II of England.

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