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Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil
Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil
Greene’s first book and the founding text of English-language Jungian astrology. Published by Samuel Weiser in 1976 and reprinted continuously thereafter, Saturn reads the ringed planet through the analytical psychology of shadow and self-knowledge. Its structure is both textbook and meditation: Saturn in the four elemental groupings of signs and houses (watery, earthy, airy, fiery), Saturn in natal aspect, Saturn in synastry, and a concluding reflection on the archetype itself (Greene 1976, contents).
The book’s central claim is that Saturn is the astrological name for the shadow: the cold, the critical, the limiting — and therefore the condition of conscious integration. 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” (Greene 1976). What appears in relationship as “coldness, criticism, and rejection” is “merely the outward display of the same kind of terror of being hurt or proven inadequate” — Saturn’s defense against his own vulnerability (Greene 1976). The book’s contribution to the Lineage is not Saturn-as-diagnosis but Saturn-as-shadow-to-be-integrated, a reading continuous with carl-jung‘s CW 9ii Aion.
The second structural contribution: Greene’s account of the outer planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) as transpersonal forces whose contact with natal Saturn marks the threshold between personal identity and the suprapersonal.