An assortment of insights about Saturn, Uranus, Capricorn and Aquarius.

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"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” —Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

In modern astrology, Capricorn and Aquarius are ruled by the planets Saturn and Uranus respectively, with Saturn co-ruling the latter.  In traditional astrology, both are ruled by Saturn, the furthest orbiting body visible to the naked eye, and the furthest one traditionally considered.

These Saturn-ruled energies sit across the zodiac from Cancer and Leo, the signs ruled by the two luminaries — Luna and Sol.  The Moon and Sun symbolize the most fundamental non-dual dualisms of the human psyche: instinct and intuition, feeling and vision, reception and projection, love and will.

Staring them down, Saturn is the archetypal parent, androgynous taskmaster planet of skeletal structure, tried-and-true tradition, and the weight of hard work in proving oneself and manifesting external results across the earthly domain.  The perceived boundary and gatekeeper between the material and ethereal.  While at first these qualities are most frequently associated with Capricorn, Aquarius’ more saturnine dimensions surface in scientific thinking, love of ‘innovation that works’ and the desire to know a system inside-out.

What the Moon and Cancer seek to prompt from a cosmic womb, a void and matrix of potentiality, Saturn and Capricorn seek to bring into form, to define or confine, to consecrate or limit.  What the Moon and Cancer might feel and receive on a primarily emotional level, Saturn and Capricorn might accept more immediately through the senses or take in with a selective deafness.

What the Sun and Leo project or expel with a sense of divine birthright, Saturn and Aquarius might gives back from a place of feeling alienated by their task, ‘lover of everyone but not anyone.’  The melancholy plodding of Saturn and Capricorn manifests differently with Saturn and Aquarius.  The astrologer Aeolian Heart describes Aquarius as the sign of “divine isolation.”  I’m fond of this, as in my eyes it points also to the soulfulness of Aquarius’ social dynamic — recognizing the outcast in everyone, appreciating the idiosyncrasy, and reaching out to say “I see that in you, and it is good.”

While ‘Leo thinks he’s God’s gift to man, Aquarius thinks he’s man’s gift to God.’  Here the Aquarian motif becomes particularly Uranian-Promethean, in that man offers back the fire ‘stolen’ from the gods.  Picture even the mad scientist, his vision broad, humanitarian, fierce and possessed, yet perhaps narrow to the needs of those immediately surrounding.  Such a spark can  become unimaginably twisted and malevolent — think Norwegian terrorist Anders Brievik.

The tendency to relegate Capricorn and Aquarius to their ruling planets' major instincts is one of the most mind-numbingly boring and near-sighted behaviors I've ever witnessed among astrologically minded folks, at times even practicing astrologers and those who write on some level about the planets and signs.  And I say this as someone who most certainly exhibits some amount of boring and near-sighted behavior.

It comes off as intuitively blind, intellectually lazy or at least happenstance ignorant to reduce anyone to sun sign in the first place, given the vast nuance and complexity of a person's whole birth chart... but it's another issue to see only stoic, conservative, rigid, dogmatic or stifling qualities in Capricorn simply because these can manifest as more negative shades of Saturn — or to limit Aquarius to erratic, revolutionary, emotionally distant, wanton, ‘rebel without a cause’ tendencies just because these are aspects of Uranus.

When we confine such contained, grounding and conservative qualities to Capricorn and uncaged, liberating and revolutionary instincts to Aquarius, we miss out on the essential multivalence of these archetypes, and risk indirectly reducing our considerations to ‘basic’ sun sign astrology.

A number of historically notable Capricorns fought tirelessly against censorship and oppression — Martin Luther King Jr., Murray Bookchin, Frances Steloff, etc. — while the saturnine shades of Aquarius are uncannily loud in the right wing of the modern political conversation lately.  This is something I feel is important, at the very least intersting, to draw attention to:

Glenn Beck is a February 10th, 1964 birth with a pretty close conjunction of Sun, Mars and Saturn in Aquarius.  Andrew Breitbart was a February 1st, 1969 Aquarius until he died of a heart attack as Uranus in Aries trined his natal Sun in Leo, while opposing his natal conjunction of Uranus and Jupiter retrograde on his South Node in Libra.  Fortunately Steve Bannon carries on his legacy… *cough*

What do Glenn Beck (Aquarius), Rush Limbaugh (Capricorn), Alex Jones (Aquarius) and Matt Drudge (Scorpio) all have in common?  All of them are college dropouts, except for Drudge who didn’t make an attempt, and all of them are Saturn-ruled sun signs born with afflicted Saturn, Uranus and in some cases both!  That is, with the exception of Drudge's Scorpio Sun and Jones' relatively smooth Saturn (re: grand air trine reinforcement).

Seriously though: Beck was born under Saturn in Aquarius at a loose square to Neptune in Scorpio (see his ongoing emotional meltdowns, disillusionment with and changes regarding his ideologies). Limbaugh has natal Saturn retrograde in Libra square to Uranus retrograde in Cancer.  Drudge, again a Scorpio Sun and Neptune, was born with Saturn conjunct Chiron in Pisces opposing Uranus and Pluto conjunct in Virgo (dreams of indentured servitude, hermit-escapist complex, public outing of private sexual identity).

Hey, take it from Milo Yiannopoulos…

“Let’s be clear about one thing. Non-college educated doesn’t mean stupid. It means you wisely chose not to pay $40,000 a year to be lectured on microaggressions. Some of the smartest and most successful people in history have been either college dropouts, like me, or people who never attended at all, like a lot of my crew on this tour…  They are smarter — and so am I — than 90% of the people in this room.”

Bits of parroted wisdom, lots of inflated, entitled… well, you know.  Some people seem likely to live in self-imposed mental prisons a great deal of the time, be them egotistical utopias or despondent wastelands, perhaps overlapping.