The transits of twenty-nine and fifty-eight
When Saturn finishes a lap
Saturn takes just over twenty-nine years to come back to where it started. Almost everything written about that is about the first one. This gives you both.
Your dates
Both returns
Work out your dates
What is actually happening
Saturn goes round the sun in about 29.4 years, so it arrives back at its birth position a little before your thirtieth birthday and again a little before your fifty-ninth. Those are the two Saturn returns of an ordinary lifetime. A third would need you to reach 88.
Saturn is the quickest of the five bodies on this site, which makes it the one where the exact day matters most and the one most likely to give you three passes rather than one.
The second one is the point of this site
Search for a Saturn return and you will find an enormous amount of writing aimed at twenty-nine-year-olds: the first job that turns into a career, the relationship that turns into a decision, the end of being able to describe yourself as young.
The second return, at fifty-eight, has a fraction of that attention and arrives with a great deal more behind it. It is the last of the sequence this site is about, and it tends to land while the others are still settling.
What astrologers make of it
Saturn's associations are with structure, limit, time and consequence — what has actually been built, as opposed to what was intended. The return is written about as an audit.
It is worth saying plainly what this site will not do with that idea. A good deal of popular Saturn writing is moralistic: that Saturn punishes the idle, that you reap what you have sown, that the transit is a reckoning you have earned. That register is common, it is the thing readers of the biggest astrology site complain about most, and there is none of it here. A transit is a piece of timing, not a verdict on a life.
This is astrology, not medicine. Nothing here describes, diagnoses or predicts anything about your health, and it is no substitute for talking to a doctor.
The rest of the sequence
5 more
How this is worked out
Positions come from the same engine that draws the charts on this site, checked against NASA's JPL Horizons. Chiron, which most astrology software licenses, is a table fetched straight from Horizons. Every date is worked out in your browser — your date of birth is never sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.