Saturn Guiding Planet

You have a knack for defining systems and making things function well and long. Saturn Skill Symbol people often exhibit an even greater capacity for work, self-discipline and for overcoming hardship and obstacles than the Mars Skill Symbol type. You can best achieve your highly focused goals through sheer perseverance and through a profound understanding of the nature of people and things. When faced with difficulties, it is best to hold fast and study the situation in detail. You perform well when undertaking clearly defined projects in a highly ordered and structured manner or environment. Administrative qualities are strong, and others may look to you for leadership, protection or mentorship.
      With Saturn Oriental, you may have an air of authority, and at times you exercise it too harshly. Though your knowledge and experience may be considerable, and acquired the hard way, it is wise to avoid rigidity and patronizing others.
      As Guiding Planet, Saturn reveals the structural patterns defining situations and behavior. The strong sense of social order and authority associated with Saturn Skill Symbol may incline people born with Saturn Oriental to see society and relationships in a strictly hierarchical manner, as systems in which wealth, status and power rules; balance may be found by attempting to see things from a more holistic, interrelated and interdependent perspective.

While Oriental Saturn suggests involvement in politics and a desire to attain positions authority, it is also seen in the birth-charts of politically astute protectors and champions of the people. Consumer activist Ralph Nader was born when Oriental Saturn was conjunct the north lunar node and trine Jupiter. The natal horoscope of Martin Luther King, Jr. features Saturn Oriental rising thirty degrees before the Sun. King’s highly aspected Saturn opposes Mars retrograde in the second house and is a member of a Grand Trine configuration with Jupiter and Neptune.
      Oriental Saturn also figures in the birth-charts of many successful artists and composers, because even though their creative work ties in with Venus (art) and Neptune (music), it also requires a well-developed sense of form, order, definition and structure — all Saturnian qualities — and the sort of perseverance and authority often required to succeed in the fields of art and music. The birth-chart of the Russian avant-garde composer Alexander Scriabin shows an Oriental Appearing Saturn close to the Sun, forming a loose trine to a Neptune-Pluto conjunction in the twelve house. A visionary Mercury Prometheus retrograde rises shortly before Saturn. Scriabin’s music, far ahead of its time, is highly ordered and underpinned by a very sophisticated and highly structured theosophical metaphysics. Another theosophist and contemporary of Scriabin’s, the pioneer Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, was also born when Saturn was Oriental, in his instance conjunct the natal Ascendant and opposite Pluto. In spite of the abstract nature of his of work, his art is highly organized, well-structured and thoroughly planned. Every primitive — point, line, curve, etc. — has a very definite meaning according to Kandinsky’s elaborate (and somewhat rigid) system which has theosophy as a basis.