Senex (Saturn)

Saturn is the archetypal senex: the old man, the structure, the limit, the lead, the cold. In james-hillman‘s account the senex “is there from the beginning… in the small child who knows and says ‘I know’ and ‘mine’ with the full intensity of its being” and returns most visibly when any function “begins to coagulate past its prime” — “the Saturn within the complex that makes it hard to shed, dense and slow and maddeningly depressing — the madness of lead-poison” (Hillman 1967, Senex and Puer). The senex is the structural principle of hoarding, boundary, and habit; in its pathological form it is the Old King of the alchemical nigredo, “the lapis as petrifaction” (Hillman 1967).

Hillman insists, with liz-greene, that Saturn is not merely malefic. The saturnine view of personality is “a collection of stable traits” — the congenital, the given, what cannot be re-learned away (Hillman 1967). “Saturn is the ‘ruler’ of astrology,” which is why astrology gives the best language for character; the psycho-dynamic view is mercurial, everything transformable, everything re-learnable — and is, Hillman suggests, naive (Hillman 1967).

Greene makes the saturnine paradox explicit. Saturn “is kin to Prometheus who stole the fire of the gods and offered it to man and was condemned because of this voluntary sacrifice to eternal torture” — the “greatest of voluntary sacrifices” (Greene 1976). The limitation he imposes is the condition of self-knowledge. He is the shadow one must contact, not the devil one escapes. His transits are the pressure that “forces growth more effectively than anything else” (Greene 1976). Saturn’s femininity — his mother Gé, sister-wife Rhea, daughters Demeter, Hera, Hestia — locks him into the material world, its property, its minting, its cities (Hillman 1967).

Relationships

Primary sources

hillman-senex-and-puer (Hillman 1967)
greene-saturn-new-look (Greene 1976)