In light of recent world events, and the personal turmoil that people are variously experiencing as well, I want to point out that Saturn and Chiron are still very tightly in square aspect, which can relate to ways in which the culture or structures we abide by are coming to a head in their brokenness. (Read more about this transit in the Saturn-Chiron archives.) Rather than reduce our current situation to this factor in the cosmic mirror, I want to deepen the imagery of this transit to hopefully illuminate some choices that we have at this time. When I think of Saturn and Chiron together, I think of a close dynamic at play between a gate and a key that opens the gate. If we already have a key or have inherited a key by past innovations and advances, we take for granted the ease through which we pass the gate, maybe even not aware that once a massive restriction was placed where we now operate freely.
Saturn relates to gravity, density, and time. It is maturity, oppression, gravitas. (As an archetype, we are capable of experiencing a range of manifestations including ones which we find enjoyable and ones we do not.) Chiron relates to what most people have heard as “the wounded healer”, but its glyph, we may note – is a key shape. Chiron relates to the way in which we offer medicine through having been through an initiatory experience ourselves. Chiron is an intermediary between the seen, visible world, and the transpersonal/beyond world. Chiron is the way that physical medicine is linked with spiritual medicine – like a healing balm made by a friend feeling more magical than one you bought at the store, or food cooked by a friend when you’re feeling heartache feeling more medicinal than soup from a can. (Not to say magic can’t be infused into the other items or that material doesn’t contain its own consciousness, but have you felt the conversation between medicinal intention and material?) This link isn’t just about medicine, but extends to all kinds of links between the seen and unseen realms. With the Saturn-Chiron square, it can speak to the ways that our structures, laws, and social mores are vessels for particular realities to unfold.
While at times Saturn may carry us in a crest of a wave of success – we have all the structural supports, all the boxes are checked, we’re in the clear, we feel competent, we can do the job, we’re rewarded for the job — Saturn is also the deep grit within us, the strength in reserve when we feel we have nothing left or nothing to resource from, the climb up a massive hill without being sure if there is any reward at the top, not even being sure if there is an end or light at the tunnel. At times it can be a massive sense of cynicism and oppression, feeling as if there is no way out. This is the planet, Saturn, from the perspective of Earth, currently making a confrontational angle to the asteroid representing the key; the mediator between seen and unseen realms.
So what does this mean for us? For both the personal and collective, it can mean that through feeling the sense of oppression or restriction, we also meet the key. We may find pressure followed by relief. Chiron in Pisces signifies, among other expressions, that sometimes the key to our situation at hand is the imagination. The imagination is an invisible force through which the things that exist, concretely in this world, were created, and are now just bones of that old imagination (which may be livable, or may be decaying). Imagination is always propelling the future. Imagination gives the mind levity to generate innovative, healing, profound ideas, as well as strategies for implementing those ideas.
Sometimes matter, experience, and reality itself is reshaped by the imagination focusing on an ideal. We don’t have to feel guilt for not finding the key right way – Saturn takes time – but I think it is at least helpful to meditate on the energetic at play. The sense of restriction/cynicism, followed by transpersonal, or yet unknown insight that is medicinal to the situation at hand. That the struggle itself might be cooking up the key under pressure.
Another possibility is the sense that surrender after struggle brings the answer. Sometimes we are working so hard to do something or figure something out, and it is when we give up and go to sleep that our dreams speak to us of the answer. The struggle – or engaging with difficult realities – is not useless: it generates a kind of heat, a kind of deep, structural sincerity to which the numinous often can not help but answer back. Ask the hard questions.
With love,
Sabrina Monarch
(Top Image: Julia Lametta)
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