Seconding all of @bookhobbit‘s initial comments! They know their stuff too. I’m just the mouse in the library, and I’ll hop to questions no matter how you send them.
SO, first a bit of unpacking Saturn’s plight, then some other info to look into:
Saturn/Satan is one of those awkward situations where the words come from completely different languages/cultures and have zero connection. It’s kind of like conspiracy theory logic – people will see the connection they’re already primed to see, then project the story they want to read. The only connection is in the heads of those who are determined to believe we’re all Misled By Demons, honestly.
A more….let’s say honest complication is that the Roman Saturn and the Greek Kronos are strongly associated. Many historians, polytheists, and casual readers alike come to Roman mythology/religion only after studying the Greek, where you generally find Kronos as either the bad guy in Jupiter’s Origin Story or as a purely philosophic/intellectual concept. While Rome had both of those facets, they were not the ONLY facets.
One last complication is St. Augustine. He had a profound influence on early Christianity and much of his writing became theological canon; he was also neck-deep in The Discourse. Late Antiquity was a bit of a no-holds-barred intellectual smackdown, with tons of name-calling and deliberate misinterpretation and obstinacy on both sides, no matter how brilliant. By putting Augustine’s contributions up on a pedestal, it not only declared him the winner but resulted in his opponents’ polytheist voices being completely silenced. He wrote about Saturn, and is in fact one of the most coherent sources on Saturn because he was directly quoting a Roman author (one of Varro’s lost works)….so for hundreds of years, Saturn’s academia has been biased by Augustine’s callout post.
Roman tradition had Saturn as an agricultural deity, and he was commonly honored in festivals and activity related to farmwork and especially the sowing of seeds. This doesn’t map neatly to the Greek Cronus at all, but was a more primary association for most Romans. This is how he connected to their lives; the lofty poetic stories were far removed, even if enjoyed.
In Rome’s mythohistory, Saturn was often invoked as one of the first kings of Latium (or father of the first king, or related to the first king, or somewhere in the early line….you get the picture). He presided over a golden age, or The Golden Age, but always in a context that placed that paradise squarely in the land that would become Rome. Janus was also named among these initial kings, setting them both off as quintessentially Roman/Latin in the face of Aeneas’ Trojan influence as well as wider Hellenic influences. (For Golden Age-related research, there’s an absolute ton on Virgil’s picture of it and how his imagery refracted into the literature that followed.
The Temple of Saturn stood in the Roman Forum, and according to tradition was one of the oldest temples there. Though the Forum grew crowded over the years, these central temples were focal points for public worship and can speak to the divine relationships cultivated by the state. For example, no temples for Dis Pater or Proserpina, the more traditionally scary/evil deities! It also served as a treasury and was well-connected to political/governmental functions.
Io, Saturnalia! The festival was among the most joyous of the Roman calendar, as it allowed a release from the year’s toils in the dead of winter. The festival grew longer and longer over the years until it lasted an entire week, and it was one of the hardest for Christianity to stomp out. It transformed over the years, but always invoked Saturn’s bounty and liberation. (Great rundown with abundant primary sources here!)
In most myths, Saturn’s wife is Ops, our most bountiful lady who bestows all the world’s plenty. Not much of an “evil” connection to be found on that front.
One caveat – Romans did kinda think Saturn enjoyed human sacrifice, now and again. You can take this at face value as a point for evil, or unpack it into a convoluted mess. But hey, this was the dude who ate Jupiter, no one ever said he wasn’t scary powerful, and other deities had demanded human sacrifices now and again. Gladiators also invoked Saturn at times, though I couldn’t say if that originated because of the sacrificial association, or arrived later and reinforced it.
In conclusion: Not Evil, just divine and beyond human comprehension and/or judgment.
Some academic sources, many full of quotes from our ancient authors:
van Nuffelen, Peter. “Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth.” Classical Philology 105-2 (2010).
A good, if rather dense, breakdown of Augustine’s commentary and representation of Varro’s arguments on Saturn.
Richardson, L. “The Approach to the Temple of Saturn in Rome.” American Journal of Archaeology 84-1 (1980).
Technically about architecture, but it winds through a lot of the mythos of Saturn and his temple before ever getting to the actual architectural argument.
Schiebe, Marianne. “The Saturn of the Aeneid: Tradition or Innovation?” Vergilius 32 (1986).
A rundown of Saturn’s role in Virgil’s Golden Age.
Moorton, Richard. “The Innocence of Italy in Vergil’s Aeneid.” The American Journal of Philology 110-1 (1989).
More Golden Age/Saturn interpretation, including Saturn-Jupiter implications.
Fentress, Elizabeth. “Dii Mauri and Dii Patrii.” Latomus 37-2 (1978).
And finally a quick glimpse of Saturn’s role over in the African provinces - he was EXTREMELY popular!
