Saturn

For Lilly 1659 this was the highest planet, finishing the zodiac in 29 years and 157 days, so it lingers around two and a half years in each sign and whole school years share it. Zadkiel's 1852 recast of Lilly adds a footnote that Herschel had not yet been found when the older author wrote. Ptolemy, in Ashmand's 1822 translation, builds its nature on that remoteness.

Capricorn is its night house and Aquarius its day house in Lilly, with exaltation in Libra and fall in Aries. Ptolemy calls it malefic for its excess of cold, a technical grade in his theory of qualities. The word alarms modern readers more than his argument warrants, because he derives it from a physics of four qualities, with cold counted as destructive.

Lilly's well-placed Saturn is severe in action, reserved in words and patient at work, and his ill-placed one is suspicious and stubborn. Sepharial 1920 picks out method, endurance and steady results. The Saturn return, about 29 years after birth, is a talking point of modern popular astrology and is left out of the old passages used here.