The Simmering of the Lead

I am not an astrologer..but Ray Grasse is. In his article -Saturn, The Late Bloomer, he uses the tortoise and the hare fable to highlight the slow moving sense of Saturn. Personally, I like the simmering of lead idea, and the alchemical process as my metaphor of choice. It is an arduous task to simmer and stir the alchemical cauldron. And it takes a long time to get to the gold.

Saturn, the planet, is also a symbol for the dense heavy metal, lead.. And lead, in alchemical texts, is the base metal to be transmuted by various operations, into the proverbial gold. Grasse says in his article

“We tend to think of planetary principles in terms of static meanings, but it's good to remember that they also manifest through a complex set of developmental dynamics over time.”

He goes on to let us know that the full effects of our work with Saturn, the lead, unfold slowly. Grasse believes that this Saturn dynamic is key not only to grasping the role of Saturn, but the key to

“unlocking the entire horoscope itself. Why? In a way, it goes back to some of the very things we normally dislike about this planet: hard work, struggle, recurring obstacles..”

Alchemists sometimes call this ‘The Great Work’.
Other astrologers refer to Saturn as the “Guardian of the Threshold”. I always remember the Don Juan writings when Guardian of the Threshold comes up. I read the Carlos Castaneda books series The Teachings of Don Juan, when I was in my 20’s, and before my Saturn Return. I still really like this concept in relation to Saturn too. The idea of Saturn as the last planet we see at the gateway before accessing the mighty outer planets.

In the book Esoteric Astrology Torgny Jansson writes of Saturn in a similar way. In the final paragraph of the discussion on the planetary effects of Saturn Jansson writes,

“Saturn builds a bridge to the soul (symbolized by the rings of the planet) an essential tool without which it would be impossible for Uranus and Neptune, vibrating at much higher frequencies, to manifest themselves in their more exalted aspects”.

Saturn is a gateway to higher worlds. The threshold of the below doorway to the above.

Rudolf Steiner talks about both Saturn and The Guardians Of The Threshold in several of his lectures. In -Initiation And It’s Results he outlines this meeting with the Guardian(s), helping us to grasp what this signifies. Steiner portrays the Guardian as confronting us with the knowledge of how we have gotten by up to this point. We become aware that while on this path we have been guarded and watched over by powers which were invisible to us. Unseen. The limiting force of Saturn holding the aperture of our lens condensed and contracted to keep our focus on the work at hand, and bound by the law of Karma. But then the Guardian reveals to us that now...

“Now they [the invisible powers] shall free you from a part of their constraint, and a portion of that which they have accomplished for you must you now accomplish for yourself”.

This is how we understand that Saturn represents both limitation and liberation, free choice. If we have shown that we can drive the car safely, then we are handed the KEY to drive on.
But this Threshold where we must pass from limitation to liberation is FEAR, mixed with Wow! Remember the first time you drove a car alone- no guardian.

We could also think of it as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter throwing rocks at us. We’re dodging and ducking the slings and arrows of Hamlet’s struggle, or maneuvering like Link in a Zelda Nintendo game, depending on your hobbies. But no matter the metaphor, the meaning of the threshold will make itself known- as

the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested:
nothing happens until the signal passes the threshold -

-Marvelous words right out of the dictionary…

Is it To Be or Not To Be ? Did we resolve our karma? Do the work… get the lead out?

In the Castaneda books the Guardian is frightful, scary, powerful. In real life its probably... becoming a parent, or that fight or flight, or the frozen catatonic moment when everything changes, and we must decide ...will we change.

I had a fun phase of putting magnets on my car, square flat magnets with a quote written on it. Once, for several months I had one that said

-Do The Thing You Think You Can Not Do-

Eventually I did.

Steiner further unfolds Saturn's connection to karma discussing the

“all pervading consciousness of the past, and more or less unconsciousness of the immediate present.”

Saturn is characterised as a vibration of the cosmic memory, and the element of retrospection is always strongly at work. It is always a disservice and an inaccuracy to summarize Steiner into a byte of earthly information, because he was and is walking us through all the dimensions of who we are / and who we were. To put forth a glimmer of the concept I offer this excerpt from his Karmic Relations lecture given on June 10 1924.

“The intense concentration upon the past is transformed into a resolute striving for ideals which lead forward, towards the future. Human beings who bring down their karma from the Saturn sphere are fired with enthusiasm for the future, for ideals which point to the future, precisely because in a purely spiritual life in the Saturn sphere their gaze was directed paramountly to the past".

And here is where we can walk back to stir that cauldron, that pot of lead we started simmering a few minutes ago.
If we return to Ray Grasse now after dabbling in Steiner, and conversing with Hamlet we can see the thread, it could even be Ariadne’s thread. Grasse says in his final remarks

"all Saturn-related energies in the horoscope tend to have a late-blooming quality to them, unfolding far more slowly over time".

This thread of karma is the needle work of Saturn. And while we are stitching away on our life we can’t really see the design of our Saturn work. It’s not until we have felt the poke of the needle off and on for a long while. Steiner says

"even with the insight of initiation one must have passed the sixty-third year and be able to look back ....before it is possible to acquire independent vision of all the connection".

Ah, maybe this is why, in the days of respect and understanding of the ancient ways, the elders of a tribe were consulted.

This alchemical cauldron of simmering lead can carry us across the bridge from Saturn to Uranus and potentially, unexpectedly, turn into the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow bridge, where the goblins and guardians, the wicked witches and flying monkeys reveal our evolution.

The rainbow bridge is the antahkarana, a Sanskrit term. In Eastern philosophy it is the name given to the bridge that connects the lower mind with the higher mind (mind of the soul). In Eastern wisdom we are shown that the bridge does not exist naturally but must be built over time, through spiritual disciplines. Saturn discipline. Through practice, struggle, facing our fears and crossing the threshold, we evolve.

Mirror that - evol ve / ev love

eV love. eV = a unit of energy equal to the work done on an electron in accelerating it through a potential difference of one volt.

Ya gotta LOVE that !