The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 45, titled:
Saturn in Sagittarius
With Chris Brennan and guests Kelly Surtees, Austin Coppock, Patrick Watson, and Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on September 16, 2015
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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 Mary Sharon
Transcription released April 17th, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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[intro music]
CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 15th, 2015, and this is the 45th episode of the show. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with four different astrologers about the upcoming ingress of Saturn into Sagittarius and what it means from an astrological perspective. For more information about subscribing to the show, please visit theastrologypodcast.com/subscribe. This podcast is made possible by listeners of the show who pledge their support through Patreon. If you enjoy the show and would like to support the production of future episodes, then please consider donating $1 or more through Patreon, and in return you’ll get access to some great subscriber benefits such as access to a private discussion forum, early access to new episodes, the opportunity to take part in one of our live monthly webinars and more.
In the first half of this show, we’ll be talking with Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock about Saturn in Sagittarius, what it means symbolically for the world at large and what we can expect from it over the next two and a half years. In the second half of the show, I’m going to be talking to Patrick Watson and Leisa Schaim about what Saturn in Sagittarius looks like from the perspective of the natal chart and what the Saturn return will look like for those who are born with Saturn in that sign of the zodiac. So let’s get started with our first segment with Kelly and Austin. Hey guys, welcome to the show.
KELLY SURTEES: Hey Chris.
AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey buddy.
CB: All right, so let’s get started with our main topic today of Saturn in Sagittarius. And I thought it would be good to start maybe by defining the timeframe that we’re talking about. So one of the things that I do, I don’t know if this is unique, but I really, especially when it comes to Saturn returns, I define the starting point of a person’s Saturn return as the first time that Saturn enters into the sign that contains their natal Saturn placement, and then it ends when Saturn departs from that sign for the final time. We’ve got kind of a unique case here though, because Saturn first dipped into Sagittarius starting in late December of 2014 and going into June of 2015. And then it retrograded out and went back into Scorpio for a few months for the summer of 2015. But now it’s going to fully ingress back into Sagittarius, and it’s going to stay there for about two and a half years starting on September 16. And then when does Saturn, this period of Saturn in Sagittarius end officially?
KS: I think it’s December 2017.
CB: Okay, so we’ve got a good almost two and a half years of this transit of just full on Saturn in Sagittarius coming up. And so let’s talk about some of the themes that we might anticipate during that time period. I’m not sure where we should start with that, maybe just in terms of what kind of symbolic or archetypal themes do you guys associate with Saturn in Sagittarius?
KS: Well, it’s a really interesting one, because we’ve got Sag, which is such a sign of movement, and Saturn, which is a planet about kind of going slow or taking your time or even limiting movement. So it’s kind of creating almost a conflicting energy around this idea of movement, whether it’s about going slower in areas of life that you’ve been going really fast or whether it’s about things speeding up. It’s you know, Saturn is going to kind of be a bit warmed up by the hot energy of Sag. But then the natural Sagittarius way is kind of tempered by the maturity or the wisdom or that kind of seriousness of Saturn.
CB: Sure, those are very different qualities. And I guess one of the… So when we start breaking this apart in terms of what astrologers think of symbolically when they start talking about a broad topic like this, like an outer planet transit through a sign, I guess, they start breaking it down into the individual components of those placements. So one of those is just what are the basic qualities associated with the sign of Sagittarius. And so with that, we’ve got what, three or four core qualities. One of them is that it’s a masculine sign, it’s a mutable or double-bodied sign, and it’s a fire sign. And then finally, it’s ruled by Jupiter. Although within this context, we have to take into account that the planet transiting through it is Saturn, which has pretty contrasting qualities. So one of the big contrasts, I guess, becomes what happens when Saturn moves through a Jupiter-ruled sign? Would you guys say that that’s one of the underlying sort of interpretive themes that you come back to?
AC: It’s relevant. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about which has to do with dignity, is the idea that Saturn has okay dignity in Sagittarius, right? Saturn’s considered to have trigonal or triplicity dignity in Sagittarius. And so the question then is, what does it mean? You know, what does it mean? What does it look like? Why is that? Why is that set? And what does that mean? And one of the things that I’ve seen developing and felt during that six months where Saturn was in Sagittarius is that it’s sort of like I felt a push and saw things develop in people’s lives where it was about getting a good enough structure to get from here to there. It wasn’t about building, you know, the foundations of a magnificent edifice, it was about enough structure, enough discipline to get it done. Right, with that, if you consider the movement and the goal orientation and also some of the impatience, which is native to Sagittarius, and then you contrast that with Saturn, right, which is slow and thoughtful and cold and dark, and signifies those things which take a very long time, like you said, you have a contrast. But what the triplicity dignity system suggests is that there is some common ground there, right. And that’s, you know, that’s a good enough structure. I think about it a lot as a vehicle, constructing a vehicle that will get you from here to there. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the car that you drive for the rest of your life. But if you’ve got somewhere to go, you need something that will get you there.
CB: Sure, that makes sense. So that goes back to one of I think the keywords that you brought up right away Kelly, is just this idea of movement, getting from here to there or perhaps ideas associated with travel.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s a really nice compliment, you know, the idea of Saturn being in a Jupiter-ruled sign, is that we can get things done in a way that is more substantive or has more substance. That’s one of the I think, the gifts or the potential positives of Saturn in Sag, is all of those lovely Sagittarian visions or kind of big picture ideals. Not all of them can be made manifest with Saturn in Sag, but some of them can. And I love what Austin’s saying there about the idea that they can be made manifest or they can come into being in a tangible way, which is so Saturn, in a way that’s good enough to keep the momentum up. And so then yeah, we come back to that idea of like the horse galloping across the paddock, you know, that idea of things moving. Maybe not perfectly and maybe not with absolute precision, but you get where you’re attempting to go.
CB: Sure. So that’s an interesting theme of that which is good enough, that’s not fully like meeting the ideal, but that it’s sufficient to get you there. What is it or what things do you have like specific things in mind Austin that you’ve associated with that or that brought up that sort of imagery for you?
AC: Oh, you know, it’s probably like 40 specific things that have just sort of gelled into a mass at this point. It’s just something I’ve been noticing, and then I noticed it again, I noticed it again. And honestly, just looking at, you know, when I sit down and look at what I want to do over the next year, I realize I’m like, “Oh, you know, I don’t have time to do everything exactly right. But it doesn’t seem like I need to do everything exactly right. I just need to keep moving.” I did want to say something about, you know, what we’re talking about, movement as an action, right. And so when we’re traveling right to a distant destination of one sort or another, if we don’t have a good map or we’re not sure where we’re going and we’re trying to compensate for a lack of certainty with just movement and action because that feels like doing something, we can actually set ourselves back. If I traveled 100 miles west when in fact I needed to be going east, then my action is not only wasted, it’s counterproductive. And so in that this is Saturn in Jupiter sign, this is one of the types of obstacles that we’ll encounter. This is what Saturn does, is he looks at you and says, “Well, that was stupid.” That was actually, that was unwise. And so things are going to be slowed down. You’re not kept from your destination by taking by going in the wrong direction, it just takes a lot longer. And so one of the themes I’ve seen, especially in the literature as well as within the Saturn in Sagittarius natives, is that is this sort of quest for direction and meaning? And that’s a big one. I could go off on that for a while. Because if you don’t know where you’re going or why you are going, then the act of going is, of course, problematized deeply.
CB: Definitely.
KS: And that’s–
CB: Go ahead, Kelly.
KS: I was going to say, that’s kind of I think the purpose or one of the potential benefits of Saturn in Sagittarius, is that if you know say, I’m thinking about listeners and their charts, you know, everybody’s got Sag ruling one particular area of their life. And that could be an area of life where people are going off on tangents or not really staying focused, which is a bit of a mutable kind of problem anyway. And then Saturn comes along, and that lovely slowing down or that seriousness or that ability to assess, you know, to be selective or to be discerning rather than just to respond and react willy nilly. And so yeah, absolutely, the pace slows down, but it slows down for a larger ultimate purpose basically, to do that course correction or to catch up on things that you skipped over along the way.
CB: Sure, these are some great keywords in terms of Saturn and the ability to assess and be discerning and to sort of like critique and re-evaluate versus this idea or this phrase that Austin had of the quest for direction and meaning. And perhaps the theme that you’ve been combining those two of being discerning about and having a reassessment of, especially for people that perhaps have Saturn in Sagittarius as we start to transition into talking about that natally, that those become one of the primary themes that they run into over the course of the next two and a half years. So we’re still talking about this in sort of a broad, mundane sense. And maybe we can continue that for a little bit. But one of the things obviously that we’ll want to do is maybe bring this down a little bit for people that have that position, either in their natal chart or people who are curious how it might affect them, even if they don’t have that position in their natal chart. But before we get there, maybe there’s some other broad themes that we might want to touch on before we make that transition.
KS: Yeah, sure. I mean, one topic that when I was researching for my Saturn in Sag ebook came up a lot, was this idea of transport and travel as a general Saturn in Sag theme. So things like the English tunnel, construction first began on that the last time Saturn was in Sagittarius. And what’s interesting about the English tunnel is that even to this day, it has the longest undersea portion of any tunnel in the world. So when that tunnel was built, I mean, it’s connecting England back to mainland Europe, you know, going from London to France, essentially. So that creates a connection, but it’s that lovely vision of Saturn, which is the construction in the tunnel and the building versus the Sagittarius, which is that connection or that linking things that were previously not linked before. And the other two areas that came up a fair bit with Saturn in Sag we’re also space travel developments, both good and bad. I mean, we had the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster when Saturn was in Sag. But we also had the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus at that point as well. So this idea of just breaking new ground in the solar system as much as in day to day life. And then to really bring that back to the microcosm, one of the other topics that came up when Saturn was in Sagittarius was the automation of DNA sequencing and the beginnings of the Human Genome Project. So a lot of the work that’s happened in this last 30 years around DNA and some of the really detailed science and medical work was kickstarted through this last Saturn in Sag period.
AC: Oh, that’s really funny. You know, I mean, Sagittarius is one of the only symbols in the zodiac which is a monstrous hybrid. And, you know, it’s exactly that potential that advances in genetics provide for us.
KS: Absolutely, and so the centaurs, what you’re saying, right, Austin? Like the man half beast, yeah. And then that DNA sequencing stuff would have led to the cloning, was it like Dolly the sheep or something that then came out a few years later?
AC: Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully this time I’ll get my centaur.
KS: Yeah, fingers crossed.
CB: That’s been like a long term aspiration of yours since childhood?
AC: Yeah, I wanted to ride a centaur into battle, ideally. Anyway, I’m gonna not talk anymore about that. So I wanted to add to this focus on travel. So I looked at the kind of stories that people tell during Saturn in Sag, as well as what Saturn in Sag meatheads do when they tell stories. And so there are a number of titles of movies and books that were released under Saturn’s time in Sagittarius that are just sort of obnoxiously literal. One of my favorites is the movie Have Gun – Will Travel, was released during Saturn in Sag. Around the World in 80 Days.
CB: Good.
KS: Yeah, it actually won the Oscar, there’s Saturn in Sag in the ’50s.
AC: Yes, best picture. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. And then, in addition to that, I looked at two authors that I could find that had both the Sun and Saturn in Sagittarius, and those were C. S. Lewis, whose primary work for which he’s remembered is the Narnia series, which is if you guys read those–
KS: Yeah, oh my gosh, loved them.
AC: And it’s just like a crazy, surreal journey that seemingly never ends.
KS: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
AC: Yeah, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and it just gets weirder and weirder. And then there’s also one of my favorites, Philip K. Dick. And if anybody has read Philip K. Dick’s work, Philip K. Dick is, I guess you’d call him a science fiction author, who wrote quite a bit between about 1960 and 1980, and whose work was adapted for films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, as well as a few others. And so what’s interesting about Philip K. Dick’s work is that almost every story is about people in a world that they don’t understand and keeps changing. And they’re just trying to adapt and figure out what reality actually is. And it’s almost like reality moves around them. And so they end up journeying, but it’s a quest to figure out what the hell is going on. And what’s interesting about Philip K. Dick being a Sun Saturn, is that even though he’s been dead for 35 years, there are two series that are coming out that are based on his work. One is that Minority Report is about to become or it has become and is about to be released as a television series. And Minority Report is about psychic police forces seeing crimes before they happen. And then people being arrested before they’ve done anything wrong. And then the other is The Man in the High Castle, which I believe oh God, it won some award when it was released in like ’60 ’62. But The Man in the High Castle is being made by Amazon, which is about… Well, I won’t go into it too much. But anyway, for those who are familiar with Philip K. Dick’s work, it’s all about this frustrated quest for meaning and this frustrated quest, what is the nature of reality and what the hell do I do, you know, now that I’m here and why does it keep changing?
CB: It’s interesting seeing somebody who I mean, he passed away already, right?
AC: Yeah, he died prematurely in, I want to say like ’79, ’80, ’81, he died right before the premiere of Blade Runner, which was based on his story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It was like the first blockbuster that was based on one of his works and he died right before it came out.
CB: Okay. Well, it’s interesting seeing somebody who, you know, died years ago but has Saturn in Sagittarius and has also it looks like the Sun and Mercury and the south node in Sagittarius having their work or their life work coming up again as you get an important outer planet transit like Saturn going through there again.
AC: Yeah, apparently your Saturn returns keep happening even after you’re dead.
CB: Right. That would be a good book for somebody at some point. You know, the post what happens? Actually, somebody actually brought that up to me already a few months ago, was [unintelligible 19.54] was wondering what happens when you look at Zodiac Releasing periods in people’s career peak periods, which is what that technique is really good for. What happens when people have career peaks after they’re dead? And we looked at some charts, and one of the ones I brought up was Vincent van Gogh, who never achieved success in his lifetime. But it was after his lifetime through the work of his brother’s wife, because both van Gogh and his brother died within a six-month period, and his wife inherited all of his paintings. And then she tirelessly promoted them to the point that eventually he achieved success and notoriety as an artist in death as a result of her efforts. And you could see him hitting his career peak periods right at that point, but it was like a decade or two after he died.
AC: Yeah, another great example would be H. P. Lovecraft, who really wasn’t very notable during his lifetime. But really just in the last 10 years has become the go to for anybody who likes horror at all. He used to be like a nerdy writer secret, but not so much anymore. And so he died, oh God, he died 67 years ago. And so he didn’t really have a resurgence until recently. There was a little bump earlier, but he’s never been as popular as he is right now. So I want to use this quest for meaning and this sort of world changing around people as perhaps a launching off point into the Saturn Neptune squares. Does that work for you, Chris?
CB: Sure, yeah, we can make that transition already. I mean, there’s one other point related to the previous trip thing travel thing that seems to come up sometimes that we might touch upon briefly first, which is just the idea of like that which is for and seems to come up pretty commonly for some reason with Saturn in Sagittarius, as well as Sagittarius in general as a theme, that seems to be connected with the travel theme. But yeah, if you want to go back, maybe we could talk about the Saturn square Neptune first, and then go on to some of that other stuff.
AC: Sure. Sure. Well, I’ll just say that if you travel long enough in any direction, you’ll encounter something foreign and unfamiliar. Like sustained travel and the encounter of that which is alien are inevitably coupled.
CB: The encounter of that which is alien, that’s good.
AC: Yeah. That’s a sort of German philosophy book-way to phrase it, but thank you, college. Anyway, yeah, so insofar as we are, I don’t know if we’re leaving the Uranus Pluto squares behind exactly, but we’ve had all the exact ones and it’s sort of just become normal. You know, our attention should and does shift naturally towards the next outer planet configuration and that’s Saturn’s three squares with Neptune, which we almost had during the first quarter of 2015. It threatened and I had several readings during that time that were people who had a body in early Pisces and in early Sag who were so confused, and it was a nice preview of what that was about. But you know, so if we’ve isolated some themes, and that Saturn’s like, “Oh, okay Sag, which direction are we going? And what’s the point of going in that direction? Neptune is not helpful for this.
KS: Not at all.
AC: Neptune is very strong in Pisces. And, you know, I think Neptune and Saturn are almost naturally mutually exclusive. They don’t even fight over the same territory. They just, you know, they just happen. They describe entirely different sets of rules for entirely different layers of human experience. And so their connections are pretty awkward. Do you guys have any thoughts on this?
KS: So many. Yeah, it is a tricky one. And one thing when I was writing about this, was trying to think they’re just on different wavelengths completely. They, as you said, they don’t even have a crossover in terms of similar things that they’re interested in. Saturn looks to kind of create or establish things that are firm and solid and real and long lasting, whereas Neptune sort of blurs the edges about things so that they become soft and mushy and unclear as if Saturn and Neptune are kind of diametrically opposed in terms of their quality. So when you put the two together, it’s a really tricky one in terms of clarity or lack of clarity is really what they create. And so confusion is one of the outcomes here. I think in the best case scenario, Neptune can help create often some overly rigid Saturnsphere or boundaries or limits. And then in return, Saturn can help one of those intuitive inklings of Neptune’s kind of lead to something tangible, but it is very ephemeral and very ethereal in terms of how they combine.
CB: I’m glad you guys you brought that up, just because that’s one of the biggest things that’s difficult about sometimes interpreting placements and looking at them from a mundane perspective is, you know, this Saturn in Sagittarius period in the mid 20 teens is going to be much different having Saturn going through Sagittarius but squaring Neptune from Pisces much of that time versus for example, like the mid to late 1980s, where you had Saturn going through Sagittarius but Neptune had already recently departed from Sagittarius and moved into Capricorn. So one of the primary signatures of Saturn in Sagittarius back in the ’80s was that it was conjoining Uranus much of the time or it was building up to a conjunction with Uranus and Sagittarius. So it almost raises this issue just in terms of wanting to interpret the literal theme of Saturn in Sagittarius in isolation on its own versus how it gets colored by these other configurations with different outer planets during the course of that transit.
AC: And this will be a real challenge for the people who were born in the late 80s and are about to have their Saturn returns. Because they all have Saturn co-present, some very closely conjunct with Uranus. And so that’s, as you pointed out, that’s a very unique signature. And they, you know, for them Saturn has been, you know, Saturn has been about… How do we say? Learning to deal with the disruptions and lightning bolts and surprises, both good and bad that Uranus offers, right. Saturn if you think of Saturn and Uranus together, you know, Uranus is constantly like redrawing the blueprints or in a case that Nick Dagan brought up with Lucky Luciano, who is a Saturn conjunct Uranus native. He was literally sprung from prison during a recurrence transit of Saturn and Uranus, you know, being a Saturn, Uranus native. And so, you know, it’s going to be interesting for people who have that natal conjunction or co-presence because they’re used to feeling, you know, their Saturn all mixed up with their Uranus, whereas Saturn’s return will double up on the Saturn and serve to isolate it a little bit.
CB: Right, so this weird theme of like Saturn versus Uranus, which those are two interesting contrasts because they’re both Saturn versus Uranus and then Saturn versus Neptune because they’re both like diametrically opposite but in different ways.
AC: I would say that I think Saturn and Neptune are almost more like an inconjunct. They, if left on their own, have nothing to do with each other. Dreams are dreams, and you know, going to work and paying the bills is its own thing, and never the twain shall meet, whereas Saturn and Uranus I think contest the ground of everyday living.
KS: Yes, they can do a little bit more on the same territory.
CB: I mean, you’ve run into that issue though where it’s still the same thing, where what happens when you do have a contrast between dreams and reality or where two separate worlds that are usually separate suddenly come into collision with each other like, you know, with a Saturn Neptune square, for example.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I’m just saying I think that essentially, they’d rather not have anything to do with each other. It’s easier for one to be separate.
KS: In their own corner.
AC: So while we’re talking about the relationship between the two, we should point out it’s not just a square, it’s a square with Saturn in the superior position. So we’re three quarters the way through the Saturn Neptune cycle, which began in the early 90s with the conjunctions of Saturn and Neptune in Capricorn.
CB: That’s an excellent point. Because you and I have both complained, I think in the past, about how that was one of the things missing from a lot of the discussion about what the Uranus Pluto square was going to be about over the past few years. And it often was interpreted as if, like Uranus was going to dominate Pluto and like the rebels were going to win the day, but oftentimes, it was flipped. So it seemed like the establishment or the power won out over the revolutionaries, even though a lot of disruption was created by the revolutions.
AC: Right, right. And so this is Saturn in the superior position. So three quarters of the way through for people who aren’t as familiar with synodic cycles, this is like the waning, this is like the waning Half Moon, we’re entering the last quarter of this cycle. And so if the Neptune Saturn cycle is about the collision of dreams and reality, as well as the hope of trying to find a solid find or create a solid form for the imaginative content of Neptune, so we saw plenty of that in the early ’90s. You know, this is sort of one of the key points or even crisis points in that. But this time, Saturn has power over Neptune, right. And so I think that we’re going to be pushed to really filter Neptune and to cut down on, you know, to cut down and sift through some of our fantasies. And that’s supported by a number of the other outer planet positions during this time. Right, we have Jupiter in Virgo opposing Neptune basically right now and then by sign for another year, and then the south node is going to enter Pisces in about two months, and then will be there for a year and a half, which is a lot of Saturn’s time in Sagittarius. So Neptune will not only be on the inferior side of the square, but sharing that place sharing Pisces with the south node, which tends to bleach out, purify, lessen that which it touches.
CB: Definitely. Okay, so some of the other… Kelly, I know you focus a lot on what other aspects are going on when you’re looking at outer planet transits as coloring things. And I think there was a few other aspects that you highlighted as well in your work, right?
KS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one view I take is that, you know, Saturn’s going into Sag which definitely has a particular theme for this sort of two and a half year period. But Saturn in Sag is going to interact with the other planets. So we’ve got the lovely Saturn square Neptune, which is the biggest aspect from Saturn in Sag. And we probably should just take a quick second and give the dates for that which include December 2015 and then June and again in August of 2016.
CB: So those are the exact squares?
KS: Yeah, that’s when Saturn… And the degrees that the Saturn Neptune square, the first square in December 2015 will happen from seven Sag to seven Pisces. And then the second square in June of 2016 will happen from 10 Sag to 10 Pisces. And then the third and final square in August of 2016 will happen from 12 Sag to 12 Pisces. So in addition to paying attention to the signs and houses if you know you have planets at those degrees, you can definitely cotton on to that. The other big outer planet aspect that Saturn will be involved in from Sagittarius is a trine to Uranus in Aries. And that’s going to be really interesting based on what Austin was just saying with that co-presence. Last time Saturn was in Sag with Uranus also there, to see whether that kind of combination of Saturn and Uranus triggers anything, particularly for people who are having their first Saturn return now. So Saturn will trine Uranus in December 2016 and then May of 2017. And again, yet even though these are two very different planets, I think they can do a lot more together or they can be more productive as a pairing. And literally with Uranus, we’ve got this breaking new ground but also particularly around science and technology not just in terms of physical movement.
CB: Sure, that makes sense, especially in terms of like Saturn representing the boundaries in some sense, of what our limitations, of what our knowledge is about the world or the limitations of what we know in current scientific thought, and then Uranus perhaps presenting you know, some additional piece of information or some sudden advancement which allows for expanding the scope of what we know.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, Saturn is in charge until Uranus comes along and just shakes up whatever status quo Saturn has got mismanaging, and we get with Uranus this idea of the pace picking up. So I think what you just said, that idea of like a sudden breakthrough or that classic kind of mad scientist working in the lab and just strikes upon this wild idea that seems to make great sense but also, you know, move things forward in sort of leaps and bounds.
CB: Sure, sure. Okay, so that’s a nice contrast that once the Saturn square Neptune is over, you get like this bit more smooth outer planet aspect of Saturn trine Uranus, which is a bit more easy to deal with, and almost more like, you know, the more like a rapid advancement of some sort rather than the sort of murkiness and lack of clarity that the square from Neptune would indicate earlier in the Saturn in Sagittarius period.
KS: For sure. Yeah, and the other difference that comes in there as well because we really are breaking Saturn in Sag into two distinct chapters. And the first Saturn in Sag period is defined by the square to Neptune, and is ruled by Jupiter in Virgo. And then by the time we get to the Saturn trine Uranus aspect, in the second chapter, if you like, of Saturn in Sag, we’ve got Jupiter moved into Libra, which is sort of a different kettle of fish again, perhaps a little bit more sparky being a cardinal sign, too. So there really is a different feeling, if you like, once we get through that Saturn square Neptune aspect.
CB: Sure, that almost makes me wonder if a lot of the Saturn in Sag people are dealing with the first half of this, their Saturn returns, whether they’re on their first Saturn return or second Saturn return, aren’t going to be dealing with, you know, some of you know… We would normally expect like questions like Austin said of like, what is my direction in life? And what am I doing here? What is my purpose? The quest for direction and meaning, but that to be really nebulous and Mercury and just to have like a complete loss or complete ambiguity surrounding what their direction and sort of meaning was in the first half. And that almost might characterize part of what that period is about, especially for the people that have Saturn in the early parts of Sag. But then later on, you get some clarity in the second half or there’s something that comes in and shakes it up and sort of pulls people out of that sort of ambiguity or that nebulousness. All right. Yeah. So what other aspects, are there other things that are worth noting in terms of important outer planet transits that’ll characterize Saturn going through Sagittarius?
KS: Well, there’s two aspects that Jupiter and Saturn will form while Saturn is in Sagittarius. Not perhaps on the same scale as that of Neptune or Saturn Uranus, but probably worth a mention, which are Jupiter square Saturn, so Jupiter in Virgo square Saturn in Sag. And that’ll happen in March and May of 2016, so through the first half of next year. And then we’ll have Jupiter and Libra sextile Saturn in Sag, and that’s more of an extended, drawn out sextile just to do with the stations. And that’ll be active in December 2016 and January of 2017. And then again in August and September of 2017. And what’s really interesting there is that December 2016, we’ve got Saturn trine Uranus and Jupiter sextile Saturn. So we’re actually getting a fairly kind of exciting pattern formed where Jupiter will be opposite Uranus and sextile Saturn while Saturn is trying Uranus. So we’re getting one of those easy opposition angles or patterns forming in the sky. And to my mind, that looks like one of the most exciting or groundbreaking periods of Saturn in Sag, is that late 2016 early 2017 when we have an alignment between Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.
AC: Well, you know, Kelly that your positivity is really wanting to make me balance that out.
KS: Give us the reality check.
AC: That’s all true. So what I think will probably be the most difficult pair of points surrounding Saturn’s time in Sagittarius will be Mars’s retrograde next year. So Mars goes retrograde about two degrees, I think, just a couple degrees before Saturn. But you know, if you look out in the sky, you will see them, you know, gazing down at you with baleful intent. So we have a Mars retrograde right next to Saturn in Sag and then Mars goes backward and then it goes forward again and then we have another and then we have the proper conjunction as well as very extended co-presence between the two malefics. And so that really… Oh boy, Mars retrogrades just last forever, especially when we look at the shadow area. And so I know the station is next April, but when does Saturn or when does Mars actually enter Sagittarius? Kelly, you know off the top of your head?
KS: 6th of March, 2016.
AC: All right, and then I believe–
KS: And it’s there until late May, May 28 or so.
AC: Right. And then it’s back to about 23 Scorpio, forward again.
CB: Back in Sag 3rd of August 2016 and there until the 27th of September.
CB: Well, that is a long Saturn… That’s a long Mars in Sagittarius transit.
KS: Yeah, essentially it’s five months out of next year. We’ve got three months to start and then two months in the middle of the year.
AC: Yeah. So I mean, as far as… And that kind of… Yeah, so as far as challenging periods, I’m having the Saturn in Sagittarius work. You know that when the two malefics are in the same sign, stuff happens that people don’t like. The last time that that happened was in–
KS: Was Mars and Saturn in Scorpio, horrible.
AC: Yeah, summer August of 2014. And that was I think an especially naughty one. But that was like, you know, I mean, it was naughty in the sense that it was Ebola, Robin Williams kills himself, and ISIS spreads all over the Middle East. I don’t think, you know, Sagittarius is at least Jupiter-ruled, so it’s not going to be quite as archetypally awful, it’s not just going to be like blood and murderers and suicide. But I would not bet on that being easy, especially the time periods where Saturn or Mars is very close to conjunction with Saturn.
KS: Yeah, it’s… Well, I mean, it’ll be mid-April when Mars stations retrograde at 8 Sag and Saturn will be at about 15 Sag. And then the exact conjunction is late August of 2016, around the 25th of August, give or take a couple of days. And what you’re saying Austin too is that’s right in the thick of the Saturn square Neptune transits as well, so talk about messiness and scandals maybe. Like when you were saying… Yeah, it’s not as sort of perhaps classically malefic as the Mars Saturn in Scorpio, which is Mars’s sign, but then I think the press is just there’s going to be scandals that are all over the papers and the internet at that time as well.
CB: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically all of the keywords and the topics we were talking about earlier in terms of travel, foreign things, and so on and so forth. But then you get this element of like conflict, of scandal, of like theft is one of the classical Mars significations, like conflict or strife or war is a common signification or incidence.
AC: Well, and you also have… So one of the things which proceeds from the human quest for meaning is religion. And if I’m remembering correctly, I believe PW:’s research showed a number of challenges to religion or, you know, spiritual or philosophical disciplines cropping up during Saturn’s time in Sagittarius. Again, if I’m remembering correctly, I believe Martin Luther nailed his complaints of the cathedral during Saturn in Sag.
KS: I think so.
AC: Yeah, and so I think that’s another as far as scandals go or as far as controversy. Or in the case of Mars fights or wars, there’s quite a bit going on there. I think that, you know, religious history is pretty combative anyway. And so this is both malefics being in that sign. And so I think we should see some interesting religious controversies emerge during probably the period where the retrograde station occurs, as well as when Saturn is back in Sag for co-presence later in 2016.
CB: Yeah, and Patrick… We’ll have Patrick on the show later in this episode to talk about some of those chart examples. And I know some different religious leaders and people that have it, actually in their chart, like for example, Martin Luther King Jr. had Saturn in Sagittarius. But then you also get the other side of the spectrum and you have Osama bin Laden with Saturn in Sagittarius, as well as then skeptics or some prominent atheists and stuff like James Randi, for example who has Saturn in Sagittarius, will talk about as well as Patrick, one of Patrick’s best and favorite examples, which is Neil deGrasse Tyson as like a famous scientist and science advocate and, you know, astronomer and space advocate. But one of the questions I have that this is raising–
AC: I’m anti-space personally.
CB: You’re anti-space?
CB: I’m anti-space.
KS: How can you be anti-space?
AC: I have a pro-death anti-space stance.
CB: So one of the things that this has raised for me was talking about this Mars retrograde in Sagittarius very early on. And the whole Saturn in Sagittarius transit is just wondering who that’s going to hit harder, like the people with night charts or the people with day charts. And what I’m actually thinking is, for the people with day charts, you know, normally Saturn returns will tend to be a little bit more constructive. But when you get a Mars stationing retrograde in Sagittarius while the person is having a Saturn return in a day chart, I bet for many people with day charts at least, that’s going to be like the most difficult part of their Saturn return. That’s going to be like the triggering point of whatever really challenging situation. If they do have a challenging situation that comes up, that’s going to be when a really challenging sort of conflict would come up in their life, which would then necessitate or be the precursor to whatever the positive or constructive Saturn return lesson is over the subsequent two years between then and Saturn finally departing in late December of 2017. Whereas the people with night charts, I don’t think, I’m betting they’re not going to get hit as hard by that Mars retrograde going retrograde there in 2016. Although there will be like some other times during the course of that next two-year period where Saturn is stationing or becoming particularly prominent in their chart for some reason. And those will be more like the important challenging turning points in terms of their Saturn return. But that’s just sort of a speculation of what I would sort of anticipate and looking at previous charts and just thinking about it from the perspective of Sag.
AC: Yeah, certainly. I mean, I think that… Kelly, you’ve actually helped outline the silver lining or the light at the end of the tunnel.
KS: Well, that’s what I’m here to do.
AC: You know, 2016’s got a bunch of messy mess.
KS: It’s really messy, messy, yeah.
AC: Whereas you know, if we can get to Jupiter and Libra, for Jupiter’s happier and is a happier angle to Saturn as its ruler, and the Mars retrograde’s fine. Yeah. And we no longer, you know, the nodes will still be in Virgo and Pisces for a while longer, but they won’t be on top… You know, Jupiter won’t be in Virgo. So you know, there’s less push-pull when you don’t have planets on both sides of the nodes. Yeah, that’s… I like that.
KS: Well, you guys have kind of clarified for me quite how difficult 2016 will be with that Mars retrograde, which I think I was just having a mental block against, but it is different. And I think it’s going to be really interesting for people who are Saturn returning, especially if they’re Saturn is in the early part, let’s say the first third or even on the first half of Sag, which is where the degrees that the Mars retrograde in Sag is really going to be picking up on.
AC: Right, so like eighty sixes and eighty sevens?
KS: Yes, exactly, the earlier, all the people, yeah, yes, exactly, the Saturn in the first half. So well, that’s good, we’ve clarified the best and the worst.
CB: Right, I think that’s good. And it sets a good tone for what I’ll get into at the later part of this show with Patrick and Leisa in terms of specific people examples of Saturn in Sagittarius nataly or examples of Saturn returning in Sagittarius in the past, as well as some Saturn returns that we’re actually looking forward to. There’s like a few notable people that are going to be having Saturn returns that I’m looking forward to seeing what transpires in their life. So other themes, other sort of broad overarching themes that we might talk about or that might be relevant in terms of Sagittarius and specifically Saturn in Sagittarius, I know Kelly that one of the themes you brought up was ideas of integrity and justice and law.
KS: Yeah, there was one thing when I was doing my research and poring over what happened in this year, and something Austin said earlier, so he can probably jump in here, too. Last time, Saturn was in Sag, there was the first American court ruling on surrogacy came down in the case of Baby M. And so it wasn’t so much that, you know, surrogacy was developed, it was already obviously, you know, in play. But the legalities of babies that, you know, are not born, you know, with all the many iterations of how babies can be brought into the world and live with people who aren’t their biological parents and all of that. So that’s just one example. But you know, Sagittarius is assigned to do with justice and to do with truth and to do with ethics and to do with morality. And particularly again once Jupiter gets into Libra, because Libra with that scales of justice, I mean, these two signs Libra and Sag, you know, really about that sense of right action or acting with integrity. And I’m really curious and intrigued to see what other major sort of legal decisions or changes to the law come down in this timeframe, perhaps to do with religion or, you know, any other social issues that come up, but that how those social changes are codified into the law of the land.
AC: Well, that ties in to what you were saying about genetic research coming to a new level of maturity. Surrogacy you can’t create monster babies without some form of surrogacy.
KS: Exactly. And then how do we manage these? How do we organize it? And I guess that’s what the Saturn–
AC: How do we keep the monster babies from taking over?
KS: Totally, it’s I mean, Saturn’s an organizing principle. So it’s almost like the law now has to catch up to some of the other developments that have been going on socially and culturally.
CB: Sure, and what are the moral and ethical implications of some of those things as they come up.
KS: Of those crazy babies Austin’s talking about.
CB: Right, and yeah, riding the centaur babies… Is it moral to ride a centaur or not?
AC: Right. Well, obviously has to be based on consent. So one thing that we haven’t talked about that I think we should very briefly, is just that Saturn’s time in Sagittarius is always right before Saturn’s time in Capricorn, where he’s home. Right. And then, you know, Saturn is the only sign that rules two consecutive signs, so you know, those being Capricorn and Aquarius. Whenever Saturn enters Capricorn, you know, we’re in for like, you know, five plus years of super Saturn time. And so one of the things I noticed when I was doing research, is that Saturn’s time in Sagittarius is always this kind of mad dash before the new order truly arrives. So late ’80s before, you know, late ’80s up to the end of ’88 before everything changed. Berlin Wall, early ’90s, etc, etc. Right, and it was the late ’50s before the ’60s arrived. It was the late ’20s, crazy time, speculation and you know, prohibition, etc before everything changed with the depression and Saturn’s movement into Capricorn. And so… Well, go ahead.
KS: I was just going to throw in very quickly, yeah, the stock market crashes.
CB: Yeah, that’s something Nick Dagan Best had mentioned to me as well. That him and Patrick had focused a lot on the financial picture and that most… He said that most of the serious financial crises since the 1800s have occurred during Saturn in Sag and Capricorn.
AC: Yeah. Well, and the Great Depression was actually about Saturn’s retrograde back and forth along that cusp. Because the, you know, the Great Depression wasn’t a single event. And it’s that border crossing back and forth that really sunk us into the depression.
KS: Interesting. Yeah, because the two big crashes in the late 1920s and then 1987, I think both had Saturn in Sag.
AC: Well, there’s a, you know, like we were talking about just in terms of mutability, mutable signs are volatile.
KS: They’re untethered, aren’t they?
AC: Yeah. Well, and I mean, they’re dual-bodied. And so they therefore must oscillate between the extremes that they’re either exploring or trying to synthesize. And with Saturn in Sag, you know, you have this sort of… It’s very easy to get to this idea of almost mandatory enthusiasm. Like, “No, no, no, we’ve got to keep believing.” You know, religion Saturn… Or excuse me, religion, Jupiter, etc. You know, we have to keep believing that the stock market will go up. And, you know, the stock markets are primarily governed by people’s belief.
KS: 100%.
AC: Right. So, you know, there are some fundamentals, but most people don’t make their bets based on due diligence of fundamentals, they base it on they heard something from somebody they believe or they become afraid and their belief follows their fear, etc, etc. So my guess is that there would be a lot of… We’d be entering, especially this next year before Jupiter gets into Libra, a period of volatility rather than just crashes, I think it’ll probably be up, down, up, down, up down.
CB: Sure. And if a system like that is based on belief, what happens when people start questioning or start becoming skeptical or what have you?
AC: Right. Or they just don’t know what to… You know, because we’ve been talking about the Saturn Neptune square, I don’t know, maybe it’s all over, maybe it’s amazing, you know. And so when you don’t have a firm picture, then you are much more susceptible to a little bit of data which suggests this and a little bit of data which suggests that. You don’t have any [unintelligible 55:08] or centaur.
CB: That is a Freudian slip. All right, and one last thing I want to mention just in terms of one developing sort of current event that I think is going to be tied in with this and a big part of it is the immigration crisis that’s been developing pretty rapidly in Europe. And what happens with that over the course of the next couple of years, I think is perfectly sort of queuing up and lining up for this long Saturn in Sagittarius period, which, you know, already dipped in a while earlier this year, but then it’s going to be full on starting this week. And just some of the tensions and other things going on in terms of international relations, the result from that.
KS: And that ties right into the legalities, too. If we have immigration on a large scale, I don’t think it’s necessarily larger than what we’ve had in the past at other different points. But large scale immigration, what are the legalities? You know, how can we get people into safe countries quickly? But the Saturn component, what are the consequences? And then what kind of a new foundation for the future does that create?
CB: Right. And then you get into cultural disputes about how much do people have to adopt like the cultures that they’re moving into versus how much can you maintain or retain your existing culture? And then also like religious disputes, like how much can you, you know, do you import your religion into whatever your existing culture is versus how much do your religious beliefs have to be modified and adapted to your culture and what happens when different religions clash in the same sphere and things like that?
KS: 100%, and this is… My husband works in public education here in Canada, which probably regular listeners know. And the changes they’ve had already in the last year or two around how they celebrate holidays, it can’t be purely Christian-based or they have to put a non-denominational spin on the Christmas nativity play at the end of the year because of growing multiculturalism even in the public school system. So that’s like a microcosm. But also that macrocosm, how do we integrate when we’ve got that melting pot of people with different philosophies and different beliefs and with different requirements around those beliefs? What is a safe way for those to interface that doesn’t, you know, isolate anyone, I guess?
AC: Yeah. And I personally think this is sort of a challenge which we’ll see throughout the 21st century. This is the multicultural challenge, not on a theoretical level, but what happens during a period of unprecedented globalization? People move more easily, people communicate more easily, and so you have to deal with relationships and compromises and all sorts of things that we’ve never really had to do on the same scale.
CB: Definitely. Well, on that note, I think we’re coming to the end of our hour for this first half of the episode, so maybe we should wrap it up. I think we got a lot of great keywords and a lot of great phrases out of this episode that should be good for people over the next two and a half years. But in terms of further research and learning more about Saturn in Sag, I know that you just or you’re getting ready to release an entire eBook on Saturn in Sagittarius. Right, Kelly?
KS: I am. It is going to be on presale at a bit of a discount at the end of this week, Thursday, Friday, and my friend Yasmin Boland at moonology.com and I on my own website, kellysastrology.com. We’ll both have all the information around that. So grab either of us on Facebook or Twitter and we’ll be sending out the info. The Saturn in Sag eBook is a massive workbook basically, there’s lots of info some of which we touched on today, some of which I go into a little bit more detail. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of tips around what you could do with Saturn in Sag depending on what house it’s in in your chart or what personal planet it might be aspecting in your chart.
CB: Nice. So it gets into the whole the personal placement of that in your chart and really personalizes it for you?
KS: Absolutely, yeah. I’ve kind of designed it as an extra reference for some of my students and clients who just want that kind of written, “What am I supposed to be doing again with Saturn in Sag?” Oh, that’s right, it’s in my sixth house. So I need to do X, Y, and Z or whatever it happens to be.
CB: Excellent. Well, I will link to that also in this post. But otherwise, people should check out your website, kellysastrology.com And Austin, do you have anything coming up? I know you talked about Saturn in Sag in your almanac this year, right?
AC: I did. There’s a brilliant essay which you can read for free on my website. And in addition to that, I’m beginning two classes on Saturday, the 26th of September. And one of them is a four-week basics class dealing with dignity and rulership. And so I’ll be going through the hierarchy of traditional dignity and also demonstrating and sort of workshopping helping people through how to use rulership, because that’s one of the… It’s one of the stumbling points in learning astrology. Oh, I don’t have anything in this house, but that house has a ruler and it’s in its own house, and it’s in a sign. So that’ll be one of my building block classes. And then I’m proud to announce, I’m actually going to be beginning a six-week class on Saturday, September 26, as well. I’m going through how to work with the deck ends or faces. You know, I published a book last year with a lot of research about the deck ends, but I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how to apply it. And so I have no trouble applying it, but I also wrote the book. So realizing that there’s actually a lot more that I could do to fill in the blanks, so we’ll be dealing with, you know, how dicanic dignity works, how is it different from other kinds, what is the texture of each of the 36 deck ends, how does that contribute to your practice of astrology, how can you use those meanings to get much more symbolically potent as well as accurate delineations of planets in places? And so we’ll be doing general stuff, and then we’ll also be going through every single deck and I’m looking at chart examples for every single deck end.
CB: Excellent. All right. Well, people can check that out on your website, which is austincoppock.com. All right. Well, thank you both for joining me. And yeah, I think that does it for this segment of this episode on Saturn in Sag.
KS: Thanks, Chris.
AC: All right, that was fun.
Part 2
CHRIS BRENNAN: Next, we transition into a discussion with Patrick Watson and Leisa Schaim. Patrick wrote a long article on Saturn in Sagittarius that was published on his blog at patrickwatsonastrologer.com, and Leisa writes and lectures on Saturn returns through her website, saturnreturnstories.com and leisaschaim.com. Hey guys, welcome to the show.
LISA SCHAIM: Thanks for having us.
PATRICK WATSON: Thank you for having us.
CB: All right. So in this segment, in the previous segment, we talked about what Saturn in Sagittarius means in a broad, from a broad sort of symbolic and mundane perspective. And in this segment, I wanted to talk to both of you because you specialize a lot more in looking at Saturn and Sagittarius in both the natal chart as well as what sort of themes come up when people start having Saturn returns who have Saturn in Sagittarius. So we’re going to focus on that. One of the things that I wanted to outline from the start since we’re going to be focusing on natal charts, so we’re gonna focus on the themes that come up in the lives of people with Saturn in Sag and themes that come up during the Saturn return in Sag. And sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between the two. So we’ll kind of intersperse some chart examples that are crossovers between both in terms of either just having really evocative natal Saturn placements or having that but also having really interesting Saturn return stories. So first, I wanted to define some dates just so people have an idea of when, what timeframe we’re talking about when we’re talking about people that were born with Saturn in Sagittarius. And there were three primary timeframes during the 20th century. So the first was approximately December 2nd of 1926 through November 29th of 1929, was roughly Saturn in Sagittarius. And anyone born during that time would have it in their birth chart. The next was January 12th 1956 through January 5th 1959. And then finally the third group and most recent group until now is November 17th 1985 through November 12th 1988 for Saturn in Sagittarius. So, okay, let’s jump right into it. And Patrick, what kind of chart examples, what are some of your most evocative Saturn in Sagittarius-type chart examples?
PW: Well, I have a mixture of examples of individuals as well as historical developments that are interesting to study in the context of Saturn in Sagittarius. But I’ll start off with my first individual chart example, which I briefly went over during the webinar episode last time. This is for the chart of Tony Abbott, who is now the former Prime Minister of Australia. You can find his data on Astro-Databank. He was born on November 4th, 1957 in London, England but the reported A rated time of 4:00am. And he was born at night with Saturn in Sagittarius in the third house. And so around the age of 29, he was studying to become a priest. He was a Catholic, a devout Catholic, and he was in school to learn to be a priest, which is very appropriate for a third house Saturn in Sagittarius, because of the third house’s association with schooling. And obviously, this is a very solitary kind of schooling, there’s no life probably more secluded and isolating than being a religious figure. So this represented a… We could see from the birth chart that this would be an area of serious concern for him. And it was actually when he turned 29 that he decided he could no longer be a priest, that he no longer wanted to be in this place where he felt isolated and alone. And he felt like his life could be put to better use. And so it was right around what he described as early 1987, and that was when he decided that he no longer wants to be in the priesthood. And he passed his Saturn return before that point. So it’s, I think it’s a fairly good example of Saturn in the sign as well as the house.
CB: Sure, so you get the religious themes coming up from the Sagittarius placement, you get themes having to do with like study and education from the third house placement, and then you get him having this real sort of crisis of consciousness in terms of being attracted towards some of those Saturn in Sagittarius in the third house type themes. But then presumably having sort of a crisis in terms of deciding not to stick with it during that time, and then having a sort of break with that area of his life in some sense at that time during the Saturn return.
PW: Right. And what was kind of interesting is that at the time of the webinar, I didn’t actually know that Tony Abbott that the very next day, it was going to be decided that he was no longer going to be the Prime Minister, he was ousted by a vote from his party. And so at the time, I’d made the statement that by the time of his next Saturn return, he might decide not to be in politics. Because perhaps as Saturn is coming back to his natal placement, that he would be deciding that this wasn’t the way he wanted his life to be, just in the same way at 29 that he decided the priesthood wasn’t what he wanted his life to be about. And so now it looks like he doesn’t really have much of a choice now that he is no longer in a political position. So it’ll be very interesting to see. In fact, he could even return to the seminary or return to religious studies, to a more religious life.
CB: Yeah, that was a really a good call in the webinar because that was just a few days ago. And then literally the news came out like a day or two after you made that statement that maybe he’ll give up politics, that he actually was getting out.
PW: Although, I should note that Ed Tamplin did call it, I think over a year ago. So congratulations to Ed Tamplin on the good prediction there.
CB: Good. And briefly before we move on, that brings up a theme just like a theme that Leisa and I have seen as a recurring theme with Saturn returns, which is just the process of letting go of things or sometimes endings as like a very common Saturn-return type theme. I think that’s very appropriate in terms of this since you can see that as almost like the primary thing or primary underlying motivation and sort of archetype underlying the Saturn return for him and in terms of letting go of both of those things in his life at those returns.
PW: Mhm.
CB: Anyway, so–
PW: On to my next chart example. My next chart example is Madonna who was born on August 16th 1958 with an AA-rated time of 7:05 a.m. in Bay City, Michigan. And she was born with Saturn at 19 degrees of Sagittarius in the fourth hole sign house. And what was happening for Madonna around that time in 1987, she had received very frosty reviews for a film that she had just been in. And she kind of felt like her career was hitting a wall, and that she kind of got the sense that she was growing up as she was. And she reached the age that her mother died which is interesting considering that she was born rather, yeah, that the Saturn placement is in the fourth house that she felt this strong connection to her mother that she reached the age that her mother had died at. This made her more kind of existential about having an existential crisis about her life and what she should do, and she finally managed to kind of wrap up all of these disparate feelings into deciding on a more mature adult direction for her music. So this is a bit past the time of the Saturn return. There were obviously a lot of other things that were happening in that time such as a tumultuous divorce from Sean Penn.
And some of that was after the Capricorn ingress, so we’re at the very end of the Saturn return period in late 1988. But it wasn’t that time in September 1988 that she recorded the song Like a Prayer which is an innuendo-laden pop song but is also very expressively religious and has this strong–Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the song Like a Prayer. But it was very, very controversial. It really got a lot of religious evangelicals very, very angry with it cuz they felt that it was sacrilegious. So I thought it was interesting that some of that outreach happened while Saturn was in Capricorn, but the song itself was recorded while Saturn was in Sagittarius. So I thought it was interesting from the sort of religious standpoint that this religious theme of Sagittarius kind of came through from this song which came from this desire to live more meaningfully and because of her mother. So it’s a weird way in which sort of these three elements, the planets, the sign, and the house kind of combined and was sort of crystallized in this song Like a Prayer.
CB: Sure. And, yeah, it brings out a sort of recurring theme that seemed to come up at different points in her life which is like her relationship with religion and with spirituality and belief and stuff.
PW: Absolutely. But this song Like a Prayer was absolutely the most kind of defining song in her exploration of her religion and her feelings about it.
CB: Sure.
PW: So that’s one of my examples.
CB: And then later in her life, of course, for the past 20 years or so she became involved in Eastern mysticism and Kabbalah.
PW: Yes, that’s correct. That’s correct. Oh. I also wanted to mention that now that we have a second Saturn return coming up, it’ll be interesting to see what this means for her at this point. I know there are some astrologers including Nick Dagan Best who have made some interesting speculations about what they think. But I tend to think that this might be somewhat controversial, but a lot of people have commented that they feel like Madonna hasn’t really grown up even since having turned 30, that she hasn’t aged gracefully, that she hasn’t decided to kind of settle down. And I wonder if this Saturn return in Sagittarius for her will be about her finding her particular way of doing that of–
CB: Sure.
PW: –of kind of bowing out with grace.
CB: Yeah, that would make sense. We would expect having a fourth house day chart Saturn in Sagittarius for her to have returned to some of these questions about like her beliefs and her religious views, things about her home and her living situation but also perhaps the–
PW: Also, her foundations. Her inner life, her private life. I’ve also found these to be significant elements of the fourth house for–
CB: Definitely.
PW: –different individuals.
CB: And maybe some lingering things just in terms of her parents or her memories in relation to her parents–
PW: Absolutely.
CB: –or home and family. And then of course Saturn’s ruling the fifth house of children and the sixth house of health. So those are potential things that could be drawn in to draw out some of those Saturn return themes as well.
PW: Absolutely. So my next chart example is Stephen Fry. He’s an English actor, comedian, and occasional bomb thrower in interviews. He was born on August 24th 1957 in Hampstead, England. And unfortunately we do not have a birth time for Mr Fry, but he was born with Saturn at Saturn-Sagittarius. And what’s kind of interesting is that in 1986 when he experienced his first Saturn return, that was when he first got involved with Hugh Laurie. Now a lot of American audiences only know Hugh Laurie from the TV show House, but long before that he was very well known in the UK as a great comedic actor. And what is kind of funny to me about this is that we are now coming up to the Saturn return of this initial comedic union. And this is also the time when Stephen Fry was involved in the shooting of Blackadder, the famous television show from England. There’s actually been talk or rather there’s actually been more or less concrete plans made for a second Blackadder series or a second set of Blackadder series to come out over the course of 2016 and 2017. So it appears this Saturn return for him will likely reunite him with Hugh Laurie and reunite him with the cast of this comedy television show 30 years later.
CB: So returning back to or revisiting sort of previous parts of the–
PW: Yeah. Yeah. Revisiting a, yeah, particular set of characters and actors he’s worked with.
CB: And in terms of his personality, what makes him a good Saturn and Sagittarius type person?
PW: Well, he’s very known. He’s known to be very vocal, very–What am I trying to say? Well, for example, he’s attracted a lot of controversy in some of his interviews where he’s articulated his atheism and in very strong terms calling–In an interview he calls God an evil, capricious, monstrous maniac for all of the evils that exist in the world. And for some people this is an understandable position, and then for other people obviously they’re gonna have a very strong reaction to that. And I think that Saturn in Sagittarius you tend to see people who have a crisis of faith in different ways. With Tony Abbott and Madonna, it was in terms of their Catholicism. But with Stephen Fry, it’s in terms of his rejection of religious labels and his rejection of the idea of God and his embrace of atheism.
CB: Sure, and this is a theme I think we’ll return back to in a little bit once we get to some of your other chart examples.
PW: Absolutely.
CB: Right.
PW: So, that’s my first batch.
CB: All right.
PW: Onto you, Lisa.
CB: So, Leisa, in terms of the types of chart examples that you’ve been finding with Saturn returns you’ve also found kind of a spread where there’s a sort of broad archetype. But there’s a few different categories of sort of typical manifestations of Saturn in Sagittarius. What’s one of your favorite Saturn in Sagittarius chart examples that you think is really evocative in terms of that placement?
LS: Well, my current favorite Saturn in Sagittarius placement is in the chart of a man named David Good. He is just coming up on his first Saturn return right now, but he’s already had quite an interesting story that is very evocative of Saturn in Sagittarius placement. And this is an estimated birth date based on news reports. There’s an autobiography coming out soon, and I’m hoping to get an exact date. So what I’ve worked out so far is November 2nd 1986 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But it was definitely November of ’86. So, he is the son of Kenneth Good who was an American anthropologist who went to the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela which is a very remote jungle tribe that rarely sees outsiders in order to study them academically. And he was supposed to stay for a matter of months, and he ended up staying for 12 years. So this is Kenneth Good the anthropologist. So he ended up marrying a woman from the tribe and taking her back to the United States. They would sort of go back and forth, and David Good was born very soon after her first time in the United States. Basically to sort of make a long story short, the mother ended up not adjusting to life in the US very well. And so she left when David was around four or five and went back to live with her tribe, and David had a real hard time with this as he was growing up. He had the stigma around his mother being sort of alien really and that she had left of course. But there were pictures of her that were naked, eating tarantulas type thing in the museum where he went to it for a class trip for instance. So, this kind of thing.
So he got to a Saturn opposition, and he was kind of drinking and trying to block it out and crying about his mom not being there. And eventually he got around to his waning Saturn square around the time when he was 20 21. And he decided that he wanted to find his mom, and he wanted to learn about this thing that he had been trying to kind of block out ever since she had left. And so he read his dad’s book about going there. He watched the documentaries that his family had been in, and he ended up saving up money for three years and finally going to travel there to meet her. And so ever since he really immersed himself in the culture there and ever since the last several years, he’s been trying to build up an organization to bridge the cultures, to bridge Western society with the indigenous cultures of both his mom’s tribe as well as a different indigenous tribe in Costa Rica. So, this is currently my favorite example because he hasn’t even hit his first Saturn return. And it’s just such a lovely story already about the Saturn part, the difficulty in what is foreign, the Sagittarius part or the difficulty and difference with the difficulty in people from vast geographical distances and so forth.
CB: Okay, brilliant. And when was it that he got back? You said it was at the Saturn square that he became interested in his mom’s culture and started exploring that again?
LS: Yes. Uh-huh.
CB: Okay.
LS: So, from about age 20 to 22.
CB: I would be almost shocked if that wasn’t like a Saturn in the fourth house or somehow connected to the fourth house like maybe ruling the fourth house or something like that example.
LS: Yeah, exactly.
CB: Just because of the close themes involving his mom and his family and like his roots and everything else.
LS: Yeah. I’ve been expecting that, too. I don’t know if I’ll ever get a birth time. But, yes, that seems really likely. And the other thing I didn’t say was actually two weeks before Saturn went into Sagittarius recently for the first time, his foundation was accepted as a nonprofit status through the IRS. And his autobiography is going to come out November 3rd of this year which I think is probably around his solar return but also will be just about a degree away from the exact first Saturn return of the Saturn degree.
CB: Okay. Brilliant.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that’s a good example also in terms of a common theme that especially comes up with people with day charts but sometimes with people with night charts as well where Saturn is like a sore spot or like a weakness or like area of pain in the person’s life. But then eventually especially through successive Saturn transits and especially the hard angles of the opposition and the square and the return, it eventually becomes like a source of strength and a source of focus and like wisdom in the person’s life because they’ve struggled with it and they’ve suffered with it sometimes. But eventually they gain a sense of maturity surrounding it and learn how to embrace it in some way.
LS: Exactly. And this is such a good example of that.
CB: Yeah, that’s a perfect example–
PW: Awesome.
CB: –of that theme. Okay, so that’s your first chart example. What’s your next most evocative Saturn in Sagittarius chart example?
LS: Well, I don’t know if it’s my next most evocative. But I’ve tried to kind of intersperse different types of Saturn in Sagittarius manifestations, so my next one is Caroline Kennedy. She was born November 27th 1957 at 8:15 a.m. in New York City New York. And I wanted to intersperse her here because she’s an example of someone who’s coming up on her second Saturn return now, so we’ve already seen what she’s done with the previous cycle. And Caroline Kennedy, let’s see. She has Saturn along with the Sun and Mercury in Sagittarius in the first house. The Sun rules the ninth house in her chart, and Mercury rules the seventh and the 10th. So it’s basically bringing in sort of extra ninth house topics as well as her career and partnership topics. And so at her Saturn return after being an undergrad and sort of exploring film and art and things that sound like a totally different arena, she decided to go to law school at her Saturn return. And by the end of her Saturn return she had graduated from law school. I was trying to think about how to put into words like why law? And I think it’s sort of an extension of religion and philosophy in just a different sense. It’s like trying to put structures around higher principles.
PW: Justice. Mhm.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, justice. But just structuring principles, structuring higher principles of how we ought to live and how society ought to be. So, anyway, she graduated from law school by the end of her Saturn return. With Mercury in there ruling the seventh, she got married at her Saturn return. Sort of amusingly to me anyway the news reports at the time were describing her fiancé in such Sagittarian ways, and he had written a couple books that were sort of like philosophy. Not academic philosophy but kind of like I don’t know. Like popular philosophy, sort of supposed to be humorous, that he was sort of like bridging all these different fields and he didn’t stick to one field. Anyway, so that was kind of funny to me when I found that. So that was the beginning. That was her first Saturn return. So–
CB: That was during the 1980s?
LS: Mhm. Yeah. So by 1988 she had graduated from law school. Since then, she’s written a couple books that were on let’s say the Bill of Rights and the right to privacy. So she’s with ninth house not just being in law but also publishing. She’s also edited a few books. Saturn rules her second and third house in her chart, so you kind of see maybe some of the book things with a third house as well. Interestingly, after that she spent a little while doing educational fundraising for the New York public schools. And I thought that was really interesting with the ruler of the second house in Sagittarius.
CB: Well, also the ruler of the third–
LS: Yeah. Yeah, both.
CB: –just in terms of lower education.
LS: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there were a lot of interlocking and overlapping themes here because she has several planets there. So she did that. She’s also now the US diplomat in Japan. So, international work. And it’ll be interesting to see. She sort of had a very brief in 2008 like an almost start but then pulled back in terms of running for a congressional seat. So it’d be interesting to see if anything like that comes up again.
PW: That would have been the square in 2008, right?
CB: Right.
LS: Mhm. Yeah. Mhm, through her 10th.
CB: So that was Saturn through Virgo?
LS: Yeah, through her 10th house. So, yeah. So, anyway, she’s about to get her second Saturn return. And actually it’s stationed very close to her son already, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes up. But that was a good example of someone who’s already gone through the whole time period between their first and second Saturn returns.
CB: Okay. So, yeah, that will be really interesting to see what happens when that comes up again just in terms of already seeing some inklings of it in terms of that Saturn square and like the question of whether she would get more into politics at that point.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: All right. And then what is your third example or sort of initial set of chart examples?
LS: My third example for now is Amanda Knox. She was born July 9th 1987 at 2:47 a.m. in Seattle, Washington. And so she has Saturn in a night chart in the seventh house and then ruling the eighth and the ninth houses. So this is another person who like David Good hasn’t had her first Saturn return yet, but has already had really interesting Saturn in Sagittarius themes come up. For anyone who doesn’t know, she was studying in Italy as a foreign exchange student in 2007. So Saturn was going through her fourth house at the time, and her roommate was tragically murdered. Very soon after, she and her then boyfriend were accused of the murder. And she went through an incredibly lengthy legal trial, actually repetitive legal trials in Italy for this. And so she’s a really interesting example to me of Saturn in Sagittarius in a night chart and I’ll suppose kind of doubling up ruling the ninth and the eighth in terms of trouble in foreign lands. So more of the difficult Saturnian things involving foreign cultures. It was particularly interesting to me that there was so much talk in the media during all of those trials about the fairness of the Italian legal system compared to the US because they could be retried for instance there where they could not have been here. And so that’s really interesting cuz it’s like multiple Saturn in Sagittarius themes, not only trouble in another culture but specifically the legal system of another culture.
CB: Sure, so we get the themes in this really weird way of Saturn in Sagittarius and her focus on foreign cultures and travel to a foreign place which is something that came up as a core theme when I was talking to Austin and Kelly. And we get Saturn ruling the ninth house which brings in the foreign country thing and foreigners even more.
LS: Mhm.
CB: We get Saturn ruling the eighth house of death. So topics surrounding mortality coming up, and then we get Saturn placed in the seventh house of relationships in a night chart. So the more challenging or negative significations come out. And so you end up with a really literal manifestation of those three placements where her and her boyfriend are charged with the murder of her roommate in a foreign country–
LS: Right.
CB: –and then gets tied up subsequently in the legal system as a result of that and this huge international murder trial.
LS: Yeah, exactly that which went on for what? Seven and a half years, something like that. And so I’m interested. So, obviously, she’s a really great example of some of those themes already even though she hasn’t had her first Saturn return. And I’m curious now to see what will happen, therefore, during her actual Saturn return when presumably these themes are gonna come up again. Will she be doing something with foreign cultures again? I can see being completely scared off for life after all of that, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
CB: Sure, sort of revisiting some of those themes at least in terms of where she wants to move forward with them in her life. And if she’s still drawn to like let’s say some of the interest in like foreign cultures and things like that, how she’ll incorporate that into her life or will it be through some other route that came up like the legal route or something like that.
LS: Right, exactly.
CB: All right. Well, I think that was a good initial set of chart examples that sort of brought up this whole range of different significations when it comes to Sagittarius and Saturn in Sagittarius in particular including religious matters, belief, politics, foreign lands, interaction with foreigners, travel to foreign places, and so on and so forth. So, now I think it would be good to explore another aspect of that which I think you really focused on as a major piece in your article Patrick where you got into some of the scientific and sort of exploratory things associated with Saturn in Sagittarius. So what was one of the primary things that stood out to you about that?
PW: Pardon me. Well, my next few examples will be kind of a mixture of individuals as well as some historical developments that I think really show Saturn in Sagittarius in stark relief especially in a more modern age. So my first example–Oh, and I should probably add these people will probably not appreciate me using them as examples on an astrology podcast.
[Leisa laughs]
PW: So Neil deGrasse Tyson is society’s most preeminent astrophysicist and popularizer of science. And I like him a lot. He doesn’t think much of astrology, but that’s okay. I could never do the math that he can do with astronomy. But, anyway, so he was born on October 5th 1958 in Manhattan, New York City. And we unfortunately do not have a birth time for him yet. But he was born with Saturn in Sagittarius, I believe, at 20 degrees of Sagittarius. And in 1988 or rather very close to a Saturn return–Let me see. Yes, in 1987 he got his first job as an astronomy professor. So that was the first time that he was able to become a professor or popularizer of science in his own sense. He was the first time he was getting up in front of people and being an astronomy professor. So now we get around to the Saturn return, and he’s already become very popular in this time. But now he’s at a point where he is gonna have his own talk show StarTalk. And he is now in this position to be a professor of astronomy on a far larger scope than he was back in the ’80s when he was just a little known professor at a university, I believe at Columbia.
And what’s particularly interesting about Neil deGrasse Tyson is that he believes that you can overcome ignorance through education, that you can beat creationists by illuminating them to the truth of science, scientific findings. And I think that that is going to be tested for him because almost just like one day off to the ingress earlier this year or actually late last year–One day off to Saturn ingress and Sagittarius is right around Christmas. And it’s really interesting because he got into trouble on Twitter when he started making all these jokes about Christmas. He had a very sarcastic tweet. I wish I had it up right now, but one is maybe thinking he’s wishing a happy birthday to Jesus Christ. But instead, he’s actually wishing a happy birthday to Isaac Newton who was born on Christmas. So there are a lot of religious people who really got their panties in a bunch over this. Can I say panties on this site? All right.
CB: We might have to bleep it out afterwards. But–
[Patrick and Leisa laugh]
PW: All right. Yeah, so they got really bent out of shape about his gentle prodding of a religious figure. But I think he is going to find out as he becomes more popular, and we’ve already seen it to some extent with his hosting of the show Cosmos that his simple desire to try to bring science to a more popular and mainstream kind of position will be met by resistance from the very people who need to hear it most. He may find his belief in the power of science, and the belief in the power of education will be tested as he becomes ever more popular.
CB: Sure, and we watched the Cosmos series. They were showing it in a local theater. What was it, like last year?
LS: Mhm.
CB: And we got to attend the showings, I guess. It was premiering, and it was amazing–
PW: Oh yeah, it was so cool.
CB: –seeing him take that over from Sagan–
PW: Mhm.
CB: –from Carl Sagan and sort of continue that legacy. You really get the sort of exploratory and like the fascination with and the love for exploration comes through really clearly in his advocacy of science–
LS: Mhm.
PW: Absolutely.
CB: –as sort of a major theme in his life at least in terms of his public persona and everything that I know about him.
PW: Yeah. No, absolutely. It definitely comes through. He’s really amazing to watch. I like him a lot, if he ever hears this.
[Patrick and Leisa laugh]
PW: So to tie into that, what’s kind of interesting about Neil deGrasse Tyson is he was born like in the same week that NASA officially began operations. And so what’s interesting about that is that if NASA was a person, it would be Neil deGrasse Tyson. [laughs]
CB: Right.
PW: The transits that produced NASA were the same ones that produced this amazing astrophysicist. And so I think that’s very interesting especially because the goal of NASA obviously is to endeavor to–It’s a very Saturn in Sagittarius type of organization. It’s to progress technology to unfathomable unbelievable heights to be able to travel to where no one’s gone before.
CB: Sure. True.
PW: And that’s really the essence of Sagittarius is moving from point A to point B. It’s a mutable sign. It’s moving from one season to another. It’s moving from one place to another. So, this is kind of interesting because NASA obviously at its Saturn return in the ’80s 1986, we have the Challenger disaster. And that put all space flights on hold for two years while they did a thorough review of the whole organization and of how spaceflight could be made safe. And that’s another aspect of Saturn in Sagittarius which is fear of technology, fear of progress, fear of going kind of this extra mile and going into the ether with dreams and wishes of traveling distant places. It really brought those kinds of aspirations and hopes and ideals and dreams to Earth literally. And as we go into this next Saturn in Sagittarius period, I believe that we will see again more concerted efforts to travel to where we haven’t been able to before. But we might also experience extreme setbacks that make us doubt whether we should or could travel to these great and distant places.
And this is also accompanied– Obviously, NASA was spurred by the launch of Sputnik which caused this panic especially in the United States, a fear of progress, a fear that we weren’t gonna be competitive. And so they really ramped up education standards and really focused on math and science. So the whole country as a whole during the late 1950s got really serious about science and education which is these realms of thought, realms of knowledge is very evocative of Saturn in Sagittarius or the sign Sagittarius and Saturn representing the concerted effort to get really serious about it. And at the Saturn return of Sputnik–So when Saturn returned to nine degrees of Sagittarius again, the Russians launched their first space station Mir. And so I think that if what we’ve seen continues, that with this current Saturn-Sagittarius period we will see some very concerted effort by NASA or another setback in space exploration. Meanwhile, Russia apparently seems to be doing fairly well with it. [laughs] So, maybe Russia will have another kind of milestone in their efforts to explore space and–
CB: Sure.
PW: –to do that. And then another aspect to all of this is there’s a company called SpaceX which is set up by Elon Musk who was born during Saturn in Gemini, and he started his company during Saturn in Gemini over the course of the Columbia disaster in 2003 which is the Saturn opposition of NASA. So I think that SpaceX might also kind of take the place of NASA in some respects that SpaceX may supersede NASA’s ambitions and NASA’s goals. And I think that might be kind of a hard thing for advocates of public funding for space exploration to accept that a private company might be able to do it better than the taxpayer-funded one. So I foresee some milestone accomplished by SpaceX which perhaps revolutionizes spaceflight in the same way that Charles Lindbergh during the 1927 to ’28 Saturn in Sagittarius period revolutionized commercial air flight when he completed his transatlantic flight. And that was the last time Saturn was in Sagittarius trying Uranus in Aries, and we’re coming up to that again. So I think that there’ll be something that SpaceX does probably which will really kick off commercial spaceflight in a way that we haven’t seen before.
CB: That’s brilliant. That makes a lot of sense just in terms of being a progression, and the progression that we’ve seen that you talked about in terms of the launch of Sputnik and the creation of NASA during one Saturn in Sagittarius period and then a challenge to that and some issues that arose with the Challenger disaster and other things during that time period. And now here we are on kind of the verge of commercial spaceflight being a thing with one of the first companies that’s really pushing for that and starting to become big and starting to become successful as we get into Saturn in Sagittarius yet again.
PW: Yeah, absolutely. It’s very exciting. So I don’t wanna take up too much time here. My next chart example is James Randi who would probably hate being mentioned here, but he was born on August 7th 1928 in Toronto, Canada with a reported but probably suspicious 1:20 a.m. So he was born while Saturn was at 12 degrees of Sagittarius. And he’s widely considered to be the founder of the modern skeptical movement, so he really exemplifies this Saturn in Sagittarius trope of skepticism in various areas of knowledge or belief. And so he’s best known for investigating and debunking paranormal claims and alleged pseudosciences. And he shares that position with many other kinds of similar kinds of critics of metaphysical subjects including Ray Hyman, Neil deGrasse Tyson who I already mentioned, Bill Maher, and Stephen Fry who I also mentioned. And during the last Saturn return in Sagittarius he actually perpetrated a hoax of his own. He pretended that he had found a psychic and gotten all of these news organizations to believe that he’d found a psychic, and he was actually feeding the psychic answers to all these different questions that people were fielding him. And he did it as a way to show the media that they needed to be more skeptical. So it was kind of interesting that the grand skeptic ended up kind of perpetrating his own hoax at a Saturn return in Sagittarius.
CB: And then even though we’re not sure about the birth time because he’s reported to potentially give out false birth times, we can’t rely on any reported ones that one of the points that you had made is that he has Saturn according to the main report of birth time in the seventh house and that somehow became relevant in that event, right?
PW: Well, yes, cuz the seventh house represents partnerships. And the person that he had gotten to pretend to be a psychic was this guy that he met and is now his current husband. So he had met his partner in this Saturn in Sagittarius period and is now married to him. And we’re coming up to this next Saturn in Sagittarius period. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but imagine that James Randi apparently seems to still be alive and kicking. And I’m sure he’ll have something fun for us before he goes.
CB: Sure. He recently had a documentary made about him that came out I think within the past year.
PW: Mhm.
CB: So that was a big turning point, I think. Yeah, well, there’s a few things that we could say. But, yeah, that’s a really great example just in terms of the natal placement and the idea of Saturn and Saturn being critical of or like rejecting things and then what happens when you import that into Sagittarius which sometimes has to do with ideas having to do with like belief or faith or one’s personal philosophy or religion or what have you. And one of the results of that in some instances is the archetype of the skeptic of the person who says, “Let’s not take anything for granted. Let’s question everything.” And in fact, maybe some people that profess to be able to do things maybe they’re not just wrong but maybe they’re trying to fool you. And so one of his big things was that he was a magician and a stage magician, and he sort of parlayed that into a career as a skeptic by showing how certain people could pretend to or give the appearance of doing certain things. But he would demonstrate how they were faking it or how they were frauds basically.
PW: Yeah. This is a slight offshoot, but like we’ve been talking about the 20th century mainly in my article. On my blog I went back aways to try to find examples through history, and this theme has borne out over multiple instances of extreme religiosity and sort of the issues that can cause such as the trial of Galileo, the Salem witch trials, Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses to the door starting the Protestant Reformation. And I found a really interesting example actually from 1370 which was one of the last times that Saturn was in Sagittarius squaring Neptune in Pisces. And there was a famed French thinker of the time Nicole Oresme, and he published a book called De causis mirabilium or the causes of marvels. And in this book he outlined a skeptical argument against a host of marvels that magical, religious, and superstitious beliefs and experiences on what they appear to be. He said it was a result of delusion and misperception and faulty reasoning, but it was remarkable because this is in the middle of the medieval era when this is not a time when people really associate with skeptical figures. But even in 1370 while Saturn was in Sagittarius, you could find this kind of theme coming up even hundreds of years ago.
CB: That’s brilliant. So, yeah, that’s a great sort of cross section of Saturn in Sagittarius in terms of the crossovers between. And then you get some really interesting crossovers between those two groups in the past, especially the past few decades between the sort of scientific movement and the humanist movement, and then you get like the skeptical movement with figures like James Randi. And then you get this crossover between the two where you have like the skeptical group and the humanists and the scientists, and then you also have the atheist groups–
PW: Mhm.
CB: –and the sort of interaction between those three different things. It’ll be interesting to see over the next few years that coming more into focus and both some challenges surrounding those things or possible issues or criticisms coming up but also some development and some evolution of those areas.
PW: Absolutely.
CB: All right. Well, that’s a good second batch of charts, I think. So, Leisa, in terms of your second batch of charts, who is at the top of your list to give us a different sort of cross section of Saturn in Sagittarius?
LS: Yeah. The next one I had was Amy Goodman, and her birth date was April 13th 1957 in Washington, D.C. We don’t have a time on her so just the date. And so Amy Goodman is the longtime host of Democracy Now! So it’s kind of an independent global news broadcast, and they pride themselves in not taking any corporate funding so they can be truly unbiased and independent. But it’s truly international journalism. So you get the broadcasting piece, and you also get the international piece both Saturn and Sagittarius kind of themes like spreading things far with the broadcasting and just things regarding different countries and cultures in general. She had her Saturn return, and began her broadcasting career. She was a host for 10 years before she–It sounds like before she started to do her own sort of hardcore journalism, and she started the Democracy Now! show about 10 years into her career. But at her Saturn return was her first broadcasting job. She had previously gotten an undergraduate degree in anthropology which sounds kind of unrelated at least to the broadcasting piece but definitely not to the sort of studying other cultures piece. So you bring in those two themes with her career that she’s developed over the last 30 years since her first Saturn return.
She’s also written and published several books, and one of them is interestingly titled The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope. And she does a lot of this kind of thing where there is a particular focus in her reporting on the sort of people–Not just occupations per se, but people sort of in difficult situations that are being overlooked in different countries. And I thought there was a particularly interesting focus in this book because hope within constraints seems like a very Saturn in Sagittarius theme in terms of those things being pushed down and what can you still bring up out of that constraint. So, yeah, I think she’s a really interesting example of a few of those Saturn in Sagittarius themes.
CB: Brilliant. That’s a good keyword hope despite constraints or within the context of constraints.
LS: Mhm. And then my next one is Elizabeth Smart. Her birth data is November 3rd 1987. It was Salt Lake City, Utah. The reported time was 1:03 p.m. But I’m not sure of that. It was an email that her aunt supposedly said this time from memory, so I’m not gonna pin too much on the time. But, anyway, that’s what was reported. And so some people may remember she was kidnapped as a 14-year-old by a couple kind of sort of crazy/religious fanatics. And it was actually within a degree of her exact Saturn opposition when she was 14 that she was kidnapped. She was raised in a religious Mormon household. Okay, so obviously we’re just gonna have the pure Saturnian theme here of like constraint and being taken away. And she had a lot of bad things happen while she was kidnapped, but she said that later on that it was her religious faith that got her through and part also thinking about her family and so forth. But she said that she remembered that her mom said she always would love her. And then she said that God would always love her and that she held onto that while she was in captivity to get through it.
And so it’s another sort of hope within constraint I think but also specifically the religious theme, sort of her religious beliefs being tested. Because you could see that happening regardless of who kidnapped her just from the circumstances themselves. But the fact that she was actually kidnapped by people who were sort of doing this twisted religious thing and justifying their actions based on that really adds another layer to that sort of testing one’s religious faith. I could easily see someone else maybe responding by sort of throwing it all out the window and saying, “If people can do this and justify it through religion, then what?” But that’s not how she went. So she actually went on to do the traditional Mormon missionary service as a young adult, and then just recently earlier this year she was part of a video this interfaith group put online. And she actually basically spoke to that experience that she had in captivity and how her religious faith got her through. And so I’m curious because of all of that development, what will happen at her Saturn return when the Saturn in Sag is actually intensified? So those were a few of those themes that I saw through her story, hope within constraint again and religious faith being tested.
CB: It’s also interesting that she ended up founding an organization. And one of her focuses over the past few years seems like, according to her Wikipedia entry, has been fighting human trafficking which is like a really interesting manifestation symbolically of Saturn in Sagittarius and the idea of like travel which is one of the themes that came up before and then we talked about with Austin and Kelly a lot about Saturn’s idea of constraints or bounds or captivity and literally the idea of like moving captive people across either state or international lines.
LS: Yeah, that is true. That is really interesting. I had sort of focused on her several sort of strong Scorpio placements in terms of some of that work, but you’re right. It does sort of encompass both of those.
CB: Sure. Okay, and she was actually abducted when she was 14 at her Saturn opposition?
LS: Yes. Mhm.
CB: Okay, so we see that placement actually being activated. All right. So who is your next example?
LS: My next one and kind of a different–But, yeah, kind of a different theme is Judith Butler. Her birth date is February 24th 1986. Oh, that’s not right. Hold on. Sorry, I have the year wrong in here. Do you have the year on yours?
CB: February 24th 1956.
LS: Thank you. [laughs] [unintelligible 00:50:32.16] So, February 24th 1956 8:30 a.m. in Cleveland, Ohio. So Judith Butler is a pretty prominent philosopher, gender theorist, queer theorist. She’s one of those academics that is not only very prolific academically but also has kind of a popular following as well due to her cultural studies tie-ins. She started her academic career at her first Saturn return. She had gotten her PhD, and so she first started her academic teaching as well as published her first book at her first Saturn return. And she’s been very prolific in terms of publishing. She has pages of articles and books she’s written and books she’s edited and so forth. And so her chart is really interesting in terms of a lot of doubling up of those themes because she has Saturn in Sagittarius along with Mars in Sagittarius in both in the ninth house with that Mars in Sagittarius ruling the ascendant. So she’s got a lot of doubling up there.
And let’s see. What else? She actually has several planets in Leo in the fifth house as well which is just kind of funny for anyone who knows her theories. Basically, she’s done a ton of work in terms of gender performance and comparing the performativity of gender to the theater. And so it’s just kind of perfectly literal in terms of the placements in her chart. So that amused me. But, anyway, she also had an interesting Saturn opposition story about how she was asked how she got into philosophy. And she was 14 and was kind of getting in trouble at her Hebrew school, and she came from a Jewish family. And so as punishment she was taken out of the class and told by the rabbi that she would be made to do a private tutorial with him and asked, “So what do you wanna study?” And that was supposed to be the punishment, but she came out with these several really sort of eloquent advanced philosophical questions. And she said she had enjoyed the tutorial immensely, and everything went from there. So, I just love seeing those themes develop through the Saturn cycle. So I’m curious what she will do at her second Saturn return that’s just coming up right now. I sort of hope she doesn’t retire, but certainly a lot of people do that sort of letting go of what they’ve been doing at the previous cycle at their second Saturn return.
CB: That’s brilliant. So she’s a Saturn in the ninth house person, and she’s like a lifelong academic that focuses on, with the ruler of the ninth in the fifth house in Leo and focuses on gender and issues related to sexuality.
LS: Yes, and a lot of philosophy aside from that as well. So you really see this sort of super focus in terms of philosophy, structures of meanings, structures of thought and so forth with the Saturn in the Sagittarius.
CB: Sure, and she has Aries rising and the ruler of the ascendant is Mars which is actually placed in Sagittarius in the ninth house. So she also has the ruler of the ascendant there.
LS: Right.
PW: Wow.
CB: Brilliant. Okay. And all right, so that’s a good set of chart examples. So other than that, since we’re getting towards the end of this show which we’ve reached our hour, I just wanted to mention there’s a few especially younger people that have Saturn in Sagittarius that we’re looking forward to seeing what their Saturn returns are gonna be about. One that I’m interested in is Shia LaBeouf has Saturn in Sagittarius. So his Saturn return is beginning right now. And he’s really interesting because he’s been kind of like a–I don’t know if this is too strong but almost became kind of like a reviled character for a while. He was getting a lot of movies, and he seemed like he was a very big up and coming star after their first Transformer films. And then he ended up in like the Indiana Jones movie and other big roles, but then there was this brief period where it seemed like he started having some problems in terms of his career. Is that your perception, Patrick?
PW: Well, I would think most people would probably agree with that. Yeah, he seemingly went off the deep end. I haven’t looked too much at Shia LaBeouf’s chart, but I do know that the Saturn opposition would have occurred around the year 2001. So that would have been like after the first season of Even Stevens.
CB: Okay.
PW: That was like his big breakthrough.
CB: Mhm.
PW: And then in 2008 or 2009, I believe, that would have been the square. So, that would have been Crystal Skull. Though I think that would have been like the Transformers sequels. I feel like that was kind of when he seemed to kind of go off the deep end.
CB: Right.
PW: It was often the Transformers movies. I think he almost kind of got too big, and then he got kind of disillusioned with being like a big Hollywood star and just decided to kind of screw with that and the erratic Twitter postings and the sort of strange performance arts exhibits he was doing. It seems like I would guess that he probably centered around these phases of Saturn. So, yeah, it will be interesting to see what he comes up with at the Saturn return. I wonder if it would be like a return to mainstream popularity or what? But–
CB: Well, that’s the thing. And it’s been really interesting. It’s like over the past few years or so he’s been doing that.
PW: Right.
CB: It’s like he almost has seen a return to more mainstream popularity. For example, he was in that–Was it Sia video? Yeah, that was really popular and that was kind of controversial. But he himself was otherwise well received. She–
PW: Oh, and that amazing choir piece about Shia LaBeouf–
CB: Right.
PW: –killing you. [laughs]
CB: Right. And then more recently the meme that was happening this year–
PW: Do it. Yeah.
CB: –the just do it meme. And so he’s been actually coming back in a really positive way, and it’s interesting to see him doing that in the ramp up to his Saturn return. So we actually have a time chart for him. He’s June 11th 1986 at 12:14 a.m. in Los Angeles, California. And he actually, if the time’s correct, has 29 degrees of Aquarius rising so that Saturn is actually ruling the ascendant traditionally and it’s placed in Sagittarius in the 11th hole sign house but conjunct the midheaven. So, anyways, he’s one of the ones–I didn’t wanna go hugely into his chart, but he’s somebody I’m very interested to see how his Saturn return turns out. Also, additionally because he has a night chart. So that’s one of the reasons I think that some of the things like the square that you were talking about earlier during some of the Transformers sequels and Indiana Jones and stuff may have been a little bit more challenging for him rather than easy.
PW: Mhm.
CB: So he’s somebody I’m looking forward to. Another person I’m looking forward to seeing is Pope Benedict XVI who is Ratzinger the guy that stepped down prior to the previous Pope. He has Saturn in Sagittarius in the 10th house, I believe, in a night chart. So I’m very interested to see what happens with that and if we see any sort of return back to him being in the public spotlight for some reason.
PW: Well, I would like to point out just on that is the fact that Ratzinger’s midheaven is at 25 degrees of Sagittarius–
CB: Mhm.
PW: –which is the same degree as Pope Francis’s Sun. So, Pope Francis’s Sun is at 25 degrees of Sagittarius. So when Saturn reaches 25 degrees of Sagittarius, it will be making a conjunction to Pope Francis’s Sun and Ratzinger’s midheaven at the same time.
LS: Hmm.
CB: Okay. Interesting.
PW: So, yeah. I’ve been keeping my eye on that too especially since Pope Francis has, I believe, the Saturn-Neptune opposition. So kind of expecting him to sync up with the Saturn-Neptune square.
CB: Sure. Yeah. And I’m kind of slightly nervous about this cuz Ratzinger, he has a night chart. So this is potentially gonna be a more challenging Saturn return, so we may see return of him back into focus for some reason–
PW: Right.
CB: –not necessarily in a good way.
PW: And for Pope Francis as well, Pope Francis has a nocturnal chart. So the Sun is contrary to sect. I’d also like to point out that Pope Leo X back in 1517, we actually have a timed birth chart for him if you can believe it. He was born on December 11th 1475 in Florence, Italy at 12:58 p.m. apparently with a AA rating. And he was born with the Sun in Sagittarius. And when Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation by nailing the 95 theses to the door, he had transiting Saturn conjunct his natal Sun. So that’s an example of a previous Pope with the Sun in Sagittarius having Saturn transit to his Sun in Sagittarius.
LS: Hmm.
CB: Interesting.
PW: And there was a rebellion brewing against the church. So it is–
CB: Yeah.
PW: –interesting to see, yeah, for this upcoming alignment that Pope Francis will be having the same transit as a previous pope with the Sun in the same sign and affecting Ratzinger in some way.
CB: Sure. So what other Saturn return in Sagittarius Saturn returns are you guys looking forward to?
LS: I’m really interested in Ronan Farrow’s because he’s another one. He’s the son of Mia the actress Mia Farrow and potentially the filmmaker Woody Allen. She said a couple years back that he might not be actually the biological son of Woody Allen. But, yeah, he’s done so much internationally already. And he’s a lawyer already, and he’s so accomplished before even turning 30 that I’m just really curious to see what will happen with him.
PW: Hmm.
CB: So, yeah, just reading through his Wikipedia page. And he’s just focused a lot on international issues.
LS: Mhm.
CB: It says in 2011 he was appointed Hillary Clinton’s special advisor on global health, youth issues when she was Secretary of State.
PW: Was that 2009?
CB: 2011.
PW: 2011.
LS: Yeah, he’s just done so much with international human rights. He’s been a journalist. Yeah, and a lawyer and everything.
PW: All-round Sag kind of guy.
LS: Yeah. Well, he actually has five planets in Sag.
PW: All right.
LS: Besides Saturn he has Sun and Moon and Mercury and Uranus, and I’m actually curious in terms of that paternity thing. Mercury does rule his IC. It doesn’t rule his fourth hole sign, but Venus rules his fourth hole sign which is in Capricorn. So I feel like something else is gonna develop with that within the next few years. And interestingly with those tie-ins as well, Woody Allen has his Sun in Sagittarius.
PW: Ah, Sag. Yeah, that’s right.
LS: So during Ronan’s Saturn return, he’ll be getting that Saturn to actually be like Sun-Mercury-Jupiter. So, yeah, something else is gonna be there.
PW: The paternity will be revealed.
LS: Yeah, maybe. [laughs]
CB: Sure. And it looks like Shia LaBeouf has late Aquarius rising with Saturn in Sagittarius conjunct the MC and then the 11th hole sign house. So, certainly, people that have Saturn ruling the ascendant going through the Saturn return and issues about selfhood and like who am I and things like that can certainly come up. Okay, any other Saturn returns we’re looking forward to?
PW: Well, there’s also Lady Gaga who was born March 28th 1986. The rating on the time is rated DD, but apparently there’s a reported birth time at 9:53 a.m. Sorry. Yes, a.m. And she was born with Saturn at nine Sagittarius. And she also has, looks like Uranus in there as well. It’s funny because a lot of people have compared her to Madonna. And I wonder if she’ll have some sort of similar trajectory as far as having a more mature sound. I think she first got popular in I think it was 2008. I think it was around 2008 that the Just Dance song first came out, so that was like the Saturn square. So, I guess if she comes up to a Saturn return, she will probably become somehow more adult I would imagine in her presentation, in her music. Maybe it won’t just be kind of dance themes. Maybe it will be something deeper, something more mature. This is the only thing I really got for Miss Gaga.
CB: Well, and it’s interesting cuz for Madonna some of the Saturn in Sagittarius stuff was religious themes–
PW: Mhm.
CB: –and themes surrounding religion coming up. But–
PW: And she’s Catholic as well.
CB: Okay, but for Lady Gaga at least so far it’s been more like social justice issues has become part of her theme in her music career in addition to just writing pop songs. Like she became–
PW: That’s true.
CB: –sort of the central figure surrounding the gay rights movement. Not central figure but kind of like–
PW: Yeah, like a prominent voice. Yeah.
CB: Right. So perhaps it will be something connected with that. Yeah. All right. And I think since this is the second half of this issue, we’re getting upwards of two and a quarter hours. So we might wanna go ahead and wrap it up. Do either of you have any final thoughts or final words on Saturn in Sagittarius?
PW: Who wants to go first?
[Leisa laughs]
LS: Well, I guess the only thing I would say besides what we’ve already discussed is just it’s interesting to see how these different manifestations come about that are sort of combinations of these two archetypes of their structuring or constriction or hard work or etc. The Saturn themes with the Sagittarian themes that are basically about expansion in one way or another either geographical expansion with the travel and the international cultural bit or philosophical or religious expansion like higher thought, even legal thought, sort of like higher principles. Yeah, and it’s just really interesting to see who goes with which themes and how those different lives play out.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
PW: That’s awesome. My article was called Saturn in Sagittarius: The Skeptic, the Architect and the Luddite. And by that, I meant that Saturn in Sagittarius seems to be skeptical in areas of knowledge of religious, philosophical, political beliefs as an architect because it oftentimes constructs or makes structures that take people great places either in the mind through knowledge or literally to far off destinations across bridges or tunnels or across the air or through space. And it is also a Luddite because it seems to be coincident with times of great fear of progress or of technological progress. And sometimes this can be seemingly rational. For example, Saturn in Sagittarius’ connection with the nuclear disarmament movement. But then it can also be corrupting in those areas as well. So, the fears may not make all that much sense at times depending on who is being skeptical of what. So, that’s Saturn in Sagittarius, the skeptic, an architect, and someone who’s fearful of progress, Luddite.
CB: Brilliant. All right. Well, I think that’s a good stopping point. So people can check out your work on Saturn in Sagittarius and your long–What is it? Like 50-page article–
[Patrick and Leisa laugh]
CB: –on your website which is patrickwatsonastrologer.com, correct?
PW: Mhm.
CB: And you’re also offering consultations and other things now?
PW: Mhm.
CB: All right. And then, Leisa, you’re writing articles on saturnreturnstories.com. And you’re also offering Saturn return consultations, right?
LS: Yes, that’s right.
CB: All right. Great. Well, I think that does it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thank you to my two guests for joining me.
LS: Thank you.
PW: Thanks for having us.
CB: All right, and thanks to Austin and Kelly from earlier. That’s gonna do it for this show, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please give it a good rating on iTunes. Think about supporting the show by signing up for our Patreon. —
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