Survival issues keep us from making changes in our careers and lifestyles. When we are frozen in fear of what might happen economically, politically or socially, we are kept from making overdue changes, either in our career or in our lives. We fear the sacrifices that we may have to make if we choose a new life direction. In an article written by Carole Kanchier, author of Dare to Change your Job—And Your Life, she states,

Because Saturn is the farthest planet we see with the naked eye, its position is simultaneously significant and symbolic. Saturn represents perceived limitation and to illustrate this point, please refer to Illustration 1, right. Simply put, up until the time that Uranus was discovered in 1781, the perception was that Saturn was the last part of our solar system. Perhaps the ancients, because they only saw out to Saturn, made this comparison in their thinking. We really do not know, but if we work with this idea, then anything discovered after Saturn, would break open the perception, or, the perceived limitation that Saturn imparts. The positive side of the perception that Saturn is the boundary of the universe is that this view shows Saturn as providing a form and structure in which we function. However, this perceived limitation doesn't allow us to see other options and possibilities that may lie in front of us, sometimes in the most obvious of places. And this view shows us the negative side of Saturn's effect.

Years ago, when I first began therapy with a wonderful counselor, I was given an example of the above concept at our first meeting. I started therapy in my late thirties when a lot of emotional issues were re-surfacing. I had the experience of a heavily laden Saturn which aspected many of my personal planets. The resulting behavior of these configurations led to my perception about how life up until that point was hard and that I had no support. This belief had me frozen in fear about a career decision that would change my life. I believed that people were not there to protect you (a Sun issue), nor care for you (a Moon issue) and that one had to learn to survive and care for oneself.

The first day of my meeting with the therapist, I burst into tears and frantically began searching for Kleenex as a tidal wave of emotion overwhelmed me. I searched my brief case and my purse unsuccessfully for tissue just as my therapist pointed out to me that there happened to be a box of Kleenex on the table right in front of me! The problem, I had, was very clear in that single moment. I had become so used to depending on myself that I had completely closed myself off to what was right there if I only paid attention.

This is actually, in simplistic terms, the solution for a dysfunctional Saturn that has learned to operate out of fear and isolation. Saturn's myth is discussed in the chapter on Career Cycles in this book. There is no need to revisit his stories. Saturn is tough, difficult, hard, dry, and cold. These are the first adjectives we use when describing some of the principles of Saturn. However, in astrology as in nature, there is a positive side to everything no matter how malefic we may view the planet to be.

The upside of Saturn is that it represents focus, direction, and an ability to organize and prioritize those things that are most important in trying to get a job done. Saturn represents patience and understanding that in time everything comes around. Saturn represents the wisdom to discriminate between what is important and what is not.

The qualities that are a part of Saturn, both pro and con, seem to reflect generational themes. If one person in a family has a high concentration of Saturn energy, then it is probably true that other members of that clan have high concentrations of that planet. The psychology of the planet can run through a family for generations. For example, if someone is born with Saturn in hard aspect to their Moon or their Sun, then it may be that their formative years taught them that one must take care of oneself without assistance from anyone, to be serious and not to waste time. When Saturn is at a hard aspect to the Moon or the Sun, the parents or primary caretakers usually carry this belief system and may it on to their children.

Looking at the first seven years of someone’s life corresponds to emotional development and is the age cycle of the Moon, which is indicative of the clan or the family. If the Moon is negatively aspected by Saturn natally, then the environment in which the young child finds him or herself may be an environment of isolation, abandonment and frozen responses. Subsequently, this experience becomes the basis upon which we build our assumptions. If our experience was that our needs weren’t met, then we come to believe that that is all that life holds for us. Our worst scenario perception may be that life is tough, unfriendly and devouring.

We are eternally caught on the first rung of survival on Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Illustration 2). We are unable to change that unless we consciously reframe it with a positive psychological intervention. This rung is the foundation point and its focus is existence. In order to accomplish anything you must be able to move beyond this point. It is true, of course that you can live in survival mode and still be "successful" in monetary terms. Think about how many old misers live with hardly any comfort in their environments, but are worth millions when they die. When we talk about success, we are talking about the concept of success in monetary as well as spiritual and emotional terms.

As you revisit the bottom rung of Maslow's ladder, which happens at different phases of life, your approach to "making it" changes as you mature. Fears that once paralyzed you have dissipated and all that remains is the healthy fear, alerting you to dangers in the world.

At this point, you have to move past perceptions and judgments and break out of the fears taught by your family and culture. When you come to this place of change there is a certain degree of courage that you must muster to move past the frozen wasteland of the survival mentality.

Robert Hand, one of the best astrological minds of the twentieth century, states, "Saturn is the illusion that there is a reality, but Neptune is the truth that there isn't". The beauty of this quote is its great truth. There are planets and realities beyond Saturn. With the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto we expanded our base of reality and consciousness. Each discovery leads mankind further into his own psyche culminating with Pluto and the birth of psychoanalysis.

However, the basic will to survive in the world has always existed and corresponds with the visibility of Saturn in the night skies. In Maslow’s model of the Hierarchy of Needs, we see an image of potentials and pitfalls. The first rung of the ladder represents the realm of the physical world. Mars corresponds with the courage to act and so Saturn and Mars co-create at this base level. I have placed these two archetypes at this juncture, since you need a successful expression of Mars to provide the courage and tools to get things done. The ability to breakout and move up requires the motivational fire of Mars. Saturn here represents what we need to do to survive.

In survival one of the first things you do is evaluate what you really need to do eliminating all other things in order face the task at hand. For good health, you need to reassess your diet, particularly the fats, and eliminate those foods, which are detrimental to your system to lose weight. On a larger scale, to improve the quality of your fruit trees, you must prune the trees in the dead of winter, the time of Capricorn (ruled by Saturn). The more efficiently you prune your trees, the better the growth in the spring.

The same holds true for expanding your business, changing your career or creating more leisure time. The old proverb "time is money" is a Saturn maxim. When you look at changing careers and what that might require, you have to first assess your costs on a per diem. What are you spending? What can you reduce or eliminate to relieve you of financial pressure? What or whom depletes your energy and keeps you from getting to where you need to go? These hard questions require crystal clear (Saturn) answers.

A great pruning happened in recent years when several outer planets entered the constellation of Saturn-ruled Capricorn in the early 1990s. Major cutbacks occurred in industries; layoffs, mergers and downsizing were the standard news of the day. Just as you have to downsize your life in order to have the necessary reserve to reach the top of that new mountain of goals.

The mythical animal, the Sea Goat, which rules Capricorn, has many meanings. In more modern times we see Capricorn simply as a goat, but when we view the Sea Goat with its tail, we see a character whose challenges are doubled in terms of survival and ascension. They must first swim (the tail) from the bottom of the sea to land. At this point they need to climb onto the shore and being their climb to the top of the mountain. This is a long and challenging journey. It is a journey that requires an ambition and a drive and a willingness to withstand comfort or pleasure for the sake of achievement. The sure-footed goat climbs a craggy mountain with little to eat and a minimal amount of protection from foul weather as they ascend the mountain. Focused and willing to eat anything for survival, the goat eventually prevails and reaches the summit.

Herein lies the difference between negative manifestations of Saturn at the survival rung of Maslow's ladder versus a positive manifestation. When you allow fear or judgment to enter the equation of accomplishment and true success, then you experience two very distinct outcomes. The negative manifestation of Saturn results in depression, the inability to act (because you are so frozen you actually freeze out your Mars energy) and a general lack of motivation. You find yourself stuck in fear and unable to look beyond your societal or familial programming.

If you are overly concerned about what other people think, then you contract inward. If early programming has taught you that stepping out of the box means that you are left alone, without any forms of support, then you may think twice about pursuing your dreams, as they can be spooky. You, in turn, may start to criticize others around you as they attain successes that you are too scared to pursue. You may begin to believe that you have no alternatives to the life that you are leading, but there remains a small part of you that continually wonders, "What would have happened if I had...?"

Depression-era parents raised in difficult times have passed those perceptions on to an entire generation. How many from both of those generations opted for "practical" careers that made them "good" money in lieu of risking? How many of these survivors were really artists that never had a chance to express themselves, because they believed that survival meant giving up dreams? By maintaining this belief philosophy, you find yourself unable to move up the ladder. In theory, it would seem that if we change our beliefs (the ninth house, which is also ruled by Jupiter who survived the devouring of Saturn), then we change our perceptions, our fears and our careers (Saturn or the tenth house). It is not an accident that planets transit through the ninth house before they filter out publicly in the tenth!

Since Saturn is traditionally the archetype of fear, it means that at crucial moments in your evolutionary process you will be faced with the challenge of moving beyond your fears. This may come when transiting Saturn creates a hard angle of 45 or 90 degrees to Saturn’s natal position, during the Saturn returns around the ages of 29, 59, and 89 or at the Saturn opposition between 44 and 46 years of age, or around 74 to 76 (see Illustration 3) (2).

The crucial element required for success is to learn how to respond to your natal Saturn and to skillfully maneuver through its often-murky psychological waters of fear and limitation. Successful resolution moves you up the Maslow ladder to Self-Actualization and Individuation.

Equally, Saturn affects the masses and their ability to move past frozen perceptions in business. During one of these recent larger cycles where transiting Saturn squared transiting Neptune, businesses changed markedly. Since Neptune is the slower planet, it had more influence than Saturn (when deciding between the strengths of two outer planets, the slower ones have greater influence as they inhabit their part of the sky for a longer duration). With the Saturn and Neptune square of recent years, business structures dissolved emerging as new melded models. On a massive scale, this brought a dissolving of borders and boundaries and opened us to an entirely new generation of business models, the dot.coms. The creative elements (Neptune) in business merged with the older and more established industries (Saturn) to form a different breed of business structures.

During this cycle, a portion of the workforce changed from standard nine to five schedules in office towers to virtual work centers in their homes or at other site locations. Internet firms, like the pioneering Amazon.com who distributes books and records throughout the world, began the model of a virtual (Neptune) business. This model set a precedent for businesses threatening to dissolve traditional merchants in bricks and mortar structures (Saturn) by relocating into the land of "virtual real estate" residing only in the minds of astute communication experts who are masters of technology.

The dissolving structures precipitate a redistribution of resources and wealth to open up the realms of possibility that only our visionary minds can create. As we dissolve traditional structures, so fall the national boundaries thus opening the way for foreign trade and offshore virtual corporations, which can drain national treasuries by withholding corporate taxes. This entire international business and trade arena begs the question as to what forms of currency will dominate in this new online market? Will we see more shared currencies as with the new European Commonwealth currency, the Euro?

As you read this book, it is important that you keep an open mind. The interplay between reality and its so-called structures and the unseen world of myth and symbolism have camps in both our left and right brains. The left-brain is the camp of what we perceive is "real" and gives us much needed structures in which to operate. This part of the brain is Saturn. The right brain is the camp that hears the music, moves accordingly and is inspired and has the visions. The best combination is when both sides, the rational (Saturn) and the non-rational (Jupiter) work together, creating a kind of Whole-brain thinking, which moves us quickly from fear to feasibility. It is the purpose of this book to provide some ideas, systems and tools to encourage this type of thinking. In this way, you, the business astrologer, or, you, the businessperson may reach a better understanding on how to do this.

Saturn Cycles of Responsibility and Fear Confrontation
Illustration 3

• 6 to 8 Years (First opening or First Quarter Square to Saturn).
• 14 to 16 Years (First opposition to Saturn, repeats again between 44 and 46 years of age).
• 20 to 22 Years (First closing or Last Quarter Square to Saturn).
• 28 to 30 Years (First Saturn Return, the First Coming of Age Cycle.

The above cycles build and lay the foundation for the beginning of adult life and professions.

• 35 to 37 Years (Second opening or First Quarter Square to Saturn. See ages 6 to 8).
• 44 to 46 Years (Second opposition to Saturn, repeats again at 74 to 76 Years. See ages 14 to 16).
• 52 to 54 Years (Second closing or Last Quarter Square to Saturn. See ages 20 to 22).
• 58 to 60 Years (Second Saturn Return, the Second Coming of Age Cycle. See ages 28 to 30).

The above cycles have built and laid a foundation for the challenge of a richer and fuller life in one's later years. This is relative to how much we have worked on letting go of attachments and fears. We face the possibility of new careers that hold more meaning and are in alignment with our spirits. Some choose to begin here or you consider retirement from the old career.

• 65 to 67 Years (Third opening or First Quarter Square to Saturn).
• 73 to 75 Years (Third opposition to Saturn, repeats again at 105 years).
• 80 to 82 Years (Third closing or Last Quarter Square to Saturn).
• 88 to 90 Years (Third Saturn Return, the Third Coming of Age Cycle).

(1) Carole Kanchier, "Dare to Change," San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 1999: J-3
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(2) The basic structure of this listing of Saturn was found in some old notes without a listed author. I have altered some of it to be more in line with this text. I do not have the name of the author of this and so, therefore, must state that the author here is unknown to me.
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