Words for the People

Saturn in Virgo, 2007-2009: Meaning for the Sign of Virgo

With Saturn in your sign, the first rule is: Take responsibility for yourself. This is the warrior's first rule, and it is the one you need to master this year. How you handle responsibility now will set the tone for your success or failure as a human being over the next thirty years. It's time to get real about who you want to be and what you need to do for yourself in order to be that person. Cut out bad habits, negative people and time-wasting, fear-based activities from your life. Stop blaming other people (or circumstances, or bad luck) for your situation and accept total responsibility. When you accept responsibility, you take back your power to make yourself into the best 'you' possible. That, quite simply, is your mission in 2009.

Although he is known somewhat less than affectionately as the Teacher Planet, Saturn also represents the energy within us that helps us develop discipline, learn to persevere in the face of adversity, and ultimately enables us to build successful structures in the external world. In the body, Saturn symbolizes the skeletal system and the skin - these structures define where we end and the rest of the world begins; without them we wouldn't be viable human beings. In life, Saturn helps us define our boundaries in relation to the rest of the world. Saturn has a strong association with authority and with rules and procedures; a Saturn transit can either bring us into conflict with these or it can help us establish them in our lives.

Saturn takes about 30 years to make a complete cycle of the zodiac. Most of us experience at least two and often three complete Saturn cycles, and we experience Saturn differently during each of these cycles. Generally, the older we get, the more we can appreciate Saturn's insistence on doing things the right way, working within our limitations, minding the details and taking a structured approach to manifesting the reality we desire. The more we work with Saturn, the less we experience him as a "mean old man" disciplinarian and the more capable we are of working with his energy to create the structures in life that enable us to become successful on the material plane.

Virgo is the solar 1st House of your chart, the energetic area of your life that describes your self, your body, your identity, and your outer personality or the mask that you have created to represent you in the outer world. We often tend to unconsciously equate the personality with the self, but if we look closer we'll find that it is indeed a mask that we created early in life in response to stimulus from the environment. Because you chose to incarnate into this life to express Virgo energy (you know the stereotypes: discriminating, intelligent, literate, picky, perfectionist, service-oriented), your tribe would react to a repeated stimulus differently than would, say, an Aries. Where an Aries might respond to a father's harsh criticism with cycles of repressed anger alternating with destructive rage, a Virgo would probably channel her hurt (and subconsciously reestablish her worth) into excelling at a school or art project, or going the extra mile to help out around the house.

Although the general outline of our personality mask tends to set quite early on, we can and do change the mask over time. Take for example a man who reacted to an emotionally abusive childhood by becoming a neurotic people-pleaser. Internalizing his parents' disappointment, he becomes a perfectionist, never satisfied with himself. The parental voices telling him he is not worthy become the obsessive soundtrack to his inner life; in a classic abuse scenario, he becomes his own tormentor. Then, at age 29, in the midst of his Saturn return, he falls in love with someone who is able to mirror to him the beautiful, innocent parts of his character. Curious as to just how much he might be able to develop a healthy attitude towards himself, he begins to learn about self-love. He reads everything he can get his hands on about dealing with the legacy of abuse, about healing the inner child. He starts to meditate and finds a therapist who helps him see the internalized parental programs for what they are - mental viruses with no basis in objective reality.

After a couple years of intensive self-reflection and inner work, his life magically begins to change. He leaves his job as a copy editor for a tech-oriented trade publisher and gets his massage license. After a decade of binge partying as a way to get away from his judgmental, rigid, inner self, he changes his social circle, gravitating to others who, like himself, are on the path to wholeness. Where a few short years ago his life felt hollow and doomed to perpetual disappointment, now he views the world with optimism. And his personality reflects this; although he still has to battle the self-destructive, judgmental thoughts at times, he now knows how to short-circuit those tape loops and replace them with positive, affirming, grateful thoughts. Gone is the neurotic, self-obsessed, defensive loner hiding behind a mask of intellectual disdain. Now, while he's still smarter than most and better read than all but a few his age, he is open to the world - he uses his discerning mind to help his clients heal themselves and in the process he is making his own life more enjoyable. When he retreats into solitude, he does so because he knows his time alone enables him to stay grounded and healthy and helps him plug in to his inner guidance and center of energy.

The man in our example is still very much a Virgo, but he has used the energy of a Saturn transit to become responsible to his higher self. All the Virgoan personality traits are still there - the outline of his mask is still the same - but they have been elevated to a much higher (and more personally enjoyable) evolutionary stage of consciousness.

This is the promise of Saturn's two-year-plus tour of your 1st House. Although it's not as concentrated and intense as the natal Saturn return (when Saturn returns to the degree it occupied in your birth chart, around age 29-30), the energy is similar. Saturn takes approximately thirty years to circle the zodiac, and when it enters your 1st House it is setting the tone for its next complete cycle. In other words, the way you choose to define yourself in 2008 and 2009 will have an enormous influence over how you experience life between now and, say, 2040.

The best way to look at a Saturn transit is as a test of your reality structures. If the structures you currently have in place are appropriate to your life and your current evolutionary needs, then Saturn will help you build upon them to achieve success. But Saturn will also show you the weak links in your life, giving you the choice of fixing those weak points or of watching your structure tumble down under Saturn's rather relentless pressure.

Although Saturn's transits get easier to deal with as we get older (we're less adverse to responsibility!), he is always going to test us. Saturn in the 1st House wants to show you how well your current identity is working for you. One of the ways this usually manifests is that your responsibilities grow to the point where you have as much as you feel you can handle. Examples would include starting a family or having a baby; dealing with illness; taking on extra responsibilities at work or having to pick up an extra job; or struggling to overcome addiction, low self-esteem or other personal problems.

Saturn transits can often make us feel tired, depressed, or as if the spark has gone out of life. I don't want to freak you out, because these symptoms definitely come in waves (if you feel constantly exhausted or depressed for the next two years, there's something else going on!), but Saturn rewards perseverance and one of the tests he will throw at you is to see whether you will keep working toward your own best interests even on those days when it's hard to get out of bed, or you don't feel so hot, or you don't really much like yourself.

Fortunately, you have an innate knack for organizing and for discriminating between what is worthwhile and what is a waste of energy. Saturn loves systems, and one of the best ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the pain of this transit is to create systems, schedules and procedures that keep you on track for your goals.

You may not be that much fun again this year but the object of this period isn't to have fun; it's to develop a powerful, responsible, successful identity that will bring you the abundance, material wealth, and satisfaction you deserve.

That said, perhaps one of the biggest lessons a Virgo can learn about self-responsibility is to let go of self-judgment and release the lie of perfectionism. If there's a razor's edge to this transit for you, this would be it: how to always do your best for yourself, while refusing to judge your progress. A good mantra for you would be the famous phrase from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: "We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection."