Saturn in Gemini

Advice for those who get overloaded by cities

If the city overstimulates you, consider relocating to some place more homogenous or even just quieter can be quite soothing. Don’t stay put because you have too much fear to leave. It’s possible that your curiosity and friendliness were thwarted at some point. Perhaps a parent had Black Forest Syndrome (“Don’t leave the village, there are wolves out there lurking!”). Your task in life, then, is to become involved in the world around you and to discover a path through it that empowers you, gives you friendship and camaraderie, and allows you to explore the inner recesses of your own mind without fear. Don’t be afraid to go look for such a place if you were not born into one. There’s a close association between mental and physical health for you. If your health is suffering especially, it is time to make that geographical move.

Isolation is not uncommon with Saturn in Gemini

It’s not unusual for people with this placement to have periods of isolation or exile. From Bobby Fisher, to Oscar Wilde, to Ted Kaczynski, to Isabel Allende. From Julia Child, to Aime Cesaire, there are periods of time when the native is removed from his or her “home.” This is part of the karmic direction for Saturn in Gemini. For these folks must experience the world around them. This can be a physical, mental, or even spiritual wandering. Oscar Wilde explained it as wanting “to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world.” It can be literal or metaphorical.

Despite proclivities for the philosophical and poetic, Saturn in Gemini folk are forced to dwell among human beings who have much to offer. But who are also distracting, noisy, curious, infuriating, and difficult. You must try to keep others in perspective and not get too irritated by them.  Also, you may have a fascination with the mechanisms of ordinary, day-to-day relationships, even as they infuriate you. Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera, and Sasha Baron Cohen are good examples of this dynamic. They mix it up with the lower classes (usually), witnessing (or even stoking at times) the drama. Also witnessing the tragedy, comedy, and catastrophe of modern life unfolding. It’s as if they just can’t figure it all out.  

The biggest puzzle to Saturn in Gemini

Strangers are one thing, but those closest to you will always be the biggest puzzle, and by closest I mean close in proximity, in age, in blood relation, or work situation. One of the biggest favors you could do for yourself is to give up the pretense of caring about their comings and goings. Don’t fret over the inner thoughts of your friends, neighbors, and siblings.  You are happiest when alone, reading, listening to music, walking, musing, contemplating.

The here and now is a distraction to you, and any attempt to come to terms with it mentally is not productive. I could compare this to trying to eat soup with a fork. Your mind just doesn’t work that way. You love your people under universal principles of daily bonding, but you will never really understand them, nor they you. Don’t spend your life trying to squeeze a square through a round hole. It’s okay to let your mind wander and forget your surroundings. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” wrote native Oscar Wilde.

The legacy of former lifetimes

In former lifetimes you spent many hours putting people under the microscope. Much as a sociologist does, or a behavioral psychologist.  This time around you are trying to fit what you have observed into a much larger scheme of things. To revisit that territory too much or too often or too soon brings confusion, disorientation, and madness. There may also have been some very conflicting viewpoints held between parents and relatives that you feel you must reconcile. Don’t take their issues on as your own.

Saturn in Gemini also implicates issues of communication with words and writing, as well as music.  The generation that made rock n’ roll — at first considered “black” music — mainstream is largely composed of people with this astrological placement.  Three members of the Beatles — Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison, have this placement. Two of the Rolling Stones — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — do, as well. Additionally, Jimmy Page, Roger Waters, Brian Wilson, Roger Daltry, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix. They were all born under this transit. So were Mick Fleetwood, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, and Joni Mitchell.

Saturn in Gemini’s relationship with the “truth”

While artistic expression allows for a great deal of freedom of speech, Saturn in Gemini can indicate a troublesome relationship. This troublesome relationship is with “the truth.” It takes various guises.  An example is the libel trial of the man who called Oscar Wilde a homosexual. The man was the father of Wilde’s younger lover. This was a trial that Oscar Wilde called for. It ultimately spelled the writer’s undoing and brought to public light Wilde’s habits of seeing male prostitutes and consorting with younger men. The charge of libel was not sustained as the accused was able to prove that Wilde was indeed a “sodomite.” And this led, in turn, to Wilde’s own trial on a charge of public indecency.

Wilde’s defense

In attempting to defend himself, Wilde gave eloquent testimony when asked to define “the love that dare not speak its name”:

Wilde elaborated, “The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. And it dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo…

It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described  as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It’s beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

A more eloquent defense of homosexuality may not exist, but Wilde still landed in jail, feeling misunderstood and exiled, then brutalized. “The world does not understand” says the Saturn in Gemini person.

Examples of complicated relationships with the truth

Other examples of complicated relationships with the truth for Saturn in Gemini people include Lance Armstrong, who famously concealed his steroid use until he finally confessed it, and Julian Assange, who made it possible for leakers to publish government secrets and now finds himself confined to the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he’s been since 2012 (there’s that period of exile again!). There’s also Monica Lewinsky, whose secret was made public by a false friend (the false friend can be a real problem for people with this placement, too).  

Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow was outed by a college newspaper which printed an interview with her before she could let her parents know she was gay:

The mistake I made was that I had not come out to my parents. I told the paper, “I will do this on the condition that you will not run the piece until after this weekend, because I will go home this weekend to tell my parents, and I want them to hear it from me instead of reading it in the paper.” And they ran it before the weekend, and indeed some anonymous person helpfully clipped the article and mailed it to my parents—and that’s how my parents found out that I was gay. 

They would have had a hard time with me coming out anyway, but this was a particularly nasty way for them to find out. They’re wonderful now, and couldn’t be more supportive, but they took it poorly at first, which I don’t fault them for. They were shocked  and upset and hurt. First of all, they were having to deal with the fact that I’m gay. Second of all, they were having to deal with the fact that I’m gay in the newspaper. And third of all, they were having to deal with the fact that they’ve raised some sort of horrific, callous rug rat who would tell the student paper before telling her family.

Saturn in Gemini people often know more about how communication can hurt and confuse than about how it can help and heal. This can be a very painful issue.

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