Saturn helps us come into our own authority by demanding that we create structures in our lives and by teaching us lessons that define and respect our own limitations and boundaries as well as those of others. Saturn is associated with the father, the paternal, and all that is authoritarian. So when placed in the more maternal feminine sign of Cancer it is said to be in its “detriment” because the paternal and maternal often challenge each other, until consciousness is brought to the family karmic inheritance. Also, old adjectives such as ‘detriment’ are not so useful because the gifts of Saturn in Cancer are great, and these old terms need to be seen with fresh eyes.
You may be carrying some restriction, melancholy, or guilt about the past or your family of origin with Saturn in Cancer. And you feel safest and emotionally grounded when your home situation now is peaceful—you tend to act protectively in relation to your home and family. Yet you can get enmeshed in control issues around family problems, so the challenge for you is to truly understand what you feel and not to act reactively.
Often folks with this placement feel an emotional allegiance to the place where they grew up, and yet have an awareness that in many ways they had a strict or difficult upbringing—or there may have been a mood of emotional coolness underlying something in the family dynamic. Secrets may have been kept, or there may have been rules as to what children could and could not do—rules or assumptions that may have caused you some suffering.
Because you are now willing to work hard at making your own family a success you will often go out of your way to try and not repeat the problems of your own childhood by working extra hard to guide and care for your own children. You may become gifted in solving family problems because you know the territory. With this placement of your Saturn, you have the opportunity to come into a balanced inner sense of authority—I think of this as becoming the “author” of your own life script—and to create and restore a bit of sanity between the archetypal influences of the feminine/maternal with the masculine/paternal.
Saturn Return Questions: Have you been able to understand and share with someone else the deep resonance and sometimes confusing feelings you grew up with? Do you know how your family of origin has influenced you? Have you answered the inner call to settle old hurts with your parents or siblings and change past patterns of relating? (c) ~ elizabethspring@aol.com www.elizabethspring.com
