Western moral reasoning–Euro-canonical, Christian-inherited, and widely secularized–suffering through a familiar “desert” logic of guilt, and moral accounting. That moral grammar is a bit oil-in-water with karma and dharma as they show up in their philosophical contexts. This where the emphasis is more on action, consequence, and order…how acts unfold in time, how duties bind, how continuity is maintained (with plenty of disagreement across traditions, but not usually reducible to a cosmic punishment). So when “karma” gets pulled into astrological discourse as a casual synonym for punishment or moral paycheck, it doesn’t clarify Saturn so much as it recruits Saturn into a punitive register the Western imagination already knows how to tell. The result is a double flattening where karma becomes moral retaliation, and Saturn becomes “abusive authority,” instead of the technical Saturn of time, necessity, rank, governance, endurance, and material conditions.
By “authority” here I mean neither personal charisma nor moral deservingness, but the worldly machinery that makes decisions stick…the structures that allocate constraint, confer rank, enforce boundaries, and distribute risk across time. Saturn describes the making (and maintenance) of authority in the world through the material conditions under which power becomes durable.
Catharsis is a separate problem. In this way modern karma talk is filling the hole left from the collapse of catharsis. When catharsis no longer aides as a discipline in the canon, it is named the wager that suffering can be transmuted into clarity through a structured experience–purged, purified, metabolized–so that the spectator leaves “clean.” It is an aesthetic theory that we can see through the cosmological manifestations of eclipses and cazimis–respectfully. It is also a moral technology where it offers emotional release as a kind of resolution, sometimes even as proof…the “karma” of Western thought and yet abandoned.
Currently Saturn and Neptune are both in Aries retrograde, Mars in Cancer, and Venus is getting ready for her full descent of Retrogradation in Scorpio–truly it is a beautiful mess. I began parsing these thoughts at the beginning of the year, but it wasn’t until now that I have been giving living examples.
In the modern composite of astrological narrative we hear intuitive, evolutionary, and archetypal astrologers attribute the tonal shift to Saturn: a tightening, a loss of ease, and a return of constraint. Saturn is a contributing factor, but this tonal shift in argumentation against the very skeleton they adorn with the band-aids of Renaissance prescription and depth psychology may be something the ancients would consider with the modern planets: Neptune’s mirage of comfort changing the shape of contemporary spiritualism. Loftiness had become the default where reassurance was the product. The atmosphere made something seem protected and legitimate without making it durable. Now we see accolades being challenged, the expectancy of comfort is no longer guaranteed, and spirituality marketed as softness without consequence is forced into contest. Saturn contributes by stripping away something that cannot be defended, so whatever remains has to survive without the narcotic of Neptune’s ease.
In this consideration, authority must prove itself as action through capacity: in its ability to protect, to attack, to decide, and to endure risk. It is also contestable because Mars respects challenge, and authority is proven in conflict or competition. Mars cuts through deliberation, though with so many planets in undesirable spaces there is bureaucratic delay, which can be witnessed through coercion without prowess and unearned rank.
Aries describes how authority is won; Saturn shows how authority is maintained. When modern astrology moralizes Saturn into the Western idea of “karma,” it turns maintenance into punishment and then goes looking elsewhere (in the current framing, Neptune) to narrate the legitimacy-crisis that follows.
Thus, for Saturn, Karma has been imported as prestige language, detached from its textual and philosophical constraints.
The pattern is visible in two contemporary figures, both of whom left graduate programs before completing the terminal degree. Neither has produced scholarship in the fields they are now policing. Their public authority rests on three observable tactics: credential inflation or weaponization, refusal to contest, and extraction of trauma.
Credential inflation is the claim to authority. Refusals to contest is the inability to maintain it. The extraction of trauma is the mechanism that protects it from challenge.
Together they describe a form of authority that is not Saturnine. It is not built through time, necessity, or material conditions. It is not proven through capacity to protect, decide, or endure risk. It is the mirage…where accolades substitute for durability and the appearance of institutional rank substitutes for the work maintaining it.
Saturn in Aries demands that authority prove itself through action. It cuts away what cannot be defended by deleting or mocking the evidence and reframing the entire exchange to profit on the self proclaimed moral cause.
The karma narrative does the rest, turning the Saturnian demand for proof into a cosmic story of retribution. It recruits Neptune to masquerade the facade of legitimacy.
Both actors position themselves on the lofty side of their own critiques. One is an archetypal astrologer, privileging psychological symbolism over technical rigor, while weaponizing a history degree outside of the space they are standing in–only coming after to their weaponization of Black trauma and decolonial language. The other spouts divine femininity and bioessentialism, locating authority in an essentialized female nature rather than in historical or textual competence. Neither positioning requires the hard work of history. Both provide a shortcut to authority. And both are insulated from critique because they are framed as spiritual truths rather than empirical claims.
This lofty positioning feeds directly into the claim that modern astrology is superior to premodern astrology–that the past was fatalistic, patriarchal, and rigid, while the present is psychological, feminist, and liberatory. But this argument depends on historical erasure. It requires that the actual complexity of premodern astrology be reduced to a strawman. It requires that the women who actually practiced astrology in the premodern world be forgotten, so that modern women can claim to be the first to do it right.
This is the erasure of scholarship itself….the erasure of labor, of texts, of words, and of womens bodies. All of it is flattened into a single narrative: the past was bad, the present is better, and anyone who questions this is on the wrong side of history.
The erasure serves its purpose by creating a classic vacuum. And into the vacuum, the propagandist pours ideology. Because if the history is known, no one can contradict you. If the texts are not read, no one can correct you. If the scholarship is erased, you now are free to invent whatever you would like.
What we are witnessing is the oldest structure of persecution. In the West we can look to late antiquity and the medieval period, when educated men and women were persecuted for the knowledge they held. Hypatia being torn apart in the streets of Alexandria, Roman astrologers were dragged from their homes–their bodies dismembered in public. The grey ladies were driven underground, their knowledge dismissed as superstition and their names erased. As we move East the focus shifts to hold the legitimacy of Western violence.
The famed women astrologers across regions as less known, and the the mono-English speaker may never know them in entirety. This required the suppression of texts, the dismissal of oral traditions, the reframing of complex systems, and the literal exclusion of women from the rooms where knowledge was produced and validated. Now we have individuals selected through personal grievance and social opportunity. The evidence falsified to confirm their narrative. The accused cannot defend themselves without being cast as an apologist for the very harm they are accused of perpetuating.
The history of scholastic erasure sits, traditionally attributed to white men–this this shifting? Is the violence of the past being repacked today. Could we translate this as a rebellion against Saturn? Performed in Saturnine language while actually serving Neptune?
Both actors claim to be decolonial. Both claim to be dismantling systems of power, extraction, and erasure. And yet the tactics they employ are the very tactics of the colonial project they claim to oppose.
Gatekeeping is a colonial tactic. The imposition of arbitrary credentials to determine who is permitted to speak is the architecture of the colonial university. The weaponization is marginalized pain is a colonial tactic. Taking the trauma of the colonized and repackaging it for the consumption of the powerful is the foundation of Orientalism itself. The suppression of dissent is a colonial tactic.
The irony isn’t lost when the critique of extraction becomes a new form of extraction. The erasure of the colonizer becomes the erasure of the colonized all over again–because the scholarship that would center the actual voices of the actual practitioners is dismissed as irrelevant. The mirage of liberation floats above the material conditions it claims to address. The performance of decoloniality replaces the work. It becomes nothing more than a brand built upon the graves of the forgotten.
Keep an eye out for the stories and histories of women in astrology. This has been a big project alongside uni, client Work, and my other projects on the great mutations, AI, and Islamic autota, and the astrological and philosophical erasure of the Renaissance–when you don’t use AI it takes longer to do proper research. Best, K
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