Growing Pains: The Saturn Return and Quarter Squares

Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer, Oct-Dec 2021

All transits invite us to grow further into ourselves, each planet in its own way. Jupiter, for example, motivates by giving us a green light forward; Mars motivates us with a boost of adrenalin. Less comfortably, Saturn motivates us by showing us what we could be, but are not yet.

Saturn plays a long game: that of getting us to know ourselves better and better through the passage of time. Although its cycle is popularly associated with fear and dread, this says more about our limited understanding than it says about Saturn. Rather than saddling these organic life passages with unnecessary psychological decoration, our goal should be to align ourselves with the planet’s essential function: that of carefully guiding us, step by step, as we become our full-blown selves.

This approach requires that we disabuse ourselves of the conventional assumption that if something is hard, it means we’re doing it wrong. We may well find that Saturn’s hits to the natal chart coincide with difficulties, but those are just teaching devices. Saturn is not the difficulties that happen to us but the inner mechanism by which we digest those difficulties. It’s not about trying to make the transits easy; it’s about trying to make them no harder than they need to be.

The Saturn return and its intermediary squares and oppositions may well give rise to inhibiting circumstances, but that’s just Saturn doing its job. The ideal approach to these transits is to put less focus on the outward event and more on the subjective experience of being challenged. Without denying the hardship, we should be asking ourselves what the episode reveals about where we need to strengthen.

Social Conditioning

Saturn is the planet of cultural conditioning. Its natal placement shows where we are acutely sensitive to — and karmically tied to — what the outside world thinks (or what we think it thinks). This facet of Saturn’s meaning has certain implications for natives whose culture disparages many of the virtues Saturn represents.

These include self-discipline, hard work, and character building: old-fashioned values that may make us modern folk roll our eyes. If we live in a society that teaches us to outsmart difficulty, to cut corners, to expend the least amount of effort possible to reach a result, and to look around for someone to sue when misfortune arises, then we will be predisposed to mistrust Saturn and misconstrue its transits. A much more profitable approach is to make an ally of Saturn.

Three-Decade Cycle

The neat chunk of time encompassed by the Saturn cycle lends itself handily to astrological study. Thirty years — roughly the time it takes Saturn to return to its natal position — is not so short that we get lost in the immediacy of the phase we’re in, nor so long that we can’t glimpse our lifespan as a whole. It’s just the right length for getting a perspective on our lives and where we’re going.

The cycle is conveniently divided into halves and quarters, as Saturn aspects its natal position. These occur at approximately seven-year intervals, each transit offering its particular incentives for growth. And every one feels like a milestone.

Natal Saturn

It all begins with our natal Saturn: the as-yet-unrealized sense of our fully mature selves. Each juncture point in the ensuing cycle refers back to this origin point. (This is true of all planetary cycles, but it’s easier to forget in the case of Saturn, which is so closely tied, in our minds, to causal explanations.) [1]

As we progress through the waxing squares, oppositions, waning squares, and conjunctions of Saturn to its natal position, we attract experiences from collective reality that test the promise of that natal potential. In the process, our sense of self either gets firmed up, like a muscle that’s incrementally and regularly exercised, or fails to hold its own. We can predict that the transit will apply pressure, but not whether the native will feel strengthened or defeated by that pressure. That’s determined by how she responds, which is in turn determined by her level of consciousness.

The natal placement reveals what does not “come naturally” for us. The areas in question make us feel awkward and incomplete, which creates an incentive for us to work on them. Because we feel undeveloped in this part of life, we try harder. Thus does Saturn achieve its hidden agenda. Through instilling a suspicion that we’re not good enough at something, it gets us to exert the requisite self-discipline to cultivate, little by little, a solid sense of self. We end up with an inner confidence that can only come of felt experience.

Certain broad generalizations can be made about the element Saturn is in natally. When in water, Saturn requires that we make an effort to express our feelings (“effort” not necessarily in the sense of difficulty, but in the sense of applying our will, repeatedly), and to empathize with the feelings of others. When in air, Saturn wants us to work on our mental acuity and our access to and management of information. Saturn in fire insists that we focus on the ways we express ourselves as individuals and stabilize our creative output. Saturn in earth pushes us to be ever more reliable and efficient in our labors.

A more specific picture can be inferred from the sign natal Saturn is in, which we share with those born within the same 2½ years, as well as with those roughly 30 and 60 years younger or older. Saturn’s sign suggests, among other things, a particular version of adulthood. All those born with Saturn in Aries, for instance, have a sense that being a grownup means taking charge, although they will each have to learn through trial and error what it means to do so in a healthy way. Those with Saturn in Taurus, regardless of how resourceful they already are, may feel that to be respected by society, they must become ever more solvent. Those with Saturn in Sagittarius may be wary of espousing the views of others, believing that unless they eke out their own beliefs, they risk not being taken seriously.

Saturn’s natal house reveals a more personal layer of meaning. From it we learn more about the native’s definition of success and what inhibits her from achieving it. (Whether or not these inhibitions are “real,” in an objective sense, is not told by the chart. All we know for sure is that the native experiences them as real.)

Along with the sign and the house, we can further pin down the nature of natal Saturn by the aspects it makes to the rest of the chart.

All told, these features comprise our vision of what it means to be a functioning member of our society, as well as the tests we will have to face to accept ourselves as such.

The God of Time

At each point of its cycle, Saturn offers us a new awareness about the finite nature of a human lifetime. There is a reason why, in pre-modern astrology, Saturn was the governor of death. Its initial return is our first whiff of mortality. Not necessarily morbid, this awareness is simply an acknowledgment of the lessons of the planet of Time, and the stark inevitability of the human aging process.

The predictability of the Saturn cycle is one of its most sobering features. Everybody who’s ever lived, if they survived at least three decades, has gone through these same rites of passage: sharp nudges forward that arrive like clockwork and feel tightly linked to our calendar age. Saturn (a.k.a. Kronos), the governor of chronological time, reminds us that we are no longer young. During its transits, we may come up against our own physical limitations, as when we try to do something we used to do, which is now impossible or unrealistic. We are made to notice the disparities between our child selves and our emergent adult selves.

If our society harbors a fear and loathing of physical aging, we too will tend to focus on its superficial aspects. But closer to Saturn’s core meaning is psycho-spiritual maturation: a long, slow process that takes the body along with it. Its precisely timed passages trace our development from the inside out.

Pre-Saturn Return

The Saturn–Saturn waxing square, at around age seven, is the first in a series of thresholds we cross in the gradual buildup of a skeleton for the identity. Then comes the Saturn–Saturn opposition at around 14, followed by the waning square at 21. Gradually and methodically, an ego structure is developed, like walls erected around the inner space of a house. If all goes well, at the Saturn return, at around 28, a sturdy interface has been established between the demanding outside world and the mysterious, ever-shifting inner world.

First Waxing (age 7)

Up until the first waxing square, Saturn is usually personified by the parents, particularly the one in the disciplinarian role. Our relationship with that person tends to shape our experience of all future authority figures, such as teachers, bosses, governmental or legal authorities. Seven years into life, our internal future self (natal Saturn) clashes against forces in the environment (transiting Saturn) that exist to curb and direct it. For most of us, Saturn squaring its natal position corresponds to going to school, the first of many times that we will leave home.

At school, we are no longer subject merely to the rules of our family nor to those of the kindergarten (garden of children). We’re now in a classroom, a microcosm of our wider society. The rules and regulations that hem us in are cranked up a notch. We become aware that there is an “out there,” and it is making demands upon us. Our young egos are introduced to the idea of social responsibility. We have to prove ourselves.

Per the Law of Correspondences, we will have attracted the very Saturn figures we need. A classroom of children with Saturn in Virgo, for instance, will resonate with the instruction to put their crayons neatly back in the box. A group with Saturn in Gemini may be nonplussed by having to raise their hands to speak. A cohort with Saturn in Libra will know, instinctively, that there is something important about games that involve give-and-take. Each Saturn sign will be confronted with those features of the world that they need to master. Each Saturn-sign peer group will be tested with a cosmically tailored series of structuring exercises.

That the new rules are karmically appropriate does not mean, however, that the children will like them. A group with Saturn in Cancer may find it especially hard to say goodbye to their mothers in the morning. Those with Saturn in Leo may be unpleasantly surprised to discover that other children get cakes on their birthdays, too. This may be the first time in our lives that we’ve had to recognize that our own singularity has its limits.

If we can meet the demands of this turning point, a process of self-resiliency has begun that builds upon itself. If not, the emerging self has a harder time at the opposition, at around age 14, when the wide world presses upon us with more severity.

First Saturn–Saturn Opposition (age 14–15)

The opposition, in adolescence, is a more explicit confrontation than the square. There is a clash, often a dramatic one, between the inner self and the new inhibitions imposed upon it. For the typical 14-year-old, the environment crowds in unforgivingly: Anything that can be construed as a restriction to his identity will rub him the wrong way. He is butting up against outer authority (transiting Saturn) in order to get a sense of his own inner authority (natal Saturn), which he can now glimpse — not yet embody, but glimpse — as an integral part of his psyche. Adulthood is staring him in the face, daring him to try it on for size.

The turbulent angst that so often arises during this transit derives from the tension of an inherent paradox (always a feature of the opposition aspect): The teenager’s innate growth trajectory makes her itch to take charge of her life, but she does not yet have enough life experience to do so.

Opposition aspects are by definition ambivalent, as evidenced in this case by the manifest contradictions of the teenaged personality. A self-inflating posturing may alternate with bouts of extreme insecurity. The inner template for our adulthood, as yet unrealized, is faced with a mirror of itself — a mirror that feels like it is tantalizing yet opposing us.

The self-doubt and melancholy that is typical of this age, sometimes to the point of morbidity, can be understood as the whisper of shadow Saturn, introducing the concept of serious failure. For the first time, we sense that we could fail at adulthood. The question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” hangs over our head like a sword of Damocles.

The life-or-death intensity that infuses the fifteenth year of life follows the astrological logic of the opposition. In every planetary cycle, when the 180° angle is reached, a new hemisphere begins and the previous one ends. We sense this ending acutely when Saturn first opposes our Saturn. We feel our childhood dying.

First Waning Square (age 21–22)

At around age 22, we turn the last corner before adulthood is officially achieved. At this point, we sense that, gulp, we might have been wrong about certain things. The self-image that we have tentatively cobbled together now runs up against the cold, hard realities of the outer world. We are thrown off base by the realization that whatever we had decided was true, a few years ago — about life, about ourselves — may not be true.

Astrologer Erin Sullivan considers the first iteration of this phase, from the waning square to the Saturn return (ages 22–29), to be the most consequential phase of life. [2] It is preceded by the Uranus–Uranus square at around 21, which may have felt like an earthquake to the young adult identity, still barely cohesive. At the same time, this phase is overshadowed by the looming Saturn return, cranking up the pressure to get our lives together.

With this square, the requisite separation from our parents is almost complete. We can no longer project the taskmaster role upon them. We are on our own.

First Saturn Return [28–30]

After the high-flying years of early adulthood, associated with Jupiter, we fall to Earth with a sobering thud at the Saturn return. The average age for it is 29½, but it may be considered a five-year-long transit: two-and-a-half years before and after the exactitude period, with maximum intensity when Saturn in the sky conjoins its natal placement to the degree of arc.

The effective length and the many sub-stages of this life-altering transit — including its applying and separating sub-phases, and the triggering aspects it receives from more fleeting planets — reflect the seriousness of the task at hand: nothing less than figuring out how to manage our future.

We have to teach ourselves how to do things our elders used to do for us, such as erecting boundaries. In many ways, these boundaries will look like everybody else’s in our peer group; in other ways, they will take their cue from the particular karmic necessities of Saturn’s natal house. The native with Saturn in the 7th house, for instance, will pay special attention to relationship boundaries. He sees them as essential to having a “real” relationship, which for him is pretty much tantamount to being a grownup. The native with Saturn in the 11th house will feel herself unable to succeed without a clearly structured group role. The native with a 3rd-house Saturn will put pressure on himself to be extra careful, and selective, with his communications. Thus will different natives prove to themselves in different ways that they are ready to meet the world.

Hovering over every decision during the Saturn return is the issue of accountability. We are now tasked with taking responsibility, something not expected of children. Pre-Saturn return, we could not have integrated the concept of karma, i.e., the idea that consequences attach to what we do, think, and say. But once we have passed that point of no return, the three-decade mark, we are treated less indulgently if we spill something and don’t clean it up. Our tantrums are no longer given a pass.

We are seen differently by our society, charged more severely in a court of law. Our student years (Jupiter) may have incurred a debt (Saturn) that now begins to accrue interest. The need to find a job is now the need to establish a career. The ticking of the biological clock is audible in our ears. We start to mull over the kinds of decisions our elders have always called “realistic.”

Societal approval usually weighs heavily on our minds at this time, though we may not want to admit that we care so much about “what people think.” Some placements, notably Saturn in the 10th house or in Capricorn, are less ambivalent. In these cases, the native’s inner growth pattern may follow quite closely his culture’s recommendations about how to be a success. Other placements express a more idiosyncratic approach.

With Saturn in the 1st house, outer-world success depends upon how carefully the inner world is managed. Here, the focus is on crafting just the right persona. Those whose Saturn is strongly aspected by Uranus may feel that they must invent their own career options, rejecting conventional paths entirely. The 12th-house Saturn returner may be especially flummoxed by the pressures of society, sensing that the demands of adulthood are not to be found in the outer world at all — but rather arise from an inner sense of obligation that is hard to pin to a source.

It is no wonder the Saturn return is such an identity crisis. Identifying those values of our society that support our natal potential is no small task. We feel that we must pledge a new kind of allegiance to collective mores — but to which ones? Our unique Saturn placement demands that we incorporate only those consensual standards that match our karmic needs.

These needs are now being pushed into consciousness. The big wide world where things get done — up until now only imagined — is now chronologically real. A deadline has been reached.

Blame

When the Saturn return is upon us, it feels urgently necessary to show the world and ourselves that we know the difference between who we used to be and who we are now. But this doesn’t mean that we know what we’re doing. At 29–30 years old, we’re still just a baby at this business of being an adult.

We do realize, usually with considerable reluctance, that we can’t keep blaming our parents for all our problems. If this realization is successfully integrated at the first return, it bodes well for a lifetime of knowing how to take responsibility. If it is not, we risk carrying forward into adulthood the all-too-common habit of misconstruing Saturn as blame. We’ll blame ourselves, other people, society at large, even Saturn-the-astrological-symbol.

We will inevitably get plenty of other chances to understand the futility of blaming, particularly at Saturn’s quarter transits. But the first return is the time when, ideally, we have figured out that our imperfections are not solely our parents’ fault, nor are the myriad imperfections of life. We must face the flaws of the world as independent beings.

We’ll be spending the next couple years figuring out which version of the paternal archetype we want to keep and which we need to repudiate. Our goal should be to fashion our Saturn into a benevolent father figure, rather than a tyrant.

Second Waxing Square (age 36–37)

Age 37 is not quite midlife, but this transit, perhaps signaled by our first gray hairs, tells us that it’s not far away. It’s time to recommit to our natal Saturn potential, and outer circumstances will arise to get us to do so.

This waxing square is not as jarring as its counterpart at age seven. At that time, our souls made the fateful decision to stick around the earth plane. We made a pact, albeit a pre-conscious one, to organize our growth around certain future goals. Now, as full-grown beings, we’re seeing where we stand in relationship to those goals.

We’re on different footing now, having gained a sense of cohesion from Saturn’s return. Jupiter, too, just had a return (age 36), perhaps giving us a bit of relief from life’s pressures. But at some point between 37 and 42, we’ll also be getting the Uranus–Uranus opposition — the first and most obvious of the midlife transits. Situations will probably arise that jolt the identity. Our higher self is trying to shake loose any of the Saturnine structures we’ve assembled that don’t truly match our soul design.

By now we’ve probably come to accept that being a functioning member of society entails curbing our self-expression, in one form or another. But the core psyche strenuously objects to this suppression. There may be a sense of being stifled, perhaps not as acutely as when we were 14 (although the similarity may be embarrassingly close, if we are feeling the Uranus–Uranus opposition now). But the parallels are undeniable and we can learn from them.

The inner friction of this Saturn–Saturn period is cosmically designed to inspire rigorous self-examination.

Second Saturn Opposition (age 43–44)

About seven years later, this conflict comes to a head.

Like every opposition, this one requires opponents. The first time we encountered this aspect, we were teenagers opposing our elders, hoping to discover to what extent their values matched those of our emergent self. This time, at around age 45, our opponent is not the external parent but the internal one: the version of adulthood we committed ourselves to at the Saturn return fifteen years prior.

By the time of the second opposition, our adult persona has taken on quite a few limitations in the process of establishing itself. These are starting to chafe. The rebellious impulses that characterize this transit, though they echo those of the 14-year-old, should not be dismissed as mere second-childhood reactivity.

The midlife impulse to radically change our circumstances — professionally, geographically, or romantically — is all but universal, though it takes different forms depending on the specifics of the chart. With a natal Scorpio Saturn opposed by transiting Saturn in Taurus, the native may feel a shift in his sexual self-image; although the deeper drive — as always, with Scorpio — is emotional, not physical. He is testing himself to see what he has learned about intimacy. With natal Cancer Saturn opposed by transiting Saturn in Capricorn, the native may feel that drastic changes must be made to her public role in order to prioritize her more personal needs.

These urges derive from a healthy instinct. Some part of us realizes that there is a danger of surrendering to the demands of societal expectations and thus becoming stuck. Ideally, we take these impulses seriously — not by acting upon them, necessarily, but by listening to what they’re trying to tell us. It’s the voice of our deep psyche, struggling to balance the outer and inner worlds.

For most women, the childbearing years are drawing to a close now, and family responsibilities are radically changing. Even if her children have not left home, the native is no longer defined by her caretaking of them. But regardless of her maternal status, it is the shift in her self-image that is most daunting. Gender roles have opened up dramatically over the past few generations, and there is far more latitude now for women to not be defined exclusively by motherhood. But it remains true that at the second Saturn–Saturn opposition, most women are harshly confronted with the need to re-orient physiologically (hormonally) and psychologically (cultural standards of femininity), as their primary identification shifts, relatively abruptly, from a deeply personal and other-oriented role to a more self-oriented outer-world role.

For the busy professional, regardless of the type of work or domestic condition, the second return is a dynamic, externally focused time. Yet, on a spiritual level, it heralds the beginning of a turn inward. We must now begin absorbing the implications of having reached the halfway mark, more or less, of our lifetime.

Second Waning Square (age 53)

Seven to eight years later, we have ideally achieved a new acceptance of mortality as a fact of life. Our conscious minds — indeed, our entire society — may approach the subject with abject denial. But for the 53-year-old committed to self-awareness, the waning square is an invitation to confront the inescapable reality of physical death: to see it as part of the natural order of things.

Inevitably, circumstances arise that test this acceptance. Our bodies begin to fail in ways we’re not used to; our children marry or make us grandparents; our seniority at work gets acknowledged, maybe through positive recognition or maybe through our being passed over in favor of a younger employee. Whether the events are external or internal, we are given to understand that our young adulthood is dying.

Second Saturn Return (age 58–59)

The Saturn cycle culminates once again in the “second adulthood” around age 59, echoing that great milestone at around age 30.

This time, though, we’re not as blindsided. As before, we feel the weight of having to prove ourselves, but now we are surer of how life works. As at the first return, responsibilities are thrust upon us, but this time they are not unforeseen. We have undergone enough turns of the wheel, by now, to not be freaked out by a few more reminders that physical existence involves limitation.

Most of us make a big deal of our calendar age at the second return, but chronological age is just one measure of maturation, and not the most meaningful one. The poignant sense of discouragement that many feel at the second return arises for the same cosmic reason it did at the first one: to get us to reevaluate our goals. This time around, we are also reevaluating our achievements, and these inevitably fall short of our early ideals.

A little bit of perspective goes a long way here. Ideally, we have mellowed into a deeper understanding of what we might once have considered our failures. We may be able to see how our apparent losses and near misses over the years have solidified into strength.

By age 60, we have done our best to live up to society’s image of what it means to Be Somebody. But that is no longer good enough. Now it’s time to come up with an image of success that is absolutely our own: that of a hard-won integrity that comes from within. Nothing else will satisfy. It is now that Saturn, that great harbinger of restriction, shows its sleeper side, as a harbinger of freedom.

We have the chance to be liberated, at last, from the myriad constraints that have molded our worldly self-image. We are untethered from the role of hands-on parent, striving young careerist, or confused self-searcher. We have individuated past the roles we have played.

We will have another Jupiter return at some point during this time, and another Uranus–Uranus square, both amplifying this sense of freedom. But whereas the liberations of Jupiter and Uranus feel unbidden, Saturnine freedom feels like something we’ve earned.

Post–Second Saturn Return

Saturn’s quarters after the second return are most profitably approached from the big picture. Our goal now should be to cultivate an unsentimental honoring of this last part of our tenure on Earth. At the waxing square, opposition, and waning square (around ages 67, 74, 81), we are challenged to construct an ever more sophisticated reframing of the meaning and purpose of the end of life. It is essentially a spiritual practice. In this inward work, we allow ourselves to marvel at the mystery of having built up, through the rigors of time, a psyche from a pre-manifest state into a manifest self.

This will likely be a highly independent exercise, perhaps without much support from the gerontophobic culture we live in. Modern society has a hard time seeing old age as just one more life phase, with its own character and challenges; it has an even harder time seeing old age as having unique gifts. Fortunately, society’s blind spots have less hold on us now. The willingness to diverge from consensus opinion is itself one of the blessings of Saturn’s phases after the second return.

At this point, our stiffest challenge is less about events than about our maintenance of a philosophical perspective in the face of these events. Each hard aspect confronts us with choices which — whether they are triggered by circumstances, other people, or our own bodies or minds — land well or poorly depending on how we view them. By now, we will have figured out that old age is not a choice; the choice is whether it is well or poorly lived. We know, better than we ever could have before, that it is not life’s vicissitudes, but the meaning we assign to them, that makes all the difference.

Notes

1. Consider that, with a planet like Venus, it is relatively easy for us to accept the law of synchronicity, as in: “I attracted that [person/event] because of something within myself.” With Saturn, by contrast, most of us find it hard to see things in terms of inner potentials. We are more likely to go with the conventional causal view: “I feel this way because of my calendar age” or “My life is this way because of circumstances that have nothing to do with me.”

2. “There is more cyclic and planetary activity between those two age periods than in any of the other seven-and-a-half-year phases.” Erin Sullivan, Saturn in Transit, Arkana, 1991, p. 68.