There’s something dangerously mundane about dad—dad is who makes the bad jokes, who picks you up from school, who dresses poorly and dances poorly, and who has a hobby that he thinks is really cool that might just, actually, be really cool.
Dad is different from father, which invokes a kind of patriarchal authority that reveals the power and structure of the nuclear family a bit too crudely to feel familiar. Father sounds like something a character from a dated English novel calls her distant patriarch, like the man of the house who says “no” a lot more than “yes.”
I’ve always seen the Sun to be the dad of the chart. The Sun talks about where we might seek approval, how we might experience that validation, and about what we do when we feel that we are deprived of recognition. The Sun shows us attention and, with it, our most childish selves. The Sun is a baby, sure, but it is a baby who searches for a relationship to authority.
Daddy takes a very different cultural position than dad or father. We don’t call our fathers daddy. We use the word as satire. We find it sometimes sexy and often times a bit gross. The grossness is built into the word itself and we use that grossness to either make fun of something or to seduce it into a role. Daddy is a tease. It’s a silly word used for silly purposes.
Saturn is a planet that is described through role reversals. Saturn is famous as a father, being the father of the most famous of all the gods, Jupiter, but he is also a son. Saturn is the son of Uranus and, through Uranus, Saturn suffered as Jupiter did under him. The Saturnalia was celebrated through role reversals, during which senators wore the clothes of the enslaved class and vice versa.
If Saturn is daddy, then daddy becomes a word that signifies a reversal of subjectivity. It is impossible for Saturn to become dad because dads hide their cultural power under comfort. Dads are too complacent in their power to exercise it brutally.
It is much easier for Saturn to become father because father is a word that signifies diminishing power. The reason why we do not call our dads father is because modernity was a myth that centered the son, progress, and technological revolution over tradition. The word father is a tradition and to name something as tradition means that thing is already in a crisis of unbecoming.
But father is not playful. We don’t call our partners father when we want to tease them and we don’t use the word father to mock powerful men. It feels dangerous to do so because it is not already possible to become father but it is always possible, through style or talk or performance, to become daddy.
If Saturn is daddy, then there is a built in silliness, grossness, and sexiness to Saturn. If Saturn is daddy, then Saturn is a mockery of patriarchal authority. If Saturn is daddy, then Saturn becomes a much less serious planet than the Sun, who behaves childishly but arrives fully vulnerable to the terror of social perception.
Daddy, as Saturn, is a generalized idea of patriarchal authority. Dad, as Sun, is a much harder conversation.
Saturn works as daddy. I often ask clients what kind of daddy they are when they deal with Saturn (issues of authority, genealogy, rebellion). This kind of question has no place when we talk about the Sun and the times I tried to bring daddy into a discussion about people’s actual parents have been mistakes that were quickly corrected by the client. We don’t talk about daddy when we talk about people’s actual fathers but we can use daddy when we react to the idea of father.
If there is freedom to Saturn, this slower moving planet that you end up sharing with several of your peers, then there is freedom in sharing how you might anticipate authority. There is freedom to Saturn, performing as daddy, because all performance becomes satirical eventually. The unfamiliarity of Saturn, and of daddy, makes it more accessible and moldable than dad.
