Father Time

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Post by Jane Lewis

With the Capricorn ingress, two different but related images are everywhere to be seen - that of Father Christmas and of the baby Jesus lying in a manger.

The cardinal earth sign is ruled by Saturn, one of whose archetypes is the Old Man, and modern-day Father Christmas has morphed to become a mixture of the rotund bon-viveur Sagittarian who enjoys a drink or two with that of the more sober Capricornian figure, no doubt because the jollier ho-ho-ho character has more widespread appeal and gets folk more into the mood for fun and festivity.

But Father Christmas is a Saturnian figure, his age shown by his flowing white beard which symbolises the promise of wisdom that can come with advanced years. He represents the dying year which gives way to a new one, imaged as the birth of the new baby, the light of the world. In the northern hemisphere the winter solstice marks the end of darkest weeks of the year, and celebrations welcome the return of the increasing light, and all that represents.
Not that all is bright and beautiful straight away for the next few months bring challenges of bitter cold and limitation which must be faced before the greater warmth and longer days of sunlight can be really felt and enjoyed. No wonder that December, January and February come under the hold of Saturn through its rulership of Capricorn and Aquarius.

“From out of the darkness comes life, and out of evil comes good. The darkness of earth holding within its womb the seed of life, and the magical touch of the Sun, the Christ, reaching down, touching, embracing Mother Earth, brings forth in due season the Spring as child of that love.”

White Eagle

Saturn is often unfairly maligned as a malevolent planet because it does indeed represent the cold, dark element of earth. But in truth, it represents the alchemical lead within all human beings that can, through hard labours of love, be turned into solar gold: the Sun within, which means the Christ child lying in the crib of the human heart. Saturn is Father Time on the three-dimensional earth plane. Saturn’s rings describe the constricting bonds that circumscribe our lives yet ultimately lead us back to the centre-point. Spiritual practice takes us on an inner journey through which we realise that time and space are only relative and do not exist in higher dimensions.

By nature melancholic and introspective, the Saturnian type gravitates towards the inner life of serious thought, he is happy to spend time alone in quiet contemplation, engrossed in deep study of the inner laws that govern the real working of things so that, at the end of a very long journey Divine Truth might be unveiled. Time (Saturn) reveals Truth (Uranus). Coldness, remoteness, unsociability are characteristics of these planet. Utterly dependable and undaunted, he traverses immense frozen, snowy landscapes in order to reach every human soul on Christmas night so that he might deliver the ultimate gift of the joy of spiritual realisation that the Divine Child is, eventually, birthed within every human heart, completely irrespective of their age, race, religion or philosophy. His precious gift is delivered ‘down the chimney’ of the human spine from crown to root, with its thirty-three vertebrae along which are the seven main psycho-spiritual energy centres. Pulling his sleigh through the frosty air are the Sacred Seven imaged as reindeer, Rudolf being the chief of these.

Coming strongly under Saturn’s influence was Johannes Kepler born at the winter solstice in 1571, who had Sun, Mercury, Venus and Uranus in Capricorn together with Saturn in Scorpio ruling his Aquarius midheaven. He is remembered for having proposed a geometrical model of the solar system with its seven traditional planets which orbit around the central Sun. He gave us his three laws of planetary motion: that planets go round the Sun in ellipses rather than circles, that planets closer to the Sun travel faster, and that a planet’s orbital period is determined by its distance from the Sun. At the moment, transiting Saturn sits upon his MC. He died at the time of his second Saturn return in 1630, presumably having completed what he had come to earth to do in that particular incarnation, hinted at by the moon’s north node in Leo, the Sun at the centre and heart of all.