Saturn in the fourth house is like a deadweight. The fourth house is the graveyard of the chart where all of your people are buried. It’s the place that you can never really leave because you must make your yearly visits to the past to check in and remind yourself that those who have left have really left. It’s where you take care of the soil because taking care of buried people is the same as taking care of the layer of ground that they feed you through. The fourth house is the house of the family.

Saturn is the heaviest planet in astrology. Yes, Jupiter is actually heavier but Jupiter gives the appearance of being full of hot air. So, Saturn is the heaviest planet in astrology.

When you have Saturn in the fourth house, you have this gravity in your past or in your history. Saturn becomes your hometown, the place where all of your dreams and sorrows lay wasted.

I was watching this movie the other day—Landscape Suicide by James Benning. It’s about how all of these macabre murders that are sensationalized by the media are actually real and motivated by the dying and genocided landscape that we are all trying to live on. When the landscape commits suicide, people tend to do so as well. The midwest part of the movie went over Ed Gein. Ed Gein was a famous serial killer who lived in Plainfield. He was doing a controlled burn in a marsh when the fire got out of control and ended up killing his brother. After that, Gein started to kill people and dig up corpses. No one could figure out why he was doing it aside from a kind of generalized sickness of soul.

What was weird about watching Landscape Suicide was that, during this scene where the director is just driving around a snowed in midwestern town with a screaming preacher on the radio, I felt nostalgic. Why do I feel nostalgic for something like that, for Ed Gein’s landscape? I grew up in a small town in Iowa next to all of these Bible thumping maniacs and I don’t have any good memories about this kind of thing. But you feel nostalgic not just for the happy memories but also for your old sorrows.

Saturn is the planet of melancholy and, in the fourth house, it is found right at home.

Here’s something else about the midwest. I’m gonna be talking a bit about my home and my alienation to try and tune into the placement because Saturn is the planet of detachment and the fourth house is the house of home. In the midwest, people don’t talk about anything. It’s not like New York where people are always trying to say smart things and give context to all of the different things happening all the time. People don’t talk because, at the end of the day, what is there to say? When things happen, what’s the use of talking about it? You can’t solve things using just your words.

I think that there is something about this that feels very Saturn in the fourth house. Your home is your home. You understand your home and you assume that the people who live in it with you understand it too. Why would you have anything to discuss?

Saturn is the planet of generational sorrows and, in the fourth house of home, we often don’t have any words. We’re so used to our landscapes, our families, and our histories. What’s the point? It’s not like you can change where your ancestors are buried. Don’t dig up corpses. Don’t be like Ed Gein.

When Saturn is in the fourth house, it gives a special weight to everything that we are already so used to that we don’t even have words for talking about it. You can talk things out with your friends, with your coworkers, sometimes even with your boss. But your mom? She’s the woman who gave you your language in the first place. Trying to talk family dynamics out sometimes feels like you’re pulling words apart with your tongue while you’re speaking them out loud. What language are you talking in? Whose words did you just choose?

That’s Saturn in the fourth house—it’s an inquiry of soul that happens as you live. It’s a complete examination through deconstruction of all of your living habits and lifestyle choices and trajectories and narratives. You get tongued tied with all of this. There are no adequate words. That’s probably why people with Saturn in the fourth house are so quiet all the dang time. They are dealing with things that mangle the mouth.

What do you call that thing your mom does that looks just like the thing your grandma does? Do you call it what your mom calls it or do you call it what your aunt calls it? If you were to make up a new word entirely, then will your mom still hear your anguish when your anguish doesn’t look the same as her anguish?

The reason why Saturn is the planet of time is because it’s the planet of stillness. Wherever you have Saturn in your chart, you learn to move forward by keeping very, very still. When Saturn feels the pressure to move faster, it just gets even slower.

A lot of the time, when we think about our families, we think about all of these things that we want to change. That’s pretty cool. Maybe we want to change how our mom speaks to us because we want to change how we talk to her. Maybe we want to feel more equal with our siblings or we want our dads to stop dropping out of social conflicts. But this is my philosophy—there are some things that you will see change within your lifetime. There will also be patterns that do not change within your lifetime because these patterns, which have to do with more than just two generations, require multiple generations to change.

My mom is currently trying to dig up all of her ghosts and examine the trauma that her mom dumped onto her. As she does that, I’m the one who is challenged to give her empathy. This kind of grieving for your grandparents that you do with your parents can’t happen in one or two generations. It takes three or four.

There are changes that you make that you will not see come to fruition until after you are gone. These changes are still real. If you have kids or are around kids, you will not see how your actions impact how these kids behave when they are in old age and how those actions impact another generation of kids. There are changes that you don’t get to experience in your lifetime because you are doing or undoing things for people who aren’t here yet. And there are changes that you get to experience because someone ages past did them for you.

I think that Saturn in the fourth house is still but it’s not accepting of just anything. It’s discerning. It doesn’t put up with bullshit from the family but it also understands the limits that time places on change. Saturn in the fourth house doesn’t entertain fantasies about generational change. It knows that real change isn’t just a narrative or story. Real change comes in the form of life.