Why Is Saturn Our Skin?
I’ve been puzzling over the fact that in astrology Saturn rules the skin. Saturn is Kronos, the filicidal god of time and the farthest ancient planet away. Being the last planet, the end of everything, he came to rule over all that’s old, cold, and hard. He is more well known for being the ruler of the skeleton, the interior armature of the body that provides the structure for all our soft parts. It’s physically the hardest part of us, and it’s all that remains of us after death. Fundamentally Saturn.
But the skin? The skin is so soft, a vulnerability, an evolutionary trade off of protection for emotional connection with others through the pleasure of bare contact. The co-ruler of the skin is of course Venus, the goddess of everything smooth, soft, sensitive, and erotic. Libra, one of Venus’ two home signs, also corresponds to the skin, and Saturn is exalted in Libra, so there’s a connection there, but I knew there must also be a deeper logic to this assignment of the largest organ in the body.
It makes more sense if we situate the correspondences in their philosophical context. The Hellenistic philosophical grounds for the correspondences was the Stoic premise that there are a multitude of microcosmic and macrocosmic expressions of everything in the universe. Our bodies too are a microcosm of the universe itself, so in this way, the skin is our outermost edge, the border of our inner cosmos, just as Saturn marks the end of the solar system.
The skin is fundamentally about boundaries, literally in the sense that it stands between our environment and our interior, but also interpersonally in the rituals of navigating who is allowed to touch it—or even cross the border and move past the skin and into the body. The skin itself may be intimate, but the inside of the body? There is no way to touch a part of someone’s body that is not skin unless you’re doing something deeply personal. From this perspective, the skin is actually the least intimate living part of us. True to Saturn, it’s also technically the driest.
The color of skin delineates boundaries of race, class, privilege, and basic human rights; Saturn has an affinity for hierarchy and order(ing). This may be a contemporary reading of this traditional rulership, but it’s present in these associations going back at least to medieval astrology, when Saturn was associated with black skin and darker-skinned regions of Africa, like the Kush (modern day Sudan). This ancient identification of all things “dark,” negative, or malevolent with black skin is traced by Fred Moten and other theorists of Afro-pessimism, who position anti-blackness as a near universal condition rather than a relatively recent and localized socio-political construct.
Saturn also rules fences and borders, physical boundaries that divide based on skin-color. Neo-fascists and neoliberals both touch on the Saturnian connection between borders and skin when they employ metaphors that compare refugees and immigrants to pathogens attempting to breach the border of the national body; through this chauvinist lens, the border becomes a natural, biological necessity: the skin itself. This is sometimes metaphorical, but just as often it’s literal, as is the case with Trump and Biden’s continued use of COVID emergency powers to strip refugees of their rights and detain or deport them.
But these neofascists (and their neoliberal collaborators) completely misunderstand the skin itself. The protective power of human skin doesn’t come from hardness or defensive spikes, but from its vulnerability and sensitivity. The level of connection we gain from the intimacy of touching soft, defenseless skin creates social bonds that are ultimately the foundation of our species’ survival. Borderhawks would learn a lot if they actually studied the correspondence that underlies their propaganda: safety comes from being porous, soft and flexible, open to being vulnerable or uncomfortable for the sake of a chance at deeper social connection and the expansive benefits of collective action.
The skin’s sensitivity and fragility itself can warn us and protect us, but it’s a harsh instructor, like Saturn: think of the pain of skin contacting a hot stove for the first time, or falling asleep in the direct glare of the sun. Saturn also rules very pale and pallid skin, like the skin of the dying or dead. I think of sunburn as Saturn’s punishment for exposing him to too much of his antithesis. Interestingly skin cancer is only ruled by Saturn, not the co-ruler of the skin Venus. Including Saturn as a co-ruler asks us to acknowledge the reality that our own skin can become malefic. But malefic isn’t the same as malevolent. Malevolence is the intention to cause harm; malefics just cause it. Our skin has its own boundaries and limits, and we suffer with it when we transgress them.
There’s something really satisfying about the idea that we use both Saturn and Venus to reach out and touch the world, to discover if things are a threat or a pleasure.
In his book Shambhala, the Sacred Path of the Warrior, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher and philosopher, Chögyam Trungpa, beautifully articulates how cultivating vulnerability can be a powerful Saturnian practice:
“...If you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of sadness doesn’t come from being mistreated. You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. There is no skin or tissue covering it; it is pure raw meat. Even if a tiny mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched. Your experience is raw and tender and so personal.
The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart’s blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness…Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart”.
For Trungpa, this kind of warriorship is grounded in “fearless renunciation,” another key Saturn concept. But the way he defines renunciation is far from austerity, asceticism, or self-denial. “What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others.”
The idea that being patient and present with an aching, tender sadness is the way to build strength and resilience is clearly a Saturnian form of warriorship. But rather than the kind of emotional blockage, depression, and isolation we usually associate with Saturn—and the moon in Capricorn where the new moon is today, Saturn’s home sign and the moon’s detriment—this Saturnian practice of renouncing the borders between ourselves and other, and maintaining presence with sadness, tenderness, and vulnerability, is actually enlivening and connects us more deeply with others—and in doing that it makes us more safe.
On the political level, this radical vulnerability would mean the complete elimination of borders. This is not an idealistic fantasy; open borders are literally the only realistic solution to the unending humanitarian disaster that borders create.
Saturn is about boundaries and the intimacy that is generated by the continual process of navigating them. During hard Saturn transits, it can feel like our boundaries are collapsing—or dissolving in the case of Pisces where Saturn is now, the mutable water sign of formlessness and emotional sensitivity. It may feel like the solution is to build something more concrete, to create more order and control, but when your outer layer is ripped away and you’re left raw, pink, and exposed, try not to move so quickly to cover it up. Remember that being the skin rather than the skeleton is still a Saturnian path forward. Feeling that rawness of exposed flesh, a willingness to be present even in emotional states that are nearly intolerable, can be so clarifying about what we really need, how much and what kind of intimacy we can tolerate, and how to orient ourselves to find that particular kind of connection. You get to rebuild your boundaries differently each time they fall apart, according to what you need now, rather than remaking the social structures you had before.
Thinking through this Saturnian dialectic of skin and boundaries can show us a more flexible side to the hardest planet. As much as he signifies protection through impenetrability and durability, he also represents the kind of strength, safety, and intimacy that’s made possible only by being weak, unguarded, and vulnerable.