We find ourselves in a time of unknowns, where instability and unpredictability abounds—environmental, economic, geopolitical, and sociopolitical. In the midst of all this, many people are struggling with their sense of identity. It’s like we have been cast out upon a wild sea, open and vulnerable to the power of the deep, riding its waves and thrown about by its storms.
Passage through troubled waters requires we have a strong boat, a psychic vessel that can ride the surges and withstand the worst of the storms. As it happens, Saturn’s passage into Pisces offers us insight into the kind of craft that might endure the turbulent spirit of the times. Saturn entered Pisces on March 7 2023 where it will stay through February 14 2026.
Saturn is the archetypal psychological principle of form and stability. It symbolizes the inner and outer structures of our lives which comprise our sense of identity. It is also associated with processes of maturation. Saturn points to where there’s learning to be done, so it anchors us. One manifestation of this imperative is Saturn in the figure of teacher, the wise old one whose presence signifies a time of growth through dedication and focus upon the work at hand. Let’s thus turn to Saturn as teacher, as a source of insight that offers psychic medicine for the fluidity, uncertainty and instability that bounds us on all sides.
First medicinal capsule from Saturn as teacher: Adhering to psychological faith that there is something forming despite a difficult birth. Though ambiguous, there is something of value emerging. Psychological faith has to do with a strengthening of the personality, a greater capacity to live with uncertainty. It means developing “negative capability.”
This idea comes the Romantic poet John Keats. He defined negative capability as a skillfulness for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”[1] It’s a way of being that finds value in not possessing knowledge, not being driven to work things out, not striving via reason towards knowing. Rather, a receptive, contemplative and attentive attitude towards what is unfolding and a “Willingness to let what is mysterious or doubtful remain just that” is what prevails. In other words, negative capability is related to a knowing more with the heart rather than with the reason-thinking mind.
Along these same lines, I love Denise Levertov’s image for our hunger for reason from the opening half of her poem “Contraband”[2]:
The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
A wall between us and God, Who was paradise.
Negative capability goes hand in hand with psychological faith because the negative knowing or embrace of uncertainty happening at our conscious ego level allows for confidence in the greater scheme of things taking shape in more unconscious ways. This sense of the larger intelligence at work in our lives is what the astro-cosmological perspective attempts to offer.
And there is a deeper rhythm at work here—the origin of negative capability is in a letter Keats wrote in December 1817 when Saturn was Pisces, so Keats’ idea was born under this same Saturn transit over 200 years ago.
Negative capability and psychological faith say the imaginal heart needs to lead. We learn about the gravity of the heart’s knowing through receptivity, and not impatiently reaching for a large mouthful of reason, understanding, clarity—throwing ourselves into the path of beauty so to behold it without always having to make sense of it. Our positive capability, which so often drives our way of being, has an opportunity to loosen and allow wild unknown possibilities to emerge—a Piscean receptivity to the creative unknown.
I think we are well aware of the challenges Saturn in Pisces given the spirit of the times—fear of chaos and of being overwhelmed by the formlessness, the unknowing, the uncertainties and ambivalences. This danger is conveyed in the mythos of the Sirens who would lure sailors to their deaths by promising divine knowledge. It is the heroic part of us that experiences the Sirens as devourers, as the greatest temptation of heroic consciousness strives to know as the gods. Heroic consciousness seeks clarity and the surety of knowing everything is under control. This hubris, which is part of the human condition, is the blind spot of ego consciousness.
This brings us to the second medicinal capsule of Saturn as teacher which is given by the goddess Circe. Counseling Odysseus as he prepares to enter the Siren’s waters, she tells him that he must bind himself to the mast of the ship so that he is not seduced by their song. Perhaps dealing with the Piscean Siren waters means being practiced in the art of self-binding, the skill of restraint to protect from ravishment. Listen to Circe’s instructions to Odysseus, “If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices, that man will never travel home.”[3] To listen to to the Sirens with heroic hubris is to perish, whereas to listen with an awareness of limitations, for where more or less boundaries are needed (Saturn), and with an understanding of what is at stake, we might hear what elevates the soul. Today this mythic moment plays our in the Siren call of the online world and some of the treacherous arenas of knowledge and deception that live there.
Odysseus being lashed to the mast of his ship and Penelope steadfastly seated at to her loom are both images of self-binding for containment. But Penelope and Odysseus also show us psychological faith in action—20 years she has faith he will return, and for the same 20 years he has faith he will return to her. The key to navigate these turbulent waters seems to be a strong vessel, our Saturn vessel, in which one can labore et orare, work and pray. The house Saturn is transiting in our birth chart, as well as the planets it will touch, show where this soul work is located. And there are many kinds of containers—a creative project, a close circle of friends, a meditation practice, active service to a cause, (re)entering soul work like analysis—anything that we dedicate ourselves to with with faith in the psyche, with heart knowing, all the while learning to make space for mystery.
“The Wind Has Died”
My little boat,
Take care,
There is no
Land in sight.
—Charles Simic