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Correspondences of Saturn

the classical correspondences of Saturn: day, metal, colour, incense, angel and deva

What the tradition reads

The grimoire tradition gives Saturn Saturday as its day and lead as its metal, correspondences Agrippa's Scale of the Number Seven records, and gives the planet, in a separate chapter on planetary colours, black, lucid, earthy, leaden and brown, and, in the chapter on planetary fumes, a suffumigation of black poppy seed, henbane, mandrake root and myrrh, with pepperwort root and frankincense among its wider incense. Black poppy seed is the opium poppy, and henbane and mandrake root are themselves poisonous plants, historically used as narcotics and, in mandrake's case, as a supposed aid to sorcery; this entry records that recipe as history, not instruction, and none of the three should be burned, eaten, drunk, smoked or applied. Agrippa's own Scale gives Saturn the angel Tzaphkiel, while the Heptameron's working text names a different angel, Cassiel, for the same day, so that Saturn is another planet where two grimoire sources give genuinely different angel names for one office rather than one name spelled two ways, as this corpus already records for Jupiter. The Vedic tradition names its own significator for the same planet, Shani, son of the Sun and brother of Yama, lord of death, read as the most feared and most respected of the classical grahas, feared for the delays it brings and respected for the discipline the tradition holds those delays are building. Both traditions keep Saturday as this planet's day, one of the few points of full agreement across every source consulted.

The story

Saturn's correspondences descend through the same sixteenth century synthesis as every other planet's, Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, but the planet's own mythic history reaches further back than any grimoire: Saturn is the Roman name for the Greek Cronus, the Titan who overthrew his own father Uranus and was in turn overthrown by his son Jupiter, a succession myth the astrological tradition reads directly into the planet's meaning, since a figure defined by being displaced by the next generation becomes, in the sky, the planet of time itself, of what ends so that something else can begin. The heaviness the tradition gives Saturn, in lead, in its darker colours, in a temperament of structure and restriction, mirrors the myth's own weight: Cronus is the god who devoured his children to prevent exactly the overthrow that found him anyway, and the astrological Saturn keeps something of that anxious, controlling watchfulness even in its most ordinary correspondences. The Heptameron's own working text names Cassiel as Saturday's angel where Agrippa's Scale names Tzaphkiel instead, two names from two independent grimoire lineages rather than one office agreed upon under different spellings, and later occultists, well used to reconciling disagreements of exactly this kind between their sources, generally recorded both rather than choosing between them.

Written from

Corpus key correspondence:Saturn.