The Saturn Line in Astrocartography

William Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647) has something to say about Saturn in each of the four angular houses, and it is harsher than modern astrocartography and more conditional at the same time.

• Tenth house (the MC): Saturn or the south node there usually deny honor, or give a person of low rank little esteem and little joy in his trade (p. 56).
• Seventh house (the Descendant): Saturn or Mars "unfortunate" there "show ill in marriage" (p. 54).
• First house (the Ascendant): Saturn only moderately well placed there, and in a good aspect to Jupiter, Venus, the Sun or the Moon, "promises a good sober constitution" (p. 51).
• Fourth house (the IC): the house of fathers, which Saturn signifies in a night birth as the Sun does in a day birth (p. 53).

Two things stand out. Lilly's judgments depend on Saturn's condition, its sign, aspects and strength, not on the bare fact of Saturn being there; and they are judgments about a birth chart, which astrocartography then applies to every place on a line. Obama was born after sunset, so by Lilly's scheme his Saturn is a significator of his father, a reading that sits beside the line rather than inside it.

Obama's birth certificate gives 7:24 PM, August 4, 1961, Honolulu (05:24 UTC). Saturn was retrograde at 25°19′ Capricorn. The lines are the API's, matching what the astrocartography map draws for him, and the example's generating script confirmed every point with the Swiss Ephemeris.

Saturn takes about 29½ years to go around the zodiac, so it barely moves while the Earth turns beneath it. On the day Obama was born it was moving backward by 0°04′ a day, between its stations of May 9, 1961 (29°51′ Capricorn) and September 27, 1961 (23°14′ Capricorn), with the opposition to the Sun on July 19, 1961 in between. Five and a half months earlier, on February 19, 1961, Jupiter had overtaken it at 25°12′ Capricorn, and the two were still close: his Jupiter MC line runs 5°47′ east of his Saturn MC line.

For the map, slowness means the date hardly matters and the clock matters a great deal. Change the birth date by a day and keep the time, and the Saturn lines move 1°03′ west, nearly all of it because a solar day runs about four minutes longer than one turn of the Earth measured against the stars. Saturn also stays near the ecliptic (within 2°47′ between 1900 and 2050), so for Obama, with Saturn 0°10′ off it, the site's zodiacal lines and Lewis's in mundo lines would be within 28 km of each other even at 60° N.

Since Lilly made his Saturn judgments conditional, a traditional reader of a Saturn line starts with the state of Saturn in the birth chart. Two questions do most of the work. Is Saturn in a sign where it is strong? Saturn rules Capricorn and Aquarius and is exalted in Libra; it is weak in Cancer, Leo and Aries. And is it in good or hard aspect to the benefics, Jupiter and Venus, and to the lights? A Saturn in its own sign, well aspected, is the moderately fortified Saturn that Lilly expected to give endurance; a debilitated, afflicted one is the Saturn of his warnings.

Obama's Saturn is in Capricorn, one of its own signs, and within 5°31′ of Jupiter, a conjunction by degree though not by sign, which puts it in the company of the greater benefic. Against that, it was retrograde, which Lilly counts among a planet's accidental debilities. Read that way, his Saturn lines carry the steadier version of the planet's reputation: weight and duty, but with the resources to carry them. The essential dignities calculator scores any planet's sign strength the way the tradition did, and is a reasonable first step before reading a Saturn line in your own map.

Saturn shows clearly how much a rounded birth time can move a reading. With the birth half an hour later, the lines would sit 7°31′ farther west. The Saturn rising line, which crosses only ocean in the real chart, would come ashore down the east coast of Australia, past Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Newcastle, Sydney and Canberra. The IC line would move from Varanasi to Delhi, Jaipur and Lahore, and the MC line from Texas to Denver, Albuquerque and Ciudad Juárez.

Someone working from 7:54 PM would read Sydney as a Saturn rising city; on the certificate time, his Saturn rising line never reaches Australia. Every line moves the same way, about a degree for each four minutes (1°00′ for Saturn), whether it is a meridian or a curve. As for how near counts as near, Jim Lewis allowed a quarter of an inch on his 1976 maps and up to 700 miles in 1982; at the wider figure Obama's Saturn lines touch 489 of the site's cities (21%). The pre-filled map shows the real lines.