Laurence Hillman - Saturn Eyewitness Reports

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The Second Saturn Return: Swept Away by Suzan Still

I’d heard rumors about the second Saturn return. They were like that vague warning, “Watch that first step,” heard just before stepping off a cliff into a seemingly bottomless, death-dealing plunge. In my case, the warning and the plunge came together in the form of a dream:

I am walking on a riverbank with my writer friend, Karla. We are going to my studio to paint and write. Suddenly the bank collapses, and we are both cast into the water. I can hear Karla calling for help, and I try to swim to her. That is when I realize that the normally tranquil river is in flood, its surface pocked with rapids and whirlpools. I cannot reach Karla, nor can I swim toward the bank. I quickly realize it is all I can do just to keep my nose above water. The current is extremely fast and strong – I am being swept away. A deep male voice says: “If you survive, you will come out in a completely different land.”

As you can imagine, the dream was troubling, especially the emphasis on that “if.” At the time I did not realize it was a harbinger of the second Saturn return, which began soon afterward with the sudden death of my best friend, Mary. On the day before her funeral, I was involved in a rear-ender that destroyed my BMW and crippled my back. The same day, another old family friend died. I hobbled into the first days of the Saturn return in funeral garb, little suspecting that these were just the opening salvos.

In very short order my elderly parents, both of whom had been active and were still running the family business, fell ill. Suddenly, my life was consumed in doctors’ offices, ERs, hospital rooms, and intensive care units. As the primary caregiver, my life ceased to be my own.

I soon realized that the family business, a public utility that cannot be allowed to shut down, would have to be sold. I hired one of only seven lawyers specializing in water law in our state, whose office was 120 miles away, to the south. And so began a dreary, vicious, mendacious battle with the state Public Utilities Commission and the local public utility, which kept me traveling between the state capital (100 miles to the north), the local utility board meetings, and the superior court, for many months. My parents were resentful that their life’s work was about to be removed from them, and the blame fell on me. The resentment mounted when I insisted that they see an estate lawyer. It was a bleak, exhausting time, without glamour or appreciation.

During this time I was also writing my doctoral dissertation and finishing the last months of a doctoral program involving a written final exam and an oral defense of my dissertation. I would crawl home from the ICU, an interminable board meeting, or the lawyer’s office, and prop myself at my desk, to write and study.

Finally, my father died. I was at his bedside and held him as he passed on. I made all the final arrangements, wrote the obit, and presided at the graveside ceremony. Three months later my partner of 14 years suddenly left the relationship, in the throes of his own Saturn return. Three months after that my darling old dog died. In a 6-month period the three main males of my life were swept away.

Graduation from the doctoral program was a sad affair. My mother was too sick to attend, my partner was gone, my father dead. Two stalwart friends attended in lieu of family, but the sense of abandonment was heavy.

My mother went into a decline after my father’s death. She lost interest in life and became bonded to her housekeeper, who hated me, and would actually sit between my mother and me when I came to visit. I began to suspect she was abusing my mother financially, a suspicion I later confirmed, and wanted to fire her, but my mother declared she would die without this woman’s help. No one else would do. I managed to wrest financial control from the woman, after which war ensued, and I felt increasingly alienated in my own family home. When my mother finally died, at home in her own bed as she had wished, I arranged her graveside service and presided at it, as she had wished.

Immediately, my sister, who had stayed as far as possible from all the above dramas, wanted to sell my parents’ house, which she had inherited. This entailed the dividing of my parents’ worldly goods, which were many, housed in two two-story buildings that were full to the brim. I brought in auctioneers to carry away the valuables. I hauled to the dump. I organized and cleaned. My sister left for another state, calling as she drove down the driveway, “I guess you’ll take care of the yard sale.” Watching complete strangers dismantle my folks’ beautiful home with the rapaciousness of feeding sharks was one of the grimmest tasks of my life. Then the new buyers, true Visigoths and Vandals at heart, arrived with sledge hammers and backhoes to demolish the gardens, my father’s shop, my mother’s studio, the quaint garden shed. It was the sternest lesson about the brevity of life and personal accomplishment.

In the midst of all this I wrote in my journal, in block letters, a bon mot I’d picked up somewhere: ADVERSITY DOES NOT BUILD CHARACTER – IT REVEALS IT. It must have been some comfort at the time. Scant comfort, but any comfort at all was welcome. I was, at that point, too tired to live. Each day also brought a new and sudden collapse of elements of my infrastructure – car, plumbing, roof, teeth, joints, friendships, finances, job. Even my dissertation manuscript was stolen by the woman who was supposed to do the final editing, along with money I had foolishly paid her, up front. I had a new job with too many demands, a boyfriend who had recently betrayed me with another woman, a body wracked with pain, a financial surprise that sapped my small inheritance, and a pervasive sense that I couldn’t go on. I spent Christmas alone, and many nights I simply cried myself to sleep. About midway through the return, I had the following dream:

I’m standing on a mountain ridge, on land owned by a man named Victor, looking east, where there is a mountain in the distance, newly arisen. I say to a woman who’s with me, “That is Crucifixion Mountain.” I know I am going to die there. I want to commemorate my passing. At the base of a cross-shaped telephone pole, I place a rectangular piece of pine board with my name written in blue paint.

At about the same time, a countercurrent began to emerge. It appeared first as a sense of gratitude for all that I had, in spite of my losses; of humility arising out of the pummeling my ego was taking; and of love for life, just as it sits. These lines are from a poem, “How It All Works,” that I wrote around that time:

Fire is at the heart of process;

Pain is at the heart of fire;

Love is at the heart of pain.

I began to have a vague hope that the weary and exhausted self might meet and merge with the more hopeful self, and that the experience of that wholeness might be transformative. As if in answer, I had the following dream:

I’m in a big city, on a main street. There is a crowd, and I am part of it. We are watching the arrival of an amazing new instrument, like a glockenspiel. It is huge, all of gold, flanked by two smaller but still oversized gold instruments like gongs. The glockenspiel itself does not resemble a regular one but reminds me of the Ark of the Covenant. It is foursquare, has four huge, twisted pillars, like Bernini’s baldacchino, and is at least 12 to14 feet high, maybe more. Its arrival signals a renewal: there will now be a huge communal chorus to go with it.

It is being pulled through the streets on a juggernaut, a low platform on ponderous wheels, by the older, white-haired men of the city. As they get to where I am standing, they stop for a rest. Clearly the weight is immense. As I see the thing approach I am moved to tears. It is beautiful, awesome, in itself. But even more, it symbolizes a renewal, a resurrection of civilization. I think of the New Jerusalem. I see a man among the pullers wiping his eyes. He, too, is moved by this arrival.

A beautiful woman comments on the beauty of a “spirit belt” I am wearing. With a man I have met, I go up a steep hill, where the glockenspiel has been pulled into a big building at the summit. We are hand-in-hand in the hallway. Already, I can hear the profoundly beautiful and glad voice of the chorus rising, and I am excited.

Many things began to sort themselves out at this time. From grief, loneliness, and abandonment, a new sense of my independent self emerged. From a sense of powerlessness against fate, a new sense of empowerment arose. And even while the burdensome cares of attending to every plodding detail of the passage continued unabated, a spontaneous sense of enjoyment was born. I began to feel stronger, surer, more positive than I had felt ever before in my life. At the very end of the second Saturn return I had the following dream:

There is a great, world-saving treasure that is in danger of being discovered and used by forces of evil. The scene opens on the side of a steep, jungled mountain. There are trails, waterfalls, thick tropical trees, and flowers. The evil of the world seeks to possess the gift as a material thing, and it is willing to destroy those who carry it, to get it. But the gift is mana, a spiritual essence which cannot be possessed, but only held and sheltered as sacred, and then passed on to its next keeper. The keepers, however, are always in danger from the evil ones. There are tense scenes, narrow escapes, and much happening in the dark of night.

The treasure passes first through the hands of very elect princesses who are also priestesses. They wear white, one-shouldered, ankle-length gowns and waist-length hair with wreathes of leaves and flowers around their brows. The energy is in their hands, in the form of small mounds like upside-down muffins of black earth, held on the open palm, with the other hand over it, sheltering.

In this fashion they pass the mana to other women. Each time it is passed, it is in response to a threat or overt movement of evil. At one point the mana passes into an outcrop of limestone rock, where it stays until the stone is eroded.

At the end of the dream, I am one of the priestesses. I have the energy, in the form of a disk of white fabric about seven inches across. It is embroidered with real gold thread, in an intricate mandala. I place it under my left breast in the front of my white gown.

I start down the hill with it. Then I realize I am giving birth – to a sword! This seems almost humorous, because there’s no one to help pull it out, and my arm isn’t long enough to grip the hilt. I am positioned over a gulley, however, and the sword is able to slip out.

I move toward a tall double gate of iron-gray wood. The doors, over nine feet tall, are closed, but I stand there with my sword in hand, waiting expectantly for them to be opened for me from the other side.

The dream images ended, but I began to receive a message from the goddess Pele. She explained that evil always imagines that power can be possessed, like an object, but that it is actually Beauty, a spiritual energy or mana, which can only be carried by those with a sense of the sacred. She told me not to worry so much about the state of the world, that evil will never be able to possess the essential energy that runs the world. Pele advised me to relax and enjoy life, and not to worry so much, because Beauty will always be safe. She was very sweet and loving with me.

With this marvelous vision and message, the second Saturn return passed.

If I were to summarize the experience in one word, it would be “loss.” Relationships of all kinds went down to death. Self-concepts, dreams, illusions, hopes, possessions, money, all passed away. There was a paring-down to the essentials, an intrusion through the defenses into the marrow. Nothing important remained unchanged. The “if” of my survival was very iffy, indeed, as my heart broke, grief surged over me, and I felt I would succumb to the death that was laying waste all around me.

The second essence of this passage would be “work.” The multitude of details that could not be ignored, but must have immediate attention, was simply overwhelming. Never have I worked harder. But something in the Saturnian energy itself gave me the steely strength and determination to do it, as I slowly passed from a victimized “Why me?” to a grim satisfaction for difficult jobs well done. It was, indeed, a revealing of character as I surprised myself by surpassing self-imposed boundaries delineating what I thought it was possible for me to accomplish.

A third concept would be “constraint and constriction.” Throughout the passage I had a profound sense of imprisonment, as if I were working off a sentence that would not be lifted for the duration. Nothing fun happened that I can recall. The travel and artistic creation that are my normal freedoms were completely removed by the necessities of the time. My beautiful gardens grew rife with weeds, my easel was empty, my sculptor’s hammer and chisels lay in dust, my passport moldered in a locked box. At just the time when I was most exhausted, sleep evaded me. At night I would sometimes be overcome by a profound sense of claustrophobia, as if my bed were really a lightless cell in some deep dungeon from which I would never gain egress.

Today, after being swept away for so long, I truly have washed up “in a completely different land.” I am sobered and humbled by the rigors of this passage. A sense of the brevity and fragility of life is pervasive, as is the urge to get on with it, to make the most of all that remains to me of this miraculous incarnation. I am amazed by life, in its minutiae and its sweeping grandeur. A profound sense of appreciation for all that remains lives in me. What’s more, that “all” is more expansive than I ever imagined it could be. The world and I are kin in ways previously unimagined.

It has taken some time to regain my energy, so exhausting was the journey; as I do, new ideas, enthusiasms, and imaginings infuse me with power. I feel unleashed from many of the shackles of past conditioning to imagine my world anew. The Saturn return was like a long birth agony in which I gave birth to my new self, this sword that cuts with discrimination that thinks and speaks with sharp clarity that defends what is sacred.

To you who are about to embark on this journey, or who are stranded somewhere in the wilderness of it, take heart! You will leave behind much that can never be retrieved. You will discover much that is not what you want to know, as illusions are stripped away. However, if you bring a willingness to surrender all, no matter how great the price, you will find that at the end of the way, the person who emerges from the flood is magnified in ways you cannot presently guess or imagine.