The Gold of Saturn – Chronos, Kairos and Aion – The Secret of the Sacred Mountain

I love Saturn. Saturn is such a complex, mysterious, and heavy, intense yet somehow fleeting energy, that it is easy to choose only one perspective to look at it. Instead, Saturn holds a dignity which deserves more attention, more depth. Here some reflections, blessed by the mysterium coniunctionis among many of the protagonist energies of my spiritual path, I felt called to honour this Elder, the personification of Time.

Seen from the highest perspective possible, that of our immortal soul, who does not know time and space, Saturn might really appear like a weird, alien creature who acts in ways which are totally inexplicable to the eternity within us. What are limitations? What does all this linear time forced journey mean? Why do we have to wait? Why do we have to be stuck, oppressed, isolated, rejected? Cut down to our very bones, as one of the I Ching readings fairly says, to the core of our bare being?

As I write, Saturn is currently engaged in a conversation with Venus, in a square in the collectively created sky. Those who paid attention at the conjunction at the beginning of the year might recall those energies. Venus is so powerful, but mellow and sweet, how elegant for her to bring a little pleasure to the tormented Scorpios like me. And despite what all the collective psyche attempts to project against her in our deep waters sign, her grace will not be diminished or offended by us. Every Scorpio loves Venus, exactly how she brings love wherever she goes and renders everything more acceptable, softer.

Saturn has already endured her reproach against the absurd one-sided position which he stubbornly holds in structural human life, preferring the male dominance to the balanced power-couple leadership. A call for equality in the Great Work was already launched by the Great One: The Red Work is still waiting.

Saturn is time - but what is time? Sure, it is Chronos, the linear aspect, cause-effect unchangeable chain which leads our incarnated existence here, beats with our hearts until we leave the body. But it is also Kairos, the time without time, axial, which leads us to experience something which does not seem to possess temporality in our material life. Those moments (we all experience them) are stuck in our memory and will stay there forever. Because time was not there. Or better, it was there, sure, but we did not sense it. We were lost in another quality of the moment, which was not linked to thoughts like “this is going to end”. There was no space for time - there was just space and eternity. Kairos has recently been quoted by an artist who was performing through this value of time, with no pre-arranged schedule. It was then cited again by someone who wrote an article about some concepts linked to time and the evolution of consciousness. It is good to see that consciousness is awakening in this respect.

Kairos is a moment with no time, in which the fullness of life fills all the gaps in our thoughts and sensations, so that nothing else but creativity and pure life force is emanating within us and around us. The ancient Greek name Kairos attests that the ancients indeed understood that time had different qualities…

And then there is the more famous Aion. The eternal, the no-time, no-space reality, that from which our very soul (spirit or whatever you prefer to call it) looks down on us and does not seem to understand what’s going on.

Saturn and saturnian people usually move from a baseline thought of scarcity linked with shame and directed primarily towards themselves. Since shame represents the attempt to hide this vulnerability, very often externally created by traumatic experiences and abuse, the natural reaction is isolation. Some souls tend to follow a vicious cycle and sometimes fall into depression, with great suffering for themselves and their loved ones who have no tools to rescue them from their “cave”, on top of which they have built themselves a rock strong towering shell.

But saturnian souls are the only ones who deeply know the power of Silence, and how glorious the manifestation appears to their humble, pure ears. They have dug deeper and deeper in their very Souls, searching for the Stone. They know how to light the candle to soothe the fear of the dark, solid and tangible black loneliness. They might be able to possess the Keys for the real Alchemical Work. Saturn is associated with Capricorn and the dark, cold earth of winter - The love I feel for this image is so powerful that it turns into pure desire, even if I hate the cold and the silence…

And then… what to do when there are blockages, when the system is stubbornly slow, mechanical, manically obsessed on tiny little cogs of the conspicuous machine? Counting their money all over again a thousand times, being convinced that there is never going to be enough? That there are priorities which do not include themselves, and therefore, anyone else? that they HAVE to be alone, fighting alone, struggling alone, and no, they won’t ask for help, and if they do, they will test you all over again a thousand times before discarding you as not good enough… EH! and what about the mistakes, the mistakes of others which cause delay in obtaining a goal for which you have been working hard?

The mistake that we can do is giving up. This is the bitter medicine of Saturn.

All the hardships which Saturn brings hide an opportunity. Even the most hideous ones – losses and grieving. Having worked so hard and seeing that our success is not going into fruition. The opportunity in disguise hides behind pain and suffering. We need to be honest - it is hard to have Saturn strong in your chart - those who do not have it, simply cannot understand what kind of limits Saturn causes in the accomplishment and satisfaction of primary needs in all areas of life (emotional, physical, mental). But there is one area in which Saturn is the most generous of the planets, and that is the Spiritual plane.

If you have been reading this blog, you know I do not subscribe to the simplistic view of Karma in general, but even more specifically I do not believe it is possible to say that people who have an “heavy Saturn” have bad and heavy Karma. And that I think would be quite a serious mistake: we live everyday on our skin the consequence of this error, but it is the time perspective which is the most relevant. You see, if we keep on justifying the abusers with the victims’ bad karma, we are the abusers. Humanity will not heal until we move out of this corrupt reasoning for a simple reason. If we are still stuck in Chronos, as if we still need to pay (and in this way confirming the bad karma forever) something for our “sins”, then, yes, there would be good reasons to believe we are imprisoned in a Hell called earth.

Dante Alighieri (the greatest of all Italian Poets in my opinion), expressed this very well in his Divine Comedy. Only Hell and Heaven are Eternal. The punishment will be performed endlessly in Hell, forever and ever amen and repeatedly, to cheer up the bored Luciferus, who sits at the bottom of the pit. And at the same time, in Heaven the souls sing endlessly the praise of the Almighty, forever and ever amen! But this would have been quite weird for the real initiates, used to know how many traditional characters were remembered for their entry and exit from the underworld, and of souls brought down and brought back, or directly sent to the sky. Dante then initiates the real Revolution. The extent of his revolutionary creation is unprecedented and plants the very seed for the destruction of the Old Paradigm (yes, I said this again, but if you despise your intellect, and of course others using it, you would not have read until here!) by introducing TIME flowing in between Hell and Heaven - in the Purgatory. It is not like you get to Purgatory and have a fresh stroll. It is a mountain, yes, a MOUNTAIN to climb while getting rid of all the filth accumulated in our soul before entering Heaven. Purgatory has HOPE. Purgatory is not “justifying the abuse because you deserve it” and therefore “you will never be healed, we will make sure your trauma is repeated so that you get stuck here forever and ever hmmm how pleasant to torture you!”, that is HELL, the immutable thinking which stays stuck on just one circular way of thinking about time. Purgatory is saying “you know you have done bad things, and you wish to let them go to reach the heights: welcome. It will be hard, VERY hard, but your soul knows about the real prize”. And time passes, becomes linear, it moves upwards in a spiraling path to the top of the mountain, and with every step we take to the top of the mountain it gives us another trial, another test. New tears, new pain, new suffering. Echoing a little the endless torture we saw in Hell, but with another GOAL: we have forgiven ourselves. We can forgive others. The pain slowly leaves, it is lighter, it is different, there is no such a tremendous certainty of the eternal damnation and its terrible despair as it is for the Souls who stubbornly do not intend to evolve. There are healthier ways to carry ourselves on this planet. Suffering is for everyone, Saturn is for everyone. Those who choose it, though, can transcend, by a mere act of free will, from the circular traps of the Devil, to climb the Saturnian Sacred Mountain, an archetype linked with Capricorn, I would say not by chance.

Maybe, the “earth prison”, as some have defined it, will stay in place only until those who enjoy practicing “punishment” on others actually stop and realize what is the real nourishment of the Soul.

To all those souls down in Hell, I love you.

Those who are looking for victory have lost sight of the goal.

Art: Dante e il suo poema – Domenico di Michelino, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze (1465). PLEASE NOTE that the Divine Comedy was written in the 13th century AD. Oh by the way, Dante was a Gemini Sun- Seems fair, right? Let's go baby.

Very selected - transits: Venus in Scorpio square Saturn in Aquarius. Saturn conjunct natal Jupiter: Mainly channeling this energy.