Saturn’s Return: The End of an Era

What will you do when your familiar paths and methods no longer work?

This is the question of Saturn’s Return.

The wide orbit of Saturn, the planet that rules discipline, responsibility, and structure takes approximately 28 years to return to its exact position in the sky at the moment of your birth. You will feel its influence for approximately five years, and thus see reports of the first Saturn’s Return beginning from age 27-29 and lasting until age 33, considered the master year.

During this time, many things that you once believed to be Truth (with a capital “T”) begin to disintegrate. The foundation of your existence, the stability that you always believed would never change is in upheaval. It’s the end of an era, a release of the Maiden/Lad years of carefree days. With an insistent urgency, Saturn will push you to commit to your life’s work, your calling, and offer a path of determined, hard work to achieve your dreams through the excavation of your inner strength and talents. Like a stern teacher who sees the greatness in you, Saturn is here to urge and support the best of YOU, unfolding to its full manifestation.

In exchange for these beneficial lessons, you must sacrifice what no longer serves you. You must let go of the stories that hold you back in order to realize more of who you are meant to be. You can no longer go on as before, at least if you want to expand your horizons, reach more levels of possibility, and achieve self-acceptance.

When Saturn returned to my skies, it felt utterly essential that I release the victim mentality that arose from pain and hurt in my childhood. Throughout my twenties, I had thrown the tarot cards and runes, smudged myself so often it felt like the sage smoke lived in my hair, visited healers and seers, and set the intention for self-love at nearly every sabbat and esbat. But I could not punch through the glass ceiling of my suffering to the other side.

My first son was born at the onset of my Saturn Return and soon after my publisher asked me to write a spell book for teens. I did not want pain to be my legacy. I had scratched the surface with rituals, but writing spells to retrieve the bits of my fragmented soul would require that I relive the pain, abandonment, cruelty, grief, anger, sadness, and fear of my younger self; if I would be stronger in the long run. Afterall, Saturn is always about the long game.

A born Witch, I had left clues for my self-recovery in my 11-year-old diary. I used this diary like a time capsule, a blueprint of my Maiden years. I wrote spells, affirmations and visualizations that would coax the small, scared parts of me, who had burrowed in the shadow of my soul, out of her hiding place and bring her to the light. Some spells were serious and addressed when at 15-years-old, I carved my boyfriend’s name into my ankle to prove I loved him. Some spells seem frivolous like getting your locker next to your friend, but represent surrounding yourself with solid support. Seventy-five spells to bring myself to wholeness with a grand hope that this book will help others. And it did.

Eighteen years later, my publisher asked me to broaden the book’s scope so that it would not appear limited by teen-centric concerns. Like a master carver, I cut 25 spells, such as the locker spell, because these lessons were surreptitiously woven in the fabric of my chants. I added spells that represented the growth I had gained to deliver the clearest, most uplifting, empowering message that I could muster.

The Book of Spells is an allegory to retrieving our original innocence, infallible lovability, and divine right to co-create our world. Self-healing is and will always be Deep Magick, in which answers swirl in a mysterious evolution, so that each go around the lessons return with more intensity and insight. If you do the spells when you are 15, 33 and again when you are 51-years-old, the spells will work differently.

Far beyond that first step into Magick, The Book of Spells is a living document that spirals around the Glastonbury Tor of self-love, patience, and stability: the kinder, gentler aspects of Saturn, a bridge from Maiden to Mother Goddess.