Saturn, Sun of the Golden Age
The Darkness who was really the Light...
Saturn is light, because Saturn is visible - the ruler of form - and all form is light vibrating in some frequency.
Saturn is the gate for the Formless to take Form by moving toward the Sun. Saturn is the Gate to the Underworld and the non-dual which is beyond form, as we move out beyond Saturn into the depths of space. Beyond Saturn are those planets which do not directly rule the physical, while from Saturn to Sun are the planets that rule form and duality. Saturn is often pictured as riding upon a dragon, and sometimes as a dragon. That dragon has become the dweller in the darkness in the times after the Golden Age, but in the Golden Age, that dragon was an emanation of the Sun, benevolent giver of light and life, much as the dragon is seen in Asia to this day. The European view of the dragon hoarding gold and treasure in a deep, dark cave, ill-tempered and representative of evil is a manifestation of the poor view held of Saturn himself, and all that the dragon represents. Yet it was not always so...
In the myths of the Golden Age, as told by the Greeks and Romans, Saturn didn't require humans to worship him in subservience. When Jupiter (Zeus) took the throne from Saturn, he overthrew the Golden Age, forcing man to toil, to suffer, to live short, brutal lives and to die in suffering, because he felt they were unworthy of the benevolence Saturn (Cronus) had shown them. He set up religious worship, forcing humans to worship him in subservience, to remind them of their place. Some of the sources for the stories of the Golden Age come from Hesiod's 'Works and Days', Plato's 'Cratylus', Virgil's fourth 'Eclogue', 'Aeneid' and 'Georgics', and in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'.
Here is what Hesiod said about the Golden Age under the rule of Cronus: "[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace."
The stories tell us that in the Golden Age humans lived in peace and plenty, with harmony and prosperity, stability and did not farm for their food. I have wondered for years if these stories don't recount some cultural memory of the time before the Younger Dryas and the advent of agriculture, when the great herds still existed throughout the Old World and mankind lived in small bands that moved about following the herds. They would have know where to gather the food they needed in addition to the meat that was abundantly available, and the relatively small populations, moving about a large territory, lived in a paradise of sorts. Archeologists suggest that these people had far more leisure time than their domesticated descendants, right down to modern times, and that they actually were taller and healthier, better fed with higher quality foods, than their descendants in the Neolithic right through to the modern era, when modern agricultural methods increased the nutrient level for large parts of the human race.
We are told by Virgil in Georgics that, "Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen. To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line. Even this was impious; for the common stock. They gathered, and the earth of her own will. All things more freely, no man bidding, bore." Ovid in the Metamorphoses tell us that, "The Golden Age was first; when Man, yet new, No rule but uncorrupted Reason knew: And, with a native bent, did good pursue. Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear. His words were simple, and his soul sincere; Needless was written law, where none opprest: The law of Man was written in his breast."
Another interesting aspect of the stories of the Golden Age is that we are told in some versions that the goddess Astraea was the ruler, or co-ruler with Cronus (Saturn), of the Golden Age. Astraea was the daughter of Astraeus (an astronomical and astrological god) and Eos (a goddess of the sun and especially sunrise). She was said to have remained on earth with humans, after the Golden Age and into the Silver Age (some myths say into the Bronze or even the Iron age), when she finally left due to men having become violent and greedy. She was said to have fled to the stars where she became one of the stars in the constellation Virgo. There is so much to unpack with that story!
I hardly know where to begin, as I see so much in that little-known story of Astraea and her role in the Golden Age. First, I have long thought that the main deity of the Golden Age was a goddess, and likely a Solar and/or Stellar Goddess. I thought this before I had encountered the story of Astraea, daughter of the Stars and the Sun and ruler of the Golden Age. The constellation Virgo is the sign that is on the Vernal Equinox during the Yuga gold age, with the precessional Age of Virgo falling at the high point of the ascending Yuga gold age, and into the beginning of the descending Yuga gold age. Virgo then is both the symbol of the Goddess and the point where the central point of the Yuga gold age actually falls.
Saturn (Cronus) may have been a consort of this Golden Age goddess, or in the later patriarchal age, his invention may have been a way to assign maleness to this female deity, to claim her place for the patriarchy. Then Zeus (Jupiter) could castrate this god, making him a eunuch (associated with priests of various goddesses) and reign as the god of the age. This story may reveal its relation to a goddess in the mind of the Greeks and Romans who told these tales. Finally, it is said that Astraea stayed on earth for a time after the Golden Age had ended. This is extremely interesting to me, because archeology and written records show that the further back you go in time, the more prominent goddesses become.
In the Yuga ascending silver age (7,000 b.c.e. to 3,000 b.c.e approx.) the turn toward patriarchy began in earnest and genetics has revealed a mass bottleneck that occurred to the Y-chromosome lines of humans in the Old World, indicating mass war and murder of male lineages at that time. War and greed only increase as we move further down the descending Yuga ages, just as the stories attribute as the reason Astraea left, to reside in the constellation of the Golden Age Goddess (Virgo). Whether she left in the descending Yuga silver, bronze or iron age, we know that throughout this time war, greed and patriarchy increased, with the old goddesses loosing their power and prestige, their standing in the world. By the end of the descending Yuga iron age, the goddess had truly flown to the stars and away from mankind. Interestingly, wherever we find the goddess we find the serpent and the dragon, and (sadly) wherever we find the diminishment of the goddess, we find the demonization of the great dragon, all that is seen as feminine and a general disdain for all things Saturnian in favor of the patriarchal and Jupiterian.
The association of Saturn with the Sun in the Golden Age seems very curious to me. I have long thought about what this could mean. I have read various theories about galactic impacts, huge changes of the solar system that resulted in a different solar system layout in our age, etc., but I wonder if there isn't a much easier explanation. If the Sun is the center of our solar system and Saturn is the furthest of the visible planets in that system as viewed from earth, perhaps what is being hinted at is that the deities of the Golden Age were the Sun and Saturn, the inside and outside of our local area of the sky, with the Sun as the Goddess, shedding her life-giving light upon earth, and Saturn, as the last visible planet, the god guarding and creating the border to reality within our solar system, bringing the far cosmic energies down to earth. In other words, Saturn is the 'sun of the Golden Age', because it joins the outer heavens to the Sun, with the earth sitting between the two, given the energy of both. I am not saying this is a fact. I am not trying to convince you of anything, but I see this as plausible and it doesn't require some grand, unprovable event. It is a simple interpretation of what is there in the sky.
If Saturn was the guardian of the heavens, bringing down the cosmic energy, far away at the border of the stars and the 'sun' bringing down higher awareness and cosmic knowledge, while the Sun was the life-giving light providing bounty to the physical world, then you have the Great Goddess and her consort as the boundaries of the sky creating all of reality the fell in between - the visible planets and the earth, and all life upon it. The Goddess fled after the Golden Age, driven out by the violence and greed of men, and so now we have left Saturn, the castrated and lame former god of the Golden Age, riding upon a golden dragon, a hint and reminder of the past, and what the real symbols of the Golden Age were.
The thoughts I expressed above are, of course, just speculation, and not meant to be taken as anything else, even though I have the gut-level feeling that there is something to that speculation. Regardless, we will now turn back to Saturn, and look at what the planet has to offer us, when we turn to his energy as the King and Sun of the Golden Age, rather than a lame, old tyrant who only wants to hold us down. When we turn to Saturn the benevolent, he has much to offer.
So how do we move past the limiting vision of Saturn to find the benevolent aspects? Well, first, we need to check our beliefs about Saturn. The stories we have of Saturn were given to us by Jupiter's representatives. They surely aren't Saturn's stories about himself! They are the stories of the victor defining the defeated. The stories are defined to make Saturn sound terrible, and Jupiter sound better, but Saturn gave humans a golden age, while Jupiter overthrew that golden age and brought about human suffering and the hierarchal age following the Golden Age. Now, I want to be clear, I do not know if there is any literality to the story of the ages, but metaphorically and symbolically, they offer very interesting insight. They are also useful in considering the span of human history, because whatever their literality, they offer some representative meaning about where we have come from and the changes the human race has gone through over its long history.
When we start to deconstruct the stories told about Saturn, let's start with the story that 'limitations' are 'bad'. Limitations are extremely helpful, and the only folks who see them as bad are those who are invested in never-ending expansion. Limitations offer us the ability to develop patience, and patience is the most valuable thing you will ever gain. More valuable than gold or jewels, patience will always carry you through, and it is the ultimate gift of Saturn, awarded through enduring limitations.
I could go on and on, because for every "negative" trait assigned to Saturn, I could tell you how that 'negative' is powerful and positive. Instead of doing that and rattling on for several more paragraphs, I simply want to close with this. The key to unpacking the Golden Wisdom, and all the gifts that Saturn has to offer, is access Saturn's knowledge. Saturn rules wisdom, knowledge and especially Hidden Wisdom. Access the wisdom and knowledge to be found inside and outside of yourself, and you will have found the doorway to Saturn's Golden Gifts.
In the myths of the Golden Age, as told by the Greeks and Romans, Saturn didn't require humans to worship him in subservience. When Jupiter (Zeus) took the throne from Saturn, he overthrew the Golden Age, forcing man to toil, to suffer, to live short, brutal lives and to die in suffering, because he felt they were unworthy of the benevolence Saturn (Cronus) had shown them. He set up religious worship, forcing humans to worship him in subservience, to remind them of their place. Some of the sources for the stories of the Golden Age come from Hesiod's 'Works and Days', Plato's 'Cratylus', Virgil's fourth 'Eclogue', 'Aeneid' and 'Georgics', and in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'.
Here is what Hesiod said about the Golden Age under the rule of Cronus: "[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace."
The stories tell us that in the Golden Age humans lived in peace and plenty, with harmony and prosperity, stability and did not farm for their food. I have wondered for years if these stories don't recount some cultural memory of the time before the Younger Dryas and the advent of agriculture, when the great herds still existed throughout the Old World and mankind lived in small bands that moved about following the herds. They would have know where to gather the food they needed in addition to the meat that was abundantly available, and the relatively small populations, moving about a large territory, lived in a paradise of sorts. Archeologists suggest that these people had far more leisure time than their domesticated descendants, right down to modern times, and that they actually were taller and healthier, better fed with higher quality foods, than their descendants in the Neolithic right through to the modern era, when modern agricultural methods increased the nutrient level for large parts of the human race.
We are told by Virgil in Georgics that, "Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen. To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line. Even this was impious; for the common stock. They gathered, and the earth of her own will. All things more freely, no man bidding, bore." Ovid in the Metamorphoses tell us that, "The Golden Age was first; when Man, yet new, No rule but uncorrupted Reason knew: And, with a native bent, did good pursue. Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear. His words were simple, and his soul sincere; Needless was written law, where none opprest: The law of Man was written in his breast."
Another interesting aspect of the stories of the Golden Age is that we are told in some versions that the goddess Astraea was the ruler, or co-ruler with Cronus (Saturn), of the Golden Age. Astraea was the daughter of Astraeus (an astronomical and astrological god) and Eos (a goddess of the sun and especially sunrise). She was said to have remained on earth with humans, after the Golden Age and into the Silver Age (some myths say into the Bronze or even the Iron age), when she finally left due to men having become violent and greedy. She was said to have fled to the stars where she became one of the stars in the constellation Virgo. There is so much to unpack with that story!
I hardly know where to begin, as I see so much in that little-known story of Astraea and her role in the Golden Age. First, I have long thought that the main deity of the Golden Age was a goddess, and likely a Solar and/or Stellar Goddess. I thought this before I had encountered the story of Astraea, daughter of the Stars and the Sun and ruler of the Golden Age. The constellation Virgo is the sign that is on the Vernal Equinox during the Yuga gold age, with the precessional Age of Virgo falling at the high point of the ascending Yuga gold age, and into the beginning of the descending Yuga gold age. Virgo then is both the symbol of the Goddess and the point where the central point of the Yuga gold age actually falls.
Saturn (Cronus) may have been a consort of this Golden Age goddess, or in the later patriarchal age, his invention may have been a way to assign maleness to this female deity, to claim her place for the patriarchy. Then Zeus (Jupiter) could castrate this god, making him a eunuch (associated with priests of various goddesses) and reign as the god of the age. This story may reveal its relation to a goddess in the mind of the Greeks and Romans who told these tales. Finally, it is said that Astraea stayed on earth for a time after the Golden Age had ended. This is extremely interesting to me, because archeology and written records show that the further back you go in time, the more prominent goddesses become.
In the Yuga ascending silver age (7,000 b.c.e. to 3,000 b.c.e approx.) the turn toward patriarchy began in earnest and genetics has revealed a mass bottleneck that occurred to the Y-chromosome lines of humans in the Old World, indicating mass war and murder of male lineages at that time. War and greed only increase as we move further down the descending Yuga ages, just as the stories attribute as the reason Astraea left, to reside in the constellation of the Golden Age Goddess (Virgo). Whether she left in the descending Yuga silver, bronze or iron age, we know that throughout this time war, greed and patriarchy increased, with the old goddesses loosing their power and prestige, their standing in the world. By the end of the descending Yuga iron age, the goddess had truly flown to the stars and away from mankind. Interestingly, wherever we find the goddess we find the serpent and the dragon, and (sadly) wherever we find the diminishment of the goddess, we find the demonization of the great dragon, all that is seen as feminine and a general disdain for all things Saturnian in favor of the patriarchal and Jupiterian.
The association of Saturn with the Sun in the Golden Age seems very curious to me. I have long thought about what this could mean. I have read various theories about galactic impacts, huge changes of the solar system that resulted in a different solar system layout in our age, etc., but I wonder if there isn't a much easier explanation. If the Sun is the center of our solar system and Saturn is the furthest of the visible planets in that system as viewed from earth, perhaps what is being hinted at is that the deities of the Golden Age were the Sun and Saturn, the inside and outside of our local area of the sky, with the Sun as the Goddess, shedding her life-giving light upon earth, and Saturn, as the last visible planet, the god guarding and creating the border to reality within our solar system, bringing the far cosmic energies down to earth. In other words, Saturn is the 'sun of the Golden Age', because it joins the outer heavens to the Sun, with the earth sitting between the two, given the energy of both. I am not saying this is a fact. I am not trying to convince you of anything, but I see this as plausible and it doesn't require some grand, unprovable event. It is a simple interpretation of what is there in the sky.
If Saturn was the guardian of the heavens, bringing down the cosmic energy, far away at the border of the stars and the 'sun' bringing down higher awareness and cosmic knowledge, while the Sun was the life-giving light providing bounty to the physical world, then you have the Great Goddess and her consort as the boundaries of the sky creating all of reality the fell in between - the visible planets and the earth, and all life upon it. The Goddess fled after the Golden Age, driven out by the violence and greed of men, and so now we have left Saturn, the castrated and lame former god of the Golden Age, riding upon a golden dragon, a hint and reminder of the past, and what the real symbols of the Golden Age were.
The thoughts I expressed above are, of course, just speculation, and not meant to be taken as anything else, even though I have the gut-level feeling that there is something to that speculation. Regardless, we will now turn back to Saturn, and look at what the planet has to offer us, when we turn to his energy as the King and Sun of the Golden Age, rather than a lame, old tyrant who only wants to hold us down. When we turn to Saturn the benevolent, he has much to offer.
So how do we move past the limiting vision of Saturn to find the benevolent aspects? Well, first, we need to check our beliefs about Saturn. The stories we have of Saturn were given to us by Jupiter's representatives. They surely aren't Saturn's stories about himself! They are the stories of the victor defining the defeated. The stories are defined to make Saturn sound terrible, and Jupiter sound better, but Saturn gave humans a golden age, while Jupiter overthrew that golden age and brought about human suffering and the hierarchal age following the Golden Age. Now, I want to be clear, I do not know if there is any literality to the story of the ages, but metaphorically and symbolically, they offer very interesting insight. They are also useful in considering the span of human history, because whatever their literality, they offer some representative meaning about where we have come from and the changes the human race has gone through over its long history.
When we start to deconstruct the stories told about Saturn, let's start with the story that 'limitations' are 'bad'. Limitations are extremely helpful, and the only folks who see them as bad are those who are invested in never-ending expansion. Limitations offer us the ability to develop patience, and patience is the most valuable thing you will ever gain. More valuable than gold or jewels, patience will always carry you through, and it is the ultimate gift of Saturn, awarded through enduring limitations.
I could go on and on, because for every "negative" trait assigned to Saturn, I could tell you how that 'negative' is powerful and positive. Instead of doing that and rattling on for several more paragraphs, I simply want to close with this. The key to unpacking the Golden Wisdom, and all the gifts that Saturn has to offer, is access Saturn's knowledge. Saturn rules wisdom, knowledge and especially Hidden Wisdom. Access the wisdom and knowledge to be found inside and outside of yourself, and you will have found the doorway to Saturn's Golden Gifts.
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