What Saturn retrograde does not mean

Among the aphorisms of Jerome Cardan is this piece of instruction to would-be astrologers:

He that would truly promote Art must insist as much on the confutation of false opinions delivered by others, as in the declaration of truth.

With that charge in mind, and realizing I’m preaching to the choir, I must say there are some statements out there in the astrology blogosphere that surely must raise doubts even in the minds of those who make them. This week I read a post by a woman who hopes to conceive with her new husband, but they’re timing their lovemaking carefully, because

we don’t want to conceive a child with Saturn retrograde, which would inevitably furnish our youngster with inferiority feelings resulting from a challenging or distant relationship with its father.*

Never mind the child’s inferiority feelings, what about poor Saturn’s feelings after reading a slur like that? It’s not Saturn’s fault a child has a difficult relationship with its father. Truly, the planets don’t stand in line like the good and the shunned fairies at the babe’s birth, waving wands and furnishing it with an inferiority complex and a parent who spends too much time at the office. The planets don’t cause anything, any more than the weatherman causes the weather.

And talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies. I can just see the scene in the maternity ward: “Don’t you want to hold the baby, George?” “What’s the use? He’s got Saturn retrograde, he probably hates me. See, he’s already crying.”

The novice astrology student can easily determine for herself whether the generalization she’s parroting about Saturn retrograde holds true. All it takes is a simple two-question poll, asked of as many people as she can round up. Question 1: what’s your birth date? (You don’t even need a time or place for this. Saturn is retrograde for more than four months of the year. Just look up the birth date in an ephemeris.) Question 2: True or false? “I had a difficult or distant relationship with my father.” Then see how the answers line up with Saturn’s direction for each person.

No one symbol in the chart means the same thing for all births. No one astrological combination is a jail sentence carved in stone.

* Paraphrased. The web is so easy to search, and my intention is to critique the astrology, not the writer.