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Saturn square Neptune

Saturn square Neptune, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Alan Leo's older delineation groups Saturn square Neptune with the opposition as a single adverse contact: an uncommon and strange position, in his words, that brings a person into remarkable situations and carries a lofty vibration present day humanity cannot fully answer, together with some hidden "kink" in the nature that may never come to fruition but remain entirely unsuspected. He counsels guarding against the subtler forms of selfishness this position can bring out, adds separately that the cultivation of psychic faculties would not suit it, and notes, as a further and distinct point, that some melancholy tendency is always associated with the position. Astrology King's reading of the same square names it specifically as a source of tests and challenges in reaching one's hopes and dreams, psychological guilt, fear and delay from other people or unforeseen events standing in the way of the ideal; calling it a karmic aspect, the same source names time, self discipline and patience as what overcomes it, and notes real creative talent among the celebrities it lists who carry the aspect tightly. Between two charts, one person's Saturn square another's Neptune places the two planets at this discordant angle across the two charts; the sources consulted for this entry give no separate reading for the synastry contact itself.

The story

A square is ninety degrees, a quarter of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the opposition, discordant, since the signs it joins are not of the same kind, but of different natures and sexes. Saturn and Neptune are father and son: the Neptune page names Saturn and Ops as his parents, and names him a brother of Jupiter and Pluto, with whom he presides over the three realms of heaven, the earthly world (including the underworld), and the seas. Set at this harder angle, the father who lends his own name to boundary and limit meets, in his son, a share of the world, the sea, that is held apart from him and administered instead by Neptune and his brothers; the square is read as the ongoing strain of the boundary that keeps that share separate from the father's own domain.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Saturn:Neptune:square.