Saturn in Aries is uncompromising
Saturn in Aries, in the sign where he falls. How has this fallen Saturn spoken to you so far?
Aries is Mars’s sign: cardinal fire, instinctive thinking, high bursts of energy, directness, simplicity, bluntness, action-orientedness, proactivity, practicality, unsentimentality, quick temper, slow grudges, transparency, independence, boldness.
Saturn prefers to be in Libra where he exalts. In Libra he is strategic, cautious, diplomatic, opaque, takes time to read the room, nurses deep grudges and revenge fantasies, deploys soft power rather than force of will, plays people against each other, cultivates authority through others' dependence on his unique skills and resources.
In Aries, Saturn struggles to Saturn. Saturn is forced to take a Mars route in order to do Saturn things.
In Aries, the invitation is to consider your relationship to strategy. Aries, like all cardinal signs, takes pride in taking action. Action can look like a lot of things. Strategy is about imagining a relationship between what you do and what happens next. Did the good, or bad, thing that happened directly result from something you did, or didn't do? In this way, strategy is a fantasy. There can be many causes behind an event but we imagine it is our actions or inactions that made things happen. The fantastical character of strategy is neither good nor bad, just is. For those of us who are activists, our life’s work is grounded on this fantasy that our actions and inactions matter in the greater scheme of things. History isn’t something that happens to us, it’s something we create through daily struggle. Sometimes the making feels frustratingly slow with no good outcomes guaranteed.
Saturn in Aries is demanding. This is the Saturn that knows that to get hard things done, you have to go hard like the ram. Saturn in Aries has tried asking nicely and failed, so he has learnt not to ask nicely. He is actually very nice up close contrary to his reputation of being spicy but effective.
Saturn in Aries is uncompromising, the opposite of Libra’s diplomatic aplomb. You don’t get to where you need to go by taking shortcuts through dubious collaborations, or toning down the language of your community’s desires. Once you find yourself playing on your adversary’s terms you’ve lost the game because you let them decide what winning and losing look like. Sumud is about the refusal to be baited, the way you say no to being defined by master discourses, the way you insist on your own perspective, your words, your vision, your story, your determination to not perform the role of the victim, the appropriated model minority, or the violent stereotype, the way you affirm your complexity, interiority and sovereignty. “If I didn’t define myself for myself,” wrote Audre Lorde, “I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies of me and eaten alive.”
The adversary will always feign their own powerlessness because they know that power is invisible, built into the architecture, stitched into the discourse, seamlessly blended into money and algorithms. Quoting Cassian in Andor Season 1, “power doesn’t panic.” Everything we’ve seen in the Zionists signifies their panic and their reactionary violence. Despite their military superiority enabled by American foreign policy and Western government’s (very slowly changing) indifference, they know they’ve lost the high ground. Power is invisible and intangible—the only thing you can know in relation to power is to know when you don’t have it. Deep down the Zionists know they’ve lost it.
Saturn favours the long game while Mars thrives in quick bursts of high energy. Is there flexibility in your vision of action for a range of risk appetites: the letter-writing campaign and the wildcat strike, the boycotts and the pickets, direct action and mutual aid campaigns, the social media call-outs and viral posts, and the less visible but no less essential acts of wheatpasting, painting banners, setting up soup kitchens and arrestee support structures?
What does it mean to exist in relation to forces that seem immovable? The late author Ursula LeGuin wrote, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” In the same speech she also said, “We need realists of a larger reality: poets, visionaries.” Saturn is the reality principle but reality is something we affirm through what we allow ourselves to accept. What is your larger reality?
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Photo credit: Cody Doherty via Unsplash Licence
