Von Sydow’s career is distinguished by parts that deal with spiritual and metaphysical themes—a rarity for any actor with such popularity and durability. As the existentially probing Antonious Bloch in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Jesus in The Greatest Story ever Told, Lassefar in Pelle the Conqueror, and perhaps most notably, Father Merrin in The Exorcist, von Sydow’s most famous roles as an actor have an obviously reverent, if not pious, tone to them. The enduring, classic quality of these roles comes from von Sydow’s manifestation of the Saturn-Neptune configuration of his birth chart. It would be an impossibility to manifest the religious strength and conviction of these characters if von Sydow were not able to access these qualities in himself.

Most notably in von Sydow is the quality of spiritual superego of the Saturn-Neptune complex that comes through in his characters. The seriousness, depth, and, gravity of von Sydow’s characterizations is not the world-wariness of the earthly and pragmatic man, but the profundity and rigor forged through facing numerous metaphysical and spiritual trials. The most obvious examples of this testing are seen in Antonious Bloch of The Seventh Seal and in Father Merrin of The Exorcist. In the character of Bloch, the ideals and faith of his subjective experience are challenged to the utmost as the soldier traverses the landscape of plague-ridden Europe. In The Exorcist, Father Merrin has the spiritual resolve to not only help his faith-challenged colleague but is able to face the darkest forces in the universe in the form of the possessed Regan. Through von Sydow’s most memorable characters, we see the extreme faith and spiritual rigor that can manifest through the Saturn-Neptune configuration.