Saturn in Sagittarius

In the youth group, the seminar or the late-night argument, yours was the voice that kept asking, politely, how anyone actually knew that.

The edge of the old sky

For thousands of years Saturn was the farthest planet anyone knew. Beyond it lay only the fixed stars. It marked the outer boundary of the visible heavens, the last wall of the known world. Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, stands for the horizon, for meaning and for long travel, and here Saturn stands at that edge. You want to go far, but you also want to know exactly where the edge is.

Tested faith

Your beliefs are hard-won. You don’t accept a philosophy because it is exciting or popular; you test it against experience, find the holes, and keep only what survives. That makes your faith, when you have one, very strong. It can also make you sceptical for years, doubting teachers, religions and grand ideas that others take up easily.

The serious student

Higher learning, law, publishing, religion, travel: you approach them all with discipline. You finish the degree others abandoned, read the long book to the end, and make the trip properly, with a plan. Over time you become an authority people turn to because you have done the work. Your bookshelves have sources, not summaries, and the margins are full of arguments with the authors.

Nothing to hold

What haunts you is the thought that nothing means anything, or that you have chosen the wrong thing to believe. You can hold on to a rigid view out of fear of drifting, or refuse to commit to any belief at all. Freedom sometimes frightens you more than it thrills you.

A teacher, in time

Saturn makes the student into the teacher, slowly. What you have learned from testing everything, you can pass on without preaching, because you remember what it was to doubt.

Travelling properly

Before a trip the history books come out, learn a few phrases properly, and come home having understood a place rather than merely having seen it. Your photographs are few and your notes are many.

The students who trusted you most were the ones who argued hardest, and you respected them for it, because you had been one of them.