Personality / B----<-----G---->-----A /Soul
Saturn in the Natal Chart - In a natal chart, Saturn by house position and sign describes how the sense of self  has been assembling itself over lifetimes.

• Awareness of self as a personality with a separate identity is a precondition of developing individuality, using that word to mean having the permanent atoms that create inter-lifetime continuity.
• A sense of individuality is attendant upon the creation of the embryonic causal body that is the means for the personality to gain soul awareness.

It is on the mental plane that the personality comes to knows itself and it is on the three highest sub-planes of the mental plane that the causal body is built. This process uses isolation and continuity.

The isolation that is crucial for this process is achieved by the act of coming into incarnation in personality form.

Anyone who has read Charles Leadbetter’s ‘The Masters and the Path’ will know from his description of the spiritual training of the chelas or disciples, the role played by applying in a concentrated form the isolating principle enshrined in the incarnating process. By isolating him so he has only his own energy field to sustain him, the chela soon learns about his deficiencies.

Those of us who have been put through this will readily attest to its effectiveness. Without stimulants, medication, and certainly without energetic input from others in the form of healing, the mind very quickly uses the simplified situation to make connections between an effect and its cause. In everyday parlance this is called being left to stew in your own juice, and although not everyone is going to like to hear it put thus, stewing in our own juice is exactly what we are doing in incarnation.

Until there is a sufficiently developed level of consciousness, continuity will express itself in its lowest aspect through repetition and recurrence, not simply within lifetimes but across lifetimes. Stewing without even bubbles to create movement!

In a chart, Saturn symbolizes what time has made familiar. It symbolizes the experiences that have gone into making that separated being aware of himself. Saturn governs survival on the mental level. This is why there is so much fear connected with moving on from our Saturnian patterns. Its natural ally is the Moon which governs survival and continuity at the biological level.

These experiences, stored in the deepest recesses of the psyche, give rise to our assumptions about ourselves and about life. In a natal chart the sign and position of Saturn will show what those assumptions are and the nature of the suffering brought by those assumptions.

In our lives, these assumptions are the cause of:

• restriction
• fear
• difficulty
• repetition
• denial

The agents for these experiences are frequently personalities, organizations and situations that we perceive as having authority.

After the construction of the causal body embryo, the process supervised by Saturn continues as before. The isolation of personality consciousness with its partial view,  its exclusive way of understanding life, its way of enabling us to link perceived cause with perceived effect, will eventually make us more and more aware of the personal reality and personal responsibility.

This is the point of entry for the western astrologers because western horoscopy is in the service of the individuated being who has an interest in his own prospects and well-being and, more latterly since the advent of psychologically oriented astrology, his own development. And eventually we have to acknowledge that our personal realities are simply a glimpse through a keyhole and that our way of understanding life is the source of our suffering.

A skilled astrologer will be able to ascertain from the sign and house position of Saturn what are his clients assumptions about life and challenge him with them. It may well be the first time that a client has been encouraged to question the foundations upon which he has built his life. We cannot see on what we are standing because our feet cover it! This is how it is with the Saturnian mindset. It is so much a part of us that we are identified with it.

Weakening that identification is the first step in weakening the hold of fate because it increases our awareness of choice and breaking out of repetition and recurrence. Using choice to make Saturn turn away from the Moon and to start serving the Sun is something that is within the reach of all westerners now. And Saturn serves the Sun when it assists our conscious efforts to uncover and manifest our true identity.

What Saturn has to lend to this effort are:

• experience
• discernment
• persistence
• structure
• self-discipline
• the ability to set and realize goals

But before we can turn Saturn around in this way we must first be prepared to have our basic assumptions about life challenged, and to go through all the fear that is aroused by choosing not to use our standard defense tactics.

If we are to go against the grain of our thinking, if we are to abandon the tactics that time has taught us will protect the person that past-life memory and conditioning has encouraged us to think we are,  we have to believe there is some point to this. This ability to understand the cause and the remedy of human suffering and to understand the purpose behind the suffering, difficulties and misfortunes will eventually be brought by Saturn over time (lifetimes) but it is a process that can be speeded up by a spiritual education that encourages self-responsibility. Understanding is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Making this gift available is the purpose of the Third Ray traditions of which Theosophy itself is one.

In this state of separation that is the personality, we learn who we are. This partial view, this restricted way of understanding, this source of discomfort and suffering, this process supervised by Saturn is the grit in the oyster’s shell and soul consciousness the pearl.