Spiritual Temperature Check #2: Saturn
In Q1 the girls were obsessed with the daddy planet.
Saturn. via NASA/JPL/ASI/University of Arizona/University of Leicester.
i. Saturn is daddy with a difference. Saturn is a big round daddy with rings to keep you at a safe, boundaried distance. He knows about restrictions, structure and responsibility. He represents the father. This is the Saturn the entry-level astrology girls are interested in right now. Within a few weeks of each other this year, Ariana Grande, SZA and Kacey Musgraves released songs about him. Women’s lifestyle sites and newspapers responded by posting about what Saturn means, what he can do to a girl. Whether you believe in cosmic weather or not, what these women are saying is that they got their lessons handed to them by dad.
ii. For thousands of years, Saturn was thought to be the final planet in our solar system. It was right out there on the edges of our consciousness. Must have seemed pretty threatening; holding the line between what is known and what is unknown.
iii. A women’s website, probably: “Saturn takes thirty years to orbit the sun and a ‘Saturn Return’ is when the planet has returned to the sign it was in when you were born. If, like Ariana Grande, you were born with Saturn in Pisces (between May 1993 and April 1996), you’re experiencing your first Saturn Return right now. Buckle up!”
iv. Go on YouTube and listen to a NASA recording of Saturn’s rings. Each ring, which is actually just floating ice, dust and rocks from busted comets and—not at all disturbing—“shattered moons”, works with the other rings to make ambient music for Silicon Valley bros to sleep to. A Darth Vader noise from hell. Like if you played it backwards, you’d hear all of Saturn’s unhuman inhabitants screaming, “Something is coming, we don’t know what, but something is coming.”
v. In 2000, No Doubt released Return of Saturn, their fourth studio album. On the cover art, a pink-haired Gwen Stefani is pictured in front of a telescope in a childhood bedroom with the rest of the band behind her. Behind her is a wedding cake. Painted on the wall are Saturn’s rings. This album—complete with its misery, anxiety, jealousy and hand-wringing about wanting to get married and be a mother—essentially describes puberty part 2. As she put it, it’s her soon-to-turn-30 “coming-of-age album”. There were technically earlier Saturn Return albums, made by people navigating theirs and writing about these typical Saturnian themes, but this is the first widely-released album to reference the concept. I like that it came at the very beginning of this millennium as a landmark moment for pop astrology. It laid the groundwork for the Saturn Return albums and songs that came later by being a messy time capsule of change, discomfort and grappling with an unknown adult future.
vi. When I was in the trenches of my Saturn Return years, I printed out Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” on my home printer and pinned it to my notice board so I could look at it every day while I worked. It’s one of Goya’s “Black Paintings” that he painted directly onto the walls in his house, while deranged from a mystery illness, sometime between 1820 and 1823. This picture—Saturn looking like the BFG, ripping into human flesh, the sheer horror of being at an afters too long in his eyes—was in his dining room. Real appetising stimulus. That’s what astrology tells us Saturn is like; it comes along to chow down on your younger self, all the while evoking the mantra of Time As Great Devourer Of All Things. Unlike this painting, the myths about Saturn usually involve him swallowing his children and then vomiting them up alive for round two.
Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”
vii. An example list of the things that can happen to you during the 2.5 years of your Saturn Return: A nervous breakdown. Moving in with your dad for six months. Family issues revealing more of your psychology to you than ten years of therapy. A break-up that needs to happen. A significant romantic relationship that illuminates more of your objectively unhelpful inner workings (that has to end too). Getting a degree and learning how to drive. Leaving the job that defined your 20s. Half your best friends moving away to other places. Moving into a place of your own. Getting your “dream job” and losing your “dream job”. Acquaintances telling you that you seem quite chaotic. Lots of wins, lots of losses. There was also a physically violent incident on the day the transit was most exact. That coincidence I can’t explain or make sense of.
viii. We’re talking about a daddy here and there’s nothing that daddys love more than to reward well-behaved girls. Someone I know is currently having her Saturn Return and as far as I can tell she’s the happiest she’s ever been, travelling the world for a year with her partner, someone she’s planning a family with. She’s left her old career behind and figuring out her business plan. Gold star from the round guy himself and a graduation into adult life. But then again, she’s got another couple of years of it. Anything could happen.
ix. For the same reasons that No Doubt’s Return of Saturn is a successful Saturn Return album, the heavy-handed conceptual work going on in Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine doesn’t sit well. The former says what it’s about on the tin and proceeds to make a catchy, experimental pop-rock album about questioning everything you know to be true and the feeling of being pulled through the eye of a needle; of craving stability amid chaos. It took two years to write and record the album and Stefani started it during her Saturn Return. On Grande’s album, the fact that she’s living through her Saturn Return is announced with its own interlude. It’s just a recording of an astrologer called Diana Garland explaining what the transit means and saying, “Wake up! It’s time for you to get real about life and sort out who you really are!” The lyrics on other songs seek to defend her choices and sense of self. Making art or criticism that tries to take any kind of final stance on yourself while you’re in extreme motion rarely works. Neither does presenting symbols and expecting them to do all the work for you.
x. The Goya scholar Fred Licht argued that naming the Black Paintings, which includes Saturn Devouring His Son, was an attempt to impose rationale on pictures which force the viewer to consider chaos and nothingness—a core theme of the series. A Saturn Return can feel like chaos and occasionally meaningless chaos.
xi. Adele—a woman who has Saturn tattooed on her body to mark her survival through the transit—wrote her Saturn Return album, 30, after she’d been through it. Along with her, Hayley Williams, Florence Welch and the female artists I’ve mentioned are making pop-leaning music that speaks directly to women of a similar age about this Saturn Return experience. It’s not trying to be relatable to anyone younger. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Adele even said, “If everyone’s making music for the TikTok, who’s making music for my generation, for my peers? I’ll do that job gladly. I’d rather cater to people that are on my level in terms of the time we’ve spent on Earth.” For artistic people there is some wisdom gained when you’ve lived through this transit that makes you want to help others who come behind you.
Saturn and Jupiter, 1496, German. via Wellcome Images.
xii. An incomplete list of the reasons people dismiss the idea of the Saturn Return, which extends to astrology more generally: total belief in individualism (my winnings and failings are mine alone, everything that happens to me is unique to me) over collectivism (I could be going through a familiar rite of passage with others); a lack of reverence for Mystery; a collective denial that we are creatures on a planet whose natural world, along with its famed satellite (the moon), has a noted and studied impact on our physiology and behaviour; star-sign astrology and the related Instagram accounts are annoying and smug; they’re a Taurus or a male Cancer; astrology seems anti-intellectual; there is a lot of pseudoscience out there that has no merit and merely causes harm—and astrology is rejected by the scientific community.
xiii. People in Western culture don’t have rites of passage outside of Sweet 16 parties and traditional hetero-markers of success like marriage and birthing a kid. It doesn’t make being alive feel very meaningful. Whatever we call this Saturn Return era, if so much routinely happens for a person between the ages of 27 and 31, why wouldn’t we want stories that help make meaning around that?
xiv. Astrology is not scientific but it is philosophical, psychological and often about free-association, the memeable version of a Rorschach test. It deals in rituals and symbology related to the human experience—you have the freedom to find what works for you and ditch the rest. In Surviving Saturn’s Return, the two female authors write that astrology does not eliminate the power of free will but “lays out the possibilities so that you can have a road map instead of mindlessly refusing to ask for directions.”
xv. Life didn’t get better or easier after my Saturn Return, it just got more real. Time sped up, fantasy started to dissolve away. Every decision and its pay-off became more costly to my sanity, sense of self and general wellbeing. My personal problems became apparent during that Saturnian period but they didn’t go away. They made themselves clear to me so I can spend the rest of my life figuring them out, I think. Welcome to adulthood, an era where daddy may not be around anymore but his presence is ever-felt, just on the reaches of your consciousness.
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If you wanted to read some other work I’ve done recently, I did a quick interview with Mannequin Pussy for a Kerrang! cover, I wrote a feature for the Observer New Review on how 30 years after Kurt Cobain’s death, Gen Z musicians are discovering Nirvana (one of the musicians I interviewed for this was Samia, whose lyrics and vocals I really enjoy) and I have an essay/travel feature in the latest issue (30) of Hunger magazine. It’s about twin towns and sister cities. I travelled to my hometown’s twin town in Germany to see if there was any obvious connection between them. It was a freaky weekend away at the very least.