July 8, 2025, 10:30 a.m.

the place of saturn ♑🌕

HACKSTROLOGY

My books are open! You can find information about readings with me at the end of this newsletter. I hope to meet you soon! :)

This letter's first full moon series will visit each of the visible planets through the houses where they have their joy. You can read Chris Brennan's 2013 ISAR article on this topic here, which forms the basis for a chunk of Hellenistic Astrology chapter 10.


Josefa de Óbidos, "St. Teresa of Avila, Mystic Spouse of Christ" (1672) Josefa de Óbidos, "St. Teresa of Avila, Mystic Spouse of Christ" (1672)

I've identified with my 12th house stellium in multiple house systems. Placidus places my Sun there, while whole signs claim my chart ruler Jupiter and punt my Sun to my 1st house. As an astrology novice, I was lured by Karen Hamaker-Zondag describing it as "the unconscious" and "a veiled house." In her book The Twelfth House, she paraphrases traditional meanings as "serious illnesses, of hospitals, sanatoria, asylums and even prisons" (emphasis mine) without citations because "they would have taken too much space,"1 nevermind this translated text makes sparse use of footnotes to begin with.

Truncating Hellenistic sources given by Brennan:

  • Hermes Trismegistus, Dodekatropos: "Bad Spirit, pre-ascension, livelihood, submission of slaves"2
  • Vettius Valens, Anthology: "foreign lands, enmities, slaves, injuries, dangers, judgments, suffering, death, sickness"3
  • Rhetorius of Egypt, Compendium: "between worlds (metakosmios)" 4

Deborah Houlding, recent conduct and historical revisionism aside, credited al-Bīrūnī with the earliest "prison" signification5 in her skeleton timeline. I traced her bibliography to what turned out to be a parallel English and Persian text that gives it as follows for nativities:

Enemies, misery, anxieties, prison, debt, fines, bail, fear, adversity, disease, prenatal fancies of mother, cattle, harbours, slaves, servants, armies, exile, tumults.

al-biruni-461.jpg

And for horary questions,

Fugitives, writers, those who neglect devotion, a precious gem, prisoners, the matter which preceded the question, property of oppressors, thieves, lost property, scorn, envy and fraud. 6

al-biruni-462.jpg

al-Bīrūnī was born nearly a century after the death of Abu Ma'Shar, who wrote in his abbreviated Great Introduction translated by Benjamin N. Dykes: "The twelfth, that of suffering, enemies, prisons, [envy and slander], pains, wants, [and riding animals]." al-Qabīsī is closer to al-Bīrūnī with "enemies and labor and sorrow, envy and whispering, clever tricks and devices, and beasts [for riding]," as well as "what will happen to mothers and their conception, in terms of good or bad."7

As you may be able to tell from these sources, I fall in the camp of the tradition's literal meanings hardly warrant the amorphous keywords psychological/humanist astrologers reach for to make the 12th house more palatable. My practice and own chart bias me: I primarily read the charts of writers for the subjects of their work alongside their biographies.

A favorite chart of mine, though tricky to calculate, is Saint Teresa of Ávila, who founded enclosed Discalced Carmelite orders for women throughout Spain and wrote extensively about the value of prayer and seclusion. Her ascendant is one degree off from mine, so her Saturnine houses are also mine: Capricorn for her 11th (religious orders are communities) and Aquarius for her 12th (enclosure). Saturn is in her 10th house, Sagittarius, though we both have late midheavens in this sign, too. Besides her writing and being one of four women Doctors of the Church, she is primarily known for her foundations. Through correspondence, she mentored Saint John of the Cross, who spent his life founding mendicant Discalced Carmelite orders for men. While both of them were mystics in keeping with modern 12th house meanings, the physical and political conditions in which they wrote were decidedly the traditional 12th.

Medieval monasteries are near indistinct from prisons; the rooms where monastics sleep are called cells. I've been specifying Discalced (shoeless) Carmelites because Teresa and John first tried to reform the preexisting Carmelite order, to great and violent resistance of which John bore much of the brunt. Part of the scrutiny they both faced arose from their shared converso heritage, or Catholic converts from Judaism pressured by the Spanish Inquisition. So within the Church and the decidedly pluralistic society of Golden Age Spain, well after the Crusades but still religiously diverse, they were deemed alien, not assimilated enough, still enemies of the faith. Rhetorius likely meant a classical cosmology when he said "between worlds," but this is where I find the oldest historical basis for the more modern 12th house association with migration and immigrants: between lands, between cultures. (Let me not get into the diversity of the late Roman empire in which Rhetorius wrote.)

Speaking of migration, my favorite musician Nick Cave's rectified birth chart puts his Virgo stellium in his 9th house, but additionally his chart ruler, Saturn, in his 12th house. Nick and his wife Susie both love Teresa and John. Susie Cave quoted both of them in translation on her now-defunct The Vampire's Wife "Stuff" blog, and Nick namechecks John on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World:" "Saint John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box..."

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2004 double album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus followed the death of Johnny Cash, and the late country singer covering "The Mercy Seat" on American III, then inviting Nick to sing a song with him for American IV which ended up being "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Appropriately for me kicking off this newsletter, Nick is an agony uncle now, so read his telling of this tale.

Johnny Cash's Saturn is in great condition twice over. It's in Aquarius, one of the signs it rules, and the 12th house, where it as its joy. Nick Cave's Saturn is in Sagittarius (like Teresa of Avila), but also his 12th house. Of course this planet ruling restriction would joy in the house to do with confinement! Both of these white men have been arrested for drug-related reasons, but never actually went to prison. Johnny Cash's 1968 At Folsom Prison concert is pretty much unthinkable today and postdates his early single "Folsom Prison Blues" by over a decade. He wrote the lyric while serving the Air Force after seeing the 1951 film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. There's layers of abstraction here: a man who'd never been to prison nonetheless drawn to the imagery, finding it familiar to his circumstances. Similarly, the American South that Nick Cave writes of in "Tupelo," his tempestuous Elvis nativity tale, is a myth filtered to a young Australian man through country and rock stars. So too are the electric chair and capital punishment, which had been outlawed federally in Australia by 1973. But these Saturnine men, especially Capricorn rising Nick, orbit these 12th house topics from early in their writing and performing careers all the way to the end, in Cash's selections for the American albums and Nick's still-powerful renditions of "Stagger Lee" and "The Mercy Seat." It's not unlike John of the Cross's obsessive contemplation of the crucifixion, right down to doodling it.

Drawing of the Crucifixion by St. John of the Cross c. 1550 Drawing of the Crucifixion by St. John of the Cross c. 1550

Perhaps thinking of John of the Cross in "There She Goes, My Beautiful World," Nick Cave tried confining himself to a home office, featured prominently in the documentary 20,000 Days on Earth prior to the death of his son Arthur. Despite his unconventional career, he treated writing and composition like a 9 to 5, but "in time this office, my retreat, started to become a place of exclusion or of hiding, a place where I could turn away from the world, under the guise of being creative, at the expense of everything else," he writes in a 2022 Red Hand File. He donated the entire contents of this office to the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen for an exhibition that's since gone on tour. "Handing it over was one of the things that allowed me find my way back to the world. Giving up my office helped set me free." The final paragraph of this letter is worth copying in full.

Perhaps, the sacred space is simply the world itself – a hallowed place where we all exist at this time, where we engage with life in all its many tempers, within the present moment. Perhaps the thing we have spent so much time escaping, or attempting to create, was there all along – the blessed space, the sacred space, the truly creative place – the world around us.

This could be that modern 12th house notion of self-effacement, absorption into the whole that cookbooks equate to Pisces, but for Nick it's plain Sagittarius. I saw him with the Bad Seeds and Radiohead's Colin Greenwood on their Wild God North American Tour this spring, and when someone on the floor shouted "Preach!", Nick replied, drily, "Yes, I am preaching." For all that Jupiter and Saturn are presented as contrasts, Saturn and the auspices of organized religion give the mystical, the intangible, a shape that we can get our hands around: Aquarius bearing water.

A vocal minority of Bad Seeds fans react negatively to Nick's spirituality that he has been more earnest, more explicit about since Arthur's death, but it's always been there. "There is something about the systemization of the church that suits my temperament, too," he told the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2023. "It's something that's habitual, on some level, like work, like drugs."8 Elder rock stars are something of a rarity because the rock star archetype is perhaps more Marsian, more narrow. Mars' domains are a fire and water sign, burning fast and drowning. But Saturn stands steady at the margins of the world, the edge of the solar system, with enough distance to turn back to face the whole. It's isolated in its house, with the clearest view.


sailorfe@hackstrology $ astrolog -q july 10 2025 16:38

Astrolog 7.80 chart for Thu Jul 10, 2025  4:38pm (ST Zone 4W)
Body  Locat. Ret. Lati. Rul.      House  Rul. Veloc.    Whole Houses

Sun : 18Can50   - 0�00' (-) [ 9th house] [-] +0.953  -  House cusp  1:  0Sco00
Moon: 18Cap50   - 4�26' (d) [ 3rd house] [-] +12.82  -  House cusp  2:  0Sag00
Merc: 13Leo29   - 1�26' (-) [10th house] [-] +0.552  -  House cusp  3:  0Cap00
Venu:  6Gem53   - 2�23' (-) [ 8th house] [d] +1.117  -  House cusp  4:  0Aqu00
Mars: 13Vir32   + 0�52' (-) [11th house] [-] +0.591  -  House cusp  5:  0Pis00
Jupi:  7Can03   - 0�06' (X) [ 9th house] [R] +0.225  -  House cusp  6:  0Ari00
Satu:  1Ari55   - 2�16' (f) [ 6th house] [-] +0.003  -  House cusp  7:  0Tau00
Uran:  0Gem09   - 0�12' (-) [ 8th house] [X] +0.042  -  House cusp  8:  0Gem00
Nept:  2Ari09 R - 1�19' (-) [ 6th house] [d] -0.003  -  House cusp  9:  0Can00
Plut:  2Aqu55 R - 3�43' (X) [ 4th house] [-] -0.022  -  House cusp 10:  0Leo00
Nort: 20Pis08 R + 0�00' (-) [ 5th house] [d] -0.168  -  House cusp 11:  0Vir00
Fort: 27Tau40   + 0�00' (-) [ 7th house] [-] +320.6  -  House cusp 12:  0Lib00
Asce: 27Sco40   + 0�00'     [ 1st house]     +308.7
Midh:  4Vir12   + 0�00'     [11th house]     +381.6     Car Fix Mut TOT   +: 6
                                                     Fir  2   1   0   3   -: 8
                                                     Ear  1   1   2   4   M: 7
                                                     Air  0   1   2   3   N: 5
                                                     Wat  2   1   1   4   A: 3
                                                     TOT  5   4   5  14   D: 9
                                                                          <:10

The moon is exactly full in Capricorn on Thursday, July 10 at 4:38 p.m. ET. I just put together a little birthday packet for a dear Cancer friend, my Saturn return twin within a few days. Ours aren't due until 2026 thanks to it stationing retrograde on July 13, after which it'll scoot back into Pisces by September, so take this moon and these late summer months as a little peek at what Saturn in Aries will feel like once we're in it fully. Consider that Aries and Capricorn are cardinal signs, in a square from one another. They're both signs that want to go, but at radically different speeds; Saturn is fallen here. The moon is also detrimented in Capricorn. Overall, I consider this lunation itchy.

For me (Pisces rising), this itch is in my 11th house of friendships and community. I'm tiptoeing back into astrology networking with this letter and rejoining AYA, but also juggling other online spaces I'm part of. I'll quickly go through the other signs:

  • ♈ Aries: reputation, career
  • ♉ Taurus: learning, long-distance travel, spirituality
  • ♊ Gemini: shared resources, shared space
  • ♋ Cancer: one-on-one relationships
  • ♌ Leo: health, illness, pets
  • ♍ Virgo: fun, creativity, children
  • ♎ Libra: home, family, ancestry, private spaces
  • ♏ Scorpio: everyday routines, writing/communication
  • ♐ Sagittarius: finances, food
  • ♑ Capricorn: self, body, identity
  • ♒ Aquarius: isolation, confinement; this letter!
  • ♓ Pisces: communities, friendships

In a little over a week, July 18, Mercury will station retrograde in late Leo, which means we're in for quite a long slog of this sign once it stations direct on August 11 shortly after the Aquarius full moon. No juicy, homey Mercury in Virgo until September 2!

🐈‍⬛


  1. Karen Hamaker-Zondag, The Twelfth House, 77-78. ↩

  2. Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology, 341. ↩

  3. Ibid, 346. ↩

  4. Ibid, 362. ↩

  5. Deborah Houlding, The Houses: Temples of the Sky, 54. ↩

  6. al-Bīrūnī tr. Robert Ramsay Wright, 461-62. ↩

  7. Benjamin N. Dykes, Introductions to Traditional Astrology, 75-76. ↩

  8. Nick Cave, interview by Justin Welby, June 30, 2023, The Archbishop Interviews, BBC Radio 4. ↩

Hi hi! I have quite an open menu of offerings that only varies based on length:

  • 60-minute reading, $90 USD: This is a good fit if you're new to astrology or don't quite know what you're looking for. We'll take a tour of your natal chart starting from the ground with your ascendant and its ruler, then look up at the sky at the lights and other planets.
  • 90-minute reading, $140 USD: Your foundational natal reading with something on the side, such as current or past transits, or timing techniques for your birthday or Saturn return.

If you're interested, reply here or email me directly sailorfe@proton.me.

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