How stars, the Moon and the search for signals shaped the ways people explain their lives.
saturnine (adj.)
Collection
The Sky Above Us
A saturnine person is gloomy and slow to warm. The word means “of Saturn,” and in the fifteenth century it described someone born under that planet’s influence.12
Saturn was thought to be the planet farthest from the Sun, and so the coldest and the slowest. Old medicine held that people born under it took on its nature.1
Renaissance writers gave the planet a second side. Marsilio Ficino, himself born under Saturn, tied it to melancholy and to the deep thought of scholars, so that a child of Saturn could be gloomy and gifted at once.3
Saturn was also the alchemists’ name for lead, so saturnine can mean “of lead.” Medicine still uses it that way: saturnine gout is caused by lead poisoning.12
He gave a saturnine smile and said nothing.