Does Saturn Hold the Key to Male Loneliness?

Another detour into some really dank woo.

“The fear of not measuring up is the Saturnian shadow at its most obvious,” writes James Hollis in the introduction to his Jungian cult classic Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men.¹

You all know about my proclivity for astrology— I’ve dipped my pen in that ink before, and we are going to do it again here, but this time with more existential urgency. I don’t actually know if this is really astrology, but it certainly deals with the mythological archetypes of the classical deities and the archetypes that float in the whole sphere around these topics, so we will at least mark it eight.

First, I guess, though, what the hell is Saturn? I never know how much you all know, and so I never know where to begin…

Saturn is a very hard entity for me. If I went a toe’s width further into woo, I would probably be forced into becoming a Saturnian priest to try and transmute the blast egg of Saturnian energy that flows through my life. As a child, I was fascinated by the planet’s beauty, but my first real encounter with Saturn was a physical one. I was sitting in my apartment, aged 30, working on a paper about the ecology of foxes. I was totally broke, my air conditioner was off, the door was open, and I took a small break and turned to look through the door— and there was an ominous orange star hanging directly over the threshold.

“There you are,” I said, out loud, knowing immediately, out of pure intuition, who I had met.

Having given up for the night, I walked down to the cafe, where I met an Iranian woman, who informed me that I was beginning my Saturn return. She had warm hands and very cold eyes.

I get the feeling— especially over the last year, that I missed something important in my Saturnian return, and have cursed this whole third of my life. My car got stolen that night— I didn’t finish that paper. Saturn has kicked me around for the last five years. This is not a hole you want to fall into. But if you’re here, with me, we need a way out. This is like the Poseidon Adventure. If you are here, you have to get somewhere else or die.

For the uninitiated, a Saturn Return is a significant astrological event that marks the time when the planet Saturn returns to the same position in the zodiac that it occupied at the moment of a person's birth. Typically, this happens between the ages of 27-31, again in the late 50s, and potentially in the late 80s. You get the picture.

The importance of a Saturn Return is often described as a “period of major life transition, personal growth, and maturity.” It is seen as a time when people are forced to confront the realities of their life, including responsibilities, challenges, and the structures they've built around themselves. Every astrology blog on the planet says that about every transit, but this is a big one. The effects are undeniable, and analogues abound in other modalities of storytelling. If Northrop Frye were our guide, the Saturn Return would mark the gate between the “Spring” and “Summer” of life.

Saturn himself, is a leering visage out of a time when gods had two faces.

Before even the philo-poetic awakening in Ancient Greece, the god who comes down to us as Saturn was a revered entity. He was heralded as the bringer of wealth, the master of time, and the harvest.² His consort, Lua, gathered the weapons of slain enemies as tribute, and ruled over desolation and darkness. The earliest traditions honored him as a divine guardian of agriculture, a deity who ensured the cycles of planting and reaping, and who presided over the sacred festival of Saturnalia. This celebration, held in the depths of winter, was a time when social norms were upended, as the people enjoyed feasts and merrymaking, giving thanks to the god who had once presided over the mythic Golden Age—an era of perfect peace and abundance.

Yet, beneath Saturn’s beneficent surface lay a darker, more complex narrative—one that stretched back through the mists of time to the very foundations of cosmic order. Saturn was not merely an agricultural deity; he was also identified with Cronus, one of the Titans in Greek mythology, whose story is intertwined with themes of power, destruction, and fate.

The origins of Saturn's myth, when viewed through the lens of interpretatio Graecae, are deeply connected to the violent and primal events of the cosmos. Saturn’s myth begins with his father, ³. According to the ancient myths, Uranus was a tyrant who despised his offspring, the Titans, and imprisoned them deep within the earth. To overthrow his father, Saturn (Cronus in the Greek telling) was compelled to take drastic action. With the aid of his mother, Gaia, the earth goddess, he seized a sickle and castrated Uranus, ending his tyrannical reign and establishing the dominion of the Titans. This violent act set the stage for Saturn's own rule but also introduced the theme of cyclical power struggles that would haunt him.

Saturn’s own reign, though initially marked by prosperity, was destined to end in turmoil. Like his father, Saturn feared the prophecy that one of his own children would rise to overthrow him. To forestall this fate, he devoured each of his children at birth—an act that reflects his control over time and the future, as well as his desire to forestall the inevitable. However, his wife, managed to save their youngest son, Jupiter (the Roman equivalent of Zeus), by hiding him away and deceiving Saturn with a swaddled stone.

In time, Jupiter grew to manhood and confronted his father. In a climactic battle, Jupiter forced Saturn to regurgitate his siblings. Together, they overthrew Saturn and the Titans, establishing a new cosmic order under the rule of the Olympian gods. Saturn, now dethroned, was exiled.

Saturn’s darker qualities have tended to color his reception since the dawn Christian era—his association with death, time, and chaos—contributed to his conflation with Satan, an image that successfully stuck thanks to the work of many medieval and Renaissance interpretations. The name “Saturn” itself shares linguistic similarities with “Satan,” and in Christian demonology, Saturn’s attributes were often reinterpreted in a diabolical light. I have speculated before that they didn’t have the wrong guy— this deity’s spread East from Crete possibly entangled him with the entities that come down to us as “Ba’al” or “Belial” or “King of Bablyon” in the Biblical tradition.

But anyway, as Saturn presided over the end of things, so too did Satan in Christian thought preside over the fallen world, over death, and over the forces of darkness. The association with lead in alchemy further underscored this connection. Lead was viewed as a base, impure material that needed to be transmuted—symbolic of sin and the process of spiritual redemption.

So that’s Saturn— and you can probably read a little bit into what’s coming, but what about his shadow?

Hollis includes a reading that explains this to me much in a very granular way. I hope it will work for you, as well. He gives a reading of The Waste Land— and specifically the part of The Waste Land that brings me to my knees on every reading:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

"Unreal City," a place where human lives are defined not by their lives but by a spiritual absence of life. Machines performing tasks—an existence hollowed out by commerce, routine, and a disconnection from the soul’s deeper needs. Eliot’s London, draped in the brown fog of a winter dawn, flows with the ghosts of the living dead, souls who have not transcended, trapped in the lifeless cycle of modernity. Echoing Dante’s shocked realization—“I had not thought death had undone so many”—gesturing toward the crowd. The mythic wasteland he describes is not simply a physical space but a spiritual condition, where the rites and myths that should guide inner transformation are absent, leaving only the hollow forces of indoctrination and mechanical living. You know only a heap of broken images,” pronounced the Cumean Sibyl, “where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket, no relief.”

This state of spiritual death is mirrored in what James Hollis (finally) calls the Saturnian shadow—the pervasive burden of unfulfilled and misaligned roles that men are expected to carry in modern society.

In this dynamic, the father figure often symbolizes an unattainable ideal, a model of masculinity that the son is expected to follow without question. The example he gives that might also resonate, regards his own relationship as a Boomer with his father (Greatest Generation). The Saturnian role, appointed to men, here, is some measure of painful work in order to provide resources for a family. Them’s the brakes. You don’t get to change that.

The Saturnian shadow is, in primus, his problem with his father— a situation whose resolution, once mediated by a whole host of rituals of induction into a community, have become acutely limiting. Those other rituals, that community— it is mostly gone now, leaving nothing to bridge the gap. Men have inherited the Saturnian gift, but frequently are disoriented. The roles their father prepared them for are gone, and there is no map except pure experience to follow into the unknown. Disorientation is violent. Unstable selves form, unstable tribes, form. The veil of violence comes down. There are winners in this game, and there are losers. Violence incentivizes violence. The reductio ad absurdum to economic value fuels itself.

And look, not to intrude again, but I feel this intensely. My father is a good man— not a great one, but a good one. He was not prepared for the kind of son I turned out to be. My father works every day. It’s not glamorous, but it’s not by any means working class either. He knew one safe way to go through life— as a highly paid professional employee of a very large corporation. That was what he knew how to do. I couldn’t do it, and have been on my own in a world that I was not prepared for since then— learning everything the hardest way possible. I’ve cultivated, deeply, somewhere in my shadow, a lot of anger about that.

The father is frequently ill-equipped to guide the son through this process. Much like Saturn devouring his children out of fear of being overthrown, the father himself may be consumed by the very societal expectations that were imposed upon him, leaving him unable to provide the emotional or spiritual guidance his son needs to transcend those same limitations. We are several generations now into this catabolic burn of shared male mythological resources. Each, increasingly inefficent transfer of the package introduces new chaos, new pain, new disorientation.

In this way, the son inherits not only the societal role but also the unresolved fears and inadequacies of his father. He is expected to step into manhood, to take on the role of protector, provider, and authority, but without the initiation or rites of passage that could prepare him for the depth of responsibility and emotional complexity involved. Lack of preparation often leads to a profound inner conflict, as men struggle to reconcile their authentic selves with the external roles they are expected to play.

The Saturnian shadow, then, is the weight of expectation combined with the absence of true mentorship. Fathers, themselves wounded by the Saturnian forces of time and societal structure, cannot prepare their sons for the journey ahead, leaving men to navigate their pain, isolation, and inadequacy alone. Without the opportunity to integrate their shadow selves and find personal meaning within their roles, men are left feeling trapped, as though they are living in Eliot’s “Unreal City,” where life is reduced to routine and spiritual death—a wasteland in which the soul’s growth is stunted.

The Saturnian shadow confines rather than liberates, imposing a sense of wounding without the possibility of transformation. Modern men are pierced by skewers to their souls, yet deprived of any vision to give that pain meaning. Like the lost souls in Eliot’s Unreal City, men are asked to transition from boyhood to manhood without true rites of passage, without the initiation that should accompany such profound inner change. This leaves them stuck in trivial roles, burdened by expectations that hollow them out rather than help them grow, much like the wasteland of Eliot’s modernity, where the spiritual and the mythic have lost their power to guide.

It is no secret, that my work and my popularity both lie primarily with men, and with men in a particular space or movement that is nominally devoted to right wing politics.

Without abrogating the need to make some sensible policy changes, like closing down the border and re-educating the entire island of Great Britain to be less British (Nigel and even Keir Starmer are doing their part in returning England to the globe, Scotland on the other hand seems more fucked than ever), I have long suspected that something much deeper undergirds what seems to me more and more like the cry of millions of men for anything to stave off disorientation.

I am, myself, one of these men. I could not be anything but what I came from, without the transmutation I am looking for, and cannot become anything but who I am.⁴ I’m here with you, unless you’re a woman, but if you are pull up a chair anyway. This Hollis text was given to me as part of a gun-swap with a very special friend. I think she got the upper hand, because this one immediately seemed critical.

Returning now, to the beginning of the text, out of the gate he makes the following claim: Men, capital-M Men, carry eight secrets. Says he! There are probably a lot more, but he picked eight gullywhompers, and here they are:

1. Men's lives are as much governed by restrictive role expectations as are the lives of women.

2. Men's lives are essentially governed by fear.

3. The power of the feminine is immense in the psychic economy of men.

4. Men collude in a conspiracy of silence whose aim is to suppress their emotional truth.

5. Because men must leave Mother, and transcend the mother complex, wounding is necessary.

6. Men's lives are violent because their souls have been violated.

7. Every man carries a deep longing for his father and for his tribal Fathers.

8. If men are to heal, they must activate within what they did not receive from without.

Asking you to read this seems steep. Telling you about it, dangerous. I’m reaching into the bag of forbidden tricks.

The static of the Culture Wars has grown vast, and we are used to hearing about some of these concepts, and have grown accustomed to dismissing them. Restrictive role expectations, governed by fear, conspiracy of silence. All of these have become de rigeur talking points in the ongoing discourse about relationships etc. These discursive spats were just starting to enter their trench-warfare stage when Hollis was writing this book, in the early 1990’s. But Hollis takes us into the primordial days of this stalemate— making reference to “our movement” and a “men’s movement” that few now remember existed alongside the “Unpacking the Knapsack” brand of feminism, but seems to have disappeared under the waves.

There is a lot to consider.

He acknowledges some truths that have become more calcified, even while they have been used by runaway agents of the modern state to villify men:⁵

American men die, on the average, eight years before women. They are four times more likely to be substance abusers and also four times more likely to take their own lives. They are eleven times more likely to spend time in jail. And these statistics do not even begin to plumb the depth of male rage, male sadness, male isolation.

The media, the popular press, and even some of the sharper talking heads in the Twitter sphere have often wondered exactly what will happen to our space of men once Trump turns out (again) not to be the stabilizing force that American men are looking for.

What stability though? Money? Power? Peace? It is easy to meme these things. It is easy to look for the Great Leader. It is easy— it is almost designed for us all to do so.

I have lived most of my life wistfully free of consequences for this lack of understanding about where I am going. Recently it all caught up at once. I did, perhaps, the worst thing someone can do, which is find the thing I was looking for. Have you ever found that thing? Come to the castle of the Fischer King? Were you prepared?

I was not prepared- and learned a hard, Saturnian lesson. I could not play the proper role, because I had no understanding of what it entailed. I mean some, but it wasn’t adequate. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

None perhaps. How do I release this rage? Where is there to put it? What to do with so much energetic blockage?

I listened to someone tell me about these things for the better part of a year— and it wasn’t a smooth year on any front. At first I dismissed them, then became afraid of them, then angry about them, and have only lately collapsed into a field of low energy, in which my ability to fend off unpleasantries has totally burned away, caught in the Shadow of Saturn.

But what was the thing? I don’t know. Hard to explain. The pieces are not hard to read. Hollis points something helpful out here:

"Every man will recall times when, as a boy, as a youth, or even last week, he dared reveal himself and was shamed and isolated. He learns to stuff that shame, mask it in male bravado and cover, cover, cover. Along the way he is frequently degraded and unable to speak his pain, his protest."

It is in these small, almost imperceptible moments, that Saturn’s shadow is most evident. What I found was a place where the degradation melted away, and someone heard the pain, and responded. And I did not know what to do.

Those early wounds drive us into isolation and force us into masks. Masks of all kinds— brave masks, hypercompetent masks, it might even be a gay mask.

"In such ways is shame swallowed and isolation deepened. The shaming and the secrecy have gone on since childhood, so men become accomplices in their own degradation."

I know many of you all are doing well. Many living complete, integrated lives. I am worried about the rest of us though. If we can be saved, what comes after Trump? Some great filtering? Where will all these people go? I don’t know if political tribalism holds an answer, I don’t know how to make us more okay with making mistakes and being wrong. I don’t know how to loosen that knot, but I wish I did. How can we come to understand our own roles well enough to deserve the reward from filing into them?

Eliot again:

Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving.

Saturn’s legacy remains dual-edged. On one hand, he is the wise, if stern, ruler of time and the seasons, a god of natural order and abundance. On the other, he is the devourer, the dark god of inevitability and decline. His temple in Rome housed the state treasury, a fitting symbol for a god associated with both the accumulation of wealth and the passage of time, which can diminish even the greatest fortunes.

This has been an “I’m deeply not okay about some stuff” post, and thank you for bearing with me through it.

1. James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994), 25.

2. As the bringer of wealth, Saturn was closely tied to the bounty of the earth. His festival, Saturnalia, was not just a celebration of abundance but also a communal acknowledgment of the cyclical nature of fortune—both material and spiritual. Saturn's role as the master of time stems from his identification with Cronus, the personification of time in its destructive aspect, devouring all things, even his own children. This association with time also underscores his connection to the inevitable cycles of life, death, and renewal, a theme that parallels the harvest, where the rhythms of sowing, reaping, and the dormancy of winter reflect the eternal return of growth and decay. Thus, Saturn embodies the paradox of both abundance and limitation, prosperity and decline, binding these cosmic forces together in a single archetype.

3. Uranus, is, to this commenter, pretty clearly the Sky God of the blue eyed horse people, whose name cannot be spoken.

4. “Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?”

5. Remember, our term for “the modern state” is “The Plantation” and still for now, we have not disaggregated that concept from the standard Black Republican claim that their brethren remain on the Democrat Plantation.