Mercury-Saturn
Mercury-Saturn combines the speech, learning, thinking, and communication associated with the archetype of Mercury, with Saturnian themes of heaviness, negation, discipline, reality, seriousness, gravity and gravitas.
This combination may show up in life as the mind (Mercury) that works hard and is disciplined (Saturn), or the mind (Mercury) that entertains heavy thoughts (Saturn), or the mind (Mercury) that focuses on the past or history (Saturn), or the ability to speak (Mercury) the truth (Saturn).
Below are examples of famous people born with this combination in their natal charts (natal chart is another word for astrological birth chart, or pictographic representation of the sky when they were born). When we witness how this combination shows up in the lives of others, we can become more self-aware of how this combination shows up in our own lives. The more we are conscious of the ways astrological alignments (otherwise known as “aspects”) show up in our lives, the more the archetypal tensions involved can become integrated in our lives, thus revealing inherent strengths to us.
Please note that the tension of this archetypal combination, as illustrated in the lives and creations of the famous people in the examples below, may be demonstrated in ways that are more integrated or less integrated.
The Mercury-Saturn combination the chart of Albert Einstein can be seen his general theory of relativity, in which weight and gravity (Saturn) are perceived and understood (Mercury) as a distortion of the structure (Saturn) of space-time caused by the presence of energy or matter. The fact that Einstein did poorly in school as a child also demonstrates this aspect as an intellect (Mercury) that is judged (Saturn) and criticized as lacking (Saturn). Saturn tends to make whatever planetary combinations it is aligned with blossom and be recognized later in life, as Einstein’s intellect plainly did.
Saturn’s tendency to slow down the success of whatever planetary archetypes it is combined with can be seen in the case of Sharon Jones. Sharon Jones was a singer with a voice (Mercury) that only became successful later in life (Saturn). Though she sang as a youth, the lack of a record contract led her to work for many years as a correctional officer, until her voice was finally “discovered” when she was forty years old.
The Mercury-Saturn combination in the birth chart of author Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton can be seen in the number of phrases he coined (Mercury) that have withstood the test of time (Saturn), such as "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", "dweller on the threshold", and the opening phrase "It was a dark and stormy night."