A friend of mine, born with the Moon in Capricorn, has an enchanting garden. It isn’t lush; there is a preponderance of desert plants, sages and succulents. But there are also a lovely little patch of lawn next to a soothing waterfall, wind chimes with a deep and resonant tone, and scattered everywhere there are rocks – smooth river rocks, crags of quartz. Appropriately for a woman with the Moon ruled by Saturn (the ruler of stone), she’s crazy about rocks. I admit I rarely give them much thought one way or another; but while she’s on vacation I’m looking in on her place daily, and her garden is making a believer out of me.
The scale is different, but her garden reminds me a bit of park in Southern Illinois that I used to visit as a kid, called Garden of the Gods. Less spectacular than its more famous Colorado cousin, it is nevertheless a kind of magical place, full of intriguing rock formations and old-growth forest. Standing atop a towering, rocky precipice, a little kid could feel close to God indeed – in fact, a bit like a Goddess herself.
We tend to think of rocks as boring, inanimate objects, but as my friend would attest there’s something magical about them – grounding and steady, eternal, peaceful. We could make grave markers from any substance, for instance; but when we want things to endure, we use stone.
Saturn was recently visited in the zodiac by Mars, in the early degrees of Virgo. Imagine the sculptor’s hand with a chisel, chipping away at a big hunk of marble, and you get the general idea. Somewhere inside you is a big block of Saturn that’s waiting to take a more useful form, to be fashioned into a protective container for your most helpful and practical impulses. The aggravating friction of the past two weeks was just Mars, chipping away the excess stone and polishing you with abrasives, to reveal your inner substance in a more graceful and glittering form.
Saturn symbolizes stones in the river of your life – they are obstructions that change your course, but they can also be used to provide shelter or protection – or to lift you closer to the Gods. For tonight’s Full Moon in Capricorn (12:59 am PDT; 3:59 am EDT), Saturn’s sign, give stones a place of honor on your altar. With both rough, unpolished slabs and smooth orbs, sculpted by river or by human hands, honor the hard lessons of Saturn that make us strong – and the friction of Mars that makes us sparkle.
