The Greatness Of Saturn: A Therapeutic Myth

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In The Greatness of Saturn, one directly experiences the healing power of the world's great myths. The telling of mythic stories has always been a powerful form of therapy, bringing healing to people facing adversity. The Greatness of Saturn is such a therapeutic myth, told and retold through many centuries. Taken from the East Indian Vedic tradition, it honors the planet Saturn, who personifies time, limitation, loss, and all forms of adversity.

No person goes through life without sometime being touched by Saturn. This book presents a classic Saturn story, and a clear view of the cosmology from which the story came. As we hear the story and come to understand its context, we experience a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

Robert E. Svoboda is the only Westerner licensed to practice Ayurvedic medicine in India. A native of Texas, he is the author of eight books on Ayurveda and Indian mythology.

Svoboda is a board and faculty member of the Ayurvedic Institute, Albuquerque, N.M.

During the decade that I lived all but continuously in India my greatest fortune was to have spent eight of those years in the company of my mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda. He exposed me to a great deal of India's classical culture and to many living traditions, and taught me both how to appreciate and how to perform in the grand pageant that is India. When he introduced me to the Shani Mahatmya ("The Greatness of Saturn") it was a mid-morning in early 1980 just before Saturn was to begin afflicting my natal Moon. After this period of affliction ended in late 1987 I became inspired to translate the Shani Mahatmya into English, that the tale might live and work in a culture far distant in time, space, and sensibilities from that of its birth.

My translation is taken from the Gujarati version of the Shani Mahatmya that was written by Pranjivan Harihar Shastri and published in the 1950s in Bombay by Natvarlal I. Desai. Though this version is now out of print, and the publisher has closed down, a Marathi rendition that is nearly identical, published by Jaya Hind Prakashan of Bombay in 1990, remains freely available. The rendering is mine alone, with abundant translation assistance from Miss Roshni Panday, and commentary assistance from several people who read pieces of text, including Margaret Mahan, Rachel Meyer, and Claudia Welch. I have followed the text almost exactly, less a few anachronisms that have been excised and a few untranslatable puns that were regrettably eliminated. The English word 'pundit' has been used as an admittedly imperfect equivalent for the Sanskrit word pandita, from which 'pundit is derived, even though pandita carries a far broader sense of both erudition and intellectual rectitude than does 'pundit.'

The most significant alteration that I made was to augment and garnish the remarkably perfunctory stories provided in the Gujarati text for the eight planets other than Saturn with stories from other sacred literature, that the text might be a salute fit for all Nine Planets. The enhanced story and its accompanying commentary were blended together with respect and devotion, and the resultant batter was then baked into what I hope will serve as a faithful representation of astrological reality. May the result fill its readers with such a pure and positive bhava ("state of being") that the truth of this subject will appear evident to their hearts as well as to their minds, and may the Nine Planets, and Lord Saturn in particular, be pleased with the result!

Many thanks to many people, in particular to Miss Roshni Panday for her help with the translations, to Ms. Rhonda Rose for her illustrations and design work, to Dr. Fred Smith for his trenchant comments, and to Mr. Hart de Fouw for his many invaluable contributions. Profound thanks to my mentor, Vimalananda, and to my Jyotish guru, the redoubtable Mantriji. Reverential thanks to Lord Saturn for consenting to make all this possible.

Very few people alive today could have produced this book. Robert Svoboda is a trained Ayurvedic doctor, in fact the only Westerner ever to complete a full education in an Indian Ayurvedic medical college. His education and practice of Ayurveda have revealed to him a vast array of treatments for various maladies and preventive situations. Because Ayurveda, for the last few centuries at least, has been widely practiced in India in conjunction with astrology (yotish), Dr. Svoboda has taken it on himself, as have many Indian Ayurvedic physicians, to master the esoteric and complicated elements of astrology. Both Ayurveda and Jyotish are used equally to treat and predict maladies, thus a natural congruence exists between them. Moreover, both are fortified by several millennia of vigorous intellectual history and scientific experimentation, leading to their widespread acceptance in India (and elsewhere) today, where they have successfully withstood the pressures imposed by Western scientific thought. In addition to his vast knowledge of Ayurveda, Jyotish, and their practical applications, Dr. Svoboda possesses a further qualification: He has a wonderful gift for languages and is highly conversant in Hindi, Gujarti, Maranthi, and Sanskrit. His knowledge is thus not second-hand, derived from poorly translated or overinterpreted accounts of Ayurveda, astrology, history, or mythology. He has studied the various astrological and mythological texts used in this book, most of them in Gujarati and Hindi, and is delivering the story of Shani (Saturn) in a composite account taken from many sources, for the first time to a Western audience.

In all systems of astrology Saturn has played a role disproportionate to the fact that it is only one of nine planets. In India, as in the West, Saturn-Shani in Sanskrit-has long been the harbinger of doom. Naturally it is in the best interest of every individual to prevent his own doom. This is why remembering Saturn's location in one's natal horoscope and keeping track of its changing position in the sky relative to the various parts of one's horoscope-including houses, planets, and constellations-provide keys to arresting, or at least slowing down, Saturn's forces of doom. Keeping track of Saturn's movements is not enough, however, that would be like standing transfixed on a highway watching a truck speed toward you. Like stepping out of the way of the oncoming truck and experiencing perhaps only a moment's fear while being spun around by the wind in its wake, understanding Shani's power is a means in itself to avoiding its worst ravages. Understanding is power because it places an individual in a meaningful relationship with the object of understanding. And in meaningful relationships, influence works in both directions. In this case, not only does Shani influence one's actions and their outcome, but the individual can influence Saturn. This is effected by resorting to any of a number of strategies that have been evolved for refining one's relationship with Shani, who is regarded in India not as a collection of inert particles but as a very powerful living being with a definite personality.

You can know, when you see "now" at the beginning of an Indian legend, that the tale to follow is living wisdom. "Now" in this position means "whenever it is that you pick up this book and begin to read it." Each time a live legend is retold it is still "now," for live stories live in a world whose time does not 'pass': that world of symbolic, subjective, reality which is the world of internal perception.

All of us can generally agree on the reality of the external world; a mango looks, feels, smells, and tastes more or less the same to any human. Once the mango enters you, though, your internal experience of it becomes unique to you. The great sages of ancient India knew well that the emotions and thoughts created within us as a 'result of our interactions with the outer environment are the matter of which the 'internal cosmos' is made. Though less solid, and therefore subtler, than the matter of the material world, things made of subtle matter are often more real, and more permanent, than are things composed of dense matter. We all know how powerful thoughts can be, though thought has minimal 'reality' in the physical universe, it is the cause of most of the physical activity that happens there. Our thoughts and emotions are regularly transformed into our physical realities, and our physical conditions generate our emotional and psychological states.

A living story is born when living wisdom incarnates in the subtle matter of a human consciousness. Every writer of fiction knows how at some point during the writing of a story the characters come to life and begin to direct succeeding plot twists. When the characters of a mundane book written by a single author can take on lives of their own, how much more dynamic must mythic gods, seers and heroes be, who have been the focus of concentration for millions of people over thousands of years? Living tales live out their lives symbiotically within human beings, preserved through regular infusions of human life force, feeding on our powers of attention as they nourish our spiritual marrow. To read or listen to vigorous stories is to nourish and rejuvenate them; to make them your own is to host them; to tell them to others is to propagate them. Living stories live within us just so long as we serve as their honest vehicles, delivering their wisdom as best they can to those who need and deserve it. Like wealth, food, knowledge, and children, stories must circulate, that they may be transferred from generation to generation, one storyteller to the next, in a continuous lineage. A story dies out whose last hearer dies without having ever told it, like any other species of being lapses when its last member expires without reproducing.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages