The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 131, titled:
Saturn Return in Sagittarius Retrospective
With Chris Brennan and guests Leisa Schaim and Patrick Watson
Episode originally released on November 9, 2017
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released July 18, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Friday, November 3, 2017, starting at 9:53 PM in Denver Colorado, and this is the 131st episode of the show. Joining me today is Leisa Schaim and Patrick Watson, and we’re going to be doing a retrospective of some Saturn Return stories that we’ve seen over the past couple of years since Saturn has been passing through Sagittarius. For more information about how to subscribe to the podcast and support the production of future episodes by becoming a patron, please visit TheAstrologyPodcast.com/subscribe. I think that’s all the preliminary stuff. So hey guys, welcome back to the show.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey.
PATRICK WATSON: Thanks for having us.
CB: Yeah. On the one hand I can’t believe it’s been two years since we did the original Saturn in Sagittarius podcast—as Saturn had just moved or was just moving into that sign—but on the other hand I thought it would have been like three years. I was actually surprised to see that we did that in September of 2015. So it was only two years ago that we did that. Does that feel like a long time ago or does it feel like a short time to you guys?
LS: Mm, kind of long for me. Yeah, actually I’m surprised it’s not more like three.
CB: What about you Patrick?
PW: Feels like a lifetime.
CB: Okay.
PW: Feels like a lifetime. I mean, so much has changed since that transit. Yeah, for me personally at least.
CB: Yeah, you are one of our honorary—not even honorary. We’re both honorary Saturn return people. But you actually went through your Saturn over the past couple of years.
PW: Yeah. Yeah, I’m finally not young anymore. I finally joined you guys as a true adult, you know, astrologically. Yeah, I mean, we’ll get into what my one was about I’m sure.
CB: Sure.
PW: Yeah, it was pretty brutal. It wasn’t very fun.
CB: All right.
PW: I don’t recommend it.
CB: Don’t recommend it. Two out of five stars, would not recommend. All right, well, we will be sharing the stories of some other people and then eventually we’ll come back and talk about yours later on in the show. So I’ve been wanting to do this show for a while because, you know, a) we did that interesting episode—I forget what episode number it was. It was like Episode 40 or something on Saturn in Sagittarius when it was first going in. And in the first half it was like Austin—Austin Coppock—and Kelly Surtees, and we talked about that as a mundane astrology-type thing. But then in the second half the three of us talked about some Saturn Return stories that we were looking forward to of people that we knew had Saturn in Sagittarius. So they would be experiencing either their first or second or third Saturn return.
And since that time, over the past couple of years, you know, I think all three of us—I know lots of astrologers—have seen a lot of interesting Saturn returns stories as you’ve actually seen some of those people that were born in the mid-to-late-1980s go through their first Saturn returns or some of the people born in the late 1950s going through their second Saturn returns. And I’ve been collecting together different stories and meaning to share them and do a show kind of talking about some of the things that I’ve observed or some of the stories that I’ve seen now that we’re finally to the end of it. And we’re not quite there but we’re just about I guess a month away from Saturn in Capricorn, right?
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, maybe six weeks.
CB: Yeah. So I think this is an opportune time to finally do this and to talk about some of these Saturn return stories. Because for me the Saturn return really begins with the ingress of Saturn back into your natal Saturn sign, and it fully officially ends once Saturn departs that sign, so we’re close enough to the end right now that we’re pretty much at the end of the Saturn return in Sagittarius. And I think we’re in a good position to talk about most of these stories even though some people might have Saturn at like 28 or 29, and so theirs might culminate over the course of the next month. But for the most part most of the things surrounding the Saturn returns have been going on for a lot of people for a couple of years now.
So all right, we’ve got a lot of stories to talk about today. And I’m actually not even sure how we’re going to get through them all or if we’re going to get through them all, but we’re going to make our best effort to get through a bunch of Saturn Return stories to talk about some of the general sort of overview of what it seems to have coincided with for a number of different people that we’ve seen. Because we’ve seen pretty much the full gamut of different manifestations I think based on different positions of Saturn in the chart, based on different rulerships and other things going on, and I think we’ll see a lot of interesting overlap and similarities. But before we actually get into the stories I wanted to talk a little bit and sort of establish what our approach is going to be and talk a little bit about how we interpret Saturn returns. So what should be our starting point for that? Should we just sort of define the subject first?
PW: Sure. Yeah, I mean, Saturn has an orbital cycle of 29-point-something years. And so, every 29—I think it’s like 29.4 or 29.6—years Saturn returns to the place it was all those years before. And like you said Chris, it’s really the ingress into the sign and its entire stay during the sign, but there is also the Saturn return to the degree which tends to be sort of that much more pivotal for people who have Saturn at that particular degree.
CB: Yeah.
PW: But there are different ways it can turn up though depending on how it’s situated in the chart or what kind of chart it is—like a day or night chart, for example.
CB: Definitely. Yeah, and I think that’s the way usually Saturn Return is defined—as like when Saturn returns to the exact degree it was when you were born or at least within that range of let’s say a few degrees in the zodiac. But you know one of the principles that I’ve had for about 10 years now is that—using whole sign aspects and using whole sign houses—that when you switch to using those you start to pay attention to the broader sort of range of things like transits. Even once a planet moves into a new sign it’s moving into a new house, it’s moving into a new set of aspects or sign-based configurations with other planets.
And you know the past two years have really re-emphasized that to me that the Saturn return really does start as soon as Saturn ingresses back into the natal sign and it ends officially once it leaves that sign. So it’s true that oftentimes there’s a sort of pivotal turning point or the most intense phase of the return is certainly when it gets right around the specific range of degrees around your exact Saturn return, but you can really see a lot of the narratives sort of developing already as soon as the ingress takes place it seems like. Do you guys feel like that’s been reinforced for you as well?
LS: Mm-hmm, yeah. And it seems like we’re all pretty much on the same page around the sign-based but also the degree-based. You feel the same way, Patrick?
PW: Uh, yeah.
LS: Yeah?
PW: I mean, I don’t want to get right into my example, but I mean I think the ingress of Saturn into Sagittarius was pretty dramatic for me in terms of, you know, kind of right out of the gate, kind of being like, “Yeah, this is what this second returns gonna be about. You know, it’s gonna be about your kids.” My daughter was born, you know, close to the ingress of Saturn into Sagittarius, which is my 5th house, the house of children. So yeah, it was pretty just almost like, “Duh.” It was so blatant, so kind of obvious that it’s like, yeah, well, that’s when a Saturn return really, you know, begins.
CB: Okay.
LS: Sure.
CB: And I know we said we were gonna put it off until later, but maybe it would be worth it just to get into it in terms of that. Because we were trying to figure out how to structure this and we still don’t know, so I just wanted to let it flow as a conversation. But one of the ways I thought about structuring it was as we talked about and introduced different interpretive principles, maybe we could pull out some of the examples that are relevant, so maybe that would be a good starting point.
PW: Yeah.
CB: So you have Saturn in the 5th house, the 5th whole sign house natally. You have Leo rising and Saturn in Sagittarius in the 5th.
PW: Yes.
CB: And so as soon as Saturn ingressed, what happened?
PW: So my wife and I—we both have Leo rising, and we both have Saturn in the 5th, and we were both in a Saturn profection. We were both in our 5th house profections and we were kind of unsure about whether we wanted a third child; we were sort of back and forth on it. By the way, never a good thing to be kind of iffy about…
CB: Right.
PW: …like whether you’re gonna have like a third child
CB: It’s kind of like, you know, “What are you gonna have for dinner tonight?”
PW: It’s a bit more binary I will admit.
CB: Right.
PW: But yeah, so we discovered that she was pregnant on January 26. I figured out that we conceived around like January 3 to January 8 of 2015, and then we discovered the pregnancy on January 26 of 2015, and then she was born on October 1, 2015. So I think Saturn was right at like 0 Sagittarius when we conceived, and then it regressed back into Scorpio and then came back again into Sagittarius when she was born. So it was like right around 0 or 1 Sagittarius that she was born. So literally we conceived when Sagittarius like stepped into the sign and then, you know, most of the pregnancy’s during Saturn in Scorpio. And then Saturn in Sagittarius again it’s like, “Here’s the baby. Here’s this thing you can barely handle. Here’s like the straw that will break your back.”
I mean, she’s adorable, I love her, obviously, but you know I’d be lying if I said it’s been totally easy balancing all of this stuff. The third child is kind of just like the, you know, the cherry on the ‘shit sundae’. I mean, a lot of 6th and 7th house issues, you know, go along with this too because those are the houses ruled in our charts.
CB: Sure.
PW: You know, issues of my employment were kind of up in the air. And so that’s been kind of hard on sort of the work front and deciding who wants the responsibility of work and bringing in what we need for the family, you know. And obviously that, you know, causes tension in any marriage, but all of it just kind of came together, you know, in this perfect, you know, combination of terrible things kind of all at once. I mean, I guess I’m not being very clear.
CB: No, that’s good.
PW: I’m just trying to remember it.
CB: I just wanted to clarify—you’re reminding me of something that I completely forgot about. Because we recorded the Saturn in Sag episode, that podcast, in September of 2015 because that was when Saturn finally officially departed from Scorpio for the last time and went into Sagittarius for the final time, but in fact Saturn had already dipped into Sagittarius earlier that year. So it dipped into Sagittarius the first time, what—January?
LS: I think it was December of 2014.
PW: Yeah. It was December 2014.
CB: Okay, so December of 2014, Saturn first goes into Sagittarius and it stays there for a few months in early Sag before retrograding out. And so, what you figured out was that you guys conceived in like January of 2015 shortly after Saturn first went into Sagittarius.
PW: Yes.
CB: I mean, that’s a really good example also because you have Saturn later in the sign by degree. It’s at like 15° or something, right?
PW: 17, yeah. Yeah, she has 14. I have 17.
CB: Maybe I should go ahead and show it. So do you mind if I show your chart?
PW: No, go ahead.
CB: Okay. So for those watching the video version of this—that I’m gonna try to put on YouTube as long as the video comes out okay—I’m gonna go ahead and show the charts while we talk about them. But otherwise, if you’re listening to the audio version, we’ll just try to describe what we’re looking at in general terms. So just remember we’re using whole sign houses. So once you know the rising sign, you know what house everything else is located in just by knowing it signs.
So Patrick has Leo rising, and he has Saturn at 17° of Sagittarius, and it’s in the 5th whole sign house, or it’s in the fifth sign relative to the rising sign. So we would expect, you know, children to be a major topic that might be associated with his Saturn return, and basically as soon as Saturn ingressed you guys conceived. So part of the theme for you or part of the issue that you’re talking about just to understand that better for our listeners is that you guys actually already had two children.
PW: Yeah.
CB: And you weren’t necessarily planning on having more, but this was kind of an unexpected surprise.
PW: Uh, a tad, you know. And we have Uranus in the 5th.
CB: Yeah. And that’s really important because that ended up being a recurring theme that I kept noticing over and over again—that those people with Saturn in Sag that were born in the late 1980s, a bunch of them had Uranus at least in the same sign, if not pretty close to a conjunction with Saturn in Sagittarius. And so, a large theme for a lot of these Saturn returns that we’re gonna look at is a Uranus thing of something unexpected that sort of comes out of nowhere.
PW: Well, right. Usually when you have two planets in conjunction they kind of each act like the other, you know. So for example, people with Saturn conjunct Uranus, their Saturn transits will have some Uranian elements and vice versa. So yeah, I think that definitely applies. The other funny thing too is, you know, with Saturn in the 5th there’s this—I forget exactly where it comes from—but there’s some traditional signification of Saturn in the 5th of this being the father of another person’s children. So my first child is actually my stepchild, and then my second child is my biological child and then this third child is my second biological child. So all of that sort of came to bear on this.
CB: And this is a really good demonstration—like I was saying, because you have Saturn, you know, towards the middle of the sign at 17°—this is a great demonstration of, you know, the Saturn return actually begins as soon as it ingresses into that sign. Because some astrologers, some modern astrologers would overlook that because they would say, well, it’s not going to be in orb until it gets within, you know, 6° or 10° or whatever.
PW: Not the case.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: No.
LS: Yeah.
PW: Not the case clearly. I mean, wow.
LS: Yeah, I’ve had people tell me that it’s not actually the Saturn return when the Saturn return has started, at least from my perspective it’s started. Like, “No, no, you’re not going through your Saturn return yet because it’s not close in degree.”
PW: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
PW: Something makes me think that when I’m around 59, I’m probably gonna end up being like a grandparent, you know, being a father of other people’s children. Like I wonder if I’ll kind of have to do this again in some way, or like maybe my children will have children but I may have to take some sort of larger role in raising them or something, so then I can have to get back into the grind of diapers and stuff. Uh, yeah, I’m not really looking forward to that.
CB: Right. Because that’s brilliant because now your first child will have Saturn in Sag as well.
PW: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This sucks. This is not supposed to happen. This is not the plan of my life, necessarily, but it totally was. I saw it all along. My first child actually was born with Saturn in Scorpio, and he is actually the Saturn return of my older brother. So essentially my mother had her first child when Saturn was in late Scorpio and then she had her first grandchild when Saturn was in late Scorpio. So there was kind of a Saturn cycle there with my mother, you know, from becoming a mother to becoming a grandmother. And so, yeah, this Saturn in Sag thing is probably gonna follow me down now 30 years from now.
CB: Nice.
PW: Wonderful.
LS: I mean, if it makes you feel any better that happens quite a lot, I feel. I’ve seen a lot of like parent-child, you know, Saturn return connections.
PW: Yeah, you know, what’s funny though is, I mean, you know, the 5th house is supposed to be like a ‘fun’ house. And the thing that sucks about having Saturn in the 5th—or I think this is the thing that sucks about having Saturn generally in a so-called ‘good’ house—is that what is supposed to be good is just so hard. Like I know people who have, you know, just amazing experiences being parents and, you know, their children bring them, you know, honors. Think of like parents who, you know, have kids who are like, you know, child stars or something.
CB: Like Justin Bieber or something.
PW: Right. Yeah. But, you know, with Saturn, I mean, I imagine that, you know, going forward—I mean, with Saturn in the 5th maybe that means like my kids are fuck-ups or something and I have to, you know, just deal with it the whole way through. So I’m really hoping it’s not quite as bad as that, you know. I mean, I think my example—the thing that my example really proves for me (and hopefully this is convincing for everyone listening) is that the ingress into the sign is not to be underestimated. That is absolutely the preview of what kind of the whole thing is about, and it is uncanny with how literally connected to the topic of the house that it is.
CB: Right. And what was the final birthday then? You said it was right after Saturn made its ingress later that fall?
PW: It was October 1, 2015.
CB: Oh, wow. So that was literally like a week or two after Saturn went back into Sagittarius for the next two years, and it was still only at like 1° of Sagittarius at that point. yeah So we’re still 16° away from the exact Saturn return, but you were firmly in Saturn return territory at that point.
PW: Yeah, yeah. The Saturn return by degree—it was kind of a blur. That was right after the election Because this Saturn return wasn’t just about children for me, it was also about me in some ways taking my hobby as an astrologer and turning it a little bit more into a serious career. And so, that was right after the election where, you know, I had gotten this big prediction wrong and I had a real kind of crisis with what I was going to do and if I really should even continue doing astrology.
And so, you can kind of see some connections there with Jupiter ruling the sign, you know, that there was this big sort of philosophical sort of quandary. I mean, I know a lot of astrologers messed up too, but those were some really dark days. You know, I remember Beth like telling me I did have to get out of bed, I did have to, you know, still go to work, and I did have to kind of figure it out. And she was like, “You can’t just quit astrology over this,” and so I really had to kind of get through that. And right after that was when I established kind of my brand as an astrologer, this, you know, ‘Big Fat Astro’ thing.
CB: Sure. So you set up a new website. Because you had a previous one, but you launched a new website and a new YouTube channel.
PW: Right.
CB: Where can people find that again?
PW: So you can go to my website, it’s www.BigFatAstro.com. You can find me on Facebook, which is facebook.com/Big FatAstro. You’ll find me on Twitter, PWatsonAstro. My YouTube channel is called BigFatAstroVlog!. So you can see my BigFatAstroVlog there. But yeah, so the Saturn return for me by degree was me having to kind of get over the mistake I made and to I guess fully kind of embrace myself as an astrologer and to kind of be more serious about it.
CB: Right, setting up. And you also ended up in The Washington Post. This was another fun, minor thing that happened.
PW: Right. Yeah. There was that huge thing with The Washington Post. That was the Uranus conjunction to my Jupiter. That was also when I did my first lecture at an astrological conference. I spoke at the ISAR conference. Yeah, that was like a New Moon or a Full Moon, I forget which.
CB: So there was a lot of 9th house. So that’s important because I can actually already think of one or two other charts where that also is relevant, where the ruler of that sign—the ruler of Saturn’s sign and its placement by house—actually becomes partially descriptive of some of the major themes that come up during the course of the Saturn return.
PW: Yeah. So absolutely the 9th house significations of—well, travel not so much. I mean, I did travel to like the conference and stuff, but definitely the 9th house significations of like publishing and philosophy, astrology itself. Yeah, so that was definitely a part of the equation.
CB: Sure.
LS: Yeah.
CB: ‘Cause that’s not.unimportant. I was thinking about that the other day because I was just reliving the whole nightmare that was like a year ago when the ISAR conference happened and then a few weeks later the election happened. But one of the things it’s easy to forget or to overlook is like literally for two weeks before the ISAR conference was this mad scramble because ISAR announced that they had Hillary Clinton’s birth time and they weren’t going to release it until the panel happened at the end of the conference. And then you and I spent a couple of weeks like trying to research this, trying to get them to release the birth time, them completely fucking around and just screwing over a lot of astrologers in the process.
PW: Right.
CB: And then eventually this led through this weird route to you talking with a reporter from The Washington Post and then being quoted in the very headline where it said, “This is not to be trusted.”
PW: This is not to be trusted.
CB: This birth time is not to be trusted.
PW: Right. Saturn in Sag.
CB: Yeah. I mean, there’s some interesting themes there just in terms of the 9th house and you’re switching and doing astrology more as your profession and launching the YouTube channel that’s been successful and everything else. So we’ve got the 5th house theme. And then of course the 5th house theme was that in having an unexpected third child, that did bring some additional, like financial and other sort of strains into your life for the next couple of years, right? Basically that was part of it?
PW: Yeah. Yes. I mean, it’s just so funny to hear you put it—it sounds almost so delicate the way you say it. Yes, that does describe it.
CB: Okay. And then it’s reinforced because—as you mentioned already—your wife also has Leo rising and Saturn in Sagittarius in the 5th house. And do you both have night charts, or is it just you that has the night chart?
PW: She was born with the Sun a couple degrees below the horizon, so she’s one of these ‘twilight’ births where we’re not really sure, but it might be kind of daytime. I mean, a lot of her struggles have kind of been in parallel with mine. Obviously having a third child was a much bigger problem for her since she is the mom, you know, and undeniably it was harder for her in every way especially because she wanted to breastfeed, which is a huge commitment. I mean, I don’t think she got sleep for like maybe a whole year. She was really, really difficult. And she’s been wanting to, you know, move ahead in her career, and you know, a lot of the choices that I’ve made have sort of had impacts on her ability to do kind of what she wants to do.
And so, you know, 7th house issues came up with the Saturn return—trying to decide are we best off together. So that was really scary, you know, how we’ve kind of dealt with the topic of potentially a divorce and sort of deciding to stay in it together. I mean, it’d be crazy. It would be even worse. Life would be even worse if we were trying to do this separately. And then 6th house, you know, employment, what helps you in what you do, you know, since it’s the trine to the 10th. You know, those issues came up with what she wants to do for work, what I wanna do for work, how we’re gonna manage the children, which of course ties back to Saturn—that we both have Saturn in the 5th. So, yeah.
CB: Sure. So one of the interpretive principles I meant that we should outline as we’re doing this is this is something originally I had developed largely through doing consultations and through just using the basic principles of Hellenistic astrology in a modern context and taking some of those ideas from ancient astrology and trying to apply it to more modern ideas and transit theory like the Saturn return.
And one of the things I kept seeing is that obviously the whole sign house that Saturn is placed in, the topics associated with that house will become more prominent during the Saturn return. But also the two houses that Saturn rules, the topics associated with those two houses often come in two play as well in different ways during the course of the Saturn return. And that’s something I know Leisa you’ve seen and that’s something in your lecture where you did a lecture on Saturn returns. That’s something you really draw out very clearly in a lot of your example charts, how that dynamic often unfolds, right?
LS: Yeah. Definitely. And usually you can notice both the house that Saturn is natively placed in, as well as at least one if not both of the houses that it rules: the Capricorn house and the Aquarius house. I’d say definitely the house placement and then often all three. Sometimes it’s two out of three, but often all three.
PW: And then as well as the ruler, you know. Whatever planet rules the sign that Saturn’s in.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I’ve really noticed in a few of the examples—I was looking at the sign placement of Jupiter because these are all Saturn in Sagittarius—the sign placement of Jupiter being really interesting in altering in different ways the tenor of their particular Saturn return.
CB: Right, right. So that’s going to be one of our primary interpretive principles as we go through here—the house Saturn is in, the two houses that it rules and other things like that. The other thing of course is the sect of the chart, which is it a day chart or a night chart. And one of the things I would continually see was that—just based on the principle of sect—one of the interpretive distinctions is that people with day charts tend to experience the Saturn return as being a little bit easier, a little bit more constructive, whereas people with night charts tend to have a little bit more of a difficult time with the Saturn return, and you tend to hear them report it as being a bit more challenging and having sometimes greater hardships that come along with it.
And there are exceptions to that because there’s mitigating rules. There’s different types of mitigations that can happen that can throw that off one way or another, especially in terms of how Saturn is configured with other planets in the chart, like Venus and Jupiter being the two benefics that are able to mitigate things for the better, and Mars, for example, being the other malefic that’s able to mitigate things oftentimes for the worse depending on how their aspecting Saturn. So you know, one of the things in talking with you, Patrick, about your story is that you certainly experienced this is a much more challenging time and that seems consistent with what we would expect since you have a night chart. And so, you’re experiencing more of a sort of challenging ‘Saturn-type’ Saturn return.
PW: Yes.
CB: Would you say that that’s accurate?
PW: It’s so clinical the way you put it, yes.
CB: I’m trying to be very neutral and like…
LS: Diplomatic.
CB: Right.
PW: Yeah, I know. Yeah, it was pretty awful. I’m almost glad to see Saturn in Capricorn.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
PW: So yeah, I’m happy.
CB: And we’ll see both ends of that spectrum with some of the other Saturn returns that we’re gonna talk about. And that’s one of the things that’s funny because a lot of the ones I was getting were day chart ones. And so, it’s just like a constructive story, you know, surmountable difficulties, minor mishaps. And then I got one of my first night chart ones and she was just like retelling this horror story of really difficult times, and then it reminded me—I forgot that up to that point I had mainly been getting day chart ones.
LS: Yeah, that makes a big difference. I think Patrick and I both being ‘night chart’ people can attest.
CB: Yeah. Okay so we’ve introduced most of the basic interpretive principles that we’re going to focus on. The only other major thing I wanted to do is, Leisa—you had written down and you had at the beginning of your Saturn returns lecture—you did a really good job of stating some of the standard modern interpretive principles of how the Saturn return is usually viewed. And I was wondering if we could talk about that for a few minutes just to give an initial set up and some context for what we would expect to see in some of the charts that we’re gonna look at.
LS: Sure. I mean, there’s kind of some main ways that people often talk about it, so it’s either major achievements or major downfalls, major difficulties. It’s often talked about as re-evaluating your life choices at that time. Endings and beginnings I think are just about universal. And then the theme of like hard work, like it’ll always be kind of like you’re working hard on something, whatever that is in your chart, however that’s signified. So hard work, persistence. It can be talked about as like a time of testing or challenges. And then I think one of the other main things is like the ‘reality principle’, like making things real or concrete—because Saturn sort of governs things that are in real life—as opposed to like your ideals or something; so can you translate what you’re doing into real concrete life. So those are I think some of the main ones.
CB: Okay. And the last thing I meant to mention that I skipped—which I know shows up more prominently in some of your examples, Leisa—is that the other thing is of course the nature of the sign that Saturn is in in the birth chart as being relevant to some of the themes. And so, I know in a lot of the example charts I found I often saw the houses are often focused on—the houses and the houses that Saturn ruled or was placed in—as being more relevant; whereas in some of the example charts you’ve really drawn out some of the Saturn in Sag themes, or you found some examples where that was much more prominent.
LS: Yeah. And it’s kind of surprising because usually I do really focus on like timed charts and the exact, you know, houses that are being ruled and so forth and those usually are very telling. But for some reason I just came across a bunch of Saturn in Sag examples that weren’t necessarily timed charts—some of them were—that just were really evocative in terms of the sign itself.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s actually something maybe we should get out of the way first. I keep repeating this over and over, over the past year or two, to Austin and Kelly on each month’s forecast episode where I’m just like I cannot believe how literal Saturn in Sagittarius has been over the past two years. And if you go back and listen to that show and some of the things that we talked about anticipating happening—either based on symbolic reasoning, based on what we expected from putting like Saturn in Sagittarius together, or based on, you know, past historical things, which is something you’ve focused on a lot, Patrick—I was still continually blown away by how literal the Saturn in Sagittarius significations really manifested over the past couple of years.
And we had some like inkling of that that we started to get at the beginning of Saturn in Sag in 2015 such as, for example, the whole immigration and like migration that was happening from the Middle East to Europe was sort of really getting going at that time into the summer, but I don’t think we could have anticipated—not we couldn’t have anticipated. We did to some extent, but still, the way that it turned out was very striking I felt. What did you guys think?
LS: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s been almost like a caricature in some ways of some of the themes, you know, crossing boundaries and getting from—I know, Patrick, you’ve talked about literally getting from one place to another physically. But then, culturally, it’s like the same thing, you know, these people who are over there and are they too far away for me to relate to, and, you know, who belongs to my group and who’s like the out-group.
PW: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of the Saturn in Sagittarius period of the late 1830s—1838 to 1840. Like that’s the Trail of Tears episode, you know. I mean, Amistad—from the same one. You know, you can definitely see kind of the historical reverberations of this idea of migration of culture and peoples. And yeah, it’s so literal. Yeah, it’s weird .
CB: Right.
PW: It’s almost like astrology works or something.
CB: I know. It’s almost as if it…
PW: It’s like a real phenomenon.
CB: Go ahead.
LS: I was just gonna…
CB: I’m glad I haven’t lost that, yeah, I’m still continuously impressed that it works to the extent that it does.
LS: Right. Well, I was gonna say also Sagittarius in terms of differences because Sagittarian is often about like crossing differences, and Saturn being like either an impediment to that or like, you know, you either work on that, or you say ‘no’ and kind of put a hard, you know, wall down and say, you know, no, we’re not going to cross those differences between different kinds of people or different cultures. It’s just ended up being a huge theme of the last few years in lots of different ways.
CB: Right.
PW: The wall.
LS: Yeah, the wall.
CB: Build that wall.
PW: The wall.
CB: One of Trump’s slogans was, ‘Build the Wall’.
LS: Right. I’m sure there’s other, you know, bigger cycles that are additionally lending themselves to this, but there’s been so many sort of nativist, nationalist kind of movements in so many countries recently. And it keeps feeling to me like sort of a closer drawing of boundaries rather than a wanting to go further…
PW: Right.
LS: …with Saturn.
PW: Oh, sorry. Right. Absolutely. One thing I was just reminded of is, you know, one of the defining moments of contention between the United States and the former Soviet Union was the launching of Sputnik. You know, that was from the Sag in Sagittarius period of, you know, 1957 to 1959. You know, that sort of kicked off this space race. So I think it’s interesting then, obviously 30 years after that in the late ‘80s—during that Saturn in Sagittarius period—that was when Russia launched the first space station, Mir. That was the Saturn return of the launch of Sputnik, and it was also the time of the Challenger disaster. So literally the idea of like going places, you know, to space, was kind of put on hold as NASA like said—in fact NASA was also started during that 1957 to 1959 Saturn in Sagittarius period, and that’s a whole organization about going places, you know.
And so, I think it’s interesting that, again, like Russia and the United States and the sort of feelings of trespass that have happened. Of course there are these allegations of Russian meddling in the American election in 2016, you know, all kinda taking place during the Saturn in Sagittarius period, you know, which has been there before at these sort of prior junctions between these two countries, the United States from Russia. So I think there’s other ways it’s shown up too. But yeah, that just sort of reminded me of this recurrent theme of nativism, you know, skepticism or fear of the frontier, as well as other cultures and…
LS: Mm-hmm, Saturn.
PW: …cultural boundaries and things like that.
CB: Yeah, that idea of fear. There’s some book, or maybe it’s like a lot of modern astrology books—but I remember reading one back in the early-to-mid-2000s very early in my studies as an astrologer where they said one of the underlying psychological themes of Saturn is fear, either, you know, where you have personal fear in your chart or sometimes where there are collective fears, and this is the first time that I’ve really seen that come out in a major way. Because I feel like that was like one of the dominant themes of Saturn in Sagittarius—like fear of that which is foreign and how that manifested in different ways.
PW: Also, fear of the frontier, fear of going the distance. And I didn’t really understand that until we got to this Saturn in Sagittarius period, for example. I did this whole study on bridges. Now I’m not the kind of person who like obsesses about like bridges or has like one of those weird hobbies where they’re like obsessed with trains or something, but I got into a little bit over the course of seeing Saturn in Sagittarius just because it’s come up as such a common theme. When Saturn ingresses into a new sign, we tend to build things and concretize things that are related to the nature of the sign. So when Saturn’s in Sagittarius, we tend to build bridges or freeways. We tend to connect places. We literally build things that allow people to go from one place to another. And you know, the sign of Sagittarius—ruled by Jupiter—kind of has these connotations of, you know, broadening horizons.
And so, the way this connects to Saturn in Sagittarius—it’s funny, back when we—what am I trying to say? Oh, yeah, back when trains were still a new thing, you know, people were afraid of going on trains. They thought that if you went past a hundred miles an hour that your head would explode, you know. And obviously that wasn’t true, but people have also had fears about using planes. And then in the 1927 to 1929 Saturn in Sagittarius period, you know, flight was considered to be commercially-viable, considered to be safe after that point so then people kind of got over their fears of flying on planes.
And I think the same thing is kind of happening with spaceflight. It’s the fear. I mean, would you want to get on a space shuttle? Would you want to get on one of Elon Musk’s planes, you know, to go to space? You know, maybe. Maybe not. I mean, it would be cool but also pretty, you know, scary. And I think that this Saturn in Sagittarius period, we’ve seen, you know, a similar development with space flight. Elon Musk, you know, he has been able to build a rocket which can be reused, and this is very similar to these previous developments with Saturn in Sagittarius with trains and with planes. So Saturn in Sagittarius is about that fear of going on a trip or going on a dangerous voyage, whether it’s on a train or on a plane across the ocean, or, you know, in a plane to space.
CB: Yeah, you really drew that out, and my hat goes off to you. Because if people go back and listen to that, I’d recommend people listen to that original Saturn in Sagittarius episode and the article you wrote on your website about it. Because you really called a lot of those travel things that came up both with things like SpaceX—where there have been some important and notable setbacks—but also some notable sort of developments and advancements.
PW: Accomplishments.
CB: Yeah, but then also other forms of travel that we saw come out and suddenly start being more prominent during this time, like the Hyperloop.
PW: Yeah.
CB: We did see some major developments with that, which I think you called as well.
PW: Yeah. I guess this would be as good a time as any—I’m just gonna go quickly through my little list here of bridges and highways.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Because one of the things—we’re 43 minutes into it, so I don’t know how much…
PW: Oh, my gosh, yeah..
CB: …we should focus.
PW: Okay. All right.
CB: I want to kind of pull back from the mundane thing a little bit.
PW: Yeah. Okay. Sure. Sure.
CB: But I do want to recommend that everybody check out those articles on your website. I mean, are you gonna post this perhaps as a follow-up?
PW: Yeah, yeah, I absolutely could. I apologize in advance though because Photobucket sucks. And so, all my images for that article are hosted by Photobucket and then Photobucket is now holding my photos ransom.
CB: Oh, no.
PW: So if you’re on the page there’s like all these broken links. But I’m gonna go back and fix it. It’s gonna take a long time. But yeah, feel free to go ahead and go to my website and just search in the search bar ‘Saturn in Sagittarius’, you’ll find. It’s called “Saturn in Sagittarius: The Skeptic, the Architect and the [Something].”
CB: Right. Research ‘Patrick Watson’.
LS: “The Luddite,” I think.
PW: “The Luddite.” Yeah, that’s right. The fear of progress.
CB: Right. All right, so let’s start getting into some Saturn in Sagittarius Saturn returns in talking about this. Because my initial fear about us getting through all the chart examples has just been heightened by taking 45 minutes to go through the first one—speaking of Saturn and fears. So maybe a good transition point is that since we’ve just been talking about Saturn in Sag and some of the manifestations in terms of mundane astrology, I know, Leisa, you had some examples that were very ‘Saturn in Sagittarius-like’ that seem to draw out primarily the sign and the quality of that sign and different manifestations of it in a very interesting way, right?
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there’s a few different ones. Maybe I’ll start with one of the first ones. I definitely want to get to the second Saturn return one, but maybe for flowing more quickly maybe I’ll start with the first one.
CB: Okay.
LS: So that’s gonna be Colin Kaepernick who’s been in the news quite a lot in the past year.
CB: Okay. I will go ahead and share the chart right now for the video. So this is an untimed chart, right?
LS: This is an untimed chart, one of several I have. And it’s funny, though, it’s actually his birthday today, November 3. So he turns 30 today. November 3, 1987. And that’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So he has Saturn at 18 Sag, and it’s both trine and ruled by Jupiter in Aries, just like Patrick’s. So I’m sure lots of people listening to this know who he is at this point, but just in case someone doesn’t, he’s an NFL football player who became famous from, say, last fall onward for sitting and then later kneeling during the national anthem before the football games in protest of police brutality against African-Americans, extrajudicial killings and things like that. So it was like a political protest or human rights protest at the football games that he was then going to play afterwards. And this has sparked like a huge nationwide discussion largely not about topics that he was intending the protests to be about.
PW: Right.
LS: So it’s turned into a nationwide discussion about freedom of expression, which is kind of, interestingly, you know, Jupiterian—Saturn in Sag ruled by Jupiter—and Jupiter sometimes indicating freedom issues about racism, about police brutality, patriotism. So that’s kind of the gist. And he’s been a free—he was signed before, but he’s been a free agent since March of this year. And there’s sort of an ongoing discussion about whether his personal protest has caused him to not be signed by teams this year or whether that’s incidental and it’s about his playing.
CB: Right. And I mean, that’s really important. One of the things obviously in terms of interpretation that we can’t unfortunately know is since we don’t have a time, we don’t know if it’s a day chart or a night chart. So we don’t know if he would be, theoretically, experiencing some of the more constructive end of it or the more, you know, hardship end of it.
LS: Right.
CB: But the fact that last season, a year ago, he was in the NFL and he did these protests and then it sparked a lot of controversy, and then this year, football is back in season again and he’s not on a team this year, it’s widely speculated that it’s partially due to his starting these protests.
LS: Right.
PW: You know what I think it’s kind of funny, and again, also kind of literal—what part of the body does Sagittarius rule?
LS: The thighs.
PW: The leg, right? And it’s the knee.
LS: Oh, yeah.
PW: Yeah, and kneeling down on the knee, you know, to protest. And one other thing that’s kind of funny is this reminds me of another kneeling football player from a while ago who also has Saturn in Sagittarius, Tim Tebow, you know, except he was kneeling to do this like public prayer.
LS: Right.
PW: So that was kind of interesting as a sort of point of comparison between Colin Kaepernick, the guy with Saturn in Sagittarius who kneels to protest against injustice or to protest for justice…
LS: Right.
PW: …and then the other Saturn in Sagittarius football player who kneels publicly to pray, to, you know, express himself religiously in a public way. I just think it’s kind of funny how they’re both ‘Saturn in Saggie’, they both have this same placement, and both have brought criticism to themselves in this act of kneeling—Saturn with Sag.
CB: Right.
PW: Anyway.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Mm-hmm. And one of the things I thought was interesting, it kind of reminded me—this particular example reminded me of the general thing, that different astrologers can kind of interpret things—like transits like this—in different ways depending on their own personal leanings and still be kind of correct about a part of it, because, for instance, you know, Saturn also rules consequence. And so, you know, one could say that he’s experiencing Saturn return by experiencing a consequence of making this decision, and that might be true. But the other piece of it that I thought was kind of interesting is that Saturn in Sag, ruled by Jupiter, Jupiter also has to do with beliefs. And so, this feels very much like a Saturn in Sagittarius standing up for one’s beliefs regardless of consequences.
PW: Or kneeling.
LS: Yeah.
PW: Kneeling for one’s beliefs.
LS: Exactly. Exactly. And I found this great quote he said in one of the interviews: “This is not something that I’m gonna run by anybody. I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.” And that feels both very much like expressing the Saturn in Sagittarius, standing up for one’s beliefs, but also that being ruled by Jupiter in Aries, because it was kind of emphasizing that he was willing to stand alone, which he was for a while.
PW: And it’s in the realm of sports, athleticism, you know, ruled by Mars.
LS: Mm-hmm. And, you know, it was only recently that more people joined in. So that felt very much like the Jupiter in Aries ruling that Saturn in Sag piece of it.
PW: Mm-hmm.
LS: Yeah. So anyway that is a lot of what people have heard about his Saturn return. And I was gonna say earlier I’m really glad that we aren’t recording this until just a month before the end of Saturn in Sag because there’s been a couple more events in a few people’s lives right at the end here, especially for people who have Saturn later. But for him, two things—one, he filed a grievance against the NFL for alleged collusion just this month; well, actually last month, so a couple weeks ago. And I don’t know where that’s gonna go, but that’s obviously kind of a big deal, you know. And a lot of times with these events during a Saturn return, it tells an ongoing story, but you might not see the follow-through yet until a little bit after the return is over. So that’s one piece.
But this other piece that I really love is that he just signed like a week ago—he reportedly signed a one million dollar book deal with a Random House imprint called One World, which is like so Sagittarian. I was sad to see that it wasn’t actually started—the imprint—during Saturn in Sag, although it was restarted recently during Saturn in Sag. But One World is such a Sagitarrian title.
PW: Indeed.
CB: Interesting. And yeah, I’m glad you mentioned we’re pretty close to the end of Saturn in Sag, but it’s not quite there yet; we’re in the last month. But Saturn—as we’re recording this—is at late 24° of Sagittarius. And that’s actually kind of tricky because there’s some people with it, you know, and they’re at the very end of Sagittarius in their natal chart. Like there’s one chart I just noticed for Hope Hicks—she’s an assistant to President Trump—and she has Saturn I think at like 27 Sagittarius.
So she’s about to have her exact Saturn return in the next, you know, couple of weeks, and they just announced that the FBI wanted to interview her in mid-November, which must be around the time of her exact Saturn return. So there’s some people like that who, you know, the most intense Saturn return has been in effect and it’s been building up for the past two years, but the exact return is going to hit right at the end of that period. And so, the most intense part might still happen, you know, in this next month.
PW: Another one is the guy who recently drove his truck through New Yorkers—I forget his name. But I found out his birth date is like February 8, 1988.
LS: Really?
PW: And Saturn is at 29…
LS: Oh, wow.
PW: …conjunct Uranus at 29. So he’s gonna be obviously brought forth for charges, you know, for this act of terrorism probably around the Saturn return. And yeah, so bit of a grim one.
CB: Right. Although that’s interesting with Saturn in Sag as a theme.
PW: Yeah.
LS: Right. I was actually trying to find his birth data as well.
PW: Yeah, no time.
LS: It sounded like a Saturn in Sag, and he was 29.
PW: No, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and that’s another theme of Saturn in Sag, you know, religious…
LS: Like fanaticism.
PW: Yeah.
LS: Fervor. Religious fervor.
PW: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Sure.
PW: Osama bin Laden was born with Saturn in Sag.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Okay. All right, so yeah, so that’s a good first example of Saturn in Sag with Colin Kaepernick and that’s a good point. I mean, that has been really interesting because, you know, we have—Leisa and I—have both, you know, friends who are like liberals who are astrologers and friends who conservative that are astrologers, and it’s sometimes been interesting seeing how those two groups will interpret something like this transit in different ways based on their political beliefs. But there’s certain core themes it seems that are there, that are sort of unarguable regardless of how you’re looking at his story and his situation or what your personal views are on it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, so did you have another Saturn in Sag, or should we jump to some of the other examples that might be relevant at this point? Leisa?
LS: I have another Saturn in Sag, but maybe you can go first. Yeah, ‘cause I have one that’s a little longer, so maybe you could do some quicker ones.
CB: Okay. I do have one that’s very much tied in with Saturn in Sag. It actually has a bunch of different themes and there’s a bunch of themes that are relevant to it. But there was this post on Reddit earlier this year that I thought was really interesting that caught my attention, it was titled “Scientist turns astrologer during Saturn Return.” And I sort of talked with her a little bit. And I’m not going to be able to retell her entire story, but I did want to retell a little bit of just her post from Reddit, and she said it was okay if I shared her chart but not her name. So hers is relevant because she actually has Aquarius rising and Saturn ruling the Ascendant—using the traditional ruler of Aquarius—and it’s in Sagittarius in the 11th whole sign house, with the degree of the Meridian Midheaven inconjunct Uranus at 27 Sag.
So her thing that was interesting—or her basic pitch at least in the Reddit post that was really interesting—was titled “Scientist turns astrologer during Saturn Return.” So I’m gonna read some of it because with a lot of these stories I’m actually not going to do a very good job of retelling it, but if I give sort of a snippet from the original description I think that does a better job. And originally, that was going to be how I was gonna structure this episode, as I debated for months whether to do individual interviews with these people and then play those snippets or just have like, you know, a group or a few of us, like we are doing now, where we talk about them. And I decided to go this route because I didn’t think I would be able to fit in a bunch of Saturn return stories if I did the interview route because it would take too long to actually do those interviews. But this is sort of the middle ground that I thought I would go with.
So here’s the post. She says: “Yep that’s me. I’m a grown damn woman, doctorate bearing scientist, atheist, and now…I’m in love with astrology.” She says: “I’m a solar Capricorn [w]ith [a] Pisces Moon and Aquarius Rising. My mom always said I was sensitive and I told her [how]she was full of shit. I now have no choice but to believe her. I recently told my partner of 10 years [that] I’m bisexual—a piece of cake. telling him that I’ve been reading about astrology? Mind-blowingly difficult.” So she’s like, ‘coming out about my sexuality, fine, telling him I’m an astrologer, really difficult.’ “My favorite authors have always been the modern atheist writers, but now I can’t stop listening to astrology podcasts! I’ve tried explaining astrology to my partner, how just because it doesn’t fit within the modern parameters of the scientific method, that it’s still a valid tool for exploring the world…that I’m aware of the confirmation bias, etc., he continues to make jokes.”
“It is very difficult for me to reconcile this newly discovered affinity for the stars. I’ve always had a fascination with intuition, the sky, introspection, but I never thought I’d turn into a huge hypocrite because of it. Seriously though, you can’t make this shit up…like every good friends or partner I’ve had have birthdays in the same two week window in June. That’s like…eight [different] people. All with those same birthday weeks…and I keep asking new friends when their birthdays are and they’re ALL [in] JUNE. My partner doesn’t want me spending money on it, [and] so I won’t be buying a reading anytime soon. I’m trying to just learn it all the long hand way so I can just read my own chart. Wish me luck as I pray to my ruler Saturn who apparently materializes as my boyfriend!!”
So actually that was her initial post. I actually talked to her, and she’s had a number of other interesting Saturn return themes. Saturn’s in her 11th house and she previously was not a very social person, and then over the past few years she’s gone through a complete transformation and suddenly is very social and is very connected with different social groups. So there’s a bunch of other themes that are relevant, so I don’t want to make it seem like that’s the only thing that came up with her Saturn return, and, in fact, there’s a lot of other interesting things. But just in terms of situating this and talking about some ones where the sign of Sagittarius itself is relevant in terms of describing some of it, this seems like another one in terms of somebody who’s struggling with going through the Saturn return and having a sudden, you know, challenge and change to their worldview and to their belief system and the structures that were previously built into their life up to this point as a result of that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that seems consistent with some of the ones you’ve found as well, right, Leisa?
LS: Yeah. And this one’s kind of interesting too because not only Saturn in Sagittarius, as a general thing, can bring that up—you know, ideologies and challenges around that—but Saturn can also bring changes or bring challenges to planets that are ruled by Saturn during the Saturn return. And so, this person has the ruler of the 9th house as Venus, and Venus is an Aquarius in the 1st house; and so during the Saturn returns, Saturn would also be ruling that ruler of the 9th house very prominently placed in the 1st. And so, that makes sense both in terms of the ruler of the 9th in the 1st being like she’s gotten a PhD, you know, higher education being a 9th house topic, and so that being prominent in the person’s life, but also the 9th house being astrology and sort of, you know, world views. And so, I see it kind of echoing in both of those things—the Saturn in Sag as just the basic sign, as well as Saturn ruling the 9th house ruler.
CB: Sure.
PW: Yeah.
CB: One of the things I’ve realized also over the past few years is I keep seeing when Saturn’s like the ruler of the 1st house that the 1st house and the notion of self really does become one of the primary keywords and one of the primary themes of the Saturn return, and that there’s something where the person sometimes themselves goes through a transformation or has a major change to something about how they see themselves or their perception of themselves or how the world sees them, and sometimes that’s one of the dominant themes in the Saturn return when it’s ruling the 1st house or sometimes when it’s in the 1st house.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Definitely.
PW: Well, you’re Aquarius rising, Chris, aren’t you?
CB: Yeah, well, and that was really funny. And, you know, it’s a little personal but one of the things that was funny during my Saturn return that was a big unexpected thing was that I lost, you know, my hair. I started losing my hair during my Saturn return and like struggled with that. And so, it was very literal how I view myself or how the world views me, and eventually around that time deciding just to start shaving my head. So that seems like a really kind of minor blow-off thing, but for me at the time it was kind of a big, big deal and it had to do with themes like self-perception and other things like that.
PW: Yeah. But now you look super cool and like super hot. It’s a good look. You wear it well. Like if I was bald, I wouldn’t be able to pull it off quite like you do.
CB: Sure.
PW: No. It’s, you know, Saturnian. I mean, Saturn’s not Venus, but Saturn’s, you know, Saturn.
LS: Right. It’s like having a more mature identity.
PW: Mature, yeah.
LS: So the 1st house being identity and appearance, you know.
PW: Serious. Sober. Yeah, it’s a good look.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s just funny because when I was, you know, growing up I always had long hair like down to my chin and stuff like that.
PW: I know.
CB: If you look at my old pictures, it’s very funny. Anyway, that was something that was like really funny for me going through that with Saturn ruling the Ascendant, but it’s something I’ve seen in other ones too. And so, I’m gonna transition away from this example. I want to thank her—I don’t mention her name ‘cause I don’t give away any identity things—but there’s other things that she mentioned that were relevant, but I wanted to use it primarily for that reason just because that was such a great post on Reddit. And people can search for it and find it if they want just to read that and some of the other comments in that thread. So that thematically, though, actually brings me to another chart that’s sort of connected with that, which was Shia LaBeouf. So here’s his chart. So his was one of the ones I was interested in because we have a timed chart for him, and he also has Aquarius rising and Saturn is at 5° of Sagittarius in the 11th whole sign house conjunct the degree of the Midheaven.
So his was really interesting for like a few different reasons, but one of the things of course that was super interesting just from an outsider’s standpoint is that the week of or around the day of his exact Saturn return—around the week of his exact Saturn return—he did this thing called AllMyMovies. He had been a child actor since he was really young, and he was on like the Disney Channel and did all this other stuff, and then eventually as he went into his teens and early adulthood was doing major sort of blockbuster films like the Transformers series and eventually like Indiana Jones and other stuff like that. And the week of his exact Saturn return, he ended up renting out a movie theater and sitting there and he watched all of his movies that he had done since he was a little kid, straight through for like an entire week, and he livestreamed it.
So there was a camera pointed at his face as he was reacting to basically reliving his childhood and much of his life up to that point. And literally, you could see he was watching himself having grown and progressed over the course of his life through his movies. And everybody was sort of watching this and it became this interesting sort of social phenomenon where people were watching this guy reliving his life at this very pivotal moment of his exact Saturn return. So one of the things that we don’t know that I was always curious about of course is we don’t know if this was deliberate—because this was part of an art project, which is an interesting sort of tie-in with the 11th house—that this was one of several different avant-garde sort of art exhibits that he did with these two other friends over the course of the past few years, probably drawing in the 11th house placement of Saturn.
We don’t know if they were aware that that was his exact Saturn return and that’s what gave them the idea to do that and that’s why they set it up for literally the week of his exact Saturn return, or if it just happened to work out that way and they just happened to schedule him watching all of his movies the same week as his exact Saturn return, which would be pretty weird and pretty cool. But that was one of the real notable or memorable ones, and it was tied in with, again, another example of somebody who had Saturn ruling the Ascendant while having his Saturn return.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Also rules the 12th and Mars.
LS: Right.
PW: I wonder what that was going to be about.
LS: I was gonna say that, too, yeah.
CB: Sure. Go ahead and,
1:06:02
you know, expand on that.
PW: Oh, well, wasn’t he arrested? He was arrested a couple of times actually. And the 12th is, you know, associated with prison or being, you know, removed away from society. And he has Mars retrograde in the 12th, so that would also indicate troubles in this domain. So during his Saturn return, he was arrested for I think one time for getting publicly intoxicated and then like another one was his art exhibit, He Will Not Divide Us exhibit that he had. He was carted away by police. So he’s gotten in trouble with the law a bit, you know, over the course of Saturn being a Sagittarius, and of course Saturn rules not just his 1st but also his 12th, which contains—well, no actually. Mars isn’t his contrary to sect malefic but it’s still a malefic in a bad house. So it sort of highlights, you know, when you’re in the middle of a Saturn return—when Saturn’s, you know, back in the natal sign—that it’s activating or putting some sort of emphasis on any planets which are in Capricorn and Aquarius and the topics that they rule house-wise.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. And that was hugely relevant also because one of the, you know, live art exhibits that you mentioned—the He Will Not Divide Us one, where they opened up an exhibit at some museum or something with like a livestream camera pointed out to a field connected with the museum—it was like him and a group of people chanting, ‘he will not divide us,’ and it opened on January 20 of 2017, the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, so it was like a Trump protest. And it’s actually interesting that you mentioned that in terms of drawing in the 12th house ‘cause one of them the main traditional 12th house themes is also enemies. And that exhibit actually ended up sort of riling up an internet mob from like 4chan against him, and they started trolling him basically sort of incessantly at this art exhibit and continually kept getting it shut down as a result of that. So there were some interesting things with that as well.
PW: Yeah. Interestingly, you know, Mars is supposed to rule, you know, separation and division. And he has Venus right opposite that Mars. So of course the name of the exhibit is “He Will Not Divide Us.” Venus is about bringing things together.
CB: Sure.
PW: Mar is splitting apart.
CB: The final thing that was relevant here also is just, you know, you pointed out that Saturn. In this chart, he has a night chart. He has the Sun in the 5th house, so Saturn is going to manifest its more difficult significations, or Saturn’s going to be the more problematic planet for him compared to Mars. And what’s interesting when that happens—when Saturn is also the ruler of the Ascendant, and Saturn is therefore representing the self—is that sometimes there’s something that comes from within the native that causes the problems. Saturn is the planet that’s going to cause problems in the chart because it’s a night chart.
But then if Saturn is also the ruler of the 1st house—which is the house that’s most closely associated with the native—then sometimes it means there’s something the native does or something about who the native is that itself is the source of the problem sometimes in their life. And so, that’s when you do sometimes run into issues or where some of the things you mentioned about him, you know, running into issues with the law due to like public intoxication or whatever that was and some of the struggles or other things that he’s had over the course the past few years become, you know, potentially relevant.
PW: Oh, yeah, there’s Neptune in the 12th, too…
CB: Right.
PW: …in terms of intoxication, right?
CB: Well, and it was also just relevant as well because it’s been interesting seeing him go through this maturation process over the past two or three years. Because I feel like up until two or three years ago, it almost became a meme that there were a lot of people that didn’t like him or didn’t like his movies, and it was almost like a cliché, sort of online thing. But over the past two to three years, I think it’s been interesting the way in which he has changed his image in some ways; and there has been a bit of a change, especially very early on when he did the AllMyMovies exhibit. There was something very endearing about that where people sort of got some insight into and understood who he was and why he was what he is now as a result of growing up as a child actor. So there were some changes there.
PW: He definitely threw off the old image of him. In some ways, I think he replaced it with this kind of unstable, like crazy image. I’m not sure. Maybe he’ll come into that when Saturn enters Aquarius, you know, and he sort of more fully, you know, embodies Saturn in the sign of his Ascendant. But yeah, I think the meme is now with Shia LaBeouf that he’s kind of unstable. Although it’s funny because Shia LaBeouf has also kind of poked fun at that as well with that YouTube video where someone wrote this whole song about him, imagining him as a serial killer like coming to kill them, you know, and like having a fight.
He’s like a cannibal and he’s like out in the woods and he’s gonna get you. And then at the very end, over this huge elaborate like choral production with, you know, an orchestra and dance, it sort of pans back and you just hear like one person clapping in the audience, and it’s Shia LaBeouf who has just watched this song about him like being a serial killer. So it’s like he knows, you know, but people think this about him. So now he’s just kind of, you know, throwing up his middle fingers at it.
CB: Right. No, that’s a really good point. It’s like he’s in on the joke, or it’s like he’s aware of the public’s perception of him and sometimes uses that or plays with that in different ways that’s interesting. And I think that’s partially a manifestation of Saturn ruling the Ascendant, and that’s why we’ve seen him…
PW: Definitely.
CB: …and some of his personal transformation has been part of that over the past few years.
PW: Definitely.
CB: Anyway, so that’s one example I thought would be good in terms of being tied in with that. So, let’s see, where should we go from here? So a lot of my other examples are house-based in terms of the rulers of different houses and showing the activation of, you know, the topics associated with those houses as being relevant to the way Saturn manifests. Are there any other ones that we should touch on first before we go there?
PW: A fairly contemporary one that I noticed just the other day—I don’t know if you have the chart—but it’s Ke$ha.
CB: Yeah, I’ve got the chart.
PW: Yeah, so she has Saturn I think at 20 Sag. And over the summer she released this song called “Praying,” which, I mean, is Saturn in Sag. You know, Sag has these connotations of belief, and, you know, praying I guess you could associate with that. And she released this song when Saturn was just at 22 Sagittarius. So she probably finished the recording for this song obviously before that July 6 date. So I imagine she probably recorded the song at her Saturn return because it was really just a few weeks before the release of this song that she had her Saturn return to the degree.
And of course this song, Praying, it was sort of built as her comeback song after the whole saga of these sexual assault allegations that she made against this producer she worked with, Dr. Luke. And the legal entanglements she had with her record company kind of forced her to work with this guy who she said like sexually abused her, and she wasn’t able to put out any work until—I’m not sure exactly how that all got resolved and she was able to start releasing music again. But I think it’s interesting I guess from the point of view of the sign, but also just as an interesting example of what happens when Saturn reaches the degree—that this is when she produced this piece of music, this, you know, work of art basically in which she kind of puts the past behind her and kind of embraces a new beginning in her life. When you watch the music video, at the very end of the song, it says, “A new beginning.”
I have a quote from her. A lot of people have thought this song was very remarkable because Ke$ha was mostly known for these very upbeat, you know, kind of filthy, dirty, pop-like party anthems, and she had this very kind of gritty and kind of gross image in some ways. But, you know, with this Saturn return, now a lot of critics have remarked about how this song has such a different sound. I mean, it almost sounds like an Adele song. You know, it’s very soulful. You know, it was a complete change from the kind of music she’s made before, so it sort of shows how she’s matured as an artist, as a singer.
And she said, for example: “I’ve never been more excited about a piece of art I’ve ever done in my entire life. This is truly from the inside of my guts.” And she said: “I’ve channeled my feelings of severe hopelessness and depression. I’ve overcome obstacles. I found strength in myself even when it fell out of reach. I found what I had thought was an unattainable place of peace. So the song’s about coming to fill empathy for someone else, even though they hurt you or scare you. It’s a song about letting you be proud of the person you are, even during low moments when you feel alone. It’s also about hoping everyone, even someone who hurt you can heal.”
So, I mean, in all of that, in all of her explanation of this song, “Praying,” you can clearly pick out a lot of the kind of Saturn in Sagittarius themes. You know, Jupiter is also associated with forgiveness. And so, that’s kind of the main theme of the song that she is not necessarily forgiving and forgetting what happened to her. But she’s like, ‘I hope you find your peace,’ you know, ‘but I’m moving on’ kind of thing. So I thought it was just kind of a clean example of, you know, a Saturn in Sagittarius return.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. Because, I mean, she’s, you know, been in some struggles over the past few years, so it was really notable that she finally released new music. Because she was somebody who was very successful in like the late 2000s, and then suddenly there was this controversy because she was in a contract with like a music producer and then she alleged that he had sexually assaulted her, and then there was like a court fight. But then it’s like his side, the music producer, was saying she was just saying this to get out of the contract, and she was saying, ‘No, I was assaulted. I do not want to work with this person anymore.’ But then it got held up in the courts, and as a result of that she couldn’t release any music at all and her career kind of started disappearing, even though she was at the height of her prominence. And so, now, all of a sudden, as you noted, just shortly after the exact return, she’s suddenly releasing new music again somehow.
PW: Right. And this song—because of the experience she’s had—this song has almost become kind of like an anthem. I heard on the radio some DJ say this song is becoming a kind of anthem for the MeToo movement online, which I know is kind of more of a ‘Jupiter in Scorpio’ thing, but I think it’s interesting regardless that this song kind is tied up with this Saturn in Sagittarius thing for Ke$ha.
CB: Right.
PW: Anyway, so that was that.
LS: Well, it’s interesting too what you said about the quote with, you know, Jupiter in Pisces ruling this Saturn-Sagittarius example—which is maybe the first one, maybe the last one had that too—but we had Jupiter in Aries before, and that was much more the ‘forgiveness’ piece and the ‘empathy’ piece. Even if it was something that really, you know, hurt her or hurt her career, it was really an interesting manifestation of the ruler of Saturn in Sag. The other thing is sometimes I notice that when it gets to the exact degree, you know, you think of Saturn much more in terms of like impediments or you being kind of held back from something that you want. But times I’ve noticed—like this example that you’ve brought, and I remember doing a Saturn return story about one like this too—it’s almost the opposite. Like you’re released from the impediment at the exact Saturn return.
PW: Well, and she has Saturn conjunct…
LS: Uranus. Yeah, that’s right.
PW: Uranus.
CB: Reversals.
PW: And the music video—right—the music video is like an explosion of color and, you know; I mean, not very ‘Saturn-y’. Saturn’s associated more with darkness, you know, but this is just a rainbow of optimism. So it’s, you know, much more Uranus in Sagittarius.
LS: Right. Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, and that Uranus conjunction, one of the themes that I see is reversals as potentially prominent. Not as potentially prominent—just something I’ve seen come up a few times as reversals. So in her instance, this is more of a positive reversal where she was being stopped or blocked or held back from doing something for a while, and then suddenly after the exact return, she’s freed or sort of liberated to do something once again.
LS: Right.
CB: One of the other reversals that I’ve seen that was really prominent in the news for a while, around the middle of Saturn in Sagittarius, was Ronda Rousey, the MMA fighter. So here is Ronda Rousey’s chart. And this is actually a timed chart because she was born in California. So unlike the last chart, I meant to mention with Ke$ha, we don’t have a time, so we don’t know if it’s a day chart or a night chart or what house it’s placed in, so we’re just talking in general. This one is more timed, although, still, really it’s only necessary to talk in general about it at this point.
You know, it’s hard to convey—and somebody like Austin would do a better job because he was an MMA fan—but even not being an MMA fan or somebody that’s following it super closely, it’s like if you followed this over the past few years just in the general public Ronda Rousey became the face of female MMA fighters. And she brought that to a new level of respectability and notability and everything else and became the face of that whole sort of profession and that whole thing, both from an entertainment standpoint, but also from a sports and other standpoint.
She also started getting roles in movies. I think she was in one of the Fast & Furious movies—she just became huge. And she also looked kind of unstoppable to the point that people really talked her up a lot, and some of that was probably marketing, but also some of it was she seemed like just this powerhouse in terms of mixed martial arts fighting and winning a lot and couldn’t be stopped. And then all of a sudden, you know, she went through her Saturn return, and she went into this major, major fight and she lost, and it was a major upset and a major reversal.
And it was just crazy how virtually overnight just the entire narrative about her and her career and everything else just suddenly changed, and suddenly, you know, the public was just heaping like tons and tons of scorn about her and saying she had been overblown. Just the narrative about her just suddenly changed almost overnight after that first loss. And I know that she went through a very difficult period after that fight—that first fight that she lost—in terms of struggling to retrain and think if she could make a comeback and everything else. And then, eventually, she did another fight I think about a year later and she lost again in another major upset, and after that second one, the narrative just was very bad. So it was a very difficult period in her life, but it was a really good example in terms of an unexpected negative reversal or a sort of ‘fall from grace’ type situation, I think.
LS: Yeah. And I remember actually paying attention to one of those—even though I otherwise don’t follow those sports—because it was so built up. You know, it was in the public consciousness no matter what. And it wasn’t just a major reversal, it was like an absolute sudden—you know, it was like 30 seconds or something, one of the fights.
CB: Right.
LS: She was knocked out in like 30 seconds. It was crazy. And she had been paid so much for that fight. You know, it was like a pay-per-view.
CB: Right. Like she made a lot of money, but it was hugely embarrassing and hugely sort of unexpected, but also just a reversal and a fall from grace. She was like—I’m trying to think of some of those other athletes who were just at the top of their game and everyone thinks the world of them, and they’re sort of put on this pedestal, but then, you know, sometimes something happens and they fall off of that. And sometimes the fall is just really devastating or is just really notable compared to where they were even a short time before that, and a lot of that seemed to be about her Saturn return story.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
PW: What about the sect?
CB: Sect? I mean, this is one of those examples where because I don’t follow her life, and I don’t know much about her personal life, I don’t know. One of the things about hers is, for example, because it’s in the 7th, it’s ruling the 8th and the 9th. You know, I think a lot of this is gonna end up being about where does she go from here and what does her life story end up being after this point, if this chapter of her life is closing down. And I think that’s part of what’s happening, and so it’s not necessarily going to be clearer to us as outsiders. And that’s one of the difficulties…
PW: Right.
CB: …of dealing with celebrity charts, where you’re just looking from the outside about whatever you actually know or what’s documented about the person.
PW: I did just check the transits, though, for the first fight that she had, which she lost. Uranus was 1° off from her Mars.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Right.
PW: And Mars does return to its general position, you know, every 30 years if you add two 15-year periods together. It’s not as close a return as 32, but a 30 years’ Mars is kind of back in a similar phase as it was at birth. But the other thing is that with Saturn conjunct Uranus, you know, her Saturn transits are gonna be a bit more Uranian. And then the fact that she had like this big Uranus transit to her Mars on the night of her first defeat, I think, you know, still says that Mars in effect is in here as, you know, the contrary to sect malefic. But I guess we’d have to conclude that the Saturn return is in some way gonna be constructive in the ultimate, in the sort of totality of her life. Yeah, like you said, we don’t quite know.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: It’s not as obvious.
CB: Yeah. You know, this is one of the examples that seems to go against my usual interpretive principle, which is that typically people with day charts, my keyword for the Saturn return is ‘a surmountable difficulty’. It’s like something that comes up, and it’s the cliché, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ And you have to like, you know, get over a major hurdle, but eventually you’re able to surmount it, and you learn and grow and whatever as a person as a result of those difficulties, whereas the ‘night chart’ people sometimes just run into a major roadblock or obstacle where they can’t proceed further down that specific road and have to sort of submit to it in some ways or just go an alternate route sometimes as the, you know, the insurmountable difficulty basically. Hers is a little bit different because this is a day chart, and she clearly did run into an insurmountable difficulty to the extent that she lost two major fights.
PW: Oh, well, Mars is actually directly applying a trine to her Saturn.
LS: Yeah, I was gonna say that actually because Mars is the malefic contrary to sect. It’s ruling the 6th, which sometimes has to do with bodily issues. And she was pretty badly beat up in that one where she was knocked out in 30 seconds. And even though it’s a trine, you know, and Mars is in its own sign of Aries—both of which, you know, makes things more constructive—it is still technically the malefic contrary to sect applying to Saturn for the Saturn return. And that is one of the interpretive principles as well. Usually if Mars is involved in a day chart that does make the Saturn matter more difficult, even though typically it’s more like if it’s a square or an opposition or something.
PW: And so, with Uranus on top of the Mars there that would supercharge the malefic contrary to fact, which is then applying to her Saturn, yeah. Yikes.
CB: I mean, and one of the things—you mentioning the Uranus transit to Mars—that I meant to say in the preliminary statements that we should be aware of and careful about is like we’re focusing on the Saturn return here, but the Saturn return is not everything. And for all of these people there’s oftentimes other major transits happening at the same time, which can sometimes add to or be descriptive of or be even sometimes more important factors that are actually describing some of the major events that are happening at that time.
But, you know, we’re focusing on just one slice of that, but we should definitely keep in mind that there’s other time-lord periods, there’s other timing techniques that are sort of active and running that we’re not necessarily talking about in each of these examples. So it’s not always necessary that everything has to be like the Saturn transit or the Saturn return or found through that lens, but, indeed, oftentimes there’s other stuff going on as well.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So anyway, hers is an interesting example. Austin and I often talk about that as contrasted with Conor McGregor who is actually a night chart and also lost a major fight, but it was less of a major devastating loss because it was almost like more anticipated in some sense that he would lose. So there’s an interesting inversion there of the rule, and I’m not really fully sure yet what to make of that. But Ronda’s—Ronda Rousey is one that I wanted to highlight because it’s a much more typical cliché sort of ‘fall from grace’ type example.
And, you know, part of that probably is the fact that it’s ruling the degree of her MC, which is in Aquarius. But there’s some 9th house and some 8th house things tied in with that—and 7th house things in terms of relationships that I don’t fully understand. Perhaps if we knew her or were privy to information about her personal life we would sort of understand better. All right, so that is that example. Let’s see, Leisa, I know you had one more that would be a good Saturn Saturn in Sag sort of general example to talk about before we get into more house rulership ones, and that was Daryl Davis.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so that’s my favorite Saturn in Sag example right now, and this is a second Saturn return. It’s a little unique ‘cause a lot of the ones we were talking about are first.
CB: Right, and that’s another preliminary thing I forgot to mention. We’re focusing here on the first Saturn return because that tends to be more important, because it’s like that final passage to adulthood. But, you know, people have second and sometimes even third Saturn returns and those can also be pretty pivotal as well, and this is an example of that.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so, this is an untimed chart but we do have the date. So March 26, 1958. He’s got Saturn around 25° of Sagittarius. And this one, I’ve been kind of paying attention—especially with these untimed charts—to the planet ruling Saturn, which is Jupiter in all of these cases. So this one is Saturn in Sag ruled by Jupiter in Libra; and so, in a nice sextile and also ruling it. And it’s just such a perfect example of that configuration, of that rulership. So his story is that he is a musician who was somewhat famous in his own right for that, but he also became famous for befriending a large number of Ku Klux Klan members. And I should say at the start he’s an African-American man.
And so, he became famous for, one-by-one, befriending people who were in the Ku Klux Klan or other sort of hate groups or white supremacist groups, which was pretty unusual. And a number of them, over the past 30 years, have renounced their membership in the KKK. And very uniquely and vividly they’ve given him their robes and their, you know, different accouterments that are part of being the KKK, and he’s collected them. And so, he’s got this large collection now of KKK, you know, paraphernalia and clothing and so forth. And actually a lot of the people who did renounce membership eventually were kind of high up. They were like state leaders, county leaders, you know, grand dragons and things like that.
So it’s just a unique story in itself. But of course it’s so perfectly the sign of Saturn in Sagittarius, you know. It’s crossing to those who are different from you, or, you know, crossing to radically different ideologies than you and seeing if you can get there from here. Kind of like your bridge thing, Patrick, but, you know, in more cultural terms. You know, can we reach each other through even this great expanse? And so, this is really amazing. So during his second Saturn return, there was actually a documentary made about his life called Accidental Courtesy. Okay, is that not another Libra word—courtesy? And, you know, his entire methodology through these past few decades has been—you know the ‘what’ he was doing was the Saturn in Sag, but the ‘how’ he was doing it was the Jupiter in Libra. Because he was cultivating these personal, one-to-one relationships over and over and befriending these people, and that’s how he kind of, you know, made them come around.
So, yeah, there was this documentary made during his second Saturn return last year, which is kind of notable in itself because often that’s what you see, especially with second Saturn returns, but, you know, sometimes third; but even occasionally first if people have been doing something for a while that’s notable. Sometimes there’s kind of a capping off or a display of what they’ve been doing or winning awards or, you know, that kind of thing. So anyway, he had a documentary made about his life last year, and it premiered on PBS. This was not the initial release. The initial release was last year, but it premiered on PBS’ Independent Lens this year on February 13, 2017. That was actually the exact return to the minute of his Saturn return; even to the degree, that was the day of his exact Saturn return, which is amazing.
CB: Wow.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that’s really interesting because that’s…
PW: Wow.
CB: …clearly something that wouldn’t be in his control, or like nobody scheduled it like that deliberately. It just happened to come out, you know, at his exact Saturn return.
LS: Right. Exactly.
CB: And that’s why with the Shia LaBeouf example, even though it’s possible that they did do that deliberately, or it’s pretty possible, it’s also, you know, possible that it just happened like that accidentally. Sometimes you don’t really know because sometimes it really does happen very tightly or exactly with some of these alignments.
LS: Right.
PW: Did he start doing this at his first second return?
LS: You know, I was trying to nail down dates before, it wasn’t clear. It seemed like kind of the impulse started around then. Because he said 1983—which I think would have been Saturn in Libra—was the first time he met someone from the Ku Klux Klan, and they were like, “I’ve never talked to a black man before.” And he was like, “Why?” And they were like, “Uhh,” and then they said they were in the Ku Klux Klan. And then he said he’d been collecting robes since 1990. So I got the sense that in between the two was when something kind of started, but I couldn’t get a firm date.
PW: Right.
LS: So this is, you know, an amazing Saturn in Sag just kind of bridging differences, which was good…
PW: Definitely.
LS: …you know, Saturn in Sagittarius keywords. He talks a lot about educating others and educating oneself about others in order to bridge those ideologies; you know, ideology also being a Sagittarian word. And yeah, he has this catchphrase that he repeated through the documentary. He was like, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?,” which, again, keeps repeating, you know, the Saturn in Sag ruled by the Jupiter in Libra. Like he wanted people to get to know him and vice versa in order to bridge these, you know, ideologies and change their prejudices.
And another reason why I thought this was an amazing example was because, you know, it already sounds like this kind of crossing of subcultures, but he actually additionally was raised outside of the US for many years until age 10, and so that also brings kind of another layer of difference in terms of what you’ve grown up with. And he has this great quote that was like, “I’ve been in 53 different countries. I’ve been exposed to many, many different cultures, races, religions, socioeconomic statuses. I look at the Ku Klux Klan as simply another culture. I don’t look at them the same way I might have looked at them had I grown up in this country and had to fight bigotry my whole life.” And then he says, “Yes, I’ve fought it, but not my whole life.”
And so, it kind of makes him come from a different vantage point than if you like grew up here, you know, from age zero, which actually then interestingly goes into him meeting with some people who do yell at him in the film, which are some young Black Lives Matter activists and also someone from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is an anti-hate group. That person didn’t yell at him, but they clearly all disagreed with what he was doing. And that was interesting to me as well in terms of Saturn in Sag because it’s like they were all supposedly on the same side, you know. So even the Saturn in Sag kind of bridging cultures and bridging ideologies, you’re still going to get flack, even if you’re sort of doing something that would be considered admirable much of the time.
CB: Right.
PW: Definitely.
CB: And this is also a really good example in terms of mitigations and in terms of the configuration of Saturn in the chart and however those configurations are partially dictating the experience of the Saturn return. Because this is like an extremely well—we don’t have a time for it. But at least just in terms of the aspects to Saturn, it’s an extremely well-placed or well-aspected Saturn where you have Jupiter ruling Saturn, as you said, in Libra, but it’s in Libra and it’s forming or is in a superior sextile within 4 or 5° degrees with Saturn.
So we have Jupiter sextile Saturn, which is a positive affirming aspect. We also have Venus sending an inferior sextile back to Saturn from 19° of Aquarius. So the other benefic is also aspecting Saturn, and in fact is basically enclosing Saturn between their rays. You have Mars, the malefic, and it’s not making a hard aspect with Saturn. This one’s also missing the Uranus themes. So Uranus is in a wide, sign-based trine, but it’s basically not very connected with Saturn. And so, this one is notable from some of the other first Saturn returns that we’re talking about from people born in the 1980s because you don’t have that unexpected reversal type theme coming up here because Uranus isn’t present with Saturn.
LS: Yeah. Definitely. And I was thinking of some of those configurations too. You know, just because this looks great I could kind of understand people arguing with him, I mean, from the, you know, like how far is too far to bridge. But not everyone would be successful as he has been doing the same thing, and I think that kind of is attested to by his chart.
CB: Right. That you could attempt the same thing but fail. It could have the opposite outcome.
LS: Yeah, for sure. I mean, especially if you’re talking to people who, you know, are like willing to be violent, which many of them were.
CB: Right. You could attempt it and get killed or something.
LS: Yeah. Exactly. So he definitely has some great aspects going on that I think helped him be successful in doing this, not just having the belief making him successful that he could do it.
CB: Sure. And that also brings up an interpretive principle just that when Saturn returns back to its natal position, it’s activating Saturn in its natal position, but it’s also activating all of the aspects to natal Saturn. So it’s like when it gets back in that degree range, it sextiles that natal Venus at 19 Aquarius, and it sextiles that natal Jupiter at 29 Libra. So it’s activating all of those aspects as well, and that becomes important as one of the interpretive principles that you have to keep in mind when you’re trying to figure out what the Saturn return is going to be about.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was really struck by all his ‘air’ planets in general because his whole methodology was like conversation, basically like congenial conversation and somehow that worked.
CB: Sure. Definitely. All right, well, that’s a good Saturn in Sag example: issues of like belief, issues of fear, issues of foreigners or foreign places and foreign travel and foreign countries, and also just the issue of like ‘the other’ and things like that.
LS: And, you know, who was too different to reach I feel like was one of the overarching themes by the end.
CB: Sure. Definitely. All right, so let’s see—in terms of other examples, I have a bunch of sort of house-based ones. And I think I want to do a little run-through of a bunch of those really quick, if that’s all right.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Yeah.
CB: All right, so we have a few different friends—all of us do—that are sort of mutual friends, or I’ve got a few friends that I’ve seen go through Saturn returns and some of their stories have been really interesting over the past few years. Let’s see, one of them said I could share her story but preferred that I kept the data and the name anonymous. So what I did is I drew a sort of chart. I drew ‘a’ chart with just her rising and Saturn placement and Jupiter placement. So she has Scorpio rising. Saturn is in Sagittarius in the 2nd whole sign house and it’s ruled by Jupiter, which is in Gemini in the 8th whole sign house. And this is a day chart. So I’m actually just gonna read the paragraph.
So with her chart—interpretive principles. So let’s go back to our basic interpretive principles, which is it’s a day chart, so we would expect sort of like surmountable difficulties during the Saturn return. It’s in the 2nd house, so we would expect financial matters or her personal finances or livelihood to come up. It’s ruling the 3rd house, so we would expect siblings to come up. And it’s ruling the 4th house, so we would expect parents to come up, right?
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Right.
CB: And then finally, relevant that the ruler of the 2nd itself is Jupiter, which is placed in the 8th house of death and inheritance and other people’s money. So she wrote me a paragraph, and she actually had a very long story and there’s a lot of details, but this paragraph does a pretty good job of summarizing the core of it—of what she experienced. So she says, “When Saturn first entered Sagittarius, my sister and I were both given a substantial amount of money from our father. About a year later, my sister and I had a falling out over shared resources and business ties involving money.” Actually they had a business together.
“Some months after that, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.” About six months later her mother actually died and passed away during this person’s Saturn return from cancer. So there’s the 4th house. The ruling of the 4th house is both that her father gave her money (so the ruler of the 4th in the 2nd) but also her mother died of cancer (so ruler of Saturn being the ruler of the 4th house). “After my mother passed away, we learned we had inherited her divorce judgment against our father, and that she had appointed a trustee to go about collecting the debt. We do not get to fire him and have no say in the matter of how he goes about doing this. He’s aggressively trying to collect a substantial sum of money from our father that is threatening to put him into bankruptcy, so that we kids can ‘inherit’ our ‘mother’s money’ even though it’s being taken directly from our father’s pocket.”
So what had happened is that her mother and father had divorced years earlier but had fought a sort of legal battle over the divorce settlement that was never settled. And now that her mother has died there’s somebody who’s continuing to fight that legal battle to get the money from the father supposedly to give to the children. But the children don’t want that to happen and just want the whole matter to go away but it’s out of their hands at this point. So it’s a really amazing example because you see all of the house placements coming into play in terms of Saturn being in the 2nd house, Saturn ruling the 3rd house of siblings, ruling the 4th house of parents, and the ruler of Saturn itself being in the 8th house of death, inheritance, and other people’s money, and all of those themes becoming very literally prominent in her life over the course of the past couple of years.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
PW: Wow.
LS: Definitely. Yeah, it exhibits all of those rulerships. And it’s also interesting that with Saturn being ruled by Jupiter in the 8th opposing Saturn, it’s like, you know, the money is still gonna come, but it’s gonna come through like this adversarial or tension-filled kind of relationship. Because, you know, they’re not totally comfortable with how it’s coming about but it’s still probably gonna come about.
PW: I mean, couldn’t they just give the money back to the dad if they…
LS: Like afterwards?
PW: Yeah. Just say, look, he’s gonna take this money, but we’ll just give it back to you when he does.
CB: Yeah, I have no idea. I’m wanting to force him to go bankrupt though in the process in order to pay it. Who knows.
PW: Yeah.
CB: But anyways, there’s actually a lot more details, a lot more nuance. I mean, her whole process of her mother’s unexpected cancer diagnosis and then six months later dying, at one point her mother had made a recovery like a few months into it and went back home. And then suddenly she was back in the hospital and then shortly after that suddenly she was gone. So there was a whole story there as well in terms of her processing her mother’s death and everything that went along with it that was very important and it was very much a focal point of the Saturn return as well. So if you actually understand all the nuances and other things surrounding this, it’s even more interesting and draws out more of those placements even more. And this is just like the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a really great example in terms of showing how those basic interpretive principles work in practice.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Okay, so that’s my first one. And hopefully, again, with all of these, I’m only sort of scratching the surface of them. So I apologize to everyone who wrote me like sort of extended stories about their Saturn return because I can’t get everything in, but I’m hoping at least we can get some of the main points. So another one is a friend of ours named Ashley. So this one—I think there’s a little bit of ambiguity because her rising degree is 0° of Libra, and it just clicked over into Libra a couple of minutes prior to the recorded birth time. So there’s some ambiguity over the rising sign, but we’re, I think, working under a presumptive Libra rising chart, which puts Saturn in Sagittarius in the 3rd whole sign house, ruling the 4th house and the 5th house.
And there was a bunch of stuff that went with that, and there was actually a whole story, but one of the primary things as I understood her Saturn return as she was like going through it and sort of reporting the process is that she was dealing with health issues and dealing with issues of being sick for several months, especially in connection with some dietary issues. And some of that comes up because she has like the ruler of the Ascendant in the 6th hole sign house and is sometimes very focused on 6th house issues pertaining to health and diet and other things like that. But with her Saturn return of course going through Sagittarius, it was squaring those 6th house placements of Venus and the Moon in Pisces in the 6th whole sign house.
But then at one point she was feeling ill and thought she had this whole other sort of illness thing going on for several months, and then all of a sudden it turned out—she found out later—that she was actually pregnant. So there was a sort of somewhat unexpected discovery that she had become pregnant during this time and that some of the health issues that she was dealing with for a short period of time turned out to be that.
And then over the course of the next few months, she went through—during the course of her final year of her Saturn return—the entire process of, you know, pregnancy and everything that comes along with that, and then just a few weeks ago actually had her son. Her son was actually born. So this is a really good example of just one of the house rulerships becoming relevant. So, Patrick, in your example, you know, it was very much focused on children because Saturn was in the 5th house, whereas this one—it’s a good example that even Saturn ruling the 5th house can sometimes make children a large part of the Saturn return.
PW: Totally. And with Uranus, again.
LS: A surprise pregnancy.
PW: Unexpected, yeah.
CB: So she actually had a bunch of other stuff. So I am gonna read this really quickly because I don’t want to underplay some of the 3rd house and the 6th house things that she talked about, and I hope that that’s okay that I’m reading it. I think I’m pretty sure she said it was okay that I did this, because she wrote a couple paragraphs.
So she says throughout the first half of her Saturn return, “I thought I should try to channel the energy by going back to school since acquiring clients as a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine proved challenging.” So the 3rd house sort of things and going back to school. “And I felt that perhaps being more versatile and having a wider scope of practice as a registered nurse or nurse practitioner would open more doors for me to practice acupuncture and Oriental medicine, while also being able to financially support myself. Part of this decision was also about redirecting the Moon-North Node-Saturn-Uranus square in my chart since I began experiencing health problems just a few days before my Saturn return began, before Saturn ingressed into Sagittarius the first time.”
“For more than six months, I struggled with kidney stones and bladder issues due to high concentrations of calcium oxalate in my blood, a byproduct of a strictly plant-based diet that I adhered to for spiritual preferences. I became a bit depressed throughout that period when I tried to maintain my habits without experiencing pain, but ended up needing to make modifications to my diet. This experience however made me concerned about my health since my 6th house is prominent in my chart, and I wanted to mitigate that if possible by practicing medicine.”
“After completing two prerequisites to apply to a nursing program, I received a message from an editor at Teen Vogue asking if I’d be interested in writing weekly horoscopes for the new spirituality column. I’d been referred after she reached out to another astrologer and began writing for the publication in July. At this point I decided to hold off on finishing the last two courses for pre-nursing since I wasn’t happy with it and focus on writing. I was also busy working part-time in a previous professor’s community acupuncture clinic and training to teach ballroom dancing in a friend’s studio during my free time, so I found myself needing space in my schedule, and writing horoscopes wasn’t something I would pass up.”
She has a sort of side note, “I later picked up another gig writing monthly and daily horoscopes. I was approached about the dailies within the same week that I found out I’d be getting a new vehicle, which I had been without for several years.” So she draws in some of the 3rd house travel-type significations that ended up becoming relevant during her Saturn return. “And the same week I had conceived my first child who would be born during my Saturn return. The pregnancy and writing dominated the last half of my Saturn return experience.” Yeah, and then that’s really the core thing—so themes like writing, becoming a writer and doing writing professionally, themes of health and illness. Themes of, you know, obviously children and pregnancy became a dominant theme in the last year of her Saturn return.
And also it sounds like they’re gonna relocate. She says, “Last of significance is my move my boyfriend and I are about to make. Within a matter of two days he was told about a job opening, an offering of a position to practice psychiatry in Connecticut where we’ll be moving in December before my Saturn return officially ends.” So at the very end of her Saturn return, right before Saturn leaves Sagittarius, they’re gonna relocate across the country. And Saturn of course is also the ruler of her 4th house, of her home and living situation.
So that’s it. Again, it’s another one of those stories where if you actually understood the story and you’d been following it live over the past few months—like seeing the Facebook posts of like her saying, “I’ve really been sick lately, and I don’t know what’s going on,” and then her saying, “I’m actually pregnant”—and then you like seeing the whole pregnancy develop over the nine-month period, it’s been an amazing and very interesting Saturn return story from a number of different angles. But again, it’s another one of those ones where the house rulership seems to be really drawing out major themes that became the focus at the Saturn return.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Wow.
LS: Yeah. And it’s interesting, you know, we’re back at, what, 24° Sagittarius, where Saturn is now and so there’s still that last hit. And it sounds like that might line up with when she’s moving…
CB: Right.
LS: …you know, maybe next month. And the other thing that was kind of interesting is, you know, again, Saturn ruling the planets that are in Capricorn or Aquarius. You know, Saturn in the 3rd by itself in a night chart might not sound like ultra-successful writing, but it’s actually ruling that Mercury in Aquarius in the 5th and aspecting it as well in a harmonious sextile, so it’s got reception; and Mercury being the general significator of writing, as well as the 3rd house rulership.
PW: And Mercury is applying by sextile to Jupiter too.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
PW: So yeah, kind of amplifying the more positive outcome.
LS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
CB: Right. Yeah. Definitely, even though it’s a night chart. And so, that’s actually mitigating what would otherwise be a more challenging Saturn placement of Saturn in a night chart.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah.
PW: Right. It hasn’t been totally easy on the whole.
LS: But some really good things in there too.
PW: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that’s a good example. So thanks, Ashley, for sharing that. I’m glad we finally got that in there because I’ve been wanting to share that one—because it’s been such a great example—since way, way earlier this year, and I wanted to make sure we got that in. There’s another similar one, though. You guys mentioning the, you know, Mercury in the 5th house and Saturn ruling that makes me think of another example where I asked—in the last forecast episode that Austin and Kelly and I did—listeners if they had a good Saturn return story to send them in, and I had a bunch that were sent in. One of them though that’s very similar is this one by a listener named Alison. And hers is actually really complicated but it’s very similar to Ashley’s where she also has Libra rising, except she has a stellium. So she has Libra rising, she has Saturn in a night chart in the 3rd whole sign house, and then she has a stellium of planets in Aquarius in the 5th whole sign house, right?
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So her story was very long, and so I should have written a synopsis of it, but the main thing that I understood is that she has a specific job. And one of the themes of her Saturn return is she was able to get some additional training and additional education and take some additional education—which is kind of a 3rd house thing—and she used those in order to learn programming. And she learned two different programming languages, which is kind of an interesting manifestation of the 3rd house where you could think of it like communication. One of the things associated with communication of course is languages, and programming itself is kind of like a language.
So over the course of the past couple of years, she learned these two different programming languages as part of her job and as part of expanding her skills on her job. She also began doing public speaking as a result of that and gave one or two major talks at conferences. Which I imagine having Saturn in the 3rd house in a night chart would be something that would be very difficult or very challenging at first, but it was something where she was able to do it successfully and sort of overcame some of the things associated with that which were difficult in terms of that placement for her.
So that’s sort of in and of itself interesting. The other interesting point though that I think is more relevant to her life in the long term and one of the things we have to keep in mind is that this is sort of, you know, an ongoing cycle where we’re seeing the completion of the first Saturn cycle, but we’re also seeing the start of the second Saturn cycle. So we’re seeing the person lay the foundation of the next 30 years of their life basically at the Saturn return. And so, some of the themes that will be associated with in the person’s life, in terms of imprinting the person’s life, are only now just starting to fully manifest and then will grow over the course of the next 30 years.
So for her, with that stellium of planets—of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter in the 5th whole sign house—one of the things that’s interesting is that she has an interest in writing children’s books, and she’s actually started writing children’s books during this time and making moves towards making that, eventually, in the long term, into more of her actual career. So that’s really fascinating to me because it’s literally the ruler of the 5th house of children in the 3rd house of writing and communication, and one of the things that she’s doing…
PW: Wow.
CB: …is writing children’s books.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Presumably, she will be writing them in Java.
LS: Right.
CB: Right.
PW: The most unreadable children’s book.
CB: Right.
PW: C++.
CB: Yeah. Well, we’ll see. I mean, it’s a long 30-year transit. But again, it’s one of those things that’s a very literal manifestation of the ruler of one house and another house. And sometimes if you could try to describe that like archetypally or get to what the underlying thing is you can sometimes do a really good job of actually describing what the person will experience ahead of time, if you understand what the underlying placement is or if you can break it down to its core components.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So there’s a ton of other detail that goes along with that story that I’m leaving out that would have been interesting if I did an actual interview. And the more I go through these, the more I realize that I probably do need to see about compiling something like that, so we can get all of the details behind some of these stories, but those are the sort of most interesting points that I wanted to pull out of that one, since you guys had mentioned that other one with Ashley’s chart and the ruler of the 5th in the 3rd. Okay, let’s see. Any points before I go on? Because I’ve got a few other house ones I wanted to push through, unless you guys have anything.
LS: Nope.
CB: Nope? Good? Okay. Let’s see, so the next example. I think I’ve done all of the friend charts that we had of people that we knew directly. So there were just a few other ones that people had sent in that I want to run through really quickly from listeners. Okay, so this is one. I’m gonna throw this chart up. This is for another Ashley who’s a listener of the podcast. This is a timed chart. She has Gemini rising, Saturn in a day chart in the 7th whole sign house, and it’s ruling the 9th house the 8th house, and also the degree of the Midheaven is also in Aquarius, so there’s 10th house significations there as well.
So hers is another one where it’s a pretty long story, but one of the things that happened is she got married to her partner of 10 years who is actually from a foreign country, who is from the UK, and this results in some long-distance or some immigration issues that they’ve wrestled with for a while as a result of being a couple from two different countries. So on the one hand, you have some of the Saturn in Sag themes coming through. On the other hand, the fact that it’s also the ruler of the 9th house is relevant—that she has the ruler of the 9th house in the 7th. And one of the traditional delineations of that that you sometimes see is like you will get married to a foreigner or married to a 9th house person, and then the actual final manifestation of that was at her Saturn return basically. So I thought that was interesting.
She also got her PhD during the course of her Saturn return and has sort of struggled to find work during the course of that. So you get some 9th house themes of education and some 10th house themes having to do with career, since the degree of the Midheaven is actually in the 9th whole sign house and ruling that, so you get overlapping things coming up during the course of the Saturn return. And another one that she was dealing with was relocation and settling down as a major theme, although this seems to be sort of connected to other transits that she was having. Uranus has been transiting over her Sun at 24° of Aries, and that’s the ruler of the degree of her IC in Leo, and some sort of unexpected and other sorts of disruptions with that.
It’s also potentially relevant and it might be relevant talking about here the fact that Saturn is squaring Mercury—which is the ruler of the 4th whole sign house—and some of the things that come up to planets that Saturn is aspecting, especially by hard aspect, that sometimes being relevant; although maybe we don’t necessarily have to dwell on that here. So she has a bunch of other things. There’s a bunch of other nuances and details that go along with that story that actually make it much more interesting, but those are some of the main things that I wanted to highlight just in terms of Saturn’s placement in the 7th and its rulership of the 9th and the Midheaven. So there were actually a few other marriages and other things in some of these other chart examples now that I’m thinking of it, but this was one of the ones where it was much more evident due to Saturn being right there on the degree of the Descendant.
All right, let’s see. Another house one—just to run through the rest of my house examples—was a listener who wrote in, named Rae. And she has Scorpio rising. Saturn is in the 2nd house, and it’s ruling the 3rd and 4th house. So that’s kind of like our previous person, our friend, who had the mother who died and who had a business with her siblings, but then their siblings had a falling out, and then they had an inheritance. But this one’s interesting because that Saturn is actually ruled by Jupiter in Taurus in the 7th whole sign house in this instance.
And her thing is that recently she basically sort of dedicated her life to traveling around the world with her boyfriend and living and working through sort of like distant working opportunities and doing things online in order to support herself. So she’s from the US. She was born in Houston. She’s currently living in Mexico with her boyfriend. She’s had some challenges in terms of working and making a livelihood in order to fund her travel dreams. So a lot of that or some of what’s coming out is that 3rd house rulership of Saturn ruling the 3rd and ideas of travel, sort of foreign things, and moving around.
So it’s not just a 3rd house thing, but sometimes you’ll see those issues of travel coming up in the 3rd house as well, and it doesn’t always necessarily have to be just short distance travel. It’s also of course in terms of her home and her living situation because Saturn is the ruler of the 4th house. And then, finally, you know, figuring out how to fund that stuff of course is a 2nd house-type issue with Saturn in Sagittarius in the 2nd. So that’s basically what I got from that example. I don’t know if you guys notice anything else that might be relevant there.
PW: Well, sometimes I’ve noticed the Descendant being kind of like a place of exile since it’s the place furthest away from the Ascendant. So for example, I think we actually had an example just a while back with Saturn in the 7th where—I forget which one that was. But I just thought it was interesting with Jupiter on the Descendent. It’s like, yeah, she’s sort of exiled, but it’s supposed to be sort of, you know, a grand adventure with her partner, you know, as opposed to being sent away or something. It’s a Jupiterian experience, you know, something good rather than bad. Typically, I think you said it was supposed to be sort of a 9th house-type thing. But yeah, you do sometimes see travel with the 3rd house as well.
CB: Yeah.
PW: Even though it’s not local.
LS: Well, and it probably emphasizes even further that he’s got the ruler of the 10th in the 9th, and you said that she’s made that kind of her career, like being, you know, in foreign places.
CB: Yeah. She says, “I’ve been trying to find my place in a digital nomad world.” She says she’s trying to live out her dream of getting to travel 100% of the time, and actually she’s struggling with it. She says, “I have not had luck finding decent remote jobs so I figure I’ll have to create an income for myself.” Just some of her sort of struggles in terms of finding work or finding ways to fund that and different things that she’s done for work in terms of that. But she says, “I’ve dedicated my life to traveling with my boyfriend and my dog.”
PW: The Saturn return to the degree hasn’t happened yet.
LS: Yeah, I was gonna say that too. She’s still got one last hit to the degree.
CB: Right. So that’s one of the tricky things in terms of some of these and talking about it in like this final month-and-a-half or so. But she says, “I’ve always wanted to travel, and I’ve always hated working for someone else and having them dictate when I could take time off and things of that nature.” She says, “Finally, in April, my boyfriend got an amazing opportunity for a 100% remote job that paid the same as his office job,” where they were living, “and he accepted that job in May, and we started planning our escape.”
So with Saturn in the 2nd house—a lot of the themes that sometimes come up are like your livelihood and what you have to do to support yourself and what you have to do for work, and what you do in order to put food on the table and bring in enough money to survive in order to pursue the other activities that you’re passionate about. And that seems like one of the recurring themes for her just based on what she wrote.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah. All right, so that’s another example that I’m, again, glossing over many, many details; but again, it just brings out some of the house rulerships and placements of Saturn that are relevant. Let’s see, I’m trying to go through—I had just a ton of people that wrote in. And unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to get to all of them tonight, but there were a few key ones that I did want to mention. I mean, there’s a bunch of others, but those are actually the core ones that I think I can actually get to because a lot of the other ones have very detailed stories. And I think I’m actually going to do a terrible job of attempting to retell them if I attempt to give my like ‘cliff notes’ version of them, so I might actually leave it at that. Are there any other ones that you guys—oh, yeah, I forgot. Leisa, you’ve actually got another good one that we haven’t gotten to yet that’s actually a timed chart.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I do. I have one kind of recent one in the news, and then I had one just kind of very quick follow-up from the earlier episode of what happened later. But yeah, the main one is Ronan Farrow. Yeah, so this one is December 19, 1987, 10:49 AM in Manhattan, New York. And he’s got his natal Saturn at 24 Sagittarius exactly; so 24 and 0 minutes. And he’s actually kind of notable because he’s got five planets in Sagittarius, and three of them are actually within like 3°. So he’s got the Moon in Sagittarius, and then he’s got kind of a pileup in late Sagittarius of Saturn, Mercury, Uranus, Sun all within 3°. So that makes this kind of a big deal turning point for him in theory, and this was actually one of the ones that made me really glad that we were recording this, you know, quite near the end of the Saturn in Sag transit, because he just had stuff explode recently because Saturn’s getting to those late degrees.
So the background on him—he’s the son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen, though there was a big thing a few years back about whether he could possibly be instead the son of Frank Sinatra. That has not unfortunately been publicly clarified during his Saturn return, and I was sort of hypothesizing it might be.
PW: Just wait, with Mercury ruling the IC.
LS: And of course with celebrities, you never know, you know, what’s being done behind the scenes that isn’t being put out publicly. So it’s possible there’s something around that. You know, and a part of why I was thinking that is because he has both the Sun and Saturn in Sagittarius, and both of those planets can sometimes be thought of as signifying the father, and, you know, at least one or the other. And so, I figured, especially with that being, you know, actually talked about his paternity, but that’s not been resolved yet.
So he’s a lawyer and a journalist. He’s been really focused on international affairs and human rights, and he’s been doing that for many years. But the recent thing that was very public is, you know, all of those stories about Harvey Weinstein. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. I’ve mostly read it in print, but I think it’s Weinstein. So all of the accusers of Harvey Weinstein of, you know, either sexual harassment or assault, initially the story was broken by The New York Times, but it seems like they were doing kind of concurrent investigations. Because Ronan had a story on this in The New Yorker just a few days later, and it had some different pieces that weren’t in The New York Times, and some of the kind of more severe pieces that people were willing to go on record for.
CB: Right. It was like The New York Times piece was the initial one that broke the story, but then Weinstein and his lawyers and his company basically just denied it at first. But then a few days later, Ronan Farrow drops the second story that had other additional bombshells and that was when the whole thing just blew wide open.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so, that initial piece, The New Yorker piece, I mean, was published online at The New Yorkers online site October 10, 2017 and then it was put in the print magazine October 23. And his exact Saturn return was actually October 25, two days after that. So this is really close. I was really glad, you know, with some of these ‘late-degrees Saturns’ that, you know, we wouldn’t hear what happened until now, so that’s a really big deal. He said, additionally, that it was the result of a 10-month investigation, which would place it starting around December 2016 or January 2017—and January was actually the first degree return that he had. He was one of those where because of the retrogrades, he had three exact degree hits.
And so, the first one was around the time, it sounds like, when he actually started this investigation. The second one was in June, and that sounded like—after I read some more articles about the process of how this came out—it sounded like he was running into obstacles with NBC, who he was working for already, in terms of them being willing to put the story out, and there was a whole back-and-forth about why that was. But in any case, so June was the second exact degree return, and that’s the kind of obstacles piece of the Saturn return where, you know, if you want something to happen you might have to keep pushing with persistence for it to happen rather than it happening easily.
And that sounds like this kind of story where he was trying to publish it initially with a company he was working for but they weren’t going for it. And so, eventually they let him kind of go forward, but not with them, and he started filming some of the testimonials and things with his own camera crew and then presented it to The New Yorker, and then it was finally published during his last exact hit or right before his last exact hit. So that was perfect to me, you know, that this was all happening around his exact Saturn return, which was later in the sign, but that, you know, each piece of it was kind of bookending each degree hit.
CB: And maybe we should explain a little bit what it was—because it’s a current news story—if somebody’s listening to this in like a year or two…
LS: Sure.
CB: …or 20 years from now and it’s been forgotten or whatever.
LS: Right. So it was basically a bunch of female actors who had been either sexually harassed or sexually assaulted in different cases by this major film director, Harvey Weinstein, who has one of the biggest, you know, film companies in Hollywood. And if you wanted to work in Hollywood, you would probably run into him. And then it sounds like from a lot of these stories, he would then probably proposition you and threaten, you know, that you wouldn’t get work if you didn’t, you know, accept.
CB: Right. So The New York Times originally broke the story through long investigative reporting, and then Ronan Farrow—whose chart this is—did a second story with actual interviews of additional specific allegations. And that was the point at which this became a major media firestorm that led to his downfall and led to a lot of other stories coming out about other actors, and yeah, a lot of things that are still ongoing. And this was of course interestingly tied in a sort of unique way in terms of his story and his history as well, right?
LS: Right. And that’s one of the things that I found most fascinating. It would have been interesting either way as a Saturn return story and very, you know, tightly timed to his exact returns, but if people don’t know already he’s the son of Woody Allen. So one of his sisters is now married to Woody Allen, which, you know, was a whole drama in itself back when that happened, and then a second sister of his accused Woody Allen of sexually abusing her when she was a child. And so, he’s got both of these like sibling issues, which are interesting because he actually has Mars in a day chart ruling the 3rd house, which has to do with siblings, and it’s in the 10th house in Scorpio. And, you know, his career seems to work out for, you know, lots of different reasons that I won’t fully interpret here, but one of the things that he was well-known for before he was known as his own identity was that he was the sibling of these people that Woody Allen abused.
And so, one of the things that seemed to happen during his Saturn return was kind of his own working through his own role in talking about or not talking about some of those issues, and he has this great quote. So he had a guest column like about a year-and-a-half ago during his Saturn return where he talks about his father and about the issue in general of not talking about abuse in public and the media’s role in kind of, you know, an act of omission, aiding perpetrators.
So he said, “Perhaps I succumbed to that pressure myself. I had worked hard to distance myself from my painfully public family history and wanted my work to stand on its own. So I had avoided commenting on my sister’s allegations for years, and when cornered, cultivated distance, limiting my response to the occasional line on Twitter. My sister’s decision to step forward came shortly after I began work on a book and a television series. It was the last association I wanted. Initially, I begged my sister not to go public again and to avoid speaking to reporters about it. I’m ashamed of that too. With sexual assault, anything’s easier than facing it in full: saying all of it facing all of the consequences.”
So it seems like that was his kind of strategy up until very recently. And so, it’s really interesting how that’s been kind of parlayed into, you know, helping all these other women—you know, not the specific women in his family, but, you know, kind of after feeling bad that he didn’t help enough and that he was silent, and realizing that he is a media person now and how the media deals with that. Then during his Saturn return, he went on to help all these other women go public with abuse allegations. And that was interesting to me in general. And the other specific chart reason that was interesting to me is because, you know, as we mentioned a couple times by now, Saturn ruling other planets will matter during that Saturn return as well.
So you think with what had happened in his family, it would be 3rd house and 4th house issues, right?3rd house being siblings. 4th house being family. And so, we talked about the 3rd house already. 4th house is Taurus ruled by Venus, which is placed in Capricorn in the 12th house. So Venus is a general significator for women, but it also rules his family. And so, that just seemed so poignant that that’s placed in the12th house, you know, because the 12th house is hidden things, and he was talking about his role in kind of letting things like this happen by omission, by not talking about it, by leaving it being hidden. And so, I just thought this was a perfect kind of end to his Saturn return. You know, kind of almost making up for what he felt bad about not doing in the first place earlier on in his life.
PW: Wow.
CB: Yeah, that’s really interesting and really relevant. Yeah, there’s obviously some sort of connection there. Even if it’s just like a thematic connection that’s interesting.
LS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
CB: And then, you know, we don’t know what other private things because then of course—well, that’s a whole separate issue and seems so minor at this point, the other issue of who his father is and other things like that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Just because there’s been a lot of speculation that it might be not Woody Allen, it might be somebody else, and whether that came up at all during the course of his Saturn return as well.
LS: Right. Yeah. And if it didn’t, I’d kind of wonder a little bit if it won’t in the next transit, not only because Saturn’s transiting the 12th—and therefore also the ruler of his 4th when it goes into Capricorn—but Capricorn is Woody Allen’s 5th house of children too. So something to keep an eye out for.
PW: Well, Venus in the 12th, you said was hidden matters.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Yet Venus is also scandals…
LS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
PW: …particularly of a salacious nature. Blackmail. Things that, you know…
LS: Right.
PW: …you wouldn’t necessarily want to get out. Which is funny that he engages with that in bringing forth, you know, the scandalous acts of others and having kind of been around scandalous acts, but then potentially then being a product of a scandal, you know…
LS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
PW: …an affair with Frank Sinatra that his mom had. So yeah, it’s really weird how it can tie together all of those different strands. It’s amazing.
LS: Right. I mean, you can see some of the house rulerships here and everything. But also just during Saturn returns in general, people often feel forced to come to terms with things that have not been easy for them to come to terms with up to that point in their lives, if they have something like that in their life. So it feels like all of those themes are kind of coming to the forefront, you know, whereas he was just kind of trying to avoid it all up to this point.
CB: And all of that with Woody Allen, was that within the ‘Saturn return’ thing? Because I feel like that was like several years ago. But was that actually within the past two or three years that…
LS: Those speculations?
CB: Well, it was like somehow Woody Allen came back up in the news, and the whole story came back up again. And it was like one of the siblings was saying that Mia Farrow had lied and put the children up to—or that the story of abuse allegations was fabricated. But then Ronan himself—that’s part of what prompted him to come forward and say, “No, we were not coached,” or something like that.
LS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
CB: Was that actually within the past two or three—was that part of his Saturn return or was that before that?
LS: In terms of saying that they were coached—that was definitely talked about beforehand.
CB: I know it was talked about beforehand, but for some reason you were talking about him writing an article in The New York Times or something a year ago.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Didn’t he write that not long ago? A year ago?
LS: It was a year-and-a-half ago. Yeah, it sounds like his sister, Dylan—the one who accused Woody Allen of abusing her when she was a child—wrote a New York Times piece in like late Saturn in Scorpio. It was like less than a year before Saturn went into Sag. Maybe 10 months before.
CB: Mm-hmm.
LS: And so, it was still in Scorpio, but it was kind of heading towards the Saturn return.
CB: Okay. Got it. And then eventually he wrote that. Okay.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Anyway, so that’s a really good example because that’s another one of those ones where he was working on that investigative piece for a while, and obviously there are other personal things tied in with his Saturn return. But then around the time of the exact Saturn return, very late in this process, suddenly he publishes this very important piece, and therefore becomes very influential in that whole thing that happened.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So yeah, that’s a good chart. Good example.
PW: I would also like to point out that Frank Sinatra has the Sun and Mercury in Sagittarius, and I believe that Woody Allen has the Sun and Jupiter in Sagittarius.
LS: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
PW: I think it’s close to around the same degrees, although the conjunctions from Saturn would have already happened. That’s pretty weird…
LS: Right.
PW: …that they’re that close.
LS: Right. Yeah, and that’s why when we did the initial recording a couple years ago, I thought that that might have come out during the Saturn return. That was partially because of Woody Allen’s placements as well in early Sag, but who knows.
CB: Yeah, who knows. And, you know, like you said, we’d never know with some of the celebrities. One of the advantages of looking at celebrity charts is sometimes their public deeds are more well-documented than the lives of private individuals. But the downside is that then if you’re not talking to them personally, you may not know some of the personal things that they’re going through or dealing with or other events in their life that have taken place.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: So who knows if that has actually been a theme for him. And it would make some sense since it’s also the ruler of his Ascendant. And so, themes of self…
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: …and like ‘Who am I?’, and public/personal image and things like that you would think would be part of what would be relevant for his Saturn return.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, well, I think that’s starting to bring us towards the end of this brief jaunt through Saturn returns in Sagittarius that’s lasted for about two-and-a-half hours at this point. So are there any major examples that we’ve overlooked? I know I had to skip a number of people who wrote in, and I apologize for that. But I hope everyone understands since we’re two-and-a-half hours into this, I couldn’t necessarily get to everything. But are there any ones that you guys wanted to touch on before we wrap up?
PW: I just want to talk about the bridge from this Saturn in Sagittarius period. I was really curious about what kind of new bridge we would get as a result of this Saturn in Sagittarius period since the other ones, you know, have all these other bridges. And I actually just saw in the news just last week that the first 3D-printed bridge has opened to the public in the Netherlands. That literally was just a few days ago that this happened, and I was like, “Yes! Finally, I got my bridge.” Because, you know, we’ve had ones made out of iron, the first steel ones. The first ones to go across a river. The first one to go across like two landmasses. The first one to go underneath the seabed. So we’ve finally got our 2017 Saturn in Sagittarius bridge—it’s 3D-printed. So like that’s the new spin now on, you know, connecting people across bridges. That’s gonna be the new, you know, construction method. So I thought that was quite cool. I finally got my bridge.
CB: Very exciting.
LS: That’s amazing with like six weeks left of Saturn in Sag.
PW: Right. And actually there were a few others too—the longest glass bridge was built in China. And you can see through the bottom, and it just goes across like a huge canyon. And it’s terrifying to walk on. You know, fear of heights, fear of going across, fear of, you know, a see-through bridge—yeah, it’s pretty Saturn in Sag. So there was that one too. But yeah, so I got my bridge.
CB: Nice. Yeah, a lot of those mundane things that you mentioned in that Saturn in Sag article you wrote and in the discussion that we had have turned out pretty impressively well. So like I said, people should definitely check that out. And you should do a video or something as a recap of some of those mundane things just to do like a victory lap or something like that.
PW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
PW: Perhaps, yeah.
CB: All right, well, this has been a lot of fun tonight, guys. I think it’s pretty late. It’s like 12:30 here in Denver. So yeah, but I’m glad that we got a chance to do this and to talk about some of these examples because I learned a lot over the past two or three years just looking at the lives of some of these people either that we know personally or that we’ve been following in the public. And I really wanted to thank, you know, the people that let us use their charts, that sent in charts or wrote a description of their Saturn return because I think that’s helpful for all of us in terms of, you know, what we do as astrologers.
Part of the research process is looking at charts like this, and you can only research some of these things. One of the difficult things that I didn’t understand when I was a younger astrologer—that you can’t understand—is that sometimes you have to see these things play out in person, live. And there’s something about witnessing that or sometimes living through it yourself that does give you a perspective that’s much different than just knowing sort of abstractly from like a book—from reading about it in a book or something like that. It’s a much different experience. There’s something about that—the difference between just knowledge versus wisdom or something like that that’s sort of relevant there.
PW: The real examples—I mean, like history is definitely the best teacher, I think. Yeah, I agree with that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
LS: You don’t get the feel by reading. When you’re actually going through the transit, you get the sort of visceral feel of what’s going on in the sphere, you know.
CB: Right. Going through it yourself, definitely, and also witnessing it in the life of somebody that’s close to you or somebody who’s a friend and watching their process of going through it, or writing about it, or even some of these celebrities where it’s like a long event that’s developing and taking place over the course of months. Like after the fact, you know, years later, you can kind of look back and write a synopsis of ‘this’ happened, but if you’re actually seeing it unfold as it’s happening, it’s a much different experience.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So yeah, I think we’ve learned a lot over the past two or three years just by watching this one little snippet in time of Saturn going through Sagittarius. And I hope that we’ve been able to take some pieces from that of some of the things that we learned sort of as astrologers and sort of put that out there collectively for the rest of the community and all of the listeners of the podcast too to draw on and hopefully to learn something from as well. So we’re gearing up then. Our next period of learning is going to be Saturn in Capricorn.
PW: Yay!
CB; Yay, so you’re no longer ‘Saturn returning’. You’ve graduated, Patrick.
PW: Yes. Although now we have Saturn conjunct Pluto in Capricorn to worry about.
CB: Right.
PW: Just a whole other problem.
CB: Well, what’s so funny is now we’re gonna see a bunch of people going through their Saturn returns that have Saturn in Capricorn, which normally is actually a sometimes useful mitigation. One of the things that Leisa shows really well in her lecture—which she sells on her website at LeisaSchaim.com—Saturn in Sect, is even if you have a night chart, but you have Saturn in Capricorn or Aquarius or Libra where it has sign-based dignity, that sometimes that can be enough of a mitigation, so that it’s not experienced as bad as it could be otherwise if it was just a night chart with no dignity.
So we’ll be seeing some of those people go through their Saturn returns where Saturn has some dignity, but at the same time they’ve both got some heavy outer planet natal placements with Uranus and Neptune, for a lot of them, being in Capricorn at the same time. So it’s not just Saturn conjunct Uranus like we’ve had with the Saturn in Sag people, but it’s Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which is gonna be pretty wild.
LS: Mm-hmm.
PW: Right. Yeah.
CB: Especially after last year. Like I really think that a lot of those things that happened in terms of the election and in terms of some of the meddling that has been alleged from, you know, Russia and the US and stuff like that had a lot to do with the Saturn-Neptune square. It’s gonna be interesting to see a bunch of people now going through this Saturn return transit who natally have Saturn conjunct Neptune and Uranus and some of the things that are going to be associated with that. So that’s gonna be fun.
PW: Yeah.
CB: We’ve got a lot to look forward to with that.
PW: Saturn in Capricorn, by the way, builds prisons—that’s the thing I’ve noticed. If that isn’t ominous.
CB: All right, I look forward to your article on that.
PW: I actually have a video about that.
CB: Oh, do you? Okay. What’s the title of the video?
PW: Oh, the title of the video is Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn: Butterflies, Sunshine & Daisies.
LS: I like that title.
PW: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s the title. Yeah, Rainbows, Sunshine & Daisies.
CB: Okay.
PW: Yeah, ‘cause it’s just gonna be rainbow, sunshine, and daisies. You have to be positive, guys.
CB: So what’s your website URL, again, where people can find out more information about your work?
PW: My website is www.BigFatAstro.com. And you can find my products, my video lectures on the Products tab. And I also have consultations on my Services tab.
CB: Awesome. So you’re doing consultations. You do Saturn return consultations, zodiacal releasing—the whole nine yards.
PW: Annual profections. Annual profections, yeah. Transits. Solar returns.
CB: Awesome. And then of course your YouTube channel. And you also have a page on Patreon. What’s your YouTube channel URL, again? You have a custom one.
PW: I believe so.
CB: Okay. And I’ll probably put links to all of this in the description page below this video basically, as well as on the podcast website itself.
PW: Yeah, it says youtube.com/BigFatAstroVlog! And my Patreon is wwe.patreon.com/PatrickWatsonAstrologer.
CB: Awesome. And people can get early access to videos, like behind the scenes news…
PW: Yeah.
CB: …and all sorts of things like that, so I recommend people check that out.
PW: Yeah.
CB: And I’ll put links to your website and everything in the descriptions.
PW: Thanks.
CB: Awesome. And Leisa, you’ve got, like I said, that lecture on your website. But you actually have a lecture on Saturn returns coming up, right?
LS: I do, yeah. On November 15—if people are watching this—soon I’m doing a talk on Saturn returns in sect in particular, as well as going into a lot more detail with the mitigations that kind of produces the shades of gray in between the night charts and the day charts, and got a whole bunch of example charts showing all of those different things. So that’s November 15 for Nightlight Astrology. It’s NightlightAstrology.com. And that one’s a by-donation lecture, so you can just pay what you can. But if you miss it, like Chris said, I do have a similar version of the lecture on my website at LeisaSchaim.com.
CB: Cool. So LeisaSchaim.com. And then of course our old blog where we have a bunch of different Saturn return stories like this is SaturnReturnStories.com. And I’ve got an article there on interpreting Saturn returns, Leisa’s got an article on Saturn returns in sect, and there’s a bunch of other stories that we’ve posted there about Saturn returns and different things. So check that out at SaturnReturnStories.com.
And I think that’s it. So yeah, and you can find out more information about the podcast at TheAstrologyPodcast.com, and my website which is ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com. So I think that’s it. All right, well, thanks Leisa and thanks Patrick for joining me tonight.
LS: Of course.
PW: Thank you.
LS: Thank you.
CB: All right. And thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time