Saturn Tattoo Meaning: Time, Discipline and the Rings

The god of the golden age

Saturn was one of the oldest gods of Rome, a god of sowing and of the harvest, shown with a sickle. Roman legend told that he once ruled over Latium in a golden age, when the earth gave its fruit freely, there was no war and no one was a slave.

His temple in the Roman Forum housed the state treasury, and the remains of its columns still stand. His name lives on in the English word Saturday, Saturn's day.

Saturnalia

Every December the Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, Saturn's festival, beginning on 17 December. For a few days the golden age returned: work and public business stopped, people feasted, gave each other gifts and candles, and the usual order was turned upside down, with masters serving their slaves at table. It was the happiest festival of the Roman year, and some of its customs of feasting and gift-giving echo in the winter holidays of today.

Cronus, who devoured his children

The Romans identified Saturn with the Greek Titan Cronus, and with him came a darker story. Cronus overthrew his father Uranus and became king of the gods. Warned that one of his own children would overthrow him in turn, he swallowed each of them as soon as they were born. His wife Rhea saved the last, Zeus, by giving Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead. Zeus grew up in hiding, forced his father to release his brothers and sisters, and took his throne.

Because the name Cronus sounded like chronos, the Greek word for time, the two were merged over the centuries. Saturn with his sickle became Father Time with his scythe, the old man who devours everything he brings into being. Francisco de Goya painted this image in Saturn Devouring His Son, one of the dark paintings he made on the walls of his own house.

The ringed planet

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the farthest of the planets known to the ancient world, which is why it marked the outer edge of the heavens for them. It moves slowly, taking about twenty-nine and a half years to circle the Sun, and this slowness linked it with old age, patience and time.

When Galileo turned his telescope on Saturn in 1610, he could not make out what he saw and thought the planet had two companions. In 1659 the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens published the correct explanation: a planet surrounded by a thin, flat ring. The rings have made Saturn the most beautiful object in the solar system to many eyes, and a symbol of wonder at the universe.

Saturn in astrology

In Western astrology Saturn is the planet of discipline, structure, responsibility and limits. Astrologers call it the great teacher: it brings tests and delays, but rewards patience and hard work. It rules the sign of Capricorn and, in traditional astrology, Aquarius as well.

Astrologers speak of the "Saturn return", the moment, around the age of twenty-nine and again near fifty-eight, when Saturn comes back to the place it held at a person's birth. It is described as a time of reckoning and maturity, when life is rebuilt on firmer ground. In the old alchemical tradition Saturn was also linked to lead, the heaviest of the base metals.

What a Saturn tattoo means to the person who wears it

Time: the awareness that everything passes, and that patience is a strength.

Discipline: a life built by structure, effort and endurance.

A turning point: a Saturn return or a hard lesson that made you who you are.

Wonder: love of the cosmos and of the planets beyond our own.