Saturn in our natal chart represents a place where we can feel limited, painfully inadequate, fearful, or experience delays. But there is a purpose behind Saturn’s seemingly negative effect on our life: Saturn wants us to grow up, take responsibility, and develop our inner authority. If we are willing to face ourselves and do the work to overcome our fears, we develop the strength and power we wanted all along.
We have a page about Saturn if you want to learn more. I also highly recommend Liz Greene’s book Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, which is the basis for a lot of my thoughts on Saturn.
Saturn in Sagittarius in the Natal Chart
Core Conflict
Vulnerabilities
- early exposure to dogmatic religious teachings
- disillusionment with established beliefs
- depression
- lack of hope
- sensitivity to the suffering of humanity
- sense of futility
- self-doubt around one’s beliefs or right to decide one’s beliefs
- guilt connected to early indoctrination
- struggle with spiritual or intellectual authority
Defenses
- strict adherence to dogma or orthodoxy
- or rejecting belief altogether (reactionary atheism/agnosticism)
- clinging to gurus or groups for meaning
- fanaticism
- extreme skepticism or extreme gullibility around belief systems
The Work
- develop your own intuitive understanding of the world without relying on external authority
- pursue personal meaning derived from personal experience
- study philosophy or psychology and decide for yourself what you believe & believe in
Transformation
- intuitive perception of wholeness and meaning
- direct mystical experience of God
- becoming your own spiritual authority
- broad-mindedness and openness to life
- joyful freedom
- faith grounded in personal experience
The Saturn Growth Journey
The Saturn journey involves a coupling of need and fear. There can be shyness, stiff awkwardness, and/or emotional coldness and a sense of inadequacy in an area where we badly want to feel confident and capable. And we just don’t. Where others experience ease, we struggle. Where others find things obvious, we have to painstakingly puzzle things out. Where others dance, we stumble. That’s just the way Saturn feels.
If we can’t face our pain, we can end up projecting our unowned negative qualities onto others, or trying to satisfy emotional needs with physical ones and replacing inner work with outer achievement. We look outside ourselves for what we need to develop within ourselves.
Eventually, we realize there is no shortcut. The only way to our goal is to just do the work, by ourselves, for as long as it takes.
