Some Saturns

Ring, ring, why don't you give me a world.

‘Saturn,’ says Ross Anderson, ‘is the best planet.’

Jupiter — or “good old Jupe” as LaFrance sweetly calls it — is a fine planet. It is, as she notes, the largest in our solar system. But there is something a bit gauche about Jupiter’s size, something akin to the sad glory of a prize-winning giant pumpkin. Given its dull, beige-dominated color scheme, Jupiter has to lean hard on its superlative size in order to be noticed. Like its namesake, the sky god of thunder and lightning, Jupiter is all shock and awe, all brute, all bully.

Jupiter is the beast to Saturn’s beauty.

Think of Saturn hanging in space, glowing like a streetlamp in fog, the tilt of its record-groove rings suggesting something imaginative, or even mad. Though it’s a giant planet, second only to Jupiter in size, Saturn somehow manages to give off an ethereal vibe. And it’s not only a vibe — were there an ocean large enough to contain it, Saturn would float.¹

Plenty of people share Anderson’s view that, pick a planet as your favourite, perhaps excluding Earth (which has the we-live-here it-sustains-us advantage), most would choose Saturn.

Which brings me to the incomparable Chester Bonestell:

Of Bonestell’s many, superb space-art canvases his most famous are probably his renderings of Saturn, many of which show the planet from one of its many moons. ‘His paintings of Saturn,’ say John Grant and Peter Nicholls, ‘as seen from the surfaces of its moons are understandably regarded as classics, [holding] great beauty and drama in their stillness and depth.’ They are, as with all Bonestell’s work, compositionally poised, precisely worked, clear and marvellous. Some place Saturn larger, some smaller. Above is ‘Saturn Viewed from Titan’ (1952: oil on board. 18.25 x 23 in), in which the planet is in shade, a thin crescent with two spurs of light reflected along its rings: appearing spectral, like a ghost of itself. Here, bulkier and more impressively physical, is ‘Saturn as Seen from Mimas’ (1944).

This image was used as the cover art for Ron Miller’s The Art of Chesley Bonestell (2001):

What is it about Saturn that makes it out favourite? Its rings (though other planets in our solar system have rings), a grooved shining halo that sanctifies the layered blonde, tan and nitrogen hues of its face. In some astronomical images Saturn looks almost peach-like; in others, there’s a sandier, harder, more parched quality to its banded visage. Then again it becomes almost blank, an unpainted canvas.

The size of Saturn, its chillily golden sheen, is as much a part of its appeal as its rings. Those rings, we know, are not solid; billions of crumbs and chunks of ice in orbital synchronisation. But they look solid: as though you could drive your car along them, as in the 1906 British silent short film, The ‘?’ Motorist.

They look like a pale form of rainbow, one that would, for an observer within Saturn’s atmosphere, be permanently arc-ing en ceil: as in this Bonestell canvas:

Alan Osborne’s villanelle ‘Saturn’ (2024) opens:

When Saturn and his choking rings complete their toils,
Malign, diseased senescence, smirking au revoir,
Are we to shortly shuffle off these mortal coils?

The wheel of time implodes, its clockwork spring uncoils.
The immanentized eschaton begins in war
As Saturn and his choking rings complete their toils.

(I’m not persuaded by the revoir/war rhyme here, and ‘to shortly shuffle off’ is a split-infinitive: but it’s not a bad poem overall). Osborne’s poem’s epigraph is a quotation from Michael Ward: “According to medieval thought, the worst planet was Saturn, sponsor of death, destruction, darkness, and disaster.” But I don’t think this older reputation of the Roman god, devouring his own son, or the malign avatar of old-age decay and dying, has carried-through to the modern age, with its capturing of the actual planet in so many beautiful astronomical and space-probe images. The planet’s rings aren’t ‘choking’, I’d say: they swing round the body of the pale-gold planet at a good distance, a mystic circle woven thrice (more than three, in fact: there are thousands of bands and individual rings, within six main bandings).

Perhaps the greatest artistic representation of Saturn is musical: the slow, trudging crescendo of Holst’s ‘Saturn: the Bringer of Old Age’ (part of his Planets suite, 1918) communicates inevitability, the approach of senescence, a processional that builds to a resonant climax of brass, and then fades away into the further depths of space: beautiful and numinous.

The Planets is an astrological rather than an astronomical work, and the names of the planets, and their astrological associations, derive from classical myth. But that is not entirely to say that Holst was working with classical myth, or more precisely, the further out from the sun the suite moves, the less mythic-specific the pieces become: so, yes, the belligerent rat-tat propulsiveness of ‘Mars the Bringer of War’ reflects Mars as wargod — although, as many people have noted, the version of war Holst orchestrates seems to capture the intensity and scale and obliterating brutality of modern, industrialised war, rather than the kinds of battles fought in Ancient Greece or Rome — and ‘Mercury, the Winged Messenger’ nimbly captures the agility and motion of the mythological ‘messenger of the gods’. But Venus is here not the goddess of love, but rather ‘the Bringer of Peace’, peace not being an association of either mythological Aphrodite or Venus. Jupiter is not, for Holst, the stern, lightning-bolt wielding absolute ruler of heaven but the bringer of jollity, and the last three planets have very little in common with Saturnus, Οὐρᾰνός and Neptunus, as classically conceived.

Though the suite is clearly structured astrologically, Holst himself was more interested in Theosophy and Eastern religions and traditions. Raymond Head notes the particularity of his beliefs.

Holst may have been prompted to look at astrology more deeply by George R.S. Mead, with whom he had a little-discussed but important friendship. Mead (1863–1933) was a classical scholar of considerable distinction and a translator of Sanskrit literature. But he was also interested in Theosophy and occultism. In 1887 he became Blavatsky’s secretary in London and edited the second edition of The Secret Doctrine. In 1890 his friend Alan Leo, the pioneering astrologer, invited him to open an occult lodge in Brixton. During the last decade of the 19th century he became well known among Theosophists on the continent, as General Secretary of the European Section of the Theosophical Society … Both Hoist and Mead shared an interest in sacred dance. Hoist had mentioned the subject in lecture given at Morley College in November 1907.²

Head notes that 1912, when Holst began looking into astrology (in his own words) ‘fairly closely’, was when Alan Leo published The Art of Synthesis, an innovative astrological book which includes an ‘Astro-Theosophical Glossary’. ‘It is this book which, I think, inspired The Planets,’ says Head.

Evidence for this assertion is contained within the book itself. Unlike in all his previous books, Leo devoted a chapter to each planet, elucidating their special characteristics. Each chapter was given a heading: thus ‘Mars the Energiser’, ‘Venus the Unifier’ etc. This is the very manner that Hoist adopted in The Planets. Indeed Holst’s title for the last movement, ‘Neptune the Mystic’, is exactly the same as Leo’s chapter-heading.

This is Head’s reading of the ‘Saturn’ movement:

With Saturn we are again in the realm of pain. The perfect intervals that characterized the motifs in the previous three movements have been replaced, for a time, by anguished augmented fourths and diminished fifths set against grating ninths. Leo calls Saturn ‘the subduer’ and only later in another chapter of his book does he refer to Saturn by the phrase Holst adopted, ‘the bringer of old age’. Saturn governs old age: at time when everyone has to face their own mortality and the meaning of life. Saturn also brings discipline of a relentless kind when everything is tested in the crucible for truth. As Leo explains, Saturn concerns duty and ‘none can neglect duty and escape the hard fate which Saturn imposes’, for Saturn brings people ‘toward the path of Renunciation’. In this manner personal insight and wisdom are attained.

Is m most graphically illustrated in the score. From the anguished opening double-bass motif (‘make as emotional as possible’, Holst wrote in his MS score in the Bodleian Library) the ideas are carried inexorably in a processional, ritualistic manner: first by trombones, then flutes, and finally trumpets, to the central animato section. The opening idea is subjected to powerful orchestral forces, with the clangorous tones of bells (played with metal beaters) increasing the tension unbearably. In the final section a tranquil chord of E major introduces the transformed double-bass melody. The bells are softened, and a gentle undulating woodwind accompaniment soothes the listener. By the end the strings make us aware that a new understanding has been reached. When Holst told Richard Capell that he ‘saw Saturn relent’ he must have been referring to this passage. Saturn, having done his work, ceases to hurt. [20]

1. Ross Anderson, ‘A Major Correction’, The Atlantic (5 Jan 2016)

2. Raymond Head, ‘Holst — Astrology and Modernism in The Planets’, Tempo 187 (Dec 1993), 21