Saturn’s Daughter

There are moments in life that don't feel like chapters but thresholds—places you step through, never to return. I’ve crossed a few of those. Not triumphantly, not with banners or clarity, but often quietly. Sometimes broken. Sometimes furious. But always forward.

I grew up in a house where silence had edges. It wasn’t peaceful, it was sharp—dangerous even. I learned early on to listen not just with my ears, but with my skin. You can hear a mood in the way someone sets a cup down, in how long they pause before answering a question. I became a child detective, deciphering the weather systems of adult emotion.

That kind of vigilance isn’t free. It costs you your spontaneity. Your lightness. You become excellent at shape-shifting, terrible at belonging.

I’m neurodiverse—dyslexic and ADHD—which made traditional learning feel like a cruel game rigged against me. Books were a closed door. So I turned inward. My mind, for all its chaos, was a theatre of questions: Why do people hurt each other? Why do they lie? Why do some smile with their teeth but not their eyes?

I obsessed over people. I watched. I remembered everything. I took every personality test I could find. It was the only way I could make sense of the world: patterns, motives, behaviours. Later, astrology became a natural extension of that. Not because I wanted answers, but because I wanted better questions.

When I say I had a difficult family, I don’t mean messy. I mean wounding. I mean court cases, betrayal, scapegoating. I haven’t spoken to my family in over a decade. And that is a peace I earned. The last straw was my mother dragging me to court—a surreal, painful echo of the dysfunction I’d spent my life trying to navigate. That was the moment I left, physically and emotionally. Moved almost 200 miles away. Closed the door and didn’t look back.

That chapter, brutal as it was, felt like the severing of something ancestral. A curse, maybe. A loop. Whatever it was, I broke it.

For a while, I vanished. Disappeared into a self-made cocoon. I needed time. Silence. No audience. Just me, my wounds, and whatever fragments of self I could still feel.

That’s when Saturn really came into focus.

My chart is heavy with Saturn. Capricorn rising, Moon in Aquarius. It’s not a placement that offers ease. But it does offer depth—eventually. The longer I studied astrology, the more I realised: everything pointed to Saturn. The teacher. The limiter. The one who strips you back to the bones and asks if you can live with what’s left.

I named my work Saturn Seminary. People hear “seminary” and think of theology, but the root meaning is beautiful—a seed nursery. A place where growth is slow, deliberate, sacred. That’s how Saturn works. Not with glittering epiphanies but with slow, carved understanding.

I’m deeply interested in Saturn’s duality. Everyone talks about the masculine archetype—Father Time, the enforcer, the structure. But what about the feminine? What about Capricorn as the Crone, the Hag, the Ancestor? That side of Saturn doesn’t command. She remembers. She teaches through withdrawal, through endurance, through the long view.

People forget: Saturn is not just the patriarch. She is also the matriarch. The village elder who teaches skills, guards the traditions, keeps the memory of how things were before we started worshipping convenience over connection.

When I looked back at the birth charts in my bloodline—some of them stretching back to the 1800s—I saw patterns. Echoes. Incompatibilities that were fated to teach. Understanding my mother’s chart didn’t heal the wound, but it gave it context. And sometimes that’s enough to stop the bleeding.

We need elders again. Not influencers, not experts—elders. Women and men who know how to hold grief and joy in the same hand. Who can read the sky, birth a child, bury a loved one, and still rise before dawn to tend the fire.

I don’t do astrology for a living. That’s deliberate. I’m not interested in performing astrology. I’m interested in living it.

The astrology world is, to put it mildly, not immune to ego. I’ve seen it turn vicious—petty squabbles dressed up as intellectual debate. People using charts like weapons, labels like shackles. I’ve had astrologers try to pin me down—“You’re a feminist,” “You’re too Saturnian,” “You’re a threat.” Maybe I am. But not to the ones doing the work.

Astrology, to me, is a tool for pattern recognition—not character assassination. If it’s not helping people grow, what’s the point?

Women, especially, need to watch how we wield power. I’ve seen it. The sly digs, the reputation sabotage. I used to run a weight-loss business. It was vicious. Not physically, but energetically. That same shadow dynamic exists in spiritual spaces, too. We have to call it what it is: internalised patriarchy dressed in sage smoke.

Saturn shows us what we’re still clinging to. The outdated systems, the brittle identities. Asking us to let go and to remember who we were before forgot ourselves.

I believe the future will look more like the past. Not in a regressive way, but in a re-rooted way. Shared gardens. Intergenerational homes. Real community. Women reclaiming their eldership—not waiting for permission, not hiding their wisdom behind filtered images and polite deferrals.

We will be the ones with dirt under our fingernails, stories in our bones, and rooms full of people who feel safe simply because we are there.

And it starts with this: knowing your chart, knowing your story, and choosing—deliberately, fiercely—not to repeat what broke you.

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I had the pleasure of sitting down with the remarkable Marja West—a true woman of wisdom in her own right. Together, we shared a raw, heart-to-heart conversation that touched on many of the themes explored in this piece: Saturn, lineage, healing, and the reclamation of feminine power. You can watch pur conversation here: