LEAD – Saturn’s Heavy Metal
However, on the day of the Saturn-Mars conjunction Schwenk reported that suddenly everything changed and a completely unusual picture appeared. He wrote:’ “The broad, heavy ‘lead formations’ become pointed and narrow and are reduced in number; a strong blackening of the background occurs.” By the following day, the pictures had returned to their normal appearance.2
SATURN’S ROLE IN THE HUMAN ORGANISM
The heaviness apparent in the pictures of lead is the nature of Saturn wherever it is found; in the body, Saturn-lead is concerned with the processes of hardening and mineralization. In a young child the bones are still growing and forming from the soft cartilage. It is Saturn which hardens and calcifies, or in other words, sculpts them into
their permanent adult form. Again we see the lead-calcium connection, as the bones are made predominantly of calcium, even the form of bones, like the hard trunk of a tree, are composed of concentric rings resembling the rings of Saturn. As we grow older the normal calcifying processes increase, the bones become more brittle, and “physical death takes place because we can no longer overcome the accumulation of hardening processes.”
In their book Saturn & The Human Organism, Lilly and Eugen Kolisko observe: “What works in the hardest substance, in the mineral, the solid, the skeleton, in the earthly, connects Man with the earth, but in such a way that he must strive continuously to overcome this force. Death takes Man physically back to the earth; spiritually it takes Man away from the earth.“6 After death only the hard mineral skeleton remains; a dead man can no longer stand up.
The hardest and boniest part of the body is the skull — consider, for example, the extremely hard and thick skull of a wild pig, or a rhinoceros. While the fontanelle, the soft part of a baby’s head, slowly closes during its first or second year, so the child learns to stand up and balance itself between the forces of gravity and the less often considered forces of levity. Detailed physiological studies of the Koliskos’ .linked the child’s ability to stand upright with the faculty of memory, that when the bone system is completed early in life,” forces are set free which are connected strongly with the human character, with the moral, spiritual, individual capacities of the human being.”6
In the organism even small amounts of lead are extremely toxic, destroying the digestive system and advancing to relentlessly destroy the nervous system and the brain. The bones are damaged and the skin becomes the grey of lead, the victims grow old before their time, become emaciated, and are quickly destroyed. The mineral process becomes too powerful, overwhelming the delicate balance between the forces of life which are carried by the warmth of blood, and the hardening of material substance.
Whenever the influence of Saturn is too strong there is abnormal hardening; lead is found in kidney and bladder stones, in hardening arteries. It causes contraction and cramping, not only physical, as “soul cramps cause fear and anguish, the leaden weight of Saturn.” There is a drying and coldness of body and spirit. Life needs warmth, the warmth of blood. In old age the body becomes more fragile and a cooling, a contraction, sets in.
Homeopathically prepared lead, plumbum metallicum, in high dilution combats this degeneration, as “the effects of material lead are changed into the sphere of spiritual influence of lead. That is the force by which Man keeps the hardening processes continuously under his control.”2
As well as being a great remedy for sclerotic conditions, homeopathic lead is also used for alcohol addictions, the cravings for the distilled spirits of the earth. It’s interesting to note the age-old custom of sealing wine bottles with lead; apart from practical purposes, perhaps this also serves to keep the spirit of the wine sealed in? It makes one curious about the effect of lead or lead-lined coffins that were common in Europe at least up until this century.
The organ associated with Saturn is the spleen where the red corpuscles are destroyed and built up again, as in the marrow of the bones where new blood is formed. So even in the depths of the bones, the most ancient symbol of Saturn and death, there is new life developing. The spleen also shares Saturn’s great power of contraction and shrinks considerably in old age.
Two other antidotes to lead’s toxic effects are sulphur and silver, its natural companions in the earth. Sulphur stimulates the heaviness of lead and people often go to sulphur spas or hot springs which bring relief to rheumatics and other saturnine afflictions.
The plants associated with Saturn-lead according to herbal tradition, are the solanaceoe family including the tomato, potato and the toxic belladonna, henbane and tobacco.
The cell salt calcium phosphate, which is said to be ruled by Saturn’s zodiacal sign of Capricorn, is a salt which forms the bones and the skeletal part of every cell. This is the limestone building force of nature, a process reflected in astrology where Capricorn rules over occupations dealing with building and architecture and structure on every level, including the social structure of civilization, and the bureaucracy, or ‘bones,’ of government.
THE OCCULT SATURN
“Saturn brings us the foreknowledge of our own death, from the moment we are born.” Anon. In the old alchemy lead, Saturn’s earthly counterpart, symbolized the ‘base’ metal, the raw material of the work and the first or ‘black’ stage of the alchemical operation, often represented by a raven, a skull, or a grave. In the symbol for Saturn-lead the lunar crescent is beneath the cross of the earth, representing the soul suffocated and darkened by the earth, or “the chaotic immersion of consciousness in the body.”7
Here is the point where one turns within to find the spirit, by withdrawing the senses and ‘dying to the outer world.’ But before the gold of the inner sun rises to illumine a new mode of consciousness, this turning away from the outside world is experienced as a time of intense darkness and aridity. In all of the Mysteries of Death, this is where the initiate is identified with, and becomes, the sacrificed god.