The Astrology of Midlife and Aging

Erin Sullivan has worked as a consulting astrologer for more than thirty years, and a great many of the people who book sessions with her are going through midlife. The description she hears most often is that everything has suddenly changed: restlessness, dissatisfaction, a lack of energy, a sense of having been marking time for years without doing what one should have been doing, and no way of saying what that is. Anyone might feel this on some ordinary afternoon, and it passes after a while. The midlife kind does not pass on its own; it asks a person to stop and take it seriously.

Her The Astrology of Midlife and Aging, published in 2005, is devoted to this stretch of life. Sullivan enters it through Jung's notion of “the unlived life”. Jung did not see midlife as the beginning of decline. In his view, this is when a person can look back and sort through the road travelled, and, on the basis of that understanding, move consciously into the next part of adulthood; the parts of oneself that never had a chance to be lived also surface at this time. There is no ready-made map of the territory of midlife; the only reference is the birth chart.

The first thing the chart gives is a starting point. As Sullivan puts it, astrological midlife has a precise start date: the day transiting Uranus first reaches the point opposite natal Uranus. Uranus returns to its birth position in about eighty-four years, so reaching the opposite point is half a circle, and she calls this opposition the “half-Uranus”. Because Uranus's orbit is eccentric, the day comes earlier for some and later for others, somewhere between about thirty-eight and forty-five: those with natal Uranus in Taurus or Gemini meet it at thirty-eight or thirty-nine, those with Uranus in Cancer at forty, those with it in Scorpio, Sagittarius or Capricorn in their early forties, and everyone else at around forty-two. After the first opposition, Uranus comes back twice more through retrograde motion, over a span of about eighteen months. The whole book sets out from here: it first describes the three stages of the midlife transition and the rites of passage, then follows age by age all the way to eighty-four.

Sullivan takes Jung's own midlife as an example. By then Jung was married with children and his practice was thriving, yet between 1913 and 1915 “something happened”. Jung's natal Uranus was at 14 degrees Leo, and his Ascendant at 2 to 4 degrees Aquarius. In 1913 transiting Uranus crossed his Ascendant, and in 1914 he was in the period of transiting Uranus's first opposition to natal Uranus. In the autumn of 1913 he had a prophetic dream that plunged him into his own unconscious. Jung's later concern with how adults go on developing grew out of this experience. So Jung's midlife began with the Uranus half-cycle, and so does each of ours.

At what age midlife falls depends on how long people live. Sullivan makes this clear first. For people in the eighteenth century, splitting a life down the middle put midlife closer to thirty, so the first Saturn return fell at midlife. Before Uranus was discovered, most people lived at the longest to around fifty-eight, just the time of the second Saturn return. Today, in well-off societies, lifespans are approaching the eighty-four years of the Uranus return, so midlife has moved later, to the Uranus half-cycle.

Sullivan reads the speech on the seven ages of man in Shakespeare's As You Like It against the classical order of the planets: the nursing infant belongs to the Moon, the inquisitive schoolboy to Mercury, the lover to Venus, the soldier to Mars, the justice to Jupiter, and the last age to Saturn, when past sixty a person totters toward the end. Today there are Uranus, Neptune and Pluto beyond Saturn, and Chiron to count as well, so a life today has a few more chapters than in Shakespeare's time. The second part of this book is called “Beyond the Bounds of Saturn”.

Psychology went through the same shift. Freud believed that after fifty the psyche's capacity for major change weakens, or even stops altogether, and so he advised analysts not to take patients over fifty. What Jung saw in himself was just the opposite: after fifty his growth was stronger and turned further inward. Sullivan says Freud was a man of his time and has been overtaken by it; the lineage she follows is Jung's. In the first chapter she quotes Jung at length, beginning with this sentence:

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning

Jung goes on to say that what loomed large in the morning will be small by evening, and what was true in the morning may by evening have become untrue. Jung called the gathering together of the scattered pieces of oneself into a whole person individuation, and in his view it only truly begins after midlife.

In her earlier book Saturn in Transit, she wrote about the thresholds from birth up to the midlife transition; this book carries on into midlife and beyond. On personal midlife, she follows Dane Rudhyar in seeing the houses as the “realm of individual experience”, so the same Uranus transit, falling in a different house in each person's chart, becomes each person's own midlife.

In the mid-1980s, at her own midlife turning point, she enrolled in the classics department at the University of Victoria to study Greek and Latin, and one of her teachers encouraged her to bring classical studies into the astrology and Jungian psychology she had already developed so fully. That is why, in a book about midlife, the discussion keeps finding its way to Odysseus and Kronos.

“You are destined to be in difficult relationships because you have Pluto conjunct your south node in the seventh house.” Sullivan says astrology is full of statements like this. They are dangerous because they are simply wrong; whether they frighten people is secondary. Everyone has difficult relationships. If someone keeps falling into the same kind of bad relationship, what they need to do is look at the darkest places in themselves, the ones they least want to touch; there is no need to blame the nodes. She herself would not use an astrological term or a cycle to fix a person in place, just as she never wanted her children to grow up into copies of her. In all her years of consulting she has not found one perfect way to live, only many ways of living, as many as there are people.

Nor does she treat the person in midlife as someone with something wrong with them. Sullivan writes about a lawyer, Rupert, forty years old, who had spent twenty years building a reputation in the legal world and had just been invited to become a judge. Just then he began to feel sad for no reason and to burst into tears at the slightest thing; he was embarrassed and thought he was about to break down. The people around him said he had not been himself lately and would come to his senses before long. Sullivan's view was exactly the opposite: Rupert had finally come to his senses, and his feelings were telling him they had been ignored for too long. He had never felt his emotions like this before; that part of life had always been handed over to his mother, his wife and his teenage daughter to feel for him. For him at this point, what mattered had shifted from what he did to why he did it. A year or so later he turned down the judgeship, joking that they could come back when he was fifty. He still did not understand what had happened to him; he was simply no longer afraid.

No one can be other than themselves. When a person who never loses their temper flares up once and says afterwards, “I wasn’t myself”, she asks in return: then who were you? So the unfamiliar feelings and thoughts that surface in midlife, in her view, all belong to the person; they have simply never had a chance to be lived before.

Sullivan lays out the planetary markers for every stage of life after midlife, so this book can hand you a timetable: roughly which year you enter midlife, which years will take the most effort, and which years you can go all out. At the same time Sullivan repeatedly reminds us that people are not clocks. A transit opens a process; it does not trigger an event. So at forty-four or forty-five, when transiting Saturn opposes natal Saturn, if the changes the book describes do not show up in you, it does not mean you have missed something.

Many wishes surface in midlife, and Sullivan teaches how to tell fantasy from dream. A fantasy is a rest for the mind and does not need to come true. A dream is tied to real potential and is worth nurturing slowly. Someone who never learned the piano, for instance, is unlikely to become a concert pianist in midlife, but a person who has always wanted to learn can perfectly well learn in midlife, and learn for their own enjoyment. With the children gone, with a supportive partner, or living alone, the degree one never had the chance to study for or the craft one wanted to learn may now be within reach. For a dream to come true, both Saturn and Uranus need to be at their best:

Saturn will remind you what you cannot do, and Uranus will prod you to explore

So when you want to take up something new, first look honestly at the part you cannot do; what remains is what you can try. Around fifty-four her advice becomes more specific. At that point the secondary progressed Moon (the Moon moved forward by counting each day after birth as a year of life) returns to its birth position for the second time, and transiting Saturn sextiles natal Saturn. These one or two years are the easiest time to break old habits, because after sixty the drive for sweeping change weakens. She suggests thinking at this time about where you want to be in ten years, rearranging your work around the needs of that time, and laying out plans for your finances and daily activities.

The book has two parts. Part I, “A Meeting at the Crossroads”, has nine chapters on midlife: the first six set out the ideas, the methods and the generational background, and the rest go by age from thirty-six into the fifties. Part II, “Beyond the Bounds of Saturn”, has four chapters on aging after sixty, continuing to around ninety.

Chapter 1: Meeting Life Halfway

The first chapter opens with Dante: halfway along the road of life, finding oneself in a dark wood. This chapter is about Uranus, which Sullivan sees as the inner witness. Even at a person's most emotional moments, there is often a part inside standing to one side and watching what they are doing, without prejudice, simply observing. When Uranus transits the natal chart, a person feels strangely split in two, one half living through it and one half watching. Sullivan values this part because, at the most chaotic points of the transition, it is precisely this moment of clarity that makes choice possible.

Chapter 2: Three Stages of the Midlife Transition

The three stages are separation, liminality and integration, and Sullivan points out that they do not follow one another neatly; they often happen at once. In separation, what a person really leaves is their past self; changes of spouse or job are only the surface. On liminality, she tells the story of Odysseus. Trapped by the Cyclops, Odysseus says his name is “No-body”, so when the giant cries to his neighbours for help, shouting “Nobody has blinded me”, they pay no attention. Yet once he has escaped to his ship, he cannot resist turning back to shout his real name. The giant's father, the sea god Poseidon, learns who it was, and a voyage of about a week becomes ten years of drifting before he reaches home. From this story Sullivan draws the rule of the liminal period: while at sea, have no name, and do not rush to produce an identity.

Do not pretend to know who you are; rather allow who you are to emerge.

Integration begins at fifty-four or fifty-five and runs to the second Saturn return around sixty; by then many people breathe a sigh of relief and have accepted their new face and figure.

Chapter 3: The Significance of Saturn and Uranus in the Midlife Transition

Astrology habitually treats Uranus as the bringer of freedom and liberation, and Saturn as the prison warder. Sullivan goes back to Greek myth and turns this view around. Ouranos is the sky itself; he loathed the hundred-armed giants that the earth goddess Gaia carried and would not let them be born. Gaia handed an adamantine sickle to her son Kronos, that is, Saturn, and he overthrew his father. In the myth, it is Saturn's sickle that brings liberation. So for an idea to become something real, it takes Saturn's hard work; with Uranus alone, the idea stays forever in the imagination. Uranus's shadow lies here too: finding one's work imperfect and simply not letting it be born. The person in midlife stands at a crossroads where the god of change and the god of stasis are both present, and both must be honoured.

Chapter 4: Uranus by Sign as Midlife Purpose Indicator; Chapter 5: The Half-Uranus House: The Unlived Life

These two chapters use natal Uranus to describe the part of life to be lived in midlife. Sullivan's reading is that whichever sign natal Uranus occupies, the opposite sign is the unlived life you are to go and live in midlife; the opposition is like a full Moon, lighting up what has never been lived. Someone with natal Uranus in Taurus, for example, drew security in the first half of life from visible things such as home, friends, money and love. In midlife, when transiting Uranus reaches Scorpio, they must find security in what cannot be seen: psychological steadiness, and a confirmation of their own worth.

Chapter 5 brings the signs down into the houses. Uranus spends seven years in a sign, and which house those seven years fall in on each person's chart depends on the time and place of birth, so the same transit is experienced differently by everyone. Sullivan writes about a woman client with natal Uranus in the eighth house. In midlife, as transiting Uranus moved through her second house, her father disinherited her, and she also left a marriage in which her husband's poor judgment had led to bankruptcy and lost her own savings. Over the next ten years she became financially independent and came to be on very good terms with herself. The second and eighth houses are about money and self-worth, and this was exactly the threshold she crossed in midlife.

Chapter 6: Generational Impulse: Purpose and Vision in Creating the Future

This chapter goes through the Pluto–Neptune sextiles, generation by generation, to describe how people see the family. She herself belongs to the Pluto in Leo generation. In the mid-1980s, when she was studying classics, the professor of her Greek mythology course was also Pluto in Leo. He taught Oedipus in psychological terms, admitted that the story held true for himself at the archetypal level, and then asked the students whether they felt the same, only to be met with blank faces. Most of those students had been born with Pluto in Virgo. This led Sullivan to think that a generation has to stop imposing its own way of seeing on its children. Turning to the later generations, those born in the 1970s with Pluto in Libra are few in number and may be a “lost generation” that fell through the cracks, yet they see relationships more objectively and more pragmatically than their parents.

Chapter 7: A Meeting at the Crossroads

From this chapter on, the book goes by age. Around thirty-six comes the preparatory stage before midlife proper: the third Jupiter return, and in the same year transiting Saturn squares natal Saturn once again. Jupiter makes a person feel that the future is finally in their own hands and no longer depends entirely on their parents' approval; Saturn asks them to redraw their boundaries according to their real potential. With both planets present, Sullivan writes of this year as Jupiter shouting “Go for it!” while Saturn, beside it, says “But carefully.”. In myth Jupiter is Saturn's youngest son, so the young side and the mature side of a person are bound to pull against each other, and the person has to mediate between them. Once that mediation is done, people often care more about what they can really achieve and spend less time imagining themselves as someone else.

Chapter 8: Middlescence

At forty-four or forty-five, transiting Saturn opposes natal Saturn, and this period is often called a second adolescence, when unfinished business from adolescence comes back. Around forty-six, a person comes to see clearly whether their life has been a success or not, and Sullivan regards this as the greatest threshold up to that point. By this age a person knows their limits very well. Saturn's work here is to edit and to define, so success has to be found within the limits: making full use of one's real abilities and letting go of youthful fantasies. A person's strengths lie within their own boundaries.

Chapter 9: Age Fifty: The Watershed and the Chiron Return

Around fifty, Chiron returns to its birth position, and Sullivan borrows Melanie Reinhart's words: at this point a person asks what the rest of their life is for. For fifty-four to fifty-seven, the word Sullivan uses is freedom. She quotes Peter O'Connor: once more time has been lived than remains, a person's centre of gravity can shift from the outside to the inside. Dependence on others loosens, and relationships actually deepen, something she has heard again and again from many people.

To be less concerned about others and more about life itself is the greatest gift of this threshold crossing.

The change is sometimes very small: turning down an invitation to a party, say, or skipping the company picnic, and no longer feeling bad about it.

Chapter 10: Introduction to Aging

At the start of Part II, Sullivan admits that this part was the hardest to write: first because she was only fifty-six when she wrote it, and second because she is deeply dissatisfied with how today's culture treats the old. The first third was easy, because she had lived through it herself; writing about old age, she was humbled by her own ignorance and could rely only on empirical evidence and other people's research. As she wrote, her view changed, and she found that the problem lay in our present attitude toward growing old.

Chapter 11: Sans Eyes, Sans Teeth, Sans Everything?

Fifty-nine to sixty is the second Saturn return. The first, at twenty-nine to thirty, is mainly about separating from one's parents. At the second, a person enters the family once again, now at the age of an elder, and it is time to pass the torch to the generations behind. Sullivan says the older we get, the more we resemble our parents. Saying in youth “I'll never turn into my father or my mother” is a necessary step in individuation; past fifty, a person already bears deeply the stamp of their parents and the whole family line. So around sixty, people often see clearly for the first time what kind of people their parents were, and then consciously choose how to live the next stage, something most parents of the previous generation could not do.

Chapter 12: The Third Act

Between sixty-seven and seventy, everyone meets two aspects: transiting Saturn squares natal Saturn once more, and transiting Neptune makes a 150-degree aspect to natal Neptune. With these, the threshold into elderhood has been fully crossed. Sullivan says the greatest blessing that friends and clients have shared with her is a kind of evenness that appears at this age. People still love and still have needs, but their attachment to personal goals fades. Compassionate detachment is the greatest human achievement of old age, which is why the role of grandparent matters so much to society.

Chapter 13: The Path Untrodden

The last chapter covers seventy-five to ninety. Sullivan writes about a woman client who was seventy-three when her second husband died, and only then realized that for more than fifty years she had always been someone's wife and mother. After a few sessions she sold her house, moved to a waterfront apartment in a big city close to her friends, and began taking photography classes, attending lectures and meeting new people. She also explains the memory of the old through the planets: Neptune washes away the details of the present, while Uranus retrieves gems from the past, so old people cannot remember what has just happened but remember history from long ago, which in the age of oral tradition was the elders' particular strength.

The Neptune of the infant is full of potential, whereas the Neptune of the elderly is full of experience.

So she argues that the stories of the old need someone to listen to them, if elders are to regain their place in the culture.

Chapters 4 and 5 go through natal Uranus sign by sign and house by house, and can be read alongside your own chart. If you are between thirty-five and forty-five, read chapters 1 and 2, then turn to these two, then skip to the chapter closest to your age. If you are past fifty, start from chapter 9 and then read Part II. You can carry on without fully understanding the two large diagrams in the introduction; just look back at them as you go.

The book has its limits. Its timetable is general, built on the fixed cycle of each planet and the same for everyone; Sullivan herself says that everyone passes through the same midlife differently, and that it only comes down to an individual through the transits and secondary progressions in the natal chart. The chapter on generations describes Western society before 2005 and centres on her own Pluto in Leo generation; what it says about the later generations is mostly conjecture, as when she predicts that the Pluto in Scorpio generation will reconstitute the nuclear family. Part Two was written from empirical evidence and other people's research, and clients over seventy were not numerous in her practice. She also admits that the unhurried aging the book describes only makes sense with money and family support. Read these places as her observations, not as settled conclusions.

Sullivan's timetable is shared by everyone. Applied to one person, the year and month in which a given marker first becomes exact, and which house of the chart it touches, have to be calculated from that person's chart. In her method, the sign and house opposite your natal Uranus are the unlived life you are to go and live in midlife, and our report Your Life Passages After Midlife in Depth starts its reading there, with the dates when transiting Uranus reaches that point calculated precisely by the program from your birth time. The report also puts particular effort into where the markers overlap. Between thirty-six and seventy-two, some years have several markers crowded together and some are almost empty; only by setting these dates side by side can you see which years are densest and need more room, and which years you can go all out. The Pluto and Neptune of the generation you were born into are also read in, as the background to these decades.

When you reach the year you are living through now, you can turn back to the corresponding chapter of the book and see how the people Sullivan met at that age made their way through it.