The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 438, titled:
Saturn Return in Aquarius Retrospective
With Chris Brennan and guests Kirah Tabourn and Jo O’Neill
Episode originally released on March 1, 2024
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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 March 11th, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today are astrologers Jo O’Neill and Kirah Tabourn, and we’re gonna be talking about Saturn in Aquarius and doing a retrospective of what it was like for people who had their Saturn return in Aquarius over the past few years, between 2020 and 2023. So, hey, welcome both of you.
KIRAH TABOURN: Hey.
JO O’NEILL: Hey, thanks for having us Chris.
CB: Thank you for joining me today. First, at the top of this, I want to say congratulations on surviving both of your Saturn returns. You both have Saturn in Aquarius. And I know it’s been like a year—we’re a little bit getting away from it now that we’re in the thick of like Saturn in Pisces—but congratulations.
KT: Thank you. Feels good. Saturn also just crossed my ascendant, so I feel very graduated.
CB: Right.
JO: Yeah, that’s huge.
CB: Yeah. But it was interesting for me, being an older astrologer now. I’m 39-years-old. I’m Saturn in Scorpio—so I did mine a while back, like almost 10 years ago now—and it was interesting to see the next generation of astrologers behind me, at the next Saturn square after mine, go through their Saturn returns over the past few years. And for some of you, having an idea of what that might be like going into it—but then obviously seeing it and experiencing it—is a much different thing, everybody realizes, once you actually go through it.
KT: Yeah, definitely.
JO: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
CB: All right, so in this episode, we’re gonna be talking a little bit about—we’ve done three of these so far; this will be the third one. Leisa Schaim and I have previously gone through—once Saturn leaves a sign—and talked about some of the different Saturn return stories that occurred over the past three years. We did that with Sagittarius, we did that with Capricorn, now we’re gonna do that with Aquarius. We’re gonna talk a little bit about some celebrity Saturn return stories and how those turned out over the past three years. we’re gonna talk about, also, some listener submissions, where listeners of The Astrology Podcast over the past few months have sent in their stories about what happened during their Saturn return. We got a ton of submissions of those. We’re not gonna be able to go through all of them, but I did want to highlight some of them and integrate them into the discussion to whatever extent we can; and then also just see what kind of conclusions we can draw and what we’ve learned from this entire process about what the Saturn return is about, as well as what Saturn transits in general are about, as well as the Saturn placement. And it’s always really illustrative each time we do this, and I feel like we learn a lot, so I think this will be a fun exercise to do again here today.
KT: I’m excited. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.
CB: Yeah. And you and I did the “Saturn Signs of Millennials” episode that actually ties in very nicely with this one at this point, I think.
KT: Yeah, that’s true.
CB: All right, so let me see—first, let me introduce some basic principles and just a recap from some of those previous episodes on Saturn returns what the methodology is and what some of our basic assumptions are about Saturn return, which Leisa Schaim and I actually outlined way back in Episode 24 of The Astrology Podcast titled “Understanding Your Saturn Return.” And this is an audio-only episode from before, when I wasn’t doing videos, so you’ll have to find it on the podcast website. And then we also demonstrated some of these principles in the “Saturn Return in Sagittarius Retrospective,” which is Episode 131, and Episode 283, which was “Saturn in Capricorn.” So the first basic premise is that in my definition, the Saturn return begins at the first ingress of Saturn back into its natal sign that it was in when you were born, and then eventually the Saturn return ends at the final egress or the departure of Saturn out of that sign where you have your your natal Saturn. So this usually sets up about a three-year period that takes place roughly between the ages of 27 and 30, I think, right?
KT: Yes, correct.
CB: Okay. So the Saturn return is the most intense when Saturn gets close to returning to the exact degree that it was in your birth chart. So there are these waves of intensity and sometimes Saturn can retrograde over that point three different times, but really the Saturn return is often experienced as a sequence of events that encompasses the entirety of Saturn transiting back through that natal sign of the zodiac that it was in when you were born. And I think that’s easy to understand abstractly ahead of time, but once you actually experience it and go through it and understand the totality of that being a chapter in your life and a whole block of time, I think it starts to gain a deeper sense or a much more internalized sense. Was it that way for the two of you? How did you experience it in terms of the difference between the sign ingress versus the degree ingress? I mean, I guess y’all are unique in that you’re one of the only generations whose Saturn return started with a worldwide pandemic since, Saturn ingressed into Aquarius literally in March and April of 2020. So it was just like, bam, Saturn return starts, worldwide pandemic. So I guess that’s an easier question for you guys to ask rather than other generations.
KT: Yeah. You go first, Jo.
JO: Yeah, it’s kind of tough. Well, first I should say my Saturn is at 2 Aquarius, so those peaks of intensity—where those exact conjunctions happened—were super early on in the process for me, but I will say that I did experience it as like a whole chapter in my life as far as the entire time Saturn was in Aquarius, even when it was in those last degrees. But, yeah, especially the first ingress of Saturn into Aquarius it was kind of hard to gauge what I was experiencing and feeling because so much else was happening that was kind of subsuming everybody’s daily lived experience. And so, I feel like for me I noticed the most personal natal themes happening the 2nd time Saturn ingressed into Aquarius, which was late December 2020 and then early 2021. So, for me, that’s kind of how it was, ‘cause when lockdowns happened, everybody was experiencing very Saturnian themes of isolation and solitude and kind of quarantining themselves and having to do a lot of looking inward and facing all that uncertainty and fear. For me, I started to notice more of what the personal experience would be like in that 2nd ingress, but I’m curious what that was like for you too, Kirah.
CB: And—
KT: Yeah—oh, sorry, go ahead.
CB: Just really quick, that reminded me of something about the dates. So the time period we’re talking about is March of 2020 until March of 2023, that’s Saturn in Aquarius. But then Saturn did retrograde out of Aquarius for a bit in 2020, in like the summer of 2020, but then it came back into Aquarius in December of 2020. So that’s probably important when people are thinking about their own chronologies as they’re listening to this episode.
KT: Yeah. Yeah, I also have Saturn really early. I have it at 1° Aquarius. Jo and I are just a couple months apart. So, yeah, I feel like that all of 2020 was very much a Saturn return experience in different ways, but it definitely kicked into gear in early 2021, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about our individual experiences. But so much so—just to echo what Jo was saying—it definitely feels like a period in my life, and I feel very much on the other side of it, which feels so good.
JO: It really does.
KT: It really does. And we’ll get more into it, but even in the sense that I moved into this apartment December 19, 2020, I’m ready to leave because it just feels like the chapter has ended. But, yeah, we’ll get more into it.
CB: Nice. Okay, so that’s important about timeframes. So other preliminary interpretive principles that we’ll be applying in the charts—the return degree is the most intense part. If Saturn is very early or late in the sign then this can sometimes extend the period a bit when Saturn, by transit, gets close to that, especially within 3°. And this is something that was a little tricky with this Saturn, because Saturn—this past winter, over the past few months—even though it moved into Pisces in March of 2023, by December, it retrograded back to 0° of Pisces. So anybody with Saturn, especially at 28°-29° of Aquarius, was getting another hit of the almost exact Saturn return coming with an orb at least, even while Saturn was in Pisces. I did want to mention that there can be some carryover, and I don’t know if that was relevant for the two of you in terms of the buildup to it. I don’t remember how far Saturn got into Capricorn before it eventually ingressed later on in 2020, but that could be relevant as well. All right, so that’s true.
The primary thing that we’re gonna focus on is that the house that Saturn is located in your birth chart is activated during the Saturn return, and it often will activate and put a greater deal of focus on the topics associated with that area of your life; so each of the 12 houses and whatever area of life or whatever topics are signified in that instance. Additionally, the two houses that Saturn rules are also activated. And this is something where we’re gonna see it not as clearly in this instance—because Saturn, when it’s in Aquarius, is in one of its own signs—but we will see some overlap in the 2nd house that is ruled by Saturn, which is Capricorn, and the topic of that house will also be activated or tend to be activated in a person’s life. And I know the two of you both had versions of that in terms of the house itself being activated, as well as the house that Saturn rules, right?
KT: Yeah, very much.
JO: Yeah, for sure.
CB: Okay. Why don’t we just talk about your stories to begin with a little bit? Or maybe we could just briefly say what topics were activated for the two of you and where Saturn’s at.
JO: Yeah, that sounds good.
CB: Okay. I mean, Jo, your main thing was relationships—and Saturn’s in your 7th house—as just the short version of that, right?
JO: Yeah, it was the classic ‘Saturn return’ divorce, but the surprising part was it was also finding love again and now a really solid relationship. Which was a really pleasant surprise to me because I had the ‘Saturn return’ fear leading up to it, that it was just gonna be all bad. I have a night chart, so I wasn’t super-looking forward to it, but it turned out really constructive, also 6th house themes interwoven in some ways too. But to keep it brief I’ll just leave it there for now.
CB: Okay. And do you mind if I show your chart? Are you still an ‘open chart’ person?
JO: Yeah, ‘open chart’ baby, let’s go.
CB: Okay, all the way.
JO: All the way.
CB: Here’s Jo’s chart really briefly. So Leo rising. Saturn is in Aquarius in the 7th whole sign house, ruling both the 7th house of relationships as well as the 6th house of work and health. Okay, we’ll come back to that. And then, Kirah, what’s your placement and house rulership? Are you okay sharing your chart or do you prefer not to?
KT: Yeah, I’m totally fine sharing. I have Saturn in Aquarius in the 12th house at 1°, also ruling the 11th house.
CB: And what is the short version of how those topics—either one or both of them—came up for you?
KT: Yeah, I think ‘community’ was a huge topic. I literally started an online membership community called the 11th House in December of 2020, but also the 12th house ‘isolation/mental health’ themes were huge as well. I moved across the country by myself, started living by myself for the first time, working for myself for the first time. Yeah, it was a lot of that 12th house ‘isolation/loneliness’ stuff as well.
CB: Yeah, isolation is both a Saturn theme but also a 12th house theme majorly and that’s a recurring one that actually came up in one or two examples as well. So it’s interesting in terms of Saturn in the 12th house and then also that you have it ruling the 11th house, so that there’s almost a contradiction there, because also at the same time community and friends and groups and alliances are coming up at the same time.
KT: Yeah, exactly. And especially in 2020, all of the online connections that were happening, that felt like a really loud aspect of the, yeah, Saturn return ruling the 11th.
CB: Yeah, that was interesting in general of Saturn in Aquarius and how the world can be suddenly more isolated than it’s ever been due to the pandemic, but then also at the same time people can be as connected as they were at that time more than they’ve ever been through social media and Zoom and everything else and the sort of dualism of that.
KT: Yeah, exactly. It’s really interesting. I think the interesting thing about a planet in its own sign is that you get those double-significations often.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And you mentioning starting your community thing in December of 2020, you just reminded me that there was a weird thing that happened with the ingresses that year, which is in March of 2020, Saturn and Mars went into Aquarius at the same time. So that was a very rough introduction to the Saturn return, especially for anybody with Saturn towards the beginning of the sign, so that their Saturn got hit by both transiting Saturn and Mars at the same time. But then in December of 2020, Saturn went back into Aquarius, but Jupiter ingressed into that sign at the same time, which was a bit more positive in terms of how that went at that point.
KT: Yeah, it was definitely a totally different vibe. I remember being so scared at the beginning when Saturn entered with Mars, like just so much fear. Yeah, definitely different towards—there was a lot more hope at the end of the year.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
JO: Yeah, it was like there was a way forward somehow, where it was just like so disorienting and jarring the first time with Mars. I feel like that’s also just a really unique feature of this Saturn in Aquarius transit in general. There were the squares with Uranus as well, but those two ingresses—with Saturn being accompanied by a malefic and then the greater benefic—there was just so much contrast. It’s such an interesting Saturn return time for Saturn in Aquarius folks in general.
CB: Yeah. And having a great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius that was setting off an entire 200-year era of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in air signs for the next two centuries; that was another momentous way to start your Saturn return.
KT: Yeah, truly.
CB: I mean, I was trying to think about that, and, wow, this is unique, there’s no other generation that has that, which is true to some extent. But then I guess it’s like other generations do probably have certain versions of that, maybe not quite as obvious: Saturn in Gemini people—back when 9/11 happened, for example—and the way that that changed both things in the US, as well as the world or different parts of the world pretty quickly, sort of overnight virtually; or, I don’t know, maybe you have people like Saturn in Capricorn people from the 1989 timeframe, when the Soviet Union fell apart or when the Berlin Wall was falling or things like that. So maybe there are sometimes generational things that are happening that lots of groups or generations are experiencing simultaneously. But, yeah, I don’t know if we’ve seen one quite like this in quite a while that was just that global.
KT: Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Saturn and Neptune go into Aries together because—yeah, we don’t have to talk about that yet.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got my eye on some Saturn in Pisces Saturn return people that we’ll mention towards the end of this. Okay, last things in terms of interpretive principles, ‘day chart’ Saturns—the Saturn return tends to be a little bit easier if you were born with a day chart, whereas night charts sometimes can be a bit more challenging. This can be offset though by a number of other factors, one of them that we outlined in the basic principles and we’ve seen happen over and over is that Saturn is mitigated when it’s in its own domicile or exaltation. And this is true here in this instance with Saturn in Aquarius, where Saturn’s in one of its own domiciles, and we’ve noticed previously that the Saturn return oftentimes is somewhat more manageable for those people compared to those that don’t have Saturn dignified in some way. Let’s see, mutual reception by domicile or having reception with its domicile lord is the next-best thing if you don’t have that but that’s not relevant here. The next thing is Saturn is mitigated when it has aspects from benefics. This can be really helpful and it can offset whether the Saturn return is gonna be experienced as a little bit more challenging or ultimately a little bit more constructive and successful.
I have one really great example of that that I’m gonna give with Miley Cyrus, which I made a prediction about ‘cause her Saturn is just amazingly placed in Aquarius in the 10th house of career; and I thought she was gonna have really good Saturn return for career matters and that turned out to be true, and she just won a Grammy following a song that she released in her Saturn return. And she has Saturn—actually let me just pull that up because it illustrates the point that I’m making right now. This is Miley Cyrus’s birth chart. She has Taurus rising, Saturn is in Aquarius in the 10th house conjunct the degree of the MC. It’s a day chart, so Saturn’s of the sect in favor, it’s in its own sign. It has this very nice and very close trine from Jupiter at 8° of Libra, and it’s trining Saturn at 13° of Aquarius, which is providing a lot of additional support and mitigation and just positive support to that Saturn placement. So I sort of said in 2020 on Twitter, just briefly, that she would be a ‘Saturn return’ success story. And I think the biggest thing was just that she released the single “Flowers,” and it was largely about a breakup with her ex-, I think, right? And then that single ended up becoming her most popular one that she’s ever released and then she won awards for it subsequently.
KT: Yeah, I love that. I never really looked at her chart before, but I love how it’s, “I can buy myself flowers,” and her chart ruler is Venus in Capricorn. That’s just so ‘astrology’ good.
JO: It is so good. Yeah, it’s perfect. I had never seen her chart either.
CB: Yeah, and it brings up another point, which is actually one of my other interpretive principles—let me read it here. Sometimes the houses square or opposite to Saturn get activated, especially if the native has planets that are getting aspected in those signs during the return. And this is true partially because the return closes one cycle of Saturn—one 28-year cycle—and opens up a new one that has its most important turning points at the squares and opposition relative to the natal Saturn placement. So in her case, she has that Saturn up here, and Saturn was closing one 28-to-30-year cycle in her life but also opening a new one.
And the important turning points of that—where it sets up a new cycle over the next 30 years—are gonna be when Saturn makes its waxing square in the 1st house, its opposition in her 4th house, and eventually it’s waning square in her 7th house. But the fact that she has Saturn at 13 Aquarius squaring some planets in the 7th house naturally means that when Saturn goes into Aquarius it’s gonna be squaring those planets and activating them at the same time during the course of the Saturn return. So as a result of that sometimes the Saturn return starts bringing in other houses that Saturn is aspecting by a hard aspect because it’s activating those of placements in the chart very strongly, which I realize starts drawing in a lot of different houses at this point; but during the course of it, I think you do see—and during some of our examples—how that can be very relevant.
KT: Definitely relevant for mine and squaring all my Scorpio placements. Yeah, that was the worst part.
CB: Right. So your Scorpio placements are in the 9th house, Kirah?
KT: Yeah, 9th house. I mean, I stopped teaching for two years. Yeah, it was a lot of 9th house stuff as well.
CB: Okay, so Saturn here in the 12th and then it was like activating these Scorpio planets, and those are your only fixed planets. And that was actually one that came up very strongly in the examples for some people. The two of you don’t have it as closely, but there’s some people with Saturn in mid-to-late Aquarius where it’s squaring Pluto much more closely, and I was seeing that come through very strongly in some of the examples that were submitted, where people had tight Saturn-Pluto squares; it was really activating some major tensions between those two houses and sometimes some real difficulties in whatever the Pluto house was.
KT: Yeah, it was loud. I feel like the squares are the worst part of the Saturn return.
CB: Okay. So it was just that you stopped teaching during that time? Was there any other 9th house stuff?
KT: Yeah, I was just really depressed. It was just like a lot of 9th house/12th house, and at the same time the South Node was also there in the 9th. But I was really curious ‘cause I started learning astrology during my closing Saturn square—when Saturn was in the 9th and the North Node was in my 9th. And so, it was very much this return and just feeling very lost and not knowing what I wanted to do in astrology and if I wanted to continue doing astrology, and, yeah, lots of doubts, lots of Saturnian doubts.
CB: Got it. That makes sense. And, Jo, did you see your aspects activated as well?
JO: Yeah, for sure. I have the Sun in Leo in the 1st and Jupiter also. So I got Saturn opposing the ruler of my ascendant, my ascendant, the ruler of my 5th and 8th. Generally, I feel like the Saturn return theme—like one of the first really big ones was my separation from my ex- and my divorce, but it was also like a big interrogation of my self-concept, honestly. I had been in that relationship for a really long time, I got married really young. So it was an 11-year marriage at the end of it—just like two weeks shy of 11 years—so it was like first time being on my own and first time creating my own infrastructure for my life, and it just challenged a lot of the ways that I thought about myself; I was also very depressed. And it was an interesting time too, because, also, professionally, things were going really well; I had given my first professional talk on the 12th house that’s become really the foundation of my practice. And so, it was like an interesting kind of bifurcation, where it was like my personal life was really, really difficult, and then my online and professional life were going really well. But, yeah, the 1st house themes came through really strongly for me, for sure. Just a lot of doubt too, like you said, Kirah. Kind of questioning how do I know what’s real or true about me and the situation and just having to figure it out and navigate it was a big thing.
CB: Did your living situation change as a result of the split?
JO: Oh, yeah.
CB: Okay.
JO: Actually a week after my 30th birthday—which would have been moving into my second Saturn-ruled profection year, 7th house year—that’s when I moved out and I stayed moved out, so it sure did. My parents also moved home from living in Colorado around this time—this whole Saturn return time—so it really did bring in all the angles.
CB: Yeah, I think that comes through really strongly for people with angular Saturns, especially if they have planets or points in each of those signs, which you do here; all of those houses can be brought in. Like I said, it also is setting up stuff where it’s setting a foundation for that entire cycle, and then it’s like in seven years you’ll get a check-in point when Saturn is in Taurus, and then in 14 years you’ll get another check in when Saturn goes through Leo, and then eventually Scorpio.
JO: Yeah.
CB: But it’s interesting with the 1st house, that’s something that came up for me during my Saturn return ‘cause I have Aquarius rising, so Saturn rules my ascendant. But the 1st house and that keyword of ‘self’—which seems so abstract—is something that really comes up when the 1st house is activated by transits in astrology, but also to some extent in the Saturn return in general. That idea of ‘self’ and ‘who am I’ is much more tangible than it sounds when you just read it on paper.
JO: Totally.
CB: All right, so last things—Saturn’s mitigated when it has aspects from the benefics, Saturn is made more challenging when it has hard aspects from other malefics, especially Mars by conjunction, square, or opposition. In this case, I saw some people with Pluto squaring Saturn where that also seemed to be making things a little bit more tough, a little bit more intense, transformative, sometimes more extreme instances of transformation—to use that as both a useful term as well as a euphemism—was happening for people when that was activated, so pay attention to those hard aspects with other difficult planets. And, finally, yeah, planets that Saturn aspects during the transit will get activated, and that’s what we’ve already talked about. Okay, so those are basically all of the basic principles. Other than that, in terms of themes, some of the major themes that we expect to see during the Saturn return are, one, a transition to adulthood, or the full transition into adulthood highlighting themes of ‘maturity’ and ‘growth’. Is that something both of you feel like you experienced or saw in your contemporaries?
KT: Absolutely. Yeah, I think one of my biggest complaints in my head during my Saturn return was just, “I just want someone else to do all this for me, I just want my mom to come in and take care of this,” and just the realization constantly no one’s going to save you.
CB: Right.
KT: You have to save yourself, like that was a big one for me.
JO: Yeah.
CB: You’re truly on your own in setting stuff up and there’s not necessarily a support underlying you. You sometimes realize that you have to create that for yourself, otherwise no one will necessarily step in and put something underneath you.
KT: Exactly, yeah.
JO: Yeah, ‘hard relate’ to the feeling of wishing someone would come help you with all this or kind of save you from it. And just like that moment—it feels like your feet are finally hitting the ground for the first time. Like there’s the gravity and the weight and you realize it’s a long path, but there really isn’t anyone to save you, but you, and that too is kind of an abstract concept. I feel like I know about the ‘maturity’ themes and the ‘fully transitioning into adulthood’ themes before my Saturn return, but having that experience made it so much more tangible and substantial. But I will say just like when you do something hard—like if you start lifting weights or something—you start to see your strength grow, and you’re like, “Oh, this is what capacity feels like, this is what a boundary actually feels like and how it actually works,” and it just takes the work to do it. And Saturn kind of spares no one in that regard, but worth it, though.
KT: Yeah, definitely.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great analogy. ‘Cause Saturn goes retrograde a bunch of times during the course of going through your natal Saturn sign, over that three-year period, and it’s almost like those retrogrades are like the reps of lifting the weight each time, and each time you get a little bit better at doing the parts that are manageable. ‘Cause obviously there’s certain parts of the Saturn return where you run into a wall, where it just says, “You can’t proceed further.” This door has to close and others will be opened, but at least for this one, that’s it. But there are some themes—especially when it comes to some of the ‘adulthood’ and ‘maturity’ themes—that do seem like a muscle that you’re strengthening over the course of that three-year period.
KT: Yeah, I always describe it to my clients as like a stress test, like when they plant new baby trees and they have them kind of held up by those little ropes at first. I always say it’s like you’re taking those ropes off, and it’s the first couple storms, and you have to weather these storms in order to get stronger. Yeah, I like the ‘muscle’ analogy a lot.
CB: That’s good. I like that. That’s a really good analogy. I like the ‘tree’ analogy. That’s like when you’re learning how to ride a bike, if you have training wheels on, but then all of a sudden somebody takes the training wheels off and you realize you’re just balancing yourself. You could easily topple over and take a big spill, but as long as you stay focused and exert everything you’ve learned up to that point, you can actually do it, and you realize that you can actually ride that bike and keep going.
KT: Yes, definitely.
CB: All right, so other themes—‘challenges’ and ‘hardships’. So the Saturn return often involves facing challenges, hardships, and sometimes losses which can lead to feelings of depression or heaviness. And I know that can be a major theme, ‘cause sometimes Saturn can, like I said, either close a door or it can take something away. Sometimes what’s being taken away—like our first point—is metaphorical, like youth—like you realize your youth is being taken away and that that’s something that’s not necessarily coming back in some sense—but in other instances what’s being taken away or removed from one’s life can be much more tangible.
KT: Yeah, I feel like with it being in a 12th house and squaring my cadent, it was just so intangible so much of it and so mental. But, yeah, I see especially with the ‘angular’ folks and even the ‘succedent Saturn’ folks that there’s a lot more tangibility to the problems and a lot of effort that needs to be exerted to move through it.
JO: Yeah. Yeah, it’s funny that you said ‘youth going away’ because I was just kind of looking through some of the dates for mine up until this recording, over the past couple days, and I was realizing that during my Saturn return was the first time I started noticing more and more just visible signs of aging. I was like, “My skin is for real different than it was in my 20s.” Which it doesn’t bother me even now, but just those changes and just being like, “Ah, this is very tangibly different.”
KT: Yes.
JO: Like I have more fine lines and stuff and my body doesn’t work or recover in the same way as it used to. Yeah, it’s very real.
KT: It’s so real. The way your body changes, it’s like, what is happening? It’s very, very weird, yeah.
JO: Yeah. I will say though that one of the key themes with Saturn that I see so much is ‘sustainability’ and making sure what you’re doing is sustainable, whatever that’s pertaining to. And Saturn has taught me how to prioritize sustainability in just so many areas of life, whether that is the way I’m using my body or treating my body or whatever else it is, with my work. So that’s a good thing that comes from being like, “Oh, I’m reaching limits with my body, and it’s changing and different. There’s some constructive stuff there too in my experience at least.
KT: Yeah, just one more thing about the aging thing. I have realized how much older I am than other people now. You’ll be around—I call them ‘the youth’—and you’ll be like, “Oh, my God, I’m old, like I’m really old,” and you’re not really old, but it’s very weird. And it’s hard to describe, but you become a lot more aware of your age, especially around younger people.
JO: I remember coworkers—when I was still working a retail day job—and they’d be like, “How old are you?” And I’d be like, “I’m 31.” They’d be like, “Oh, my God, you’re old. Like I had no idea.”
KT: Yeah, yeah.
JO: Okay, 31 is not that old. But also, true, you’re 22; of course, I felt the exact same way when I was 22. Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, Kirah.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good one, just an awareness of age and aging, and an awareness that you didn’t have up to that point that becomes much more stark and in some instances tangible or concrete in some way. I famously started losing my hair during my Saturn return, which is my funny ‘1st house aging’ thing as a parallel with yours.
KT: I chopped mine off when Saturn squared my Sun, yeah.
CB: Nice. That’s brilliant.
JO: I also chopped my hair during my Saturn return actually, just not as short as you guys.
CB: Well, you did it pretty short on some of the previous episodes; I know there was one of them that you were on. That’s interesting. Maybe that’s a theme that we didn’t previously know about of ‘chopping off hair’ as a Saturn return theme.
KT: Maybe it’s because we all have fixed Suns and it’s aspected our Suns.
JO: True. That’s very true.
CB: Yeah, that could make sense. All right, so next, testing limits. This period is marked by testing and understanding one’s limits both personally and in a broader context in life. That can also be in terms of boundaries, that’s basically what Jo just said. Austin has used an analogy that you get to a point in life with Saturn where you realize that you’ve expended all your energy, and your gas tank is empty, and you don’t have this infinite source or this well of energy, of youth; but sometimes if you push yourself too far or past a certain limit or boundary, you kind of collapse, and I think Saturn return can sometimes be the first realization of that as a theme.
KT: Yes, very much so. I think about all the time how people used to be like, “Kirah, how do you do so much?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I just do.” And now I’m like, how the hell did I do all the things that I did?
CB: Yeah.
KT: Pre-Saturn return. Literally, I can’t even imagine doing a quarter of all the things I used to do on a regular basis. Yeah, you very much become a lot more aware of your limitations.
JO: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like before my Saturn return, I had this infinite capacity for—and this was a 7th house Saturn return—just adapting to my relationship and the situations that arose there. And my Saturn return was most definitely me hitting a wall and being like, “I think I finally found my hard boundary,” like my hard ‘no’ of like, “This actually cannot continue,” when previously there had been so many checkpoints. And I was like, “Why do I have such a big capacity for bullshit, but I couldn’t find whatever I needed to really make a change?” But it really did feel like hitting a wall when my Saturn return finally kicked in, where I was like something has to give.
KT: Yeah.
CB: That makes sense. All right, other themes—‘constructive, hard work’. There’s an emphasis on striving towards long-term goals through consistent effort and sometimes the achievement of something or hitting a new high point. Although one thing that kept coming up consistently in some of the Saturn return submissions from listeners was finding out that they didn’t want to continue proceeding in a certain path, in some direction where their Saturn was placed in life, especially if it was tied in with their 10th house and a certain career path, and literally having the ending of that career, which then led them to a new one which ended up working out and being for the best. But at least having a somewhat unexpected ending to something was a theme that kept coming up over and over again.
KT: I see that a lot with clients, yeah, whether they start a new career path and start going to school for something new, or they’re just like, “Yeah, I got here, and I realize I don’t want to do this at all.”
CB: Right. Yeah, realizing that you don’t want to do something, I think that’s a really great keyword or a great phrase.
JO: Yeah, I see it with clients a lot too, where it’s like you can feel the clock ticking in a different way, and you start to realize that if you stay on the path you’re on right now, you’re going to be there for a while. And so, realizations start to set in where you discover now is the time to make changes, like major changes, if you want the future to be different or your future to look a different way.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And Saturn also—like one of the basic principles underlying its significations is to ‘reject’ or to say ‘no’ to things, and sometimes saying ‘no’ to something can be hard or difficult, but sometimes it can also be necessary. And I think saying ‘no’ to certain things—which is adjacent to the notion of setting boundaries—is very much part of that experience.
KT: Yeah, definitely.
CB: All right, last point—themes of ‘life’s turning points’. The Saturn return is generally remembered as a major turning point marked by significant achievements or profound changes. So achievements or sometimes reaching a new milestone in some area of one’s life is a really common Saturn return theme and something we’ll see in a number of different stories.
KT: For sure. Can I add one more theme—
CB: Please.
KT: —that we kind of touched on that is just really loud for me, which is the ‘re-parenting’ process? She kind of touched on it with the maturing, but there’s something with having to not just become your own parent and kind of parent yourself in the ways that either, one, you never got, or two, you’re just not gonna get anymore ‘cause you’re an adult. And then. Also, I find a very consistent theme is having to ‘parent’ your parents. There’s just something that just comes up often with both clients and myself, where there’s this situation that comes up where you have to ‘parent’ your parents through it. Yeah, just the whole parenting and being your own advocate and caring for yourself and setting boundaries for yourself and learning how to do that. I mean, my mother—she also has Saturn in Aquarius—she lost her mother during our Saturn returns and things like that. And I remember there was something that happened with my younger sister, with our dog dying, and I remember having to tell my mom, “You’re the parent, you need to you need to go and do ‘x, y, and z’, and just it being this realization of like, oh, I’m literally feeling like I’m parenting my parents right now. Yeah, that’s just another theme I wanted to bring up.
CB: That’s a great point.
JO: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up ‘cause I feel like that’s so true in my experience too. And a phrase that came to me while you were reflecting on all that was ‘becoming the central authority figure in your own life’ when previously maybe that role was occupied by someone else. But there’s so many different ways that this can happen, whether it’s re-parenting or re-parenting ourselves or kind of playing the parent role with our parents or just having to do stuff ourselves that’s difficult and we’ve never had to do on our own before, but there’s something there with the concept of parenting and that kind of elder or authority figure. So, yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great one. And also, just hitting that stage in life, in your late 20s and early 30s, where you realize—for a lot of people—you’re at the age roughly when your parents were raising you and then realizing like, “Oh, my God, how were they raising me at this age? I don’t feel like I could be doing that.” Or in some instances some people are raising children, but just it gives you a lot of perspective hitting that age where you came into your parents’ lives in some instances and then wrestling with having a sudden realization of, “Oh, when they were raising me, they didn’t have all the answers. They didn’t necessarily know what was going on. They were struggling to establish some of these themes that I’m struggling with now.” That gives you a much different perspective on your parents than you have growing up to some extent.
KT: Yeah, for sure.
CB: All right, are there any other themes like that that are good? Like core Saturn return themes that I’m forgetting, or standard ones that came up for either of you?
KT: Back problems.
CB: Yeah.
KT: Back problems. I don’t know, that’s another consistent one I’ve seen, especially with the ‘Saturn in domicile’ folks. I’m having it now with Saturn on my ascendant. I think it just comes with aging, the body stuff we talked about, but in particular back and teeth problems. Luckily, my teeth, I have Saturn privilege in that way, but a lot of people go through teeth and dental problems as well.
JO: I feel like that makes sense with Saturn ruling the bones. It’s just like your bones just have a hard time, man, whether it’s your back or your teeth or whatever.
KT: Yeah, you start creaking.
JO: Oh, yeah.
CB: Yeah, ‘bones’ and ‘teeth’ are two huge Saturn themes. ‘Cause it also brings up another point, which is if you haven’t taken care of yourself up to that point then it starts to show and you start to pay for it, you start to have consequences. So at that point it forces you to start taking better care of yourself than you had up to that point, because all of a sudden you realize that you’re not invincible anymore.
KT: Yes. And ‘sobriety’—‘sobriety’ is another one.
CB: Yeah, which is really interesting, and that came up in several different stories that were submitted. Saturn, metaphorically, is considered to be a ‘sober’ type of planet in the sense of not being carefree or being restrained or something. But sobriety—in a more tangible sense of what we usually talk about in terms of not using drugs or alcohol or other things like that—is also a really common Saturn return theme.
KT: Yeah, one of my exes, I was with him when he was going through his Saturn return and alcoholic and Saturn conjunct Neptune, and he had gotten his 2nd DUI when we were together, so he had a forced sobriety moment. And this was like a whole thing but I just remember being like, “Yep.” And of course I hadn’t gone through it yet, but just trying to coach him through a Saturn return, he didn’t want to hear it, but I was like, “This is part of it, it’s time to get sober.”
JO: Yeah, yeah, sobriety was a part of mine too. Although when I quit drinking, that was February 2020, so it was just before my Saturn return. But I don’t know if you felt this way, Kirah—I think part of it was profection years were involved, ‘cause Saturn was activated back to back—but I definitely felt like the buildup when Saturn was in Capricorn; that was Saturn opposite my Moon. But I feel like lots of my clients as well were like, “Did we get double-Saturn returns because of the Saturn in its domicile thing?” But, yeah, kind of living sober for that first year or two was a huge part of the way I was experiencing all of these other themes, like just the consequences of what had been going on the past decade really.
KT: Yeah.
CB: Which is so amazing, because on the one hand, Saturn is supposed to be about hard reality and facing reality as opposed to let’s say Neptune, which is more dealing with illusory things metaphorically. But Saturn is also about exercising restraint and also doing things that are hard and doing things that require repetition and just going in day after day and doing it over and over again, which another major part of sobriety is doing something that’s hard, that maybe one part of you doesn’t want to do, but another part of you realizes that you need to and therefore you have to work on it constantly.
JO: Yeah, definitely. That like ‘one day at a time’ mentality is very Saturnian in general, I think.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, awesome. Well, I think those are all good broad themes. Let’s talk about some other charts. Let’s talk about some celebrity charts, some listener charts. Let’s start with some of the celebrity ones. I already talked about Miley Cyrus. I did want to show my tweet, just to do a victory lap on that because I was pretty happy with it. So September 2020, I said, “Calling it now: My Miley Cyrus as a Saturn return in Aquarius success story,” and I said that because she had Saturn in the 10th house, so well-placed. And it wasn’t that she didn’t go through difficulties—since obviously she also struggled with the after-effects of losing that major relationship—but she was able to channel some of that loss and difficulty into that song and then ended up winning her first Grammy as a result of it, shortly after her Saturn return. I think it’s just a good example of somebody doing the Saturn return relatively well and achieving success during it, rather than it always being necessarily this really difficult or hard time. ‘Cause I think when talking about Saturn returns—even though it’s important to acknowledge the difficult and challenging and even really tough parts—also it’s important not to freak people out too much, because there can be some really good things that happen during the Saturn return as well.
KT: Yeah. Maybe this is ‘day chart’ privilege, but I felt like it was really, really hard, especially the squares. The exact return was fine, but I’m so grateful for it. I feel like I’m probably in a lot of material ways worse off than I was at the beginning, but mentally, spiritually, emotionally I feel so much better and stronger, yeah.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, another celebrity one—I just found this one recently—is Princess Mako of Japan who has Saturn in the 7th house in a night chart with Leo rising; she actually gave up her royal status in order to marry a commoner or marry a non-royal person basically. And what was interesting about it is that they had announced that they were gonna do this back when Saturn was in Scorpio at the waning square of her Saturn cycle—or 30-year Saturn cycle—but then they just finally did it recently while Saturn was in Aquarius, going through her 7th house of relationships. So I thought that was a really fascinating case, especially because obviously that doesn’t happen to everybody but it’s a pretty cool manifestation of that.
KT: Yeah, that is really cool. I can’t believe they’ve been with each other that long. That whole seven years, they were just like getting ready?
CB: Yeah, I guess there were just lots of details surrounding it because she also ended up relinquishing payments or something like that. She would have gotten money, but she ended up rejecting it. So it’s interesting ‘cause it’s also a night chart. It’s like there’s difficulties in that she’s having to give something up in order to do this or have this thing that she wants, but it’s also something that she wants even though she’s making a hard decision, so it’s an interesting combination of challenge and positive things.
JO: Yeah, especially with that exalted Moon right on the midheaven square Saturn, opposite Mars, like there are so many interesting things about this chart. Like sacrificing your status for a relationship is the most ‘Saturn overcoming the exalted Moon in a square’ thing that I’ve ever heard of.
CB: Totally.
KT: And then looking at her benefics in Virgo—it’s like, yeah, she has these fallen planets on top of all these very domiciled exalted planets. I mean, night chart, the Venus wins out. She did it for love.
JO: It’s romantic, honestly.
KT: Yeah.
JO: Wow, I’m obsessed with this chart. Thank you, Chris.
KT: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, I was really happy to have found that. Other ones really quickly to run through—Elvis, I recently discovered, had Saturn in Aquarius in the 3rd house of siblings in a night chart. Weirdly, he had a twin who was born 35 minutes before him, but it died; it was actually a stillborn child. So just in terms of his natal chart that’s interesting, Saturn in the 3rd in a night chart, and he lost a sibling at birth. Also, recently, those biopics of Elvis came out—especially the main one that happened like a year or two ago—during his Saturn return. And I thought that was really interesting and I’ll probably come back to that and expand on it more in an episode I’m working on posthumous astrology, which is that our charts continue to work and operate even after we die as long as the memory of us is still echoing in time.
KT: That’s gonna be cool. That’ll be a cool episode.
CB: Yeah. All right, another Saturn in Aquarius return I saw that was really cool—and it’s less connected to the house placement—was Conan O’Brien, who’s like a famous talk show host I grew up watching. And his story initially was sad because over a decade ago or 15 years ago now, he got The Tonight Show—which was the biggest talk show at the time on television—but then somehow it was taken away from him after only like a year of him doing it, and it was seen as this big downfall or this big catastrophe that he lost his dream job that he had aspired to get for 20 or 30 years up to that point. But what was interesting is over the past decade, he started a podcast and it started building up and building up and becoming more and more successful, but then eventually when he got to a Saturn return, the podcast just seems like it’s been wildly successful, and it was bought by Sirius FM or something like that for millions and millions of dollars. So he got both a really good deal and was successful in terms of that financially, but also I realized in watching a recent episode where he was reflecting on the last 30 years of his life and that the hardships ended up pushing him in a direction so that he’s just at the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing right now and he’s having a good time and his life is fulfilling. Even though he lost what he thought was his dream job, it ended up allowing him to do something that was eventually much more suited for him and just puts him in a much better position nowadays than doing a talk show every night would have, in retrospect.
KT: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Yeah, he got a whole podcast network that was started during that. Yeah, I didn’t know the podcast got bought, that’s awesome.
CB: Yeah. So it’s actually doing really good, he’s interviewing a lot of famous celebrities right now. But he’s doing really long-form, engaging, interesting interviews and he’s able to do his usual humor and stuff, but it’s actually much more interesting and engaging and much more relevant for the times when podcasts have become so huge over the past decade versus how talk shows in some ways have fallen a little bit more by the wayside in terms of that format that was much more popular and suited for the ‘90s or the early 2000s or something. All right, so there’s that one. I’ve got a couple more—but what other celebrity ones jump to mind for either of you that have been major ones, or ones that you wanted to share?
KT: Do you have any, Jo? I mean, I have a couple. I guess like there’s so many. Johnny Depp. I kind of look at Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt together ‘cause there was so much about their relationships and both kind of fell out of public—what’s the word I’m looking for? Like out of favor in the public. They used to be humongous stars, like the hottest celebrities, I mean, both of them. But, yeah, now they are kind of infamous for these really messy relationships and abuse allegations.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JO: Oh, I was just gonna say I was briefly looking at Johnny Depp’s chart for this reason, and I feel like if I’m doing the math right there was like a 12th house profection year thrown in there with this very public Saturn return stuff going on, and I was just like that’s rough for him. But, yeah, that is so interesting, like the huge fall from favor in the public eye.
CB: Right. And for Depp especially ‘cause he has Leo rising, Saturn was in his 7th house, and the entire thing was that there was this very highly-publicized trial between him and his ex-wife where there were all these allegations being thrown back and forth and it became this circus or spectacle. So that’s actually a really interesting example of a Saturn return in the 7th house that’s on the much more extreme negative side.
KT: Yeah. I mean, there were like I think multiple docuseries about it. It was just, yeah, a huge public spectacle.
CB: And maybe it’s relevant in that sense that his Saturn’s at 23 Aquarius, and it’s squaring his Mercury and Venus and Taurus in the 10th house. So maybe that’s part of why it was not just very public but also why it had an effect then on public perceptions of him or on his career or other things like that, because it’s activating the natal tension between those two houses due to the placements involved. All right, that’s a pretty good one. Let’s see, what other celebrity ones? One that was sent in by listener Vandana Gyan pointed out that Michelle Yeoh was the first Asian-American actress to win the Academy Award for best actress for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022, and she has Saturn in Aquarius; we don’t have a birth time. But that was a really interesting one ‘cause it was viewed also that she hadn’t received an award that earlier in her career, but now that she was in her late 50s, receiving an Academy Award at that time, there were was this age component to it that people were talking about at the time when that happened. So it was kind of striking and a good reminder that sometimes during Saturn returns and Saturn transits that sometimes there can be an age discussion that comes up connected to whatever is happening at that time.
JO: That was a really good one.
CB: Yeah. Well, it was really heartening. And it was a cool movie, and she was just perfect for that role. It’s like that time when that one role comes along, that the actor really nails it, and then they also are not just perceived but recognized for that and they received the accolades as a result of doing a great job. I think that’s another great Saturn return theme.
JO: For sure. And she has a Leo Sun, right? So this is also a really nice Saturn return opposing Leo placement that actually worked out really well for her, so I like that part of it too.
CB: Yeah, this is apparently the chart with Saturn at 7 Aquarius and it’s opposing the Sun at 13 Leo and Mercury at 21 and Uranus at 29 Leo.
KT: Something we didn’t really mention in the beginning is when Saturn’s retrograde natally, there can often be those delays. It doesn’t surprise me it took her second Saturn return to really receive her flowers, ‘cause we often get those delayed gratifications with retrograde planets.
CB: That’s a really great point.
JO: Yeah.
CB: And then you’re doubling-it up Saturn, which is already dealing with time-related things and age and then retrogrades, which often delay the manifestation of what the planet indicates.
KT: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Good point. Let’s see, the only other one Vandana also submitted was Tom Cruz, saying that Top Gun: Maverick was released in 2022 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where he earned an honorary Palme D’Or, and the film earned over $1 billion dollar, which was the highest-grossing film of his career. Which is also kind of interesting ‘cause it was like a throwback to over 30 years earlier, to the first Top Gun movie, which was in like the late ‘80s or early ‘90s.
JO: I did not know it did that well, honestly. I haven’t seen it, but that’s great for Tom Cruz. Very Saturn return of him.
KT: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, I didn’t have any interest in seeing it. I didn’t think there was any way that a movie 30 years later could be any good. But I got talked into seeing it and it was actually pretty good. I’ll have to say it was decent.
KT: Yeah, I really heard good things.
CB: Yeah, I don’t know. All right, moving on to other celebrities, one that you noted Kirah was Jennette McCurdy.
KT: Yeah, she’s an actress. Was she on Nickelodeon?
JO: I think she was on iCarly, yeah.
KT: Yeah, iCarly, and she wrote this hugely best-selling book I’m Glad My Mom Died, and it was published during her Saturn return. She has a Moon-Saturn-Pluto T-square natally; we don’t have a time. But, yeah, she wrote that book and it was a huge hit.
CB: Wow.
JO: Even just that title is very Saturn return. Like it’s very straight to the point. It’s very blunt, it’s about death, it’s about a parent—it’s a lot.
KT: Yeah.
CB: Looks like we might have gotten a time. I’m calculating the chart now.
KT: Yeah, so essentially in the book she explains all the horrible abuse she endured with her mom, like a lot of different types of abuse and kind of explains the why. I didn’t read the book, but I just remember a lot of discussion around it.
CB: I’m just checking, but, yeah, Astro-Databank is saying ‘birth certificate in hand’, so I think this is correct. And if it is, she has Leo rising, Saturn’s at 17° of Aquarius. This is one of the first examples of what I was talking about earlier. Look how close that Saturn-Pluto square is, where Saturn’s at 17 Aquarius, and it’s closely squaring Pluto at 20° of Scorpio, which is in her 4th house. And you were just saying part of the premise of that book was she was talking very openly about the abuse she received from her mother basically growing up.
KT: Yeah. I’ve seen an exalted Moon countless times where people have very controlling mothers; I like to say ‘super mom’, which isn’t always the best; especially in the 10th about appearances and, yeah, especially with the malefic of sect in detriment right there.
CB: Right. For the audio listeners, the Moon’s at 14 Taurus, and its conjunct Mars at 8 Taurus, and they’re both in the 10th house.
JO: Yeah, and ruling the Sun, Venus, and Mercury in the 12th from the 10th. What comes to mind is ‘dance’ mom or ‘theater’ mom, or ‘acting’ mom stuff. And from what I understand of her story—I haven’t read the book either—there was a lot of being forced to act and ending up being the breadwinner for the family and lots of being pushed by her mother and things like that. That’s a really interesting exalted Moon manifestation square Saturn.
KT: Yeah, a very malefic Moon.
JO: Yeah.
KT: Malefic exalted. That’s tough. That’s a tough combo.
CB: It’s interesting with the interchange between the 12th and the 10th as well, because the 12th is generally about loss, but it’s connected here with the 10th house of career. That’s a super-literal manifestation, though. Like the title of her book is literally I’m Glad My Mom Died; that also speaks to that a little bit as well.
KT: Yeah, definitely.
CB: I’m just reading a thing, a synopsis, but it said in the book that the abuse included emotional manipulation, controlling behavior, and forcing an acting career upon her, as well as child stardom and the psychological toll of that. Which that’s an interesting Saturn theme, because kids that act sometimes are being forced to grow up or be an adult way before they’re ready to.
KT: Yeah, that’s a big one.
CB: All right, so that’s a good one. Let’s see, other ones—what was the Michelle Obama one? She has Saturn in Aquarius?
KT: Yeah, I don’t know, it’s kind of boring. She just had a lot going on during her Saturn return. She was involved in documentaries and different podcasts and she wrote another book, and, yeah, she got a lot of awards throughout the time, but, yeah, kind of boring.
CB: Yeah we don’t have a birth time for her, so we don’t necessarily know what house it is.
KT: Yeah.
CB: And then you had Jeff Bezos here who also has Saturn in Aquarius.
KT: Yeah, he had a divorce—I don’t remember if it was during Saturn return—but more notably he gained so much wealth during his Saturn return. And he’s of course an Aquarius—sorry, a Capricorn Sun. I remember a lot of this started kicking off when Pluto came to his Sun. And, yeah, he’s just gained massive amounts of wealth during that time.
CB: I’m just pulling up the chart, and it looks like he also has a Venus-Saturn conjunction, so that’s interesting. This is just a noon chart, it’s not timed, so we don’t know the houses; but Saturn’s at 21 Aquarius and Venus at 24. So that’s an interesting point in terms of whatever planet Saturn is with will also get activated as well, and it’s activating those aspects in combination. So sometimes whatever the general meaning of a combination is can be what that’s about. And he—oh, yeah, right, his story was he and his wife separated, and he got together with somebody new, but then his wife did something. She had billions of dollars from stock from Amazon.
KT: I think he cheated.
CB: Okay.
KT: Yeah, I think he cheated and she had proof, which is why she had such a crazy, huge divorce settlement. And, yeah, now she’s known for her philanthropy.
CB: Yeah.
KT: I want to say ‘philan-thropy’, ‘phi-lanthropy’.
CB: That’s what I was gonna say. ‘Cause she then donated just like a ton of money to charities and stuff. She gave away a lot of what she took from the divorce.
KT: Exactly.
JO: Love that.
CB: Yeah, that’s pretty interesting, pretty cool. All right, so I think that might be good. You mentioned Jon Stewart. So he’s Saturn in Aquarius?
KT: Yes. He returned to hosting, ‘cause he had stopped after a long time. He started the show The Problem with Jon Stewart in 2022. It was canceled after two seasons a year later in October of 2023—‘cause Apple executives didn’t like how he was covering AI and China—and now he’s returning to be a guest host on The Daily Show, which is kind of cool.
CB: Yeah, that’s super interesting that he had that setback. ‘Cause it looked like that was gonna be his new thing, that Apple show, but then it got canceled because of things he was saying about China and about AI. And as a result of that, it closed that door, but now he’s suddenly coming back to where he started and hosting The Daily Show during an election year, when he has the potential to influence the discourse surrounding the election and around Biden and Trump and everything else. So it’s interesting how probably that’s something that he really did not experience well during his Saturn return—having those restrictions of what he could say imposed on him and therefore deciding to leave that—and then inadvertently opening up a new door which could end up putting him in a much more influential place than he would have been otherwise.
KT: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: All right, cool. All right, well, I think that’s all the major celebrity charts.
KT: You don’t want to talk about Pete Davidson?
CB: I mean, if you want to. His love life is definitely one of the most important news events of the last three years.
KT: It’s not important. It’s just that, yeah, that whole time when he was dating Kim Kardashian. He became super popular because everyone was like, “Why is he getting all the hottest girls, all the hottest celebrities?” (there’s reasons) during that, and he went to rehab a few times during that as well. So, yeah, that was just a random little one that I thought was funny to include.
CB: Yeah, it was super funny. I just pulled up his chart. We don’t have a timed chart, but it looks like he has Saturn at 23 Aquarius. And he has a huge Scorpio stellium, so it’s squaring all of that, which includes Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Sun, and Pluto. But, yeah, he really was popping off during that period in terms of hitting a high point in his career, but also his notoriety partially as a result of all these relationships he was having with all these famous women. Yeah, that was pretty crazy at that time.
KT: Yeah. Yeah, I just thought it was funny people were referring to him—especially men were referring to him as ugly, and they were like, “Why is this ugly guy getting all the girls?” And all the women were like, “‘Cause he’s funny and he has ‘line cook’ energy.’ Now that The Bear is out most people probably get what that means.
CB: Yeah. He inspired and he gave hope to non-super-attractive-looking men everywhere ‘cause he was dating Ariana Grande and he was dating Kim Kardashian. Wasn’t there like one other—there was like one other person he was with at one point as well.
KT: Yeah, I can’t remember. But, yeah, just all the hotties.
CB: Yeah. All right, good times. Well, I’m gonna put that as a ‘Saturn return’ success story in my book.
KT: Can I do one more real, real quick, ‘cause I just loved this one? Bob Odenkirk—he just had a second Saturn return. I just wanted to note it because Better Call Saul has such a huge fandom, and they did the series finale during his Saturn return, and he also got a Hollywood star. So I felt like that was a really good ‘Saturn return’ success story.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great one.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Also because it was such a random thing that happened in terms of how he ended up getting there; the character he played originally 10 years ago was just like a side character, the lawyer in Breaking Bad. But then the fact that it was so popular—that they were able to spin it off into this whole separate series, which itself became very popular—was pretty impressive and pretty surprising and some of that culminated during his Saturn return.
KT: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I just thought that was so cool, coming from Breaking Bad. I don’t even know if he was supposed to be on for that long. I think he was just supposed to be like a side character, and he was just so great. And, yeah, now he’s a Hollywood star.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’s a good one. All right, cool. Well, let’s take a little bit of a break and then let’s come back and look at some listeners’ submissions.
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CB: All right, so we’re back from break. Before we move on from the celebrity section, I just wanted to mention a couple of reflections from past ones. It’s been interesting after we do these Saturn return retrospectives continuing to see how people’s stories play out in retrospect with some of the different celebrities we talked about in different episodes. So one of them that was interesting from the last Saturn return episode we did in Capricorn was MGK, the rapper who we talked about at the time. His Saturn return story was really interesting because he got in a rap battle with his idol, Eminem—who was another famous rapper—and the two of them released ‘diss’ tracks against each other and it was very divisive. But what’s interesting is that after that happened, over the past two years he seems to have made a career switch and he’s sort of not focusing on rap as much, but instead he’s focusing on doing this pop-punk sort of thing he’s been doing for the past few years, which he’s been actually having success at and maybe has become more successful in that area. But it was interesting because his Saturn return ended up closing one door in his life and opening another, but it was through this singular event of getting into a battle with one of his idols. Am I describing that right?
KT: Honestly, I wouldn’t know.
JO: I don’t either.
[crosstalk]
KT: Yeah, I just remember hearing about how he was in a rap battle with Eminem and it didn’t go well for him. ‘Cause like why would you do that? I don’t know.
CB: Yeah, I think the conclusion was that Eminem won, although MGK had put up the best fight out of anybody that ever attempted that in the past in terms of Eminem, so that it was still halfway respectable; but it’s interesting then to whatever extent that was the singular event that pushed him to go in a different direction. But it’s interesting—people going in a different direction after their Saturn return is a theme that we’ll see come up in some of these stories we’re about to go through. And there was actually another one from the previous Saturn return, which is Ronda Rousey—who we talked about during the Saturn return in Sagittarius—who was a famous MMA fighter; and she was sort of at the top of that game at the time and really talked up a lot, but during her Saturn return she famously lost this major fight against another fighter. Interestingly, after that, she’s made this transition away from MMA fighting and instead focusing on professional wrestling; so it’s like another instance where somebody had one door closed during their Saturn return but it sent them on a different path and another path that ended up working out for them in in some way or being the path that they were supposed to be on in some broader sense.
KT: I’m hoping that’s happening for me as well.
JO: Yeah, same.
CB: And then there are some future ones. Actually, let’s save these for the end, but I want to make sure that we mentioned these. So remind me to come back to the future ones, the ‘Saturn in Pisces’ people.
JO: Gotcha.
CB: All right, let’s talk about some listener submissions. I’m gonna zoom through some of these. We have about an hour to do this. So one of the charts was that was sent in was by a listener and an artist named Mega McGrath who has Saturn in the 9th house with the midheaven—the degree of the midheaven, so it’s blending 9th and 10th house significations—and Saturn is also ruling the 8th house of debt, other people’s money, shared resources and things like that. And some of the themes for her that came up were a career in art, issues related to debt, and also relocating abroad. Okay, here is the summary. I’ll read just the summary version ‘cause it’s very good what she sent in.
She says: “I was working in a nightclub, a job I disliked, while trying to pursue a career in art that I had been working on for many years. My habits and finances were out of integrity and my two identities were at odds with each other. As Saturn ingressed and my Saturn return started I immediately lost my job as well as all of my art clients overnight. Unable to afford interest payments, I was finally forced to reckon with the amount of debt (8th house significance) that I had been carrying for years and come clean to my mom. Thankfully, she loaned me the money to pay off my debt under the promise that I create better financial habits. I then had no choice but to rely on my art for income and rebuild from the ground up. In 2021, I met a mentor (9th house signification) who greatly inspired me and helped me create a clear path forward in my career as an artist. During those years, I worked very hard, I had a lot of success (and some failures of course), but my income rose higher than pre-COVID levels. By the end of my Saturn return, I had repaid my loan in full. I also took a big step towards my dreams of living abroad and I got my UK Visa. I had to create real structure and integrity in order for the move to happen. I am proud to say that I live abroad now with a career I’ve always dreamed of.”
So this was, I thought, an amazing ‘Saturn return’ success story, and also—just in terms of from a technical standpoint—how that shows up in her birth chart is just perfect. So we can see the blending here of the 8th house, which Saturn rules, and some of the issues surrounding money and debt, as well as loans from other people and getting one’s financial stuff under control. We can see some of the ‘9th house’ themes, which involve foreign countries, foreign travel, eventually relocation, but also mentorship; having a teacher who teaches or guides you is also a very ‘9th house’ theme. And then, finally, the fact that the degree of the midheaven is there in the 9th whole sign house, it’s importing major ‘10th house’ themes into it, which manifested through her really changing and focusing on this career as an artist and eventually achieving success within the context of that career.
JO: Yeah, there are so many good things and interesting things about this chart and the way it’s all working together. I’m looking at the Moon here at 28 Cancer, the Part of Fortune happens to be there too. But that would have meant that especially as Saturn crossed back and forth between Aquarius and Capricorn, this was also a 2nd house Moon transit as well, where it’s like a strong Moon opposing a strong Saturn and those financial themes being really carried forward into the overall ‘Saturn return’ story, which did involve really confronting the debt, but then creating a structure to pay all that off and be able to kind of start fresh after that. I think that’s a really interesting combination there with the Moon.
CB: That’s a great point. And that would have been especially the case during the course of 2020 when Saturn first dipped into Aquarius and hit her Saturn, but then retrograded out that summer and went back into Capricorn where it would have opposed the Moon.
JO: Yeah, definitely. And I’m thinking too a little bit about profection years—which the only way I can do this math is because this person’s born the same year as me. So in 2021, that would have been moving into a 7th house profection year with Jupiter activated, and then following that, in 2022, that would have been the start of the back-to-back Saturn-ruled years. And I think that it’s really cool that within those two years—with the 2nd of the two being right now—there’s this movement from Saturn into Pisces, out of the Saturn return phase, where even more of these long-held goals and dreams are being made manifest career-wise. It’s bringing in that whole sign 10th house and continuing those Saturn-ruled midheaven in the 9th’ themes as well, so that’s that’s pretty neat too.
CB: That’s a super great point. So taking into account what sign or what house Saturn goes into right after the Saturn return as being relevant and being the first step in that new cycle of where things head from there.
JO: Yeah.
KT: I think it’s really interesting that they lost their job right around the Saturn ingress, when Saturn was trine their Mars—Mars at 2° Libra—which rules the 6th house, which is kind of what I would assume is a day job that they had would go in. And I often think about trines as like freeing; they’re of the nature of Jupiter and they have this ‘lubricant’ effect. And so, it’s interesting how Saturn kind of came in with like a ‘no’, a denial, but it had this liberating, freeing effect of getting them out of this job that they would probably have not left otherwise and they kind of didn’t have anything else to hold on to. Yeah, I think the malefic trine can show up in an interesting way.
CB: For sure. And also just thinking about what we mentioned earlier, where the first ingress of Saturn also was a first ingress of Mars, and they conjoined at like 0° and 1° of Aquarius, right on the Saturn. And that was the really hardest event that opened the Saturn return and also the beginning of the pandemic; but then later that year, in like December, Jupiter going in there at the same time and then experiencing an entire year of Jupiter transiting through the 9th house with the midheaven at the same time. So there’s something about that that’s very important in terms of the dynamic about how this set of Saturn returns went for everybody. Obviously, that’s gonna be different for different Saturn returns, but it’s interesting how you could sort of predict and set up the beats of how things are gonna go just based on those ingresses if you wanted to ahead of time. Yeah, so that is an amazing one. And she’s actually a really good artist, like that was the other thing. Her Instagram account is here, if anyone wants to search for her name. And there’s some of her paintings.
JO: Oh, wow.
KT: Oh, wow. Beautiful.
JO: Yeah, that’s amazing. This is such a good example.
CB: Right. Like that’s what I thought. So that’s why I wanted to start with this one. And thanks to her for sending this into us as a great ‘Saturn return’ success story.
KT: It’s @MegaMcGrathh with two ‘H’s’, if anyone wants to search.
CB: Yeah, thanks for saying that, mentioning that.
KT: Yeah.
CB: All right, awesome. And I should look at where the transits are now and how it’s hitting her chart for today, sharing that story. I know everything’s in Aquarius right now, so of course that’s relevant for everybody.
JO: Luna returned too.
KT: Yeah.
JO: Well, probably tomorrow.
CB: Oh, yeah, the Moon is in Cancer today. So for the record, we started recording this today on Monday, February 19, 2024. We’ve been recording for 1-hour-and-40 minutes, and it’s 2:55 PM now, and we used an election with cancer rising today; so there’s the data for people that are curious. All right, let’s move on.
KT: It’s funny, that char. I was also born in ‘91, and there’s like three girls in my grade who were born in ‘94 on that same day. It’s just so interesting how the same day my friend is a Cancer rising and just how different things can be, you know. Yeah, it’s just always interesting to see the same but different charts and how much a rising sign can change things.
CB: Totally.
JO: Yeah.
CB: One of the coolest and funnest parts of this for me sometimes is seeing how your friends are going through a similar transit or sometimes seeing either celebrities or people with different variations of the same chart and how they manifested in similar but also very different ways.
KT: Yeah.
CB: All right, so let’s move on to the next one. So the next chart is a listener named Morgan. I told people they could send in a one-minute video with their write-up, and I was surprised that only two people did, but Morgan was actually one of them. So let me see if I can play that video here within Zoom. Morgan had Saturn in Aquarius in the 8th house in a night chart and also ruling the 7th, so that’s part of the context for this example. And some of the themes that came up were dealing with death, as well as grief, and a number of other things. So let me share that.
MORGAN: My Saturn return in the 8th taught me how to integrate and ‘alchemize’ grief. It started with the publishing of my first book, which is a fictionalized memoir on the loss of my best friend to suicide in 2016. Also during my Saturn return, my grandfather passed away suddenly. I wrote his eulogy, handled his ashes. I got pregnant and then lost a friend of mine in childbirth due to undiagnosed preeclampsia when I was 15 weeks along, and her death helped me advocate for a more positive birth story for myself. I also euthanized a couple pets and wrote a second book. So Saturn taught me a lot about grief, but also the things that can come of grief and the glimmers sometimes we can find in really dark places.
CB: All right, so here’s the chart with Saturn at 15° of Aquarius. It’s retrograde. It’s squaring Pluto at 20° of Scorpio. So this is one of the first examples where I noticed that thing I was talking about earlier of just when there’s a very close connection between those two planets, sometimes the topics of that house really are coming into play, and we saw the 5th house coming into play for sure for her. So there was a bigger part to that though. So let me actually read it. She says: “My first novel, All the Yellow Posies, was published on April 21, 2021, when Saturn was at 12 Aquarius. It’s based on my personal experience with the loss of my best friend, a suicide, in 2016, and much of its content is inspired by journals I filled up in a grief writing group. This particular friend, his name was Steven, was a previous coworker of mine. I worked for his family’s salon from ages 19 to 23 [which is interesting ‘cause that’s the ‘Saturn square’ side note]. In January of 2021, when Saturn first entered Aquarius, I went back to work for them a 2nd time as a front desk coordinator. So I was immersed in the past, our old stomping grounds, when my book was actually published. Not to mention I totally based the characters on his whole family; they read it first. Steven’s death hurt me tremendously, and I spent a lot of my 20s pretty scarred by it. But the combination of the book being published and my return to the salon helped me to face my grief in a way that I could finally integrate it. I was also able to immortalize him in a way because he was the writer himself and always wanted to write a novel. So for what it’s worth, just to add, the first time I went to work for his family was October of 2011, and the notes were in Gemini/Sagittarius both times I worked there.” Okay, she says: “On May 29, 2021, about a month after the book was published, my grandfather died suddenly. I ended up writing and reading his eulogy and handled the care of his ashes. It was too hard for my mom and grandma, so I saw it as an opportunity to channel my 8th house Saturn and what he had taught me of grief so far.” So that’s pretty amazing.
Then she says: “In March of 2022, I got pregnant. I had been married for 10 years and we had agreed on no children, mostly because of my intense fear of childbirth. So this was a last minute change and it was due to a series of dreams I had about having a son. My husband had a low sperm count, so we were told before we attempted we would likely need in vitro fertilization to accomplish a pregnancy, so with that in mind I figured it couldn’t hurt to start trying early. I got pregnant on the first cycle. It was a boy. When I was 15 weeks along, a close friend of ours died in childbirth from undiagnosed preeclampsia. She died on June 25, 2022. As horrific as her death was it was an interesting manifestation of my 8th house Saturn return, my natal Saturn-Pluto square in the 5th, and the nodes being in Scorpio/Taurus at the time.” Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. That’s really important. “It was one of the times that the astrology was just too literal. Her death helped me advocate for an electional C-section and tubal ligation. My doctor told me I was the only patient ever to write a paper on why I should be allowed to have one. My son was born in a spectacularly positive birth on December 7, 2022, when Saturn was at 20 Aquarius. He was also born during my Mars return in the 12th. These were my main points of my Saturn return. Smaller things include euthanizing a few pets, writing my second book, and diving more heavily into esotericism. My Saturn return taught me a lot about resilience, the cycles of life and death, and what glimmers we can find in between.”
KT: Wow.
CB: So I thought that was a pretty amazing one for a Saturn return in the 8th house, having that square with Pluto in the 5th house of children and many of these themes becoming very relevant. She also has Mercury retrograde at 7 Leo opposite Saturn and sort of squaring Pluto, and the Sun and Chiron at 16 and 13 Leo, so tying in some other themes there as well at the same time.
KT: Yeah. And that 12th house Mars trine Saturn as well I think is really interesting with it ruling the 5th house and there being all these fears, and she ended up having the elective C-section. Yeah, I don’t know, there’s a lot there. 2022. Wasn’t that the Mars retrograde in Gemini?
CB: Yeah.
JO: It sure was.
KT: Yeah, ‘cause I had like three friends give birth December of 2022 with that Mars retrograde. Yeah, I don’t know, that’s interesting. It stationed on her natal Mars.
CB: Sure.
KT: But the trine to the Saturn and how that played in with the pregnancy is really interesting.
CB: Yeah, and then Mars is the ruler of the 5th house of children in her chart. And it was interesting that she mentioned the eclipses. I forgot that for a good chunk of Saturn in Aquarius we were dealing with eclipses bouncing back and forth between Scorpio and Taurus squaring the natal Saturn placement, as well as transiting Saturn. So that’s for sure for some people drawing in that other axis at the same time for her, both children, as well as friends, and the tragic loss of her friend.
KT: Yeah. And, yeah, Mercury ruling the 3rd too, if we’re thinking of the 3rd as ‘friends’ as well.
JO: Yeah. Yeah, something that I am just now thinking about too is the nodes moving through Taurus and Scorpio during Saturn in Aquarius would have put Saturn in this position of being at the bends of the nodes, which is often this like really kind of wobbly feeling, where it’s like kind of caught between two things, or you find yourself very much reconsidering a sort of axis in the chart. And I think it’s so interesting that the real crux of that was Saturn in the 8th; it’s bringing in the 5th house. And, Kirah, I love what you said about pulling in Mars in the 12th, ruler of the 5th. Like it’s so clear to see these themes. We’re going kind of farther away from that initial Saturn placement and the houses that it rules, but it’s so clear how these different themes tie in and come to the foreground so clearly, it’s just fascinating.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And it’s a good reminder that while we’re isolating one transit—or we’re trying to with the Saturn return—obviously there’s other transits happening in a person’s chart at the same time and there’s usually a lot of other stuff going on that has to be taken into account as well at the same time. But it’s interesting how much you can see just from that one transit of Saturn during the Saturn return and what it’s activating in the chart.
KT: Yeah, very much.
CB: All right, so moving on to another example, this is the chart of a listener named Zlotina who has a 5th house Saturn in Aquarius. And some of the themes that she wrote about were a casual relationship that got serious, financial issues, attitudes towards motherhood, and conception issues or issues with conceiving. So the concise description she wrote was: “My Saturn return in the 5th house was mostly about a relationship going from very casual to very serious and life-changing over the course of the transit. I had some financial issues that coincided with the Saturn-Uranus squares between my 5th and 8th house, as well as career changes and realizations. My maternal grandmother died, and the way I relate to my mother and motherhood in general has changed. In that regard, I also experienced some health issues which threatened my ability to conceive. I got a master’s degree in business psychology, I started taking astrology very seriously and reading about it a lot, which transformed the way I see myself and the people around me.” So, yeah, I thought that was pretty good. One of the themes of the 5th house can be ‘relationships’, especially casual relationships; like whatever it is prior to getting married or having a serious long-term partnership usually goes in the 5th house. But it’s interesting in this instance having Saturn there and having what you think is a more casual short-term relationship that won’t turn into anything suddenly turning into a major long-term relationship; it’s a really interesting manifestation of Saturn in the 5th house.
KT: Yeah. They said that they changed careers as well. Did they say that was related to the relationship, or did I mishear that?
CB: No, I don’t think so.
KT: Okay. But then the grandmother died as well.
CB: Right. I mean, I did a summary of it, but I don’t think the career stuff was related to that. I mean, the summary was: “Dissatisfaction with their job, combined with inflation pressures, spurred her to seek better opportunities. Despite a promotion and a raise linked to Saturn transits, she realized her heart wasn’t in her chosen career path.”
KT: Got it, got it.
CB: Which is like a common theme we see come up over and over again of just realizing your heart really isn’t there and you have to let something go.
KT: Yeah, this one has a really tight Saturn-Pluto square too, which is interesting and the troubles conceiving.
CB: Yeah.
KT: I just finished a fertility astrology course with Nicola Smuts Allsop, and I’m like, “I want to dissect her chart now and ask a million questions.” But did she end up conceiving and having a kid, or no?
CB: Let me see. For some reason I thought I did, but I didn’t put the full right up here in my notes, so let me find it really quickly.
KT: I’m just curious. Yeah, I mean, looking at that chart, I would put money on Saturn being the almuten of pregnancy and being really the planet responsible for pregnancy. And with that square of Pluto being activated, yeah, I’m curious what ended up being the issue.
CB: One of the issues when I was trying to go through is I was having a hard time summarizing all of the stories.
KT: Yeah, there’s a lot.
CB: Yeah, there was a lot. So I’ll just share it on the screen really quickly from the notes that I just pasted in. I mean, the full write-up was actually amazing of how she talks about the build-up of her casual relationship with a close friend becoming more serious. That’s gonna be one of the problems in any attempt to convey any of these. It was this entire thing that happened over a three-year period, and hearing the details of it when you hear somebody explain their Saturn return is much deeper and richer in meaning in how the meaning of the chart comes alive in very subtle but evocative ways, so it’s kind of hard to convey all of that. Okay, so here’s the 5th house part. “I have Saturn in the 5th house ruling over Capricorn Moon, and, to me, having a child was always something to be decided after 30. I was always silently judgmental of people I know having children without having a proper job or vocation.” That’s actually really interesting. So in and of itself, she just had a very serious attitude towards children growing up already with Saturn in the 5th. “Counting on other people to help raise them and using a child as an excuse to justify all kinds of behaviors. This all changed and a lot of things occurred that contributed. I got an illness that could have threatened my ability to naturally conceive. I also realized my partner would make a wonderful father and that such an experience would even elevate us and make us better human beings. This is all intertwined with me discovering my mother’s real birth time in the wake of my grandmother’s, her own mother’s, death. We found out that her rising is 20 Aquarius, as her birth time was actually very well-documented.”
KT: Yeah, it doesn’t look like—oh, sorry. I was just gonna say I’m scanning it. It doesn’t look like she notes it.
CB: What part?
KT: Oh, I was just looking for “I had a kid” or not.
CB: Okay.
KT: That’s what I’m curious about. I’ve seen other ‘Libra rising, 5th house Saturn return’ babies during this time too, during the Saturn return. So, yeah, I was just curious if that ended up working out or not for her.
CB: Yeah, I think it might be something that’s still ongoing.
KT: Yeah.
CB: But at least her attitudes towards children and childbirth changed, as well as starting a major long-term relationship where it sounds like she’s ready to do that, so that’s a pretty good ‘Saturn return’ realization.
KT: Yeah, that’s awesome.
CB: Yeah. All right, thank you for sending that one in.
KT: And also, yeah, the 4th house themes seemed to be really loud for her too, just losing her grandmother, and then also so the changing relationships with her parents that was really loud.
CB: Yeah. All right, so the next chart was sent in by a listener named Hannah. And in the short version Hannah writes: “I have Saturn at 28° in the 2nd house of my natal chart in a night chart. My Saturn return dried up all of my resources and finances, and the degree position of Saturn throughout the three-year period tracks with the level of my bank and savings account balance throughout this time, astonishingly, accurately. Key moments of my financial journey over the last three years happened as Saturn ingressed into Aquarius, and when Saturn was within 3°-4° degrees of exactitude of my natal placement. It was only as Saturn returned to 0° of Pisces this year that I noticed this significant pattern, as the themes returned into my life after several months of financial ease for the first time since the end of 2020. I’ve always been someone who had a lot of money in savings since I began working at 17, so this was a very unusual period of time for me.” So I like that. It’s good, ‘cause one of the other things it brings up is that sometimes it’s only until after your Saturn return is over—when you can step back from it and view that three-year period in its totality—that you can see what the full purpose of it was and what the main overarching themes were. But sometimes—not all the time—but sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, you may not be able to see it fully yet until all the different pieces come together.
KT: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the financial themes are really evident with Saturn in the night chart in the 2nd house. But I think what’s also interesting is that tight sextile to the Sun, which rules the 8th house. I don’t know, the Sun feels so bound to Saturn; it’s also in Saturn’s term there. But, yeah, it was like both the 2nd and 8th being tied up in that Saturn return and not really getting freedom from it until Saturn left Aquarius just makes a lot of sense, even though it’s a sextile. I kind of look at Saturn—especially in domicile, but maybe just in general—it cares a lot about timing and it will slow things down to a halt if it needs to, if it’s keeping you in the right timing. And it sounds like there was something there with this person around that, like there was just a need to experience that contraction for that period of time.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And the full write-up is sort of interesting in terms of the sequence of events and what happened over the three-year period where there was this intensification of some of the financial stuff that came and went and how that ended up playing out in terms of starting her own business or starting different side projects and things like that. But it was interesting also from a technical standpoint. She mentioned part of how she even realized in retrospect that this was a theme was that things had eased up over the past year since Saturn got to 7° of Pisces, but then it was when Saturn started retrograding back to 0° of Pisces, and some of the issues started coming up again, that she realized that that had been a major part of the theme of her Saturn return, and it’s ‘cause she has Saturn at 28° of Aquarius. So this winter, when Saturn got back to 0 Pisces, it was reactivating that placement basically. That creates kind of an exception to my ‘clean’, three-year rule in terms of Saturn returns starting at the first ingress and ending at the last ingress, because sometimes you get these cases where the Saturn’s very early or very late and there can be overlap, especially if Saturn gets within 3° at the beginning or end of a sign.
JO: Yeah.
CB: All right, so that’s good. I would go into that more, but I want to see if we can get through a few others. Give me a sec. I’m just trying to figure out where to go next. What houses have we covered, or which houses have we not covered?
KT: We haven’t done much 1st house.
JO: Yeah.
CB: 1st house. Let me find one. I got one, it’s anonymous. They asked me not to share the name or the birth data, but it was Saturn in the 1st house on the ascendant, and there was health and body stuff. So let me read the summary of that and everyone can just imagine Saturn in the 1st house. So the summary said: “Big themes of health and body and parenting, becoming the adult came up for me. I had a miscarriage. Tried to have children. Started in vitro fertilization. Explored my feelings around birth. Bought a house/slash our first property. Started seeing a therapist. Increased my responsibilities at work. Created an exercise routine. Reflected on my relationship to my mom and how I was nurtured. Found ways to self-soothe instead of relying on an external parent/other. On the last week and the last Saturday of Saturn being in Aquarius, I was present and next to a close family member as they passed away. Up to this point I’d never experienced death face-to-face, never been present for someone dying. They were my last and only member of my family in the UK apart from my partner. It was a very poignant experience to say the least. Spring of 2023, I started studying to become a counselor. Overall, since Saturn left Aquarius, I feel overall like I’ve been in more of a dialogue with my body and mental health. I exercise more, I eat healthier, and see a therapist regularly.” I wanted to add I think that’s coming into play also ‘cause of the 12th house being ruled by Saturn.
KT: Yeah.
JO: For sure.
CB: So she says: “I trust myself more, I feel like I know myself better, and I’m also not afraid to be the adult/authority of my own life. I feel more comfortable standing up for myself, while before I would often put my feelings aside for other people’s wants and wishes. I also know my limits and I listen/value my feelings more.” So that one’s ‘Anonymous’, but I thought that was a great one, ‘cause it just summarizes so much stuff that we were talking about earlier in a singular example.
KT: Yeah. I mean, as someone who just finished the 12th house Saturn return—and Saturn literally just crossed my ascendant about a week ago, it stationed retrograde there last year—this past year I’ve been very much in ‘Saturn in the 1st’ land. A lot of what ‘Anonymous’ said tracks for me, just thinking about the 12th house/1st house connection. I honestly feel like, for all the Aries risings out there, I hope you’re okay, but 12th house Saturn return was so much like surrendering, falling apart, just kind of being like, “Yeah, I don’t know what’s happening.” But coming into the 1st, there’s so much more realization and just being able to actually take Saturn’s lessons and use them. Yeah, I don’t know, what they were saying about how much they’ve been putting effort into their 1st house and their body and their mental health, I’m like very much there right now too. So, yeah, that was really good.
JO: Yeah, it really hit on how many topics there are connected to the 1st house. ‘Cause when we say the 1st house of ‘self’ and ‘selfhood’ that connects to so many things in life, and I feel like we see those streams moving out from this concept of selfhood into these other areas of life. And I wanted to say too, we saw this in one of those first examples, the Saturn return in the 8th house. What you brought up Kirah about parenting and parenting yourself and these parent/child roles coming into focus, even in this one here that’s a 1st house Saturn return, there’s this reflection on their relationship to their mom and how they were nurtured, finding ways to self-soothe. I just wanted to kind of bring that into too, ‘cause that’s so consistent here with all these examples. That’s really cool.
KT: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Sorry, my light’s doing that. I don’t know why that started happening. But, yeah, also the things having to do with their miscarriage and that connection to the body as well, yeah, there was a lot there. And what you said about the 1st house connects with so much of the chart—literally every—
JO: It’s just every—
KT: —minus-four other houses, exactly.
CB: Yeah. There was also a theme here of death and loss. And I feel like it goes back ultimately to Saturn having to do with time and letting go sometimes and the giving up of something. But sometimes the feeling of finality that comes with Saturn is the underlying archetype that something has reached the end of its cycle, the end of its life cycle, and that you have to let it go, and that’s the theme that people experience in different ways, in different parts of their chart based on where their Saturn is. But sometimes there’s no greater manifestation of that in a tangible sense than having to let go of somebody who passes away at that time, so I think that comes up as a theme in different ways with the Saturn return in general.
KT: Yeah, definitely.
CB: All right, so that’s a really good one. There was one other anonymous—a day chart Saturn return in the 1st house—and I just took one sentence from it where it said: “In retrospect, my first Saturn return was a very constructive time which clearly emphasized for me to grow out of paralyzing dependence on external factors by striving for internal courage and discipline to become self-established and accountable in my life, both personally and professionally,” which I thought was a good summing up of things.
KT: Yeah.
JO: Yeah, I love this so much because it’s bringing in this thing I think about so much with Aquarius rising charts, which is just what does it mean to have the ruler of the first and the 12th be the same planet and have those two places so tightly-bound together? And I love that even just in this one sentence, looking inward and finding courage and discipline there is like the most ‘Saturn as ruler of the 12th and 1st house’ thing I’ve ever heard. I feel like it really shows how constructive that can be. It’s an interesting way to think about what if these ‘Saturnian’ virtues could be resources for you, even in the 12th house way of ‘they’re inside you, they’re not outside of you’? And I just think that’s really interesting. I’m kind of obsessed with Aquarius rising charts for this 12th house configuration situation, but, yeah, this is a good one.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, moving on this was a listener-submitted one where they submitted their husband’s. I’m gonna just read the description. It’s Saturn in the 4th house in a night chart and also ruling the 3rd. And they said: “Shortly after the transit began in January 2021, his grandmother passed away, his father’s mother, and his last remaining grandparent alive. Later in the spring/summer, he quit his job in the tech industry and temporarily worked for his brother’s plumbing business to make ends meet,” which is amazing since Saturn’s ruling the 3rd house of siblings. “In November of 2021, his parents sold and moved out of their family home of 30 years,” so Saturn is in the 4th house, which is the place of parents, as well as home and living situation. And then she continues saying: “Which led him to come and live permanently with me. March of 2022, he got his first barista job, as he was interested in pursuing his own coffee business, an idea that had been put on hold due to the pandemic. April of 2022, his brother permanently immigrated to Australia from the UK after years of waiting for lockdowns to end and waiting for a visa. After working a few barista jobs and realizing the money wasn’t very good, my partner eventually came back to working in the tech industry in February 2023 in order to make better money that would fund his passion in coffee and eventually the coffee roasting business. On a final note, during the transit, he finished paying his parents back for money that was borrowed to purchase a car. In reality, his parents had saved the money for him and gifted it back to him sometime in 2022, which he then used to purchase his first coffee roster during the Venus retrograde in Leo that summer.”
So I thought that was an amazing example. I’ll just show the chart really quickly. Okay, here is the chart. And I thought it was an amazing example just because it’s Saturn in the 4th house, so obviously the themes of home, living situation, as well as parents were coming up majorly. But also, since it’s relating to the 3rd house, siblings were playing a significant part of the Saturn return, both in terms of the native’s personal story but also just in terms of things that were happening in the life of the sibling as well that did not necessarily directly impact the native. And I think that’s a really important point that sometimes when we’re talking about the Saturn placement in different houses and ruling different houses, it can bring up things happening in the lives of people around you and sometimes that does impact you directly; but sometimes it’s like the event is happening to someone else, not necessarily directly to you.
JO: That’s so true. That happened in my Saturn return as well with the 6th house themes that came in, like my partner was pretty sick, my husband at the time was pretty sick. And I fortunately stayed pretty well during that time, but his illness really impacted just my life in general and the relationship in general, so I think that’s an important dimension to keep in mind as you’re kind of projecting about your own Saturn return or kind of looking at others.
CB: For sure. And if we want to focus on that, there was one other example just like that. Is there anything else to say about this chart? No? Okay. All right, there was one other listener named Lauren who submitted a Saturn in the 7th house in a night chart example. So Leo rising, Saturn in Aquarius in the 7th house in the night chart squaring a bunch of Scorpio stuff in the 4th house. And the short description summary was: “I got married in 2020 after four years in a relationship. My husband is a Virgo ascendant, so my 7th house Saturn return was hitting his 6th house. In 2021, I was in a 4th house profection year with Saturn squaring my Sun and Mercury in Scorpio. My husband and I have a small farm, and in July of 2021 while working the farm, my husband suffered a head injury which caused some major behavioral changes. Saturn definitely stress-tested our new marriage. My Saturn return story became about learning how to manage the circumstances we found ourselves in, how to set boundaries and take care of myself in relationships, what is within my power and what I am powerless to change. This was definitely one of the most challenging times in my life. Ultimately, we came out stronger and did a lot of growing up.”
So that’s just the short summary, but I thought that was an amazing thing in terms of, one, continuing the theme that we talked about earlier, that sometimes it’s something that happens in the life of somebody around you that matches that house or matches the house that Saturn rules. It’s kind of interesting in this case that she has the ruler of the 6th house of injury in the 7th house of relationships, and so the activation of that was her partner getting injured and then adjusting to and learning how to deal with that and accommodate that. But there were also other themes of how to set boundaries in relationships, how to take care of herself. And also, I thought a really important one that was highlighted was identifying “what was within my power and what I am powerless to change.” That’s a huge Saturn theme and a huge Saturn return theme that I think is really important. ‘Cause you don’t always know going into it—you’re sometimes given an option of “Do I work really hard to keep this thing that I have already, and do I want to keep it, or is this something that I’m gonna be forced to let go?” Which obviously in the most extreme instances—when we’re talking about things like death or something—it’s not negotiable; that’s like the most extreme-case scenario where you don’t have a choice but to let something go. But in other instances, there can be things where you just need to push through and stick with it, or where it becomes a surmountable difficulty of a ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’-type scenario; but sometimes figuring out the difference between those two can be tricky during the course of the Saturn return.
KT: Yeah, that was definitely a huge one for me. Is Saturn crystallizing, or is Saturn denying? That is always difficult. And it’s difficult even in, yeah, client charts, when you’re kind of forecasting someone’s Saturn return, especially in the 7th. It’s like, “Well, this could be you meeting your person and really crystallizing this relationship,” or it could be a three-year dry spell which could also happen. So, yeah, that definitely resonated with me.
JO: Yeah, absolutely, the same. The same thing in my personal experience of my Saturn return. I’ve sometimes said one of the best choices I ever made—just in my life overall—was to fight for my marriage at the time, ‘cause it’s a huge reason I got sober, it’s a huge reason I really committed to therapy. But then the next best decision I ever made was deciding to not fight for it anymore and realizing this situation—I actually am powerless to change this situation or improve it any further, so the only other option is finding the exit and moving away from that situation. But it’s one of those things that’s way easier said than done. Even with those transits, I remember before my Saturn return even started thinking like, “Oh, well, Saturn and Mars moving into Aquarius together on the first ingress, it’ll be really hard, but then the second time it’s with Jupiter. Will things get better?” And in this specific example, I think it’s really interesting that there’s this square from Mars and Scorpio to this person’s Saturn placement in the 7th, but then there’s also this trine from Jupiter and Venus both in Libra. So this is a really interesting mixed-bag situation with this chart where there’s the really challenging stuff—the commitment of Saturn coming through—and then also the discernment of Saturn of “What’s within my control? When do I need to just surrender? When does there need to be a boundary?” Like it’s a really beautiful demonstration of these kinds of different supports and challenges from these other placements too.
KT: Yeah, I have a good friend with essentially the exact same chart, born a week before, so everything’s essentially the same, and, yeah, watching them go through lots of relationship issues as well. But the bonification from the benefics really helped. Yeah, it lubes it up a little bit. It’s less harsh and you can really see the bright side of it, which I think, yeah, that helps a lot. I feel like maybe that’s a difference with people who experience their Saturn return, in retrospect. Yeah, that was really good and constructive, and I’m glad that happened versus not, it might be those benefic aspects. ‘Cause there’s some people that are like, “Oh, no I don’t want to go back to that ever again.
JO: Totally.
CB: Yeah. I mean, it’s also a good example—speaking to that—of when you have really hard aspects, as well as really good aspects, you get both; and sometimes they can offset each other but other times you just get both happening in parallel. That was kind of what we saw, for example, in a really spectacular case with Will Smith, where he was having the most positive transit and one of the most negative transits the night of the Oscars when he slapped Chris Rock and just caused a huge negative backlash; but then at the same time he also won finally an Academy Award, which he’d been striving for many years. And so, sometimes when you see both the most extreme of positive and negative you end up getting both sometimes in parallel.
KT: Yeah, I feel like that was a big one for me. I have a Saturn-Venus whole sign trine and Saturn-Mars whole sign square, and there was definitely a little bit of both during the Saturn return.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, what houses have we done yet? Give me a house.
KT: We’ve done most. We did 10th. We do 9th? Yeah, we did 9th, which was kind of a midheaven one.
JO: Mm-hmm.
KT: 8th, 7th, 6th-ish. We’ve done most of them.
JO: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Well, in that case, let me just summarize some of the titles that I wrote down for different ones based on the placement, since I know we’ve only got about 20 minutes left here. Okay, a listener named Alina wrote in with Saturn in the 7th in a day chart, and one of the themes,‘surmountable difficulties in relationships’, was my summary. A listener named Koena wrote in with Saturn in the 6th and ruling the 5th and work and children themes came up. I’ll read that one really quickly. It says: “With my Saturn at 0° of Aquarius, I know my Saturn return started right around the spring of 2020, and I kept getting hit again a couple more times when the planet retrograded. Within that timeframe I saw my life completely changed in every way, not just on the macro because of COVID and shelter-in-place, but also the micro. I stopped working. I was pregnant by May and gave birth to my son in January of 2021, as well as completely shifted trajectories and settled on being a stay-at-home mom for the foreseeable future, rekindling and honestly completely upleveling my capacity to tackle life more playfully.” Thought that was a great combination of 6th and 5th house themes.
KT: Mm-hmm.
CB: A listener named Ashley wrote in with Saturn in the 6th in the night chart, and main themes that I summarized were COVID and being laid off.
KT: Yeah, my sister’s in her 6th house Saturn return now, and I’m just hoping she gets a new job. Saturn rules her 4th and 5th. I just want her to get a new job, move to LA, and get a cat. I’m hoping that happens by the end of her Saturn—
JO: That’s a super reasonable checklist for a Saturn return like that.
CB: Yeah. We can all aspire to that. This one actually maybe I should show it briefly and read it. So this is Ashley’s chart. Saturn in Aquarius in the 6th, also ruling the 5th. Ashley says: “My Saturn return was by far the most pivotal catalytic time in my life. I got engaged November 4, 2020. I got married February 2021. I got COVID December of 2020 before the vaccine, which was a very scary time. I got a job in a new career field away from the music and media industries as a copywriter at Twitter in February of 2022, before ultimately getting laid off in January of 2023, part of mass layoffs after Elon Musk purchased the company. Since my Saturn return officially ended in early March, I’ve continued to feel the effects of great change in my life, including my husband getting into a wreck and totaling my car.” And this is tricky ‘cause it’s Saturn’s now gone into her 7th house, which is Pisces, since she has Virgo rising. “I’ve continued to feel that getting into the wreck and totaling the car I had for 12 years, losing my great-grandfather, and ultimately losing my mother due to a sudden heart attack, growing up in Memphis and going to college at Stanford shaped me into a person who always had a very well-thought-out plan and map of becoming my most successful self. However, these events in the past few years shook my whole foundation of being able to control all that happens in my life. It also made me become more free in my creativity as a writer, mainly because it is a way to manage my grief during this time.” Which I thought was a very interesting tying-in of the 5th house as being connected with creativity.
KT: Yeah.
JO: Wow.
KT: Saturn would have just hit their Sun right around the time of those Twitter layoffs, ‘cause my Sun’s right there too. I’m at 25 Scorpio, and I remember just trying to get to March 7; and, yeah, Saturn had one more thing to do before leaving Aquarius for them. But, yeah, that all tracks a lot.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Okay, I was just scanning through the others. There was one other submitted by a listener named Taylor that had Saturn in the 9th house by night, and the summary I wrote was ‘just challenges to faith’, as well as ‘publishing’. And both of those—one’s faith or religion or beliefs—are very 9th house things that can come up with Saturn in the 9th house. But 9th also relates to publishing. And often when a person has major 9th house transits publishing a book can go along with that.
KT: Yeah, I got a book deal like a week into my 9th house year that just started.
CB: Nice.
KT: Yeah. But the faith part of the 9th house, I mean, my 12th house Saturn return was squaring my 9th house ruler. And that was a big one for me of just trying to find hope, faith, you know, something to grasp onto. Yeah, I definitely get that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Another listener—I have this one summarized—named Quinn wrote in with Saturn in the 5th house and ruling the 4th house, and some of the key takeaway points were: “I started EMDR therapy to deal with childhood trauma. This was great and very helpful. I became a manager at my job, taking on responsibilities. I got burnt-out and quit my job.” These were the ones that were most important: “I broke up with my boyfriend because I knew it wasn’t gonna work out long-term. I wrote a novel, a very positive and helpful ‘5th house Saturn’ thing. A family member helped me buy a house, big responsibility, but also a huge blessing. And finally, at the tail-end of Saturn in Aquarius, my talent agent dropped me, which ultimately led me to deciding to quit being an actor a few months later. This was probably the biggest change as I’ve wanted to be an actor my whole life and have been pursuing it professionally for eight years. So, all in all, not a super-fun time. All that fixed energy means I really don’t like change, but I did grow and learn a lot. I definitely felt like a real adult by the end of it.” So I thought that was amazing with some of those little details about the connection between the 4th house and a family member helping them to buy their home, but then also the talent agent dropping them with the 5th house, to whatever extent it has to do with creativity or actors or acting; but also the 5th house, again, having to do somewhat with relationships and ending a relationship that they didn’t feel like was going anywhere.
KT: Yeah, and that would have been when Saturn was squaring the ruler of their 7th house as well. Yeah, and just to note, anytime someone has a 5th house Saturn return, I’m like, “Okay, so you’re gonna conceive something. It might not be a baby but there’s something that you’re gonna be giving birth to by the end of this.” And, yeah, the novel makes so much sense with that.
CB: For sure.
JO: Yeah, that’s perfect. Another listener, Katie, with Saturn in the 4th house, the summary is ‘a very thematic 4th house Saturn return story after a lifetime of unstable housing and isolation from community’. “I spent my entire Saturn return in one apartment, from start to finish. Through the internet I found tools to dismantle my identity and find my authentic self, destroying the comfortable life I had finally attained to build something new and unfamiliar,” which I thought was a great summary.
KT: That’s awesome. The best feeling.
CB: One listener named Marcelina had Saturn in the 6th and lost several pets that were very close to them that they had had for a long time. Don’t overlook the 6th house signification with pets, it can be very important. A listener named Jenn with Saturn in the 9th house by day, with the midheaven, having an extended overseas trip and a new position at work; it wasn’t expanded on but it was just interesting ‘cause it was tying in the 9th house as well as the degree of the midheaven. As a side point, with these examples—and with Mega’s example towards the beginning, seeing the overlap between the 9th whole sign house and the midheaven—it’s here in the transits, in dealing with Saturn returns especially, that you can see how that works when whole sign house astrologers talk about paying attention to where the degree of the midheaven or the IC falls and how that will double-up the significations in that entire sign with the whole sign house and the quadrant house essentially. This is where that really comes alive and you start to see what that means in a real tangible sense, because you get an actual sequence of events where overlapping topics are actually coming up simultaneously. And so, that’s one of the things I love about Saturn returns, is it’s really illustrative for that purpose.
KT: Absolutely. Yeah, I have so many Gemini rising friends born in 1991 for some reason, and they all have that midheaven in the 9th. And so, there Saturn returns—everyone shifted careers. It was like one after another. One wanted to go back to school or started taking classes and courses to learn new things. But, yeah, that 9th house/midheaven connection is always really loud.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Here’s one I wanted to share really quickly. Again, we keep going back to similar houses, but it’s a good example of a really positive, constructive Saturn return story, where Saturn’s really well-placed in the chart, despite it being a night chart; because I wanted to also offset people’s fears about night chart versus day chart. So this is the chart of a listener named Jess. She has Saturn in the 5th house in Aquarius along with the Sun and Mercury. And Jupiter is conjunct the degree of the ascendant in Libra, and it’s a very closely trining Saturn from 14 Libra to 19 Aquarius. There’s also some other interesting placements in the chart, like an exalted Moon in Taurus in the 8th and an exalted Venus in Pisces in the 6th, which is actually in mutual reception or exchanging signs with Jupiter in Libra in the 1st. So the summary is: “During my Saturn return, I founded a community environmental charity that secured half-a-million dollars in government funding just before my Saturn return ended. On the exact day of my final pass of the Saturn return, I was formally employed as the chief executive officer of the charity that I had worked tirelessly to launch and secure funding for over the previous two years.” And this is an environmental charity, which I thought was amazing, ‘cause it’s one of the things Valens actually mentioned way back in the 2nd century. He mentions good-doing and doing good deeds and charity-related events, and right here is a very tangible example of that.
KT: Wow. Yeah, like the midheaven being ruled by the exalted Moon, the sect light. I mean, the whole nocturnal team is doing its thing.
CB: Yeah.
KT: Yeah, I love that. That Saturn-Jupiter trine seems to have really come through. And it sounds like the Saturn return was really challenging—especially Saturn to the luminaries always sucks—but it’s like they have all these tools to get it done.
CB: Yeah. Let me read theirs really quickly because it’s good at showing the sequence. They say: “In January of 2020, I returned to Australia from Europe after completing a master’s degree—[and I think that’s interesting ‘cause it’s also ruling the 4th house of living situation]—driven by a desire to address the biodiversity and climate crisis. By March 2020, I began volunteering for conservation groups. In early 2021, I started drafting a proposal to the state government for a funded charity supporting conservation volunteer groups in national parks. The pivotal meeting with the government representatives took place just after Saturn exactly conjoined my Sun on December 21, 2021. Afterwards, securing funding became a real possibility but significant work remained, such as establishing a board and registrations. On my first Saturn return pass, on March 9, 2022, I met a retired professional who became our charity secretary. My second Saturn return pass was within 36 hours of my second and final meeting with the government regarding charity funding, September 16, 2022. Finally, the funding was approved on November 15, 2022, nearly a year after the initial government meeting. My dedication throughout the Saturn return year was marked by extensive voluntary efforts that challenged my determination. On the day of my final Saturn return pass, November 29, 2022, I was appointed as chief executive officer of the charity.”
KT: Hell, yeah.
CB: Isn’t that an amazing story?
KT: Yes.
JO: That’s incredible.
KT: And isn’t Saturn also connected to just like land stewardship and land administration, and just the land in general, especially wetlands?
CB: Yeah. Valens actually says that Saturn’s associated with the soil, and he also associates it with farmers, which has long been an association with Saturn.
KT: Yeah. And then the 4th house connection to land, especially. I feel like that ‘Capricorn 4th house’ connection with environmentalism is so loud, yeah.
CB: Also, she has an exact Uranus-Neptune conjunction at 19° of Capricorn in the 4th house. And that was when we saw during the Saturn returns in Capricorn—the people that had Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus conjunct. There was like a very idealistic tint to their Saturn return stories and trying to do things in order to bring about a better world through their higher ideals and innovation, and we can kind of see a continuation of that here.
KT: Yeah, definitely. Wow. You did the damn thing. That’s so Saturnian.
JO: It is. Like what a success story, being able to get that big of a sum of money from the government. I also like that part of it was challenging her determination in this whole process. It’s simple but it’s extremely Saturnian.
KT: Like doubled-up, yeah.
JO: Exactly. And the thing about these domicile Saturn returns is they can be so incredibly straightforward. It’s just very cut-and-dried. Will you stick to it or will you not? Can you commit or will you not? So I love seeing a success story that turned out that well with it.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so zooming through some other examples, a listener named Leo had Saturn in the 12th house by night, and it dealt with themes of isolation and mental health, but also ultimately growth. So I’m trying to figure out how to summarize this one or what parts to summarize. I’ll read the last three paragraphs. And actually let me share the chart. Okay, so here is Leo’s chart: Pisces rising, Saturn in Aquarius in the 12th. All right, I’ll read the last four paragraphs. “Early in 2020, I was in Los Angeles doing side work as a DJ, a photographer, and driving for Uber. I had just gotten fired from a crappy job that I hated, I was struggling financially and depressed, and things at that point had felt very hopeless for a long time. I got a job offer in Seattle that I had impulsively decided to apply for, so I packed my one bag full of clothes and I left all my friends and family and my whole social life behind, which really hurt. My start day in Seattle was March 2, 2020, so it was just a couple weeks before the COVID-19 lockdowns and before Saturn officially went into Aquarius. So there I was alone, trying to get settled in a new city where I didn’t know anyone, and I get forced to stay inside my little apartment confronting my own thoughts, all of which are 12th house themes of isolation and mental health. I know everyone was isolated at this point, but I was already dealing with being so far away from everything I knew and COVID only added to the heaviness of the situation. There were other smaller Saturn return details I noticed as well, such as getting used to how cold, dark, and rainy it was in Seattle compared to Southern California. Saturn’s presence was definitely felt. During this time, however, I didn’t lose my job, and I am still employed with them to this day. Also, there were other important transits that happened for me, such as Saturn square Sun, Uranus conjunct Sun in late ‘21, Jupiter made a trine from Venus. That trine from Jupiter is when I started dating my current girlfriend who was also going through a Saturn return. So through all of that, as you can imagine, there were a lot of things that changed. My values changed. I found new ways of making a living. I did a lot of growing up. There was a lot of self-reflection and learning to take accountability. My partner and I began to work toward a new life that was more aligned to what we both truly value. I understand now that if I wouldn’t have made the sacrifice to move away, my life would have gotten much worse in LA during COVID.” I think he’s from LA. “Even back then I wondered, why did I do this to myself before Saturn’s transit into Aquarius? It was easy to assume the worst since I know the 12th house rules ‘hospitals’, ‘mental institutions’, and ‘prison’. The scenario that took place was literal but also felt very metaphorical at the same time. I’m grateful that I can understand that the direction I was going was not where I was meant to go, instead of feeling bitter. There were a lot of things that I thought I wanted to happen in my 20s that I’m glad they never did, and I didn’t realize that until I learned to be honest with myself.” So I thought that was great.
KT: I can relate to this so much, yeah.
CB: So that was part of what you were going through with your similar Saturn 12th house return?
KT: Yeah. I also had a lot of fears about the 12th house Saturn return. I was sure I was gonna end up in the hospital. I don’t know why, I just thought that was gonna be it. So I decided, all right, I’m going to move across the country by myself and have that be my 12th house Saturn return. And, yeah, it was very much a lot of just being. I actually enjoyed a lot of it. I often am like, “I want to go back to that time where I didn’t have to leave my house.”
CB: Right.
KT: But after a while, especially Saturn coming to square the Sun, it was like, yeah, it got tough. Yeah, I related a lot to that one.
CB: Yeah, for sure. So that was good. Another listener named Aaron had Saturn in the 7th, and they brought up sobriety as one major theme amongst others. They said: “I know this isn’t uncommon for a Saturn return, and yet I’m another person that experienced it. And while this journey didn’t happen overnight, it’s something I never saw coming and remains a Saturnian lesson.” She says: “Addiction was always part of my story through immediate family members and all of my romantic partners. It’s always been a through-line in my life, though, ironically, I never realized it was a personal problem until my Saturn return. I attribute that to the opposition aspect and how I had projected these problems onto others rather than witnessing them equally, my own. I made the decision to get sober in June of 2021 after a few months of back-and-forth and started my official sobriety date on November 5, 2021. This was by far the most unexpected change of this period and the most transformational. I think it’s a beautiful reflection of my Sun in the 12th house maturing with Saturn’s influence rather than continuing to be swept away and/or distracted by the addicts around me.”
JO: Amazing. That’s perfect.
CB: I thought that was really good. Okay, so—one, two, three, four. Actually there’s several more. So it’s four o’clock. I know we need to wrap up soon. How much more time do you have, Kirah, to wrap up? Or where should we leave things?
KT: Yeah, I can do another like 10-15. Whatever we need, yeah.
CB: Cool. Let me just quickly then mention just a few others from my summaries and then we’ll have some concluding remarks. So a listener named Brandon had Saturn in the 2nd ruling the 1st in a day chart. Major themes were full-time entrepreneurship, financial accomplishments, and becoming a caretaker for his mother when it hit his Moon, which was also in Aquarius. So that was a really good one with the 2nd house themes. Another listener named Luke wrote in with Saturn in the 7th house in a night chart and suffered the loss of a child with his partner while the pandemic was happening sort of in the middle of all of that, so it was a really challenging time of loss. Another listener named Martha had Saturn in the 6th house ruling the 5th, and this was her second Saturn return. She says: “I’m a doctor.” And in her first Saturn return, she moved in order to start a fellowship in hematology/oncology at a large academic medical center. During that time she also had her first baby and bought her first house. So that was 30 years ago during her first Saturn return. During her second Saturn return, she says she stepped down as chair of hematology, she cut down to half-time her work as a doctor so she could enroll in Kepler College to study astrology in school. She began building a new house in Colorado and began preparing to start her own business as an astrologer, which she sees as like her new baby in some sense.
KT: That’s awesome.
CB: She concludes by saying: “When I retire from medicine later this year, I’m planning to move to Colorado and open my own business that will combine astrology with shamanism and Reiki. Although I kicked around these ideas for a few years, I gained clarity about my goals and timeline after an astrological consultation with Leisa Schaim in early 2021. I’m grateful to her and look forward to joining your profession for my second act.” So I thought that was awesome because we’ve talked a lot about first Saturn returns, which is usually treated as the more important one, but second Saturn returns can be very important as well. And it can be interesting—the second Saturn return—to look back and see how the themes are connected or not connected—in the closing of one cycle and the beginning of another—with what happened at the first Saturn return.
KT: Yeah, it’s so cool. I saw it with my mom too and starting her own business. We both started our own businesses during our Saturn return. Yeah, it’s so cool. I love seeing second Saturn return stories.
JO: Yeah, the same. This one’s so perfect. It’s the perfect illustration of the start of a cycle at the first Saturn return and the closing of that one and the start of another one at the second Saturn return. Like literally going to that fellowship in hematology and then stepping down as chair of hematology for the second Saturn return, like it’s just 10-out-of-10.
CB: Here’s the chart itself with Virgo rising and Saturn in Aquarius in the 6th in a day chart, and Jupiter and the Lot of Fortune and the South Node are also Aquarius in the 6th. So that’s pretty cool. Another listener named Sabine had Saturn in the 9th and had international moves, and her life as a traveling musician ended abruptly due to COVID, but it ended up being sort of a positive transformation ultimately. All right, another listener named Kelsey—Saturn in the 9th house conjunct the midheaven—was laid off, became an astrologer, sold their home, and moved into a bus to live and travel as nomads with her partner.
KT: Sick.
CB: Which is pretty amazing.
JO: That’s so perfect.
CB: So perfect. Here’s the chart for that one, with Saturn conjunct the degree of the midheaven at 24 Aquarius. So, again, you get both the 9th house and the 10th house themes. Shelby—Saturn in the 8th House, a farmer—dealt with issues surrounding death, inheritance, and actually a number of other themes. A listener named Marissa had Saturn in the 3rd house and had a bunch of different things, but one of the things I wrote down was experienced the death of an aunt right when the Saturn return began. The 3rd house represents ‘extended relatives and family’ and sometimes that can come up with the 3rd house. Another listener named Vanessa had Saturn in the 2nd and had some interesting financial thoughts. “Faced fears about money, took responsibility for investments I had inherited. Had basically no income during this period being in school, which was stressful.”
Reinvented her career plan and embarked on two expensive educational programs, both of which roughly coincided with the transit. Yeah, and that actually was the last submitted one. So there were a number of others that I wasn’t able to get together, but I think that does a pretty good job of covering a bunch of the houses. Obviously, there’s a clustering on certain ones—where if I had looked harder we probably could have made a bigger distribution—but I think it gives you a pretty good idea of some of the themes that can be encountered during the Saturn return during this time and gives you some idea of the scope of just how different people experience the Saturn return in ways that are similar and universal, and other ways that are are very specific and very particular but often end up matching the chart nonetheless. All right, any final thoughts on Saturn in Aquarius?
KT: I know this is gonna sound ridiculous but I feel like we had it relatively easy. Okay, so I just feel people who have Saturn conjunct another planet natally—an outer especially—I feel like their Saturn returns were so much more difficult. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe it’s ‘cause I was just younger and watching them. But I feel like the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, the Saturn-Uranus, having Saturn-Pluto as your Saturn return—like the Saturn in Caps—that just seemed so hard. We just really had to deal with Uranus, essentially. And so, yeah, I don’t know why I wanted to say that. I guess I’m always trying to ‘bright side’ it all, just from being ‘Jupiterian’. But overall, I guess I’ll just say people who are going through a Saturn return now or even the ones who are looking at it coming, don’t do what I did—what I’m sure a lot of people do—which is worry about it for seven years.
CB: Right.
KT: ‘Cause I certainly did that. You’re gonna ‘catastrophize’ everything in your brain and there’s no use doing that. But just know that it is a really incredible experience and it’s a process. Like a lot of people think that they’re gonna tackle their Saturn return and they’re gonna do it the right way, or they’re doing Saturn’s so good up to now so it’s gonna be fine; and I certainly had certain mindsets like that. But it humbles the hell out of you. Saturn sits you down. It slows you down and shuts you up and you just have to trust that it’s what you need.
JO: Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad you’re saying some of these things too. ‘Cause I also definitely worried about mine for seven years. The moment I knew what a Saturn return was I looked at mine and I was like, “I am in such big trouble,” and I just dreaded it and dreaded it. But I feel like with so many things we saw in the example charts—and just like my own experience—Saturn will force you to get really, really honest with yourself. And so, like if there’s one way to prepare for a Saturn return, start practicing that. There’s always gonna be stuff you can’t really anticipate with a transit this, but being really honest with yourself is a start. Because Saturn will force you to when it comes down to it, but then you’ll also have invaluable skills you learned through experience from having to go through those things. And I genuinely feel like I don’t know if it was because our Saturn return was relatively easier because we didn’t have an outer involved as heavily as some other ones. I won’t say it was like a ‘10-out-of-10’ experience, ‘cause the first part of it for me was really devastating and really jarring. But the remainder of it—I would say the second two-thirds of my Saturn return overall—I feel so much more grounded as a human being than I did before and honestly really grateful. And, yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s deepened my relationship with Saturn in a way that’s totally irreplaceable, including all of the really hard stuff that happened. Again, for all the people anticipating or going through their Saturn return right now, just some thoughts for them.
KT: Yeah.
CB: For sure. I do want to say I think both of you having Saturn so early in the sign, you didn’t necessarily get the Saturn square Pluto that some of the later people did that have Saturn around mid-to-late in the sign, where it was a little bit more intense in some of those stories. Even something that Kirah just mentioned—the Saturn-Uranus square—created some tensions with people, because transiting Uranus was going through Taurus. So there were some people that were getting hit by that at the same time of having Uranus square their natal Saturn, and that created some complications or some unexpected disruptions for some people that was kind of unique, so all of those things are really important.
But it’s good that you’re bringing up the point that as astrologers, knowing the extreme examples of how a Saturn return can work out in the worst-case scenarios, sometimes we can have a tendency to freak ourselves out, and I think it’s really important as astrologers to try to not do that. Because oftentimes when we actually get there to the transit and we start experiencing it, even if major things come, there can be this sense of relief of finally experiencing it and knowing, okay, this is what it’s gonna be, like this is it. And in most instances, it’s like I’m gonna survive this, and I’m going to wake up tomorrow after it’s over and there’s going to be another day. My life may be different, there may be some doors that were closed, or some instances where my life has gotten darker in some ways, but there’s also gonna be something about this that’s going to push me in a new direction that I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. And to the extent that that’s helping me to follow and to find my purpose and my fate and ultimately my destiny, sometimes you have to just follow that where it takes you. And sometimes you’ll be surprised that later on there can be good things that come from that, even if you deal with great challenges or adversity or even loss at the time of the transit itself.
KT: That was great, yeah.
JO: Yeah.
KT: That was a really nice summation.
CB: Thank you.
JO: Excellent.
CB: Just something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in the philosophy of astrology and what we’re doing here, and, yeah, wanting to leave people with something good and with some hope. So speaking of hope, we are already a year into Saturn in Pisces, and the next time I do this, it’s gonna be reflecting on the Saturn returns in Pisces that have occurred during that two- or three-year period. So there’s a few ones I’m already keeping my eye out for, and I wanted to ask if there’s any that you were looking at for Saturn returns in Pisces. Usually in these, we have certain celebrities that we pick out that we’re gonna pay attention to. So one that I’m curious about is Dua Lipa who has Saturn in the 10th house in a night chart. I’m really curious about this one ‘cause it just seems like she’s just killing it right now and is on top of the world, so I’m curious what Saturn in the 10th house as a transit ends up being for her in terms of career and how that ends up changing and what it looks like by the end of that transit compared to the early part of it over the past year that we’ve just started. Justin Bieber is another one that I’m interested in how that’s going for him, because he has a whole Pisces stellium in the 5th house with Saturn there. And there was a notable thing recently where Usher performed at the Super Bowl, and I think the reports were that Justin Bieber was invited because they had a very important connection, the two of them, and one of their big hits was together. But Bieber didn’t end up performing with him, and there’s been speculation about him and his wife having major health issues over the past few years and whether it’s related to COVID or long-COVID and different things related to that or not.
So I’m really curious how his Saturn return will go over the next couple of years, because I know sometimes part of Saturn can be pulling back and recognizing your limitations and not being able to do as much as you did before. Tracy Chapman was another really interesting one that just happened, who has Saturn at 0° of Pisces. And there was a whole thing with somebody doing a cover of one of her songs that became really popular over the past year, but then they ended up getting together and doing a duet at the Grammys just recently, in the past few weeks, when Saturn was very close to her exact Saturn return. And it was interesting having this sort of revival of her music and recognition of her music from back 30 years ago, the last time Saturn was in Pisces. So there’s a lot of interesting celebrity stories I’m keeping my eye on and that we’ll talk about. Are there any celebrities that the two of you are keeping an eye on that have Saturn in Pisces?
KT: Meg Thee Stallion for me. She’s had such a huge Saturn in Aquarius, which she is an Aquarius Sun, but I’m very curious to see. Yeah, she is having a huge moment right now with the song she released. It’s kind of similar to the ‘MGK/Eminem’ thing but different with Nicki Minaj and Meg Thee Stallion.
JO: That’s true.
CB: That’s so true.
KT: I mean, not the same but similar in terms of someone newer and someone older on the scene beefing. But essentially it seems like Nicki Minaj’s attention that she put on Meg in her new song is part of the reason why Meg’s song is doing so well. Obviously, Meg’s song is also great, but it brought so much attention to it. And so, yeah, I’m very curious to see. She just also had a landmark deal with her record label where she’s able to maintain all of her publishing rights and all of her distribution rights and all of that. She still owns her masters, so that’s a landmark deal that just happened. So, yeah, I’m really excited to see what the rest of her Saturn return’s gonna bring, ‘cause she’s been through so much and things are starting to look kind of good for her.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That’ll be really great to see hers. I just checked astro.com. She may have Taurus rising based on a social media report where she said she had Taurus rising. If that’s true, her Saturn’s in the 11th. And that’s actually even more interesting in terms of what’s happening with her and Nicki Minaj, in terms of the 11th house having to do with friends, and sometimes falling out with friends can be a part of that.
KT: Yeah, and just like her fandom right now is growing. People are just treating her like this huge celebrity, which she is. But I think in response to what’s been going on, it’s like her fandom’s grown a lot, so it’s really interesting.
CB: For sure. Awesome, cool. Jo, do you have any you’re paying attention to? Are you following the celebrity gossip culture?
JO: I feel like I don’t know any other Saturn in Pisces celebrities other than the ones that have already been listed, ‘cause I’m a little out of touch with celebrity stuff. But, yeah, all of those that you mentioned, Kirah, have been briefly in and out of my mind too, especially that beef with Nicki Minaj and Meg Thee Stallion, so we’ll see how that goes.
CB: Yeah. And the other thing we’ll watch also is people in our personal lives, our contemporaries, and how they’re going through their Saturn return. That’s probably even more illustrative than the celebrity examples. But, yeah, we’ll come back and we’ll see those again in two or three years. In the meantime, both of you—what do you have going on? Let’s see, Jo, what do you have coming up? What do you have going on? You offer consultations?
JO: I do. I offer consultations. Just natal consultations and timing as usual, but my specialty is 12th house work. So I offer “Waymaking to the 12th House,” which is available as a lecture on the 12th house and also a reading, which is really about bringing together traditional astrology and storytelling to kind of re-engage with the 12th house and all that it entails in your chart, using narrative work and storytelling as kind of like a buffer. I also have just a plain old 12th house reading, if you just want to get into all the ins and outs of your 12th house patterns, ‘self-sabotage’ stuff, all those things, and kind of how to navigate. And I also just started a 12th house horoscope each month for each rising sign going through their 12th house season. So, Kirah, you’re done with your 12th house season as of today.
KT: Yeah.
JO: So Aries rising would be next while the Sun’s in Pisces. So you can check that out once a month. And, yeah, I’m on Instagram as well. You can find me everywhere: website, Instagram, @jomakerofways.
CB: Awesome. And that’s your website URL as well, jomakerofways.com?
JO: Mm-hmm. Just dot-com, yeah.
CB: Dot-com, all right. Kirah, what about you?
KT: What am I doing? Too much once again. I’m currently teaching a course on traditional astrology—like a fundamentals course called “Astrology that Hits,” which has been awesome—and working on a book, which I’ll talk about at some point. But the main thing I’m excited to talk about is the app that I’m working on called Stars Align. It’s not on here, but we will be launching in May. So, yeah, there’s not really much out there right now, but just keep an eye out. Oh, our socials, TikTok and Instagram—don’t show this.
CB: Don’t show it? Okay.
KT: No.
CB: I’m trying to be helpful here.
KT: I know. No, don’t show that ‘cause we’re working on the website, that’s kind of old.
CB: Okay.
KT: But our social is where to follow. On Instagram, especially, I do a weekly dating and social horoscope or forecast I should say. So I tell you the best days of the week to go out, what days to definitely not have a first date, things like that. I care a lot about people having dates on good days. But anyway, the app will be launching in a couple months. I created the algorithm for matching people based on your astrology, and I’m very excited about it. But, yeah, until then just follow me on the socials, and I’ll start doing readings again in a couple months ‘cause I miss it.
CB: Good. Yeah, I think everybody that listens to this—especially with a Saturn return coming up—I think getting a consultation with a good astrologer can be a great way to kind of get oriented for your Saturn return and see what they think some of the themes will be for you, and sometimes they can point out things that you might not notice about your chart. So definitely people should go to each of your websites to get a consultation or find out more about that. I’ll put links to both of your websites in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode. But, yeah, otherwise I think that’s it. Thank you both for joining me. Again, thank you and congratulations on completing your Saturn return. Thanks to all the listeners that listened and submitted their stories, I appreciate it. It was really cool seeing everyone’s stories, and I’m looking forward to seeing how everybody grows and develops after this point. And then eventually we’ll check in again in a few years to see how the Saturn in Pisces people are doing.
KT: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, having us. Thanks, Jo, it’s great to see you as always.
JO: Yeah, great to see you too. Thank you for having us, Chris. This was super fun.
CB: Of course. All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
[credits]
Shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the CHANI App, the #1 astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. You can download it on the Apple App Store or on Google Play, or for more information, visit app.chani.com.
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If you’re looking for a reliable astrologer to get an astrological consultation with, then we have a new list of astrologers on the podcast website that we recommend for readings. Most of the astrologers specialize in birth chart readings, although some also offer synastry, rectification, electional astrology, horary questions and more. Find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code ‘AP15’ to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC, and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at AstroGold.io, and you can use the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology, then I would recommend my Hellenistic Astrology Course, which is an online course on ancient astrology, where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures, as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course you will have a strong foundation on how to read birth charts, as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.theastrologyschool.com.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at MountainAstrologer.com, and the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening both in person and online, May 23-27, 2024. You can find out more information at norwac.net.