saturn: steward of thresholds

To the reader who finds themselves here, at the beginning of this blog—thank you.

The Third Eve opens with Saturn, which may seem an unusual starting point. A distant planet. A mythic father who devours. A figure etched with themes of time and restraint, limitations and consequences, and overarching themes of boundaries, discipline, and inevitability—all these are symbols of Saturn. Saturn, I’ve found, is often where we are forced to begin—at the boundary, at the fracture, at the limit of what the self can hold.

My early training was in literary fiction and creative nonfiction, though I turned to journalism—not for a lack of love of literature, but out of fear. A writing mentor once told me that to write with depth, I would have to bleed onto the page. I wasn’t ready. I learned instead to shape facts, not feelings.

For many years, this served me well. I built a career on clarity, structure, and intellectual precision, eventually earning advanced degrees in psychology and, perhaps ironically, specializing in analytical (or depth) psychology. What a curious contradiction: to work daily with the depths of the human psyche—in both clinical practice and personal analysis—while resisting the expression of that same depth in my own writing. But the psyche is patient. It waits.

And then my daughter died.

grief collapses boundaries

Grief collapsed the boundaries I had so carefully maintained. It refused containment. It demanded something raw and unguarded. I began to write again—not to inform, but to survive. And slowly, what emerged was a different kind of language–one oriented not around answers but around meaning, soul, and the quiet architecture of becoming.

Looking back, it’s no wonder my mentor’s charge to “bleed on the page” left me paralyzed. I was nineteen. He didn’t tell me how to do it, only that I must. So, I turned instead to what I could control: the clean structure of journalism and nonfiction, the discipline of fact over feeling. I hadn’t yet found tone—the register that carries emotion as much as meaning, that doesn’t resolve too easily or rise just to reassure.

In the writing I was trained to do, tone was meant to be in a major key: balanced, bright, redemptive. To linger in ambiguity or sorrow was often seen as indulgent. But Saturn teaches otherwise. His lessons unfold slowly, through restraint, rigor, and the quiet ripening of what we’re not yet ready to say.

I write now at the intersection of psychology, myth, and lived experience. The Third Eve is an offering, a place where language reaches toward the ineffable, and meaning may emerge in the slow alchemy of reflection.

And so we begin with Saturn: the harbinger of endings, the steward of thresholds, and perhaps, the silent architect of what waits beyond.

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saturn: the silent architect

Lately, I’ve been pondering Saturn. Saturn the planet, yes–but also Saturn in mythology, in astrology, in the natal chart, in literature, and in analytical psychology.

The figure of Saturn returned to me most recently after a curious encounter: a natal chart reading offered by a self-described astro-theologian–a priest who reads astrological charts not as fortune-telling, but as symbolic mirrors of the soul. I had accompanied a friend on what I assumed would be a lark. Instead, I left both confounded and deeply stirred.

Through my training and studies in Jungian psychology, I knew that Carl Jung had explored astrology with the intent to disprove it—only to discover that astrological patterns often aligned with contemporary personality typologies and tests of martial compatibility. He came to view astrology not as prophetic, but as a symbolic system through which psyche may speak.

Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Or perhaps: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you more yourself.

_{^{the third eve}}

I was told that I have Saturn in the Twelfth House—quite possibly the most exiled placement a planet can occupy. The Twelfth is the house of asylums, institutions, prisons, dictators, saints. It’s the house of what is unconscious, hidden, or unspoken. Saturn, ever the taskmaster, shines its cold spotlight here on one’s limitations, compulsions, and secret griefs. Anxiety and depression find fertile ground. So do isolation, martyrdom, and megalomania.

This placement, the priest explained, often makes a person her own wicked stepmother—judge, jailer, and internal accuser. But it is also the placement of saints and mendicants, crucifixion and transfiguration. A house of extremes.

Naturally, I returned home and to my books. Was I, as I’d long suspected, born both warped and wonky? Was this psychic terrain a life sentence—or a path to redemption?

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saturn in mythology

More than a planet, Saturn is a symbol—a name given to a particular kind of psychological and spiritual force. Myth, as ever, gives us a way in.

In Roman mythology, Saturn was the god of agriculture and the harvest, a figure bound to cycles of growth and decline. Though often conflated with the Greek Chronos, god of time, Saturn carries his own lineage: son of the heavens (Uranus) and the earth (Gaia), he overthrew his father by castration, seizing power through violence. But no one escapes the harvest of their own deeds. A prophecy foretold that Saturn, too, would be overthrown by one of his children. To thwart fate, he devoured each child at birth.¹

Goya’s haunting painting—Saturn Devouring His Son—captures this archetype in its most grotesque form: the consuming father, the destructive force of unchecked authority and fear.²

But fate, as myth teaches, has its own cunning. Saturn’s wife tricked him after the birth of their youngest, hiding the child (Jupiter) and swaddling a stone in his place. The boy grew in secret, and, as foretold, returned to overthrow his father—ushering in a new era of expansion, justice, and divine order.

Saturn thus becomes a double symbol: the destroyer and the necessary precursor to renewal. He is both prison and threshold.

In astrological lore, Saturn in the Twelfth House has an unsettling reputation. It’s associated with isolation, repression, confinement–the hidden places of the psyche. History offers no shortage of examples on the shadow side: figures like Vladimir Putin, Ted Bundy, Donald Trump, the Unabomber, O. J. Simpson, and Lyle Menendez all had Saturn in this position.

Yet it is not a placement of doom. It is a crucible. Barack Obama, Beyoncé, George Washington, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Thatcher, and Steve Martin also share this chart signature. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet—a bit of Obama’s grace, a flash of Woolf’s insight, or, if the stars allow, the banjo skills of Steve Martin.

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the symbols of saturn

Saturn, in its deepest symbolic sense, governs the habitual thoughts and patterns that sabotage us—the slow forces of self-undoing. In astrology, it is often called the Great Malefic, yet Saturn’s glyph resembles a throne, suggesting not ruin, but sovereignty. Perhaps it is the throne of a heavenly father—the kind who withholds before he blesses, who prunes the vine so that it might bear more fruit. Saturn is the god of restraint, yes, but also of eventual abundance.

Because of Saturn’s association with the harvest, he is sometimes imagined as an old man bearing a sickle—a figure that shades easily into the Grim Reaper. But the scythe is not only an instrument of death; it is also the tool of the reaper, the one who gathers what has ripened. In this sense, Saturn governs the arc of endings that make way for beginnings.

His is the energy of death and rebirth—the great alchemy of undoing that precedes transformation. I’m reminded of the words attributed to Jesus:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, by itself; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

John 12:24, New American Standard Bible

Saturn speaks this same paradox in astrological language. The life that is clung to must fall away, so that a truer self might emerge. This, too, is the root of the old proverb: Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or perhaps: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you more yourself.

I’ve always admired how psychoanalyst James Hillman reflects on Saturn’s role in the formation of the soul. He writes:

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that the curses, the frustrations, and the character faults visited on me by Saturn mean something completely different than what I thought when I was younger [ . . . ] It isn’t Saturn who curses us; we curse him. We make him into that poor, shunned, limping old God because we don’t understand his mode of blessing. What a curse it must be to keep giving gifts that are received as punishments. The faults and frustrations he visits on us are his way of keeping us true to our particular image. No way out.³

Hillman & Ventura, p. 69

The ancients attributed the last years of life to Saturn, and for good reason. Only with time, and the erosions Saturn brings, do we begin to see what we are—and what we are not—with less rebellion, and more reverence.

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the gifts of saturn

I continue to work at accepting, and even loving, the strange blessings of having Saturn in the Twelfth House. I don’t believe the stars dictate our fates, yet I remember that in scripture, it was the stars that led both shepherds and wise men to the Christ child. I approach such symbols with a question mark and a kind of holy awe.

My daughter’s illness and death were catastrophes that shattered any straightforward path and led me instead into the hinterlands of mourning, depth work, and psychoanalysis. I spent the better part of a decade in what Dante called the selva oscura—the “forest dark.”⁴

Though it once felt like the punishment of a cruel god, suffering has slowly revealed something essential about my nature: I am composed in a minor key–shaded, melancholic—but my sharps, though deemed accidentals, lift the tone. And that tone, it seems, was intentional all along.

I write now not to escape the weight of that tone, but to follow it—to see where it leads, what it echoes, and who else might be listening. The Third Eve is a companion to that journey, a place for those who wander not to escape meaning, but to seek it. And if Saturn is the steward of thresholds, then perhaps this is one of them—a place to pause, to reckon, and to begin again.

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endnotes

1. Bullfinch’s Mythology. Richard P. Martin. Ed. New York: Collins, 1991. ↩︎
2. Goya, Francisco. “Saturn Devouring His Son.” c. 1820-1823, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Featured image for “Malefic Saturn.” In the public domain. ↩︎
3. Hillman, James and Michael Ventura. We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. ↩︎
4. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise. The Inferno, Canto I. New York: The Union Library Association, 1935. ↩︎

resources

• “Archetypes: What Are They?” The Third Eve, 2008.
• Rossi, Saffron. Saturn in C. G. Jung’s Liber Primus: An Astrological Meditation, Saffron-Rossi. com. PDF.
• Purrington, M. “Carl Jung on Saturn Quotations.” Carl Jung Depth Psychology, 2021.
• Heidekolb. “On Soul, Solitude and Saturn.” Jungian Work, Nov 2009.

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featured art

Goya, “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons,” 1819-1823

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