I was thinking about gender roles today because I was at Safeway getting last minute groceries for when my sister and her family arrive for Thanksgiving and there were a lot of what were probably single men there. This happens to me often-
I don’t like cooking or even thinking about cooking, so I often spring to the grocery store last minute for supplies and find myself feeling slight shame around my unfulfilled gender role. As I drove home on near-empty downtown streets, I thought about all the women who were busy preparing Thanksgiving meals today. A lot of men for sure, but a lot more women.
Conservatives are ruled by Saturn as their archetype, and regardless of what’s going on psychologically or financially behind simplicity, Saturn treats it as a virtue. Saturn often wants to use the most elementary or skeletal form of a model of a technology or knowledge. For example, Hutterites or traditional Mennonites are Saturnian in the way that they say, “If we are to be good, holy people, we have to get by with less. Less is more morally superior.” If the ancient astrologers used only the visible planets for their astrology, a Saturnian person today might reject modern astrology that uses the outer planets that were discovered later, and restrict themselves to the visible planets so they can follow the ancient astrologers’ texts to the letter. There is much more information available about the modern psyche due to the development of the field of psychology opening up in the early 1900’s, and therefore more information available to read a person’s chart, but a Saturnian person might feel more virtuous getting by with less information.
It’s the same with gender roles. There seems to be a virtue in getting by with Venus and Mars only, which explains why there is so little breathing room around them for political conservatives. For Christians, essentialized gender roles are really important to identify with, as they make things less complicated psychologically. As long as a man can project his anima onto a woman, and a woman can project her animus onto a man, and they match up and don’t grow psychologically, the formula for a balanced family is simple. Don’t get me wrong, gender is interesting and I like my gender, and being my gender, but thankfully, there are eight more planets that round out a person’s identity that are equally as important. Of course, for a healthy society, we need both Saturn and his opposite, Jupiter, in balance, as both Saturn and Jupiter (wisdom, expansiveness, extending the franchise) are essentially to a healthy society and democracy.
Ancient texts are important and we must preserve their techniques, but they were written with only the visible planets as guidance. Advances in astronomy were accompanied by advances in human psychology, so why shrink back to a more elementary understanding of human nature when there is so much deeper, rounder, and fuller understanding available? From personal experience, as someone who tried just using the Bible to grow in the way I was craving, there just wasn’t enough nutrients in there to guide me in the way I needed to reach the maturity and integration I was seeking. It’s ok to grow and develop and realize you don’t fit your clothes anymore. Saturn is important, but not when we essentialize his nature as morally good as a defence against complexity.