Saturn Mythology

Cronus is the youngest of the Titans. Hesiod tells in the Theogony how he castrates his father Uranus with the sickle Gaia gives him, later swallows his own children, and is finally overthrown by Zeus and shut in Tartarus. In Hesiod's second account he rules as king of the golden age on the Isles of the Blessed. His name was wrongly matched with Chronos, the word for time, and the match has never gone away. Cronus in the Greek family tree →

Saturnus is the king god who fled from Iuppiter, took refuge in Latium, taught people agriculture and presided over the golden age. His temple in Rome housed the state treasury. At the Saturnalia, held from 17 to 23 December, slaves became masters for a week and everyone exchanged gifts. He began as a god of the sickle and the crop and was later identified with Cronus.

Ninurta is the son of Enlil. He is the god of war, farming and the plough, and he recovers the tablets of destiny from Anzu. In Babylonian astronomy the planet Saturn is called kayamanu, 'the steady one', is counted as the star of Ninurta and is also known as 'the sun of the night'. Berossus makes a different identification and equates Ea, the god who warns of the flood, with Cronus. Ninurta in the Mesopotamian family tree →

The Egyptians observed Saturn under the name 'Horus the Bull' (Hor-ka-pet). Its mythological counterparts are the earth god Geb and Osiris, the grain king who dies and rises again. Geb is the lord of the throne, of boundaries and of inheritance. Plutarch, in Isis and Osiris, equates Cronus with Geb. Geb in the Egyptian family tree →

Shani is the name of Saturn in Vedic astrology. He is the son of the sun god Surya, is described as lame and dark-skinned, and moves slowly. His gaze is held to be inauspicious and his justice cannot be escaped. His seven-and-a-half-year passage over the Moon is called Sade Sati, and it is still a feared period today. Saturday (Shanivara) is his day and blue sapphire is his stone.

In Indian mythology Yama, the king of the dead, carries Saturn's face of death and judgement. Saturday (Saturni dies) is the Sabbath in Judaism. The Sabbath is the seventh day of creation, when no work is done and a boundary is drawn around the rest of the week. Saturn works in the same way, setting limits and bringing things to a halt so that rest can follow.

In the myth the sickle of Cronus first cuts Uranus. In farming the same sickle reaps the crop, and in time it becomes the scythe of Death. When Cronus and Chronos, the word for time, merged in the Renaissance, the image of 'Father Time' was born, shown with an hourglass, a sickle and a long beard. In this image Saturn stands for the end of everything and for the time that ripening takes.

Saturn is the outermost of the seven classical planets, so it was taken to be the wall of the sky. In the body bone and skin belong to it. In society law and custom fall within its domain, and in the soul discipline and fear do the same. A boundary confines like a prison wall, but it also holds things up like a skeleton.

Jung gave this archetype the name senex. The senex is old, patient, bound by rules and speaks from experience. It is both the opposite and the complement of the puer, the archetype of youth. In the tarot the Hermit (IX) walks alone on the mountaintop with a lantern in his hand, and in that one figure he shows both the solitude and the wisdom of Saturn. Jung also found the senex and puer pair in the alchemical texts, where the old Saturn stands opposite a Mercurius who will not stay still.

In the doctrine of the four humours black bile, or melancholy, belongs to Saturn. It is counted cold and dry, and it weighs a person down and draws them into thought. Ficino calls scholars and philosophers the 'children of Saturn' and assigns melancholy to them. Dürer's engraving Melencolia I brings the symbols of this tradition together in a single image. In this tradition depression and depth are held to come from the same root.

Hesiod's golden race lives in the age of Cronus. These people know no care, they do not grow old, and the earth gives them its fruit of its own accord. Rome rebuilt this age for one week each year at the Saturnalia, when roles were reversed and gifts were given. This other face of Saturn holds a freedom beneath the law and a festival in the middle of winter.

Cronus fears the prophecy that he will be overthrown, so he swallows each child as it is born. Goya's painting 'Saturn Devouring His Son' shows this moment in full horror. In depth psychology the myth describes an authority that halts development and swallows whatever is new. Such an authority appears as the father who will not allow growth, or as a structure trapped in its own repetition.

In the tarot the World card shows the completion of a cycle through a figure dancing inside a wreath. The Golden Dawn assigns this card to Saturn. In Kabbalah Saturn's counterpart is Binah, the third sephira. Binah means 'Understanding' and is known as the great mother who gives form. In both of these correspondences Saturn marks the end of something and its arrival at wholeness at the same time. The tradition gives Saturn a second card as well, and the Hermit (IX) carries its solitude, its patience and its inward search. The World shows a cycle closing, while the Hermit shows the road walked through it.

Saturn's metal is lead. Lead is heavy, dark and poisonous, yet for the alchemist it is the raw material of the work. The great work begins with lead, in the stage of blackening called nigredo, and ends with gold. For this reason the alchemists said that there is no gold without Saturn. In the body the bones, spleen, teeth, right ear and skin belong to it. The black residue left at the end of the nigredo is called caput mortuum, the dead head, and the alchemists read it as the sign of rot and darkness. Rotting is not a loss here but the stage that has to stand before a new form.

In earthy Capricorn Saturn is like the goat climbing the mountain, and there its ambition, patience and power to build structure come to the fore. Saturn is also the traditional ruler of airy Aquarius, where the water-bearer speaks of society, rule and distance. Both are winter signs. In the season when the Sun is at its weakest, Saturn is at home.

Babylonian texts call Saturn 'the star of Shamash' and name it the sun of the night. In Hellenistic astrology Saturn is counted as the Sun's shadow and carries a cold light. Ptolemy calls it cold and dry because it is the planet farthest from the Sun. For him Saturn is the planet that the Sun's heat reaches least.

Jung gave the name Shadow to the parts of a person that are not accepted and are pushed down into the unconscious. Meeting the Shadow hurts, but for Jung there is no other road to becoming whole. Saturn marks exactly where a chart asks for that meeting, because nothing there comes easily. What Jung called the Self, the centre of wholeness, is not a prize waiting at the end of the process but the thing that orders it.

In the tarot the Devil (XV) is drawn as a figure with the horns and legs of a goat. That picture reached the Christian devil from the Greek god of the wild, Pan, since the horns and the goat legs are properly Pan's marks. The name Lucifer is Latin for 'light-bearer' and really belongs to the morning star, which is Venus. Its use for the devil comes from a late reading of Isaiah 14. Saturn keeps company with these figures because of its binding to matter, body and limit. Pan in the Greek family tree →

In the Greek line the throne always changes hands the same way. Uranus is overthrown by his son Cronus, and Cronus by his son Zeus. Hesiod tells the chain link by link in the Theogony. The hero's victory is therefore never a clean one, because what founds it is a crime against the father. Saturn shows the weight of that conflict in a chart, which is the price of settling accounts with authority. Uranus in the Greek family tree →

On the Sun page the hero answers the call, defeats the monster and comes back with the prize. Saturn shows what happens next in the same story. The winner takes the throne, wants to keep it, and forbids in himself the youth that would unseat him. Cronus is the young god who brings his father down with a sickle, and then the old king who swallows every child he fathers. They are the same figure. In classical reading Saturn marks the threshold where victory turns to hardness. The hero's return on the Sun page →

Pain, restriction, fear and anxiety are Saturn's territory. The classical sources call it the greater malefic for that reason, and Valens lists Saturn as the significator of deprivation, delay and grief. On the other hand, a person who meets a limit notices for the first time what they are actually choosing, because where every road is open there is no choosing. Read this way, Saturn becomes the condition of self-discovery and of free will as well.

Saturn's discipline is not a prohibition imposed from outside but a person's government of their own desire. Greek moral philosophy calls this enkrateia, self-command, and puts it at the base of virtue. Fasting, abstinence, solitude and ascetic practice are all assigned to Saturn in the astrological tradition. The monk and the hermit are counted among Saturn's people for the same reason.

Saturnus is the god of the crop and of farming in Rome, and the sickle is a harvest tool. The same planet also signifies ground that yields nothing, famine and long illness. In the Tetrabiblos Ptolemy counts Saturn cold and dry and connects its effect with chills, scarcity and illnesses that dry the body out. The tradition therefore gives the farmer, the miner and everyone who works the land to Saturn.

Modern astrology calls Saturn the lord of karma, because it shows what past action has made of the present. The guardian of the threshold is the figure who sets the test at the passage from one stage to the next, and the Saturn return is the best known example of such a threshold. In Rome the god of thresholds, doors and passages is Janus. Ovid writes in the Fasti that Janus was the king who received Saturnus in Latium. The two stand in one branch, since one measures the time and the other holds the door.

In the Etruscan pantheon Satre is the god who answers to the Roman Saturnus. His name appears on the Piacenza liver, a bronze model of a sheep's liver found in northern Italy in 1877. Its surface is divided into compartments and each compartment carries the name of a god. Etruscan priests read the liver of the sacrifice as a small map of the sky, and the region a mark fell in told them which god was speaking. In the north the matter is disputed. In the tradition of the planetary days Odin answers to Mercury, because the Latin Mercurii dies became Woden's day in the Germanic world and reached English as Wednesday. Saturday was never turned into a Germanic name and stayed Saturni dies. The reading that pairs Odin with Saturn belongs to later esoteric writing and rests on his old age, his single eye, his hanging on the tree and the price he pays for knowledge. Norse myth has no clean equivalent of Saturn. Odin in the Norse family tree →

Saturn is the planet of order, but order only means something beside chaos. Ovid opens the Metamorphoses with a universe that is a shapeless mass until boundaries are drawn and it falls into order. Saturn does the same work and puts what is scattered into a form. When that order hardens it turns into a prison of its own, which is why the tradition counts Saturn as structure and as the force that blocks.

In alchemy the prima materia is the formless raw matter the work begins from, and the texts often equate it with lead, which is to say with Saturn. In those same texts Mercurius is the principle that escapes, changes and transforms, while Saturn is the side that holds, weighs down and fixes. In Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung reads the pair as two ends of the psyche and gives the old figure the name senex. However dark the raw matter looks, the alchemist has nowhere else to begin.