“The ‘black sun’ again takes up the semantic field of ‘saturnine,’ but pulls it inside out, like a glove: darkness flashes as a solar light, which nevertheless remains dazzling with black invisibility.” — Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
“The true essence of lead is gold. In order to free the soul from its coagulation and paralysis, its essential form and its materia must be dissolved out of their crude and one-sided combination. It is as if spirit and soul had to be separated from one another, in order, after their divorce, to become married again. The amorphous materia is burnt, dissolved, and purified, in order finally to be coagulated anew in the form of a perfect crystal.” – Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy
On May 24th, Saturn will change signs—leaving Pisces and following Neptune into Aries, where it will remain until spring 2028. Our next PSYCHO-COSMOS class is Sunday May 25th and will focus on the planet Saturn, who has long been associated with contemplative, distant, heavy, and melancholic states. We’ll think about Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” alongside Liz Greene’s writings on astrological Saturn, Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, and Ficino’s Renaissance insistence on Saturn and melancholia as ever-linked to artistic genius and religious contemplation.
Saturn’s alchemical metal is lead. It falls at the beginning and end of the work and world, as you’ve heard me say again and again. But it needs repeating. It’s strange, eerie. What does it mean? When we feel we’ve hit a wall, that some foreign-familiar heavy sun is dragging us down, forcing us into contemplation: Saturn. Saturn, the zodiac’s “greater malefic” for Ficino, is the extraordinary, whereas Jupiter, Saturn’s counterpart, dubbed by the ancients the “greater benefic” is associated with ordinary life. This month’s PSYCHO-COSMOS will kick off a new quarter, focusing on the weirder corners of astrology and psychoanalysis. Here are the themes/reads for spring/summer:
MAY 25, 2025: SATURN: MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA: Saturn in astrology, Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Lars von Trier’s movie Melancholia. Liz Greene’s Saturn: A New Name for an Old Devil; Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”; Lars von Trier’s Melancholia; Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun; Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists : A Documented History from Late Antiquity Through the French Revolution by Rudolf and Margot Wittkower
JUNE 29, 2025: SEX, DEATH, AND THE ENTRANCE TO THE UNDERWORLD: Eros and thanatos, and the 8th house in astrology, which was called by the ancients the ‘gate to hell,’ and is the mysterious ruler of topics such as sex and death. The Erotic by Lou-Andreas Salomé; writings by Sabina Spielrein; Bataille’s writings on eros and death; Freud on the death drive; selections from Jamieson Webster’s Disorganization and Sex.
JULY 27, 2025: UNDERWORLD AND UNCONSCIOUS: PLUTO, DREAMS, TRASH HEAPS: Dreams, slips of tongue, remains of the day. The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman; selections from Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty; surrealism; Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; The Astrology of Fate by Liz Greene.
AUGUST 31, 2025: MOON, MOTHER, MATTER: “Leonardo da Vinci and the Mother Archetype” from Erich Neumann’s Art and the Creative Unconscious; “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” by Freud; Camilla Paglia’s “Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother”; Paglia’s “Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts” from Sexual Personae; The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Elissa Marder.
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In honor of Saturn’s move into another arena, I’ve also opened up 11 days in late May and June for Saturn-focused sessions. Because I’m a nerd, I’m calling it SATURN STUDY. Saturn is a crucial, oft misunderstood, and fascinating planet, god, energy. Associated with loss, it is the edge-dweller of the zodiac, situated at the border of the inner and outer planets. Saturn has a particular VISION. Time, boundaries and restrictions AND primordial chaos, melancholia, and artistic vision.
Studying Saturn means studying how and what we must contemplate, how we structure our time, our intellectual pursuits, and the nature of our particular darkness. This is a 90-minute, free-associative deep-dive into SATURN in your chart. Because Saturn is changing signs at the end of May, we'll also look at some themes for you during Saturn’s years in Aries.
After our session, I'll email you a bespoke document that I will compose while contemplating your natal Saturn, and which may include suggestions for readings, artists, films, and practices, along with important upcoming astrological dates for your calendar during Saturn’s time in Aries. Good for those who are feeling at a dead end (Saturn rules ENDS) in a project or in a particular area of life, or who just want to study Saturn’s ways.
Below, lots of notes toward this month’s melancholia/Saturn workshop, and pieces of Saturn (a planet/state/alchemical process I’ve been teaching on since 2020, each time surprising me and pulling me in unexpected, extraordinary, sometimes disturbing directions) from my bizarre archives: