LEAD – Saturn’s Heavy Metal
Osiris, the black god, was the first deity of the Egyptians to die and be resurrected, demonstrating again Saturn-lead’s contrasting properties of rigidity and heaviness, and its revivifying inner fire. It was Isis, his sister and wife, who restored him to life. The agent of his death was Set, son of the primordial goddess, from which the name Saturn is derived — the bones are his symbol. Crossed bones are also the symbol of the Voudoo loa Baron Samedhi — Master of the Crossroads – who stands at the junction of life and death.
When despair and loneliness rise to choke the joy and love from life, you may be sure that Saturn’s shadow is passing by, black as the messenger crows of Cronus. People with Saturn working strongly in their horoscopes tend to be serious, pragmatic, sometimes cold and gloomy, sometimes downright morbid. But they often live to be very old, even despite themselves, and like the mountain goat they can scale the heights through their tenacity, self-discipline and endurance. They can also reveal an unexpected sense of humour.
Saturn brings the tests, responsibilities and ordeals of material life which none of us born to earth can avoid, and was regarded as the great malefic by medieval astrologers. But just as lead has ahidden fire and beauty, so Saturn has another more universal role, providing a bridge to the outer planets and other states of being, if we use the occult knowledge which can only be found in its darkness.
There is another side to Saturn, if we go back beyond its ‘heavy’ connotations, firstly to discover that both Saturn and Cronus were originally gods of agriculture, with the name saturn being derived from the latin severe, ‘to sow.’ Saturn’s wife Ops was an earth goddess of crops and the harvest, and the crows mentioned above were also associated with ancient rituals where the barley-king was sacrificed every year, or ‘reaped’ by the golden sickle of the Goddess, his blood fertilizing the fields for the new year.
The great orgiastic Roman festival of Saturnalia, dedicated to Saturn and Ops, began on December 19 and lasted for several days, celebrating both the winter solstice and the memory of the golden reign of Cronus. All social customs were reversed, slaves were waited onby their masters, and the people exchanged candles and dolls in imitation of the original human sacrifices to the barley-god.
The reign of Cronus was said to have been agolden age, when humans lived like gods, free from work or sorrow or old age, a time when the earth flowered like a garden. When the ancient Titans were banished, there is a version which tells of Cronus going not to the underworld, but to the Islands of the Blest in the northern seas, where he sleeps heavily guarded, but will return.
GODDESS OF SATURN
“I am Life and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.” Liber AL vel Legis
To go back even further, before the ‘decadent patriarchalism’ of Cronus and the Olympian king-gods took shape from an even earlier mythology, the sickle was originally the symbol of the ancient star goddess of the Great Bear constellation.
In the Qabalistic tradition the female nature of Saturn is clearly expressed in the sphere called Binah on the Tree of Life, described as ‘the female potency of the universe’ and ‘the primordial formative influence…behind and beyond manifesting substance,’ just as Saturn was called ‘the god of the most ancient form of matter.’8
Her symbols are the womb and the cup, and she is both the Mother of all life ‘who binds force into the discipline of form’, and the bringer of death. Through her, life descends into all levels of manifestation. It was once the custom for brides to wear black for their wedding ceremonies, and in Eastern European countries to wear the wedding ring on Saturn’s middle finger, to connect with the female potency of this sphere.
The Hindu goddess Kali, black as space, who wears a garland of skulls and carries a sword, expresses the nature of this primordial power, the dual nature of Saturn which alternately creates and destroys. In all of the old religions which were based on the cycles of nature, death was celebrated equally with life — in order to live, the barley seed must die.
When worship of the primordial goddess was forcibly suppressed by the new male-oriented religions, the understanding of death became instead man’s greatest fear and taboo. Material and temporal power, the lowest expressions of Saturn, were grasped as if to compensate for the loss of the spirit of the goddess.
The grey-faced rulers who stalk the cold bureaucratic halls of church and state today are the old barley-kings who refuse to die. It is no coincidence that President Bush is a member of the elite and highly symbolic Skull and Bones Club.
But only pollution, decay and destruction mark the end of man’s attempt to dominate nature, and Saturn moves in, patiently, inexorably, to drive this lesson home.
LEAD REFERENCES
1. The Nature of Substance, Rudolf Hauschka, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983
2. The Secrets of Metals by Wilhelm Pelikan, Anthroposopbic Press, N.Y., 1973
3. Metal Magic, Mellie Uyldert. Turnstone Press Ltd., England 1980
4. Agriculture of Tomorrow, L & E Kolisko, Kolisko Archive Publications, Bournemouth, England 1978
5. Spirit in Matter, L. Kolisko, Kolisko Archive, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud, England 1948
6. Lead and the Human Organism, L and E Kolisko, Kolisko Archive Publications, Bournemouth, England 1980
7. Alchemy, Titus Burkhardt, Element Books, Ltd., Dorset, Great Britain, 1986
8. The Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune, Samuel Weiser, Inc., N.Y., 1984
Nightside of Eden, Kenneth Grant, Frederick Muller Ltd., London 1977
Gray’s Anatomy, Henry Gray, Running Press, Philadelphia, PA 1974
Homeopathic Materia Medica, William Boericke, Jain Publishers, New Delhi, 110055 India
Astrology and Biochemistry, Vanda Sawtell
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, New York, 1911 The White Goddess, Robert Graves, Farrar, Stroud & Giroux, N.Y., 1984