Recently, Kirah from thestrology did a whole series on her blog about millennials and Saturn placements. After spending some time with her writing, I wanted to take a look at how different Saturn generations might interact with each other across generations.
For this article, I’m going to be a bit arbitrary. I’m just going to look at how some Saturn generations seem to be interacting with each other based on my client work without looking at a specific generation. Rather, I’m just going to look at millennials and some zoomers because that’s the majority of my clients. We’re also going to be looking at Saturn as an agent of social change. The thing about Saturn is that it’s about being anti-authoritarian. I know that Saturn has this weird reputation in pop astrology as some kind of rule following bureaucrat but that’s not what Saturn is about. Saturn is about transcending the limits of political power. It’s about being anti everything. It’s about being dissatisfied. A lot of revolutionaries have been Saturn people.
I’m also not going to go in order. Instead, I’m going to start with the generation who are currently going through a Saturn return.
Saturn in Capricorn/Saturn in Aquarius: Community
This is the generation that I am part of. It’s definitely no coincidence that, as I’m writing this, the word community has become such a big buzzword both in current discourse and in corporatespeak. Saturn dignified people are people who are looking for our communities. The concept of community is very ambiguous. The word community has this aura around it that seems to be about authentic connection and support but it’s also a word that’s used by marketers to sell products. We live in an age where there’s a lot of “digital communities” that are just media phenomena and “community ambassadors” who are promoting a brand.
A lot of the things that Saturn in Capricorn and Aquarius people are dealing with are around resilient community building. We’re talking about what it means to call someone out or in, about whose issues are aligned with our own, and about how we handle abusers who are “within community.” We’re dealing with boundaries.
I don’t like the word boundary. The word boundary tries to describe our inner selves as if they resemble nation states, with borders and with outers and inners. Instead of boundary, I like to use the word intention.
Boundary setting is actually about the setting of intentions, not about creating walls or borders. It’s not about casting anyone out but about choosing the intention of the group. It’s about recognizing your purpose and committing to the word you want to do, minimizing things that complicate your survival.
When we think about boundary setting in terms of building walls, we give a lot of space to people who are not ready to get behind the purpose of the group. We center those whose political interests do not align with ours. If we create a feminist community, the focus should not be around whether we exclude cishet men through boundary making. The focus should be about intention setting and pulling in people whose interests align with that intention. It’s through intention that strong communities build themselves—not through borders. Communities with intentions are not cliques. They aren’t built to say “here’s some people who are in the group and here’s some people who are outside of the group.” They’re about political purpose.
A lot of Saturn in Capricorn and Aquarius people have had bad experiences in community. We’ve been in communities where the message was branded away from its members, we grew up in digital communities like Neopets where management changes led to the horrible inflation of Neopoints, and we’ve all been in communities where there was abuse under the surface. We understand that community is a buzzword and we often feel apathetic to it but we still want to create cohesion because we recognize that cohesion is the only thing that will bring us towards creating political purpose.
Saturn in Scorpio/Saturn in Pisces: Devoted
Saturn in Scorpio people are older millennials who were born around the mid-eighties. Saturn in Pisces are people who were born in the mid-nineties. Why group these together? Because I think there’s some similarities between these two water Saturn generations.
I’ve noticed that both Saturn in Scorpio people and Saturn in Pisces people can, well, tend to give everything about themselves towards their purpose. It’s almost as though they don’t trust that they genuinely care about an issue unless they burn themselves. They can be purist in terms of their commitments, understanding the world as people who are with them on their issue or against them. Saturn in water people are devoted people and they can sometimes see that devotion as something that needs to be protected at all costs.
Saturn in Pisces tends to have more feet in more pods. They tend to want to abolish more systems and to enact more changes. They’re not just focused on one issue but on several. They want to address wealth inequality, sexism, racism, and everything else. Saturn in Scorpio people tend to be way more focused on one, singular issue that they devote their lives to.
What these two Saturn generations can teach each other is perspective. It’s not that Saturn in Pisces wants to work on too many issues—it’s that every issue is rooted in capitalism. It’s not that Saturn in Scorpio is too obsessed with one issue—it’s that, by doing focused work on their one issue, they can touch on all oppressions because all oppressions are linked together.
Saturn in Pisces people are very disillusioned. They were young kids who were learning about the world during the Bush years. Saturn in Scorpio is the Daria generation. They grew up during the nineties when everything was supposedly good and happy but there was a crisis simmering under the surface. Both these two Saturn placements actually care a lot. However, both may have experienced situations where their care was used against them and outwardly act like they don’t care just to get by.
Saturn in Sagittarius/Saturn in Gemini: Discourse
Saturn in Sagittarius people are extremely frustrated with institutions. A lot of Saturn in Sagittarius people, if they went to college, went to college at a time when college was getting more expensive, becoming almost mandatory for certain job sectors, and right when the Supreme Court passed a law making affirmative action mandatory for colleges. So, a lot of people of color with this placement are first time college goers. A lot of white people with this placement went to school with more diversity than their parents.
Saturn in Gemini people are only about eighteen or nineteen right now. A lot of them are not going to college. A lot of them are choosing whether they want to go to college at a time when classes are literally just $40,000 online courses due to COVID-19. A lot of them are marxist-leninists because of Twitter.
A lot of Saturn in Sagittarius people, at the time of writing, are post Saturn return and at a place where they’re starting to gather some power in institutions like non-profits, schools, or companies. A lot of Saturn in Gemini people...are frustrated with the Saturn in Sagittarius generation and how they see this generation as representing certain issues. They may not understand that, when Saturn in Sagittarius was growing up, change was being enacted within institutions. Saturn in Sagittarius may not understand that Saturn in Gemini is growing up in an era where it’s almost impossible to differentiate institutions from brands online, a place where information is confusing and there is no memory.
Both Saturn in Sagittarius and Gemini people actually share a common problem, which is that they can often feel like their political ideals exceed the resources or options that they have at their disposal. They can both have a hard time communicating their issues to even the people closest to them, Saturn in Sagittarius because a lot of the language they had when growing up around mobilizing was so academic and Saturn in Gemini because the language they have around social issues is so subcultural.
What both these planets bring to the table is the knowledge that anything in life, and that includes social change, must be a learning process. Saturn in Sagittarius and Gemini people always want to learn. They want to talk, discuss, read, and think. Learning also happens in a hands on way. These Saturn generations are people who need to be able to make mistakes and say the wrong things before they’re able to learn.
Saturn in Aries/Saturn in Taurus: Scammed
Saturn is in fall in Aries. A lot of Saturn in Aries people really do not trust any kind of authority figure (and Saturn in detriment or fall often does become an authority figure since authority is just the expression of community as oppression). They’re basically all punks. This generation wants to just throw the whole world away and start from scratch. These people were teens when Occupy Wall Street was going on. They’re not fazed by burning some buildings and know the police to be very brutal.
Saturn in Taurus people are just a few years younger than Aries Saturn people. Saturn in Taurus is the first generation to have a sizable number decide to not pursue any higher education, or take on any debt, because there was so much activity revealing college to be a scam. As Saturn in Taurus people grow up, a lot of them are growing up in an age where there’s a lot of pressure to monetize their existence in whatever way that they can online. While Saturn in Aries, like we established, are profoundly dissatisfied, a lot of them did take on debt and went to school even though they might have done so knowing that they would be more likely indebted for life because school was presented as the only path towards earning a living. That’s why a lot of them are so mad.
Both Saturn in Aries and Taurus feel...a bit scammed by society. While Saturn in Aries wants to do something about it right now, Saturn in Taurus wants to build a sustainable revolution. While Saturn in Taurus is more concerned about making money, Saturn in Aries owes huge debts and feels that money is just a tool of the oppressor. Now that both of these scammed generations are growing up, they’re concerned with scamming institutions back. Saturn in Aries and Taurus is Saturn in the sign of the Sun and Moon’s exaltation. They want to take back what was taken and make it their own.
