is saturn to blame?
the worm and the butterfly
One of the most common questions I'm asked when I explain to a client that they're moving through a Saturn transit is,
“Do I need to be worried?”
These transits can bring periods of discomfort, and at times, a sense that things are shifting or coming undone.
I've found a story that explains this process in a way that's simple, but hard to forget.
It comes from Dane Rudhyar, a well known astrologer, and offers a different way of understanding what these transits may actually mean, and how we might move through them with greater awareness, rather than fear.
“At a certain period in the worm's life, its outer skin hardens, and within what has then become a chrysalis, a process of organic disintegration occurs... until the chrysalis is only a hard skin filled with a jellied substance.
But out of this apparently formless substance, the butterfly will soon form the glory of wings.
The worm might well say: 'O horrible fate. Saturn conjoins my Sun, and see how my soft skin hardens.'
And a little later, it might cry in anguish: 'Help me. My progressed Sun is coming to Neptune, and see, all of me is dissolving into a jelly.'
Indeed, Saturn and Neptune would be adequate figures of speech, valid symbols of what is happening...”
— Dane Rudhyar
From our perspective, moving through a period of change can feel overwhelming. It can feel exposing. Like being taken back to square one, with nowhere to hide, even though that may be exactly what we want to do.
From the caterpillar's perspective, nothing about this feels like transformation.
It can feel like something has gone wrong.
And yet, from a wider view, we understand that nothing is going wrong at all.
It is a process that allows the caterpillar to become the butterfly.
Rudhyar reminds us that what we call Saturn is not a force acting upon us, but a way of describing what is already unfolding within the process of life.
The caterpillar might blame Saturn for the hardening.
But this is simply a language we use to make sense of an experience that is part of a much larger rhythm.
Astrology does not create the process.
It mirrors it.
Instead of asking, “Do I need to be worried?”
There is another question:
“What is this process asking of me?”
Awareness does not remove the experience, but it allows us to move through it more consciously, rather than becoming completely identified with it.