Saturn and elder hood – prompts from yesterday’s studio

We are in the balsamic phase of the Moon, nearing the completion of the cycle beginning with the Taurus New Moon, and readying for Friday’s New Moon in Gemini. This is a time of finishing what we started, and resting in preparation for the new.

We continued our exploration into the nature of Saturn by talking about the ‘senex and the puer’, the old man and the youth per Carl Jung in his work on archetypes. Saturn represents eldership and wisdom, letting us trade in our culture’s assumption of aging as loss for the elder as wise guiding force of the tribe. 

An ancient archetype mirroring the Saturnian phases of life is the triple goddess: maiden, mother and crone. We can imagine the transitions at each Saturn return, ages 29, 58, and 87. 

Our prompts for the short writing session were these:

• “When I was a child”…what were some of the ‘childish things’ you had to put away as you grew up?
• List some blessings of adulthood.

Our longer writing period began with these prompts:

• Use the picture above to reflect on the maiden/mother/crone archetypes and phases of life;
• Start with this sentence: “Sometimes we have to let go of the past to take hold of the future.”‘;
• Or reflect on this phrase from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “The Mists of Avalon”: What happens to the King Stag when the Young Stag is grown?

We begin our June studio series on June 2nd. Check it out: https://kristinebackes.com/weekly-astro-writing-salon/