Once in a while, I read/hear an astrologer reference an inherant cold touch that stems from a Saturn placement. (I think this stretches to mundane also?) What is this about? What about Saturn cools social interaction? The kind I mean is avoiding or exiting social situations. I've heard about this with Moon, Venus, Sun-Saturn contact, I think the Lights and the three personal planets.
Years ago, I found a chart with a tight Venus-Saturn trine. Back then, I thought 'trine is good' and expected only positive results. This person proved very prudent with money (not 'tight-fisted' just prudent) and stable and steady in love. But the person ... had no interest in friendship. Watching potential friends try to connect with that person was like waiting for a response to a signal sent into space. This is just one example, I don't base it all on this.
Can anyone enlighten about the cold, social Saturn touch?
I can relate to this, since I've often wondered/been bothered by whether or to what extent I'm a "cold" person. [Birthdata: Nov. 2, 1945 at 12:55 am Central Standard Time, 88W06, 37N40, with the Nonagesimal (NG) about 3° Gemini, therefore the ASC about 3° Virgo.] The presumably relevant configurations are Mars conjunct Saturn, Venus square Saturn, and Mercury trine Saturn. Although I'm very friendly and will go out of my way to help people I've never made friends easily, am a loner, and in childhood was described as "slow to warm up". I'm still slow to warm up. I have to be around someone for weeks or months before I let my guard down enough to be comfortable, natural, and more or less spontaneous in their presence. So much of the time when I'm around people I feel like I'm standing back and observing, even to the point of observing myself interacting with others. There's also the fact that I like to read and ruminate, or just ruminate, which requires being alone or at least uninterrupted, so I do like being alone at least part of the time. But I think it's the acute self-consciousness and sense of always being an observer, even when I'm interacting with others, that acts as a buffer between them and me and accounts for people thinking I'm distant, cold, or even unfriendly until they get to know me. As one co-worker recently observed, "You never said anything until I hugged you, and then you started talking."
That's description but you asked for enlightenment, and at one level I can simply note that people with Mars conjunct Saturn, according to my current understanding and belief, tend to be introspective, self-conscious and inhibited, with much of the above being the experiential side of that. For a better understanding we need a better understanding of Saturn per se, in the context of astrology, and I think one of the best ways to get it is via developmental psychology. Age transits occur at the same age for everyone and developmental psychology, to a significant degree, is about what happens at what age, so the latter can be usefully viewed as research on age transits by members of a field which is more epistemologically advanced than our own. We would do well to incorporate their insights, even if not quite in the way that they might prefer.
The twin giants of cognitive developmental psychology are Jean Piaget and Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, with the latter's ideas especially, even startlingly, relevant to astrology. Piaget posited a sensorimotor stage running from birth to (from our perspective) the first Mars Return at about 21 to 24 months, a preoperational stage that lasts until the Saturn square Saturn transit at 6-7, a concrete operational stage that runs until the first Jupiter Return at 11½-12, and a formal operational stage that begins at the Jupiter Return and continues into adulthood. (Lifespan developmental psychologists, most notably Daniel Levinson in
Seasons of Man's Life and later in
Seasons of a Woman's Life, have posited additional turning points beginning with a transition to adulthood at 18 to 22 (Uranus square natal Uranus), a transition to middle adulthood at 38 to 43-44 (Uranus opposite Uranus), a transition to late adulthood at 60 to 65 (Uranus square Uranus), and a more speculative transition to late, late adulthood in the early 80s (the Uranus Return), with briefer turning points at 28-29, 36-37, 43-44, 50, etc. coinciding with Saturn's hard-angle transits to its natal place.) Piaget's major stages end and begin at the first Mars Return, at Saturn opening square Saturn, and at the first Jupiter Return, suggesting that transitions from one stage to the next occur during those transits, but Piaget doesn't have much to say about the transitions per se. Vygotsky does. He posits an alternating series of relatively lengthy stable periods, which coincide with the periods
between transits, and relatively brief critical periods, which coincide with the periods
of transits. His stages include Crisis of the newborn; Infancy (two months to 1 year); Crisis at age one; Early childhood (1 to 3 years); Crisis at age three; Preschool age (3 to 7 years); Crisis at age seven; School age (8 to 12 years); Crisis at age thirteen; Age of puberty (14 to 18 years); and Crisis at age seventeen. (There are problems with the last three, but that need not concern us here.)
The crisis at age three, like the crisis at age one, doesn't last an entire year but might be better characterized as the crisis at the
turn to age three, since it begins slightly before and ends not long after the third birthday. At that time the child develops the ability to have one thing stand for another. This is the birth of imagination, with a long stick or broom handle being the horse the young boy rides as he chases the bad guys. It's the birth of narrative, in which a series of actions are linked in the child's mind into a whole, going-to-the-store, for instance, or playing-with-Jamie, or taking-my-baby-to-see-the-doctor. It's the birth of will, because now the child can anticipate an activity and hold to that desire. The child at this age is often stubborn, refusing to change her mind even when it would be advantageous to do so. It's because she's learning to
have a will, to not be deflected by others from what she wants from one moment to the next. The younger child doesn't have a will in this sense. She sees a ball she rolls or drops it. A door gets opened and closed. Each object she encounters evokes a response. Perception and motivation have not yet differentiated into separate psychological functions. This changes at the turn to age 3, when for the first time the child is able to
decide what she wants to do, and the things she wants to do aren't simple actions but activities, as described above. Further developments along the same line occur at 6 and 9, with climactic developments, the full flowering of imagination and the development of what-if hypothesizing, occurring during the first Jupiter Return.
From not long (a couple of months or so?) before the 7th birthday and continuing until about 7½ or so the child develops a persona, a self-image she tries to live up to. Vygotsky notes that the child seems affected, even phoney at this age, and no wonder. This is his first crude attempt at projecting a self-image, something adults do with much greater skill and subtlety. We all wear a mask, the self we want to be and want to be seen as, but we adults are a lot less obvious about it. (We may even have a persona that says we don't have a persona, in which we're "just ourselves". Ahem.)
The preceding is context for Vygotsky's critique of Piaget's concept of egocentric speech, which enables us to sharpen the distinction between Jupiter and Saturn in the human psyche. In egocentric speech the child says things like: It go there. Push it. She like that. No, don't do that. The child is unable to get outside herself and put herself in the other person's shoes, so that she can anticipate what the other person needs to know in order to make sense of what she's saying. Piaget argued that between 2 and 7 egocentric speech gradually dies out and is replaced by social speech, in which the child is able to put herself in the other person's shoes when she's communicating. Vygotsky offered an alternate account of the genesis, function and fate of egocentric speech. He noted first of all that egocentric speech doesn't gradually die out between 2 and 7 but actually increases and becomes even more telescoped before it more or less abruptly disappears [when Saturn squares its natal place]. It also increases when the child is engaged in a particularly difficult task. Vygotsky argued that the child's speech doesn't
become social but is social from the beginning. At the turn to age 3 it splits into two functions, the original, social speech-for-others and a new function, speech-for-oneself. The child who says things like: It go there. She wants it, and so forth isn't trying to communicate with someone else, although she doesn't yet realize it. She's talking her way through a difficult task by telling herself what to do. She's thinking out loud (the only way she know to do it, because talking to herself with words is a new function). As she grows older she does this more often, that is, thinks more, and her "egocentric speech" becomes even more telescoped because
she doesn't need the verbal clues that an "outsider" needs to make sense of what she's saying. It doesn't need to be out loud, either, and at 7, as she finally clearly understands who she's talking to, herself, it goes underground and becomes Silent Speech, the speech in our heads that from that point on is perceived simply as thinking. It is only at that point that she can keep her thoughts to herself — she no longer "thinks"
only out loud — and it's only at that point that she can lie to others (part of the process of maintaining a persona/public face/self-image).
From the preceding and from other considerations (can't put it all in one post) I believe that the psyche consists of a set of functions of different temporal wavelengths which match the periods of the planets (and Sun and Moon). Just as different wavelengths of light are experienced as different colors, different temporal wavelengths are experienced as different psychological functions. What Freud called the ego, Jung the persona, Maslow esteem needs and Erikson industry vs inferiority is simply a part of the psyche that comes to the forefront at 7⅓-year intervals, which
we call the Saturn cycle. The 3-year intervals, in contrast, correspond to Freud's id and ourJupiter cycle, what we want to do rather than what we think we ought to do. These functions/periodicities interact with one another, not only predictively but also in a natal context. I don't think that the angular distances between the planets in the natal chart magically confer attributes. Rather, as I see it the natal chart is a time framework. Take Mars conjunct Saturn. Every time a person with this natal aspect has Mars conjoining, squaring, or opposing its natal place she
simultaneously has Mars conjoining, squaring, or opposing natal Saturn. Every time she feels dissatisfaction with her daily routine (Mars/Mars), and the urge to do something about it, she also feels inhibited by the social consequences of her possible actions (Mars/Saturn), which limits or channels what she ends up doing. Bit by bit, transit by transit a propensity, a personality pattern, builds up. It doesn't mean every person with this aspect will characteristically behave the same way. If we posit, for instance, that a characteristic of this conjunction is fear of humiliation, of being made to look the fool, one person might be extraordinarily careful, crossing all her t's and dotting every i, while another might accomplish the same end by being evasive and hard to pin down. The same aspect doesn't necessarily predict the same external behavior, only the same underlying cause or challenge for whatever behavior
is characteristic.
Return now to the notion of cold, social touch. There are different kinds of coldness which would therefore have different roots. The sociopath (I prefer psychopath but many people confuse that with psychotic, which is what we're referring to when we say someone is psycho) has weak emotions and never develops empathy or a conscience, and is therefore ruthless and totally out for number one. This person will be perceived as cold but I 'm not sure it has anything to do with Saturn. But a person who's perceived as cold, distant, standoffish might be someone with a Mars/Saturn aspect, or with some other Saturn aspect that has a different but similar effect. For the Mars/Saturn person I suspect that having her actions filtered through social consequence considerations — How will this make me look? How will people react if I say or do such and such? — might make her seem calculating and cold, even though she might be deeply empathetic, generous, kind, etc. And it might be that other Saturn aspects, for instance Moon/Saturn and perhaps especially Venus/Saturn, will seem cold in a related but not identical sense for related but not identical reasons. (See my article
After Symbolism for further details on some of the issues raised here.)
