Author: Charlie Obert

The difficulty with exploring Saturn being feminine as a possible earlier and alternate form of astrology tradition lies precisely in the fact that it is earlier and alternate, and hence we have very few surviving written references. Like the work that has been done by feminist theologians in recovering a tradition of the feminine as divine, much of the work is as much reconstruction as it is recovery.

There are very few traditional astrology texts that refer to Saturn as feminine. Besides that one sentence in Dorotheus that I talked about in my first post on the subject of Saturn as feminine, there are another handful of sentences that I am aware of, scattered here and there through the hundreds of traditional texts that have come down to us.

As far as I can tell, if you rely solely on traditional astrology texts, the traditional support for viewing Saturn as feminine is very slight. Let’s acknowledge that up front.

The historical case for Saturn as feminine is greatly strengthened if there is evidence of a spiritual tradition alive in the West that consistently associates the planet Saturn with feminine symbols, . As it turns out, there is such a spiritual tradition, related to astrology, and passed down to us along similar lines, that has a strong history of associating Saturn with feminine meanings and imagery, and we will examine just a little bit of that tradition here.

It is known as Qabalah.
Continue reading “Saturn and Qabalah”

On this coming March 19 I am going to be participating in an on-the-web conversation as part of Kepler College’s celebration of International Astrology Day. The theme for the day will be, astrology and spirituality.

That got me thinking.

I am just off doing a couple of blog posts on rethinking Saturn as feminine and Saturn as Crone, and what that entails. A commenter on one of the posts asked if I had considered looking at how viewing Saturn as feminine works out in chart interpretation.

That also got me thinking, and the two topics dovetailed.

To really get a sense of how Saturn as feminine changes how we do chart interpretatation, I think we need to have a very good grasp of the deep knowing compassion of age – in my last post I labeled that quality, Understanding.

That is the subject of this meditation.
Continue reading “Wisdom of Saturn”

This is the second post in which I am exploring the ramifications of viewing Saturn as feminine, and also considering symbolism related to Saturn as Old Crone.

In my previous post on Saturn as Feminine I quoted a passage from the Hellenistic astrologer Dorotheus, in which Saturn is classified as one of the feminine planets. This created some striking arrangements of Saturn with the other planets, having some of the distinctive symmetry and balance of much of traditional Western astrology.

In this post I want to consider further how the symbolism of Saturn is linked to feminine symbolism.

Here is the quote from Carmen Astrologicum by Dorotheus:

“…the feminine planets are Saturn, Venus and the Moon, the masculine ones are the Sun, Jupiter, and Mars.”

When I first saw this quote I wondered if Saturn might originally have been associated with an Old Crone goddess figure or figures, that then was turned masculine in a later cultural development.

What I want to do in this post is to consider the nature of Saturn and feminine symbolism, and see how they combine.

Continue reading “Saturn as Feminine and Crone”

This is the fourth in a series of posts, in which I am examining the implicit mind/body dualism in our modern world, and ways to move towards a more consciously integrated set of values that affirms the worth of our mortal selves.

Last week I talked about reclaiming the spiritual value of the body along with the mind, matter along with spirit, emotions and desires along with the detached and dispassionate parts of our minds.

That was framed mostly in terms of being alive – the incarnation, the feelings, the passions, the movement.

This week I need to consider the necessary other half of the process. When we reclaim our connections with our bodies, desires and emotions, we need to recognize and reclaim our experience of sickness, decay, decline, mortality,  and death.
Continue reading “Reclaiming Mortality”

In the two previous posts in this series I have examined the way that our astrology has inherited a value system based on a mind/body, spirit/matter dualism. The purpose is to become aware of the language that we have inherited, and the values that it assumes.

In this post I want to look at places that we can see the development of a different, body-affirmative kind of approach to spirituality and values, and how that affects the language we use in doing astrology.

Over about the past half century I think we can see the seeds and roots of a new point of view that re-integrates the sacredness of the body, of our emotions and desires,  and of the  earth. I see evidence of this new worldview in a couple of different areas.

Continue reading “Reclaiming the Body”

In my previous post, I looked at the implicit mind-body split that is assumed in much of our modern culture, and in our astrology.

This post is about the influence of the Theosophy movement on modern astrology, and how that movement shaped the value system implicit in our modern astrology.

The roots of twentieth century psychological astrology, with its emphasis on character rather than prediction, can be traced back to the overwhelming influence of a single man, Alan Leo.  Leo is responsible for asserting that Character determines Destiny, and that the stars Impel, they do not Compel.

It is really interesting – if you look at astrology books published prior to Alan Leo, and then after his work, there is a very marked difference. It is a completely different world, and books prior to Leo feel antique.

Leo was British, and a member of the Theosophical Society when it was at the height of its influence. The language and values of Theosophy, which drew heavily on Hindu and other Indian sources,  became part of the language of modern astrology through Leo and his many influential books, which are still mostly in print today. Thanks to Leo, our modern astrology looks mainly to Asian sources for its spiritual underpinning, rather than to our own Western spiritual tradition.
Continue reading “Leaving the Body Behind”

This will be the first of a series of posts. I want to examine some of the ways that our western astrology mirrors some fundamental splits in human consciousness today, and think about ways we can become aware of them, and move our minds more towards wholeness.

If we go back to the era of the birth time of western astrology in the Hellenistic empire, we have a kind of beautiful and precarious balancing and mingling of different threads of consciousness. On the one hand there is the still vital connection to the Gods, what we in the west tend to label the “mythical” side, but without the reductionist connotations of that term that we have in the modern world.

Along with that we have a beautiful flowering of the Greek development of the mind, the reason, and of geometry, mathematics, philosophy – and of course astrology, which feels like the system that ties it all together into a living whole.

However, also during that era, I think that we have the beginnings of a series of splits in consciousness taking place, where we were distanced from our bodies, our emotions, our desires – and from the Gods.
continue reading…